Vassar College Department of English

III. Advanced

Prerequisite: Open to juniors and seniors with 2 units of 200-level work in English; or, for juniors and seniors without this prerequisite, 2 units of work in allied subjects and permission from the associate chair.

300a or b. Senior Tutorial (1)

Preparation of a long essay (40 pages) or other independently designed critical project. Each essay is directed by an individual member of the department.

Special permission.

305-306. Composition (1)

Advanced study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry. Open in the senior year to students concentrating in English. Deadline for submission of writing samples immediately before spring break. Mr. Russell.

307b. Senior Writing Seminar (1)

Experimental first offering of an advanced writing course in parallel with the long-established senior composition sequence, accommodating the multiple approaches, genres, forms and interests that represent the diversity of a contemporary writing life. Ms. Wallace, Mr. Harmon.

[ 315. Studies in Poetry ] (1)

Advanced study of selected topics in the history and theory of poetry, exploring a range of interpretive contexts for understanding individual poems. Discussions may consider such issues as the poetic canon, attacks on the defenses of poetry, and the boundaries of what constitutes poetry itself. The course includes both poetry and criticism, and may focus upon a particular period, genre, poet, or poetic tradition.

Not offered in 2009/10.

317a. Studies in Literary Theory (1)

Advanced study of problems and schools of literary criticism and theory, principally in the twentieth century. May include discussion of new criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, reader-response theory, new historicism, and Marxist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and feminist analysis. Ms. Graham.

Topic for 2009/10: Critical Theory Since 1965.

[ 319b. Race and Its Metaphors ] (1)

(Same as Africana Studies 319) Re-examinations of canonical literature in order to discover how race is either explicitly addressed by or implicitly enabling to the texts. Does racial difference, whether or not overtly expressed, prove a useful literary tool? The focus of the course varies from year to year. Ms. Dunbar.

Not offered in 2009/10.

320b. Traditions in the Literature of England and America (1)

The course studies varied attempts by writers to imagine human conduct and speech that is heroic and yet not ridiculous in the time and landscape of the writer and the reader. The writers read may include Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Radcliffe, Austen, Twain, Faulkner, Cheever, and Angelou. Mr. Weedin.

324b. European and American Drama (1)

(Same as Drama 324b) Historical and critical study of European and American dramatic literature, theory and criticism, playwrights, and/or aesthetic movements.

Topic for 2009/10: Genet Revisited: Life, Art, and the Production of Self. This course explores the significance and relevance of Genet's work today. We read Genet's novels, plays, essays, poems, letters, and examine the impact of his activism and politics of representation. Readings also include theoretical essays and the writings of other artists about Genet. Weekly presentations culminate in a final theatrical rendering of one of Genet's texts. Ms. Cody.

Prerequisites: Drama 221/222 or permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.

325a or b. Studies in Genre (1)

An intensive study of specific forms or types of literature, such as satire, humor, gothic fiction, realism, slave narratives, science fiction, crime, romance, adventure, short story, epic, autobiography, hypertext, and screenplay. Each year, one or more of these genres is investigated in depth. The course may cross national borders and historical periods or adhere to boundaries of time and place.

Topic for 2009/10a: The Multiple Modes of Black Urbanism. This course explores the black encounter with the American city. The class draws from a wide range of scholarship in the humanities. We look at historical examples in which cities have functioned in the political interests of Blacks, such as antebellum Boston and its radical abolitionism. We review the wide range of sociological scholarship-from W.E.B. DuBois to William Julius Wilson-that has cast the urban as a besieged chocolate space. We review the work of anthropologists such as John Jackson and Steven Gregory that account for black encounter with gentrification and urban change. The course culminates with a critical look at black cultural uses of the city, among them, graffiti, hip hop, sports, religion, and music. Mr. Simpson.

Topic for 2009/10b: Studies in Genre: Medieval Travel Writing. The class looks at medieval travel literature that include pilgrimage accounts, fabulous tales from the East, maps, romances, chronicle, and hagiography. Some of the texts we look at include: The Book of Margery Kempe, The Old English Wonders of the East, The Travels of John Mandeville, crusading romances, and the Hereford World Map, the letter of Prester John. Ms. Kim.

326b. Challenging Ethnicity (1)

An exploration of literary and artistic engagements with ethnicity. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.

Topic for 2009/10: Race and Melodrama. Often dismissed as escapist, predictable, lowbrow or exploitative, melodrama also has been recuperated by several contemporary critics as a key site for the rupture and transformation of mainstream values. Film scholar Linda Williams argues that melodrama constitutes "a major force of moral reasoning in American mass culture," shaping the nation's racial imaginary. This course investigates the lasting impact of such fictions as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life, the romanticized legend of John Smith's encounter with Pocahontas, and John Luther Long's "Madame Butterfly." What precisely is melodrama? If not a genre, is it (as diverse critics argue) a mode, symbolic structure, or a sensibility? What do we make of the international success of melodramatic forms and texts such as the telenovela? How do we understand melodrama's special resonance historically among disfranchised classes? How and to what ends do the pleasures of suffering authenticate particular collective identities (women, the working-class, queers, blacks, and group formations yet to be named)? What relationships between ethnic or racial identity, affect and consumption does melodrama reveal? Texts may also include work by David Belasco, Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Doane, David Eng, Sui Sin Far, Sigmund Freud, Christine Gledhill, Todd Haynes, David Henry Hwang, Nella Larsen, Annie Proulx, and Douglas Sirk. Mr. Perez.

328a. Literature of the American Renaissance (1)

Intensive study of major works by American writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Authors may include: Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Fuller, Stowe, Delany, Wilson, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. In addition to placing the works in historical and cultural context, focusing on the role of such institutions as slavery and such social movements as transcendentalism, the course also examines the notion of the American Renaissance itself. Mr. Peck.

329a. American Literary Realism (1)

Exploration of the literary concepts of realism and naturalism focusing on the theory and practice of fiction between 1870 and 1910, the first period in American literary history to be called modern. The course may examine past critical debates as well as the current controversy over realism in fiction. Attention is given to such questions as what constitutes reality in fiction, as well as the relationship of realism to other literary traditions. Authors may include Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather. Mr. Simpson.

330a. American Modernism (1)

Intensive study of modern American literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century, with special attention to the concept of "modernism" and its relation to other cultural movements during this period. Authors may include Dreiser, Wharton, Cather, Frost, Anderson, Millay, Pound, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O'Neill, H. D., Faulkner, Wright, Eliot, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Crane, Yezierska, Toomer, Hughes, Cullen, Brown, Hurston, McKay, and Dos Passos. Ms. Graham.

331b. Post-modern American Literature (1)

Advanced study of American literature from the second half of the twentieth century to the current date. Authors may include Welty, Ellison, Warren, O'Connor, Olson, Momaday, Mailer, Lowell, Bellow, Percy, Nabokov, Bishop, Rich, Roth, Pynchon, Ashbery, Merrill, Reed, Silko, Walker, Morrison, Gass, and Kingston. Mr. Hsu.

340a. Studies in Medieval Literature (1)

Intensive study of selected medieval texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation. Issues addressed may include the social and political dynamics, literary traditions, symbolic discourses, and individual authorial voices shaping literary works in this era. Discussion of these issues may draw on both historical and aesthetic approaches, and both medieval and modern theories of rhetoric, reference, and text-formation.

Topic for 2009/10: The Gawain-Poet and his Contemporaries. Mr. Amodio.

341b. Studies in the Renaissance (1)

(Same as Women's Studies 341b) Intensive study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.

Topic for 2009/10: Elizabeth I: Representation of the Virgin Queen in iconography, poetry, and prose. Ms. Robertson.

342a. Studies in Shakespeare (1)

Advanced study of Shakespeare's work and its cultural significance in various contexts from his time to today.

Topic for 2009/10: Wholly Hamlet! "Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad," inquired Oscar Wilde, "or only pretending to be?" It has been said that "Hamlet invented modern subjectivity"; that Hamlet engages us "not as a work by Shakespeare but as a work of western culture," "a field of operation for thoughtful play," "a poem unlimited." The Hamlet story survives in medieval folk tales and in a thousand modern redactions, including three substantially different "Shakespeare" scripts (1603, 1604, 1623). In this interdisciplinary seminar we shall consider folk Hamlets, stage Hamlets, printshop Hamlets, burlesque Omelets; Hamlet as transposed to the painter's canvas and to the silver screen; Hamlet in textual scholarship, literary history, classroom editing, dramatic theory, art history, psychiatry, anthropology, philosophy, gender studies, queer theory, kiddie lit, theology, Bardolatry, anti-Stratfordianism, pop culture, world culture, and the Internet. Nor shall Ophelia drown without notice. Mr. Foster.

345b. Milton (1)

Study of John Milton's career as a poet and polemicist, with particular attention to Paradise Lost. Mr. Weedin.

350b. Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature (1)

Focuses on a broad literary topic, with special attention to works of the Restoration and eighteenth century: a consideration of the genre of satire as a way of understanding the world; or sensibility and the Gothic, a study of the origins of these literary trends and of their relationship to each other, with some attention to their later development.

Topic for 2009/10: Interior Life in Eighteenth Century England. Ms. Park.

351b. Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (1)

Study of a major author (e.g., Coleridge, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde) or a group of authors (the Brontës, the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters) or a topical issue (representations of poverty; literary decadence; domestic angels and fallen women; transformations of myth in Romantic and Victorian literature) or a major genre (elegy, epic, autobiography).

Topic for 2009/10: Deals with the Devil. This course examines the Faust theme in works of nineteenth-century British literature. The story of the scholar-magician who sold his soul to the prince of darkness compelled the imaginations of many British writers of the Romantic and Victorian era. Often they associated this legend with the myth of Prometheus, the Titan who dared to steal divine fire for the benefit of humankind. The course studies the various faces of the archetypal over-reacher and the significance of the archetype for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Ms. Darlington.

352a, 353b. Romantic Poets (1)

Intensive study of the major poetry and critical prose of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge (first semester), and Byron, Shelley, and Keats (second semester) in the context of Enlightenment thought, the French Revolution, and the post-Napoleonic era. Readings may include biographies, letters, and a few philosophical texts central to the period. Some preliminary study of Milton is strongly recommended. Ms. Darlington.

355. Modern Poets (1)

Intensive study of selected modern poets, focusing on the period 1900-1945, with attention to longer poems and poetic sequences. Consideration of the development of the poetic career and of poetic movements. May include such poets as Auden, Bishop, Eliot, Frost, Hopkins, Moore, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Williams, and Yeats.

356a. Contemporary Poets (1)

Intensive study of selected contemporary poets, with attention to questions of influence, interrelations, and diverse poetic practices. May include such poets as Ashbery, Bernstein, Brooks, Graham, Harjo, Heaney, Hill, Merrill, Rich, and Walcott. Mr. Joyce.

357a. Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature (1)

Intensive study of literatures of the twentieth century, with primary focus on British and postcolonial (Irish, Indian, Pakistani, South African, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian, etc.) texts. Selections may focus on an author or group of authors, a genre (e.g., modern verse epic, drama, satiric novel, travelogue), or a topic (e.g., the economics of modernism, black Atlantic, Englishes and Englishness, themes of exile and migration). Mr. Chang.

362b. Text and Image (1)

Explores intersections and interrelationships between literary and visual forms such as the graphic novel, illustrated manuscripts, tapestry, the world-wide web, immersive environments, the history and medium of book design, literature and film, literature and visual art. Topics vary from year to year.

Topic for 2009/10b: 20s/20s. In the United States during the 1920s there was an unusually close collaboration between writers and artists, who often knew one another well and shared aesthetic programs and cultural agendas. Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams for example, understood their work in relation to that of American artists like John Marin, Georgia O¹Keeffe, and Charles Demuth. A century before, in the 1820s, the emergence of the Hudson River School landscape painters goes hand in hand with the emergence of a national literature in works by writers such as Washington Irving. In both decades, important cultural institutions, such as little magazines in the 1920s and New York City writers and artists clubs in the 1820s, helped establish an intimate dialogue between literature and art. In this course, we seek to learn why this kind of dialogue was unusually rich during these two decades of American life. Mr. Peck.

Topic for 2009/10b: Because Dave Chappelle Said So. From Hip Hop to Paul Beatty's White Boy Shuffle to Spike Lee's Bamboozled to Dave Chappelle to Aaron McGruder's Boondocks to Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G character, black masculinity seems to be a contemporary site of massive satire. This course explores the history, style, content and movement of black, mostly male, satirical comic narratives and characters. Using postmodernism as our critical lens, we explore what black satirical characters and narratives are saying through "tragicomedy" to the mediums of literature, film, television and comics, and to the ideals of morality, democracy, sexuality, femininity and masculinity. Are these narratives and characters, while asserting some sort of critical citizenship, actually writing black women's subjectivity, narratives and experience out of popular American textual history? Does satire have masculinist underpinnings? How are these texts and characters communicating with each other and is there a shared language? Is there a difference between a black comic text and a black satirical text? These are some of the questions we explore in "Because Dave Chappelle Said So." Mr. Laymon.

365a or b. Selected Author (1)

Study of the work of a single author. The work may be read in relation to literary predecessors and descendants as well as in relation to the history of the writers's critical and popular reception. This course alternates from year to year with English 265. Ms. Yow, Mr. Peck.

Topic for 2009/10a: William Faulkner.

Topic for 2009/10b: F. Scott Fitzgerald.

370a or b. Transnational Literature (1)

This course focuses on literary works and cultural networks that cross the borders of the nation-state. Such border-crossings raise questions concerning vexed phenomena such as globalization, exile, diaspora, and migration—forced and voluntary. Collectively, these phenomena deeply influence the development of transnational cultural identities and practices. Specific topics studied in the course vary from year to year and may include global cities and cosmopolitanisms; the black Atlantic; border theory; the discourses of travel and tourism; global economy and trade; or international terrorism and war.

Topic for 2009/10a. The Marvelous. This course investigates and critiques "magic," spirituality, and supernatural event in historical and contemporary narrative, verse, and visual imagery. The course includes Latin American, Indian, Irish, and African works in English and in translation. Ms. Kane

Topic for 2009/10a: Oz Lit: From Down Under to Up Over. Postcolonial cultures are often divided into two types: indigenous and settler, according to the circumstances of colonization and subsequent history. This course examines one of the settler cultures, Australia, through the lens of its literature, as it has developed since the nation's origins as a British penal colony. The focus, however, is mainly on modern and contemporary literature, which has developed with such extraordinary vitality in recent decades. In addition to exploring the dynamics of this new Australian literature—or Oz Lit—we consider the impact of British and American influences, and the unique situation of Aboriginal culture in Australia. In placing it in the broad context of globalized writing in the twenty-first century, we seek to understand Australia's ongoing contribution to anglophone literature. Authors may include Peter Carey, Helen Garner, David Malouf, Gwen Harwood, Richard Flanagan, Alice Pung, Les Murray, Inga Clendinnen, Alex Miller and others. Course fulfills the race, gender, sexuality or ethnicity requirement. Mr. Kane and Mr. Sharp.

Topic for 2009/10b: Literature of Globalization. This course focuses on the novels that deal with contemporary globalization: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland; Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss; Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Orhan Pamuk's Snow; Ha jin, A Free Life; Uzodenma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation, and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. We also read various theorists of globalization, including David Harvey, Gayatri Spivak, Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis, Edward Said, Also under discussion, four films on reserve in the library: Monsoon Wedding (2001), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Syriana (2005) and Babel (2006). Each student writes one short essay (5 pages) and one long essay (12 pages). Mr. Kumar.

380-389a Advanced Literary Study (1)

The content and the requirements for the completion of the work in each section vary from year to year.

Enrollment is limited to 12.

380a. J.D. Salinger and the Craft of Writing (1)

This seminar focuses on the craft of writing in J.D. Salinger's work, including Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams and Hapworth 16, 1924. The course also explores Salinger's relation to social and literary movements of the 1950s, such as the Beats, and his influence on other writers, including those of the twenty-first century such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Aimee Bender. Of special interest to creative writers. Ms. Wallace.

384b. The Literature of Friendship (1)

This seminar explores the treatment of friendship in a wide range of texts, mainly literary but also historical and philosophical, from antiquity through the present, including works by Aristotle, Cicero, Sappho, Po Chu-I, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Keats, Wilde, Frederick Douglass, Jorge Luis Borges, Anna Akhmatova, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Groucho Marx, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, Helen Garner, and Carol Smith-Rosenberg. Mr. Sharp.

399a or b. Senior Independent Work (1/2 or 1)

Open by permission of the Chair.

One unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.