Vassar College Department of English

III. Advanced Courses

III. Advanced Courses

Senior Year Requirements

The College requires a special exercise to distinguish the work of the senior year in one's major.  In the English department, that requirement takes the form of English 300, Senior Tutorial.

Description of English 300:  All senior English majors should consider taking this course.  The Tutorial should reflect and extend the intellectual interests you have developed in your earlier course work.  The tutorial itself involves working with an individual faculty member to produce a long paper (approximately 10,000 words or 40 pages).  The project may consist of a sustained essay or a series of linked essays, or one of several alternatives, such as primary research in the Special Collections department of the Library, a piece of translation, a work of dramaturgy, or a scholarly edition of a particular work or group of works.  Senior projects that are not essays in themselves should be accompanied by a complementary essay.  When taken with 305-306 (Senior Composition), English 300 must be elected in the a-term, and it follows special guidelines to be established in the context of 305-306.

Description of Advanced Literary Study (English 380-89):

The content and requirements of the various sections of this course vary from year to year.  The descriptions of next year's offerings are appended herewith.  The enrollment in each section is limited to 12 students, and registration requires the permission of the instructor.   The application form is available in the English office.

300 a or b

Senior Tutorial

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.

 

306.51

Mr. Russell                              T            3:10-6:10

Senior Composition:

Advanced study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry.  Open in the senior year to students concentrating in English.  Special Permission.

Deadline for submission of writing samples is the week before spring break. 

Check with the English office for the exactdate of deadline.

If you are selected for Senior Composition, you, the student, must enroll in ENGL 300 in the fall in addition to ENGL 305 and 306 to receive your 3 credits.

307.51

Mr. Harmon, Ms. Wallace                     R            3:10-6:10

Senior Writing Seminar:

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.

Special permission. This course treats various forms of writing (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as forms that combine or resist such categories).

Students submit a cohesive final portfolio of work, as well as a craft essay

on some aspect of technique or form.

 The course presumes a prior knowledge of and commitment to writing and

revision. Readings may include novels, collections of short fiction and

poetry, creative non-fiction, and critical essays.

 Manuscript submission required, maximum of 10 pages emailed to both professors BY FRIDAY, NOV.13.

320.51

Mr. Weedin                                W            1:00-3:00

Traditions in the Literature of England and America:

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.

Fulfills the pre-1900 requirement. 

 

325.51

Ms. Kim                                      W            1:00-3:00

Studies in Genre: 

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 2009/2010b Medieval Travel Writing: Strange Lands and Strange Creatures.

This class will examine medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early exploration accounts of sixteenth century explorers in the New World. We will look at pilgrimage accounts to Rome and Jerusalem, the Old English Wonders of the East, Alexander romances, medieval mappa mundi including the Hereford World Map, medieval bestiaries, The Book of Margery Kempe, crusader romances including Beves of Hamtoun, King Horn, and Richard Coer de Lion, the letter of Prester John, and the Siege of Jerusalem.

In this class, we will think about bodily wonders: troglodytes, giants, "monsters," fabulous beasts, and dragons. We will also think about how these texts develop imaginary or historical encounters with strange folk: fairies, elves, green children, Saracens, Jews, demons, Ethiopians. We will encounter some cannibalism, interfaith and interracial marriages, miracles both religious and political, and the early constructions of race that becomes the background behind Western Europe's "contact" with the New World.

326.51

Mr. Perez                                      T            4:00-6:00

Studies in Ethnic American Literature:

An exploration of literary and artistic engagements with ethnicity. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.  Fulfills the English department's Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity requirement.

Topic for 2009/2010b: Race and Melodrama.

Often dismissed as escapist, predictable, lowbrow or exploitative, melodrama has also 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. The conventions of melodrama originate from popular theater, but its success has relied largely on its remarkable adaptability across various media, including print, motion pictures, radio, and television. 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 critics diversely 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 and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain? 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 identity, affect and consumption does melodrama reveal?  In addition to those listed above, texts studied may include work by Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Doane, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christine Gledhill, Sigmund Freud, Todd Haynes, Kalup Linzy, Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, Joselito Rodríguez, Douglas Sirk, and Kara Walker.

331.51

Mr. Antelyes                                  T            3:10-6:10

Postmodern American Literature:

Advanced study of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Course may examine works of fiction (DeLillo, Pynchon, Morrison, Reed, Dick, Hagedorn, etc.) as well as journalism (Mailer, Malcolm, Didion), theoretical texts (Weber, Benjamin, Lyotard, Jameson, etc.) and art/architecture criticism (Berman, Lucie-Smith, Venturi).

341.51

Ms. Robertson                                   M            3:10-5:10

Studies in the Renaissance:

(Same as Women's Studies 341)

Intensive study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.

Fulfills the  pre- 1800 and Race, Gender, Sexuality, or Ethnicity requirement.

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

 

345.51

Mr. Weedin                                       M            3:10-5:10

Milton:

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

Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

350.51

Ms. Park                                             W            1:00-3:00

Studies in Eighteenth Century British Literature:

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 2009/10b: Interior Life in Eighteenth Century England.

351.51

Ms. Darlington                                      F            10:30-12:30

Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature:

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 2009/10b: 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.

353.51

Ms. Darlington                                 R          10:30-12:30

Romantic Poets:

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.

355.51

Mr. Whalan                                      W          10:30-12:30

Modern Poets:

This course will give a survey of modern poetry in English from 1900 to 1950, with a particular focus on American poets in a time of enormous social and political upheaval. Poets considered the relationship of poems to political and national commitment; the ontological question of how the word related to the world; how new social and technological forms required new literary forms; and how poetry's unique qualities of representation could be of value to the modern consciousness. Women and African American poets sought answers to these questions whilst articulating a difference and a distance from poetic traditions that sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly sought to exclude them. This class will explore the extraordinary range of poetry from the first half of the twentieth century, the debates that went on between poets, and how contemporary critics and theorists have conceptualized their work. Topics will include modernism and its discontents; imagism and after; poetry and the nation; poetry and mass culture; and the poetics of identity. Poets studied will include William B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. 

362.51

Mr. Peck                                                R         10:30-12:30

Text and Image:

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.

This offering of ENG 362 fulfills the English major requirement of a course in literature pre- 1900.

Topic for 2009/10b: 20's/20's.

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.