Course Offerings - Spring 2012

ENGL 489, Charles Dickens
John Pennington, MWF 12:20-1:30

English 489, the capstone course for English majors, will focus on the works of Charles Dickens, perhaps the greatest and most popular novelist in the English language.  In the course we will examine the evolution of Dickens, from a struggling reporter to the great comic and social novelist of the Victorian age.  Works will include Oliver Twist (1838), which we will read in serial format, mirroring the publication history of Dickens’s novels; David Copperfield (1850); Bleak House (1853); Hard Times (1854); Great Expectations (1861); and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), the greatest of all mysteries since Dickens died after finishing only half the novel. We will also watch major film adaptations of select novels. The course will be discussion-based, modeled after the seminar format.  Students will write weekly reading insights on Oliver Twist, two shorter critical essays, and one seminar paper.

ENGL 206, Sexuality and Literature: Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Texts
Karlyn Crowley; T 1:00-2:50, Th 3:00-4:50

When Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s partner, famously said, “I am the love that dare not speak its name” referring to his own hidden sexual identity, he articulated a conundrum in gay identity: how do you tell your story when it is unspeakable? This introduction to the lesbian, gay, and transgender tradition in literature tackles this question among others. This course focuses primarily on twentieth century U.S. texts (fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, film, and theory). It examines how sexual identity, along with intersecting experiences of race, class, and gender, changes over the course of the twentieth century while shaping texts that build on and influence one another. We will read such authors as E.M. Forster (one of a few British authors), Walt Whitman, Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Jeanette Winterson, Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Feinberg, and Tony Kushner, to name a few. 

ENGL 222A, Modern Poetry
Deirdre Egan-Ryan, MWF 1:40-2:50

This course explores modern poetry by poets in the context of modernism, an international, interdisciplinary movement that spanned both World Wars and included literature, music, drama, art and film. Featured poets may include progenitors Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, as well as W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Wilfred Owen, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes.