English
Undergraduates who major or minor in English explore literature as readers and writers in small classes that focus on the individual student. With exposure to our wide array of course topics and intellectual approaches, alumni of the English department have succeeded in top-notch graduate programs in English and creative writing as well as in law, business, medicine, journalism, and government.
Preparation for the English major begins at the first-year level. In both the fall and spring semesters, first-year seminars of 15 students or fewer are led by distinguished faculty on subjects such as detective fiction, literature and justice, the invention of romantic love, and the cultural history of the American university. Majors go on to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the history and criticism of literature written in English. Our department's commitment to cross-fertilizing creative and critical literacy is genuine and longstanding. Home to a strong and rigorous MFA program that fosters a close-knit community of talented writers in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, the department offers an undergraduate minor in writing as well as a major with a specialization in creative writing. English students frequently enroll in creative writing workshops or classes in advanced rhetoric, and three such courses may count toward the regular English major.
Contact Info
Phone: | 314-935-5190 |
Email: | english@wustl.edu |
Website: | http://english.artsci.wustl.edu |
Chair
Abram Van Engen
Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities
PhD, Northwestern University
Director of Graduate Studies
Melanie Micir
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Edward McPherson
Associate Professor
MFA, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities
Director of the Creative Writing Program
David Schuman
Teaching Professor
MFA, Washington University
Department Faculty
Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu
Assistant Professor
PhD, Cornell University
Jennifer Arch
Teaching Professor
PhD, Washington University
G'Ra Asim
Assistant Professor
MFA, Columbia University
Miriam Bailin
Associate Professor Emerita
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Mary Jo Bang
Professor
MFA, Columbia University
Guinn Batten
Associate Professor
PhD, Duke University
J. Dillon Brown
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Bethany Daniels
Senior Lecturer
MA, University of Missouri–St. Louis
Kathryn Davis
Hurst Writer in Residence
BA, Goddard University
Danielle Dutton
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Denver
Gerald L. Early
Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters
PhD, Cornell University
Chris Eng
Assistant Professor
PhD, City University of New York
Wayne Fields
Lynne Cooper Harvey Chair Emeritus in English
PhD, University of Chicago
Erin Finneran
Senior Lecturer
PhD, Washington University
Kathleen Finneran
Senior Writer in Residence
BA, Washington University
Niki Herd
Visiting Writer in Residence
PhD, University of Houston
Gabi Kirilloff
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Marshall Klimasewiski
Senior Writer in Residence
MFA, Bowling Green State University
David Lawton
Professor Emeritus
FAAH, PhD, University of York
Naomi Lebowitz
Former Hortense and Tobias Lewin Professor in the Humanities, Professor Emerita
PhD, Washington University
Joseph Loewenstein
Professor
PhD, Yale University
Phil Maciak
Senior Lecturer
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
William J. Maxwell
Fannie Hurst Professor of American Literature
PhD, Duke University
William McKelvy
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Virginia
Heather McPherson
Senior Lecturer
MFA, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Robert Milder
PhD, Harvard University
Michael O'Bryan
Senior Lecturer
PhD, Washington University in St. Louis
Anca Parvulescu
Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature
PhD, University of Minnesota
Amy Pawl
Teaching Professor
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Carl Phillips
Professor
MA, Boston University
Stephanie Pippin
Senior Lecturer
MFA, Washington University
Vivian Pollak
Professor Emerita
PhD, Brandeis University
Martin Riker
Teaching Professor
PhD, University of Denver
Jessica Rosenfeld
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Richard Ruland
Professor Emeritus
PhD, University of Michigan
Wolfram Schmidgen
Professor
PhD, University of Chicago
Vincent Sherry
Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities
PhD, University of Toronto
Matthew Shipe
Senior Lecturer
PhD, Washington University in St. Louis
Victoria Thomas
Teaching Professor
PhD, Washington University in St. Louis
Julia Walker
Professor
PhD, Duke University
Sarah Weston
Assistant Professor
PhD, Yale University
Gary Wihl
Hortense & Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Professor Emeritus
PhD, Yale University
Rafia Zafar
Professor
PhD, Harvard University
Steven Zwicker
Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities, Professor Emeritus
PhD, Brown University
Courses include the following:
English Literature
Visit online course listings to view semester offerings for L14 E Lit.
L14 E Lit 100 First-Year Seminar: The Literary Life
This class approaches literature from many angles: the creative to the scholarly, the personal to the ethical, the edifying to the entertaining. At the heart of our study will be a survey of literary "values" such as invention, emotion, style, subversion, beauty, humor-those fundamental reasons readers come to literature in the first place. Through readings and discussion, we will consider the great variety of ways literature expresses these values, and will explore them ourselves via creative assignments. Along the way, we will learn about literary life today through discussions with nationally renowned writers who will visit the class, and through units on literary scholarship, book reviewing, and magazine and book publishing. In the midst of it all, you will write and workshop your own stories, poems, and non-fiction works. Course enrollment preference is given to first-year students.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 115A First-Year Seminar
A variety of topics in comparative literature, designed for first-year students--no special background is required--and to be conducive to the investigation and discussion format of a seminar. Previous topics include: Story Telling Through Sound, Banned Books, Imigrants and Exiles, Literature and Democracy, Literature and the Art of Apology, Hell on Earth: Crime, Conscience, and the Arts, Magical thinknig: Literature and Theory Engage the Occult
Same as L16 Comp Lit 115
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 150 First-Year Seminar: Turn & Face the Strange: Alienation & Transformation in Modern Lit & Cntmp Music
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L14 E Lit 152 Literature Seminar for Freshmen
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 153 Literature Seminar for Freshman
Reading courses, each limited to 15 students. Topics: selected writers, varieties of approaches to literature, e.g., Southern fiction, the modern American short story, the mystery; consult Course Listings. Prerequisite: first-year standing.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM
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L14 E Lit 155 First-Year Seminar: Campus Novels and Dark Academia: Stories of College Life
Reading courses, each limited to 15 students. Topics: selected writers, varieties of approaches to literature, e.g., Southern fiction, the modern American short story, the mystery; consult Course Listings. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L14 E Lit 156 Literature Seminar for Freshmen
Reading courses, each limited to 15 students. Topics: selected writers, varieties of approaches to literature, e.g., Southern fiction, the modern American short story, the mystery; consult Course Listings. Prerequisite: first-year standing.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 160 First-Year Seminar: Immigrants and Exiles
Literature has traditionally been a welcoming space for people who, by choice or history, do not fit easily in the mainstream of community life. The widespread changes and upheavals of the last century have vastly expanded the ranks of such people, accelerating the processes of immigration and exile while fundamentally altering traditional notions of home and belonging. This course will examine fiction by writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Albert Camus, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and Teju Cole, who write from and about the position of "outsider," exploring what such texts have to say about living in an unsettled, diasporic modern world - a world in which real belonging seems an increasingly elusive goal. In reading these texts, we will investigate how their authors have portrayed the journeys, hopes, and hardships of dislocation and alienation, as well as the role literature might play in creating a sense of community for immigrants, refugees, and people living in various forms of exile. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 161A Morality and Markets
What does it look like to live a moral life in today's market system? We know all too well what it does not look like. The news is filled with moral failures of leaders and executives at top firms. We like to believe that we would behave differently, but what kinds of pressures inform our moral choices? What pulls us, what pushes us, and what persuades us to act one way rather than another? These are the questions that a course combining business and literature can address in unique ways; the world of fiction helps us to examine the ethical dilemmas of the market we inhabit every day. In this course, we use great books, classics of film and modern television, and the tools of modern psychology and business strategy to think critically about what is entailed in living a moral life in the midst of the modern market. This course is for first-year (non-transfer) students only.
Same as I60 BEYOND 161
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYBB A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 201C Classical to Renaissance Literature: Text and Traditions
Students enrolled in this course engage in close and sustained reading of a set of texts that are indispensable for an understanding of the European literary tradition, texts that continue to offer invaluable insights into humanity and the world around us. Homer's Iliad is the foundation of our class. We then go on to trace ways in which later poets and dramatists engage the work of predecessors who inspire and challenge them. Readings move from translations of Greek, Latin, and Italian, to poetry and drama composed in English. In addition to Homer, we will read works of Sappho, a Greek tragedian, Plato, Vergil, Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare.
Same as L93 IPH 201C
Credit 3 units. A&S: AMP A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 2151 Literature in English: Early Texts and Contexts
How did what we now call English literature emerge? How did such literary activity reflect the world, and how did the world shape this writing? How can literature help us understand the history of art, race, religious identity and sectarian conflict, nations and empires, gender, sexuality, and class? We will address these questions by studying the early history of literature in English, from the Middle Ages through the late 18th century, as well as the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of contemporary literary studies. We will learn about the material forms of English literature (manuscript, print, and performance traditions) as well as major poetry and prose forms (e.g., sonnet, epic, blank verse, romance, letter, slave narrative). In addition to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Ignatius Sancho or Olaudah Equiano, the syllabus may include authors and texts such as "Beowulf," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Julian of Norwich, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Eliza Haywood. Note: This course satisfies one of the two 200-level requirements for the English major.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 2152 Literature in English: Modern Texts and Contexts
What is modern English literature, and how do we tell its story? Is it a succession of literary movements from romanticism to realism to modernism and beyond? Is it a canon of classic texts to survey? Is it a sustained critique of that canon's exclusions, a recentering of the marginalized authors whose works reveal previously obscured accounts of modernity? It is, in fact, all of the above. In this course, we will introduce students to the central themes, forms, and forces that have shaped the history of English-language literature from the late 18th century to the present, as well as to the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of contemporary literary studies. Throughout, we will examine the norms and assumptions of literary history, including those based in race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Students will encounter fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction from Britain and the United States, along with African, Caribbean, or other global literatures in English. Authors studied may include William Wordsworth, Phillis Wheatley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, James Baldwin, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zadie Smith. Note: This course satisfies one of the two 200-level requirements for the English major.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 224 Publishing: History and Contexts
This course offers a broad introduction to book publishing, with the goal of establishing an understanding the larger issues facing publishing today, as well as the historical and cultural contexts that informs these issues. We will look at both multiple types of book publishing, with a general emphasis on contemporary Anglophone trade publishing, and will have frequent class visits (via Zoom) by professionals from different sectors of the publishing community. This course will count for one of the core requirements of the forthcoming Publishing Concentration.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 250 Sophomore Seminar
Topic will vary by semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 257 The Art of Poetry
An introduction to the critical vocabulary necessary for the study and evaluation of poetry; provides a basic understanding of prosody, poetic forms and figurative language, and the historical periods in which poetry has been written.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 258 Art of the Novel
In this course we will read novels drawn from several literary traditions and a number of distinctive narrative modes. Among the questions we will consider are those addressing the nature of narrative form, and the literary and stylistic choices made in order to express such things as character and consciousness, society and history, and the relation between the fictive and the real. There will be two papers, and several short writing assignments.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 299 Research Assistantship
For students assisting English faculty members with their research. The student must provide a description of his or her assistantship and secure permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies. At the end of the semester, the student must submit a four-page essay describing the work done during the assistantship, along with any documents or work produced. In addition, a written evaluation by the faculty member they assisted is required. Up to three units acceptable toward the English Major. Only for declared English Majors. Must be taken pass/fail.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 302 The Great American Novel
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 302W Writing Modern War
The twentieth century, as Graham Greene observed, was a century "in which there would never be a peace." This writing intensive course examines the ways in which modern writers have tried to describe warfare and its impact on both combatants and those on the "home front."
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 303W Strangers and Savages, Aliens and Outcasts
This writing intensive course will focus on a literary tradition united by its representation of passionate hatred and intolerance.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 304W Craft of Fiction: Historical Fiction
This writing intensive course will be a literature/creative writing hybrid course in which a number of contemporary historical fictions (meaning, fictions set in periods prior to the authors' births, and sometimes incorporating real historical events or figures) will be covered.
Credit 3 units. EN: H
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L14 E Lit 305 Literature and Consent
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L14 E Lit 305W Fabricating Lives
The premise of this writing intensive course is that autobiography is not a straightforward narrative of the past but a conscious shaping of life into a meaningful design.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 306 Old English Literature: Beowulf
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3065 Voice, Language and Power: Late Medieval Religious Writing
In the later Middle Ages, there is a flowering throughout Christian Europe of religious writings that offer a new voice in which personal religious experience can be pursued and expressed. Their voices are mainly intended to be communal ones, to be contained within the Church and regulated by it. But in each case the fact that it is a voice may offer a mode of resistance, or of difference. Such writing is often aimed at lay people, sometimes exclusively at women; and sometimes the intended auditors become the authors, and propose a version of religious experience that claims a new and more intimate kind of power for its readers. This course looks at a wide range of such writing in vernacular languages read in translation (English, French and German), including the work of Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Eleanor Hull, the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing and the perhaps pseudonymous William Langland, author of Piers Plowman. Whether such writing seeks to be orthodox or conducive to heresy, it presents a challenge to the power of clergy - a challenge that is written in the vernacular language of lay people, rather than clerical Latin, and in doing so offers distinctively new voices for religious experience. The course will also look at ways in which such work might have been influenced, if only oppositionally or at times indirectly, by contact with Muslim and Jewish writing (including Jewish exegesis of the Psalms).
Same as L23 Re St 3065
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L14 E Lit 307 The Writing of the Indian Subcontinent
The Indian Sub-continent has in recent years yielded a number of writers, expatriate of otherwise, whose works articulate the postcolonial experience in the "foreign" English tongue. This course is designed to be an introductory survey of such writing, drawing on select Sub-continental writers. Covering both fiction and non-fiction by several authors including R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Sara Suleri, Micheal Ondaatjie and Romesh Gunesekera, we will discuss such issues as the nature of the colonial legacy, the status of the English language, problems of translation (linguistic and cultural), the politics of religion, the expatriate identity and the constraints of gender roles.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3071 Caribbean Literature in English
Rum! Fun! Beaches! Sun! This is the image of the Caribbean in America today. This course will survey literature and culture from these islands, looking both at and beyond this tourists' paradise. It will aim to introduce students to the region's unmistakably vibrant tradition of multicultural mixture, while keeping an eye on the long history of slavery and rebellion out of which the islands' contemporary situation formed. Along the way we will encounter a wide variety of texts, from the earliest writing focused on life in urban slums, to the first novel ever to have a Rastafarian as its hero, to more contemporary considerations of the region's uncertain place in a U.S.-dominated world. Toward the end of the course, we will also look at important films like The Harder They Come as well as discussing the most globally famous cultural product of the contemporary Caribbean: reggae music. The course will involve readings from multiple genres, and will cover authors such as C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, and Caryl Phillips.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3075 The American Radical Novel: Literature Versus Inequality
Intended to help students reckon knowledgably, imaginatively, and articulately with our era of escalating social inequality, this course is a writing-intensive study of representative American radical novels stretching from the 19th-century abolitionism of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to the 21st-century dystopianism of Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story." Its main goals are (1) to introduce students to the long history and current significance of efforts to pit American literature against American inequality; and (2) to improve the quality of advanced student writing in the related fields of American Culture Studies and English literature. The first goal is pursued through close analysis of both radical novels and the contemporary political documents that inform them, juxtaposing such texts as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto," Alice Walker's "Meridian" and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Nonviolence and Racial Justice." The second goal is pursued through the hands-on analysis of successful rhetorical strategies sampled from The Hodges Harbrace Handbook, and, more importantly, from the scholarly writings of students themselves.
Same as L98 AMCS 3075
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD, WI BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 308 Topics in Asian American Literature: Identity and Self-image
Topics in Asian American literature which will vary from semester to semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3081 City on a Hill: The Concept and Culture of American Exceptionalism
This course examines the concept, history, and culture of American exceptionalism-the idea that America has been specially chosen, or has a special mission to the world. First, we examine the Puritan sermon that politicians quote when they describe America as a "city on a hill." This sermon has been called the "ur-text" of American literature, the foundational document of American culture; learning and drawing from multiple literary methodologies, we will re-investigate what that sermon means and how it came to tell a story about the Puritan origins of American culture-a thesis our class will reassess with the help of modern critics. In the second part of this class, we will broaden our discussion to consider the wider (and newer) meanings of American exceptionalism, theorizing the concept while looking at the way it has been revitalized, redefined and redeployed in recent years. Finally, the course ends with a careful study of American exceptionalism in modern political rhetoric, starting with JFK and proceeding through Reagan to the current day, ending with an analysis of Donald Trump and the rise of "America First." In the end, students will gain a firm grasp of the long history and continuing significance-the pervasive impact-of this concept in American culture.
Same as L98 AMCS 3081
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 311 Topics in English & American Literature:Contemporary Literature of the East West Divide
Topics: themes, formal problems, literary genres, special subjects (e.g., the American West, science and literature, the modern short story). Consult Course Listings for offerings in any given semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H UColl: CD
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L14 E Lit 311E Electronic Poetry
An inquiry into new forms of screen art beginning with traditional printed poetry to varieties of virtual poetry emergent on the computer screen; the stream of programming code as a level of writerly activity.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 311W Electronic Poetry
The primary focus in this writing intensive course will be to look at every possible kind of electronic poetry we can come up with in order to evaluate it as poetry.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 312 Introduction to Digital Humanities
It is a truism that computers have changed our lives and the way we think and interact. But in fact systematic efforts to apply current technologies to the study of history and culture have been rare. This course will enable students to consider how these technologies might transform the humanities. We will explore the various ways in which ideas and data in the humanities can be represented, analyzed, and communicated. We will also reflect on how the expansion of information technology has transformed and is continuing to transform the humanities, both with regard to their role in the university and in society at large. Readings and classwork will be supplemented by class presentations and a small assigned group project.
Same as L93 IPH 312
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3121 The Medieval Romance
The romance grows out of the epic: how we get from the fall of Troy to the fall of Troilus. Readings from Vergil's Aeneid to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3122 Topics in Literature: Heroes and Lovers
We will read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, The Mabinogion, The Tain, Margery Kempe, and Malory's Morte d'Arthur.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 312C Introduction to Digital Humanities
It is a truism that computers have changed our lives and the way we think and interact. But in fact systematic efforts to apply current technologies to the study of history and culture have been rare. This course will enable students to consider how these technologies might transform the humanities. We will explore the various ways in which ideas and data in the humanities can be represented, analyzed, and communicated. We will also reflect on how the expansion of information technology has transformed and is continuing to transform the humanities, both with regard to their role in the university and in society at large. Readings and classwork will be supplemented by class presentations and a small assigned group project.
Same as L93 IPH 3123
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 312W Topics in English and American Literature: End of the Century: American Culture in the 1990s
Starting with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, a book that helped re-ignite the Culture Wars, this course will consider the debates and problems that pervaded American culture during the 1990s. From the end of the Cold War to the sexual scandals that rocked Bill Clinton's presidency, from the emergence of the Internet to the rise of grunge and rap, the 1990s were a time of vast change in American culture. It was period when we, as a nation, reconsidered the legacy of the 1960s, the Reagan revolution, and the end of the Cold War, a time of economic expansion and cultural tension. In our consideration of this period, we will take a multidisciplinary approach when tackling a variety of materials-ranging from literary fiction (Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections) and popular films (Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and The Cohen brothers' The Big Lebowski) to the music of Nirvana and Public Enemy-in an attempt to come to a better understanding of our recent history. Throughout the semester, we will pursue the vexed cultural, political, and historical questions that Americans faced in the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and consider how literary texts imagined this period of American history.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 313 Topics in English and American Literature
Called the "Age of Revolution," the Romantic Age of British literature, 1770-1830, witnessed the birth of new lyric forms, the effacement of traditional strictures on style and taste, and produced through poetic voice (and its quaverings and multiplications) what might be called, over simply, the modern subject. Within a developing discourse of human rights and personal freedom, this growing assertion through poetry of individual expressivity allowed William Blake to construct in a single work a visual and verbal "Jerusalem. It encouraged William Wordsworth to write a pathbreaking investigation of the sources of his own creativity that challenged conventional restraints on what topics can, and cannot, be confessed in poetry. Beginning with these two poets, we will consider the historical contexts, and the sometimes competing histories of ideas, that shaped the five major British Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and John Keats. We will follow an anthology for much of the poetry, including the poems and prose of influential contemporaries (female as well as male) who included the political philosopher Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. Texts also to be assigned will include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Byron's Don Juan.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 313W Bots, Drones, and Cyborgs: Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines
We llive in a world where not only our access to information, but our social interactions, and bodily autonomy are increasingly mediated by- surveilled, analyzed, facilitated, enhanced- by technology. This course will ask what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines. What happens to our notions of individuality, autonomy, and political subjecthood when domains or categories once thought exclusively to be the preserve of humanity- language, emotion, complex information processing (playing chess, or driving cars, for example)- are increasingly threatened, replicated, and extended by technology? We will cover a range of science fiction texts including Karel Capek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and William Gibson's Neuromancer along with works of speculative fiction such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun along with films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix. We'll juxtapose these cultural representations of artificial intelligence with emerging philosophical and scientific discussions to ask to what extent the fundamental ways AI continues to redefine the boundaries of the "human" as a category.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 314 Topics in English & American Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L14 E Lit 315 Topics in American Literature
Topics: themes, formal problems, literary genres, special subjects (e.g., the American West, American autobiographical writing). Consult Course Listings for offerings in any given semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3153 The Women of Greek Tragedy
This course examines the role of women in Athenian drama. Students will read English translations of the works of the three major tragedians -- Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides -- and their near contemporary, the comedian Aristophanes. Direct engagement with ancient texts will encourage students to develop their own interpretations of and written responses to the political, social, and ethical manipulation that these mythological women were compelled to endure and the subtle ways in which they appear to exercise power themselves. Selected scholarly articles and book chapters will help students to contextualize these ancient dramas in their culture of origin. Because such issues continue to preoccupy both sexes today, students will see how Greek tragedy addresses perennial historical and cultural concerns through the examination of adaptations of Greek tragedies ranging from Seneca in ancient Rome to Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" and Luis Alfaro's "Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles." The final research paper will encourage students to consider how a specific female character from antiquity is transformed for a "modern" dramatic audience.
Same as L08 Classics 3153
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 315W The Literature of the American Revolution
While not a historical survey, the course will present several case studies raising questions about later myth and contemporary reportage.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 316 Topics in American Literature: Travel Writing and Empire
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3161 Topics in English and American Lit
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3164 Adaptations Literature / Film / TV
"The book was better than the movie." "The movie wasn't faithful to the book." "The TV series didn't capture the book like the movie did." These have forever been the complaints of readers watching their favorite works of literature adapted to the screen, and, in a media ecosystem increasingly flooded with adaptations and reboots of existing intellectual property, these complaints won't be going away any time soon. Film and literature have been interconnected since the very first films screened at end of the nineteenth century, but the dynamic between literature and media has sometimes been strained: film reviled as the cheap degradation of a vital art form, the novel anxious at the rise of narrative film - and later television - as rival storytelling media. But, viewing literature and visual media in opposition can obscure what becomes visible if we view them together. This is a course about the history, theory, and practice of adaptation from literature to film and television and back again rooted in both canonical and non-canonical case studies. We will study authors whose works have been repeatedly adapted across eras and media; filmmakers whose works are pastiches of various literary and cinematic sources; rigorously, obsessively "faithful" adaptations; radically transformative "unfaithful" adaptations; and works of literature and media that are themselves about the process and ethics of adaptation. The course will be anchored by a reading of Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel Station Eleven and a serial viewing - replicating the unusual original release - of HBO Max's miniseries adaptation.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 316W Topics in American Literature: Girls' Fiction
Topic varies. Writing intensive.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: ENL
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L14 E Lit 317 Topics in American Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 317W Topics in English and American Literature
Selected Topics. Varies from semester to semester. Writing Intensive
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 318 Topics in American Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3191 Contemporary American Women Poets
An introduction to the work of contemporary American poets who are women; extensive reading of both poetry and prose. Readings include the work of poets such as Bishop, Rich, Plath, Sexton, Clampitt, Gluck, Moss, Graham, Howe, Dove, Oliver, Forche, Lauterbach.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3192 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 20th Century: The European Avant Garde
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Artistic movements characterized by revolt against tradition, emphasis on radical experimentation, and redefinition of the art work. This course will familiarize students with the avant-garde's main currents: Italian Futurism, English Vorticism, Russian Constructivism, "stateless" Dadaism, and French Surrealism. We will ask ourselves how to define the avant-garde, how it is related to modernity, and whether its aesthetic is necessarily political. Texts include "Futurist Manifestos", Cendrars's "Trans-Siberian Prose," Stein's "Tender Buttons", Breton's "Nadja". We will also examine artworks such as Duchamp's "Large Glass" and films Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou".
Same as L93 IPH 3191
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 319A Topics in English & American Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 321 American Literature to 1865
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3211 Topics in 19th-Century American Writing
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 322 American Literature 1865 to Mid-20th Century
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3222 20th-Century American Writers
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3227 Devising, Adaptation and Docudrama
This course explores three ways of theatre-making that have revolutionized the contemporary stage: devising (a collaborative process emphasizing physical techniques to realize ideas), adaptation (the transposition of a narrative from one mode to another), and docudrama (the self-conscious staging of history through the assemblage of documentary records). Beginning with a focus on the current "postdramatic theatre" and the pre-histories of these contemporary practices, we will engage current scholarship on each form, learning the "how" and "why" from contemporary practitioners, while considering the rhetorical structure of each form in relation to the social meanings they generate for their audiences. Divided into 3 units, the course will combine the study of each method with hands-on practice, and will conclude with a showcase featuring an original performance created by the student collective. A theme (variable by semester) will unite the three sections of the course, helping students see how a single topic can be illuminated in different ways through these three methods of creating performance.
Same as L15 Drama 3227
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 322C Major American Writers II
Representative works of American writing from 1880 to the present, with particular attention to fiction and poetry; authors include James, Stein, Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison. Prerequisite: 6 units of sophomore literature, junior standing, or permission of instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 322E Major American Writers II
Representative works of American writing from 1880 to the present, with particular attention to fiction and poetry; authors include James, Stein, Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison. Prerequisite: 6 units of sophomore literature, junior standing, or permission of instructor.
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L14 E Lit 322W Major American Writers II
This writing intensive course is intended as an in-depth introduction to arguably the two most significant American fiction writers of the first half of the twentieth century.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 323 Selected American Writers
Intensive study of one or more American writers. Consult Course Listings for offerings in any given semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 325A African Americans and Children's Literature
This course explores two distinct themes: how African descended people have been depicted in American and British children's literature and how African Americans have established a tradition in writing for children and young adults. It will also examine two related questions: How has African American childhood been constructed in children's literature and how have African American writers constructed childhood in children's literature? We will look at such classic white writers for children like Helen Bannerman, Annie Fellows Johnston, and Mark Twain as well as efforts by blacks like the Brownies Book, published by the NAACP, and children's works by black writers including Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Arna Bontemps, Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, Mildred Taylor, Floyd and Patrick McKissack, Julius Lester, Rosa Guy, Sharon Bell Mathis, bell hooks, and others. For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 1.
Same as L90 AFAS 3254
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 328W Selected English and American Writers
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 330A Topics in AMCS
This topic varies by semester. See course listings for current offering.
Same as L98 AMCS 330
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 334 A History of the Golden Age of Children's Literature
A comprehensive survey of the major works for children written during this period.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3341 The History of Children's Literature from the End of the Golden Age to the Age of Multiculturalism
A continuation of English 334, this is a comprehensive survey looking at the major works of children's and adolescent literature in both Britain and America.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 335 Modern Drama 1850-1920
The emergence of modern drama: emphasis on Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3351 Modern Drama 1880-1945
Major figures of modern drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov, Lorca, Synge, Pirandello, Brecht and O'Neill. Close literary study and consideration of these plays as examples of the art of the stage. Reference will also be made to contemporary experiments in the other arts, and to major literary movements in the time period under consideration.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3361 Modern Drama, 1945 to the Present
Course concentrates on the development of modern drama from 1945 to the present. Focus is on both literary and theatrical techniques as well as the examination of trends in the contemporary theatre from Samuel Beckett through Sam Shepard. Perspective is comparative and international in scope, with particular attention given to women and minority playwrights.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 336C Topics in American Culture Studies
Same as L98 AMCS 336
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3370 Contemporary Stages: An Anglo-American History of Performance after 1950
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 339 Topics in 19th-Century American Writing
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3391 Topics in 19th- and 20th-Century American Writing: American Short Fiction
This course is directed toward a broad range of majors and non-majors with a serious but not scholarly interest in American Short Fiction.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 340 Topics in 20th-Century American Writing
An introduction to major American works and writers from the later 19th century through the mid-20th century. Writers studied include Twain, James, Crane, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Frost, Eliot and Stevens. The course assumes no previous acquaintance with the material and is directed toward a broad range of majors and non-majors with a serious but not scholarly interest in the subject. Students with little or no background in literature might be advised to take E Lit 213C (Chief American Writers), while English majors looking to do advanced work should consider the 400-level American literature sequence. Students who have taken E Lit 213C should not enroll in this course.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 340W The American Novel: Split and Hybrid American Identities
Examination of the struggle to form an enabling identity for author, characters, and text against the divisive pressures of family and society.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 343 Two Cultures: Literature and Science
The relation between biology and literature as it has been examined and expressed in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of the past two centuries.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 344W Writing About Performance
In this writing-intensive course, students will develop critical strategies for writing about theatre and other performance events, in the present and in a range of historical periods.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3451 Topics in American Literature
Emerging in American films most forcefully during the 1940s, film noir is a cycle of films associated with a distinctive visual style and a cynical worldview. In this course, we will explore the sexual politics of film noir as a distinctive vision of American sexual relations every bit as identifiable as the form's stylized lighting and circuitous storytelling. We will explore how and why sexual paranoia and perversion seem to animate this genre and why these movies continue to influence "neo-noir" filmmaking into the 21st century, even as film noir's representation of gender and sexuality is inseparable from its literary antecedents, most notably, the so-called "hard-boiled" school of writing. We will read examples from this literature by Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich, and discuss these novels and short stories in the context of other artistic and cultural influences on gendered power relations and film noir. We will also explore the relationship of these films to censorship and to changing post-World War II cultural values. Films to be screened in complete prints or in excerpts will likely include many of the following: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Murder My Sweet, Phantom Lady, Strangers on a Train, The Big Sleep, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The High Wall, Sudden Fear, The Big Combo, Laura, The Glass Key, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, The Crimson Kimono, Touch of Evil, Alphaville, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Devil in a Blue Dress, The Bad Lieutenant, and Memento. Required Screenings.
Same as L53 Film 345
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L14 E Lit 346 British Enlightenment Culture
To capture the range and vibrancy of British enlightenment culture, this class invites students to read broadly and imaginatively in the most influential literary, economic, and philosophical texts of the time.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L14 E Lit 347 Masterpieces of Literature I
Masterpieces of Western literature in English translation: Homer through Dante.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 348 Masterpieces of Literature II
Masterpieces of Western literature in English translation: the 17th century through the 20th century.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 350W On Time: Clocks, Calendars, Crisis in Modern British Fiction
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3520 Introduction to Postcolonial Literature
At its zenith, the British Empire encompassed almost a quarter of the globe, allowing the diminutive island nation unprecedented economic, military, and political influence upon the rest of the world. This course will introduce some of the foundational responses to this dominance, both literary and theoretical, by the colonized and their descendants. We will examine important critiques of colonialism by theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, as well as literary works that reflect a postcolonial critique by authors such as V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Doris Lessing, and N'gugi wa Thiong'o. The course will interrogate how literature could be said to help consolidate Empire as well as ways in which it might function as rebellion against imperial power, with a view toward teasing out the problematics of race, gender, language, nationalism, and identity that postcolonial texts so urgently confront. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3522 Topics in Literature
Topics course which varies by semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3524 Topics in Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3525 Topics in Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3527 Blacks and Jews in America
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 352A Topics in English & American Literature
The black athlete is a central figure in American entertainment, and has been since Frederick Douglass decried Christmastime slave games in his Narrative. This course will examine literary depictions of black athletes-in novels, memoirs, essays, and poems-in order to better understand the cultural significance of sportsmen and women in the African American struggle for equality, from abolitionism to the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Students will read works by Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, and John Edgar Wideman, among others, and examine the lives and athletic pursuits of prominent athletes such as Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Wilma Rudolph, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James. Popular perceptions of gender and sexuality, in addition to race and racism, will factor into readings, especially as students incorporate secondary sources into their own research.
Same as L98 AMCS 352A
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 352D Fanstasy, Horror, Sci-Fi: Genre-Fiction in Arabic Literature
Genre is a category, or to use Aristotle's term, a species. It is a category of literature, arts, music, and other forms of composition, to classify works of shared conventions, practices, and aesthetics. A typical example would be poetry. Subgenre is a single division of a given genre. In this example, epic poetry, the sonnet, haiku are subgenres of poetry. But who gets to decide what is genre, subgenre, and how? These would be some of the main questions we willl address in this course. Genre theory can teach us a fascinating history of how various cultures imagine their forms of creative expression. The development of genres and subgenres reveal complex histories on who has the power to define and redefine creative expression. For example, the novel, now a dominant and prestigious global literary genre, was once considered an inferior and working-class genre in Europe over a century ago. The novel genre then developed into numerous subgenres, which are today placed under one large umbrella that is "genre-fiction," such as sci-fi, fantasy, horror, gothic, mystery etc.. However, the borders between these subgenres and the larger genre itself are always contested and reformulated. Through the history of genre and subgenre, we get to learn about literary taste and literary criticism, and whose definitions and conventions have changed the course of literature and the arts, and for what reason. The dominance of the historical novel today, for example, is attributed to larger phenomenon such as decolonization, feminism, and anti-racism. The sociopolitical urge to utilize fiction to address larger issues has not only boosted the impact of the historical novel but "elevated" it to become a common form of the genre itself. Within this grand history, Arabic literature has a complex and rich story to tell about genre and subgenre. The most obvious example here, which will be our entry point in this course, is 1001 Nights (also known as The Nights, or The Arabian Nights). This multi-volumed masterpiece has influenced fiction writers across the globe, especially in the past three centuries as the novel began to formulate into a modern genre. It is an exceptional work where we see a cosmology of subgenres of storytelling, narrative, but also of poetry, and in some editions, illustration and drawing, as well as translation. The Nights is often seen as the first hybrid work of literature where subgenres and forms co-exist but also blur and converge. This dynamic, revolutionary, and mobile nature of The Nights expresses the meeting of various cultures, experiences, and traditions of storytelling during the Abbasid empire. Today, it remains ever more relevant and inspiring in a cosmopolitan world. The question and history of sub/genre, however, will guide us through an exploration of modern and contemporary Arabic literature. We will get to engage with these texts thematically, stylistically, and intellectually. The aesthetic choices made in literature are never isolated from the intellectual, political, and sociohistorical contexts of a given text. Through the assigned texts and artworks, we will also learn about colonization, gender, imperialism, class, migration, ecology, among other pressing topics. No knowledge of Arabic is necessary; all readings in English translation.
Same as L75 JIMES 3520
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 352I Topics in AMCS: The Real and Fake: Identity, Conflics, and Race in Asian American Literature
Topics vary by semester; see semester listing for course description.
Same as L98 AMCS 3520
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3531 Selected English & American Writers
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3539 Jews, Jersey, and America: Philip Roth Reconsidered
Beginning with the publication of his debut Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, Philip Roth remained a highly visible, and at times highly controversial presence on the American literary scene. Questions of Jewish American identity; the power struggle between fathers and sons; the irrationality of male sexual desire; the consequences of exercising one's (artistic, sexual, personal) freedom; the tumultuous history of Newark; the nature of the American experiment-these are the central concerns that percolate throughout his thirty-one books. In this course, we will read Roth's major novels and explore how his fiction addressed these questions. Moreover, we will discuss how we can approach Roth's fiction in the wake of such events as the Trump presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the #Me Too Movement. How do we read Roth in the wake of the political and social traumas that have shaped our recent history? How does Roth's fiction speak to the recent rise in anti-Semitism? To help inform these questions, we will also consider how contemporary writers, such as Nicole Krauss and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, have directly reconsidered Roth's legacy in their fiction, rethinking his treatment on such topics as Jewish-American identity, sexual politics, and the status of the novel.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3550 Undoing Empire: Introduction to Postcolonial Writing and Art
This course introduces students to the histories and politics of postcolonial writing and art. By tracing the genealogies of writing and art produced in the aftermath of colonialism, this course will explore how writers, artists, and scholars working from the context of formerly colonized nations have responded to the legacies of racial, cultural, and economic oppression. Students will look at novels, poems, art, and theater produced by those working from Africa, the Caribbean, and other formerly colonized nations in order to chart the complex networks of political solidarity these works enable. Writers like Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Gayatri Spivak will be read alongside literary and artistic pieces by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Safiya Sinclair, Arundhati Roy and artists such as Zanele Muholi, Santu Mofokeng, Tessa Mars, William Kentridge, and others. Topics such as racial memory, postcolonial identity, radical aesthetics, and Afro-futurism will be explored.
Same as L90 AFAS 3550
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3551 Topics: Literary Criticism and Theory: Ways of Approaching a Literary Text
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 3552 Introduction to Literary Theory
This course introduces students to some of the most influential theoretical approaches to interpretation applied to English-language literature; to significant conceptual and historical debates about literary and cultural theory; and to the keywords used in these debates. Students will learn how to write and speak about theoretical texts and how to recognize the theoretical assumptions that underlie acts of literary interpretation. Theoretical approaches to be featured may include formalism; Marxism; psychoanalysis; gender and sexuality studies; structuralism and post-structuralism; postcolonial studies; critical race studies; new historicism and cultural materialism; cultural studies; affect theory; neurocognitive approaches; and disability studies. This course fulfills the literary theory requirement for the English major; no substitutions will be permitted. In order to preserve necessary seats for English majors, the course will be enrolled through the wait list.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: HUM
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L14 E Lit 357 The Art of Poetry
Techniques of poetry, considered theoretically and practically in relation to problems of form and significance: meter, rhyme, image, metaphor, stanzaic patterns, and others.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3571 20th-Century Poetry
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 358 Studies in Short Fiction
Study of the work of four novelists who were also fascinated by shorter forms throughout their careers: D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and William Faulkner. The course will be concerned with the variety of forms their work takes as it is shaped by the very individual visions of each.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3581 Historical and Comparative Linguistics
Historical linguistics focuses on how languages change over time. Comparative linguistics focuses on their similarities and differences. In this course we will trace some of the differences and changes in sound (phonetics and phonology) word formation (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), and meaning (semantics). Topics include linguistic universals, the structural and genetic classification of languages, the techniques of reconstructing proto-languages, and the causes of language change. Examples from Indo-European languages (for example, Greek, English, and Spanish) and from Native American languages (for example, Quechua and Mayan) will be emphasized. Prerequisite: Ling 170D.
Same as L44 Ling 320
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: HUM EN: S
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L14 E Lit 3582 Black Literature: Race, Class, and Writing in the United States and the Caribbean, 1900-1950
Study of the differences in literary tradition arising from the divergent social, racial, and educational milieux of the United States and the West Indies.
Credit 3 units. BU: BA, HUM
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L14 E Lit 359 Scribbling Women: 19th-Century American Women Writers
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher, William Tichnor, that "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash." In this class, we examine works of those scribbling women of the nineteenth century. We read one of the best selling novels of the century, one that created a scandal and ruined the author's literary reputation, along with others that have garnered more attention in our time than their own. In addition to focusing on these women writers, we also explore questions about the canon and American literature: What makes literature "good"? What constitutes American literature? How does an author get in the canon and stay there? Finally, in this writing intensive course, there are frequent writing assignments and a strong emphasis on the essential writing process of drafting and revising.
Same as L77 WGSS 358
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 359H Hot Takes: Cultural Criticism in the Digital Age
The twenty-first century has seen a new and exciting wave of cultural criticism, and along with it a new wave of public intellectuals. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Jia Tolentino, Anne Helen Petersen, Jo Livingstone, Hanif Abdurraqib-at their best, writers like these aspire to the sort of indispensability on political, social, and artistic matters that their forebears like Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, and James Baldwin had at midcentury. But these voices are unique because they emerged through and alongside a specifically online critical sphere, a space betwixt and between the comments section and the little magazine. This is the space of viral tweets and threads, "hot takes" and "think-pieces." It's a space of potentially greater democratization and diversity even as it is an opportunity for bigots and trolls. These writers are beholden to their networks, but those networks are far wider, more idiosyncratic and inclusive and incendiary-more unstable-than anything buttressing the vaunted public intellectuals of the past. This course examines the cultural critics of the contemporary moment in context of the critical space they opened and now occupy. We'll begin with a quick history of the "public intellectual" from the eighteenth century to the present before we log on. The rise and fall of Gawker, Grantland, and The Awl; The New Republic's controversial digital pivot; the feminist communities of The Hairpin and The Toast; the conservative "intellectual dark web"; the message boards of the early 2000s; the emergence of semi-academic sites like the Los Angeles Review of Books; the blogs and tumblrs and livejournals that nurtured the talents and provocateurs that we now find indispensable or unavoidable. We will dissect their style, understand their theory and practice, engage with their subjects, and investigate the way their writing has intersected with and propelled social media movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and #OscarsSoWhite. And we will consider the way these critics have influenced the way scholars and students approach the texts and topics we always have.
Same as L98 AMCS 359H
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 360 The Writings of Philip Roth
Fiction by Philip Roth in chronological order from his earliest to his last major effort.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 362 The 18th Century: A Study of Major Texts
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 363C Theatre Culture Studies III
The third in the department's three-course history sequence, TCS III surveys the dramatic literature and cultural history of the modern theater. Beginning with Romanticism's self-conscious break with the past, we'll study the rise of bourgeois melodrama with its intensely emotional rendering of character and spectacular effects. We'll consider how those effects were made possible by advances in industrial stage technology which reproduced the everyday world with unprecedented verisimilitude, and how playwrights responded to those technologies by calling for the theatre to become either a "total work of art"--plunging its spectators into a mythical realm--or a petri dish--analyzing the struggles of the modern individual within his or her modern milieu. Exploring a range of aesthetic modes--including Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism, the Epic Theatre, and the Theatre of the Absurd--we will read classic plays by modern playwrights to consider how the modern theatre helped its audiences understand as well as adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of the modern world.
Same as L15 Drama 365C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 365 The Bible as Literature
The Bible is one book among many; the Bible is a book like no other; the Bible is not one book but many. The course will debate such positions and the different histories and practices of reading they involve. We shall read extensively in English translations of the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, with emphasis on literary form and ideas. We shall look at the Bible´s material forms, and the history of its interpretation and translation. The aim is not to adjudicate its meaning but to explore what over time it has been taken to mean, attempting to locate within the book the potential for different interpretations. The course requires, and should foster, attentive reading, vigorous yet courteous argument, and respect for the readings of others.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L14 E Lit 367 Religious Themes in Contemporary Literature
The use by selected 20th-century writers of religious themes and symbols. Close analysis of the literary techniques by which religious concepts and images are developed and differing insights of writers representing a broad spectrum of contemporary attitudes toward religious issues.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH
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L14 E Lit 368 The Development of American Romantic Thought: Enlightenment Confidence to Postmodern Questioning
We'll examine the revolutionary shift in human sensibility commonly known as "Romanticism" by tracing its development in America from the "Fireside Poets" (Bryant, Longfellow) and Transcendentalism (Emerson, Whitman) to anticipations of Modernism and Postmodernism (Henry Adams, Louis Sullivan, Charles Ives). Fulfills the 19c and Am lit requirements for the English major.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 369 Reading Sex in Premodern England
This course introduces students to the literary representation of gender and sexuality in England from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. To understand a tradition that addressed the intractable problem of human sexuality in terms very different from ours, we will ask: how does pre-modern culture imagine gendered identities, sexual difference, and erotic desire? How do various contexts-medical, religious, social, private, public-inform the literary representation of gender and sexuality? What are the anatomies and economies of the body, the circuits of physical pleasure, and the disciplines of the self that characterize human sexuality? Students will have the opportunity to study romances, saints' lives, mystical writings, diaries, plays, sex guides, novels, and scientific treatises. By learning how to "read sex" in pre-modern literature, students will acquire a broad cultural and historical understanding of English sexualities before the descent of modern sensibilities.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 370 The Age of Victoria
Works of fiction, poetry, journalism, children's literature, political cartoons, book illustrations, genre paintings, and photographs. The course aims to give a sense of the age in all its diversity and peculiarity, as well as to concentrate on a few central issues and developments in 19th century British society: e.g. industrialism, materialism, feminism, liberalism, the rise of the social sciences. Readings will include works by Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Trollope, Oscar Wilde, and Edmund Gosse.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 371 The Age of Chaucer
Study of the ways in which literature and history interplay between 1340 and 1400. Literary texts include writings by Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, and anonymous composers of songs, dream visions, romances, satires, debates, and low stories; attempts to move from these to theoretical and over into historical texts, alienating where necessary and translating where possible.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 372 The Renaissance
Major texts of the European Renaissance examined to set English literary achievement in a continental context. Among authors to be studied: Petrarch, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, Luther, Wyatt, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Milton. Prerequisite: 6 units of literature, junior standing, or permission of instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: ENE
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L14 E Lit 3725 Topics in Renaissance Literature
Topics course in Renaissance Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3731 Writing and the Representation of Pain
Writing intensive course on the representation of pain at every level, from private suffering to public policy. Course reader consists of examples of or extracts from a diversity of materials: the "Bible" and "Ovid," medieval religious lyric, saints' lives, visions of hell and damnation, descriptions of visionary illness, Freud's "Anna O," Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose," Woolf's "On Being Ill," Artaud and the theater of cruelty; autobiographical and other writings by Susan Sontag and Inga Clendinnen; theory by Bataille, Deleuze, Dollimore, and Elizabeth Grosz; work on pain by Leder, Morris, Rey and others; poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Gwen Harwood, Alan Jenkins and others. We will also read Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain" and two recent novels: Andrew Miller's "Ingenious Pain" and Manil Suri's "The Death of Vishnu."
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 374W Epistolary Literature in the 18th Century: Other Peoples' Letters
In this writing intensive course, we will examine the attraction the letter held for authors and readers alike, taking into consideration the advantages and the disadvantages of the form, its role in the development of the early novel, and current theories of epistolary writing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 375A American Culture Studies: Methods & Visions
Required course for AMCS Majors. See semester listing for current topics. As a Writing Intensive course, 375A serves as an occasion for AMCS students to think about matters of argument and presentation, and to develop ideas and models for future research. This course is intended for students at the Junior Level or Higher; it fulfills the "multidisciplinary" (MD) requirement for AMCS Minors and the "Methods Seminar" requirements for AMCS Majors.
Same as L98 AMCS 375A
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 375C Topics in Comparative Literature: Representation and Memory in St. Louis Museums
Same as L16 Comp Lit 375
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L14 E Lit 376 The Victorian Period
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 376A Reading Across the Disciplines: Introduction to the Theoretical Humanities
What does theory look like in an age like ours so sharply marked by interdisciplinarity and in which most humanities scholarship crosses disciplines-- for instance, combining literature or history with philosophyu or critical race studies? In this way all (or almost all) humanities scholars are comparatists in practice if not always in name. The course is designed to introduce this complex and exciting state of affairs to CompLit and English majors, yet any students in a humanities program, or with an interest in the humanities, will fit right in. Our main text is Futures of Comparative Literature, ed. Heise (2017), which contains short essays on topics like Queer Reading; Human Rights; Fundamentalism; Untranslatability; Big Data; Environmental HUmanities. We will supplement this material with relevant short texts from a variety of fields, including some that cross over into the social sciencs.
Same as L16 Comp Lit 376
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 381 Banned Books
Why would anyone want to burn a book? Under what circumstances would you support censorship? Several years ago a Russian student was exiled to Siberia for possessing a copy of Emerson's "Essays"; today, schoolboards in the United States regularly call for the removal of "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Catcher in the Rye" from classrooms and library shelves. Actions like these dramatize the complex interconnections of literature and society, and they raise questions about what we read and the way we read. The course explores these issues by looking closely at several American and translated European texts that have been challenged on moral, socio-political or religious grounds to determine what some readers have found so threatening about these works. Possible authors: Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Defoe, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Twain, Chopin, Brecht, Salinger, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury. Brief daily writing assignments.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH
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L14 E Lit 3831 Topics in African-American Poetry
Beginning with the year in which Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, we will examine the tradition of African American poetry and the ways in which that tradtition is constantly revising itself and being revised from the outside. We will focus in particular on the pressures of expectation -- in terms of such identity markers as race, gender, and sexuality -- and how those pressures uniquely and increasingly affect African American poetry today.
Same as L90 AFAS 3838
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3838 Topics in African-American Poetry
Same as L90 AFAS 3838
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 385W Comedy, Ancient and Modern
In this course we will examine the nature of dramatic comedy and its role in society. We will read, discuss and write about comedies from ancient Greece and Rome and from various modern nations, paying particular attention to the following questions: Do comic plays reinforce or challenge the preconceptions of their audiences? How have comic playwrights responded to issues such as class, gender, religion, and politics? Why does comedy have such power both to unite and to divide people? This course has an extensive writing component, so much of our time will be spent writing about the comedies we will read, revising what we have written, and discussing how best to write about comedy.
Same as L08 Classics 385W
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, WI Art: CPSC BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 386A Topics in African-American Literature: Rebels, Sheroes and Race Men
In this seminar-for we are fortunate to be an elite group this term--we will focus on the first century of African American prose writers. In genre terms that means we will largely, but not exclusively, read autobiographies and novels. Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs are now familiar names in U.S. literature surveys, but others are not yet household names, and in fact may never be. We will survey a core group of texts, available at the WUSTL bookstore, but also supplement our readings with materials placed on BlackBoard, via online databases (e.g., materials accessible digitally from the Schomburg Division of the New York Public Library). For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 1.
Same as L90 AFAS 386A
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 387 African-American Literature: Early Writers to the Harlem Renaissance
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 388 African-American Literature: African-American Writers Since the Harlem Renaissance
African-American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries grows from the Harlem Renaissance into a world-shaping institution. Guggenheim, Pulitzer, and Nobel prize winners; card-carrying Communists, rock-ribbed Republicans, and Black Power nationalists; Broadway playwrights, Book-of-the-Month Club novelists, and even a U.S. President are among the many whose fictions and memoirs we will study, with special attention given to the intimate links between Black writing and Black music. The syllabus will thus feature authors ranging from poet Alice Dunbar Nelson (born 1875) to satirist Colson Whitehead (born 1969), with more than a dozen stops in between. Written assignments may include two papers and two exams. No prerequisites, but related courses such as E Lit 215 and/or AFAS 208 are suggested. Satisfies the American literature requirement in English and/or one 300-level elective requirement in AFAS.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3881 Black Women Writers
When someone says, black woman writer, you may well think of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. But not long ago, to be a black woman writer meant to be considered an aberration. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that Phillis Wheatley's poems were "beneath the dignity of criticism," he could hardly have imagined entire Modern Language Association sessions built around her verse, but such is now the case. In this class we will survey the range of Anglophone African American women authors. Writers likely to be covered include Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Wilson, Nella Larsen, Lorraine Hansberry, Octavia Butler, and Rita Dove, among others. Be prepared to read, explore, discuss, and debate the specific impact of race and gender on American literature.
Same as L90 AFAS 3651
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 388C African American Literature: African American Writers Since the Harlem Renaissance
African American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries grew from a renaissance in Harlem into a world-shaping institution. Public enemies and Nobel prize winners; card-carrying Communists, rock-ribbed Republicans, and Black Power nationalists; Broadway playwrights, Book-of-the-Month Club novelists, and a duly elected U.S. president are among the authors we will study with special attention to the intimate link between black writing and black music. Aiming at chronological and stylistic breadth, the syllabus will begin with poet Alice Dunbar Nelson (born 1875) and end with novelist Colson Whitehead (born 1969), with an array of better-known names--W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison--coming in between. Assignments will consist of two papers, one presentation, and one exam. Prereqs: none, but related classes such as E Lit 2151 and E Lit 2152 and/or AFAS 255 are suggested. Satisfies the Twentieth Century requirement in English, and/or one 300-level elective requirement in AFAS.
Same as L90 AFAS 388C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 391 Literature and Medicine
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 391W Literature and Medicine
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 392W The Rise of the American Short Story
The course will focus on several short stories by 6 different authors in this order: Hawthorne-- My Kinsman, Major Molineux; The Birthmark; Young Goodman Brown; Artist of the Beautiful. Poe: The Black Cat; The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar; The Tell Tale Heart; The Fall of the House of Usher. James: The Jolly Corner; The Figure in the Carpet; The Real Thing. Crane: The Upturned Face; The Open Boat; The Blue Hotel. Anderson: WINESBURG, OHIO. Hemingway: Indian Camp; A Clean Well-Lighted Place; In Another Country; Now I Lay Me. Faulkner: A Rose for Emily; The Evening Sun; Pantaloon in Black. There will be 2 brief papers 2-3 pages; 2 Introductory Paragraphs; 2 4-6 page papers; and 1 paper covering an entire author. There will be 1 rewrite in each category.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 394 African Literature in English
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 394W Writing For and About the Theater
In this course, students will learn to write for and about the theater, exploring different forms of dramaturgical and scholarly research as well as journalistic and academic writing. To build skills in both critical analysis and synthesis, students will learn how the key elements of the playwright's text (e.g., language, character, plot, setting) work to create meaning within the work of dramatic literature and how theatre-makers use the various "languages" of the stage (e.g., costume/scenic/lighting design, music, acting) to give expression to an overarching interpretation of the play. Because research is essential to this course, students will learn how to access a variety of library resources by working closely with our subject librarians. By the end of the semester, students will have assembled a portfolio consisting of both journalistic and academic performance reviews, a dossier of dramaturgical research, and a research-based scholarly paper.
Same as L15 Drama 394W
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3951 Shakespeare's Sonnets: Framing the Sequence
We will begin by exploring ways of reading a small number of individual sonnets, proceeding thereafter to think about patterns of meaning in language and image across broader groupings and the sequence as a whole. We will investigate the influence of earlier sonnet tradition, especially Petrarch's sonnets, and the relationship of the poems to modes of sexuality and selfhood. Finally, we will ask how some of Shakespeare's most creative readers--including Wilde, Booth, and Vendler--have responded to the challenges of the Sonnets. Students will work on writing their own commentary on a group of poems.
Same as L93 IPH 3951
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 3975 Wolves of Wall Street: American Business and Popular Culture
America's perceptions about Big Business and the Free Enterprise system have evolved and changed over time from the 1920s to the present. During the 1980s, for example, Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' seemed to endorse the notion that "greed is good." Today, however, the topic of rising income inequality has been connected with the collapse of prestigious Wall Street firms, the "housing bubble," a declining middle class, and widespread fear about the future of "The American Dream." This new course examines a variety of artistic, ethical and historical perceptions about American Business as depicted in popular culture and the arts over the past hundred years. How have America's foremost artists (among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Martin Scorsese), dealt with questions of conspicuous consumption, the acquisition of capital for its own sake, and the disparity between rich and poor? We survey several artistic genres and artistic forms, including American tragic works like 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Death of a Salesman,' to popular musicals such as 'How to Succeed in Business' without Really Trying and 'The Producers.'
Same as L98 AMCS 3975
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 399 Senior Research Seminar
This course is tailored to the needs of students who are pursuing honors in English in their senior year. It will develop students' ability to gauge how different approaches affect the research and the outcome of a project in literary studies. It will guide them in their research by analyzing and discussing research design, the construction of an archive, and the assessment and use of sources. Assignments will include annotated bibliographies, summaries of the critical debate on student topics, abstract writing, research presentations, as well as drafts and final versions of chapters or essays. We will workshop many of these assignments in the classroom and practice peer review. The seminar will stretch over two semesters, ending before spring break, when honors work is due in the college. It is required for students who pursue honors by coursework and by thesis.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 3991 Senior Research Seminar I
This course is tailored to the needs of students who are pursuing honors in English in their senior year. It will develop students´ ability to gauge how different approaches affect the research and the outcome of a project in literary studies. It will guide them in their research by analyzing and discussing research design, the construction of an archive, and the assessment and use of sources. Assignments will include annotated bibliographies, summaries of the critical debate on student topics, abstract writing, research presentations, as well as drafts and final versions of chapters or essays. We will workshop many of these assignments in the classroom and practice peer review. The seminar will stretch over two semesters, ending before spring break, when honors work is due in the college. It is required for students who pursue honors by coursework and by thesis.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 3992 Senior Research Seminar II
This course is tailored to the needs of students who are pursuing honors in English in their senior year. It will develop students´ ability to gauge how different approaches affect the research and the outcome of a project in literary studies. It will guide them in their research by analyzing and discussing research design, the construction of an archive, and the assessment and use of sources. Assignments will include annotated bibliographies, summaries of the critical debate on student topics, abstract writing, research presentations, as well as drafts and final versions of chapters or essays. We will workshop many of these assignments in the classroom and practice peer review. The seminar will stretch over two semesters, ending before spring break, when honors work is due in the college. It is required for students who pursue honors by coursework and by thesis.
Credit 2 units.
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L14 E Lit 402 Introduction to Graduate Studies I: Research
This course seeks to prepare students for successful doctoral study in English literature. We will examine the history of our discipline and its institutions, including shifting definitions of our objects of study and the histories of exclusion and inclusion that accompany these shifts. We will also consider issues of canonicity, especially as they relate to empire building both within and outside the academy. We will survey critical methodologies and consider what is at stake in the objects we read and the ways we choose to read them. Finally, we will introduce challenges to the traditional organizing frameworks of humanism and national literature. Focused on the academic discipline of literary study, we will also consider the new ways in which the English Ph.D. is preparing students for multiple roles and careers both in and beyond academia.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 403 Black and White in American Drama
This course will address the complex issue of race in America through the 19th and 20th centuries as dramatized by American playwrights, black and white. Authors include Countee Cullen, Lillian Hellman, Eugene O'Neill, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Arthur Miller. Prerequisites: Junior standing, two 300 level courses or better.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 404 Topics for Writers: Beckett
WAITING FOR GODOT, HAPPY DAYS, KRAPP'S LAST TAPE: these are but three of Samuel Beckett's revolutionary texts for theatre. The complete canon of plays will be examined for structure and compositional elements. Students undertake exercises in dramatic composition and perform a chamber presentation of ENDGAME. Course is intended for writers with some experience of the dramatic form. Intending students MUST interview with Instructor Nov. 12-14.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 405 Living Influences: Poets and the Poets Who've Shaped Them
This course examines a number of very contemporary collections of poetry (e.g. from first books writers like Karen Volkman and Greg Williamson, to more established writers like Carl Phillips and Frank Bidart) to discover how generations of writers speak to and through one another. The course considers the nature and possible anxieties of writerly influence and how traditional and/or canonical writers' voices, verse, and vision have shaped a number of poets writing today. This class requires at least a basic knowledge of poetry in English up to the 1950's as we will be moving freely among writers such as Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, as well as Pound, Eliot, Lowell, and Plath.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4050 Theory and Methods in the Humanities
Same as L93 IPH 405
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 407 Old English, Introductory
Study of the Anglo-Saxon language and introduction to major prose and short poetry of the period. Prerequisites: junior standing and 6 units of literature.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 408 Old English Literature
Close study of some major literary texts (e.g.. Beowulf, the Exeter book) and major issues (e.g., Anglo-Saxon and Latin culture, traditions of heroic literature) of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Prerequisite: E Lit 407, or permission of instructor.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 410 Medieval English Literature I
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4101 Medieval English Literature II
Topics course in Medieval English literature.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 411 Old and Middle English Literature
Early English literature from Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, in translation, through major works in Middle English of the 14th and 15th centuries, exclusive of Chaucer.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4111 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities
This course will open with a survey of the classical tradition in pastoral/bucolic. We will consider questions of genre, intertextuality and ideology, and we will ask how ´the lives and loves of herders´ became favored ground for literary meditation on issues of surface and depth, reality and illusion, artifice and sincerity. This portion will involve intensive reading in translation of Theocritus, Vergil and Longus. In the second half of the semester, we will consider the survival, adaptation and deformation of ancient pastoral themes, forms and modes of thought in British and American writing from the 19th and 20th centuries. We will read works of Mark Twain, Kenneth Grahame, Thomas Hardy and Tom Stoppard.
Same as L93 IPH 4111
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L14 E Lit 412 16th-Century English Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 413 17th-Century English Literature: 1603-1660
Selected readings in English literature from Donne and Jonson through Dryden.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 415 18th-Century English Literature
Selected readings in English literature from Pope and Swift through the age of Johnson.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4172 Roman Remains: Traces of Classical Rome in Modern British Literature
This course will examine the use of the Roman textual and material inheritance in poets, novelists and critics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries working in Britain, and will ask how modernity addresses the claims of the classical tradition. We will place Thomas Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13" next to Vergil's Aeneid, then survey Hardy's relationship to the visible remainders of Rome and the people it conquered -- roads, barrows, forts -- in the landscape of Dorset. After examining the representation of the Celtic hill-fort in fiction, and the legacy of Vergilian representations of the countryside in poetry, we will consider representations of Rome in light of modern imperialism (Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Ezra Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius) and examine the place of Vergil in T. S. Eliot's critical and poetic practice.
Same as L93 IPH 4171
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 418 Victorian Literature 1830-1890
Readings in such authors as Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Mill, Arnold, and Pater.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 420 Topics in English and American Literature
Comparing the literatures -- readings in the literature and theory of English and American Literature. Topics vary according to semester offerings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 423 Topics in American Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4231 Topics in American Literature I
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4232 Slavery and the American Imagination
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 424 Topics in American Literature II: Modernisms in America
This course offers an advanced introduction to both the literature and the concept of modernism, the "ism" used to mark the experimental verve of early twentieth-century writing and to grasp its ties to modernity, or the modern social world. As the course title suggests, we will devote most of our time to the career of modernism in the United States, a place imagined as both the modernist nation par excellence and the desert modernism escaped to be born. Three groups of primary texts--early modernist experiments, 1920s modernist landmarks, and Great Depression revisions--will illuminate the grand ambitions of eccentric literary forms and sequestered avant-garde movements; the public disputes and buried alliances between "high" expatriate and Harlem Renaissance modernisms; and the influential Depression-era reinterpretation of modernism as reactionary self-indulgence. The syllabus will feature fiction, poetry, and drama by old and new literary celebrities: Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Meridel LeSueur, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright. A shorter list of critical essays will highlight modernism's tendency to theorize itself while introducing 21st-century perspectives from the "New Modernist Studies." Satisfies the American requirement. For undergraduates, Junior or Senior standing is required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4240 Topics in American Literature II
Fiction not often found in the standard survey course, such as Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware, G. W. Cable's The Grandissimes, Frank Norris' The Octopus, Jack London's Martin Eden, Thornton Wilder's Heaven's My Destination, Dorothy Baker's Young Man With a Horn, R. P. Warren's All the King's Men, Thomas Pyncheon's V, short works by Edith Wharton and Ring Lardner.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4241 In the Kingdom of Swing-Black American Culture
An examination of the development of African-American literature and culture between 1929 and 1941.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4243 Contemporary African-American Drama
A close study of selected plays from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. We shall consider plays by Lonnie Carter, John Pepper Clark, Adrienne Kennedy, Wole Soyinka, Efua T. Sutherland, Derek Walcott, and Edgar White, among others.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4244 Topics in African-American Literature
Hold for new hire
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 425 Early American Literature: American Modernisms
his seminar offers an advanced introduction to both the literature andthe concept of modernism, the "ism" used to mark the experimental verve of early twentieth-century writing and to grasp its ties to modernity, or the modern social world. As the course title suggests, we will devote most of our time to the career of modernism in the United States, a place imagined as both the modernist nation par excellence and the desert modernism escaped to be born. Three groups of primary texts--early modernist experiments, 1920s modernist landmarks, and Great Depression revisions--will illuminate the grand ambitions of eccentric literary forms and self-sequestered avant-garde movements; the public disputes and buried alliances between "high" expatriate and Harlem Renaissance modernisms; and the influential Depression-era reinterpretation of modernism as reactionary self-indulgence. The syllabus will feature fiction, poetry, and drama by old and new literary celebrities: Djuna Barnes, John DosPassos, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway, Ella Larsen, Meridel LeSueur, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen,Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright. A shorter list of critical essays will highlight modernism's tendency to theorize itself whileintroducing 21st-century perspectives from the "New Modernist Studies."
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 425C Humanities by the Numbers
To what extent can computational techniques that draw on statistical patterns and quantification assist us in literary analysis? Over the semester, we will juxtapose the close reading of historical documents or literary works with the "distant reading" of a large corpus of historical data or literary texts. We will ask how the typically "human" scale of reading that lets us respond to literary texts can be captured on the "inhuman" and massive scales at which computers can count, quantify and categorize texts.While this class will introduce you to basic statistical and computational techniques, no prior experience with technology is required. Prerequisites: two 200 level or one 300-level course in literature or history. This is a topics-type course and the specific documents and works examined will vary from semester to semester. Please see semester course listings for current offerings.
Same as L93 IPH 425
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 426 The American Renaissance
Literature of the mid-nineteenth century with attention to social and intellectual backgrounds and the sources of the transcendentalist movement.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 426C Imagining the City: Crime and Commerce in Early Modern London
The astonishing demographic and economic growth of early modern London, and the rapid increase in spatial and social mobility that accompanied this growth seemed to harbinger, in the eyes of many contemporaries, a society in crisis and perhaps on the brink of collapse. As increasing numbers of vagrants or masterless men flocked to the metropolis and a growing number of people - apprentices, domestic labor, street vendors etc - lived on the fringes of legitimacy and at risk of lapsing into vagrancy, policing early modern London provided unique challenges for authorities. At the same time, the very notion of the social - a shared space of kinship and community could often seem to be under threat as an emerging market and a burgeoning commodity culture reshaped the traditional underpinnings of social and economic transactions. Yet, late Tudor and early Stuart London remained by far England's most prosperous metropolis, its primary market, home to a burgeoning print culture and nourishing theater and emerged, eventually, as the epicenter of a global economy. This course will consider the topographic, social and institutional configuration of early modern London and the ways in which these were reimagined and negotiated in the literature of the period. Drawing on the drama of the period and a wide array of pamphlet literature, we will discuss how civic institutions handled the growing influx of the poor and adapted to the increasing power of an emerging bourgeoisie who asserted themselves in unprecedented ways. In addition we will consider secondary sources ranging from maps, theories of urban space and social and economic historiography as well as digital archives and computational techniques that allow us to "scale up" our thinking about early modern London to a vast corpus of texts and documents.
Same as L93 IPH 426
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 427 American Literature: The Rise of Realism to World War I
The maturing of American literature from the regional origins of realistic fiction just prior to the Civil War through the early naturalist novel and the beginnings of modern American poetry.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 428 Modernism and Postmodernism
Readings in early sources of 20th-century developments, followed by a selective survey of literary discourse from the 1920s through the 1990s in the United States. Prerequisites: junior standing and 6 units of literature or graduate standing.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4282 English Modernist Fiction
The first half of the twentieth century produced some of English fiction's greatest individiual achievements, linked by writers' attempts to represent, through narrative experiments, a world in which many certainties about self and society were dissolving. Attentive reading of ten novels or short story collections; study of the historical and cultural contexts to which these writers were responding. Among writers to be considered: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, and Ford Madox Ford.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 431 English Drama, Exclusive of Shakespeare, to 1642
Studies of selected major plays against a background of change and tradition in English drama from its beginnings to the closing of the theatres.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4312 Early Drama
This unit is concerned with English and European drama and spectacle from late Roman theatre onwards: primarily in England, but with comparative material from France and Italy. The chronological span of the course will end at about 1600; the working assumption is that there is no clean break between 'medieval' and 'Renaissance' drama, but that the theatres and scripts of the late sixteenth century should be understood as developing out of, as well as departing from, earlier theatrical traditions and practices.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 432 Topics in Renaissance Drama
A study of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical culture--the plays, players, playwrights, and audiences of public theaters, private theaters, and banqueting halls. Study includes the plays of Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marston, Middleton, Webster, and Shakespeare.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4323 Reading in the Renaissance: Literature and Media in Early Modern England
Examination of reading practices among original audiences for Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Marvell, Rochester, and Dryden and application to our understanding and experience of early modern texts.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 432A Programming for Text Analysis
This course will introduce basic programming and text-analysis techniques to humanities students. Beginning with an introduction to programming using the Python programming language, the course will discuss the core concepts required for working with text corpora. We will cover the basics of acquiring data from the web, string manipulation, regular expressions, and the use of programming libraries for text analysis. Later in the course, students will be introduced to larger text corpora. They will learn to calculate simple corpus statistics as well as techniques such as tokenization, chunking, extraction of thematically significant words, stylometrics and authorship attribution. We will end with a brief survey of more advanced text-classification terminology and topics from natural language processing such as stemming, lemmatization, named-entity recognition, and part-of-speech tagging.
Same as L93 IPH 432
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 434 Topics in English and American Drama
Varies from semester to semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 435 Childhood and Society: The Formation of Children's Literature
An intensive examination of some of the major works that have shaped the canon and conception of children's literature in the English-speaking world. Among the authors to be studied are George Macdonald, Mark Twain, Kenneth Grahame, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and others. If time permits at the end of the course, we will examine some works that appeared in the Brownies' Book, the children's publication of the NAACP that appeared in 1920 and 1921, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, a significant attempt to create a literature for children of color.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 436 Craft of Fiction: Dialogue
A literature/creative writing hybrid course, we'll concentrate on the element of dialogue in fiction. We'll focus on 20th Century novels and stories which use dialogue in radical ways or which place conversational dynamics at the center of their projects, probably including works by Don DeLillo, Henry Green, Grace Paley, and Philip Roth. We'll consider the architecture of conversations--the evasions and hidden agendas; the art of the well-made monologue; how speech is shaped by varieties of linguistic capital; and secrets as a narrative device, extending into issues of conspiracy and paranoia. Since this will be a craft rather than a traditional literature course, we1ll approach the texts as creative writers (although experience as such is not required), considering what they have to say through a primary emphasis on the means they develop to say it, and we'll put the craft into practice: assignments will include both a critical paper and a short story using radical elements of dialogue. We'll also make room for some consideration of the dynamics of actual conversations, outside of fiction, through a reading of some conversational analysts and speech-act theorists, and through some real-world experiments.
Credit 3 units. EN: H
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L14 E Lit 441 Literature of Catastrophe
In this course we will examine the ways in which art, both literary and visual attempt to adress catastrophic events.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 442 Introduction to Romantic Poetry
We will read the poetry of the major Romantics-- Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats--with attention to their biographical, historical, economic, and cultural contexts
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 446 Introduction to Contemporary Poetry
Introduction to contemporary poetry.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 447 Modern British and American Poetry
Modern poetic forms, schools and techniques. Readings in such poets as Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Moore, Auden, Bishop, Hill.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4471 Modern Poetry I: Modernisms
American and British poetry before, during, and after World War I. Readings include Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Stein, Eliot, Williams, Moore, Johnson, Pound, H.D. and Stevens, as well as selections from Wordsworth, Whitman and Dickinson. First half of two-course sequence; second half optional
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4472 Modern Poetry II: Postmodernisms
American and British poetry from 1930 to the present. Readings include Stevens, Riding, Crane, Zukofsky, Bunting, Auden, Brooks, Olson, Bishop, Merrill, Ashbery, Hill, Ammons, Rich, Wright and Howe. Prerequisite: E Lit 4471 or permission of instructor.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4485 Topics in Irish Literature: Modern Irish Poetry
Topics course in Irish literature.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4492 The Irish Literary Revival
The class will study major writings by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, James Joyce, & Flann O'Brien within the contexts of the language movement, colonialism, cultural nationalism, the socialist movement and the 1913 Lockout, the Easter Rising and the War for Independence, the Civil War, the founding of the Irish Free State, the Partition, and the Irish Theocracy. Wilde's notions of the primacy of art with regard to politics and their elaboration by W. I. Thompson and Declan Kiberd will be an organizing principle in the course. The class will see two films, offer oral reports, and write papers.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 449A Topics in Literature: Humanism
In this course, we will read a broad range of literary works written by ethnic Chinese from various parts of the world. We will examine the notion of "Sinophone," primarily its implications to the challenge of cultural identity formation to those Chinese who are not traditionally identified as "Chinese" because of war, migration, immigration, colonialism, among others. We will also examine the meaning of being on the margins of geopolitical nation-states. Finally we will discuss the notions of hybridity and authenticity vis-a-vis literary representation. We will read works by ethnic Chinese writers from the United States, France, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Mongolia, Tibet, and so on. This course is limited to seniors and graduate students only. All readings will be in English. Active class participation is required.
Same as L16 Comp Lit 449
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 450 American Film Genres
By close examination of three or four specific types of film narratives, this course will explore how genre has functioned in the Hollywood mode of production. Students will gain an understanding of genre both as a critical construct as well as a form created by practical economic concerns, a means of creating extratextual communication between film artist/producers and audience/consumers. Genres for study will be chosen from the western, the gangster film, the horror movie, the musical, screwball comedy, science fiction, the family melodrama, the woman's film, and others. In addition to film showings, there will be readings in genre theory as well as genre analyses of individual films. Required screenings
Same as L53 Film 450
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4505 Interdisciplinary Topics in the Humanities
Same as L93 IPH 450
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 450A Interdisciplinary Topics in the Humanities
Same as L93 IPH 450A
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4531 American Drama
Topics in American Drama.
Same as L15 Drama 453
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 456 English Novel of the 19th Century
Prose fiction by such writers as Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontæs, and Hardy.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 458 The Modern Novel
Content and craft in the varying modes of the American, British, and continental modern novel by such writers as James, Joyce, Lawrence, Faulkner, Kafka, Mann, Gide, Camus.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4581 Modern British Novel
A selection of books by some of the major 20th-century figures: Henry James, Samuel Butler, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Sybille Bedford, V. S. Naipaul, William Trevor, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4583 British Fiction after Modernism
Course attempts to identify characteristics of British postmodern fiction: experimental novels of the 1970s and 1980s -- works by, for example, John Fowles, Alasdair Gray, and Martin Amis; the "devolution" of British fiction into its constituent Scottish and English strands in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as its simultaneous globalizing as diasporic novelists wrote from Britain about "home". Younger writers, in frequently provocative ways, address the questions of nation, place, class, and sexual identity that have dominated the post-war period.
Credit 3 units.
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L14 E Lit 4584 Contemporary Fiction
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4601 The Shaping of Modern Literature
Themes and major figures associated with the shaping of the modern literary imagination, including such topics as Freudian and Jungian versions of the self, phenomenological thought, the symbolist imagination, and such masters as Hegel, Kafka, Kierkegaard, William and Henry James. Topics vary each semester; consult Course Listings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 461 Topics in English Literature I
Studies in special subjects, e.g., allegory and symbolism in the medieval period, the sonnet in English literature, English poetry and politics. Consult Course Listings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 462 Topics in English Literature II
Variable topics, such as Travel and Colonization in the Renaissance; Renaissance Skepticism and the Literature of Doubt.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4621 Topics in English Literature
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H UColl: ENL
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L14 E Lit 4631 Topics in English Literature and History: The 17th Century
Variable topics, such as Writing, Politics, and Society in Revolutionary England, Life Writing and Literature in Early Modern England.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4655 The Pre-History of Blogging: Social Media of the Enlightenment
This course will explore the ways in which the Enlightenment-in France, England, Germany and the US-was shaped by the emergence of new literary forms, media, and technologies of communication. Like our blogs, Facebook, and e-mail, the eighteenth-century had its new social media-newspapers and literary journals, letters that surged through the national postal systems-as well as new social institutions-salons and coffeehouses-that served as forums for public debate. We will examine these novelties in order to investigate the often ambivalent heritage of the Enlightenment: the use of media to exchange knowledge and express dissent; the use of media for surveillance and State control.
Same as L93 IPH 465
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 466 Theory and Methods in the Humanities
Same as L93 IPH 405
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4692 Shakespeare and Performance
How were Shakespeare's plays performed in their own day--in the Globe theater, with boy actors, and with very short rehearsal times? How, for the actor, did performance work on the outdoor stage, with the Globe's wide and deep acting platform and its intimate relationship to the audience? How might one stage Shakespeare today in an outdoor environment without lighting and with minimal sets, and with the capacity to move easily from one outdoor venue to another? From what social types in Renaissance England-such as merchants, prostitutes, aristocrats, constables, beggars, and princes-did Shakespeare draw? How can evolving ideas about race, gender, and sexuality inform the way we perform Shakespeare today? Addressing these questions and others, the course weaves together performance and literary, critical, and historical study. Topics include blank verse, performing Shakespeare's prose, playing with figures of speech, working the Globe stage, engaging an outdoor audience, acting from a written "part" rather than an entire script, performing types, exploring Shakespeare's sources as performance alternatives, making Shakespeare new-and more. Students will rehearse and perform sonnets, scenes, and monologues based on social figures from Shakespeare's England. The course assumes a willingness to perform but not specialized acting training.
Same as L15 Drama 4692
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 470 Research Lab
This class allows faculty members to work on their research in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students. The content of the class (and its subtitle) will be determined by the faculty member's research project; its primary activities will involve the students in making concrete contributions to the faculty member's research. The basic idea is to create a collaborative environment akin to a lab, in which researchers of various skills pursuing various tasks contribute to a distinctive project.
Credit 3 units. Arch: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 470A Interdisciplinary Topics: Data Signs-A Literary History of Information
Various interdisciplinary topics are explored that may includes around the humanities, social sciences and data sciences.
Same as L93 IPH 470
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 472 History of the English Language
Concepts and methods of linguistical study: comparative, historical, and descriptive. Application of methods to selected problems in the history of English. Contrastive analysis of excerpts from Old, Middle, and later English; sounds, meanings, syntax, and styles.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 478 The Craft of Fiction
A literature/creative writing hybrid course concentrating on the element of dialogue in fiction, reading novels and stories that use dialogue in radical ways, including works by Don DeLillo, Henry Green, Zora Neale Hurston, Grace Paley, and Philip Roth.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 479 The Art and Craft of Poetry
An examination of poetry from its beginnings in English to the present day considering the relationship between earlier traditions and the manifestations of those traditions in contemporary poetry. Issues such as image, metaphor and the employment of it, notions of vision, the extent to which vision can spring from the intersection of art and craft. Study of prosody, reading poems which exemplify the successful use of prosodic technique, and trying our own hands at those techniques as well.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 481 Selected English Writers I
Concentrated study of one or two major English writers, e.g., Spenser, Dickens, Blake, Yeats. Consult Course Listings.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 482 Selected English Writers II
Concentrated study of one or two major English writers, e.g., Spenser, Dickens, Blake, Yeats. Consult Course Listings.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 483 Selected American Writers I
Concentrated study of one or two major American writers, e.g., Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright; Emily Dickinson. Consult Course Listings each semester for specific authors.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 486 The Business of Books
Book publishing shapes our literary and intellectual landscape in defining ways, yet only with the recent rise of Publishing Studies has the theory and practice of publishing become a serious subject of attention within the academy. This course offers a broad introduction to publishing, with a practical emphasis on contemporary literary publishing. We will explore how publishing communities form in relation to aesthetics, demographics, and technologies, and will consider how ethics and business practices are defined within these communities. On the applied side, we will study editing, contracts, marketing, sales & distribution, infrastructure, and media, and students will write reader's reports, marketing plans, and a final paper analyzing a contemporary publishing project and placing its work in relation to the historical and cultural context, demonstrating how each particular publishing practice is adapted to its own cultural ecosystem. Industry professionals will visit to speak with the class by Zoom, and Professor Riker brings two decades of experience as a book publisher, author, and reviewer. Alongside these other activities, over the course of the semester students will follow the progression of a book published by the nationally acclaimed publishing house Dorothy, a Publishing Project, of which Professor Riker is the publisher.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 493 Spenser
Readings in the Faerie Queene and Shepheardes Calender, with attention to Spenser's deliberate fashioning of a literary career.
Credit 3 units. Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4930 The Unmaking and Remaking of Europe: The Literature and History of the European War of 1914-1918
The Great War of 1914-1918 is one of the most momentous events in history. We can approach its broad European import by reading its literatures comparatively. Far wider than the concerns of any one national ideology, the literature of record represents a profound crisis in the European cultural imaginary. A number of critical and interpretive issues will be in play in our readings, which will move through three major phases. We begin with the powerful immediacy of trench poetry (1914-1919), develop into the constructed narratives of the great postwar novels and memoirs (1920-1931), and then turn toward the retrospect of the 1930s, which is also the prospect on the next, now inevitable, war. The authors featured include combatant and civilian writers, names well-known and not so famous: Mann, Apollinaire, Owen, Pound, Cocteau, H.D., Woolf, Maurois, West, Celine, Joyce, Musil, Eliot, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Graves, Hardy, Trakl, Stramm, Lichtenstein, Péguy, Barbusse, Manning, Jünger, Zweig, Brittain, and Kroner. All readings for class will be in English translation. Our secondary literature will provide approaches to specific texts and models of literary and cultural history that represent the longer-range importance of the war.
Same as L16 Comp Lit 493
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 494 Milton
Major poems and prose works in relation to literary and intellectual currents of the 17th century.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 494C Seminar: Translating Gertrude Stein
This course may offer a variety of topics. Semester sub-title will vary. In Fall 2008, it was offered as an in depth study of the individual through autobiographies. At other times before, it has been offered as a course on visual poetics from antiquity to the present. See department for further details.
Same as L16 Comp Lit 494
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4951 Seminar: The 19th-Century European Novel
Seminar in Comparative Literature Studies. Topics Vary. See course listings for current semester's offering.
Same as L16 Comp Lit 495
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 496 Shakespeare Adv Course
A study of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist, with intensive work on particular plays in the light of critical traditions. Prerequisite: E Lit 395C, or permission of instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L14 E Lit 4968 Digital Methods in Literary Analysis: Shakespeare by the Numbers
This course will explore how emerging digital techniques can help us read literary texts in new ways. We will read a set of Shakespeare plays closely but also work with a large corpus of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as we cover basic text-mining and visualization techniques and use simple statistical and quantitative approaches to think about questions of genre and style. We will ask how the typically "human" scale of reading that lets us respond to these texts can be captures on they massive scales at which computers can count, quantify and categorize. What nuance is lost in this translation between "close" and "distant" readings and what insights are gained?
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4969 Shakespeare in Production
This course will examine Shakespeare's comedies in performance. Combining scene work and production history, students will gain access to the world of the comedies from both a hands-on, theoretical and historical perspective. Prerequisites: Drama 395C or permission of instructor.
Same as L15 Drama 469
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 4976 Advanced Seminar in Literature
This seminar is an interdisciplinary examination of how Americans represented the Civil War during and after the titanic conflict, with special attention given to the period between 1865 and 1915. The course explores how painters, novelists, photographers, sculptors, essayists, journalists, philosophers, historians, and filmmakers engaged the problems of constructing narrative and reconstructing national and individual identity out of the physical and psychological wreckage of a war which demanded horrific sacrifice and the destruction of an enemy that could not be readily dissociated from the self.
Same as L22 History 4976
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 498 The Spenser Lab
This course involves graduate and undergraduate students in the ongoing work of the Spenser Project, an inter-institutional effort to produce a traditional print edition of the Complete Works of Edmund Spenser.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L14 E Lit 498A Special Topics in Playwriting: Art and Activism
Taught by guest teaching artist, Regina Taylor, playwright, director, stage/screen actor, this course will focus on how art can effect change through personal expression. The monumental cultural shift that is in motion throughout the world will be explored through the specific lens of each student's life. Students will write short pieces and one-act plays that will explore where they are at this moment in time. Works in the class may be added to Regina Taylor's black album mixtape. No playwriting experience necessary. Course open only to juniors, seniors and graduate students.
Same as L15 Drama 498
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L14 E Lit 498W The Spenser Lab
In this Writing Intensive course, the students will be given a variety of writing tasks: writing commentaries, introductions, software manuals, grant proposals, software requirements, and design documents (SRDDs).
Credit 4 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI EN: H
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Children's Studies
Visit online course listings to view semester offerings for L66 ChSt.
L66 ChSt 114 First-Year Seminar: Childhood in Greek Antiquity
Recent social histories exploring Greek childhood have emphasized the reconstruction of the ancient child's agency. Such studies have been interested to illuminate the lived experience of children and to apprehend their voices so often silent in the sources. While such inquiry has clearly widened our understanding of ancient children's lives, the present course is designed instead to explore explicitly the representation of children as particularly rich reservoirs of cultural values. Drawing upon a range of art historical and archaeological sources and literary genres, we will examine the ways in which children were presented to mirror back social mores, thus capturing the aspirations of ancient Greek society. As figures of future potential, children continue to offer social historians one of the most striking lenses through which to explore the question of our humanity. The protean answer to this question at once reveals the proximity and vast distance that stands between our modern society and the ancient Greek one.
Same as L08 Classics 114
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 178 First-Year Seminar: Imagining and Creating Africa: Youth, Culture, and Change
The goal of this course is to provide a glimpse into how youth reshape African society. Whether in North Africa with the Arab Spring, in West Africa with university strikes, or in East Africa through a linguistic full bloom, youth have been shaping social responses to societies for a long period. In this course, we will study social structures, including churches, NGOs, developmental agencies as well as learn about examples of Muslim youth movements, and the global civil society. The course will also explore how youth impact cultural movements in Africa and how they influence the world. In particular, we will examine Hip-Hop movements, sports, and global youth culture developments that center on fashion, dress, dance, and new technologies. By the end of the course, students will have enriched ideas about youth in Africa and ways to provide more realistic comparisons to their counterparts in the United States. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Same as L90 AFAS 178
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L66 ChSt 219 The Infant Mind: Sophomore Seminar
What goes on inside the mind of an infant? In this course we will explore a variety of hot topics concerning how babies experience the world around them. We will cover topics such as temperament (Do babies get mad?), language and communication (How do infants learn words and what if a baby is exposed to more than one language?), the effects of poverty on the developing brain (Does it matter?), social categories and relationships (Do babies notice differences across people?), and morality (Do babies have a sense of justice?). We will also discuss how to put child development research into practice, for example, by considering research relevant to policies concerning vaccination, early childhood education, and whether screen time is okay for babies. Students will have ample opportunity to interact with children at a local childcare center, where they can experience first-hand the research they are learning about in class. If you are curious about the developing mind, human nature, or considering a career in a field that involves children (e.g., education, medicine, public policy) this course is for you. PREREQ: Sophomore standing, and is open to students from all majors. Enrollment is restricted to 20 sophomores or permission of instructor.
Same as L33 Psych 219
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 251 Juvenile Justice in the Black Experience
This course examines the sociolegal past, present, and future of American juvenile justice, with a focus on the Black American experience. The course is organized in three parts. Part I surveys the late 19th- and early 20th-century development of the "parental state," including its institutional centerpiece (the juvenile court), its principle legal subjects ("dependents" and "delinquents"), and how these took shape alongside the contemporaneous rise of American Apartheid. Part II examines several key changes and challenges in contemporary juvenile justice, including the transformation of this institution in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the endurance of racialized juvenile social control in the post-Civil Rights period. Finally, Part III considers possible futures of youth justice in the United States and beyond as well as practical strategies for achieving equal protection within and beyond the law. For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 2.
Same as L90 AFAS 251
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC, SD Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 299 Internship in Children's Studies
This course offers up to three hours of academic credit (on a pass/fail basis) for an unpaid internship with an outside organization in some area of Children's Studies. Enrollment is restricted to Children's Studies minors and will require completion of a final written project as well as coordination with a site supervisor. For more information, please contact Dr. Wendy Anderson at andersonwl@wustl.edu or 314-935-9523.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L66 ChSt 300 Interdisciplinary Introduction to Children's Studies
What is childhood? Is it supposed to be happy? And what can children's books, toys, and memoirs tell us about the experience of childhood in a certain time and place? This course is designed to introduce students to the field of children's studies, including readings in the history and literature of global childhood, excerpts from children's films and TV, visits from Wash U. faculty studying children across various disciplines, and real or virtual field trips to a children's museum and a juvenile detention facility. The course is intended to give students a richly detailed picture of how children and childhood are dealt with as subjects throughout the curriculum and the impact these approaches have had on how the greater society thinks about children. Freshmen are welcome to enroll. This course fulfills the Social Contrasts requirement in Arts & Sciences.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 3005 Childrens Picture Books: Culture and Content
Even in our world of apps and e-readers, paging through a picture book remains a beloved pastime for children. What has allowed the picture book to persist as a cultural object for over 300 years and what can it teach us about childhood? In this course, we will examine the history of the picture book, from the earliest illustrated educational texts to John Newbery's groundbreaking delights to the socially conscious picture books of the 21st century. We will use the picture book to trace important social and educational movements given its use as a tool to impart cultural values and knowledge. We will also examine important moments in picture book publishing history, most notably, the post-war Little Golden Books phenomenon. Authors and illustrators of study will include Randolph Caldecott, Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Bruno Munari, Jerry Pinkney, Eric Carle, Tana Hoban, Leo and Diane Dillon, and Christian Robinson. Students will engage critically with both text and image, delving into the way images communicate meaning. The course will also contemplate important contemporary issues, most notably, race and representation in picture books and the rise of picture book bans. This course is well-suited for students interested in illustration, education, publishing, and cultural studies, and is appropriate for students pursuing the children's studies minor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 301C The American School
In this course we analyze the development of American schooling within the context of American social history. Our focus is on three general themes: the differing conceptions of schooling held by some American political, social, and cultural thinkers; the changing relationships among schools and other educational institutions such as the church and the family; and the policy issues and arguments that have shaped the development of schooling in America. We spend considerable time studying the history of schooling in relation to the enduring challenges and dilemmas of marginalized groups including but not limited to systemic racial inequalities, access to schooling and inequitable schooling experiences. Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 301C, while graduate students must enroll in Educ. 5001.
Same as L12 Educ 301C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, ETH, HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 303 Gender and Education
An examination of educational experiences, practices, and institutions across multiple levels (PK-university) using gender as a critical lens. Key topics include common beliefs, practices, and expectations related to gender in educational spaces, as well as the intersections between gender and other identities that may influence educational experiences and outcomes. Readings are drawn from multiple disciplines, including sociology, history, psychology, and philosophy. Students should be prepared to analyze their own gendered educational experiences in the context of the scholarship explored in the course, while also listening respectfully and reflecting on the experiences shared by classmates. Enrollment Note: Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 303, and graduate students must enroll in Educ. 5003.
Same as L12 Educ 303
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SD Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 304 Educational Psychology
This is a course in psychological concepts relevant to education that is organized around four basic issues: (1) how humans think and learn; (2) how children, adolescents, and adults differ in their cognitive and moral development; (3) the sense in which motivation and intention explain why people act as they do; and (4) how such key human characteristics as intelligence, motivation, and academic achievement can be measured. Offered fall and spring semesters. Enrollment Note: Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 304. Graduate students must obtain approval of instructor and their advisor before enrolling in Educ. 5004.
Same as L12 Educ 304
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 313B Education, Childhood, Adolescence and Society
This course examines the social and developmental experiences of children and adolescents at the national and international level. Readings will focus on the development of children and adolescents from historical, sociological, psychological, and political perspectives. Students will examine how both internal and external forces impact the developmental stages of children and adolescents. Students will investigate the issues that impact children and adults such as poverty, war, media, schooling, and changes in family structure. Students will explore some of the issues surrounding the education of children such as the effects of high quality preschool on the lives of children from low income families and the connection between poverty and educational achievement. Students will focus on the efficacy of the "safety nets" that are intended to address issues such as nutrition, health, violence, and abuse. Throughout the course, students will review and critique national and international public policy that is designed to address the needs of children and their families throughout the educational process. Undergraduates must enroll in Educ. 313B, while graduate students must enroll in 513B.
Same as L12 Educ 313B
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 3140 Sociolinguistics, Literacies, Schools, and Communities
Literacy learning and development within a thriving community require attention to the linguistic, cultural, and economic diversity of students. Within an era of state standardization and accountability, it is imperative to use a systems approach in education that unites homes, schools, and communities. Differentiating instruction to meet the needs of all students, including English language learners and other traditionally marginalized groups of students, is essential. This course will introduce students to sociocultural theories of literacy across settings. It will prepare students to analyze how race, ethnicity, class, gender, and language influence the development of literacy skills. We will develop a multifaceted view of literacy that is embedded within culture and that acknowledges the influences of social institutions and conditions. We will incorporate strategies for individual student needs based on students' backgrounds and prior experiences to deliver differentiated instruction and to teach students to set learning goals. Offered in fall semester only. Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 314, while graduate students must enroll in Educ. 5114.
Same as L12 Educ 314
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L66 ChSt 316W Topics in American Literature: Girls' Fiction
Topic varies. Writing intensive.
Same as L14 E Lit 316W
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: ENL
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L66 ChSt 318 Topics in American Literature
Same as L14 E Lit 318
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 321 Developmental Psychology
This course concentrates on the cognitive and social development of the person from conception to adoldscence. Topics covered include: infant perception, attachment, cognitive development from Piagetian and information processing perspectives, aggression and biological bases of behavior. PREREQ: Psych 100B.
Same as L33 Psych 321
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 3221 Girls' Media and Popular Culture
This course will analyze girls as cultural consumers, mediated representations, cultural producers, and subjects of social anxiety. Readings will cover a range of media that have historically been associated with girlhood, including not only film, television, and digital media but also dolls, magazines, literature, and music. We will explore what role these media texts and technologies have had in the socialization of girls, the construction of their gendered identities, and the attempts at regulation of their behavior, sexuality, and appearance. Although the course will focus on girlhood media since the 1940s, we will consider how constructions of girlhood identity have changed over time and interrogate how girlhood identity intersects with race, sexuality, and class. The course will examine important debates and tensions arising in relation to girls' media. We will evaluate concerns and moral panics about girls and their relationship to or perceived overinvestment in media and compare and contrast this with accounts of girls as active media consumers and producers. We will critically analyze how girls have been understood to negotiate agency in relation to commercialized culture -- how they have been represented as wielders of "girl power," as passive or active consumers, as fans, and as media producers themselves. We will also analyze attempts to intervene in girls' media and popular culture and consider how these interventions have attempted to empower, inspire, or regulate girls or how they have worked to reinforce or challenge gendered understandings of childhood.
Same as L77 WGSS 3221
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC, SD Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 325 Psychology of Adolescence
This course concentrates on brain, cognitive, and social development during adolescence. This period of development is marked by transition and change. Special topics will include the vulnerability of the adolescent brain and the development of sexual orientation. Prerequisite: Psych 100B.
Same as L33 Psych 325
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 3254 African Americans and Children's Literature
This course explores two distinct themes: how African descended people have been depicted in American and British children's literature and how African Americans have established a tradition in writing for children and young adults. It will also examine two related questions: How has African American childhood been constructed in children's literature and how have African American writers constructed childhood in children's literature? We will look at such classic white writers for children like Helen Bannerman, Annie Fellows Johnston, and Mark Twain as well as efforts by blacks like the Brownies Book, published by the NAACP, and children's works by black writers including Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Arna Bontemps, Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, Mildred Taylor, Floyd and Patrick McKissack, Julius Lester, Rosa Guy, Sharon Bell Mathis, bell hooks, and others. For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 1.
Same as L90 AFAS 3254
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 3270 Comics, Graphic Novels, and Sequential Art
This course traces the evolution of comics in the America from the "comic cuts" of the newspapers, through the development of the daily and Sunday strips, into the comic book format, and the emergence of literary graphic novels. While not a uniquely American medium, comics have a specifically American context that intersects with issues of race, class, gender, nationalism, popular culture, consumerism, and American identity. Comics have repeatedly been a site of struggle in American culture; examining these struggles illuminates the way Americans have constructed and expressed their view of themselves. The way comics have developed as a medium and art form in this country has specific characteristics that can be studied profitably through the lens of American Culture Studies.
Same as L98 AMCS 3270
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 331 Topics in Holocaust Studies: Children in the Shadow of the Swastika
This course will approach the history, culture and literature of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust by focusing on one particular aspect of the period-the experience of children. Children as a whole were drastically affected by the policies of the Nazi regime and the war it conducted in Europe, yet different groups of children experienced the period in radically different ways, depending on who they were and where they lived. By reading key texts written for and about children, we will first take a look at how the Nazis made children-both those they considered "Aryan" and those they designated "enemies" of the German people, such as Jewish children - an important focus of their politics. We will then examine literary texts and films that depict different aspects of the experience of European children during this period: daily life in the Nazi state, the trials of war and bombardment in Germany and the experience of expulsion from the East and defeat, the increasingly restrictive sphere in which Jewish children were allowed to live, the particular difficulties children faced in the Holocaust, and the experience of children in the immediate postwar period. Readings include texts by Ruth Klüger, Harry Mulisch, Imre Kertész, Miriam Katin, David Grossman and others. Course conducted entirely in English. OPEN TO FRESHMEN. STUDENTS MUST ENROLL IN BOTH MAIN SECTION AND A DISCUSSION SECTION.
Same as L21 German 331
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 334 A History of the Golden Age of Children's Literature
A survey of Golden Age texts for children from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" to W.E.B. Du Bois's "Brownies' Book," British and American, 1865-1925. Fiction, drama, poetry. In this course we will examine a remarkable period in the history of children's literature, covering a broad range of genres, from domestic fiction to fantasy literature to stories of adventure. The settings include the British nursery, the American small town, the jungles of India, a deserted island, and a rabbit hole. The depictions of and assumptions about children that emerge from these disparate texts will guide our investigation of the period's concept of childhood and its relation to categories of identity and nation. Authors will include Alcott, Du Bois, Barrie, Baum, Burnett, Carroll, Mukerji, Nesbit, Stevenson, Sui Sin Far, and Twain.
Same as L14 E Lit 334
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 336 The Cultural History of the American Teenager
This course will explore the recent history of the teenager in the United States, from the rise of teen culture in the 1950s to the current state of adolescence in the new century. Why have so many novels and films memorialized adolescence? How has the period of development been portrayed in books and film? How have depictions and attitudes toward teen culture changed over the past fifty years? We will begin with J.D. Salinger's classic novel of adolescence alienation, The Catcher in the Rye, a book that in many ways helped initiate the rise of the youth movement in the 1950s and 60s. From there, we will read a series of novels and historical studies that will trace the changes in teen culture that have occurred over the past half century. Our class will also consider a few films, such as Rebel Without a Cause and Dazed and Confused, which have helped shape our conception of the American teenager. Ultimately, we will question what these depictions of teen culture can tell us about larger trends and concerns in American life. Readings will include Judy Blume's Forever, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, and Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor.
Credit 3 units.
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L66 ChSt 341 Children and Childhood in World Religions
This course will investigate the roles children play in some of the world's major religious traditions and how those traditions construct their concepts of childhood. From child disciples to child martyrs, from the miraculous childhoods of religious founders to the rites marking childhood's end, and from divine commandments involving fertility to those mandating celibacy, we will explore a wide range of different religions' teachings about children and childhood. We will combine primary and secondary sources including written texts, movies/video, and web-based content in order to learn more about the complex relationships between children and the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L66 ChSt 342 Childhood, Culture, and Religion in Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean World
From child saints to child scholars and from child crusaders to child casualties, the experience of childhood varied widely throughout the European Middle Ages. This course will explore how medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims developed some parallel and some very much divergent concepts of childhood, childrearing, and the proper cultural roles for children in their respective societies. Our readings will combine primary and secondary sources from multiple perspectives and multiple regions of Europe and the Mediterranean World, including a few weeks on the history and cultural legacy of the so-called Children's Crusade of 1312. We will conclude with a brief survey of medieval childhood and its stereotypes as seen through contemporary children's books and TV shows. This course fulfills the Language & Cultural Diversity requirement for Arts & Sciences.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L66 ChSt 344 Children's Television
How does contemporary television imagine children? How does the industry speak to them, with what aims, and using what types of representational strategies and modes of address? In turn, how do young people respond, both as viewers and, with the advent and increasing accessibility of new technologies, as media producers? This seminar will address these and other related questions while introducing students to the study of children's television in cultural and critical media studies. Throughout, we will address the theoretical question suggested by the course's title, a reference to the work of literary scholar Jacqueline Rose: is children's television possible?
Same as L53 Film 344
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 354 No Boys Allowed: Girlhood and Programming for Girls in the 19th and 20th Centuries, United States
This course takes an intersectional feminist approach to studying girlhood in 19th and 20th Century United States using fictional accounts of girlhood, conduct books for girls, the history of girls' education, psychological theories of girlhood, girls' toys, and the development of extracurricular programming for girls. Each topic will allow us to study the way stereotypical girlhood of a particular historical moment serves a political purpose in articulating American identity. At the end of the course students will understand how the concept of girlhood is socially constructed, which means that understanding historical context is a core component of the course. The title of the course is a play on words because in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, most schools and boys' clubs excluded girls. All are welcome to enroll in the course. L77 100B Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies recommended, but not required.
Same as L77 WGSS 354
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 3620 Anthropological Perspectives on the Fetus
Where do we come from? How do we get here? When does "life" begin? Is the fetus a "person", or something else? How could we decide? This course will integrate biological, medical, philosophical, and cross-cultural perspectives to examine how various societies (including our own) understand the nature of the human fetus. The course will examine basic human embryology, beliefs about conception and fetal development, ideas about the moral status of the fetus, controversies surrounding pre-natal care and ante-natal diagnostic testing (including sex-selection and genetic screening tests), current controversies about fetal medicine and surgery, and the problem of abortion in cross-cultural perspective.
Same as L48 Anthro 3620
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 381 Banned Books
Why would anyone want to burn a book? Under what circumstances would you support censorship? Several years ago a Russian student was exiled to Siberia for possessing a copy of Emerson's "Essays"; today, schoolboards in the United States regularly call for the removal of "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Catcher in the Rye" from classrooms and library shelves. Actions like these dramatize the complex interconnections of literature and society, and they raise questions about what we read and the way we read. The course explores these issues by looking closely at several American and translated European texts that have been challenged on moral, socio-political or religious grounds to determine what some readers have found so threatening about these works. Possible authors: Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Defoe, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Twain, Chopin, Brecht, Salinger, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury. Brief daily writing assignments.
Same as L14 E Lit 381
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH
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L66 ChSt 385 Topics in Comparative Literature: Narratives of Childhood
Topics in comparative literature. Subject matter will vary from semester to semester.
Same as L16 Comp Lit 385
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 400 Independent Work in Children's Studies
This course provides credit for Children's Studies Minors who undertake a program of independent reading and/or research under the supervision of a faculty mentor on some subtopic within Children's Studies for which there is no regular course available. Please contact the Academic Coordinator for more information.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L66 ChSt 4036 Children of Immigrants: Identity and Acculturation
This seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach to children of immigrants as an analytical subject. The course texts are in sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, and a significant number of our case studies focus on 1.5- and second-generation Asian Americans and Latinx. Identity and identity politics are main topics; in addition, the course will critically examine theories on acculturation and assimilation. Our discussions cover a wide range of topics from culture, ethnicity, and race, to bilingualism, education, family, school, ethnic community, and youth culture. Students are required to conduct an individual research project among a selected group of children of immigrants. Attendance on the first day of class is mandatory to reserve class enrollment.
Same as L97 GS 4036
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 408 Education and Psychology of Exceptional Children
Learning, psychological, cognitive and social characteristics of exceptional children and youth from gifted to those with disabilities. Study child and adolescent developmental stages and the application to educational settings through data-based decision making using assessment and student data in a critical thinking, problem solving team approach. Current practices of educational strategies, interventions, and modifications to differentiate instruction for individual learning needs are emphasized. Plan lessons and activities that address student's prior experiences, multiple intelligences, strengths, and needs to positively impact learning. Learn specific strategies for classroom management, consultation and collaboration with families, colleagues, and administrators to meet individual needs within a culturally and demographically diverse classroom. Influences of legislation, criteria used to identify children, and awareness of supportive services are explored. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor. Enrollment note: All students are enrolled onto the waitlist. Priority is given to Teacher/Deaf Education majors, prospective Teacher Education majors, and majors/minors in Educational Studies. Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 408 and graduate students must enroll in Educ. 6008.
Same as L12 Educ 408
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 4280 History of Urban Schooling in the United States
More than ever, schooling in urban areas is researched, and it is at the center of debates for improving U.S. schooling. This course, which is framed by contemporary issues, focuses on the history of urban schooling and policy to deepen our understanding of the contemporary landscape. We will focus on particular cities and their school districts; these may include New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta. In this course, students will develop a strong contextual understanding of the conditions of urban schooling; the history of urban school reform; and the debates over the purposes of urban schools, past and present. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor.
Same as L12 Educ 4280
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 4289 Neighborhoods, Schools, and Social Inequality
A major purpose of the course is to study the research and policy literature related to neighborhoods, schools and the corresponding opportunity structure in urban America. The course will be informed by theoretical models drawn from economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, education and law. A major focus is to gain greater understanding of the experiences and opportunity structure(s) of urban dwellers, in general, and urban youth, in particular. While major emphasis will be placed on data derived from the interface of urban environments and the corresponding institutions within them, the generational experiences of various ethnic groups will complement the course foci. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor. Enrollment note: All students are enrolled onto the waitlist. Priority is given to Department of Education majors, minors, and graduate students. Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 4289 and graduate students must enroll in Educ. 5289
Same as L12 Educ 4289
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC, SD Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L66 ChSt 453B Sociology of Education
There are few institutions that nearly all Americans pass through, and schools are one of them; around fifty million students are enrolled in preK-12 schooling in the United States. As such, schools are an institution deserving of rigorous scrutiny and careful interrogation. But in studying K- 12 schools, we are in fact attending to a multitude of things - competing visions of and purposes for schools, and disparate experiences of accessing and navigating education that are widely divergent along axes of inequality. In this course, which will be conducted as a discussion-based seminar, we will engage with texts examining the enterprise of education from varied vantage points, but always through a sociological lens. We'll discuss the varied purposes theorists and practitioners envision for schools, and the extent to which schools live up to those ideals. We'll talk at length about how schools are a microcosm of many of the inequalities we see in the broader society, looking at issues of race, class, gender, and place. By taking a sociological lens to studying education, we'll learn a language and facility for rooting discussion of issues in education in theoretical grounding and empirical evidence. In so doing, students will develop the capacity to more critically assess scholarly research and public discourses on education, as well as their own experiences. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor. Enrollment note: All students are enrolled onto the waitlist. Priority is given to Department of Education majors, minors, and graduate students. Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 453B and graduate students must enroll in Educ. 5530
Same as L12 Educ 453B
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC, SD Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA, ETH EN: S
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L66 ChSt 4607 Education of Black Children and Youth
This course provides an overview of the education of Black children and youth in the United States. Covering both pre- and post-Brown eras, students in this course offers a deep examination of the research focused on Black education. The social, political, and historical contexts of education, as essential aspects of American and African-American culture and life, will be placed in the foreground of course inquiries. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor.
Same as L12 Educ 4607
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 4608 The Education of Black Children and Youth in the United States
This course provides an overview of the education of Black children and youth in the United States. Covering both pre- and post-Brown eras, this course offers a deep examination of the research focused on Black education. The social, political, and historical contexts of education -- as essential aspects of American and African-American culture and life -- will be placed in the foreground of course inquiries. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor.
Same as L12 Educ 4608
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD, WI Art: HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 461B Construction and Experience of Black Adolescence
This course examines the construct of black adolescence from the general perspectives of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. It begins by studying the construct of black adolescence as an "invention" of the social and behavioral sciences. The course then draws upon narrative data, autobiography, literature and multimedia sources authored by black youth to recast black adolescence as a complex social, psychological, cultural and political phenomenon. This course focuses on the meaning-making experiences of urban-dwelling black adolescents and highlights these relations within the contexts of class, gender, sexuality, and education.
Same as L90 AFAS 461B
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S UColl: ACS, SSC
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L66 ChSt 481W History of Education in the United States
Examines education within the context of American social and intellectual history. Using a broad conception of education in the United States and a variety of readings in American culture and social history, the course focuses on such themes as the variety of institutions involved with education, including family, church, community, work place, and cultural agency; the ways relationships among those institutions have changed over time; the means individuals have used to acquire an education; and the values, ideas, and practices that have shaped American educational policy in different periods of our history. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor. Enrollment Note: All students will be enrolled onto the waitlist. Because this is a writing intensive course, enrollment will most likely be 12-15 students. Enrollment preference will be given to students who are majoring/minoring in Educational Studies, Teacher Education, History, American Culture Studies, and Children's Studies and to students needing to complete their Writing Intensive requirement. Instructor will e-mail students about enrollment. Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 481W, and graduate students must enroll in Educ. 5810.
Same as L12 Educ 481W
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD, WI BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L66 ChSt 499 Senior Seminar in Children's Studies
The WU Children's Studies Minor brings together a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches to the study of children and childhood. In this one-credit seminar, meeting for five three-hour evening sessions, junior and senior Children's Studies minors will discuss a series of interdisciplinary readings about the past and future of Children's Studies as a field, reflect on their own pasts and futures in the Children's Studies Minor, and create and present portfolios of their minor experience. This course is a capstone experience for the minor in Children's Studies. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing and a minor in Children's Studies.
Credit 1 unit. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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Writing
Visit online course listings to view semester offerings for L13 Writing.
L13 Writing 103 College Writing: Writing, Literature, and Justice
This course seeks to develop the advanced reading, writing, and research skills that students need in a university setting. It uses classical texts of the western tradition to investigate the question of justice and to develop arguable claims through the careful analysis of evidence. The act of crafting arguments, we will assume, is implicated in the question of justice because arguments depend on an ethics of persuasion. We will learn how to practice such an ethics as we improve our ability to understand and utilize four crucial aspects of academic writing: evidence, analysis, argument, and research. Mastering these aspects will make us proficient in the difficult art of judgment. It will allow us to make sense of some of the most powerful literary statements about justice, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Toni Morrison. Note: THIS COURSE SATISFIES THE FIRST-YEAR WRITING REQUIREMENT FOR ALL DIVISIONS.
Same as L59 CWP 115
Credit 3 units.
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L13 Writing 104 Writing Identity
Who are you? This simple question becomes ever more complicated the more closely you examine it. How should you define yourself? By ancestry, hometown, gender, cultural allegiance, ethnic background, nationality, sexual preference, social class, personal history, fashion sense, career aspirations, taste in music, or by some other category? This course will examine the complexities of identity as they have been expressed in a wide variety of modern literary (and some philosophical) writings in order to develop the advanced reading, writing, and research skills that students need in a university setting. This course will satisfy the Writing 1 requirement.
Credit 3 units.
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L13 Writing 203 The Sentence in English
Though formal knowledge of English grammar is not always necessary for effective writing, learning it can help students understand how sentences are put together, and it can allow them to develop their own writing using a new set of skills. The Reed-Kellogg system of diagramming is a method of learning grammar by creating "pictures," or maps, of sentences. These pictures show the logical relations between words, phrases, and clauses, and they illustrate the choices writers are making as they craft individual sentences. Using a recent textbook by Eugene Moutoux, we will learn to diagram sentences both famous and ordinary, both contemporary and of historical interest. Our aims will be (1) to learn both the "rules" and the peculiarities of English grammar, (2) to understand how the structure of a sentence can influence its meaning, and (3) to use this knowledge productively in crafting and revising our own prose. By the end of the course, students should be able to diagram just about any sentence in English, whatever the genre or time period, including their own. Extensive practice in writing and revising sentences will give students a consciousness of how grammar and syntax influence the meaning and effectiveness of their own writing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 205 Writing the Visual World
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: CPSC, HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 211 Writing 2
This course invites students to pursue a writing project that centers on their own intellectual interests and that complicates their approaches to researched, creative, and analytical work. See section description for details about specific class emphases. Limit: 12 students. PREREQ: Writing 1 (L13 100).
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 212 Rhetoric and Power
The study of rhetoric, one of the original seven Liberal Arts, is perhaps more relevant today, in a world where diverse opinions reverberate 24/7 from television and the internet, than in ancient times when rhetors invented arguments to help people choose the best course of action when they disagreed about important political, religious, or social issues. How do we make our voices heard? How can we invent and present compelling written discourse. This course will introduce students to common rhetorical principles and to the disciplinary history of rhetoric and compositional studies. Assignments in this class include rhetorical exercise in invention and craft, imitations, and varied compositions, ranging from the personal to critical, from the biographical to argumentative. We will examine rhetorical principles (audience, context, kairos, exigency, ethos, pathos, logos, and so forth) that are employed, for example, not only in literary analysis but in law, politics, education, and science. We will aim for a mastery of craft and a refinement of thought.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 213 The Long Essay
This course is designed for skilled writers who want to bring more complexity and depth to their style and content. Emphasis is on the innovation that can occur when we give sustained interest to our subjects in a long work. The class is particularly well-suited to students who wish to produce extended works of creative nonfiction, honors theses, or artist statements.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 220 Creative Nonfiction Writing 1
A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing creative nonfiction. While the course will cover the major forms within the genre of creative nonfiction, including literary journalism, biography, profiles, nature writing and travel writing, special emphasis will be given to personal essay and memoir. PREREQ: Writing 1.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 221 Fiction Writing 1
A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing fiction. PREREQ: Writing 1. 3 units.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 222 Poetry Writing 1
A course designed to introduce students to the fundamental craft elements involved in writing poetry. PREREQ: Writing 1. 3 units.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 224 Playwriting
An introductory course in playwriting. Limited to 8 students. Prerequisite: Writing 1 and permission of the instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 298 Journalism: Communications Internship
For students undertaking projects in newspaper or magazine journalism, in radio or television, or in business, government, foundations, and the arts. The student must secure permission of the Chair of the Undergraduate Committee, file a description of his or her project with the Department and, at the end of the semester, submit a significant portfolio of writing together with an evaluation by the internship supervisor. Up to three units acceptable toward the Writing Minor, but cannot be counted toward the English Major or Literature Minor. Prereq: Writing 1. Must be taken Credit/No Credit.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L13 Writing 300I Independent Study
This independent study in creative writing is for students who have taken the 200-level introductory course in the genre they want to focus on with the instructor. The whole syllabus should be directed toward developing the student's higher-level skills, among them the capacity to reflect on craft methods. It is strongly recommended that two to four multiple-page written assignments be assigned over the course of the semester.
Credit 3 units.
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L13 Writing 305 Modern Humor Writing
This course will analyze and put into practice what makes good humor writing both good and humorous, from subject matter to the mechanics of setting up a punchline, from crafting an unexpected metaphor to perfecting the reversal.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 306W The Long Essay: Researched Writing
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 307 Writing and Medicine
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 309 Writing the Natural World
For students interested in the environment and natural sciences. This course brings together essays from a wide range of communities including biology, physics, medicine, environmental studies, creative writing and more. Readings and assignments are intended to enhance students' understanding of the relationship between writing and their experience/knowledge of the natural world. Major assignments allow students to follow, explore, and write about their own unique interest in a related subject, and include a personal essay, an expository essay, and a researched argumentative essay, as well as peer review workshops, oral presentations, and revision. Students will record and explore their own experiences of nature in short creative assignments that prepare them for the major papers. Prerequisites: Writing 1 and junior standing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 310 Guided Research in Composition: Theory and Pedagogy of One-to-One Writing Instruction
This course teaches theoretical and practical approaches to the tutoring of writing, specifically focusing on tutoring writing within the context of undergraduate courses. Students will learn collaborative methods of tutoring writing, explore different approaches to writing comments on student work in various content areas, and examine the connections between writing and thinking. Students in this course will analyze their own writing processes and learn how to help others through the writing and revision process. Readings and discussions will focus on writing theory and pedagogy, and students will practice one-to-one methods in mock conferences and with sample essays. Assignments: two short essays, a longer research paper and presentation, and a journal.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 311 Exposition
This advanced writing course considers style in relationship to audience and purpose, asking the writer to engage more consciously with writing conventions, and to explore strategies appropriate to various writing situations. PREREQS: Writing 1 (L13 100) and junior standing. A note for students and advisors: when registering refer to WebStac for updated information on section times and available seats.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 3111 Exposition (Visual)
This advanced writing course emphasizes writing and visual analysis, asking students to examine important forms of visual media to devleop a sophisticated sense of the strategies, techniques, and the rhetoric of visual representation. PREREQ: Writing 1 (L13 100) and junior standing.
Credit 3 units.
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L13 Writing 3112 Exposition: Writing and Medicine
For students who have a particular interest in health, illness, and medical care. Exposition is a course that considers style in relationship to audience and purpose, asking the writer to engage more consciously with writing conventions, and to explore strategies appropriate to various writing situations, from the more experimental and performative to the more formal and scholarly. The course will involve frequent practice in analyzing and critiquing, with special attention to techniques of organization, argument, and emphasis. Students in this special section of Exposition will read essays, journalism, and personal narratives about the experience of physicians and patients in the modern health care system. Students will use expository writing to think critically and personally about their own experiences with illness and disease. Pre-medical students might use this opportunity to write and think about the anticipated rewards and challenges of the profession they hope to join.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 312 Argumentation
This upper-level writing course considers the strategies of argumentation emphasizing audience awareness, reflective thinking and strategic presentation. We will explore elements of argument such as enthymeme, the three appeals, claim types, and fallacies. Students will learn to evaluate a wide range of arguments (including their own), considering the rhetorical strategies that make for effective argumentative performance in a given situation. The course will involve regular practice in both written and oral argument. Prereq: Writing 1 (L13 100) and junior standing. A note for students and advisors: when registering refer to WebStac for updated information on section times and available seats.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 313 Topics in Composition
Topics intended to increase the range and skill of writers who have already attained satisfactory competence. Typical subjects include applications of classical and modern rhetoric, writing problems in a variety of professional fields, differences between essay and research writing. Prerequisites: College Writing and junior standing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: HUM
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L13 Writing 314 Topics in Composition
An advanced writing course focusing on selected topics related to writing. Topics to be chosen by department/instructor. See section description for details about specific class emphases. (Note: In some cases, this course may be cross-listed with other programs/departments and may satisfy the writing-intensive requirement.) PREREQ: Writing 1 (L13 100) and junior standing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 320 Creative Nonfiction Writing 2
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Non-Fiction Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as writers and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Non-Fiction Writing 1.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 3208 Imaginative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 321 Fiction Writing 2
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Fiction Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as writers and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Fiction Writing 1. 3 units.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 321J Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Seminar
Credit 1.5 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 321S Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Seminar
Credit 1.5 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 321W Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Seminar
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI EN: H
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L13 Writing 322 Poetry Writing 2
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Poetry Writing 1 and wish to pursue both their development as poets and the study of craft in the context of a more rigorous workshop. PREREQ: Writing 1, Poetry Writing 1. 3 units.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 322W Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship Seminar
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI EN: H
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L13 Writing 323 Fiction Writing: The Short-Short, Sudden Fiction, and Microfiction
This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Fiction Writing 1 or Poetry Writing 1 and wish to further explore the craft of fiction through the medium of the short-short story-a story. The course will focus on reading, writing, and thinking critically about short-shorts.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 324 Fiction Writing: Coming of Age in the Short Story
A fiction writing course that explores coming of age themes.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 325 Poetry Writing: The Poetry of Travel
This course is offered for students who have taken Poetry 1 and are interested in further developing their craft.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 326 Fiction Writing: Stories in the Suburbs
In the fifties, the suburbs were still somewhat of a novelty in American culture-most people still lived in cities and small towns, or on the farm. Back then, Levitowns and the like were embraced with either gee-whiz optimism, or seen as sinister dystopias where youth, ideals, and romance went to fester and die. But now that the American mainstream is stucco McMansions, strip malls, and big box stores; now that the suburbs have become more ethnically diverse; now that literature is being generated from these places instead of just about them, how have stories set in the 'burbs changed? We'll read short stories written from the fifties until the present day exploring this particular setting, and, through a series of exercises, workshops, and our own short fiction, we'll explore the milieu as writers (whether we happen to be from the suburbs or not), always on the lookout for the unexpected in these familiar places.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 327 Creative Nonfiction: Personal Essay and Memoir
This is an intermediate course in writing creative nonfiction, with a concentration on personal essay and memoir. PREREQ: Creative Nonfiction Writing 1.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 330 Fiction Writing: Fiction and Obsession
Desire is at the heart of fiction, from the forces that drive the decisions characters make to the ways stories work on us as readers.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 331 Fiction Writing: Historical Fiction
A literature/creative writing hybrid course, students will read a number of contemporary historical fictions and then write one of their own. We'll consider the ways in which these fictions inhabit, depart from, and reflect upon the historiography and history they're built from--upon the indeterminacy of the historical record, and the limits of its reach--but we'll also discuss fiction's reponsibility to historical "facts" and documents, and the relevance of fictions among non-fictions in approaching an event or figure. PREREQ: Writing 1, Fiction 1
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 333 Copyediting
This course fulfills one of the requirements of the Publishing track in the English major, but all students who wish to improve their skills in editing and revision are welcome. We will begin with definitions of editing in the publishing world, but move quickly to focus on the practice of editing for grammar, syntax, and mechanics. While learning the conventions for edited prose suggested by the Chicago Manual of Style, we will note how arbitrary those conventions are by looking at other systems (e.g., MLA, APA, AMA) next to Chicago's. Two exams will assess what students have learned about editorial practice, including citation of source, as well as grammar, syntax, and style. Three written projects will ask students to do their most careful work in editing, analysis, and revision. The final project, with presentation, will ask students to learn about fact checking. Active participation in discussions of this often controversial material will be expected.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 351 Introduction to Playwriting
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 352 Introduction to Screenwriting
Writers will explore the various elements, structures and styles used in crafting a motion picture screenplay. They will experience this process as they conceive, develop and execute the first act of a feature-length script. Writers will create a screenplay story, present an outline for class discussion and analysis, then craft Act One. Writers will be encouraged to consult with the instructor at various stages: concept, outline, character and scene development, and dialogue execution. While the students fashion their screenwriting independently, the class will also explore the general elements of THEME, GENRE, and VOICE. A more specific examination of mechanics, the nuts and bolts of story construction, plotting, pacing, etc. will follow to support the ongoing writing process. In-class exercises will aid the writer in sharpening skills and discovering new approaches to form and content. Writers' work will be shared and discussed regularly in class. Screening of film scenes and sequences will provide students with concrete examples of how dramatic screenwriting evolves once it leaves the writer's hands.
Same as L53 Film 352
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 360 The Art of Publishing
This course introduces students to the art and craft of book publishing through a practical emphasis on types of writing and thinking that are specific to publishing, and by creative engagement with the variety of forms books now take in our culture. As part of our study, we will follow two different books through the publication process, studying the different roles (editor, designers, marketer, publicist) that contributed to their creation and their published life. We will have frequent class Zoom visits by book professionals who worked on the books we are studying, as well as writing assignments (such as reader's reports, jacket copy, and book reviews) that put you in the position of working on these titles yourself. And we will have creative assignments in which you apply what you've learned to hypothetical publishing projects of your own. NOTE: This course is one of three required courses for students enrolled in the Publishing Concentration.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 372 Music Journalism
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 373 Cultural Journalism
In the Internet Age, journalism has migrated from traditional, or "legacy" institutions (book publishers, film & television production companies, newspapers) to digital versions of the same thing, however the craft remains tied to its legacy models. The migration online has endangered certain ecologies of journalistic practice - in particular, arts journalism, especially criticism, the long form investigative essay, and foreign reporting. The first two of these three fit under what I describe as cultural journalism, and our purpose in this class is to practice what have been Cultural Journalism's forms, at the same time as we inquire into the modes and genres that are its future.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 375 Political Writing
Defined most simply, politics is that which pertains to the "affairs of the polis," one's community. In its real-life context, writing always interacts with a community in some way, engaging a defined audience to produce an intended effect. In this sense, writing always touches the affairs of a polis, and thus, writing is inherently political, regardless of whether the writer considers this during composition. In this class, we will focus on explicitly political writing by writers who are not politicians, that is to say, sanctioned experts in the affairs of the polis. Foregoing public policy memoranda and economic analyses, we will look at how journalists, grassroots organizers, and creative writers have consciously written to intervene in the affairs of their communities despite their outsider status. Using techniques of rhetorical analysis and logical structure, we will examine how these writers crafted works that inspire and move audiences through the conventions of several genres: essay, polemic, journalism, and satire.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 400I Independent Study
This independent study in creative writing is envisioned as more specialized than a 300-level course, with students intensively investigating a particular topic, theme, craft element, genre, and so on. Students should, along with the instructor, create an intensive reading list in the area of focus and complete a substantial creative project during the semester.
Credit 3 units. BU: SCI
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L13 Writing 401 Writing for Children and Young Adults
In this course we will examine various genres of writing for young people: poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
Credit 3 units.
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L13 Writing 403 Dramaturgy Workshop
A laboratory course that investigates dramaturgy from four vantage points: New Play Dramaturgy, Institutional Dramaturgy, Dramaturgy of Classics, and Dramaturgical Approaches to Nontraditional and Devised Theater. This is a "hands-on" course where student dramaturgs will not only pursue the study of dramaturgy, but will work actively and collaboratively with playwrights, actors and each other.
Same as L15 Drama 403
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM
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L13 Writing 405 Rhetorical Theory: Problems and Methods
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM
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L13 Writing 4131 Topics in Composition
Composition topics course -- offerings will vary from semester to semester.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 417 Prose Style in English: History and Craft
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 420 Advanced Nonfiction
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 421 Advanced Fiction Writing
For qualified students who wish to continue their creative writing and reading through immersion in an intensive fiction workshop. Students wishing to enroll must not only register but also submit a 15 page (double-spaced) fiction sample. The sample must include a cover page with: your name, the semester you took Fiction Writing 2, and the name of the Fiction Writing 2 instructor. Submit samples to the English Dept. mailbox of the L13 421 instructor no later than April 20th. No one is officially enrolled in this class until contacted by the instructor. PREREQ: Writing 1, Fiction Writing 1, Fiction Writing 2.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 422 Advanced Poetry Writing
For qualified students who wish to continue their creative writing and reading through immersion in an intensive poetry workshop. Students wishing to enroll must not only register but also submit 8 poems. The sample must include a cover page with: your name, the semester you took Poetry Writing 2, and the name of the Poetry Writing 2 instructor. Submit samples to the English Dept. mailbox of the L13 421 instructor no later than April 20th. No one is officially enrolled in this class until contacted by the instructor. PREREQ: Writing 1, Poetry Writing 1, Poetry Writing 2. 3 units.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 423 Proseminar in Writing: Nonfiction Prose
For students qualified to pursue their own projects in nonfiction prose; criticism by other members of the class and by the instructor. Limit: 12 students. Prerequisite: permission of instructor upon submission of writing samples.
Credit 3 units.
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L13 Writing 424 Poetry Tutorial
These credits are available to students who have completed Poetry I and Poetry II. This is an opportunity for students who have already completed Advanced Poetry, or who are not able to take Advanced Poetry because of scheduling conflicts, to meet individually with the instructor to develop a portfolio of poems. During weekly meetings students will explore various writing processes and revision techniques. There will be directed readings and discussions of selected topics related to contemporary poetry and poetics. Credits may be taken concurrently with Advanced Poetry. Permission of the instructor is required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 431 Craft of Fiction
A literature/creative writing hybrid course; students will read a number of contemporary historical fictions-an increasingly important and innovative genre-and then write one of their own.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 432 The Craft of Poetry
This course is for writers who wish to study long-form poetic composition and book arrangement. The major assignment will be to compose a poem or poetic sequence of considerable length. Gwendolyn Brooks ("The Anniad") and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ("Dictee") will be chief among our guides. We will study how poets arrange their books, and we will also make a brief foray into the material history of the book. Texts by Rosa Alcalá, John Ashbery, Daniel Borzutzky, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, George Oppen, Ed Roberson, Brian Teare, and Simone White will also be included. This course counts toward the creative writing concentration. Prerequisite: L13 322.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 4521 Advanced Screenwriting
This course is intended for students who have already taken Film Studies 352, "Introduction to Screenwriting." Building on past writing experiences, students will explore the demands of writing feature-length screenplays, adaptations, and experimental forms. Particular attention will be paid to the task of rewriting.
Same as L53 Film 452
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 4731 Advanced Playwriting
This course explores the tendencies and relationship between each individual student writer and the page. Exercises dispel any lingering doctrine that presupposes a certain style of writing. A large part of the class centers around collaborations. The writers write scenes as a final project for an acting class, and also work with two professional actors in an extended writing project that culminates in a script-in-hand presentation. The informal moments between collaborations look at the process beyond the first draft -- i.e., the playground of language, non-verbal options, and the maintaining of "the work" through rewrites, readings, workshops, and productions. Prerequisite: Introduction to Playwrighting, Drama 227.
Same as L15 Drama 473
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L13 Writing 490 Creative Writing Capstone Seminar
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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