(Offered as ENGL 383 and FAMS 360)  What’s intimate about cinema?  Since its invention, cinema has spurred pronouncements on the emotional, affective, and even spiritual impact of the filmic image, as well as deeper examinations of the specific devices through which films produce intimate experience (the close-up, the kiss, etc.).

Many Americans believe that a free public educational system is crucial in a democratic society.  What concretely does this mean?  The question has shaped a persistent and unresolved debate throughout American history to the present, as it will our work together.  Two fundamental and contradictory questions have centered nearly every controversy:  (1) Should education be a competitive system to establish and legitimate a hierarchy of merit?  (2) Should schools focus on the fullest development of each student so as to enable her or him to participate equally in a dem

(Offered as ENGL 353 and AMST 353.)  This course begins with the premise that if we are to understand the rise of nationalism in our time, it is worthwhile to grapple with its roots.  Although these roots reach back long before the beginning of the United States, we will focus on nationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it was linked to debates about race, social Darwinism, colonialism and immigration.  Some of the guiding questions will include:  How was nationalism entangled with Anglo-American claims to “native” American ide

Readings in twentieth-century writers such as Henry James, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, George Orwell, Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Spring semester.  Professor Emeritus Pritchard.

This course offers students an immersion in nineteenth-century British fiction, from Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad.  Reading a selection of the long novels (both serious and comic, restrained and emotionally overwrought, domestic and imperial) that continue to shape our sense of what the novel is and does, we will ask how the Victorian novel’s imagination of things like love and sex, gender and politics, the relation between the aesthetic and the social, and race, ethnicity, and empire, remain with us still.  Engaging with a range of critical approaches to the novel and to no

(Offered as LJST 317 and ENGL 337)  [Research Seminar] It is well known that Shakespeare’s texts put into play an intricate set of juridical terms and forms. The premise of this course is that we can retrieve from this “putting into play” a unique way of thinking about modern juridical order at the moment of its inception.

An advanced level fiction class.  Students will undertake a longer project as well as doing exercises every week exploring technical problems.

Requisite:  Completion of a previous course in creative writing.  Admission with consent of the instructor.  Limited to 15 students.  Preregistration is not allowed.  Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course.  Spring semester.  Visiting Writer Kimani.

(Offered as THDA 370 and ENGL 322) A workshop/seminar for writers who want to complete a full-length play or series of plays. Emphasis will be on bringing a script to a level where it is ready for the stage. Although there will be some exercises in class to continue the honing of playwriting skills and the study of plays by established writers as a means of exploring a wide range of dramatic vocabularies, most of the class time will be spent reading and commenting on the plays of the workshop members as these plays progress from the first draft to a finished draft.

(Offered as ENGL 321 and BLST 312.)  Abdul JanMohamed argues that colonialism produces a compartmentalized world in which white authors write to extend their domination through demeaning depictions of blacks, while black authors use their writing to recuperate their people’s dignity through, to use Chinua Achebe’s inventive term, “re-storying.”  The lingering question:  what does this “re-storying” entail?  And how do African writers imagine “whiteness”?