4000-Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 4038-001: Critical Thinking in English Studies: Teaching English
Instructor: Martin Bickman
The first thing to say is that this is a Service Learning course. Students will teach and/or tutor in the schools and in community educational centers. An extra credit hour under the rubric Service Learning in English will be available for those who do a significant amount of this experiential work, but all students will be required to do some.
This course will explore the intersections of theory and practice in the teaching of English. Too often our actual classroom practice does not fulfill and realize our highest ideals and best theories about teaching, learning, reading, and writing. While we recognize that the literary text generates a number of divergent responses, we often work in the classroom towards closure and consensus. Further, we know that literature speaks to our whole being, to our emotions and senses as well as to our intellects, but the kinds of responses we encourage are often abstract, generalized, cognitive ones. Too often process--the pluralistic, the erring, the mysterious--is ignored, suppressed, or finessed to get to some kind of product on schedule. Even in classrooms where the most radical lines of social defiance are presented, the structures of authority and patterns of interaction remain as rigid and unimaginative as ever.
We will, then, study theories as well as the narratives of other teachers, but will always be examining and testing them with and against the main text of the course, our own learning and teaching. We will take to heart Susan Horton’s observation:
Despite his insistence that we make students aware of the principle scribo, ego sum--I produce texts, therefore I am--Professor Scholes and all the rest of us have stopped short of the next step: a recognition that the classroom is also a text, produced by teacher and student in collaboration. There is a semiotics of that text, too, and it is time we studied it. . . Why do we talk about what texts we should teach, ignoring the one text we must all teach: our own action in the class.
I hope to get us to analyze this text with the same kinds of passionate attention that we expect in our best readings of literary texts. At the same time, I hope we can bring to life and to concrete lived awareness the theories of reading, of interpretation, of making meaning that you have been learning throughout your major. Besides those you have probably learned already, I plan to introduce you to reader-response theory and the revival of American pragmatism as particularly helpful in conceptualizing teaching.
The books assigned for the course are:
Elaine Showalter, Teaching English
Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned
Michael Johnston, In the Deep Heart’s Core
David H. Richter, ed., Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature
Much of our reading, though, will be in articles posted on CULearn from such periodicals as like College English, College Literature, College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy.
I would like to touch base with prospective students before the spring semester begins, so please email me at Bickman@colorado.edu, call at 303-492-8945, or drop by my office, Hellems 146, anytime you see the light on.
ENGL 4038-002: Sex, Rights, Character, and the Novel
Instructor: Jordan Stein
This course explores the relationship between art and politics, taking as its
central case study the co-emergence in the eighteenth century of universal
rights and the novel. We will pay attention to the novel’s generic emphasis on
character, and ask how the kinds of characters that novels create do and don’t
comply with the conceptions of persons articulated in contemporary political
philosophies of human rights. We’ll be interested in how novelists and
philosophers respectively deal with the limits of characters and rights: what
make these conceptions vulnerable, violable, fragile? Accordingly, our readings
will pay close attention to gender and sexuality, asking why violation in these
areas comes to the fore as the paradigm for vulnerability and subjection in the
texts we examine.
This is a reading and writing intensive course. Requirements include upward of
200 Pages of reading per week, weekly short writing, an oral presentation on a
primary text, an annotated bibliography of secondary materials, and a final
paper.
Readings from texts by Mary Rowlandson, Samuel Richardson, Denis Diderot,
Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Taylor, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and J. M. Coetzee.
Secondary readings draw from critics including Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Richard Terdiman, Rita Goldberg, Alex
Woloch, Deidre Lynch, Claudia Johnson, Jonathan Arac, Donald Pease, Sacvan
Bercovitch, and Lauren Berlant.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Jordan.A.Stein@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-003: Detection, Repentance, Sensation: Crime and the Novel in Nineteenth- Century Britain
Instructor: Padma Rangarajan
In this course we will be studying the evolution of the detective fiction, from the confessional novels of the Romantic era to the emergence of quintessential detective in the late Victorian. Along the way we will consider how representations of crime are inflected by issues of urbanization, class, gender, colonialism, and industrialization. Alongside the novels we will also read contemporary criticism and nineteenth-century non-fiction prose. This is a reading-intensive course, and students are expected to keep up with the reading, participate in class and on the online discussion board, and deliver two in-class presentations. In addition, there will be two or three 6-9 page papers.
Reading List: (subject to change):Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
Collins, The Woman in White
Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Dickens, Oliver Twist
Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Meadows Taylor Confessions of a Thug
Please contact the instructor for further information: Padma.Rangarajan@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-006: The Queer Eighteenth Century in Britain
Instructor: Scarlet Bowen
[At] the end of the eighteenth century . . . there emerged a completely new technology of sex; new in that for the most part it escaped the ecclesiastical institution without being truly independent of the thematics of sin. Through pedagogy, medicine, and economics, it made sex not only a secular concern but a concern of the state as well; to be more exact, sex became a matter that required the social body as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals, to place themselves under surveillance.
Foucault's History of Sexuality v. 1
This course explores the history and construction of non-normative sexuality and gender in eighteenth-century British culture. We will explore the different ways that British society came to imagine, control, and organize sexuality and the different nationalist, patriarchal, and class-legitimating agendas that accompanied these imaginative constructions. Using a cultural studies model, we will look at legal, moral, medical and literary texts from the period, staying attentive to the specific rhetorical powers of each kind of text. This course will also serve as an introduction to lesbian and gay studies as we seek to delineate a genealogy of sexuality that existed prior to the homosexual/heterosexual binary solidified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will evaluate the efficacy of various theoretical approaches to this material, such as queer theory, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, semiotic, feminist, historicist, and Marxist approaches.
Possible Texts: poetry by Rochester, Phillips, Behn, and Gray, Restoration plays such as The Country Wife and The Recruiting Officer, Aristotle's Master-piece, Ned Ward's description of molly clubs, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson, Cleland's Fanny Hill, The Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke, Defoe’s “Apparition of Mrs. Veal,” Barker’s “The Unaccountable Wife,” Fielding's "The Female Husband," Snell's The Female Soldier, Onanism; or, A Treatise Upon the Disorders of Masturbation, gothic novels such as The Castle of Otranto or Ormond,Diaries of Ann Lister, Woods vs. Pirie Court Case, History of Mary Prince.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Scarlet.Bowen@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-007: The Literature of the Fantastic: Imagination and Metamorphosis Instructor: Eric White
Whether it opens onto a prospect experienced as infernal (in tales about vengeful spectres and maleficent apparitions) or marvellous (as in an alchemist's magical transmutation of reality or an adept's visionary transport), the literature of the fantastic invariably entails, in Roger Caillois's words, "a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissable within the changeless everyday legality." The fantastic upsets mundane appearances and dominant paradigms, disassembles the received order of things and confronts the putative finality of definitive worldviews with the unforeseeable and the unprecedented. Alternately inducing feelings of astonishment and terror, exhilaration and repulsion, it testifies both to the incomprehensible multiplicity of objective reality and to subjective desire's limitless capacity for metamorphosis. In this course, we will track the development of the fantastic as it has evolved over the past two centuries, from E.T.A. Hoffmann, Honore de Balzac, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker, to Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter. Written work will include three 5 - 6 page essays and a final examination.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Eric.White@colorado.edu .
ENGL 4038-009: Early Modern England in a Global Context
Instructor: Valerie Forman
What was England's place and role in a world that was becoming increasingly global? This question will guide our discussion of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature, culture, and history. The early modern period saw many radical changes in the ways that different regions of the globe interacted with one another: the exploration of the New World by Europeans, the development of overseas trade routes from Europe to the East Indies, the establishment of colonies in the Americas, and the development of the triangular slave trade were all developments of what we now call the "early modern" period. This course will focus on the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when England, who was relatively late in its entry into these endeavors, became a significant participant in them. Some questions we will explore in this class are: how did England perceive and represent itself in relation to other nations? How did what it meant to be English develop through England's relationship to other regions and out of conflicts with other European nations who were vying for supremacy in these regions? The seventeenth century was also tumultuous at home: a civil war, a regicide, and radical political and economic groups threatened to alter the relationships (e.g., of class and gender) among English subjects living in England as well. As we explore how England was participant in global changes, we will also consider the ramifications of these changes for England's domestic social relations. For example, how did the developing slave trade or the ideology of pirates inform debates at home about freedom, property, and the family? As we investigate these concerns we will consider the impact of these debates on literary developments as well. For example, why was tragicomedy the dramatic genre most often used to represent issues of travel and trade? To what extent were England's literary developments in dialogue with, or even pirated versions of, literature from other nations?
We will be reading travel narratives of Englishmen in the Americas (including narratives about Englishmen who are captured and held prisoner in Mexico, about the search for gold in Latin America, and about English pirates/privateers who traveled the global plundering Spanish ships); plays set in the East Indies, Mexico, and the Ottoman Empire; early modern texts about race; the first English literary text to represent Sub-Saharan Africans on their own continent; texts on early English colonies in the Americas, and texts that connect English radicals to the Caribbean West Indies.
Some possible texts:
John Fletcher, The Island Princess
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries
Philip Massinger, The Renegado
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
John Dryden, The Indian Emperor
Miguel Cervantes, The Spanish English Lady
Please contact the instructor for further information: Formanv@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-881: American Women Writers, 1790-1920
Instructor: Mary Klages
In the first century of the United States, there were thousands of women writers; today, we know of only a handful. This class will explore the idea of the "woman writer" in pre-twentieth-century American culture: who was she, what did she write, and what impact did her writing have on her culture? Looking at a wide variety of texts, including fiction, poetry, essays, drama, political speeches, advice books, cookbooks, and travel narratives, we will locate women writers of different races and classes within the codes of "womanhood" prevalent in the nineteenth century.Textbooks for this course will be available at Word Is Out Bookstore, 2015 10th St. (west end of Pearl St. Mall).
Please contact the instructor for further information: Mary.Klages@colorado.edu
ENGLISH 4224-001: Modern British and Irish Novel
Instructor: Eric White
As we read a selection of writings by Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Angela Carter, we will consider the textual innovations and cultural issues at stake in modern British and Irish fiction. Readings for the course will include:
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse
Samuel Beckett, Molloy and The Unnamable
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus.
Written work: two 5-6 page essays, a midterm and a final examination.
Please contact the instructor for further information:Eric.White@colorado.edu.ENGL 4235-001: American Novel I
Instructor: Jordan Stein
What is “American” about the American novel? This course examines a generic
range of novels (gothic, sentimental, historical, fantastic, romance, proto-modernist, local color, realist, naturalist) conventionally taken as “American” and
asks how national identity (of writers, readers, and texts) can be constructed on
their basis. We’ll also think seriously about how these novels establish and, in
some cases, assault the conventions of the genre (setting, theme, character,
plot).
This is a reading and writing intensive course. Requirements include upward of
200 pages of reading per week and multiple short papers.
Likely texts include:
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799)
Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)
John Neal, Rachel Dyer (1828)
Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself (1836)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857)
Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872)
Henry James, Roderick Hudson (1876) or Washington Square (1880)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces (1900)
Please contact the instructor for further information: Jordan.A.Stein@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4533-001: Renaissance England 1600-1700.
Seventeenth Century England: Literature and Culture
Instructor: Valerie Forman
This course is organized around a set of related questions. What is particularly significant and compelling about the history of seventeenth-century England? What is the relationship between this history and the literary developments of the period? What makes the seventeenth century and its literature a particularly interesting area of study for us today? In order to develop answers to these questions we will focus on three areas that have recently been the focus of much debate: the history of gender and sexuality,
the formation of the nation and rebellion, and travel, global trade, and colonialism/postcolonialism. We won't be considering these debates in isolation; instead we will be thinking about them in relationship to literary developments. Reading sonnets, epic poems, closet drama, city comedy, revenge comedy, travel literature, and more, we will consider why the ways these texts were written and read, as well as the forms they take, are integrally connected to the issues they engage. Throughout the course we will practice close reading as a way to explore the narrative, dramatic, and poetic strategies by which texts pose literary and historical questions and also manage them. Put simply, we will investigate what issues were of primary concern and how writers were engaging these issues in literary forms.
Some texts we will read in the class:
Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl
John Fletcher, The Island Princess
Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries
Please contact the instructor for further information: Formanv@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4564-001: The Early Romantics:Other Worlds
Instructor: Padma Rangarajan
In this course we’ll be studying a variety of texts from the late eighteenth and nearly nineteenth centuries, a tumultuous, revolutionary literary and historical period now known as the Romantic era. In this class we’ll be studying canonical and lesser-known texts across the period with an emphasis on the Romantic penchant for the exotic and the supernatural. In effect, we’ll be studying how the Romantics understood other worlds in relation to their own, and they used literature to mediate these relationships.
Reading List (subject to change):
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate
Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology
Please contact the instructor for further information: Padma.Rangarajan@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4614-001: Later Victorians
Instructor: Kelly Hurley
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1850)
To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
— Walter Pater (1889)
During the latter half of Queen Victoria’s reign, when Great Britain was not just a wealthy island nation but also the center of an vast and powerful global empire, the country was characterized by its materialism and arrogance. And yet the later Victorians were also a surprisingly anxious people, internally divided, grappling with the social conflicts attendant on modernization, secularization, and globalization. Their literature charts a wide range of attitudes – whether complacent or highly critical, hysterical or intellectually engaged – towards imperialism, evolutionary science, gender and sexuality, and class conflict.
“Later Victorians” is designed to introduce you to the diverse history and literature of Great Britain from approximately 1860 to 1900, a literature that includes the melancholy of Tennyson, the grotesque humor of Charles Dickens, the austerely moral humanism of George Eliot, the decadence of Pater and Oscar Wilde, the existentialist modernism of Joseph Conrad. The course will also work to hone your skills in close reading and written analysis. Class time will be devoted primarily to discussion, but will include lectures and student presentations. Occasionally we’ll break into small groups in order to facilitate discussion on a more personal scale.
This is an upper-division English course, which means that the work load will be heavy some weeks, and that much of your grade will be based on your writing skills. On many days I have assigned more readings than we will be able to cover in class, with the expectation that you should be able to analyze some of the material on your own.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Kelly.Hurley@colorado.edu .
ENGL 4655-001: Studies in American Literature to 1900: Traveling Much in Concord
Instructor: Marty Bickman
I have traveled a good deal in Concord. . .
—Henry D. ThoreauBecause I see—New Englandly—
The Queen, discerns like me—
Provincially—
—Emily Dickinson
This course will explore the interrelations among the literary community that centered around Concord from about 1840 to 1860 and included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. We will study such topics as Transcendentalism, education reform, nature writing, feminism, communitarianism, radical politics, abolitionism, and Romantic conceptions of the self. We will read widely short pieces by all of the authors above and focus on how these topics are related to each other through extended textual and contextual readings of Walden and The Blithedale Romance. A major goal of this course will be to form our own literary community, and to help do this, I am asking students to come to virtually every class and to write for each of these class meetings. Aside from informal writing on our CU Learn Website, each student will work on a particular interest of his or her own that will be both taught to the class and also take the form of an extended written project due at the end of the course. This course is particularly recommended to those students who like to work hard and exercise their intellectual curiosity, not for those who might see it as another hurdle in their path of life. It would be good if students could read over the break one of the following books:
Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work.
Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr., The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind.
Philip McFarland, Hawthorne in Concord.
Professor Bickman would be delight to talk with prospective students at 303-492-8945 or answer email questions at Bickman@colorado.edu