Bryn Mawr College

COURSE  

  COURSE TITLE  

This course offers non-native speakers of English a chance to develop their skills as college writers. Through frequent practice, class discussion, and in-class collaborative activity, students will become familiar with the writing process and will learn to write for an academic audience. Student writers in the class will be guided through the steps of composing and revising college essays: formulating questions; analysing purpose; generating ideas; structuring and supporting arguments; marshalling evidence; using sources effectively; and developing a clear flexible feedback from peers and the instructor.

The purposes of this course are essentially threefold. First, it aims to trace the chronological development of English poetry from around 1360 to 1740 and to explore some of the "histories" that might be constructed on the basis of such developments. Second, it will emphasize forms, themes, and conventions that have become parts of the continuing "vocabulary" of poetry, a literary tradition richly in conversation with itself. Third, the course will often revisit that perennial question, what to say about a poem, and explore the strengths and limitations of different strategies of interpretation.

Readings:Readings will include a broad sampling of authors and of different poetic kinds, together with "featured" poets who will be explored in greater detail. Featured poets for the Fall semester will include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Pope.

Course Requirements:The formal requirements of the course are three 5-6 pp. papers spread over the semester; there will not be a final examination.

Prerequisites:There are no prerequisites for this course. Students are free to take English 242 as an independent unit or in combination with English 243: An Historical Introduction to English Poetry II (not offered in 2010) which takes up developments after 1700. The two semester courses were designed, of course, to be taken in sequence.

Spanning the centuries between the 1690 publication of A New England Primer and the 1935 publication of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, this course will explore the figure of the child and fantasies of childhood in American literatures. Focusing primarily upon the function of the girl as a particularly contested model for the nascent and/or future American, we will read sermons, slave and captivity narratives, literatures for child readers, and adult novels and poetry that imagine girlhood as the location for the reformation of civilization and nation in each generation, and trace the ways in which expectations shifted according to era, class, race and gender.  Texts may include works by Susannah Rowson, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Jamison, Catharine Sedgwick,  Mary Prince, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Stoddard, Mark Twain, Zitkala Sa, Jean Webster, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Students will be expected to write two papers, a midterm and final, of 8 and 12 pages respectively. Each student will also be responsible for one extensive in-class presentation.

For roughly half the semester we will focus on the sonnet, a form that was domesticated in England during the sixteenth century: sonnets and sonnet sequence were used primarily, though not exclusively, to record the vicissitudes of amorous relationships.  We’ll look at the origins of the English sonnet in the poetry of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and then work closely with the love sonnet sequences of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Wroth.

The other half of the course will focus on the “metaphysical” poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell.  We’ll spend significant time with Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” Herbert’s poem sequence, The Temple and a selection of Marvell’s poems that will include “Upon Appleton House” and “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun.”  Ben Jonson’s “Epigrams” will be introduced briefly so that his rhetoric and objectives as a poet can be contrasted with those of Marvell, Herbert and Donne.

The course will have a strong component of critical and theoretical reading to contextualize the poetry, model ways of reading it, and raise questions about its formal strategies and its social, political and religious purposes. 

Course requirements: Two papers of 10-12 pages in length. Two oral presentations, one on a piece of theoretical or critical reading and one on a group of poems.Informal response papers will often be assigned as well.

Pre-requisites: English 210 and/or a prior course in lyric poetry.

This course focuses on fiction, poetry and drama by Black women (African and Caribbean American) published since 2000. Attendant to the diversity of aesthetic and thematic approaches in this body of literature, we will explore exploding notions of racial identity and allegiance, as well as challenges to the boundaries of genre.

The course explores the role of pleasure in the production, reception, and performance of Asian American identities in the mass media of film, video, and the Internet.  As such, it participates in an emerging queer and feminist Asian American sexual archive that has been overlooked in queer and Asian American visual cultural studies.  Interrogating the dominant mode of stereotype criticism, the course seeks to examine the complicated and “perverse” potentials of spectatorship that contest heteronormative criteria.  Looking closely at the representations of the deviant sexuality of Asian Americans (e.g. hypersexual women and emasculated men), we discover that they do more than uniformly harm and subjugate Asian American subjects.  The texts examined in the course alternate between those produced by mainstream culture (Hollywood, European cinema, commercial pornography, the Web) and interventions made by Asian American artists.  We will investigate how pleasure functions in relation to both sets of texts and advance fresh perspectives that cannot be reduced to uncritical celebration or righteous condemnation.  In so doing, the course surveys the terrain of pleasure as a crucial modality of cultural and political struggle, one informed by hegemonic structures, but also available for joyful, oppositional engagement.  Exploration of these issues will draw on theoretical developments in cultural studies, film studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and sexuality studies, alongside Asian American studies.

Joyce's works lend themselves particularly well to critical disagreements: he has been called the most pessimistic nihilist and the greatest optimist; a misogynist and a radical feminist; a true Catholic and a great Jewish writer; the worst of elitists and a celebrator of the common man; a fascist and a socialist; the most boring writer and the writer providing the most intense, orgasmic pleasures.  I hope our class will function as a workshop in which we develop such opposing opinions and yet can talk to each other without excessive rancor and without compromising into vagueness.  We will read one novel, Ulysses, over the entire term, but that journey will be broken up with forays into Joyce’s earlier works (Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), into the main source for Ulysses, The Odyssey by Homer, and into a book that uses Joyce’s novel as its source, Fun Home by Allison Bechdel.  Assignments will include some small research projects (into biography, history, critical reception, etc.) to be presented in class and a 20-page paper developed in stages.

This course locates an area of vigorous experiment in genre such as that described as the “proemdra” by South African writer and critic, Mothobi Mutloatse. In the late 50s, Chinua Achebe warned that African writers intended to do “unheard of things” with the English language. This course follows the concrete trajectory of contemporary experiments in form. It is the logical conclusion of the work of English 279 – a broad, continental introduction to a Cape- to- Cairo- imaginary and the complement of the other single 300-level African literature course that focuses on a single writer or two. It prepares students for a richer, globalized understanding of a continent of more than 50 countries and engages them in an eclecticism that involves the study of three Abrahamic religions, many indigenous religious and cultural traditions, and a variety of storytelling traditions and innovations.

This course is designed to prepare you for the writing of your Senior Essay. Through weekly seminar meetings and regular writing and research assignments, you will develop your essay topic, frame challenging and practical questions about it, and develop a writing plan. You will leave the course with a persuasive proposal for department review, an annotated bibliography on your chosen area of inquiry, and 10 pages of writing towards your Senior Essay. Some of you may already know a great deal about your area of study. For others of you, this will be your first excursion into your topic. Some of you will be writing creative essays with an analytical component. The assignment sequences in this course are designed to maximize your preparation and to help you develop your ideas and your research, regardless of your level of preparation. The work we will do in this class will significantly advance your project and prepare you to use most efficiently your independent research time in spring semester. You must pass this course in order to enroll in the spring semester independent study; you must pass both this course and the spring semester independent study in order to graduate as an English major.

Course Requirements: In order to pass this course you must attend each class, participate in class discussions and workshops, and complete each assignment on time.