Winter 2012 Course Descriptions

English 292/293, British and American Literary History (Thorne-Murphy and Snyder)

For English majors who have yet to take the required surveys of later British and American literature (English 292 and 293), the English Department will offer a single, six-credit-hour, combined class that will fulfill both course requirements.  Like conventional sections of 292 and 293, this course will offer a broad survey of British and American literary history while encouraging a particular appreciation for representative authors and texts from these respective traditions.  Where it will differ, however, is in its focus on transatlantic literary exchange.  Specifically, the course will engage with questions such as:

• How did American writers during the colonial and early republican periods imitate, appropriate, or resist the literary conventions of the “mother country”?
• How have British and American authors represented their own national identities, and how have they envisioned each other’s?
• At what point in history did the United States establish a vibrant enough intellectual culture that authors in the old world not only read American books but drew upon them in their own works?
• How useful are traditional nationalist labels (e.g. “American literature,” “British literature,” “French literature”) for describing contemporary literature?  Is there still – or was there ever – such a thing as a distinctively “British” (or “American”) literature?

English 324, Writing with Style (Hansen)

The purpose of this course is to refine the writing style of students who want their writing to be better than “just okay.” The course is intended for students who plan to enter professions in which writing plays a key role—academia, law, government, public service, business, professional and technical communication, editing, journalism, etc.—and in which the ability to write correctly, fluently, and gracefully is the prime requisite for success and  advancement. English majors who aim to go to graduate school in English are particularly encouraged to take the course, since they are likely to become instructors in first-year writing courses. They should therefore not only be the best writers possible but also the most knowledgeable about the elements of writing so that they can explain to students how written English is composed.

In the course we will briefly review basic elements of English grammar but do so from the perspective of what a writer should know to produce prose that is not only correct but stylistically effective. In other words, we will focus on the rhetorical role that grammatical building blocks play in successful writing. We will focus heavily on other elements of style, including rhetorical tropes and figures. Finally, we will focus on revising prose to make it clearer, more graceful, more readable, more memorable. Throughout the course, you will use your growing knowledge to produce rhetorically effective writing in a number of short exercises and several papers.

English 333, Th­e English Novel (Spen­­­cer)

This course on the English novel will explore the novel’s form, content, history, and transformation. Broadly, we will engage the conceptual and material origins and history of the literary genre “novel”. To this end we will read several critical essays that attempt to define the generic conventions of the “novel,” situate it in literary history, and clarify its stylistic development over roughly 300 years. The majority of our class will center on the reading and discussion of the novels themselves. Novel readings will include:  Oroonoko, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, Emma, A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island, Heart of Darkness, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again, and Neverwhere. Grades will stem from several short writing assignments leading to a long essay, reading journals, a final exam, and classroom participation.

English 336, section 1, The American Novel: History Unhinged: The Broken End of Time in Contemporary Jewish American Literature (Cronin)

Contrary to popular belief, Jewish American Literature, our first canonized American ethnic literary tradition, has waxed, not waned in the aftermath of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth. In the post-1976 high moment of Saul Bellow’s Nobel Prize, a large and vital tradition of postmodern Jewish American literature  emerged which engages provocatively with all of the central issues of the modernity and postmodernity in the late 20th and early  21st centuries. Its obsessive themes include: the Jewish immigrant experience;  broken history; loss of faith; recurring genocides; various fascisms; the Eastern European Yiddish legacy; contemporary Israel;  gender conflict; belief and disbelief; fiction as midrash; the legacy of Yiddish literature;  multiple or unstable  identities; absent fathers; the lost maternal ground; the status of the author; the American second, third, and fourth generation survivors; writing and re-writing the body; and the continuing impact of American assimilation. But it also does so through Jewish American humor traditions. In this course we will study: Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham, Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay, Rebecca Goldstein’s Properties of Light, Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces, Philip Roth’s Plot Against America, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,  Chaim Potok’s Book of Lights, and Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible.

English 336, section 2, The American Novel: Still In Need Of “Traveling Shoes”: The Contemporary Journey in African American Literature (Cronin)

This course will examine contemporary works by African American writers on the nature of the ongoing African American cultural and spiritual journey, the post-sixties moment, issues concerning women, men, children, civil rights, romance and courtship, renewed  religious paradigms,  vernacular  speech, humor traditions, survival strategies, signifyin’, African inheritances and resources, and the current focus on the black family. In this course we will read Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou, Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams, Kindred by Octavia Butler, Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, The Hand I Fan With and The Baby of the Family by Tina Mcelroy Ansa, and The Healing by Jonathan Odell.

English 345, Literature and Film (Fox)

For Winter Semester 2012, English 345 features a variety of authors and genres (short stories, novels, plays, and non-fiction) that have been adapted to film to achieve these learning outcomes:

• Explain an adaptation process in detail including the ways in which literature, theater, and the true-life story resist film.
• Analyze a film adaptation as an interpretation of a text, using approaches that go beyond “fidelity” to text.
• Recognize the formal elements of a film and a text and explain their interrelationships.
• Be an active, analytic viewer of film instead of one who passively resorts to escape and mental thumb sucking.
• Propose the elements you would include in adapting a text to film.
• Be able to use library and internet resources on literature and film.
• Evaluate the ethical issues in adaptations, including the MPAA rating system.

English 358R, Native American Literatures (Lundquist)

This course will examine the mythic foundations of Native American Literatures—including the works of the prophet Black Elk, the healing rituals of the Navajo and Iroquois, the political foundations of Chicano culture (Quetzalcoatl: An Aztec Hero Myth), and the fiction of writers whose works are founded on such myths: N. Scott Momaday (Pulitzer Prize winning novelist), Rudolf Anaya (American Book Award), and Linda Hogan (finalist for Pulitzer).

English 360, American Literature to 1800 (Hutchins)

In a world where audiovisual forms of interpersonal communication (telephone and videoconferencing) are in the ascendancy and where dominant textual modes privilege brevity (email, Facebook posts, texts, and tweets), the letter—and particularly the handwritten letter—is increasingly an historical artifact rather than an object of current concern. This course will ask students to rediscover the value and unique power of epistolary writing by examining the letters that, quite literally, shaped our nation. During the formative period of United States history, no genre had a greater effect on the course of public affairs; letters to the editor entertained and mobilized the masses; private letters between powerful men and women swung votes and swayed policy, while epistolary novels advocated for social or political interests beneath a veneer of fiction. In stark contrast to this public sphere of letters, private epistles articulated the concerns and domestic struggles of citizens learning to cope with the new-found freedoms of the republic. We will read the love letters of John and Abigail Adams alongside novels of seduction by William Hill Brown and Hannah Webster Foster; we will read letters written for love of the United States (Peter Markoe and William Hill Brown) alongside letters written for love of a colonial North America lost during the Revolution (John Dickinson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur).  By the end of this course students will be able to articulate the role that public and private letters played in shaping eighteenth-century history; describe the development of epistolary culture and the genre’s distinguishing characteristics; and compose thoughtful, moving letters of their own. 

English 361, American Literature 1800-1865 (Crisler)

English 361 considers American literature from 1800 to the beginning of the Civil War, examining the work of such major writers as Brown, Cooper, Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and others.

English 362, American Literature 1865-1914 (F. Christianson)

English 362 will focus on literary realism exploring he influence of  urbanization, migration, nationalism, and various social movements on fiction at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Important novelists and short story writers from the period will include Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Frank Norris, among others.

English 363, American Literature, 1914-1960 (Matthews)

This semester we will examine the complex aesthetic, generic, and political developments in American literature and culture between 1914 and 1960.  The lens through which we will examine these works is “adolescence.”  In his mid-century study of American literature and culture, Leslie Fiedler claims that images of “adolescence haunt our greatest works as an unintended symbolic confession of the inadequacy we sense but cannot remedy.”  Fiedler’s essay suggests that the adolescents in America’s literature are symptomatic of the adolescence of American literature and culture.  The anxiety that America may never be as “mature” as Europe haunts the cultural, economic, and political narratives of twentieth-century America.  At the same time, however, many modern American thinkers invoke the adolescent as a symbol of hope and progress – a type for the “American Dream.”  These authors associate the young and independent adolescent with nascent opportunity and potential success.  Inadequacy or potentiality?  Immaturity or innocence?  The seemingly conflicting uses of and for the American adolescent signal the complex processes involved in constructing a national identity and literature.  It will be our project this semester to explore how particular texts and literary movements engage with the varying and oftentimes competing discourses of this turbulent period.

English 365, American Literature, 1960-Present: Religion and Ethics in Postmodern American Fiction (Cronin)

Against popular charges of nihilism, many postmodernists assert that by its own rules postmodernism can never claim that there is no Transcendent Reality or realities. However, it does insist that we examine the epistemological foundations of what we have chosen to call “Truth,” and revisit the ethics of our relationship to our Others. Much of this ethical energy can be summed up in the biblical dictum that we are indeed our brothers’ keepers. During this course we will be examining a selection of postmodern novels  rich in  renewed interest concerning matters of religion and ethics.  Common thematic threads of multiplicity versus the universality tie these novels together as they rethink belief, faith, ethics,  indeterminacy, moral foundations, contemporary fragmentation, the status of the subject, the crisis of representation, simulacra, hybridization, carnivalization, and multiculturalism.  Each of these books takes on the burden of re-examining moral responsibility in a global world. The purpose of this course is to: 1) learn how to read contemporary American fiction, 2) develop a critical vocabulary for identifying and describing its techniques and strategies,  and 3)  explore its preoccupation with the moral/philosophical/religious/ethical issues of subjectivity, at the end of the “American” 20th century. We will be reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Louise Erdrich’s Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Lloyd Jones' Mr. Pip, Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Tim O'Brien’s The Things They Carried, Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient, Jonathan Rosen’s The Talmud and the Internet, and Daniel Coleman’s In Bed With the Word.

English 366, Studies in Poetry (Howe)

This course will review the major varieties of contemporary American poetry and look back to the 20th century to examine the precursors of these different types of poetry.

English 374, British Literature, 1789-1832 (Muhlestein)

In English 374 we will explore the poetry of the Romantic period.  Using Romantic Poetry:  An Annotated Anthology, we will read representative selections from what is sometimes called the new Romantic canon, including such authors as Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, Helen Williams, Maria Edgeworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Felicia Hemans.  We will also study the six poets who dominated the traditional Romantic canon:  William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. 

As we study the texts written by the authors of both the new and the traditional canons, we will explore the historical circumstances which helped shape the content and structure of the poems under discussion.  We will situate the poetry within the context of its authors’ ideologies and hegemonic practices.  And we will analyze the texts from a variety of critical perspectives.  Because our focus will be on depth of analysis rather than overall coverage, English 374 is best understood as a core sample of the poetry of the Romantic period, rather than a survey of it.

English 375, British Literature, 1832-1900: Beauty All Around? Victorian Domesticity (Horrocks)

“The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling,” says Walter Benjamin. “It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior.” This course will examine Benjamin’s claim by considering domestic ideology as it is constructed and debated in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. We’ll look at conceptions of the home and hearth in canonical Victorian literature—works like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Gaskell’s Cranford, and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret—and we’ll supplement these texts with non-canonical domestic manuals, housekeeping magazines, and popular texts on home decor, many of which are collected in the HBLL’s Special Collections archive.  We’ll consider how these texts perpetuated a domestic ideal in fashion, cookery, childcare, and home management that was continually challenged by polyvalent notions of class, gender, and religion. We’ll also rely heavily on secondary criticism that traces the rise of the “cult of domesticity” and considers its importance within Victorian social and political culture.

English 376, British Literature, 1900-1950: Bloomsbury: Beyond Pemberley (Watts)

This course will explore the art, literature, and culture of early twentieth-century England through the works of the Bloomsbury Group. We will examine the relationships among the literary works of Bloomsbury authors such as E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, and particularly Virginia Woolf, focusing our attention on their perspectives on English society and personal experience. We will also consider their work in light of their 19th-century predecessors (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, G.E. Moore) and in light of the post-impressionist visual artists and art theorists of the Group (Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry).

English 380, British Literature, 1950-Present (Leman)

This course will be an examination of British and Irish writers following the end of World War II. Although anthologies of this period often reflect the post-colonial trajectory of “British” literature in the late 20th century (incorporating African, Indian, and Caribbean literatures in English), there have been and continue to be important literary developments within the United Kingdom itself. By way of exploring the possibility of a contemporary British tradition (which may yet, in the end, be unavoidably post-colonial on some level), a few of these developments will be our focus for the semester. In part, given the importance of history (as a theme, a theory, a practice, a burden, etc.) to so many contemporary British writers, we will move chronologically: from poets and novelists in the 1950s and 1960s responding to both high modernism and the aftermath of WWII in Britain; to Northern Irish representations of the “Troubles” in the 1970s and 1980s; and finally to the 1990s and 2000s during which writers repeatedly grapple with the burdens of history and the question of what it means to be British in the present day. Authors we will study include Kingsley Amis, Harold Pinter, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Tom Stoppard, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, and others.

English 382, section 1, Shakespeare (Windsor)

In this section of English 382 we will be examining plays from each genre in the Shakespearean canon. Tentatively the list of plays and poems we will read is Richard III, Henry IV, Titus Andronicus, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, The Rape of Lucrece, and the sonnets. We will be doing extensive analytical work and students will come to understand the plays and the context in which they are written as we discuss the historical circumstances in which the plays were written, the nature of early modern stage and performance, family relationships and gender roles, and the economics of publication and book production. We will watch portions of various performances, and be doing some performing ourselves in class. The course requirements include occasional quizzes, short written assignments, a group presentation, a midterm and a final, and a research-based term paper.

English 382, section 2, Shakespeare (Burton)

Students will demonstrate mastery over fundamental information about Shakespeare's life, works, and legacy. They will interpret Shakespeare's works critically in written form, in performance (on stage and on screen) and in digitally mediated transformations. Students will engage Shakespeare creatively through performance and literary imitation, and develop their abilities at writing about Shakespeare both formally and informally in online contexts. This section will require students to blog about Shakespeare (See http://ShakespeareUnbound.blogspot.com).

English 382, section 3, Shakespeare (Duerden)

We will study eight plays chosen from the comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances.  The one assumption we begin with is that each play can be read several times, from different angles, to produce several kinds or levels of interpretation, from language and artistry (how is a play designed? how does it work aesthetically?) to issues and ideas (what concerns does the play address? what ethical challenges does it ask us to face?), and on to historical, political, or theatrical contexts (what social and political work does a play do?  at what points does it subvert or undermine its own or others’ conventions, ideas, or prejudices?).  Our particular emphases in this course will be (1) Shakespeare’s career and his development as a writer and thinker, (2) methods of reading, including critical and theoretical approaches to the texts, (3) contexts of reading, including our efforts to reconstruct the historical contexts of the plays and their issues, as well as critical reflection on our own assumptions and the contexts we bring to our reading, and (4) scholarly research and writing. 

English 382, section 4, Shakespeare (Wood)

Following an introduction to Elizabethan culture and brief attention to the sonnets, we will study eight Shakespeare plays: tentatively, three tragedies (King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth), three comedies (Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and two romances (The Tempest andThe Winter’s Tale).  Approaching each play from multiple perspectives, we will examine the nuances of language, address thematic, social, and gender issues, study historical and cultural contexts, consider publication and reception strategies, engage with the current research and criticism, and, in particular, address performance concerns.  To this end, we will watch excerpts from various filmed performances and film adaptations, attend a performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost by BYU’s theater department, and do some performing ourselves.  This course will give you an opportunity to further develop your analytical, interpretive, and research skills as we delve deeper into the works of the man generally considered to be the greatest and most influential writer in the English language.

English 382, section 5, Shakespeare (Christiansen)

We will read 8 plays sampling from the histories, tragedies, comedies and romances and spanning Shakespeare’s career.  In doing so, we will observe how Shakespeare conceives of each of these genres, how he plays with the conventions of each, and how he innovates and matures in his artistry over time.  We will also read these plays within the context of the rhetorical education of the Renaissance that determines the assumptions about reading and writing that both Shakespeare and his audience would have shared.  Assignments for the course will include 8 take-home quizzes, 1 short paper analyzing Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric to create character, 2 exams, and 1 research project, involving both a class presentation and a research paper (8-10 pp.).

English 384, section 1, Major Authors: Edgar Allan Poe (Perry)

This class will focus on the wide range of writings of Edgar Allan Poe, including criticism and literary theory, science fiction, gothic horror, satire, adventure, poetry, and detective fiction. In addition, we will have a Poe-on-Film week and explore his impact on popular culture as well as literature.

English 384, section 2, Major Authors: George Eliot (Wood)

This course will examine the life, criticism, and major works of Victorian author George Eliot, of whom Virginia Woolf wrote: “That greatness is here we can have no doubt. . . . The ruddy light of the early books, the searching power and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger and expatiate beyond our limits.”  Beginning with her essays on religion, literature, and philosophy, we will move to her early novels, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, as we trace Eliot’s development as a writer and social critic.  A significant portion of the course (time to both linger and expatiate) will be devoted to a study of her two most important and complex novels, Middlemarch (which Woolf termed “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”) and Daniel Deronda, examined within the context of Victorian debates on science, religion, politics, and gender.  We will end with a sampling of Eliot’s poetry and short fiction, including her gothic story, “The Lifted Veil.”  Come and see why Eliot is currently such a hot topic in Victorian scholarship

English 384, section 3, Major Writers: Cormac McCarthy (Snyder)

We’ll trace McCarthy’s career chronologically as it developed, covering all of his published texts and delving into some excellent secondary criticism.  We’ll read and discuss a core of texts as a class and cover the other texts through group reports.  Everyone will read the following:  Suttree (1979); Blood Meridian (1985); The Border Trilogy, comprising All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998); The Road (2006); and The Sunset Limited (2006). We’ll divide the class by lottery into five-person groups for reading and reporting on the following: The Orchard Keeper (1965); Outer Dark (1968); Child of God (1973); The Gardener’s Son (1976); The Stonemason (1994); and No Country for Old Men (2005). Course requirements will include a reading log and journal, a book or journal review, a conference paper proposal, and a ten-page conference paper.  McCarthy is a truly great contemporary writer, but he doesn’t work well for everyone, so make sure you’re a sufficiently mature reader before signing up for the class.

English 390, Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature (Westover)

Whether they did their work in London or New York, Edinburgh or Philadelphia, Anglophone writers during the nineteenth century found themselves in a new, modern world: a world in which all things—trade goods, newspapers, trains, steamships—were in motion. This was an era when books and bookish people especially had little respect for national boundaries. Authors cultivated transatlantic friendships and sought international audiences. Many books were published (and republished) on both sides of the Atlantic, to the point that it was sometimes hard to know where texts originated. Thus, this course begins with the premise that we should understand the nineteenth-century literatures of Great Britain and the United States as part of a larger concern—an international “English” literature that was then under construction. Despite disciplinary conventions that push us to keep literature within national containers, we will think in trajectories that cross and re-cross the ocean. The course will focus on Anglo-American literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning in the U.S. Early National Period and ending in the years just before the Civil War (also known as the American Renaissance). To put it another way, the course will engage transatlantic literary history from the British Romantic Period to the middle Victorian Period. Part of the fun will be exploring colliding schemes of periodization and national definition.

English 395, section 1, Women Writers and the Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Wood)

This course will trace the development and transformation of the Gothic tradition among British female writers over the course of the 19th century.  Examining these works in the context of significant cultural and scientific discourses of the period, we will explore the following questions:  Why were so many women writers in 19th-century Britain drawn to the Gothic tradition?  What characteristics are unique to the 19th-century Gothic genre as constructed or reconceptualized by women writers?  What gender, class, social, and philosophical issues do these writers explore through the grotesque and/or the supernatural, and in what ways?  Does this attraction to the Gothic ultimately mainstream or marginalize women writers and the genre as a whole?  How do these texts both posit and critique the Gothic as a legitimate literary genre?  What relationship do these Gothic texts have to the Gothic Revival in art and architecture in 19th-century Britain?  Texts include Radcliffe’s The Italian, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings and Other Fantastic Stories, and Stoker’s Dracula.  We will end the semester by considering the enduring legacy of the Gothic tradition in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (a 2009 Booker Prize Finalist).

English 396, Women's Literature (Lundquist)

This session of Women’s Literature will explore award-winning American Women authors—including: Willa Cather (Pulitzer), Patricia MacLachlan (Newberry), Ursula K. Le Guin (Hugo and Nebula), Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer), Annie Dillard (Pulitzer), and Alice Walker (Pulitzer) among others.  We will begin with the immigrant experience and explore women’s voices both mainstream and multicultural.  Films (documentaries included) will also be viewed and discussed, including Iron Jawed Angels, the story of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and the fight for women’s suffrage.

English 452, Literary Theory 2: Contemporary Criticism (Muhlestein)

English 452 is designed to bring you face to face—or at least face to text—with many of the literary theorists who have in the last sixty years transformed the study of literature into what it is today.  By now you have probably heard of theorists like Frye, Levi-Strauss, Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, Fish, Gramsci, Althusser, Eagleton, Foucault, White, Greenblatt, Montrose, Howard, Lauter, Showalter, Gilbert, Baym, Kolodny, Robinson, Tompkins, Rich, Sedgwick, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, Spivak, hooks, Morrison, and the like.  This semester, you will have both the opportunity and the obligation to read each of these theorists—and many others like them—in detail.

My goal is not merely, or even primarily, instrumental.  For although I certainly hope that I can help you add to your toolbox of techniques for literary analysis, my primary goal in English 452 is more philosophical than tactical:  I sincerely hope that in the process of studying individual theorists we can begin to contextualize the study of literature in ways that will allow you to re-conceptualize, critique, and—in certain instances—perhaps even transform your experience and perspective in the major.  I also hope that the theoretical and philosophical insights you gain while reading these tests will serve as both a capstone and a foundation:  a capstone for your present study, a foundation for your future work.