Summer 2004
Summer I (June 7 - July 8)
ENW 3560.01: Reading and Writing About Reading and Writing
Cox
Reading and writing are not the simple acts we often take them to be. If they were, we would have no trouble learning to interpret texts critically and express ourselves effectively! Recently, a number of highly skilled writers have taken it upon themselves to document the struggles of reading and writing well. In 'Reading & Writing about Reading & Writing,' we will pore over a number of these contemporary books that explore the subjects of reading and writing in all their delicious complexity. (The course texts are listed below.) We will then go on to produce a series of essays in which we will examine our own experiences with the processes of reading and writing.
Nonfiction:
*Diane Osen (ed.),
The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book
Award Winners and Finalists
*David Denby,
Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and
Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
*Kate Bernheimer (ed.),
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their
Favorite Fairy Tales
*Eudora Welty,
One Writer's Beginnings
*Azar Nafisi,
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Fiction:
*Tobias Wolff,
Old School
*Dai Sijie,
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
*Christine Schwarz,
All is Vanity
Summer (full term)
ENL 4360.40: Psychoanalysis on Stage--20th Century American
Drama
Curtis
Participants in this course will be involved in an investigation of several psychological theorists and their influence on the writing, performance, and literary interpretation of several twentieth-century American plays. Authors will include Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Tony Kushner, and Suzan-Lori Parks.
This class will meet entirely online using WebCT.
ENG 5810.40: Readings in British Literature
Monteverde
At one time, no student of English would have been considered educated without having read, usually more than once, in detail, and perhaps even in the original form of our language, many of the works and authors that will form the backbone of this course: Beowulf; Chaucer; Langland; the Gawain Poet; Malory; Spenser; Donne; Milton; and, of course, Shakespeare. Though I have not entirely settled on the reading list of this course, several works I know we will be covering: Beowulf; some of the Canterbury Tales; either Gawain and the Green Knight or the Pearl; excerpts from Piers Plowman and the Morte D'Arthur; selections of Renaissance lyric poetry; at least one play by Shakespeare; and all, yes all, of Paradise Lost. While this has a lot in common with the reading list for a British Literature I survey, I hope to deal with some of the overarching issues raised by these texts, especially: the challenges posed by reading texts in early forms of English; changes in the conception both of the hero and gender roles; the relationship between Christian and pre-Christian ideologies; the representation of history and the past; and, of course, the central question: what may we be losing through our growing unawareness of these foundational texts which loomed so large in the minds of subsequent writers. NOTE: I will have to miss two classes, 6/24 and 7/2, and I may need to find a way to make up these meetings.
