English R1B •
Section # 7:
Topic: : The Ghostly Time of the ‘Present’ has no Boundaries
Instructor: David Menilla
Time: MWF 3-4
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Toni Morrison, Beloved; A course reader will also be assigned.
Course Description: The texts we will read in this course will challenge us to think about how a story is constructed. Our imagination and critical thinking skills will be stretched to their limits by novels which disrupt assumptions we may have about how a story develops in time. We will read novels where the story oscillates back and forth from the past to the present. And we will get to know characters that come back from the dead; some that seem to travel into the future, others into the past. Authors will become characters in their stories, characters will become third person narrators, and we will become active participants in the stories we read. Can you imagine being a character of the story you are reading? We will be confronted by scattered pieces of narrative that will require the work of our hands and our minds to piece together. The skill of close reading will help us to see the pieces more clearly and how they might fit together; moreover, the way we think about a text will also help us to think about how we write.
Course Objectives: I want us to think about writing as an ongoing discussion we have with ourselves and the ideas that others have had on the text. We will incorporate critical perspectives which will question our assumptions about a text at the same time that they will enrich our reading of it. Our job is to understand how we can incorporate the research that we conduct with the ideas we have found through close reading. The goal of this class is to develop the skills needed to read, analyze, and write about literature, and to acquaint you with the research skills needed to write larger expository essays. To this end, you will be asked to write a number of short essays of 4-6 pages based on class readings, which will culminate in a final expository essay of 8-10 pages. You will have the opportunity of honing your writing skills through peer-editing exercises, and meetings with me, that will focus on drafting and revising your work. Ultimately, you should be prepared to write a minimum of 32 pages in addition to completing the required reading for this course.
English R1B • Section # 10
Topic: Literature and the City
Instructor: Jasper Bernes
Time: TTh 9:30-11
Location: 225 Wheeler
Book List: André Breton, Nadja; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; Phillip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly; Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks Ed Roberson, City Eclogues; A course reader, including essays and poems by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Davis, Jameson, O’Hara and others.
This course will consider the ways in which literature has responded to the city and its accompanying modes of life: alienating, unhealthful and frightening; thrilling, liberatory and glamorous; the site of torments and marvels; of endless workdays and boundless consumption. Among our various lines of inquiry, we will want to identify the ways in which literary form—whether that of the lyric poem, the prose poem, the essay, or the science-fiction novel—impacts and is impacted by the social and historical forces at work in the city.
To this end, we’ll hone our skills as critical readers, learning how to make observations about the problems and intricacies that these texts offer, to broaden these observations through careful analysis, and to combine our analyses into a critical essay shaped by a thesis. As such, we will devote a large portion of class time to the particulars of students’ own essays, paying special attention to sentence mechanics, paragraph construction, thesis and argument. In addition, because one of the aims of an R1B course is to introduce you to research methods used in the humanities, each of our primary texts will serve as the entry-point for individual research from a wide variety of fields: literary criticism, history, cultural theory and urban studies. Students will conduct independent reading projects, report on their research to the class, and incorporate what they have learned into two 7-10 page research papers.
English 45C • Section # 1
Altieri, Charles
Lectures MW 11-12 in 141 McCone, plus one hour of discussion section per week F 11-12
Texts will include the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Oscar Wilde, Portrait of Dorian Gray/Henry James, The Turn of the Screw Virginia Woolf, /Mrs Dalloway James Joyce The Dubliners William Faulker, the Sound and the Fury Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, and a reader of Eighteenth Century British Literature.
Course Description: English 45C will offer a survey of major texts in British and American literature from about 1880 until 1950. Thanks to Lyn Hejinian, this class will provide a distinctive opportunity. Students admitted to her 143B/1 course will also enroll in this section of 45C, and she will contour many assignments to the English 45C syllabus. And she and I will attend and be present in both classes. Our ambition is to dramatize how reading and writing can mutually inform one another.
