[Before 1800]  This course has as its first goal the rapid mastery of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) as a language for reading knowledge. Selected prose and short poems, such as The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon, will be read in the original, with emphasis on literary appreciation as well as linguistic analysis. After that, our objectives will be an appreciation of Beowulf in the original, through the use of the instructor’s dual-language edition, and an understanding of the major issues in interpreting the poem.

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.

Limited to 15 students.  Preregistration is not allowed.  Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course.  Spring semester.  Writer-in-Residence Hall.

(Offered as ENGL 309 and EUST 309.)  A critical reading in English translation of substantial portions of Marcel Proust’s great work of fiction and philosophy, A la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).  An extended synopsis of the entire work will be provided.  Class discussion and exercises will concentrate on major passages of the work (amounting to roughly half of the whole).  Attention will be given to the tradition of critical commentary in English on Proust’s work and its place as a document of European modernism.

Readings and discussions centering on the work of Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. Some attention also to A.E. Housman, Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

Spring semester. Professor Pritchard.

(Offered as ENGL 289 and FAMS 222.)  The topic changes each time the course is taught.

(Offered as ENGL 281, FAMS 220, and ARHA 272.)  “Foundations and Integrations” will be an annual team-taught course between a Critical Studies scholar and moving-image artist.  A requirement of the Film and Media Studies major, it will build on critical analysis of moving images and introductory production work to develop an integrated critical and creative practice.  Focused in particular around themes and concepts, students will develop ideas in both written and visual form.  The theme for spring 2013 will be “Film and Inner Life.”

(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210.)  An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of a few critical and descriptive terms, together with a selection of various films (classic and contemporary, foreign and American) for illustration and discussion.  The terms for discussion will include, among others:  the cinematic image, mise en scène, montage and editing, narration in cinema, genre, authorship.  Frequent critical writing required.

Children’s books are a site of first encounter, a doorway to literacy and literature.  This course will offer both a history of book production for child readers in England and the United States and an exploration of what these first books can teach us about the attractions, expectations, and responsibilities of reading.

Spring semester.  Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.

This course is concerned with the problem of honesty in subjective expression.  We will study both fictional and non-fictional first person narratives.  Some narrators deliberately deceive, and some deceive without intending to.  How does an elusive understanding of the self make even an “honest” narrator’s project of telling harder, if not impossible?  Readings will include works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Lauren Slater, and Geoff Dyer.  Students will be required to produce both critical and creative writi

An introduction to the study of the novel, through the exploration of a variety of critical terms (plot, character, point of view, tone, realism, identification, genre fiction, the book) and methodologies (structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic).  We will draw on a selection of novels in English to illustrate and complicate those terms; possible authors include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Emma Donoghue, David Foster Wallace, Monique Truong, Jennifer Egan.