Spring 2024 Office Hours
Mon, Wed, Fri 11:00-12:00
Tues & Thurs 2:30-3:30
&
by appointment
ENGF 390 Topics: Looking at War
Watching representations of war, imagining war, talking and writing about, and doing war: This course explores the interrelationship of these acts and emphasizes their real consequences; our concerns are moral as well as aesthetic. The primary materials are films, but we will also look at prose, poetry, still images, and other textual artifacts—both from the U.S. and around the globe. We will launch the course with Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, and proceed to study foundational films such as The Battle of Algiers as well as newer works such as Waltz with Bashir and Zero Dark Thirty. Students should be aware that the nature of our course involves exposure to and discussion of potentially uncomfortable subjects. Prerequisite: completion of any 300-level ENGF course or ENGL 258 (see above); or by permission of the instructor. Spring 2024 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 110 Introduction to Academic Writing (W1)
Instruction and practice in the forms, styles, grammar, and analytic skills necessary for success in academic writing at the undergraduate level. Open to first-year students recommended by the English Department. Open to other first-year students and sophomores only by permission of the instructor. Spring 2024 Description/Syllabus
ENGL 258 American War Literature (LS, W1)
An examination of narrative, poetic, and cinematic responses to war from the Civil War to the present. The focus of the course varies, with three chief versions: a chronological survey of the entire span; an examination of a more limited period (even to one armed conflict); and an inquiry on the human body as an instrument and artifact of war. Not all authors are combatants/veterans/men/U.S. citizens. Spring 2024 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 272 Black American Speculative Fictions (LS, W1)
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved expresses memory’s frightening grip on former slaves through a ghost story. It’s a novel all about possession. Marginalized communities have often turned to speculative fiction—the supernatural, fantasy, science fiction, the surreal—to say what mainstream realism can’t, to challenge dominant narratives, and to tell a good story. Black writers have also used it to appreciate the African roots from which they were violently sundered. This course serves as an introduction to African American literature by studying its tradition of speculative fiction from the late 19th century to the 21st century in prose, poetry, and film. Coming Spring 2025.
ENGL 275 Literature & the Environment (LS, W1)
An examination of how literary and other representations have depicted their culture’s relationship to the environment. The exact content will vary from term to term, though the course will study various literary and representational forms, including some theoretical writing. While the course examines how writers have experienced, understood, and envisioned their environment and their place in it, other aspects of the texts will also be studied (character, point of view, gender, race, economics, etc.). Fall 2023 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 330 Modern American Poetry (LS)
Close analyses of works by Stein, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, H.D., Brooks, McKay, O’Hara, Ginsberg, and more. Prerequisite: completion of one 200-level literary studies course or permission of the instructor. Fall 2023 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 335 American Modernism (1900-1945) (LS)
What is modernism? Gertrude Stein liked to quip that America was the oldest country in the world because it had lived in the 20th century the longest. The beginning of the twentieth century, the so-called American century, brought unprecedented changes. People were on the move, spatially and socially, as never before. Technology sped up life, restructured labor, and created new forms of communication and expression. Consumption changed. And of course the old conflicts persisted and also took new forms, conflicts between genders; races and ethnicities; economic classes; and nations. This was the era of the Great War and the Great Depression. Creative writers had to be equally revolutionary--a century later, we are still beholden to them as we grapple with modernity’s evolution into the 21st century. Our study of their literary confrontations with this new world will feature fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Nathanael West, Anita Loos, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright. Prerequisite: completion of one 200-level literary studies course or permission of the instructor. Spring 2022 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 336 Postmodern & Contemporary U.S. Fiction (1945+) (LS)
Timewise, the “postmodern” is concurrent with the Cold War. But how else does it signify, especially in relation to the modern and to the contemporary? The course explores ideas of postmodern authorship and identity, as formally embodied in texts, from post-WWII authors into the flowering of a richer and more diverse U.S. literary world, ranging from Flannery O'Conner through Toni Morrison to Viet Thanh Nguyen (Our full roster of texts/authors is more suggestive than comprehensive or representative). Prerequisite: completion of one 200-level literary studies course or permission of the instructor. Fall 2019 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 397 Imagined Việt Nam (LS)
This course aims to develop an appreciation and understanding of how Viet Nam has been imagined in literature and film by Vietnamese, American, and European artists, within the context of Vietnamese history from the early 19th century to the present. Course material covers the spectrum of narrative expression by including prose fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. Prerequisite: completion of one 200-level literary studies course or permission of the instructor. Fall 2022 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 464 Faulkner and Wideman Seminar (LS, W2)
William Faulkner and John Edgar Wideman provide a study in contrast and a study of deep similarities: a white rural Mississippian writing in the early part of the century and a black urban Pennsylvanian writing in the current era, both of whose works not only show stylistic similarities but also share persistent concerns of the past's presence in the present; of place; of race and gender; and of the use of fiction to investigate the author's personal sense of history, home, and self. We will explore three of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels and then Wideman's Homewood trilogy. Open to seniors; open to other students only by permission of the instructor. Prerequisite: completion of any 300-level course in English. Spring 2019 Description/Syllabus.
ENGL 465 Ernest Hemingway Seminar (LS, W2)
“Do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.” But even this statement by Ernest Hemingway fails to do his work justice. Hemingway was an incredibly complicated person who produced one of the most influential bodies of American fiction. In the 2021 three-part, six-hour Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Hemingway, the Irish writer Edna O’Brien calls his mind “androgynous.” Contrary to his reputation, Hemingway’s work is full of self-interrogation, ambiguity, and vulnerability. It’s also a window on the first half of the twentieth century and its art. The course will study Hemingway’s career from In Our Time (1925) to the posthumously published The Garden of Eden (1986). Open to seniors; open to other students only by permission of the instructor. Prerequisite: completion of any 300-level course in English. Fall 2021 Description/Syllabus.