(Eng 2051)  AMERICAN LITERATURE II:  THE AGE OF REALISM

This survey of works published after the Civil War through the 1920's explores American optimism, racial conflict, class antagonism, romantic illusion, violence and imperialism, westward expansion, the obsession with wealth, the image of women, and the popular fascination with criminal behavior.  Fiction from C. W. Chesnutt to Scott Fitzgerald, definition of self in Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson, Kate Chopin,  Harlem Poets and others. One paper; two half-semester essays with IDs. 

(Eng 3077/5050)  AMERICAN POETRY

Seminar in 19th and 20th-century poetry traces the transition from romantic to modern sensibilty, from Emerson to T. S. Eliot and beyond to contemporary poets of the Americas.  Discussion of forms and techniques but emphasis is on reading well, finding distinct voice and dramatic context in each poem.  Includes Whitman, Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Derek Walcott, Sharon Olds, Stephen Dunn, Julia Alvarez, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Young-Li, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others.  Regular required recitations, analyses and writing assignments.  Some strong language.  

(Eng 2007)  MASTERS OF THE SHORT STORY

This seminar-style course covers a wide range of culturally diverse short fiction.  Emphasized are interpersonal relations, narrative voice, imagery, symbolism and other aspects of short story telling.  Included are Ann Beattie, T. C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Sandra Cisneros, Ralph Ellison, Louise Erdrich, Richard Ford, Gail Godwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ha Jin, Bernard Malamud, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Silko, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, Amy Tan and others.  Goals are improved critical reading, writing and speaking.  Required: Open class discussions, organized critical presentations, regular writing assignments.

(Eng 2036)  ENGLISH V:  THE MODERN AGE

Twentieth-century and contemporary English and Irish writers whose work challenges social, religious and aesthetic conventions.  Course deals with the beginnings and refinements of Modernism, the effects of class and cultural conflict, the risks of intimacy and the search for values in contemporary society.  Includes W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf,  Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien,  Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Harold Pinter, Maeve Binchy, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie.  Some language may offend cultural sensibilities.  Lectures, midterm, paper, final.  Discussion encouraged.  

(Eng 2052)  AMERICAN  LITERATURE  III:  THE 20th CENTURY & CONTEMPORARY

The work of notable twentieth-century and contemporary writers as reflections of various aesthetic, cultural, political, economic and regional developments.  Course examines the literary reaction to complacency, hypocrisy, vulgarity, chauvinism, social injustice; the constrictions of family and of racial and ethnic bias; the image of women and of men.  Includes Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Tim O’Brien, Sharon Olds, John Edgar Wideman, Dave Eggers, Junot Diaz, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Jumpha Lahiri, Z Z Packer and David Foster Wallace. In keeping with the realism of the material, some language may offend cultural sensibilities.  Lectures, midterm, paper, final.  Discussion encouraged. 

(Eng 3041)  MODERN LOVE POETRY

Twentieth-century and contemporary treatments of intimacy in poems from various traditions in English and in translation from other languages.  Emphasis is on tenderness, erotic attraction, courtship, falling in and out of love, addiction, martyrdom, obsession, compulsion, fantasy, loving the self, living with loss, and living together.  Discussion of problems in communication, education, censorship.  Purpose:  improved critical reading, writing and speaking.  In-class readings, analytical essays required.  Some strong language.