This course focuses on the Old English poem Beowulf, engaging students in learning about or refreshing their knowledge of the poem and its cultural and historical background in conjunction with various Old Norse-Icelandic texts. All texts will be read in translation. Two oral presentations will be required in addition to a researched term project.
In 1993, philosopher Jacques Derrida published Spectres of Marx thus beginning what is roughly termed "the spectral turn" in criticism. In this course, we will examine the American corpus through the lens of spectrality or haunting. At question is how thinking of America, and specifically American literature as a body of haunted texts--texts which invoke absence, loss, trauma--changes the way we think of this body of literature. We will consider the work of American literature, not just as a nation building practice, but also a literature of grieving, of crypts, of haunting, in short, as a literature of the dead.
As much as ours is, in some real ways, a literature that seeks to perform its own best promise, we are also a literature that is shadowed by a contradictory past that we cannot reconcile. Faulkner tells us that the past is not dead, it is not even past. In this course we will seek to think through our not yet-dead past to uncover that which continues to haunt our national imaginary. Texts span roughly a hundred years, from the beginning of the 20th to the early 21st century and include: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Great Gatsby (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), Absalom! Absalom! (1936), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), House Made of Dawn (1968), The Woman Warrior (1976), Beloved (1987), Tracks (1998), Their Dogs Came with Them (2007), The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Daughters of the Stone (2009), Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Critical Texts include Cultural Haunting (1998) and various PDFs.
The rise of a tyrannical oligarchy in the United States is the subject of Jack London’s 1908 novel— our studies proceed from there with courage and, perhaps, hope. Texts include The Iron Heel, It Can't Happen Here, The Heads of Cerberus, The Demolished Man, The Man in the High Castle, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, The Female Man, Neuromancer, Paradise, The Parable of the Talents, Underground Airlines, Future Home of the Living God, and Station Eleven.
This course will give students the opportunity to investigate both the individual careers and the shared influences of these two poets, who were married from 16 June 1956—four months after they had first met—until Plath’s death on 11 February 1963. We will read several of Hughes’s major works, including The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Lupercal (1960), Crow (1970), Flowers and Insects (1986), Birthday Letters (1998), and Howls and Whispers (1998). Selections from Plath’s oeuvre will include her posthumously Pulitzer-Prize-winning Collected Poems (1981); the edition of Ariel that Hughes put together (Faber and Faber, 1965); and Ariel: The Restored Edition, the version that their daughter Frieda Hughes edited (Faber and Faber, 2004). We will also look at some of the critical assessments of their overlapping work lives, including Heather Clark’s 2011 study The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
This course will be centered on literary theory concerned with race, racism and diversity—from postcolonial theory to the “pedagogy of the oppressed” to critical race theory and whiteness studies.
ENG 614 British Women Poets
ENG 621 Hawthorne and Melville
ENG 621 The African American Novel
ENG 623 Literature of Continental Europe: Narratives of Symbolism and Decadence
ENG 631 Shakespeare and Collaboration
ENG 638 Becoming Jane Austen ENG 638 Toni Morrison
ENG 641 James Joyce’s Ulysses
ENG 641 Magical Realism
ENG 644 Ideology and Literature: Black British Literature and Theory
ENG 652 Literary Criticism
ENG 670 Lexicography
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