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Spring 2010 Undergraduate Courses
Table of Spring 2010 courses meeting ethnic/non-western or pre-1800 literature major and minor requirements
Spring 2010 dual-listed courses which may be counted toward the major Spring 2010 200-level courses
Table of Spring 2010 Courses which count towards an AXEL requirement other than HCA Course Request Period for Spring semester begins Monday November 2 and ends at 4 pm on Friday November 13, 2009. Special Notes: Instructors, sections, and topics for 100-level writing courses are subject to change after Course Request Period, depending on enrollments. Admittance to Honors sections and 200-level Creative Writing workshops are subject to instructor approval. See individual course listings for specific instructions.
Spring 2010 dual-listed courses that may be counted toward the major:
Tichi, C. and Randall, A.
W 400-7:00
Southern Food, in Text as Text
An exploration of food as subject and metaphor in southern literature, film, song and life. Representations of the production, collection, storage, distribution, preparation, consumption, and disposal of food in the south will be explored. Assigned readings will include fiction and non-fiction that engage the subject of food in the new and old south. Students will also be assigned essays from a variety of scholars, ranging from Levi-Strauss to Bower, that will provide an introduction to food-ways as an evolving discipline. Traditional and non-traditional texts will be considered.
Lam, Ling Hon
TR 1:10-2:25
meets ethnic/non-western requirement
This course explores Chinese culture of sex and gender from antiquity to the eighteenth century. We will examine how sex and gender are configured in various ways with different power implications by political, moral, medical, religious, and literary discourses, which testify to the plasticity of the human body, the fluidity of desire, and ultimately the arbitrariness of sexual/gender differences. Taking literature as the richest source of these issues, we will also cover a variety of literary genres (poetry, drama, short tales, full-length fiction) that vividly shows us how traditional Chinese writers imaginatively loosen up the otherwise confining prescriptions of men and women.
Wasserstein, D.
T 1210-240
Jewish and non-Jewish literary and historical texts studied in parallel so as to discover the differences between them. The course will consider texts from the ancient world to the early modern period and ask what constitutes Jewish writing and how it has been defined through time and geography. All readings will be in English.
JS 253W. Witnesses Who Were Not There: Literature of the Children of Holocaust Survivors
Meyer, A.
1010-1100 MWF
Fiction and nonfiction produced by children of Holocaust survivors.
Solomon, S.
M 310-600
Other People’s Lives: Biography, Profile, and Memoir
Due to limited enrollment, students will be screened during first week of class on the basis of writing samples. Registered students must contact the instructor before the first day of class.
Students in this course will read selected portraits of other people—portraits drawn from memory and personal experience and from documents, both historical and contemporary—and then they will try to write their own portraits. This is a nonfiction workshop, so the emphasis will be on writing vividly and offering feedback to classmates about writing. The class will read excerpts of biographies (mostly about writers and other artists); long and short profiles, the latter in the form of obituaries (in Britain are often wonderfully evocative sketches of the man or woman who has died); and memoirs that focus on another person. We will look at how these descriptions can make individuals come alive on the page—at the details of character and action that give the reader a sense of other people’s lives, their idiosyncrasies, their virtues and limitations, and tell memorably what people do and how they do it.
ENGL 201. Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Guralnick, P. R 310-600 Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same proviso. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break.
This is a workshop on Creative Nonfiction, which revolves around the writing of the participants, with additional readings in work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Jack Kerouac, Wil Haygood, Rosanne Cash, and Alice Munro. It will focus on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception, with special emphasis on the profile -- in other words, how to make a real-life story come alive in the same way that fictional narrative can. This is a workshop in which we are all interdependent on each other's efforts.
Three major pieces of 2500-3000 words will be required, along with the possibility of some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the other students' papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. Class participation is the second most important element of the class (after the writing itself), so attendance is of the highest importance. Most of all, the workshop is a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing (irrespective of the level of achievement) should make it engaging -- and fun -- for all. The only prerequisite is a commitment to effort and honest self-expression.
Reisman, N.
M 310-600
Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same provision. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break.
This course is designed to help experienced writers refine both their own aesthetics and their understanding of fiction's possibilities. We'll focus on literary fiction, primarily short forms , and examine how published writers and workshop member define ‘story’. The heart of the course is the workshop, the development of your original fiction, and your exploration of new territory in form and subject. Our readings will be drawn from international contemporary authors and essayists, and we’ll look closely at the way time, space, and perception can operate in fiction. The workshop will focus primarily on realist modes (extending to surrealism and magical realism), and we’ll consider the architecture of stories as well as the ways work in other art forms might illuminate or inform our visions of fiction writing. Previous university level experience with creative writing required; fiction workshop experience highly recommended. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, which will be based primarily on writing samples. After pre-registration closes, I’ll contact pre-registered students with guidelines and the submission deadline for the sample.
ENG 205-02. Advanced Fiction Workshop Lopez, L. T 310-600 Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same provision. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break. This advanced workshop is designed to help students hone and refine skills, such as, but not limited to developing complex and nuanced characterization, using perspective judiciously and consistently, balancing scene with summary, building tension and energy through well-selected detail and imagery, and weaving thematic strands effectively in narrative. To better apprehend and build such techniques and others, students will write two original short stories, complete writing exercises, attend and respond to literary events, and examine published short stories to discuss structural and stylistic components that contribute to these stories’ overall success, in addition to reading and presenting on craft essays and critiquing work by peers. Creative writing workshop experience is required and fiction workshop experience preferred for this workshop. Students must obtain instructor’s permission for admission.
Daniels, K.
This is a poetry writing workshop for those with experience who seek to improve their skills and develop a deeper understanding of their own poetry and that of others. Students will be asked to write 12-15 poems during the semester, to respond at length (in writing) to poems written by their peers, to take turns facilitating discussions of student work, to read books by poets in the Visiting Writers series, and to attend the Visiting Writers readings. In addition, two conferences with the instructor are required to discuss work in progress. We will begin each class with a discussion of a Poem of the Week or Essay of the Week (selected by the instructor & read in advance). No midterm or final. A final portfolio of work will be submitted at semester’s end.
W 1210-300 Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same provision. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic before the December break.
The semester will conclude with two projects: a class poetry reading, and a Guerilla Poetry Project (details tba).
Readings: individual volumes of poetry as assigned, plus selected poems or essays, provided by the instructor.
Grading: 50% written work, 50% participation
To be considered for enrollment, send three recent poems (what you consider to be your best) to kate.daniels@vanderbilt.edu by December 1.
Please put the poems in an attachment, and include a brief note giving your year, major, other creative writing courses taken at Vanderbilt and the faculty who taught them. Also list several poets (contemporary and/or historical) whose work you regard highly. You will be notified of your enrollment status by email early in December.
Jean Valentine Door in the Mountain (Wesleyan 2003)
Suji Kwock Kim, Notes from the Divided Country (LSU 2003)
Rebecca Sierfle, The Ripped Out Seam (Sheep Meadow 1993)
Ciaran Carson, For All We Know (Wake Forest 2008)
Nesler, M.
TR 235-350
satisfies pre-1800 literature requirement for major
Courtship and Rivalry in British Literature
This course intends to introduce students to major British writers and texts before 1660. As students read canonical works by writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cary, and Milton, they will be urged to trace themes of courtship, erotic desire, and violent rivalry across the periods. To what degree did English writers share anxieties or concerns about sexuality and violence, and how did their representations change over time?
Gottfried, R.
MWF 910-1000 No writer writes in a vacuum. Moved not only by the surrounding events of the time and place, a writer is changed as well by previous authors and works. This course will examine the major periods of English literature from the Restoration to the Modern era in their cultural features and will study the major poets in engagement with their literary predecessors. The course provides an exposure to the famous works of the English tradition for the general student and provides a broad background for those students considering more specialized advanced studies.
ENGL 208B-02. Representative British Writers, 1660-present
Porter, D.
TR 935-1050
Impossible, Perverse and Strange in British Literature, 1660-1900
Enlightenment and modernity have conventionally marked the end of an era ripe with superstition, mysticism, and magic. However, with rise of objective, empiricist science in Britain came an outpouring literature concerned with the unexplainable and strange. From Gulliver's Travels to The Ancient Mariner to Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, the literature of modernity is littered with impossible settings, ghostly hauntings, unaccountable transformations, and characters whose magnetic power fascinates and draws you into their tales.
This course will survey a broad swath of British literature from the mid-seventeenth to the turn of the 20th century, concentrating on how and why authors chose to write about the fantastic and fabulous in an age of rationality. We'll begin with Milton's epic rendering of Satan's fall in Paradise Lost, setting it against shorter poems—both religious and bawdy—by his contemporaries Marvell, Vaughan, and Rochester. Moving into the 18th century, we'll explore the cave of spleen in Pope's mock epic The Rape of the Lock, travel to the land of rational horses with Gulliver, track the progress of Black Death with Defoe, and take a peek into London's dingy underworld of crime and prostitution with Hogarth and Swift. As we move later in the century, we'll encounter the specters, bloody deeds, and blasphemy of the gothic tale, and trace its influence on two generations of Romantic poets (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Robinson, Shelley, Keats, and Byron). By internalizing the gothic, these authors paved the way for intense psychological explorations such as Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner and DeQuincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Later in 19th century, vampires and goblins share the page with murderous dukes and mad doctors, while the medieval settings of the gothic gave way to eerie romances and Darwinian allegories for the British empire. We'll end the course by juxtaposing the ultra-rational with the maniacal, keeping pace with Sherlock Holmes as he exposes the supernatural as a craftily manufactured fraud and following Conrad's unconventional narrator into The Heart of Darkness. Requirements: weekly posts, poem explication, two short papers, final exam, and lively participation in class discussions.
Chapman, R.
MW 310-425 meets pre-1800 requirement Identity, Performance, and the Problem of History in Shakespeare’s Late Plays What does it mean to think of identity—of who you are—as a series of public performances rather than an inherent or inalienable condition of being? This is a question that present-day theories of subjectivity work through, and one that Shakespeare compulsively raises in his late tragedies and romances. This course examines ten plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist, and will most likely include: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Anthony and Cleopatra, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. It also explores the ways in which the relationship between identity and performance in these plays manifests itself in striking similar discourses today. ENGL 211. Representative American Writers Dicker, R. MWF 110-200
This course is a survey of American literature from its beginnings to 1900. We will be reading a wide range of authors (both popular and canonical) and genres (fiction, poetry, political writings, travel literature) and discussing many issues in order to get a sense of the scope and variety of American literature. By providing the "big picture," this course serves as a starting point for more specialized study in the major.
Lamb, J.
MW 235-350
meets pre-1800 requirement
The eighteenth century is generally regarded as the period that saw the rise of the novel. Compared with the prose romances of the previous centuries, where knights battled with each other and ladies were alternately wooed and abducted in Arcadian landscapes, the novel was new (novel) because it showed life as it was. `What delights are works of fiction such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that happen in the world,’ wrote the critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson. So we shall try to do three things. First of all we shall look at some novels which retain the features of old-fashioned romance, then at some which thematize the difference between modern fiction and romance, and finally we shall tackle some novels which offer a picture of a believable world. I want to end the course by setting ourselves the task of considering what fiction is doing in the eighteenth century (and whether that is substantially different from what it does now).
So we shall be reading the following novels:
Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Daniel Defoe, Roxana
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess
Frances Sheridan, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph
There will be a fair lump of reading to be done each week, but you will find these novels for the most part as easy to read as modern ones. Presentations will be done in groups of three and tackle a specific issue important for the class’s appreciation of the background of a given novel: an aspect of literature, culture, politics or history.
Kreyling, M.
TR 1100-1215
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. 1900
F. Scot Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. 1925.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. 1929.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1938.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. 1943.
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March. 1953.
Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything. 1958.
These are not all “masterpieces,” novels that would be on anyone’s list of books to save if the planet were to explode next week. But each one is on somebody’s “100 Best” list because it captures something essentially American in novel form.
Expect to write two critical essays (8-10 pages) and sit for the final exam.
ENGL 233. The Modern British Novel
Wollaeger, M.
TR 1100-1215
In this course we will study fiction by major British novelists, paying particular attention to transformations of novelistic form and the ways in which novels engage their historical moment. These novels are often quite challenging. For reasons we will discuss, many modern novelists (and poets) cultivated difficulty both at the level of story (many are narrated in a less than straightforward manner) and style. At the same time, however much novelists wanted to revise fictional form, the expected pleasures of novel-reading remain: complex characterization and the creation of a fictional world. Novelists will likely include Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Rebecca West, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster, Ian McEwan. Requirements will include regular reading quizzes, two short essays, and a final exam.
Fesmire, J.
TR 110-225
This is a great books class which covers the Early Modern Period through the present. We will read Marlowe, Pope, Moliere, Byron, Pushkin, Flaubert, Conrad, Achebe, Woolf, Bulgakov, Achebe, Atwood, and Stoppard. You will write three formal essays, one of which will be substantially revised. You will also write a number of short response papers. And you will participate enthusiastically in class discussion.
ENGL 243. Literature, Science and Technology
Clayton, J.
MWF 1010-1100
Genetics in Literature and Film
The revolution in contemporary genetics has generated enormous media attention on topics such as Dolly the cloned sheep; newly discovered genes for breast-cancer, homosexuality, and long life; ecological and religious protests against gene tampering; controversies about evolution; insurance problems arising from genetic screening; the patenting of genes; DNA forensic evidence in criminal cases and paternity suits; the prospect of cloning a wooly mammoth; and eco-terrorism over genetically modified food.
In this course we explore novels, films, and popular cultural texts that attempt to come to terms with these intriguing issues. These texts will come from a number of different genres, including postmodern novels, science fiction movies and novels, advertising, and critical essays on contemporary science, evolution, and medicine.
No expertise in genetics, biology, or evolutionary theory is required. Students will be introduced to the basic concepts of genetics and evolution through science writing by people such as Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, and James Watson, and, as well as in accessible works by some of the pioneers of the new genetics. Novels will include Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever, Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Philip Kerr's A Philosophical Investigation, Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf, Zadi Smith's White Teeth, and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Spillers, H.
TR 110-225
This course is devoted to the study of theory generated by women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, developed in the US academy over the last 20 years; we will read from a range of thinkers in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary context.
Enterline, L.
TR 235-350 meets pre-1800 requirement Amazons, Enchanters, and Demons: Reading Renaissance Epic
This course will explore Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost in light of their most important classical and continental precursors. Beginning with a few passages from the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses important to 16th c. epic poetry, we will read epics by the two Italian authors – Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso – whose work had enormous impact in 16th c. England. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was translated for Queen Elizabeth and bequeathed a recognizable cast of characters to 16th c. writers: androgyne knights, enchanters, amazons, magical beasts, and errant maidens. Torquato Tasso, who lived during the Spanish Inquisition and whose name became synonymous with “melancholia” in the 16th c., was both a literary critic and poet; his views on allegory and epic as well as his brilliant epic poem about the First Crusade (Jerusalem Delivered) were crucial to the way Spenser and Milton thought about epic, empire, and poetic achievement. Tasso became known as a poet of exquisite sentiment – particularly in female characters. After reading the Italian epics, we will be ready to explore a few books from The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost in which each author extends the work of his poetic forbears in new directions and for new, English, purposes. Topics include: epic and empire; enchanters and fiction making; knights, wandering, and desire; cross-dressing and the plot of a family dynasty; prophecy, history, and narrative poetry; magic, demons, and belief; allegory, social critique, and visionary poetics; the place of “Italy” in renaissance English imagination.
“The Age of Enlightenment” in the Long Eighteenth Century
Garcia, H.
TR 935-1050
meets pre-1800 requirement
In “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant defines Enlightenment as, “the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity.” This course will focus on how Enlightenment-as-maturation, a trope frequently deployed in eighteenth-century English literature (1660-1830), involved new conceptions of the mind, self, and society that illuminated the dark corners of socio-political life in unexpected, complicated, and contentious ways. By reading across a broad range of genres, we will examine various literary forms that record narratives of arrested childhood development, or stories in which the enlightened protagonist fails to grow up. The main premise here is that this counter-Kantian narrative evolved to accommodate the uncertainties that defined “the Age of Enlightenment:” the “progress” of science and reason, the rise of the novel, women’s place in the public sphere, the emergence of England’s overseas empire, and the Romantic reaction against impersonal modes of rationality. As such, this course will help us develop some insight into how the English writers of this period remained skeptical of projects of human emancipation, calling into question our cherished assumptions about the role of the Enlightenment in the larger narrative of Western history, then and now. We will be reading from the works of Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and others.
The class involves a take-home midterm and a comprehensive final exam in the form of an analytic essay. One page response papers will be assigned periodically. For the term paper project, each student will write a five-page essay, which will be expanded and revised into a ten-to-eleven page final draft. Attendance and participation are essential.
Teukolsky, R.
TR 235-350
This course will introduce the prose, poetry, and fiction of Victorian England. We will study the important topics that defined the era, including the rise of the modern city, reactions to the Industrial Revolution, the “Woman Question,” literatures of social protest, religion and doubt, changing views of the natural world, art and aestheticism, and the culture of travel and imperialism. Authors will likely include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde, among others.
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