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ENGL-041-01 Gateway: 18th/19th Century Lit/Cult
Fall 2009
Professor Dennis Todd
The ‘I’ and the Other
In this class, we will explore a literary question and a cultural question. The literary question is, How did 18th and 19th-century English and American authors exploit the areas of experience that a first-person narrator made available to them? The cultural question is, How did these authors deal with the existence of ‘Others’—those radically different peoples and cultures that 18th- and 19th-century exploration, colonialism, and slavery brought them in to contact with? I hope that we might even begin to see a connection between these two questions. We will read five novels: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In the class, we will be introduced to the skill of close reading, to some of the rich criticism and scholarly analysis that surround these novels, and to some of the concepts and theoretical constructs that are foundational to the discipline of English. Finally, we will be attentive to writing, and you will be assigned numerous reader response papers and several longer analytic papers.
Spring 2010
Professor Margaret Debelius
This course will focus on learning how to read a variety of texts from the turn of the nineteenth century. We will consider works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton, and others as expressions of a host of cultural anxieties – anxieties about race, class, gender, technology, and sexuality. We will develop the close reading skills required to read literature intelligently and learn the terms and concepts necessary to understand the critical discourse surrounding these texts. Be prepared for frequent writing and rewriting.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
Course syllabi
The following syllabi may help you learn more about this course (login required):
Fall '09:
Joseph Fruscione
(file download)
Additional syllabi may be available in prior academic years.
Sections:
ENGL-041-02 Gateway: 18th/19th Century Lit/Cult
Fall 2009
Professor Samantha Pinto
Introduction to African American Literature: Migration and Diaspora Stories
This class will cover the major texts and critical debates of African American Literature from Phillis Wheatley to Pauline Hopkins to Claude McKay. Through the lens of both forced and voluntary, if economically and regionally driven, migration, we will study how African American literature has traditionally been published and received. We will also expand our definition of "American" literature in the 18th, 19th, and even 20th centuries to include Caribbean, African and other transnational influences. Assignments will include response papers, quizzes, a midterm, 4 papers, a group project, and attendance and participation. This will be a writing intensive class.
Spring 2010
Professor Lyndon Dominique
Race and Gender in 18th Century British Literature
The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine’s classic argument in defense of the individual’s right to assert freedom in the face of tyranny, was a popular late-eighteenth century refrain originating from the 1789 French Revolution. But generalized arguments about individual human rights also gave rise to specific debates concerning the rights of women and Negro slaves. What rights were these individuals denied in eighteenth-century Britain and how did the period’s literature reflect their dilemmas? This course will consider these questions as a way of introducing you to the study of race and gender in a British colonial context. But it is particularly concerned with occasions in literature where British writers combined simultaneous discourses about race and gender in ways that sometimes helped and at other times hindered the fights against tyranny that Negro slaves and female advocates fought. We will read plays, poetry, novels, short stories, travel literature, and non-fiction prose as well as recent theories about gender and racial construction in the eighteenth century to discuss representations of British men and women, and colonial Others like Negro slaves, Creoles and Jews. We will consider an assortment of issues ranging from slavery, anti-slavery, abolition, miscegenation, mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity, blackness and whiteness, to marriage, libertinism, and sexual double standards in a variety of canonical and obscure texts.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-041-03 Gateway: 18th/19th Century Lit/Cult
Fall 2009
Professor John Pfordresher
Many poets write within a matrix of long-standing artistic traditions. But rather than simply repeat the achievements of the past they use their own individual voices to transform the practice of poetry for their era. In this course we will study how this happens in the work of five writers: Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins. During class discussion we will look closely at traditional forms such as the ballad, sonnet, and the poetic narrative and we will consider the ends they serve. We will be particularly attentive to the music of poetry as it sounds and hence to the ways that poets use meter, rhyme, sonic imitation, and the traditional affective associations linked to specific stanzaic forms. Students will write a series of short essays in close reading and will be encouraged, playfully, to try their hand at writing their own poetry in traditional forms. At the end of the semester students will write a more comprehensive paper surveying one or two significant elements in the work of all five poets.
Spring 2010
Professor Dennis Todd
The ‘I’ and the Other
In this class, we will explore a literary question and a cultural question. The literary question is, How did 18th and 19th-century English and American authors exploit the areas of experience that a first-person narrator made available to them? The cultural question is, How did these authors deal with the existence of ‘Others’—those radically different peoples and cultures that 18th- and 19th-century exploration, colonialism, and slavery brought them in to contact with? I hope that we might even begin to see a connection between these two questions. We will read five novels: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In the class, we will be introduced to the skill of close reading, to some of the rich criticism and scholarly analysis that surround these novels, and to some of the concepts and theoretical constructs that are foundational to the discipline of English. Finally, we will be attentive to writing, and you will be assigned numerous reader response papers and several longer analytic papers.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-041-04 Gateway: 18th/19th Century Lit/Cult
Fall 2009
Professor Joe Fruscione
“Writing, Race, and Nation: In and Around the American Renaissance” (Fall 2009)
This course will examine a host of 18th- and 19th-century literary texts, as well as a handful of critical and scholarly essays pertinent to the American Renaissance. This important era gave America some of its classic texts and canonical authors, while also creating and re-creating ideas of “America” and “American Literature”—both of which fall under the rubrics of Writing, Race, and Nation.
Probable literary texts include: Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and selected stories, essays and speeches of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
Spring 2010
Professor Rebecca Boylan
Through a Lens Darkly: Phantoms Haunting 19th C Literature
This course explores the individual hidden by others and hiding the self in 19th C literature (and painting and photograph) as this obscurity reflects the century’s sociological, psychological, aesthetic, and philosophical wrestles. We begin by pondering several conundrums: how this century of realism and technological advancements in vision celebrates illusions and masked identities; why obscurity provokes the desire to discover; why the observer desperate to see often veils his vision or covers up the object of his gaze; how those in hiding mysteriously reveal a multi-faceted self-consciousness; how discomforting truths struggle out of confusing ambiguities. As readers traversing misty moors and seas, opium dreams, foggy streets, and phantasmagoric interiors, we will meet real ghosts, sprites, transforming portraits, and haunted houses. As scholars, we will study how, why, and to what effects the shadows of the 19th C crept into the early 20th C to determine to what extent historical perspective adjusted the lens on these ephemeral Victorian personas. We might well ask, does Alice come UP the rabbit hole? Is the Other discovered only to disappear behind a different barrier? How do changed expectations for Art’s functions and purpose provoke either our urgency to see or our complacent blindness? Participants will respond in several short response essays, a mid-length paper, and a longer final paper. Dynamic and consistent class participation is expected. Critical and theoretical essays are available via electronic reserve. Novels include: E. Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, James’s The Turn of the Screw, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Forster’s Howard’s End, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Lawrence’s The Rainbow.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-041-05 Gateway: 18th/19th Century Lit/Cult
Spring only
This course will span roughly a century of American literature, from the late-18th century to the post-Reconstruction era. We will pay particular attention to matters of: race, slavery, and Reconstruction politics; rhetoric, literacy, and literary art; nation, nationhood, and nationalism; notions of geographic, historical, and intellectual quests; gender dynamics, constructions, and hierarchies.
Authors: Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain.
Assignments and Requirements: Reading Quizzes; Analysis Papers; Final Exam; Class Participation.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-041-06 Gateway: 18th/19th Century Lit/Cult
Spring only
Hardy, Larkin, Heaney
Professor Duncan Wu
Spring 2010
This course will survey the work of three twentieth-century poets: Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. Students will be expected to cultivate the skills entailed in close analysis of poetry. Metrical examination will form an essential part of the course, alongside semantic and formal elements of poetic practice. The emphasis throughout will be on close examination of the text, and group discussion in which everyone is expected to participate. In addition, students are expected to write occasional response papers which will be analysed and discussed in class and with Professor Wu.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-041-07 Gateway: 18th/19th Century Lit/Cult
Fall 2009
Professor Dennis Todd
The ‘I’ and the Other
In this class, we will explore a literary question and a cultural question. The literary question is, How did 18th and 19th-century English and American authors exploit the areas of experience that a first-person narrator made available to them? The cultural question is, How did these authors deal with the existence of ‘Others’—those radically different peoples and cultures that 18th- and 19th-century exploration, colonialism, and slavery brought them in to contact with? I hope that we might even begin to see a connection between these two questions. We will read five novels: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In the class, we will be introduced to the skill of close reading, to some of the rich criticism and scholarly analysis that surround these novels, and to some of the concepts and theoretical constructs that are foundational to the discipline of English. Finally, we will be attentive to writing, and you will be assigned numerous reader response papers and several longer analytic papers.
Spring 2010
Professor Margaret Debelius
This course will focus on learning how to read a variety of texts from the turn of the nineteenth century. We will consider works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton, and others as expressions of a host of cultural anxieties – anxieties about race, class, gender, technology, and sexuality. We will develop the close reading skills required to read literature intelligently and learn the terms and concepts necessary to understand the critical discourse surrounding these texts. Be prepared for frequent writing and rewriting.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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Other academic years
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