Vassar College Department of English

II. Intermediate Studies

205a

Composition:  Sections of Composition are open by application to the department.  No writing sample is required, but an application form must be completed prior to the end of the pre registration period. These forms are available in the English office.  Spaces in the course are assigned according to the students' preferences and the priorities indicated in the College Catalogue.  All sections are writing intensive, but the focus of the individual sections will vary.  See descriptions below.

205.01

Ms. Rose  T  10:30-12:30

Composition:

What are the elements of the short story?  What distinguishes the short story form from that of the poem, essay, dramatic scene, character sketch, or autobiographical reflection?  While we all intuitively know when we've read a good short story, in this class we will attempt to arrive at an analytic understanding of the form in order to have more authoritative control in creating our own stories.  Time will be divided between discussion of student work, analysis of published work, and in-class writing exercises.

205.02

Ms. Mark   M  4:00-6:00

Composition:

Students in this course will read and write narratives in a number of modes. Though we'll focus on short fiction and the elements of its composition (characterization, plot, structure, point of view, dialogue, voice, style, and so forth), we'll also explore the increasingly permeable boundaries between fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. This section of Composition is both a seminar and a workshop: Students will read experienced practitioners of various forms, analyze what they've read, and apply what they've learned to their own work. Readings may include works by Ashbery, Baldwin, Bambara, Beattie, Bishop, Borges, Carey, Chekhov, Cortázar, Faulkner, Hughes, Jen, Joyce, Kafka, Kincaid, Lahiri, Mukherjee, Munro, Nabokov, O'Connor, Packer, Paley, Saunders, Simic, Trevor, and Woolf. Frequent conferences.

205.04

Ms. Rose   T   3:10-5:10

Composition:

What are the elements of the short story?  What distinguishes the short story form from that of the poem, essay, dramatic scene, character sketch, or autobiographical reflection?  While we all intuitively know when we've read a good short story, in this class we will attempt to arrive at an analytic understanding of the form in order to have more authoritative control in creating our own stories.  Time will be divided between discussion of student work, analysis of published work, and in-class writing exercises.

205.05

Mr. Sassone   F  1:00-3:00

Composition:

This course will develop the student's abilities as a rigorous writer and reader of creative prose, with a particular emphasis on short fiction. Students will be expected to produce short exercises, stories, and comprehensive revisions and to participate actively in discussions of peer and published work. The syllabus will be flexible according to the emerging needs of the class. Frequent conferences with the instructor will be required.

205.06

Mr. Harmon  T  3:10-6:10

Composition:

This course will focus on reading and writing short texts-poems, prose poems, short-short stories, and other brief texts less easily categorized-in lyric, narrative, meditative, and non-narrative modes.  Our secondary emphasis will be on process-oriented texts.  We'll operate class in part as a studio, with a good deal of our time devoted to writing; we'll also spend a good deal of time discussing course readings and matters of craft and technique, and some time in writing workshops discussing student work.  Readings will include Queneau's Exercises in Style, as well as several mostly recent titles-possibly Paige Ackerson-Kiely's In No One's Land, Zachary Schomburg's The Man Suit, Harryette Mullen's S*PeRM**K*T, Christian Bök's Eunoia, Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's, John Keene's Annotations, and perhaps one longer work, A.R. Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year-as well as various selections from many other writers.  Students will have weekly assignments, and will assemble a final portfolio of revised work.

206a

Composition:  Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry.  Open to any student who has taken English 205 or an equivalent course.  Registration is by draw number as in any other course.  Special permission is not required.  No application form is required.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

[206.01]    Not offered "a" semester.

207 a or b  Literary Nonfiction

Study and practice of literary nonfiction in various forms.  Reading and writing assignments may include personal, informal, and lyric essay, travel and nature writing, writing, memoirs.  Frequent short writing assignments.
One 2-hour course and individual conferences with the instructor.

207.01

Mr. Kumar   T  10:30-12:30

Literary Nonfiction: Writing About the City.

Students in this course will read about New York, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Bombay. We will read extracts from Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York; Mike David, City of Quartz; Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul; Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin; and, finally, Suketu Mehta, Maximum City. Other texts: Vivian Gornick on how to write about the New York street; a chapter from Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a book of travels through small towns; Hanif Kureishi's "Bradford," an account of a visit to the "city of knives"; war-reportage by Joan Didion from San Salvador and Susan Sontag from Sarajevo. Additional pieces by W.G. Sebald, Edmund Wilson, Jonathan Raban, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau. The class will experiment with writing in different genres: memoir, travel-writing, reportage, cultural analysis. You will be expected to write a page of prose for each class, and a five-page essay for the mid-term, which will later be developed by the end of the course into a 10-12 page-long publishable piece.

208 a or b Literary Nonfiction

Development of the student's abilities as a reader and writer of literary nonfiction, with emphasis on longer forms. Assignments may include informal, personal, and lyric essays, travel and nature writing, memoirs.
Prerequisite: open to students who have taken English 207 or by permission of the instructor.                                                                                                                    
One 3-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Not offered "a" semester.

209.01

Ms. Kane    M  3:10-6:10

Narrative Writing:

This year long course develops a student's abilities as a writer and reader of narrative, with particular emphasis on the short story. The first semester of this course will focus intensely on the writerly analysis, generation, execution, and revision of short stories and creative nonfiction. The second semester will elaborate on this foundation by including more experimental work.   As the course is structured as a writing seminar, it stresses intensive, self-participation in the workshop, through written comment and class discussion.

Deadline for submission of writing samples is the week before spring break.  Check with the English office for the exact date of deadline.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

211.01

Ms. McGlennen   M  3:10-5:10

Verse Writing:

This year long course develops a student's abilities as a writer and reader of poetry.

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

Check with the English office for the exact date of deadline.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

222/223

Founding of English Literature:

These courses offer an introduction to British literary history through an exploration of texts from the eighth through the seventeenth centuries in their literary and cultural contexts. Please note: historical parameters of 222 and 223 will be different in 2009-2020 from those in the printed catalogue. The fall term begins with Old English literature and continues to the early 16th-century. The spring term begins with the Protestant Reformation and continues through the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, the Civil Wars and Puritan Interregnum, to the Restoration in 1660. Critical issues may include discourses of difference (race, religion, gender, social class); tribal, ethnic, and national identities; exploration and colonization; textual transmission and the rise of print culture; authorship and authority.

222.01

Ms. Kim  TR  12:00-1:15

Founding of English Literature: Multilingual Medieval Britain.

This class will examine almost a millennium of literary writing produced in the British Isles from the eighth to the sixteenth century. We will examine works in prose and verse, dramatic texts, and texts that combine multiple genres and medias. We will begin with a rumination on Caedmon's Hymn, and the poetic "founding" of English verse. We will consider the Germanic heroic code and its consequences in The Battle of Maldon, the religious lives of Aelfric and the prose of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Along with way, we may read some Old English riddles, charms, and runic poetry.
But the "founding" myths of Britain do not begin with the Anglo-Saxons, they start with the end of the Trojan War and the founding of a new Troy in Britain. So, we will also be reading a selection of British texts in Welsh and Latin: "Pridwen Annwn", Branwen, "Dream of Rhonabwy", the poetry of Taliesen, and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Brittaniae.
We will consider the consequences of conquest and the questions of English as a minority language, multiculturalism, and the effects of a multilingual Britain producing multilingual texts. We will find strange creatures in strange languages in Gerald of Wales' historiographic works. The influence of women and their literary tastes will surface in the Anglo-Norman French work of Marie de France, the religious lives of the Katherine Group, and the first English autobiography dictated by a fifteenth-century brewer and wife named Margery Kempe.
We will find the voices of the middle and peasant classes in the guild plays produced for centuries in the towns of York and Chester. We will think about the crisis of our everyman "Will" in the allegorical dream vision of Piers Plowman. We will see the world of the English and Scottish courts in the works of Gower, Chaucer, and King James.
We will finish by looking at the founding and foundation of the Tewdwrs (or as we know them, the Tudors) and the beginning of print culture.
The course meets the pre-1800 requirement of the English Department.

225.01

Mr. Kane   TR 10:30-11:45

American Literature Origins to 1865:

Study of the main developments in American literature from its origins through the Civil War:  including Puritan writings, captivity and slave narratives, as well as major authors from the eighteenth century (such as Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson) up to the mid-nineteenth century (Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson).

227.01

Ms. Dunbar   TR  1:30-2:45

Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors:

(Same as Africana Studies 227) This course places the Harlem Renaissance in literary historical perspective as it seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways was "The New Negro" new? How did African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance rework earlier literary forms from the sorrow songs to the sermon and the slave narrative? How do the debates that raged during this period over the contours of a black aesthetic trace their origins to the concerns that attended the entry of African Americans into the literary public sphere in the eighteenth century?  Fulfills the race, gender, sexuality or ethnicity requirement.

230.01

Mr. Perez   TR  12:00-1:15

Latina/o Literature:

(Same as Latin American and Latino/a Studies 230a)
This course requires students and instructor to collaborate in building and dialoging with an archive that we might call "Latina/o Literature." The category "Latino" presents us then with our first challenge:  exactly what demographic does "Latino" isolate (or create)?  How does it differ from the categories "Hispanic," "Chicana/o," "Raza," "Mestiza/o," "Boricua," or cyber-neologisms such as "Latin@" and Xican@," to name only a few alternatives, and how should these differences inform our critical reading practices?  Together, we will work to identify what formal and thematic continuities may characterize a Latina/o literary heritage.  Some of those commonalities include code-switching, generational conflict, border crossing or displacement, and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, or assimilation). Writers may include Judith Ortiz Cofer, Achy Obejas, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Carmelita Tropicana, Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Junot Díaz, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, John Leguizamo, Piri Thomas, Nicholasa Mohr, Martín Espada, Américo Paredes.
As a class, we also will need to decide what other forms of cultural production to include in our archive and consider how our selections amplify the very terms (i.e. "Latina/o," "Literature," or "archive") of our investigation.  These might include corridos, Brown Power, Puertorriqueñidad, graffiti, Spanglish, the telenovela, salsa, testimonio, reggaeton, and hip-hop.

235.01

Mr. Amodio  MW 10:30-11:45

Old English:

Introduction to Old English language and literature.

237.01

Ms. Kim   TR  3:10-4:25

Chaucer

The major poetry, including The Canterbury Tales.

    Topic for 2009/10: Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde:

Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Troilus and Criseyde. Before Shakespeare's cultural behemoth defined what it meant to be star-crossed lovers, the story of Troilus and Criseyde was the dominant and popular narrative of doomed love. So, what happened? Did Shakespeare's treatment of it kill the story? Why has it dropped out of the canon? This class will evaluate Chaucer's other major poem Troilus and Criseyde and contextualize it by examining its sources, philosophical underpinnings, and its impact on literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We will begin by looking at both the Benoît de St. Maure's and Boccacio's treatment of the story of Troilus as source texts; Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and Chaucer's translation the Boece; the French court poet Guillaume de Machaut's contemporary influence on the poem; Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; Henryson's Testament of Cresseid; and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cresseida.

240.01

Mr. Foster  MW  10:30-11:45

Shakespeare: Playing it by Ear.

"Shakespeare," explained Voltaire, "is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London, and Canada" [also, needless to say, in Po'town].  This course is intended chiefly for kindred spirits of the Bard (i.e., drunken savages with some imagination).  This section will entail practical instruction in the close reading of Shakespeare's printed scripts, and a broad range of critical approaches.
Not open to students who have taken English 241, 242.

240.02

Ms. Dunn  MW  1:30-2:45

Shakespeare: Shakespeare Through Performance.

The first half of the semester will focus on early modern theatrical conditions and practices. We will explore the playtexts as scripts for performance through workshops on speaking verse, staging scenes, and rehearsing "in parts" as early modern acting companies did. We'll learn to read printed texts for imbedded stage directions, and to imagine them bodied forth on the stages for which Shakespeare wrote. And we'll place plays in their early modern historical and cultural contexts in order to better understand their resonance for early modern audiences. In the second half of the semester, the emphasis will shift to contemporary contexts and modes of performance, including theater, television, and film, and to "reading": performances as acts of interpretation. Throughout the course we will pay special attention to plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and Othello, which have become problematic for post-modern global audiences.  
Not open to students who have taken English 241,242.  Fulfills the pre 1800 requirement.

245.01       

Ms. Park  TR  1:30-2:45

Pride and Prejudice: British Literature from 1640-1745.

Study of various texts and genres that were influential in defining the period's literary culture and its experimental nature.  Authors may include Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, the Earl of Rochester and William Wycherley.

248.01

Mr. Sharp  TR  9:00-10:15

The Age of Romanticism:

Study of British literature in a time of revolution. The focus of the course will be on poetry and poetic theory, including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats, but we will also study two novels: Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN.

250.01

Mr. Kane   TR  6:30-8:30

Victorian Poets:  Eminent, Decadent and Obscure.

A study of Romantic impulses and Victorian compromises as expressed in the major poems of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Swinburne.  The second half of the course turns from aesthetic concerns to material conditions of the marketplace and to challenges met by women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, "Michael Field" (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Amy Levy, and Alice Meynell.  Some preliminary acquaintance with Romantic poetry is helpful, but not required.  Fulfills the pre-1900 requirement.

251.01

Ms. Yow      TR    12:00-1:15

Topics in Black Literatures:

(Same as Africana Studies 251) This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.

        Topic for 2009/10: Black Paris.

This course will examine the cultural productions of black writers and artists in the City of Light. Long considered a haven for African American artists, Paris also attracted (and repelled) African and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals as the metropolitan center of the French empire. Through an exploration of literature, music and film, we will think about what Paris has represented in the transnational cultural and political circuits of the African diaspora. The site of the first Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in 1956, the city provided a space for the development and negotiation of a diasporic consciousness. For James Baldwin, Paris was where he discovered "what it means to be an American." Throughout the semester, we will interrogate how the experiences of expatriation and exile complicate understandings of racial, national and transnational identities. Topics for discussion include modernism, jazz, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and the Présence Africaine group.
We will consider the work of Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Sidney Bechet, Bricktop, Aime Cesaire, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Andrea Lee, Claude McKay, Paulette Nardal, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright and Shay Youngblood. Films may include ZouZou and La Permission.

255.01

Ms. Zlotnick  TR  10:30-11:45

Nineteenth Century British Novels:

Readings vary but include works by such novelists as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Trollope, George Eliot, and Hardy.

256.01

Mr. Chang  TR  3:10-4:25

Modern British and Irish Novels:

Significant twentieth-century novels from Great Britain and Ireland.

Topic for 2009/10:  All the Mod Cons: City and Suburbia

This semester we will read a selection of fiction that takes place in and around London.  Readings include: E. M. Forster' s Howards End, Virginia Woolf's The Years, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, Muriel Spark's The Bachelors, Djuna Barnes' Metroland, Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

265.01

Mr. Russell  MW  10:30-11:45

Selected Author:

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 writer's critical and popular reception. This course alternates from year to year with English 365.

Topic for 2009/10: Vladimir Nabokov.

280.01

Mr. Mack   TR  9:00-10:15

Classics of Modern Children's Literature:

This course provides a theoretically informed introduction to some of the most significant and foundational classics of modern children's literature within the Anglophone tradition. The readings encountered within the first several weeks of the course suggest that the perceived canonical traditions of literature written specifically for an audience of younger readers begin early on both to embrace and to question the Romantic and subsequent early Victorian legacies that posited "Childhood" as a privileged social construct - i.e., as a stage that was to be characterized most by its posture of fragile and somehow intangible innocence. The individual authors and works read throughout the term themselves trace a fascinating dialectic between those who would look somehow to perpetuate both such a construct and its implications (e.g. Arthur Ransome, "B.B.", Alison Uttley) on the one hand, and those who would (perhaps) openly disavow those same notions (e.g., Richard Hughes, Natalie Babbitt) on the other. The course thus - in the process of introducing (and perhaps occasionally reintroducing) students to some of the most enjoyed and perennially popular texts for children written in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries - engages in a vital and on-going debate regarding the history and nature of childhood itself, and openly addresses the perception of children and young adults both as the consumers and as the possible constructions of such literature, while also addressing a number of significant issues related to the cultivation of national, cultural, and ethnic identity, generally. Texts may include Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons (1930), Noel Streatfeild, Circus Shoes (1938), "B.B." [Denys Watkins-Pitchford], Brendon Chase (1944), Noel Langley, The Land of Green Ginger (1936), Alison Uttley, A Traveller in Time (1939), Lucy M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe (1954), Gillian Avery, The Elephant War (1960), Natalie Babbit, Tuck Everlasting (1975), Robert O'Brien, Z for Zachariah (1975).

290 a or b.

Field Work
Field work is open by special permission of the associate chair, and is usually offered for one-half unit of credit.
Field Work projects are sponsored by individual faculty members in the department.  Students interested in Field Work should see page 30 for further details on the requirements.

Independent Study

Independent Study is open by special permission of the associate chair. Independent Study is intended to supplement (not duplicate) the regular curricular offerings by defining special projects in reading and writing under the direction of an individual faculty member.  The prerequisite for Independent Study includes 2 units of 200-level work in English.  One unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.

Application forms for Independent Study are available in the English department office.

298 a or b                                (1/2 Unit)

Prerequisite:  2 units of 200-level work in English, and by permission of the associate chair.  1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.

399 a or b                                (1/2 Unit)

Open by permission of the associate chair.  1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.

Senior Independent Work

Open by permission of the associate chair.  1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases.