Courses
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Bower Meadow
ENG 262
Course Description: This course is designed to familiarize you with the literature of England and its historical contexts from about 1700 to about 1900. The work in it should also improve your ability to appreciate, analyze, and write coherently about literature. Contributing to the coherence of the course as an historical survey, our discussions will often focus on specific issues: 1) The difficulties of dealing with cultural changes, particularly those caused by the rise of industrialism at the very end of the eighteenth century. 2) Possibilities in an industrial society for radical political and social transformation, which can be seen either as threats to established political and social order, or, alternately, as the promise of a new and better one. 3) Changing gender roles and gender relations. 4) The role of the artist (usually the writer) in society. 5) Attitudes toward religious belief as a system of foundational or sustaining moral and spiritual values.
English 262 as a "Learning Community" - As you well know by now, learning is an interactive process. Students and teachers interact with each other and with educational materials (texts, films, specimens, etc) in unique and original ways sometimes so as to actually create "knowledge" but more often to understand, as fully as possible, knowledge that has been generated by others. In order for this process to be successful, our classroom must be an interactive environment. This means that all students are responsible at every class meeting for having read and thought about assigned materials and for interacting with each other and with me. For this reason attendance and participation will play a significant role in determining your success in this course (and, thus, your grade).
TEXTS:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume Two. SEVENTH EDITION. Abrams et al. (Norton)
ENG 463 - The Victorian Period
Course Description: This course is designed as a selective survey of Victorian literature, focusing on non-fiction prose, fiction, and poetry published between 1830 and 1900. Like Victorian England itself, the course should offer something for everyone's tastes. Our focus will be on issues that were of urgent interest to Victorians: social problems and possible solutions to them in the first industrial nation, gender relations and sexuality ("the woman question"), threats (and alternatives) to religious belief, attitudes toward art (especially literature) and its influence in the social world, and the question of empire. Students in the course should not only learn a good deal about Victorian literature and culture (especially regarding the issues noted above), but also hone their writing and research skills.
English 463 as a "Learning Community" - As you well know by now, learning is an interactive process. Students and teachers interact with each other and with educational materials (texts, films, specimens, etc) in original ways so as to actually create A knowledge and to try to understand knowledge that has been generated by others. For this process to be successful, our classroom must be an interactive environment. This means that all students are responsible at every class meeting for having read and thought about assigned materials and for interacting with each other and with me. For this reason participation will play a significant role in determining your success in this course (10% of your grade).
TEXTS:
Altick, Richard. Victorian People and Ideas (Norton, 1973).
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (Bedford. Ed. Ross Murfin, 1996).
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton (Broadview, 2002).
Mermin and Tucker, eds. Victorian Literature, 1830-1900 (Harcourt, 2002).
ENG 491 - Gender and Textuality in 19th Century English Literature
Course Description: This course examines the operations of gender ideology in a variety of nineteenth-century texts, prose non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, beginning with the first major challenge to established gender ideologies, Mary Wollstonecraft´s Vindication of the Rights of Women, written at the time of the French Revolution. The course will be introduced by a careful reading of Toril Moi´s brief history and analysis of the development of feminist literary and social criticism: Sexual/Textual Politics. Discussion of this work will provide theoretical foundations for analysis of both literary and non-literary texts in the course. Examination of formal issues and historical contexts, as well as matters of substance, will help students understand how gender politics inflects textual production and reception at all levels.
ENG 560
Course Description: The focus of this class is on Victorian women poets, whom we discuss in the dual contexts of Victorian women´s socialization (including their education) and the marketplace for poetry, especially women´s poetry, during the period (in various venues from traditional books to periodicals to illustrated annuals). We read a variety of poets, including those who are famous (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) as well as less well known figures: Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Proctor, Augusta Webster, Michael Field, Mary Coleridge, and others. We also explore the renewal of critical interest in Victorian women poets in the context of feminist/gender theory and criticism.