ENGL 597: Topics in Literature: How to Read a Film
Meetings: Thursday, 5 – 7:30 PM
Professor Lincoln Konkle
The large majority of films made in Hollywood are only concerned with presenting an entertaining story (and making money). In this course we will study film as an art form that employs many cinematic techniques that reinforce, comment on, or otherwise enhance the narrative elements. To do this, we will watch a film per week from a variety of genres and time periods made in a variety of styles, and discuss readings from the field of film studies. Films may include Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, Hamlet (Olivier), 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Empire Strikes Back, Boyhood, Risky Business, Do the Right Thing, Apocalypse Now, Zero Dark Thirty, The Tree of Life and Parasite, but I am open to students’ suggestions. Assignments include weekly Canvas Discussion posts, a researched presentation, 2 non-research essays, and a research essay.
ENGL 550: Seminar in Poetry
Meetings: Tuesday, 5—7:30 PM
Professor Catie Rosemurgy
This course will explore the contemporary reader’s relationship to poetry in general and to books by a cross section of American poets in particular. What does poetry offer that other forms of media can’t, that other literary texts don’t? What does poetry ask of us as readers and is that work still necessary? In the age of the internet, can the slow, deliberate reading of poetry become an act of resistance?
These are the questions we will start off the semester asking. The focus in this course will be on the reader’s direct experience of the book as we consider poetry’s relationship to place, culture, selfhood, and citizenship.
ENGL 505: Literary Theory
Meetings: Wednesday, 5 – 7:30 PM
Professor Harriet Hustis
An introduction to the scholarly methods necessary for graduate work in literature and to the study of theoretical frameworks important to contemporary literary criticism, including formalism, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, new historicism, and psychoanalysis. The course exposes students to the primary texts from which those theoretical frameworks are derived and requires students to critique and construct applications of those theories to specific literary texts.
ENGL 612: Shakespeare: Dynamic Shakespeare
Meetings: Monday, 5—7:30 PM
Professor David Venturo
Samuel Johnson astutely remarked of Shakespeare that he “has no heroes” and that his plays are neither tragedies nor comedies but reflect “the real state of sublunary nature.” In other words, Shakespeare’s plays, informed by the dynamics of real life, are generically, psychologically, dramatically, and morally complicated. The chief goal in our class will be to address Johnson’s observation and to find freshness and complexity in the seeming familiarity of Shakespeare. I hope to engage and encourage you to search for, and to examine these tendencies in the following eight Shakespeare plays: The First and Second Parts of Henry the Fourth, Hamlet, As You Like It, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.
ENGL 654: Transnational American Literature
Meetings: Tuesday 5:00—7:30
Professor Ellen Friedman
By studying literature written in the 20th and 21st centuries, this class will consider the complications, erosion, alienation, redefinition, and meanings of American identity as depicted by U.S. writers. Through readings and discussion, it will explore how U.S. writers capture the changing meaning of “America” and its effect on ideas of home, community, nation, state, and identity.
ENGL 670: Studies in Literature: Love in Theory
Meetings: Wednesday 5-7:30
Professor Juda Bennett
“To try to write love,” Roland Barthes asserts, “is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little….” What do efforts to “write love” look like in our world today? Just in time for Valentine’s Day, this course will “confront the muck of language,” and because love is messy some of the best theories on love blur the line between genres, making this a course full of hybrid works, collage literature, and genre-bending texts as much as it is a course on love in theory.