Graduate Schedules and Descriptions Archive
Summer 2006
Six Week 1 (May 30-July 7)
ENG 581—Major Texts in Western Literature
course number: 2433
meets:
TTH 6:00-9:30 p.m. HU 132
H. Elam
This course will address a few texts in the Western literary tradition and some of the major issues they raise. Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, segments from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a brief text by Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground) will address the movement of narrative from ancient epic to modern novel/short story. Requirements: short paper, final paper, work groups, in-class presentations.
ENG 581—Studies in Literary Criticism - Antinomian and Puritan Legacy in Emerson
course number: 1553
MTTH 6:00-8:30 p.m. HU 108
B. Arsic
The class will address Emerson’s relationship to antinomianism as well as the way he was influenced by the philosophy of Jonathan Edwards. We will try to “reconstruct” the cultural contexts of both antinomianism and the Second Awakening and examine how they shaped an intellectual climate that was receptive to the ideas of both Anne Hutchinson and Jonathan Edwards. However, we will work principally through close analysis of texts by Edwards and Emerson that address questions already raised by antinomianism: the practice of listening (hearing silence), communal voices, the spaces of confinement (body, world of shadows, thoughts), the question of grace and love, the impersonal, abandonment, conversion, secret stigmata and obedience to the law. Readings: Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, Jonathan Edwards, The Great Awakening, Typological Writings, Emerson, Essays.
Six Week 2 ( June 26-August 4)
ENG 581—The Romantics
course number: 1518
meets: MW 6:00-9:30p.m. ED-B22
H. Elam
This is a course on a “period’ or “movement” in which the very concepts of period or movement will be put into question. Romanticism—the focus of which in this course is poetry—raises questions about definitions, about genres, about what is marginal and what is central, about the nature of the fragment. All these are odd subjects—yet substantial enough to have generated philosophical inquiry. They will be addressed through close readings of four major poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. Midterm, two papers, intense class discussion.
Four Week 2 ( June 26 –July 21 )
ENG 580—19th Century Fiction & Contemporary Metafiction
course number: 2328
meets:
Daily 3:20-5:40p.m. HU 133
R. Craig
This is a class in themes and figures of the nineteenth century and in the ways in which subsequent writers have re-imagined them. We concentrate on four texts that have inspired various re-tellings: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. One of our objectives will be to read nineteenth century narratives against later re-imaginings of them to get a sense of changing cultural history. Not only do ideas emanating from the works of Shelley, James, Stevenson, and Wilde undergo significant changes in the modern and post-modern periods but artistic forms and genres also evolve.
