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Culture and Belief 55: Enlightenment Creations of the Self, Society, and Institutions

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2013
The Enlightenment creates modern ideas of the self, a just society, and reformed institutions. The course explores six interrelated developments: (1) taking nothing on authority, a spirit of critique examines knowledge, religion, and government; (2) the spread of general knowledge to populations of increasing literacy; (3) debates about human nature—naturally selfish or sympathetic, altered by race or gender, innate or learned? (4) new institutions for equity and justice, even using violent revolution; (5) efforts supporting abolition, women’s rights, and religious toleration; (6) self-... Read more about Culture and Belief 55: Enlightenment Creations of the Self, Society, and Institutions

English 251 Comparative Romantic Theory

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2013
Key romantic topics that remain relevant to literature and art, e.g., symbol, language, aesthetics, nature (“green” romanticism), history, irony, gender. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Emerson, Fuller, and Poe; others and recent critics as well.

English 194 Literary Criticism: Major Approaches

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2012
Significant critical orientations: modernism, classicism, romanticism, the New Criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism, as well as feminism, formalism, and other -isms. Theoretical formulations yet also practical criticism, history of criticism, and critical writings oriented toward psychology, language, and cultural contexts. Aristotle, Horace, Johnson, Coleridge, Schiller, Arnold, Wilde, Eliot, Shklovsky, Freud, Foucault, Barthes, Showalter, Derrida, Sontag, Frye, Cixous, and others.

English 90w Seminar: Wordsworth

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2012
Concentrates on poems before 1820: The Ruined Cottage, Home at Grasmere, Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, sonnets, Poems of 1807 and collected poems of 1815; also selected later work. The seminar explores Wordsworth’s thematic and formal originality, engagement with nature, moral imagination, his own critical writing, relation to earlier poets, Coleridge’s admiration and critique of his achievement, and recent critical assessments.

English 90gt: The Age of Johnson: Seminar

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2012
Course Website

will examine the works of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (Johnson's biographer), Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Robert Burns, and others. Essays, biography, political and historical writing, poetry, and the novel.

English 54: Poets: English Romantic Poets

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2012
Course Website

Readings in Blake, Baillie, Coleridge, Clare, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others. Lyric and narrative forms. Close aesthetic readings linked to thematic considerations. Social and political contexts. Romanticism as an artistic movement and cultural era.

English 242: Restoration and 18th-Century Texts: Graduate Seminar

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2011
Course Website

Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Montagu, and others; the lyric, periodical literature, satire, biography, and drama; relations of engaged literature with politics, religion, history; issues of audience, gender, class, genre, and canon.
Note: An intensive introduction to 18th-century literature at the graduate level. Presupposes no previous acquaintance with field. Graduate students who have studied 18th-century literature should consult with the instructor. Open to qualified honors undergraduates.

Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 15: Elements of Rhetoric

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2011
Course Website

Rhetorical theory, originating with Aristotle, in contemporary applications. The nature of rhetoric in modern culture; practical examples drawn from American history and literature 1765 to the present; written exercises and attention to public speaking; the history and educational importance of rhetoric in the West; stresses theory and practice as inseparable.