ENGL 4021-801: TR 11-12:15 PM with Professor Noah Eli Gordon
ENGL 4021-802: TR 11-12:15 PM with Professor Ruth Ellen Kocher
ENGL 4051-802: T 2-4:30 PM with Professor Stephen Graham Jones
ENGL 4051-803: TR 12:30-1:45 PM with Professor Jeffrey DeShell
ENGL 4038-001: MWF 10-10:50 AM with Professor Martin Bickman
ENGL 4038-002: MWF 12-12:50 PM with Professor Valerie Forman
ENGL 4038-003: MWF 1-1:50 PM with Professor Mary Klages
ENGL 4038-004: TR 9:30-10:45 AM with Professor Sue Zemka
ENGL 4038-005: TR 11-12:15 PM with Professor Sidney Goldfarb
ENGL 4038-007: TR 9:30-10:45 AM with Professor John-Michael Rivera
ENGL 4116-001: TR 3:30-4:45 PM with Professor Ed Rivers
ENGL 4204-001: MWF 12-12:50 PM with Professor Scarlet Bowen
ENGL 4224-001: MWF 11-11:50 AM with Professor Janice Ho
ENGL 4245-001: TR 2-3:15 AM with Professor Karen Jacobs
ENGL 4523-001: TR 9:30-10:45 AM with Professor David Glimp
ENGL 4614-001: MWF 12-12:50 PM with Professor Padma Rangarajan
ENGL 4665-001: MWF 9-9:50 AM with Professor Martin Bickman
ENGL 4021-801: Advanced Poetry Workshop
Instructor: Professor Noah Eli Gordon
TR 11-12:15 pm — HUMN 270
Prereq: CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR OR INSTRUCTOR CONSENT
Through group critique, discussion, experimentation, work and play, this course will create a space for you to simultaneously develop your poems and poetics. We will attempt to bridge the gap between intuitive artistic play and an intellectual understanding of the requisite work involved in the writing of poetry. This course will also include reading heavily in and around contemporary poetry, with some of the authors we’re going to investigate (Mathias Svalina, Eleni Sikelianos, Chelsea Minnis, and possibly Adrian Matejka) making visits to our classroom. The course will culminate in the creation of your own chapbook—a small booklet to both document our work together and further its reach.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Noah.Gordon@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4021-802: Advanced Poetry Workshop
Instructor: Professor Ruth Ellen Kocher
TR 11-12:15 pm — HLMS 259
Prereq: CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR OR INSTRUCTOR CONSENT
Students will gather as a writing workshop in this course, focusing in poetry writing and poetry related cross-genre writing with an attention to craft, stylistic development, self-assessment, critical perspective, and peer evaluation. Writing generated by students will be the primary text for the course as will the discussion of such writing be the primary focus of class content. Students will be asked to complete a portfolio of semester work which includes drafted, original and revised poetry written specifically and only during the course of this workshop, an evolving written self-assessment, poetry reading reviews, poetry book reviews, and an annotated bibliography of poetry read over the course of the semester. Students will write from prompts and exercises both in and out of class and will be asked to function within a community of writers in critique, reading and/or performance. Students in this course are encouraged to take innovative as well as traditional approaches to working in the poetry genre.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Kocherr@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4038-001: Critical Thinking in English Studies: Teaching English
Instructor: Professor Martin Bickman
Call No. 15467
MWF 10-10:50 am — HLMS 191
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MJRS. MAY NOT BE REPEATED FOR CREDIT
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. We will read two entire books: Elaine Showalter, Teaching English and Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned but the bulk of our reading will be articles and chapters on CU Learn. If you want to get some sense of my approach to teaching, go to:
http://www.mindingamericaneducation.com/bickman_ch9.pdf
Prospective students are encouraged to email me [Bickman@colorado.edu] or call me [303 492 8945] before the course starts.
ENGL 4038-002: Literature of Rebellion in Early Modern England
Instructor: Professor Valerie Forman
Call No. 15468
MWF 12-12:50 pm — HLMS 196
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MJRS. MAY NOT BE REPEATED FOR CREDIT
This class will explore how the literature of early modern England represented rebellion. What shapes do narratives of both armed and nonviolent resistance to various forms of authority take? What affect did this literature have on its readers? This was an age that saw an unprecedented proliferation of new literary genres and a revision of existing genres. How did this veritable information revolution play a part in the crises of this period: a war (the English Revolution in which neighbors sided against neighbors and one branch of the government went to war against another), a regicide (the execution of King Charles I), a new form of government that took its place, the planting of colonies in the Atlantic and West Indies, a radical increase in global trade and in the forms of unfree labor that supported it—both of indentured servants from Europe and of slaves from Africa? In this class we will read literature that represents rebellions against rulers, class struggles on both sides of the Atlantic, rebellions of and against native Americans, slave rebellions, resistance to economic imperialism in the Spice Islands of the East Indies, and resistance by women to husbands and even to the institution of marriage. We will also read literature that conducts imaginative experiments in what political, economic, and other kinds of community could emerge as a result of the vacuum created by the elimination of tyrannous forms of authority and oppression. We will be reading a variety of genres of literary works: tragedy, tragicomedy, epic poetry, lyric poetry, political pamphlets, and prose narratives—including one that is often considered the first novel in English and sometimes also the first American novel. Though most of the literature we will be reading is of the early modern period, we will most likely end with a contemporary novel that looks back to this period. Some authors we will likely read in this course: William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Cary, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Toni Morrison.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Valerie.Forman@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4038-003: Constructing American Sexualities 1620-1920
Instructor: Professor Mary Klages
Call No. 15469
MWF 1-1:50 pm — GUGG 205
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MJRS. MAY NOT BE REPEATED FOR CREDIT
This course explores the social construction of the concept of “sexuality” through examining the textual places where sexuality is articulated, in both literary
and non-literary discourse. Moving freely among legal, medical, theological, autobiographical, fictional and poetic works, we will ask how representations of sexual
activity work in reciprocity with human sexual behavior: do people write what they do or do what they read? Central to this investigation will be questions of
methodology: what is “the history of sexuality” and how does one discover it? Readings will include historical and sociological works, as well as literary texts such
as Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Melville’s Billy Budd, Whitman’s Calamus poems, short fiction
by Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Kate Chopin, Frank Norris’ McTeague, and Nella Larsen’s Passing.
This course is offered for senior English majors; there will be a heavy reading and research load. In registering for this course, students acknowledge that the
content will be sexually explicit, and agree to conduct themselves in accordance with the rules of classroom behavior required at the University of Colorado.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Mary.Klages@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4038-004: Literature and Victorian London
Instructor: Professor Sue Zemka
Call No. 15470
TR 9:30-10:45 am — LIBR N424B
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MJRS. MAY NOT BE REPEATED FOR CREDIT
Victorian London was a real place and a nightmarish fantasyland. It was vast, dark, crowded, and dangerous; many parts of the city were unmapped. A person could get lost here. Walking the city was an adventure; according to novels of the period, walking in London could change the course of your life. It was also a place where thieves and murderers dwelled, hiding in corners of the city or behind unlikely aliases. Victorian London was a birthplace of many types of literature: the detective novel; the novel of urban anomie; the poetry of urban shock and rage; the poetry of estrangement as a pleasure and a style. In this course, we will spend a semester exploring Victorian London in literature. We will read novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, George Gissing, and Amy Levy. We will also read shorter pieces by Thomas De Quincey, Henry Mayhew, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle, and selected poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Arthur Symons. The major assignment for the course will be a twenty-page research paper due at the end of the semester. Students will choose their own topics, and will submit short draft installments of the research paper over the course of the semester. Students will also be asked to present and share work on their research projects.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Sue.Zemka@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4038-005: Experimental Drama
Instructor: Professor Sidney Goldfarb
Call No. 15471
TR 11-12:15 pm — HLMS 137
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MJRS. MAY NOT BE REPEATED FOR CREDIT
The class is intended to introduce students to the tradition of non-representational theater from Strindberg to Sarah Kane. There are many names used, none of
them quite adequate, to describe this complex and various development in the history of the theater. Sometimes it is called non-mimetic theater to distinguish that
aspect of this movement from the whole history of art that attempts, in one way or another, to “mirror” the so-called real world. Lionel Abel used, a half century
ago, mainly in response to the Theater of the Absurd, the term Meta-Theater, to describe this movement, as a way of stressing its abstract or metaphysical content.
And there have been a myriad of other terms, both before and after Meta-Theater, that have attempted to encompass this change away from the realistic or naturalistic
norms of both the 19th and 20th Century and beyond. I have chosen the more modest term “experimental” because it seems to encompass most inclusively the works this
class deals with. Reading this range of experimental drama, we would hope to find out some thing about its intention, its function, its structure, and how it differs
from representational theater.
Reading List:
- Strindberg, Five Plays, tr,, Carlson (Minnesota)
- Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays (Penguin)
- Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Minnesota)
- Genet, The Balcony (Grove)
- Beckett, Endgame (Grove)
- Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (Grove)
- Irene Maria Fornes, Plays (PAJ)
- Adrienne Kennedy, The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (Minnesota)
- Sarah Kane, Collected Plays (Metheun)
One five page paper. One ten page paper. Occasional brief typed assignments in preparation for discussion. Grading is as follows: Class participation, 20%; short paper, 20%; long paper, 40%; typed assignments, 20%.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Sidney.Goldfarb@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4038-007: The Art of Truth: Creative Nonfiction
Instructor: Professor John-Michael Rivera
Call No. 25470
TR 9:30-10:45 — MUEN E114
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MJRS. MAY NOT BE REPEATED FOR CREDIT
In this course we will study a genre that has become tremendously popular in the literary market—creative nonfiction. We will begin be reading broadly in the area of nonfiction, studying creative non-fiction mostly, and, in doing so, we will explore how this genre uses fictive and poetic techniques in its aesthetic pursuit to represent the truth. Most of the course will run like a workshop, and we will work on our own creative projects and hold workshops throughout the summer. By the end of the summer, I want you all to not only be aware of the traditions and models of creative nonfiction but also become writers who are actively engaged in exploring the aesthetic limits and possibilities of writing the truth.
Please feel free to contact Professor Rivera with questions at John-Michael.Rivera@colorado.edu
ENGL 4051-802: Advanced Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Professor Stephen Graham Jones
T 2-4:30 pm — HLMS 137
Prereq: CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR OR INSTRUCTOR CONSENT
As the final course in the creative writing curriculum, this course is, first, for those about to graduate, and, second, for those who have already taken at least one 3051 (ideally, two) or one 3051 and another 4051. Which is to say we hit the ground running, so as to cycle through as many stories as possible, as supplemented a bit early on by stories for discussion. Ideally, we'll get four stories done. In addition, you'll be mailing those stories out for publication, and also working on a semester-long writing project. Textbooks: none, except maybe a style guide or two, just to be certain that any mechanical issues that arise with your writing, we won't have to deal with them in-class. With the right style guides, you can deal with them before you ever come to class, leaving us to workshop the story elements. Which is what Advanced Fiction's all about.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Sgjones@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4051-803: Advanced Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Professor Jeffrey DeShell
TR 12:30-1:45 pm — HLMS 104
Prereq: CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR OR INSTRUCTOR CONSENT
A fiction workshop where advanced student fiction is written and discussed in a workshop setting.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Jeffrey.DeShell@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4116-001: Multimedia Sound
Instructor: Professor Ed Rivers
TR 3:30-4:45 pm — ATLS 1B25
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MAJORS
Students learn what sound is and where it comes from; how to create, analyze, alter, mix, and record it digitally in the studio and in the field; and how it can interact creatively with other media. In addition to analyzing how professionals use sound, students will create five sound-based projects of their own. Possible examples include podcasts; interactive sound design; music using software instruments, real instruments or both; song writing and recording; web-site design that uses sound creatively; sound design (including sound FX) for film or video; or sound design for digital poetry or fiction. For full details and a picture, click here.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Ed.Rivers@Colorado.edu
ENGL4204-001: Development of the English Novel 1
Instructor: Professor Scarlet Bowen
Call No. 24852
MWF 12-12:50 pm — ECON 117
Prereq: JR/SR STANDING
TThis course takes a look at the origins of today’s most popular genre—the novel. Compared to other genres such as the epic or drama, the novel is a relatively
new form, appearing in Britain during the late 1600’s and early 1700’s. Why the novel form materialized during this era is one of the most intriguing puzzles in
literary history. In this course, we will explore various theories for the rise of the novel as well as the influences and innovations of the eighteenth-century
novel. In addition, we will be following the direction of recent scholarship that highlights the early British novel as a genre profoundly influenced by transatlantic
and global trade, colonization, and migration.
Possible Course Texts: Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Haywood’s The British Recluse, Richardson’s Pamela, Foster’s The
Coquette, The Female American, Brooke’s History of Emily Montague, Leonora Sansay, Secret History and Laura, Smollett’s Humphry
Clinker, The Woman of Colour, Owenson’s The Missionary
Please contact the instructor for further information: Scarlet.Bowen@Colorado.edu
ENGL4224-001: Modern British and Irish Novel: Public and Private Modernisms
Instructor: Professor Janice Ho
Call No. 15478
MWF 11-11:50 am — HLMS 211
Prereq: JR/SR STANDING
This course is a survey of some of the most important novels in the era of British modernism. We will be focusing in particular on the works of “high modernism”
written within the short, but aesthetically rich and historically eventful, period of 1910-1930. In these two decades, major historical events occurred: the First
World War, the enfranchisement of women, the beginnings of decolonization, the independence of Ireland, to name but a few of the most important. This course is
interested in the inter-relations between the public and the private: that is to say, we will examine how public, historical events such as war and imperialism
affected private notions of selfhood; but also how private experiences of subjectivity, domesticity, and sexuality critically engage with the larger socio-political
issues of the time. Additionally, we will examine the distinctive formal contributions of the modernists to the genre of the novel, and consider the way these formal
experiments were in fact attempts to express a uniquely modern sensibility.
Assigned texts are still subject to change, but will probably include: Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, James
Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway, Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie, and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. Students who choose to enroll in this
course should be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time in reading (around 200 pages a week).
Please contact the instructor for further information: Janice.Ho@Colorado.edu
ENGL4245-001: American Novel 2: Mapping the Body-Politic: (Re)discovering Post-war America
Instructor: Professor Karen Jacobs
Call No. 24890
TR 2-3:15 am — HLMS 255
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MJRS
This course will consider some of the ways the post-1945 American novel re-conceives of national purpose, borders, identities, and pasts. We will pay special attention to questions of defining, inhabiting and navigating national space, both literal and conceptual: from the movements across bodily and national borders, and those bridging pastoral and urban spaces, to passages that divide underworlds from (or connect them to) mainstream territories. We will read a selection of the following: Ellison's Invisible Man (1952); Nabokov's Lolita (1955); Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (1967); Coover's The Public Burning (1977); Cha's Dictee (1982); Morrison's Beloved (1987); DeLillo's Underworld (1991); Vollmann's The Atlas (1996); Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1997); Mazza's Homeland (2004); Larsen, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009). Students will write two 7-page papers and a cumulative final exam.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Karen.Jacobs@Colorado.edu
ENGL4523-001: The Renaissance in England, 1500-1600
Instructor: Professor David Glimp
Call No. 24860
MWF 11-11:50 am — ECON 2
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN/THTR MAJORS
The English sixteenth century was a period of extraordinary literary experimentation and achievement, culminating in the drama and poetry written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It was also a period of drastic political and social transformation. The period has held an abiding fascination for the popular imagination, for example in movies on the life of Queen Elizabeth, and a cable series on the Tudor dynasty. This course will provide an opportunity to explore this fascinating century from the perspective of its poets and playwrights. We’ll examine changes in lyric poetry from the satirical poet John Skelton to the sonnets of William Shakespeare; the growth in popularity of forms of prose fiction that in turn laid the groundwork for the emergence of the novel; and the development of drama during the period, from the earlier moral and religious traditions to the popular theater of playwrights such as (in addition to Shakespeare) Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. A primary objective of the course will be to understand how these developments responded to and sought to understand and shape the political, social and cultural forces transforming their contemporary life.
Please contact the instructor for further information: David.Glimp@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4614-001: The Later Victorians
Instructor: Professor Padma Rangarajan
Call No. 15486
MWF 12-12:50 pm — HLMS 137
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MAJORS
Contemplating the end of the century, the Victorians were faced with vexing questions concerning the status of women, the ruling of a vast and unruly empire, the
growing role of technology in society, political unrest, terrorism, religion, evolution, the discovery of bacteria, and possible alien invasions. In the course of
grappling with these weighty issues they also had to reevaluate the role of art and the artist in society. In this class we will consider literature written between
1859-1901 as the products of a culture that had reached its zenith, but that was also nervously anticipating destruction. In addition to novels, we will also study
poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose. Authors include Dickens, Tennyson, Swineburne, Stoker, Wilde, Besant, and Haggard, among others.
This is an upper-division class, so the reading load will be substantial, and the expectation for participation in discussion will be high. In addition to papers(2)
and exams(1), students will all have to give in-class presentations.
Books (subject to change):
- Stoker, Dracula
- Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- Haggard, King Soloman’s Mines
- Hardy, Jude the Obscure
- Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Victorian Era
Please contact the instructor for further information: Padma.Rangarajan@Colorado.edu
ENGL 4665-001: Studies in American Literature After 1900: The Visionary Tradition in American Poetry
Instructor: Professor Martin Bickman
Call No. 24893
MWF 9-9:50 am — ECON 205
Prereq: JR/SR ENGL/HUMN MAJORS
The visionary creates, or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured and charged with a new
intensity of symbolism. This is quite consistent with art, because it never relinquishes the visualization which no artist can do without . . . This suggests that
mysticism and art are in the long wrong mutually exclusive but that the visionary and the artist are allied.
--Northrop Frye
To walk barefoot into reality means abandoning the independence of the ego. Instead of making everything an object for the self, the mind must efface itself before
reality, or plunge into the density of an exterior world, dispersing itself in a milieu which exceeds it and which it has not made. The effacement of the ego before
reality means abandoning the will to power over things.
--J. Hillis Miller
This course will trace what has become the dominant tradition in American poetry. Its keynote address is Emerson’s “The Poet,” which urges the following guidelines: 1) form should be an extension of content, not a pre-existing Platonic structure [“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, —a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” 2) A language that restores sensuousness and specificity to our poetry [“But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.”] and 3) the subject matter of a poem should be an immediate consciousness living its quotidian existence [“I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.”] This course will explore this tradition through Whitman, Dickinson, W. C. Williams, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov. There will be writings and analysis for each class period and a final project. Attendance is strictly required in the service of building an intellectual community.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Bickman@Colorado.edu