ENG 140 Reading Literature is a required foundation course in the English major that satisfies the General Education Cultural Interpretation requirement. It emphasizes close reading of texts from different historical periods and introduces students to literary conventions and terminology as well as to library and Internet resources available for research. It is a prerequisite for ENG 245 and all other 200-level and higher courses. This course does not count as credit toward the English major.
In this class, we’ll learn the mechanics of literary analysis through familiarization with library resources and deep close reading. To achieve these results, we’ll take a ghastly tour through some of literary history’s major revenge texts. Our tour begins with early canonical revenge plays by Seneca and Shakespeare. Then, we’ll proceed to the 19th century, exploring how authors including Shelley and Poe adapted elements of the revenge story to shape the Gothic. Finally, we’ll end with diverse 20th and 21st century texts that further adapt and amalgamate revenge tropes in various ways. By the end of class, you’ll understand that revenge narratives often interrogate systems of justice. Specifically, they depict instances of vigilantism to mark points of inequity and corruption perverting the system. We’ll explore this concept and its offshoots through work that prepares you for the English major, including note-taking exercises that set the foundation for three major essays. Be prepared to read . . . or else! Muahaha!
TEXTS: In addition to shorter works posted on Brightspace, course texts will include the Penguin Classics edition of Phaedra and Other Plays (edited by R. Scott Smith), the Penguin Classics edition of Five Revenge Tragedies (edited by Emma Smith), the Broadview edition of Shelley’s Frankenstein (edited by MacDonald and Scherf), and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
ASSESSMENT: 3-4 essays of 5-8 pages and an end-of-semester multimedia presentation that combines design software with class reflection
This course introduces students to the methods of literary interpretation and the art of reading texts attentively. The course emphasizes close reading of a wide variety of different genres from different historical periods and understanding how the meanings of texts relate to their formal devices, period conventions, and cultural contexts.
TEXTS: The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms; The Norton Introduction to Literature (shorter 11th edition)
ASSESSMENT: a combination of quizzes, short and long papers, and exam
This course is an introduction to the principles and practices of writing fiction and poetry; other genres may be added at the discretion of the instructor. Students will be exposed to a variety of writing modes through exercises and engagement with literary texts. Emphasis is on using imaginative and precise language, on developing critical skills through workshops, and on assembling a portfolio of revised student writing.
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
NOTE: ENG 201 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
| Professor | |||
| Bendzela | MW | 9:30 – 10:45 | Gorham |
| Bendzela | MW | 12:30 – 1:45 | Gorham |
| Cheung | TR | 11:00 – 12:15 | Gorham |
| Cheung | TR | 12:30 – 1:45 | Gorham |
| Kelly | Online | ||
| Menting | TR | 3:30 – 4:45 | Portland |
| Sruoginis | Online (2 sections) | ||
| Tussing | MW | 11:00 – 12:15 | Portland |
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Engaged Learning Requirement
Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
NOTE: ENG 204 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
This career-oriented writing skills course explores how professional writers accomplish business goals through text. Most often, these goals require writers to craft strategic emotional appeals that prompt a particular demographic to complete a call to action, such as buy, subscribe, schedule, or vote. Specifically, we will complete the responsibilities associated with various professional job titles – including newswriter, content writer, marketer, and job seeker – ultimately learning how to craft text that supports sales and branding objectives. Our guiding concept will be “economy,” which works on two levels. First, we will learn sentence-level composition strategies for economical writing, so that we can write streamlined and digestible prose that produces maximum effect. Second, we will deploy this economical writing to achieve results within a business economy, where organizations make pitches to their audiences to achieve a call-to-action. This class is taught by a professor who worked as a marketer in a past life and should be helpful to any students who want guidance adapting their writing skills to occupational opportunities.
TEXTS: Online resources will include examples from the USM Library Ebooks: Gunelius, Writing the Parts of an Email Message, 157-166 and Handley and Habeshian, Writing for Email, 219-225. Other resources will be assigned by the instructor.
ASSESSMENTS: 3-5 portfolios consisting of smaller documents that work together to complete professional writing goals, including a job application portfolio, a newswriter portfolio that includes a news roundup and various articles, and an advertising campaign portfolio that combines strategy with social media content
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Foundation Course in Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
NOTE: ENG 205 does not satisfy the English Major Writing Requirement.
Knowing how to write, revise, and shape sentences will help you negotiate the varied writing contexts you will encounter as a student and as a professional. You can use this knowledge to shape your style according to audience and genre, so that your sentences contribute to clear, effective communication. Being able to identify and manipulate sentence structures and types will prepare you for new writing situations that call for particular styles of writing.
TEXTS: Bacon, Nora, The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013; Hacker, Diana, A Writer’s Reference, 6th Ed. New York and Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. [An earlier edition from College Writing or another course will serve for this class.] Other readings will be available on Brightspace.
ASSESSMENT: frequent quizzes, style imitation exercises, personal style reflection, genre exercises
ENG 220 World Masterpieces I is a required course in the English major that will cover the major works of Western and non-Western literature from the classical, medieval, and early modern eras and provide an historical foundation for subsequent coursework in literature and theory.
Fulfills Elective Requirement (Requirement Term Spring 2015 or prior)
Fulfills English Major Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2015 or later)
In this survey, we will study some of the most enduring works of early global literature through the lens of storytelling. What stories endure from these earlier cultures, and what do these stories have to teach us about the cultures in which they were produced? We will trace the emergence of epic heroes across the world, seeking to understand the cultural conditions that lead disparate cultures to produce similar figures. Likewise, we shall consider how genres are informed by sociopolitical contexts in both classical and medieval texts.
TEXTS: Our reading will include excerpts from ancient and medieval epics, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ramayana, the Iliad, and Canterbury Tales; classical drama and lyric poetry; and stories about creation and storytelling from cultures around the world.
ASSESSMENT: short analytical essays; engaged participation in class discussion and writing activities; a semester-long commonplace book and reading journal; and a sustained research project
This course introduces students to the terminologies, methodologies, and writing strategies necessary to pursue a major in English. Through readings of both critical essays and literary works, we will study and compare a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to textual analysis and explore the relationships between literature and culture. There will be a strong emphasis on writing assignments that teach skills necessary both for effective critical thinking and for writing a literary research paper. Ideally, you should take this course with other 200-level major requirements, such as ENG 220 World Masterpieces. As this course prepares you for reading and research, you should take it before any 300-level literature or theory course. It is a prerequisite for the capstone seminar and is a required course for English majors.
This course will introduce literature as a unique form of cultural expression and an academic field of study. Using the New Criticism model, we will practice close readings of poetry and plays, highlighting their formal, textual features. We will analyze Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl as embodying the American genre of the slave narrative. We will assess how Donald Barthelme’s Snow White foregrounds postmodernism as an aesthetic response to modernism. The course will also take up digital literature as a new form of literary production, like Twitterature and video poetry. We will study essays by T.S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf, and selections from the work of Andrew Marvell, Denise Lows, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Langston Hughes, Matthew Arnold, Robert Frost, and Leo Tolstoy.
Throughout the course, these questions will be our chief concern: What makes a text a literary text? How can we study its unique textual and aesthetic elements? Can literature reflect and shape social and cultural mores? If so, how? How can we draw from New Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Feminist theory, and Postcolonial discourse to enrich our understanding of literary studies? How are digital technologies influencing the production and reception of literature in the contemporary moment?
Researching, writing, and re-writing thesis-based papers, with a bibliography and diverse sources, are strongly emphasized throughout the course.
TEXTS: Snow White, Life of a Slave Girl, several poems/essays available online or on Brightspace ASSESSMENT: weekly informal responses to readings; three formal critical analyses of literary texts; regular class discussion. At least one required Zoom conference with the instructor to discuss class progress and content.
ASSESSMENT: weekly informal responses to readings; three formal critical analyses of literary texts; regular class discussion. At least one required Zoom conference with the instructor to discuss class progress and content.
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
How does a piece of fiction evolve, from inception through revision? The aim of this class is to provide you with tools to help guide you through the writing process. We will focus on the craft and technique of writing fiction through a series of miniature units on character, point of view, dialogue, structure, voice and revision. During these units, we will read widely from published work by a variety of contemporary authors and experiment with short, experimental writing assignments on each topic. This class follows a workshop model in which students will submit their own works in progress to the class, giving and receiving written and oral feedback on their stories. By the end of the semester, each student will draft a short story and take it through the revision process. The goal here is to think about writing as a process of discovery and experimentation and to push our writing beyond the constraints of its original conception.
TEXTS: We will read assorted short stories, pieces of flash fiction and craft lectures by a number of writers including Grace Paley, Edward P. Jones, Flannery O’Connor, George Saunders, Steven Millhauser, Charles D’Ambrosio, Lorrie Moore, Donald Barthelme, Tobias Wolff, Amelia Grey, Amy Hempel and more.
ASSESSMENT: short writing assignments; longer workshop submissions; written and oral feedback during workshop; revision of a short story; and class participation. Because it is impossible to “grade” a work in progress, assessment will be mostly based on the feedback you give, the effort you put into assignments, and the thoroughness of your revision.
Prerequisite: ENG 201
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
This course will acquaint students with the basic elements of poetry writing. Class is structured around poetry writing, reading, discussion, and workshop. Students will submit poems to the class as a whole for comment and critique. Emphasis will be on the study and imitation of contemporary writers, exercises that stress the elements of poetry, and the development of personal approaches.
TEXTS: We will study poems by modern and contemporary poets, texts on style, craft, technique and form, as well as various articles on poetics.
ASSESSMENT: discussion and the workshopping of poems; the completion of writing exercises and response-reflections; feedback on peers’ poems; a brief project and presentation; and the quality and effort put into the final portfolio
Prerequisite: ENG 301 or instructor’s permission
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Creative Expression Requirement
Poetry Workshop is for students who have engaged in the practice of poetry and who want to continue developing the skills and style they’ve already established, while at the same time challenging that style and exploring new possibilities. The writing of poetry begins with reading, so we will proceed largely by reading 20th-and 21st-century poems, writing new poems of our own, and giving each other feedback on drafts. Exercises and/or close reading of poems will happen every week. Students will produce a portfolio of revised poems.
TEXTS: The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris; The Poem is You, edited by Stephanie Burt; Rocket Fantastic by Gabrielle Calvocoressi; Post-Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz; So to Speak by Terrance Hayes; The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón; and other poems as needed.
ASSESSMENT: weekly exercises (25%); attendance and participation (10%); recitation (10%); book discussion leader (15%); final portfolio (40%)
Fulfills Writing Requirement (Requirement Term Summer 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW ENG 305 Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Fulfills the General Education WRI 3 Requirement
Writing, like playing the piano, is a skill achieved through practice, but also like music, writing requires knowledge of fundamental units. Just as one cannot play the piano without understanding scales, chords, and phrasing, one cannot write without knowledge of words, phrases, clauses, and patterns of sentences. While it is possible to play or write by ear, most musicians and writers need to learn basics first. And in both cases, teaching the skill requires theoretical understanding of those basics. Writing is thus both a content and a practice. This course aims to conceptualize writing as form, skill, and convention as well as process, and to develop a theoretical grasp of rhetoric, syntax, and style as a basis for editing and revision as well as enhanced clarity and grace.
In this course students will focus on sentence-level writing as a specific skill and as a basis for larger structures, developing knowledge of theory and style as well as expertise in editing. Specifically we will work on the following objectives: 1) to understand syntax as rhetoric, that is, to see grammar and sentence-level writing as central to meaning rather than as arbitrary rules, 2) to develop an understanding of grammar and syntax as a range of choices that allow complexity as well as clarity and style, 3) to develop an understanding of these choices as possibilities for meaning rather than as a way of avoiding error, and 4) to use these skills to write a full essay that is rhetorically effective, stylistically sophisticated, and intellectually distinctive.
TEXTS: Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Bedford); The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed.
ASSESSMENT: All readings, regular assignments and exercises in sentence structure and style, assignments of specific paragraph forms and styles, and a term paper developed in sequence over the semester that demonstrates ability to use all course concepts. There may also be short tests or papers on theory, depending on the class. The course will consist primarily of discussion, joint editing, and workshops on student writing.
Prerequisite: ENG 302 preferred or permission of instructor
Fulfills Writing Requirement
Pushkin said, “Ten years is not too much time to think about writing a novel.” That’s probably good advice, but since there are barely four months in the semester we’ll have to jump right in.
Our focus will be on creating openings that are so deviously compelling that our readers will beg us to continue. We’ll read novels and novel excerpts and do lots of in-class exercises. Before the end of our class, each student will submit an opening chapter draft to be workshopped. If it’s not obvious, this is a writing-intensive course.
Students will compose and revise at least thirty pages of new material, but should expect to write much more.
TEXTS: Mongrels, Stephen Graham Jones; The Friend, Sigrid Nunez; and Normal People, Sally Rooney
ASSESSMENT: mastery of aspects of craft, completion of assignments, reading quizzes, and class participation
Fulfills Elective Requirement
This course examines different ways post-apocalyptic fictional worlds, both in prose fiction and in film, are constructed from preeminently ideological ideas of “human nature.” In different decades across the 20th Century, writers imagine different answers to these and similar questions: How do people act when civilization collapses and social bonds must be re-built? What is “human nature” when people live in demolished worlds, struggling to survive or rebuild?
TEXTS include representative works by Jack London, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and others. We will also view some representative films.
ASSESSMENT: a combination of in-class writing, quizzes, short and long papers, and exams
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
The concept of the self has undergone critical changes in the history of autobiography. Many modern autobiographical writers have completely dispensed with traditional notions of the self, expanding the genre and giving it a strong literary focus. By comparing a selection of autobiographical texts by modern authors such as Rilke, Stein, Barthes, and H. D. with more traditional forms of autobiography, the course investigates the historical vicissitudes in the conceptualization of a “self.”
TEXTS: Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions; N. Scott Momaday’s The Names; Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Marjorie Perloff’s The Vienna Paradox
ASSESSMENT: four critical essays; one in-class report
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills Public and Professional Writing Minor/Certificate Elective
Memes, fanzines, interactive fiction, blogs, social media platforms—the list of new writing genres generated by cyberspace is constantly growing. Such new genres have led to many claims about the changing nature of writing and constructing meaning in interactive and nonlinear environments. But what do these new writing spaces actually offer us as writers, readers, and thinkers? In this writing course, you will explore ways in which writing practices are changing in light of emerging digital technologies. Recognizing that the act of writing can no longer be confined to the production of printed words alone, you will engage in the analysis and production of digital multimodal texts that blend alphabetic, visual, and aural components. You will learn key rhetorical concepts (e.g., argument, arrangement, appeals, audience, context, delivery, invention), which can guide both the reading and writing of digital multimodal texts. Through these kinds of analyses, we will examine the web’s relation to and reconstruction of notions of identity, community, and democracy (e.g., how race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship are negotiated, affected, and challenged by the web). Ultimately, we will question whether or not the web constructs new forums for public discourse and/or replicates current power structures in new guises.
TEXTS: Readings will be available via electronic reserve.
ASSESSMENT: four multimodal projects (accompanied by short writing assignments); an oral presentation; class participation and peer-response; generative/in-class writing
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement
This course is an introduction to major schools of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Emphasis is placed on identifying points of agreement and divergence between various theories and methods for interpreting literature. Specific theoretical perspectives to be studied may include (but are not limited to) structuralist and poststructuralist thought, psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Lacan), deconstruction, Marxist and feminist perspectives, and cultural and gender theories.
TEXT: Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: Anthology
ASSESSMENT: four papers and an examination
Fulfills Criticism and Theory Requirement (Requirement Term Summer 2021 or earlier)
Fulfills NEW Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies Requirement (Requirement Term Fall 2021 or later)
Fulfills General Education Culture, Power, & Equity/Diversity Requirement
In the age of digital connectivities (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X), we are constantly encountering and engaging in transnational circuits of ideas and knowledge production. How do we see the connectivity that happens on digital sites such as Facebook and X happen in literature? How do we see the production of identity that occurs on YouTube occur in literary texts? This course will focus on fictional, dramatic, and poetic accounts of the experiences of gender and sexuality as seen through the eyes of different writers. In reading literary texts written throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—and written from various parts of the world—we will interrogate how knowledge about gender and sexuality gets produced and circulated through writing and textual representation. We will address questions such as: How are writers defining femininity and masculinity? How do gender roles and ideas about sexuality get performed, negotiated, and subverted in these texts? How do ideas about gender and sexuality “move,” as some of the characters within the texts migrate across national borders? How do we understand gender and sexuality within the interlocking systems of race, class, and nationality? And finally, how might we understand gender and sexuality within the context of a transnational, global world constituted by histories of colonialism and racism?
TEXTS: Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (ISBN 0156628708); Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand (ISBN 0140183957); M. Butterfly – David Henry Hwang (ISBN 0452264669); E-mails from Scheherazade – Mohja Kahf (ISBN 0813026210); Other course texts (short stories, supplemental articles, pop culture pieces) will be provided as electronic documents/links.
ASSESSMENT: three major papers; an oral presentation; discussion posts; class participation and peer response; generative/in-class writing
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
In this course we will discuss the language, dramatic forms, themes, and characters in plays from different periods of Shakespeare’s career. Attention will be given to the historical contexts of the plays and a variety of critical theories will also make an appearance.
TEXTS: Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, and a Shakespeare “companion” of some kind TBD
ASSESSMENT: Grade will be based on essays, exams, and class participation.
Fulfills Historical Period Courses Before 1800 Requirement
This course investigates the emergence of new forms of self-determinative writing in the 18th century—autobiography, the travel journal, and the Bildungsroman (novel of self-development). Many of these discourses of self-determination were used by people who also influenced the social history of the period—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Thomas Jefferson. Their self-expressions will be read in conjunction with important social discourses of self-determination these writers produced: Rousseau’s “Social Contract,” Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” and Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.” We will also explore how early narratives of self-determination like The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African open up the possibility for later emancipatory writing reflected in autobiographies like that of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Ultimately, the course will explore how discourses of self-determination draw on one another and pave the way not only for the possibility of the democratic individualism we value but also the evolution toward what our constitutional founders called a “more perfect union” in American socio/political life.
TEXTS: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, ed. Werner Sollors, Norton Critical Edition, 2001; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Princeton U.P. Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel, Book 1, Chapts. 1-5; Wollstonecraft, Mary, Letters on Sweden, Denmark and Norway; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, (excerpts); “Review of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano” (in Norton Critical Edition); “Letters to Gilbert Imlay” (selections); Wordsworth, William, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind; short texts and excerpts available online or on Brightspace
ASSESSMENT: four five-page essays
Fulfills Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
This course explores the Victorian fascination with the monstrous and the idea of a supernatural reality beyond (or, depending on the world being depicted, beneath) the everyday. We begin with Romantic precursors and the emergence of classical gothic and then explore the different ways Victorian literature revises classical gothic and continually reconfigures the monstrous and supernatural. Our monsters and other supernatural beings and forces include fairies (not the nice kind), ghosts, vampires, mummies, werewolves, child-haunting demons, terrible ancient gods, doubled selves, uncanny curses, and a few unnameable things. Theoretical concerns will prominently include concepts of the abject, uncanny, fantastic, and monstrous. One particular focus will be the ways in which the Victorian gothic uses (both wittingly and unwittingly) gothic conventions to undermine the period’s dominant ideas of gender.
TEXTS: Key writers will include Coleridge, Gaskell, Le Fanu, Stevenson, Elliott, Hardy, Stoker, James, Kipling, and some literary women (Clifford, Nesbit, Braddon) who are not as well known today as they were in their time.
ASSESSMENT: a combination of quizzes, short and long papers, and exams
Students work one-on-one with an advisor to complete a thesis comparable to an MFA application portfolio. Typically, students revise 10 to 15 poems or 25 to 40 pages of fiction. May be completed concurrently with second workshop course.
Must be completed for student to receive Creative Writing Minor.
Prerequisite: ENG 302, 303, 304, or 306
Requires: Permission of Advisor
Fulfills Elective Requirement
Fulfills the General Education Engaged Learning Requirement
Fulfills Public and Professional Writing Minor Elective
This internship is an opportunity for qualified English majors to gain experience in professional writing outside the classroom. Duties may include researching, drafting, and editing articles or press releases while learning other technical aspects of professional writing. Students have held internships with businesses, non-profits, and a wide variety of publishers, including Alice James Books, The Bangor Daily News, The Gorham Times, and many others.
PREREQUISITES: Serious interest in professional writing and an application filed with the Coordinator of Internships are required. Guidelines for the application are on the Department’s website or in hard copy in the English department office. The application should be submitted to the Coordinator during pre-registration, or, at the latest, before the end of the current semester.
ASSESSMENT: Completion of the semester’s work at internship site. An internship report supported by published work of the semester is required for a Pass/Fail grade. Guidelines for the final report are available from the Coordinator.
A seminar is a small class (limit of 15 students) designed to encourage independent thinking, intensive student participation, and in-depth research on topics of the student’s choice related to the seminar topic. Typically, seminars allow a professor to teach a focused subject of special interest, one on which the professor has done recent research and/or scholarly writing.
Fulfills Capstone Seminar or Criticism and Theory Requirement
This course examines the digital revolution from theoretical, historical, and cultural perspectives, particularly the role of reading, writing, and creative activity in the digital age. It begins by studying the rise of print technology in the 15th century, its impact on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, to learn how print-era disruptions can help us understand the current age of digital disruption marked by mixed media literary and cultural production. A particular focus will be on theorizing the technology of the digital as a computational practice leading to new methods of reading and interpreting literature, like distant reading and macroanalysis. The course then picks up on four powerful contemporary trends—the Googlization of information, drone warfare, surveillance, and Artificial Intelligence—in order to examine their impact on culture, democracy, individuality, privacy, and globalization.
Throughout the course, students will develop skills in using a variety of digital tools to apply their knowledge in digital environments and explore humanistic questions about modernity, post-modernity, knowledge, individuality, privacy, peace, war, and the greater common good.
TEXTS: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Gregorie Chamayou, Theory of the Drone; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity; Siva Vaidyanathan, Googlization of Everything; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis; Franco Moretti, Distant Reading; David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, The Watchman in Pieces. Most texts will be available online at the course’s Brightspace site.
ASSESSMENT: several reflection pieces, class presentations, mid-term paper, and final research project, which will incorporate one or two digital tools
Fulfills Capstone Seminar or Historical Period Courses After 1800 Requirement
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is among the great literary artists of the 20th century, and the most prolific and celebrated Modernist woman writer. Our class will largely be directed by student inquiry and research, but in the course of reading all of Woolf’s major works—including To the Lighthouse, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves—we will contextualize Woolf’s relationship to Modernism, memory, gender, sexuality, feminism, ageing, race, and class. In this endeavor, we will be guided by reading from Jane Marcus’s Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race and the edited collection Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries. In addition to mining Woolf’s thematic preoccupations, we will discuss the fairly recent scholarly focus on Woolf’s political use of punctuation.
TEXTS: The Voyage Out (1915); Jacob’s Room (1922); Mrs Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando: A Biography (1928); A Room of One’s Own (1929); The Waves (1931); The Years (1937); Three Guineas (1938); Between the Acts (1941)
ASSESSMENT: two paper proposals, two papers, one student-lead class discussion