Search Results
Your search for courses · during 24FA, 25WI, 25SP · tagged with ENGL Tradition 2 · returned 10 results
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AMST 269 Woodstock Nation 6 credits
“If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.” We will test the truth of that popular adage by exploring the American youth counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the turbulent period of the late sixties. Using examples from literature, music, and film, we will examine the hope and idealism, the violence, confusion, wacky creativity, and social mores of this seminal decade in American culture. Topics explored will include the Beat Generation, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, LSD, and the rise of environmentalism, feminism, and Black Power.
Extra time
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ENGL 211 Haunting the Margins of American Literature 6 credits
Nineteenth-century Americans were hardly strangers to ghosts and the world beyond. In fact, many actively sought communion with the dead by attending table-rapping séances and sitting for spirit photographs. This class will analyze a variety of literary hauntings from the long nineteenth century to explore the cultural anxieties and desires they might represent. Paying particular attention to questions of race, gender, and sexuality, we will consider how figures ghosted from history become present in ways that demand attention and, at times, redress. Authors will include Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.
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ENGL 213 Being Queer in Nineteenth-Century America 6 credits
What forms of community, gender identification, and desire were imagined as possible in the literature and life writing of nineteenth-century Americans? How did race and class shift the terms of what could be imagined, and how did these possibilities change with the sexual taxonomies developed by scientists? This course will explore these questions by reading American literary texts from 1799 to 1899 alongside shorter works of history and theory. We will consider not only the discourse around wealthy, white “romantic friendships,” but also the ways that poor and non-white bodies were deemed queer in conduct manuals and scientific texts.
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ENGL 215 Modern American Literature 6 credits
A survey of some of the central movements and texts in American literature, from World War I to the present. Topics covered will include modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat generation and postmodernism.
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ENGL 227 Imagining the Borderlands 6 credits
This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is “American”, what is race, what is human.
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ENGL 228 Banned. Censored. Reviled. 6 credits
What makes a work of art dangerous? While present-day attacks on books, libraries, and schools feel unprecedented, writers and artists have always had to fight efforts to suppress their work, often at great personal and societal cost. We will study literature, films, graphic novels, images, music, and other materials that have been challenged and attacked as offensive, taboo, or transgressive, and also explore strategies of resistance to censorship.
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ENGL 230 Studies in African American Literature: From the 1950s to the Present 6 credits
We will explore developments in African American literature since the 1950s with a focus on literary expression in the Civil Rights Era; on the Black Arts Movement; on the new wave of feminist/womanist writing; and on the experimental and futuristic fictions of the twenty-first century. Authors to be read include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin Young, and Tracy Smith.
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ENGL 233 Writing and Social Justice 6 credits
Social justice is fairness as it manifests in society, but who gets to determine what fairness looks, sounds, feels like? The self-described Black Canadian poet Dionne Brand says that she doesn’t write toward justice because that doesn’t exist, but that she writes against tyranny. If we use that framework, how does that change our own writing and our own notions of justice in our or any time? What is the role of literary writing, especially fiction, the essay, and poetry in the collective and individual quest to understand and build conditions that could yield increased potential for social justice? In this course, students will read, analyze, discuss, and write about various texts that might be considered to be against myriad tyrannies, if not necessarily toward social justice. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Phillip Metres, Toni Morrison, Myung Mi Kim, and M. NourbeSe Philipe.
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ENGL 255 The Poetics of Disability 6 credits
Scholar Michael Davidson has suggested that “perhaps the closest link between poetry and disability lies in a conundrum within the genre itself: poetry makes language visible by making language strange.” In this class we will read a wide range of poets who tackle ideas of normalcy and “ability” by centering disability consciousness and culture. We will engage with poetry’s capacity as a genre to destabilize our assumptions and generate new imaginaries. Alongside contemporary U.S. poetry, we will study contemporary theory in the field of disability studies in order to better understand the critical conversations around the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability.
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ENGL 338 Dickinson, Moore, Bishop 6 credits
An intensive study of lyric invention and innovation in the work of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. Starting with formalist readings and historicizing the poetic subjects they pursued in common (self and society, loss and knowledge, nature, gender, the senses, the body), we will explore their practice, reception, and influence in relation to changing Modernist poetics, 1860 to 1970, and to specifics of place: Amherst, Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil.
- Spring 2025
- LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND One 6 credit English course (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with grades of C- or better.