4000-Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 4038-002: Modern Short Story
Instructor: Professor Ed Rivers
Call No. 75317
MWF 2:00-2:50 — ATLAS 1B25
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
A study of the modern short story in English, with emphasis on American writers.
The course will aim for both variety and in-depth study. For variety, we will read one or two works by a number of authors including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eudora
Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, and others. For in-depth study, we will read a number of stories
by two major (and very different) authors: Tobias Wolff and Vladimir Nabokov. The course will pay special attention to political, scientific, and literary contexts
and will include opportunities for students to write their own short stories. It is an advanced seminar with limited enrollment and will be taught mainly by
discussion.
Texts: All texts will be available on-line or on e-reserve. There are no books to buy.
Requirements (subject to change): two in-class tests; two papers (five to ten pages); mid-term; final.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Riversj@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-003: Renaissance Literatures of Emergency
Instructor: Professor David Glimp
Call No. 84406
MWF 11-11:50 — HLMS 196
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
This course explores the central role of geo-political emergency to the Renaissance literary imagination. How and why did emergencies—potential rebellion, war, the demise of kings, the rise and reign of tyrants, for example—figure so prominently in much of the most important literature of this period? Engaging the work of contemporary scholars of risk and political emergency (Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, Giorgio Agamben, David Harvey, and possibly others) along with crucial statements by early modern political theorists (Machiavelli, Lipsius, Hobbes, Locke and possibly others), we will strive to come to terms with the conceptual resources available for defining, comprehending, and responding to potentially catastrophic political conflict. Our primary objective will be to explore how these concerns can illuminate a reading of early modern literature and can inform an effort to understand the work of genre in this period. In addition to the above theoretical and philosophical resources, the syllabus will include Sir Thomas More's Utopia; romances by Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, and possibly others; dramatic works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Middleton, and Elizabeth Cary; possibly concluding with a discussion of newspapers (newly developed in the 17th-Century) and the periodical essays of Addison and Steele.
Please contact the instructor for further information: David.Glimp@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-004: Poetry of the 1950s
Instructor: Professor Julie Carr
Call No. 75319
TR 11-11:50 — HLMS 137
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
The 1950s are often described as an era of conformism. As the United States enjoyed economic prosperity, as women turned from the workplace to the home, as anti-communism became institutionalized, the period is widely understood as socially and politically conservative, if not repressive. However, the decade was also a time of great experimentation and rebellion on the arts, and in poetry in particular. In this class we will read works from many of the major American poets of the decade, seeking to understand the origins of the divergent and dynamic poetic strains that continue to this day. We will read works by William Carlos Williams, H.D., Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, Charles Olson, Lorine Niedecker, and Jack Spicer in the contexts of McCarthyism and the Cold War, consumer culture, second wave feminism, and the civil rights movement. We will also spend some time examining film, jazz, and abstract expressionism as a way to further our understanding of the poetry we are reading.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Julie.Carr@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-005: "Nature" Writing
Instructor: Professor Teresa Toulouse
Call No. 75320
TR 12:30-1:45 — HLMS 259
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
The course will examine a range of representations of "American" texts (and possibly visual artifacts) in relation to some current competing theories about the nature and practice of "eco-literature" and "eco-criticism." Literary texts may include poets from Bradstreet and Dickinson through Gary Snyder; essayists from Johnathan Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Muir through Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and John McPhee, and fiction writers from James Fenimore Cooper through DeLillo, Silko to Margaret Atwood. Students may make other suggestions.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Teresa.Toulouse@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-006: Plagues and Literature
Instructor: Professor Richelle Munkhoff
Call No. 75321
TR 2:00-3:15 — HLMS 104
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
This course will examine literary interest in catastrophic disease from the Black Death to the threatened Bird Flu, in terms of the literal and material consequences as well as the metaphorical and symbolic possibilities. Epidemics disrupt the social body on multiple levels, from the fear of contaminated individuals to the implementation of widespread public health measures, such as quarantine. Yet the social disorder caused by ‘plagues’ also allows for the renegotiation of community, and offers a site for literary production itself. Indeed the threat of plague produces rhetorical devices that seem to have remained constant since the Middle Ages. We will consider these issues, and their effects on community and identity, by looking in historically-informed ways at a variety of plagues, both real and imagined, including the bubonic plague, yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia and New Orleans, influenza, and AIDS. Texts will likely include: Margaret Atwood, Oryx & Crake; Albert Camus, The Plague; Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year; Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider; José Saramago, Blindness; Will Self, Dorian; and John Edgar Wideman, Fever: Twelve Stories.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Richelle.Munkhoff@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-009: Virtual Realities: From Fiction to Game Worlds
Instructor: Professor Marie-Laure Ryan
Call No. 85433
TR 4-5:15 — LIBR N424B
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
The urge to create imaginary worlds and the pleasure we take in immersing ourselves in alternate realities are so widespread across cultures and so important to the life of the mind that they can be regarded as cognitive universals. In this course we will study the diverse manifestations of these fundamental mental activities. The first part of the course will concentrate on theory, literature and film, and the second part on new media forms of fiction, especially online worlds. During our travels through virtual realities we will ask questions such as: What is the nature of fictionality? To what media beyond language-based narrative is the concept of fiction extendable? How do we experience fictional worlds and what human needs does immersion in these worlds satisfy? What happens to the notion of truth in fiction and how does the real relate to the fictional? Can the distinction between fiction and reality survive its deconstruction by postmodern theory? How permeable is the border between the real world and imaginary worlds? What is common to fiction and games? How does digital technology affect our experience of fictional worlds? How do people relate to their avatars in virtual worlds and what does role-playing in these worlds do for our sense of identity? Among the phenomena we will study will be: counterfactual history, transfictionality (the migration of characters beyond their text of origin), metalepsis (the transgression of ontological boundaries, as when characters speak to their author), hoaxes (fictions passing as fact), and texts of uncertain status with respect to the fiction/history boundary. Readings will include philosophical texts dealing with possible worlds theory and the logic of fiction, short literary narratives and films (The Truman Show) that play with multiple worlds or question the boundary between fact and fiction, and ethnographic studies of the experience of online virtual worlds. We will also visit the online world Second Life.
For more information, please contact Prof. Marie-Laure Ryan at: marilaur@gmail.com.
ENGL 4245-001: American Novel 2
Instructor: Professor Bruce Kawin
Call No. 75330
MWF 11:00-11:50 — HLMS 137
Prereq: SOPH/JR/SR ENGL/HUMN/FILM Majors
A survey of the American novel from the 1890s to the 1970s, from naturalism to science fiction. Two papers. Books: Maggie, McTeague, The Wings of the Dove, Three Lives, Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Sound and the Fury, Miss Lonelyhearts, Native Son, Savage Night, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pale Fire, Cat's Cradle, The Female Man.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Bruce.Kawin@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4604-001: The Early Victorians
Instructor: Professor Padma Rangarajan
Call No. 84168
TR 11-12:15 — HLMS 237
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
The term “Victorian” is still used in contemporary parlance to indicate anything fussy, prudish, old-fashioned, and generally bland. How did the Victorians
acquire this reputation? Was this how they felt about themselves? And were they really so bad as all that? In this course we will study the early years of the
Victorian era and attempt to unearth, complicate, and otherwise reconsider the Victorian legacy through a study of its novels, poetry, and non-fiction prose.
Reading List (subject to change):
Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford)
Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Norton)
Dickens, Hard Times (Norton)
Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age
Course Packet (available online under Course Reserves)
Please contact the instructor for further information: Padma.Rangarajan@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4697-001: Journeys Through Race and Time: African American Travel Narratives and Fictions of Travel
Instructor: Professor Cheryl Higashida
Call No. 75336
MWF 10-10:50 — ECON 205
Prereq: JR/SR Standing
The fundamental theme of New World African modernity is neither integration nor separation but rather migration and emigration. — Cornel West
Travel has played a central role in African American projects of political resistance and self-determination. Even as slavery and imperialism led to forced
migration, incarceration and ghettoization for people of African descent, many of them refused to stay “in their place,” as defined by the dominant racist social
orders. As slaves, freedmen and women, missionaries, sailors, diplomats, emigrants, laborers, expatriates, and tourists, African Americans traveled throughout the
U.S. and beyond its shifting, vexed borders. Fictions of travel and nonfiction travel writing by African Americans remind us that the space between “African” and
“American” sets in motion a host of questions about the meanings of each of these terms as well as the relationship between them.
In thinking through cultural studies of travel in relation to African American literature, we will raise questions about the sites and transits—hotels,
stations, different modes of public and private transportation—that appear in and facilitate representations of race. We will look at how
reconceptualizations of travel entail reconceptualizations of blackness that rely on notions of “home.” We will also examine conventions of travel writing in
relation to the slave narrative, the narrative of passing, autobiography, and other genres. Finally, we will spend considerable time bringing debates within
African American studies around diaspora, transnationalism, and imperialism to bear on cultural studies of travel.
Course requirements will likely include a 5-7 page paper, an oral presentation, an annotated bibliography, an 8-10 page final paper, and consistent attendance and
participation. Through written and oral work, we will develop close reading, critical thinking and composition skills.
Possible primary readings include Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man;
Claude McKay, Banjo; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Alice Childress, A Short Walk; Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow;
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; and poetry and essays by Audre Lorde. Films might include Sankofa,
directed by Haile Gerima, and Life and Debt, directed by Stephanie Black.
Possible secondary readings include selections from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation; Paul Gilroy, The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Who set you flowin’?: The African-American Migration Narrative; Nikhil Pal Singh,
Black is a Country; and Michelle Stephens, Black Empire.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Cheryl.Higashida@colorado.edu.
English 4655-001: Studies in American Literature to 1900
Instructor: Professor Mary Klages
Call No. 75333
TR 9:30-10:45 — KTCH 301
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN Majors
The Fabulous 1850s!
Slavery and abolition! The California Gold Rush! Westward expansion, women’s rights, socialist communes, free love, murder and mayhem, romance and realism—the 1850s has it all! This decade, often called “The American Renaissance,” fostered a wide and wild range of literary publishing: the greatest works of Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman appeared alongside works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, E.D.E.N Southworth, and a host of other authors, some remembered, some forgotten. This course will examine the booming of American literature during this decade, reading canonical and noncanonical literature and working to understand the cultural contexts and questions which fostered the phenomenal growth of American literature in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Mary.Klages@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4820-801: English Honors Seminar
Instructor: Professor Karen Jacobs
MWF 11-11:50 — LIBR N424B
Prereq: See ENGL Student Services Office (HLMS 111) for eligibility and registration info
This seminar is designed to help you write an honors thesis that is well-researched, historically and culturally grounded, and responsive to critical trends that have informed your particular topic. It will focus on sharpening the skills needed to write a successful thesis, including research skills, the formulation of an argument, revision, and the ability to summarize and evaluate secondary materials. This class is necessarily a cooperative one and will provide you with a weekly forum in which to exchange ideas and share work with your peers. You and your thesis projects will generate the primary materials and topics for this class. As a result, your participation, engagement, and commitment is of paramount importance.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Karen.Jacobs@colorado.edu.