FALL 2008

COURSE	COURSE TITLE	MEETING TIMES	INSTRUCTOR

B 126	Writing Workshop for Non Native Speakers of English	F 2:00-3:30 pm	Litsinger
	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; analyzing purpose; generating ideas; structuring and supporting arguments; marshalling evidence; using sources effectively; and developing a clear, flexible academic voice. Writers will receive frequent feedback from peers and the instructor.

B 201	Chaucer: Canterbury Tales	MW 1:00-2:30 pm	J. Taylor
	Access to and skill in reading Middle English will be acquired through close study of the Tales . Exploration of Chaucer's narrative strategies and of a variety of critical approaches to the work will be the major undertakings of the semester. (Taylor, Division III)

B 210	Renaissance Lit: Performances of Gender	TTh 10:00-11:30 am	J. Hedley
	Readings chosen to highlight the construction and performance of gender identity during the period from 1550 to 1650 and the ways in which the gender anxieties of 16th- and 17th-century men and women differ from, yet speak to, our own. Texts will include plays, poems, prose fiction, diaries and polemical writing of the period. (Hedley, Division III)

B 234	Post Colonial Literature in English	TTh 10:00-11:30 am	M. Tratner
	This course will survey a broad range of novels and poems written while countries were breaking free of British colonial rule. Readings will also include cultural theorists interested in defining literary issues that arise from the postcolonial situation. (Tratner, Division III; cross-listed as COML B234)

B 238	History of Cinema: 1895-1945	TTh 11:30 am-1:00 pm Screening M 7-10 pm	E. Gorfinkel
	Introduction to the international history of film as a narrative and aesthetic form, with consideration of cultural, social, political, technological and economic determinants that allowed film across the world to evolve, thrive and become the defining artistic medium of the 20th century.

B 239	Women and Cinema	TTh 2:30-4:00 pm Screening T 7-10 pm	E. Gorfinkel
	This class will examine the particular challenges that women filmmakers face, as well as the unique and innovative contributions they have made to film aesthetics and narrative form. The class will address central debates within feminism from the 1970's to the present, in particular feminism's influence on women's independent film production and the question of female authorship.

B 250	Methods of Literary Study	MW 11:30 am-1:00 pm	J. Hedley
	Through course readings, we will explore the power of language in a variety of linguistic, historical, disciplinary, social and cultural contexts and investigate shifts in meaning as we move from one discursive context to another. Students will be presented with a wide range of texts that explore the power of the written word and provide a foundational basis for the critical and creative analysis of literary studies. Students will also refine their faculties of reading closely, writing incisively and passionately, asking speculative and productive questions, producing their own compelling interpretations and listening carefully to the textual readings offered by others. (Hedley, Division III)

B 252	Graphic Novel	TTh 1:00-2:30 pm, F 12-2:00	W. Liu
	The primary question driving this course is relatively simple: Are “graphic novels” simply stories with fun pictures? In an effort to reach some possible answers, the course will pair readings of graphic novels with a variety of critical texts, covering a range of interpretive methods. Note: This course is taught as an accelerated 8 week course, meeting 3 times a week.

B 253	Romanticism	TTh 2:30-4:00 pm	R. Ricketts
	Through an emphasis on Romanticism’s readers, this course will explore the Romantic movement in English literature, from its roots in Enlightenment thought and the Gothic to contemporary visions of Romanticism. By reading over the shoulders of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Tom Stoppard, the course will explore fiction, prose, and especially poetry of the period 1745 to 1848. While these years mark revolutions and expansion in almost every cultural sphere in Europe, America, and the Caribbean—politics, the arts, literature, and science—writers looked inward to the thoughts and passions of individuals as they never had before. (Ricketts, Division III)

B 263	Toni Morrison	T 7-10 pm	L. Beard
	All of Morrison's primary imaginative texts, in publication order, as well as essays by Morrison, with a series of critical lenses that explore several vantages for reading a conjured narration. (Beard, Division III)

B 269	Vile Bodies in Medieval Literature	MW 10:00-11:30 am	J. Taylor
	New Course: This course examines literary representations of the human body in medieval English and Continental literature. The Middle Ages imagined the physical body both as the site of moral triumph and failure as well as the canvas upon which social ills could be exposed. We will examine medieval medical tracts, saint’s lives, poetry, and representations of the Passion, discussing topics ranging from the plague and its effect on understandings of mercantilism to the legal and religious depiction of torture. As we read texts by authors like Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Julian of Norwich, we will supplement our discussions with contemporary readings on trauma theory and embodiment. (Taylor, Division III)

B 293	Critical Feminist Studies: An Introduction	TTh 2:30-4:00 pm	A. Dalke
	Not monolithic, prescriptive, conformist or singular, contemporary feminist theory covers a wide range of perspectives and approaches, which this class will showcase. The texts we will examine will include, but not be limited to, those that address the matters of reading and interpreting literature. We will also be attending to broader theoretical concerns, in an attempt to define the questions which contemporary feminisms raise and the different answers with which feminisms reply. For starters, we will interrogate four keywords: what does it mean to be ‘feminist”? What is “difference,” what “theory,” what “literature”? Before ending, we will consider what cultural and political work these texts have done/we might use them to do. Once a week, students will be expected to post their responses to readings on-line, on Serendip’s Exchange. During the first half of the course, we will read a range of short theoretical texts; we will then select several longer literary texts to read together. Possibilities abound. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/courses/femstudies/f08

B 324	Topics Shakespeare: Shakespeare on Film	T 1:00-4:00 pm Screening Sun 3-6	K. Rowe
	The past two decades have witnessed entirely new approaches to the staging of Shakespeare on film and video, thanks in part to the dynamic engagement with Shakespeare’s plays of a number of gifted filmmakers. This seminar will explore these adaptations, paying particular attention to the audio-visual idioms they draw on —from European experimental film to television newscasts, documentary, rock video, and computer games. In the process, we will dig deeply in current theories of adaptation and reception, in film, television, and performance studies (Rowe, Division III)

B 334	Topics in Film Studies: Queer Cinema	F 9:00-12:00 am Screening Sun 7-10 pm	H. Nguyen
	The course explores how communities and subjects designated as “queer” have been rendered in/visible in the cinema. It also examines how queer subjects have responded to this in/visibility through non-normative viewing practices and alternative film and video production. We will consider queer traditions in documentary, avant-garde, transgender, AIDS, and global cinemas. Please note: Sunday evening film screenings are required. Cross-listed with HART B334. Enrollment limited to 18 students. Counts toward Film Studies minor.

B 354	Virginia Woolf	TTh 11:30 am-1:00 pm	M. Tratner
	Virginia Woolf has been interpreted as a feminist, a modernist, a crazy person, a resident of Bloomsbury, a victim of child abuse, a snob, a socialist and a creation of literary and popular history. We will try out all these approaches and examine the features of our contemporary world that influence the way Woolf, her work and her era are perceived. We will also attempt to theorize about why we favor certain interpretations over others.

B 374	Experimental Poetry	TTh 10:00-11:30 am	W. Liu / JC Todd
	This course will focus on the questions of poetic experiment and their worth: What is “experimental poetry,” and why would anyone want to write it? The course will focus on the histories of American experimental form in conjunction with the material conditions of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. We'll seek to understand contemporary theorizations of “form” itself, and develop a deeper understanding of the larger field of poetics and poetic theory. Students will be responsible for in-class presentations, two essays (one of which contains a significant research component) and a number of short, creative assignments. (Liu, Division III)

B 385	Problems in Satire	MW 11:30 am-1:00 pm	P. Briggs
	An exploration of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of great satire in works by Blake, Dryden, Pope, Rabelais, Smiley, Swift, Wilde and others. (Briggs, Division III)

B 398	Senior Seminar	M 2:30-4:00 pm	Hemmeter, Rowe,Ricketts
	Required preparation for ENGL 399 (Senior Essay). Through weekly seminar meetings and regular writing and research assignments, students will explore a senior essay topic or topics of their choice, frame exciting and practical questions about it, and develop a writing plan for its execution. Students will leave the course with a departmentally approved senior essay prospectus, an annotated bibliography on their chosen area of inquiry, and 10 pages of writing towards their senior essay. Students must pass the course to enroll in ENGL 399. (Hemmeter, Ricketts, Rowe)

SPRING 2009

B 202	Understanding Poetry	TTh 11:30 am-1:00 pm	J. Hedley
	This course is for students who wish to develop their skills in reading and writing critically about poetry. The course will provide grounding in the traditional skills of prosody (i.e., reading accentual, syllabic and accentual-syllabic verse) as well as tactics for reading and understanding the breath-based or image-based prosody of free verse. Lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetry will be discussed and differentiated. We will be using close reading and oral performance to highlight the unique fusion of language, rhythm (sound), and image that makes poetry different from prose. (Hedley, Division III)

B 205	Intro to Film	TTh 2:30-4:00 pm	H. Nguyen
	This course is intended to provide students with the tools of critical film analysis. We will consider film forms, genres, and histories within the broader framework of visual culture practices. Emphasis will be placed on readings of documentary, feminist, and avant-garde film, video art, and new media alongside Hollywood production. Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory.

B 223	Evolution of Stories	TTh 1:00-2:30 pm	A. Dalke
	In this course we will experiment with two interrelated and reciprocal inquiries — whether the biological concept of evolution is a useful one in understanding the phenomena of literature (in particular, the generation of new stories), and whether literature contributes to a deeper understanding of evolution. We will begin with several science texts that explain and explore evolution and turn to stories that (may) have grown out of one another, asking where they come from, why new ones emerge, and why some disappear. We will consider the parallels between diversity of stories and diversity of living organisms. Lecture three hours a week. (Dalke, Grobstein, Division II or Division III; cross-listed as BIOL B223)

B 225	Shakespeare I	MW 10:00-11:30 am	K. Rowe
	A basic introduction to the plays of Shakespeare. Course emphases will include Shakespeare's dramaturgy, the material text, Bardolatry, adaptation, gender performance, symbolic geography, Shakespearean recycling. Readings will include selections from the Sonnets, “A Lover's Complaint,” Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, Henry V, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, The Two Noble Kinsmen. (Rowe, Division III)

B 229	Movies & Mass Politics	TTh 10:00-11:30 am Screening F 9 am-12:00 pm	M. Tratner
	This course will trace in the history of movie forms a series of debates about the ways that nations can become mass societies, focusing mostly on the ways that Hollywood movies countered the appeals of Communism and Fascism. (Tratner, Division III; crosslisted as Comparative Literature)

B 231	Modernism in Anglo-American Poetry	TTh 10:00-11:30 am	K. Kirchwey
	The purpose of this course will be to familiarize students with the broad outlines of that movement in all the arts known as Modernism, and in particular to familiarize them with Modernism as it was evolved in Anglo-American poetry — both from its American sources (Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams) and from its European sources (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein). The course is intended to prepare students for ENGL 232, American Poetry Since World War II; together, these courses are intended to provide an overview of American poetry in the 20th century. (Kirchwey, Division III)

B 233	Spenser and Milton	TTh 1:00-2:30 pm	P. Briggs
	The course is equally divided between Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, with additional short readings from each poet's other work. (Briggs, Division III)

B 243	Historical Intro to English Poetry II	MWF 9:00-10:00 am	P. Briggs
	The development of English poetry from 1700 to the present. This course is a continuation of ENGL 242 but can be taken independently. Featured poets: Browning, Seamus Heaney, Christina Rossetti, Derek Walcott and Wordsworth. (Briggs, Division III)

B 250, I	Methods of Literary Study	MW 1:00-2:30 pm	J. Taylor
	Through course readings, we will explore the power of language in a variety of linguistic, historical, disciplinary, social and cultural contexts and investigate shifts in meaning as we move from one discursive context to another. Students will be presented with a wide range of texts that explore the power of the written word and provide a foundational basis for the critical and creative analysis of literary studies. Students will also refine their faculties of reading closely, writing incisively and passionately, asking speculative and productive questions, producing their own compelling interpretations and listening carefully to the textual readings offered by others.

B 250, 2	Methods of Literary Study	TTh 2:30-4:00 pm	M. Tratner
	See description for section I

B 257	Gender & Technology	MW 2:30-4:00 pm	Blankenship, Dalke
	This course will explore the historical role technology has played in the production of gender; the historical role gender has played in the evolution of various technologies; how the co-construction of gender and technology has been represented in a range of on-line, filmic, fictional and critical media; and what all of the above suggest for the technological engagement of everyone in today's world.

B 279	Intro to African Literatures	TTh 1:00-2:30 pm	L. Beard
	Taking into account the oral, written, aural and visual forms of African “texts” over several thousand years, this course will explore literary production, translation and audience/critical reception. Representative works to be studied include oral traditions, the Sundiata Epic, Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments, Mariama Bâ's Si Longe une Lettre, Tsitsi Danga-rembga's Nervous Conditions, Bessie Head's Maru, Sembène Ousmane's Xala, plays by Wole Soyinka and his Burden of History, The Muse of Forgiveness and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat. We will address the “transliteration” of Christian and Muslim languages and theologies in these works. (Beard, Division III; cross-listed as COML B279)

B 288	The Novel	TTh 11:30 am-1:00 pm	R. Ricketts
	This course will explore the multi-vocal origins of the novel in English and the ways in which its rapid development parallels changes in reading, vision, thought, and self-perception. The course will trace the novel’s evolution from its seventeenth-century beginnings in Romance, spiritual autobiography, and travel literature; through its emergence as a middle-class mode of expression in the eighteenth century; to its periodof cultural dominance in the Victorian era; and to modernist and postmodern experimentation. In studying the novel’s historical, cultural, and formal dimensions, the course will discuss the significance of realism, parody, characters, authorship, and the reader.

B 355	Performance Studies	TTh 2:30-4:00 pm	R. Ricketts
	Introduces students to the field of performance studies, a multidisciplinary species of cultureal studies which theorizes human actions as performances that both constructu “culture” and resist cultural norms. Explores performance and performativity in daily life as well as in the performing arts. (Ricketts, Division III)

B 360	Women & Law in the Middle Ages	MW 10:00-11:30	J. Taylor
	Studies the development of legal issues that affect women, such as marriage contracts, rape legislation, prostitution regulation and sumptuary law, including the prosecution of witches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in official documents and imaginative fictions that deploy such legislation in surprising ways. Asks how texts construct and interrogate discourses of gender, sexuality, criminality and discipline. Broadly views the overlap between legal and literary modes of analysis. Examines differences between “fact” and “fiction” and explores blurred distinctions. (Taylor, Division III)

B 362	African American Lit	T 7:00-10:00 pm	L. Beard
	Intensive study of six 18th-21st century hypercanonical African American written and visual texts (and critical responses) with specific attention to the tradition's long use of speaking in code and in multiple registers simultaneously. Focus on language as a tool of opacity as well as transparency, translation, transliteration, invention and resistance. Previous reading required. (Beard, Division III)

B 387	Allegory in Theory & Practice	MW 2:30-4:00 pm	J. Hedley
	Allegory and allegories, from The Play of Everyman to The Crying of Lot 49. A working knowledge of several different theories of allegory is developed; Renaissance allegories include The Faerie Queen and Pilgrim's Progress, 19th and 20th century allegories include The Scarlet Letter and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. (Hedley, Division III, cross-listed as Comparative Literature)

B 399	Senior Essay	by appointment with Advisor

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FALL 2008

COURSE

COURSE TITLE

MEETING TIMES

INSTRUCTOR