Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester. The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 486 and FAMS 421.)  As an upper-division seminar in film theory, this course will offer an in-depth examination of historically significant writings that analyze film form and its social functions and effects.  Our particular focus will be on the production of film theory in a collective setting:  the film/media journal.  Thus, the course will consist of several units, each centering on a particular journal in generally chronological order (such as the Modernist Close Up; two phases of the French Cahiers du Cinéma, which has set

Avant-garde poetry resists definition.  In this class, we will explore poetry that defies convention, be it formal (exploding the poetic verse line), material (appearing outside of the conventional venues of the published, mass-produced book), or linguistic (using everyday language rather than poetic diction).  We will read widely from a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century poets as well as important nineteenth-century forebears.  The course will center on the movements and schools of avant-garde poetry in the Anglo-American tradition, such as modernism (T.S.

This research seminar provides students with an opportunity to engage in archival research in the world’s most complete collection of the Wordsworth family’s manuscripts, letters, journals, books, and related materials, at The Jerwood Centre, in Grasmere, UK.

A poetry writing course, but with a strong emphasis on reading.  Students will closely examine the work of various poets and periods, then attempt to write plausible imitations of their own, all by way of learning about poetry from the inside, as it were.

Admission with consent of the instructor.  Limited to 15 students.  Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course.  Spring semester.  Writer-in-Residence Hall.

(Offered as ENGL 417 and EUST 417.)  This course explores creative responses to the destruction of European Jewry, differentiating between literature written in extremis in ghettos, concentration/extermination camps, or in hiding, and the vast post-war literature about the Holocaust.  How to balance competing claims of individual and collective experience, the rights of the imagination and the pressures for historical accuracy?  How does the Holocaust in American culture differ from the Holocaust narrated in Jewish or European languages?  Readings from a variety of liter

(Offered as ENGL 377 and FAMS 383.)  This course focuses on the documentary impulse–that is, the desire for an encounter with the “real”–as a way of understanding the different philosophies and ideologies that have shaped the history and practice of documentary. We will approach canonical studies of the modes of documentary (e.g., expository, observational, poetic, reflexive), placing pressure on concepts whose resonance or antagonism has shaped the notion of documentary, such as spectacle, authenticity, reality, mimesis, art, fiction, and performance.

(Offered as ENGL 373 and FAMS 353.)  U.S. film in the 1970s was evident of tremendous aesthetic and economic innovation. Rife with but not limited to conspiracy, disaster, love and war, 1970s popular films range from the counter-cultural to the commercial, the independent to the industrial. Thus, while American cinema of the first half of the decade is known as the work of groundbreaking independent “auteurs,” the second half of the decade witnessed an industrial transformation through the emergence of the giant blockbuster hit.

“I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced,” Thoreau writes in Walden.  “Extra vagance!

(Offered as SWAG 329, BLST 377 [US], and ENGL 368.) History has long valorized passive, obedient, and long-suffering black women alongside aggressive and outspoken black male leaders and activists.  This course provides an alternative narrative to this misrepresentation, as we will explore how “bad” is defined by one’s race, gender, class, and sexuality as well as how black women have transgressed the boundaries of what it means to be “good” in U.S. society.