Sarah J. Heidt

Introduction to Literature and Language

ENGL 103

Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.

Introduction to Literature and Language

ENGL 104

Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close attention to each student's writing. Students in each section are asked to work intensively on composition as part of a rigorous introduction to reading, thinking, speaking and writing about literary texts. During the semester, instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of department chair. Offered annually in multiple sections.

Writing for the Humanities

ENGL 199

Proper Ladies and Women Writers

ENGL 210

"We think back through our mothers if we are women," Virginia Woolf writes in "A Room of One's Own." Taking Woolf's meditation on women and creativity as our point of departure, we will examine a range of fictional, poetic and polemical writing produced by British women from the late 18th century through the early 20th century, a period that witnessed increases in the literary and cultural opportunities available to female writers, as well as challenges to those opportunities. We will explore debates over "proper" education for women; the role of culturally sanctioned "plots" (most notably, romance and marriage plots) in shaping women's lives and narratives; complex negotiations between public and private experience, particularly between work and domesticity; and the aims and achievements of women's activist and political writings. When has it been possible, or desirable, for female writers to "think back through [their] mothers"? If a tradition of women's writing exists, what motivates and characterizes it? How did these women writers create new plots — or terminate familiar ones — in response to incommensurable or uncontainable desires and allegiances? How did these writers respond to traditions they inherited from their predecessors, whether male or female? Course authors will include Woolf, Wollstonecraft, Austen, Gaskell, Eliot and Barrett Browning, among others. Students will write two essays and a final exam. This counts toward the requirement for the women's and gender studies concentration and toward the approaches to literary study or the 1700–1900 requirement. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

Autobiographical Theory and Practice

ENGL 211

Autobiographical writing allows us to study the complicated cultural and personal dynamics of self-making, as individual authors define (and show themselves to have been defined by) their sociohistorical circumstances. How do writers confront or capitalize on such intersections of the personal and the historical? How and why do autobiographers translate life experiences into writing? How do they grapple with elements of experience that are difficult to represent in language? Is truth necessary to — or even possible in — autobiographical writing? How have writers' gendered, sexualized, classed, raced or geographically located identities shaped the possibilities and purposes of autobiographical narrative? And where is the line between autobiography and biography? In this survey of classic and experimental autobiographical texts, as well as of major developments in autobiographical theory, we will consider broad questions of identity, time and memory, and narrative through close attention to specific works' subjects, structures and histories. Authors may include Augustine, Thomas De Quincey, Harriet Jacobs, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston and Art Spiegelman, among others. Students will write two essays and several reading response papers and will lead one class discussion. This counts toward the approaches to literary study or the post-1900 requirement. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

Page, Stage, Screen: 19th-century Novels Transformed

ENGL 354

In the 19th century British writers brought into the world innumerable fictional characters and plots that have — for good and ill, and in forms as low as cereal boxes and as high as acclaimed novels — served as cultural touchstones for more than a century. In this course, we will explore a handful of fictions that have undergone particularly provocative transformations into novelistic, theatrical, and cinematic productions. Throughout the semester, we will use our close readings of fictions, plays and films (as well as of ephemera like cartoons) to consider theories and practices of adaptation in both the 19th and 20th centuries. What kinds of plots seem most to have enthralled or even possessed 19th- and 20th-century readers and viewers? How do those plots change when they undergo shifts from textual to visual media? We also will explore the cultural and critical discourses that have grown up around particular works. Course texts will include Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", Shelley's "Frankenstein", Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and Stoker's "Dracula", as well as numerous film adaptations of each novel. Students will produce two formal writings and weekly film response papers and also will participate in a group research presentation. Students enrolled in this course must enroll in a mandatory weekly film screening. This counts toward the approaches to literary study or the 1700–1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210– 291 or permission of instructor.

Victorian Poetry and Poetics

ENGL 356

This course will serve as a wide-ranging exploration of Victorian poetic culture. Our primary focus will be Victorian poetry in all its forms — including lyric, ballad, elegy, narrative and epic — and its staggering range of subjects sacred and profane: love, grief, social injustice, doubt, sadomasochism, religious devotion, pet dogs, travel, madness and poetry itself (among many others). We will read works by Tennyson, the Brownings, the Brontes, the Rossettis, Arnold, Clough, Hopkins, Swinburne and Hardy, examining the formal and topical conventions and innovations of their verse. We also will examine mechanisms of fame and obscurity as they shaped these (and other) poets' careers, and we will discuss a number of female poets whose critical and canonical fortunes have risen in recent years, including the dramatic monologist Augusta Webster and the duo who wrote as Michael Field. We will consider the relationship of poetry to other arts (especially painting) and literary forms (such as the novel); we also will discuss the role anthologies, periodicals, reviews and the development of English literature as an academic discipline played in the circulation and consumption of poetic works throughout the 19th century. Students will write two formal essays and several three-to-four-page poetry explications and also will perform at least one poem during class. This counts toward the approaches to literary study or the 1700–1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210–291 or permission of instructor.

Victorian Ghosts

ENGL 358

In the 19th century, Britain was nothing if not haunted — by (among other things) history, doubt, science, political unrest, desire and sexuality, other parts and peoples of the world, and the unfathomable complexities of the human psyche. This course will provide an intensive introduction to Victorian literature and culture through an examination of its ghosts. Among the literary works we will read are fictions by Emily Bronte, Hardy, Eliot, Gaskell, Dickens, Pater, James and Wilde; poetry by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne and Hardy; and autobiographical writing by Oliphant. We will explore extraliterary movements and phenomena that illustrate how Victorian people attempted to document and/or make contact with ghosts, including spiritualism, spirit photography and psychical research. And we will give some consideration to the ways the Victorian period has haunted its successors. Students can expect to complete two major essays and a final exam, deliver at least one oral presentation, and compose occasional short reading papers or discussion questions. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210–291 or permission of instructor.

Middlemarch

ENGL 359

This course will afford us an opportunity to concentrate on and to luxuriate in one novel, George Eliot's "Middlemarch" (1871-72), and to consider how close study of a single literary work can afford a window onto the cultural, political, and intellectual developments of a complex historical period. During our first read, we will move through this eight-part novel at roughly the pace at which you might have encountered it in a course on the Victorian novel or on George Eliot's works more broadly. On our second read, we will move at the much slower pace of one part per week, bringing various contextualizing materials to bear upon our rereading. This course will thus function both as a chance to become deeply conversant with an iconic British novel and also as an experiment in slow reading and in rereading. We will engage with questions of literary form and formal close-reading, of cultural and biographical contexts, of publishing and reception history, and of changing critical and theoretical perspectives. Students will take a midterm exam, design and conduct part of a class session, and write a final research essay. This counts toward the 1700–1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing, ENGL 210–291 or permission of instructor.

ST: Middlemarch

ENGL 391

ST: The 19th Century Novel

ENGL 391

ST:Reformers, Rebels & Radical

ENGL 391

ST:Dickens and Eliot

ENGL 491

ST: Sr Sem in Literature

ENGL 491

Individual Study

ENGL 493

Individual study in English is a privilege reserved for senior majors who want to pursue a course of reading or complete a writing project on a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum. Because individual study is one option in a rich and varied English curriculum, it is intended to supplement, not take the place of, coursework, and it cannot normally be used to fulfill requirements for the major. An IS will earn the student 0.5 units of credit, although in special cases it may be designed to earn 0.25 units. To qualify to enroll in an individual study, a student must identify a member of the English department willing to direct the project. In consultation with that faculty member, the student must write a 1–2 page proposal for the IS that the department chair must approve before the IS can go forward. The chair’s approval is required to ensure that no single faculty member becomes overburdened by directing too many IS courses. In the proposal, the student should provide a preliminary bibliography (and/or set of specific problems, goals and tasks) for the course, outline a specific schedule of reading and/or writing assignments, and describe in some detail the methods of assessment (e.g., a short story to be submitted for evaluation biweekly; a thirty-page research paper submitted at course’s end, with rough drafts due at given intervals). Students should also briefly describe any prior coursework that particularly qualifies them for their proposed individual studies. The department expects IS students to meet regularly with their instructors for at least one hour per week, or the equivalent, at the discretion of the instructor. The amount of work submitted for a grade in an IS should approximate at least that required, on average, in 400-level English courses. In the case of group individual studies, a single proposal may be submitted, assuming that all group members will follow the same protocols. Because students must enroll for individual studies by the seventh class day of each semester, they should begin discussion of their proposed individual study well in advance, preferably the semester before, so that there is time to devise the proposal and seek departmental approval before the registrar’s deadline.

Senior Honors

ENGL 497

This seminar, required for students in the Honors Program, will relate works of criticism and theory to various literary texts, which may include several of those covered on the honors exam. The course seeks to extend the range of interpretive strategies available to the student as he or she begins a major independent project in English literature or creative writing. The course is limited to students with a 3.33 GPA overall, a 3.5 cumulative GPA in English and the intention to become an honors candidate in English. Enrollment limited to senior English majors in the Honors Program; exceptions by permission of the instructor. Undertaken in the fall semester; students register with the Senior Honors form as well as the individual study form. Permission of instructor and department chair required.

Senior Honors

ENGL 498

See description for ENGL 497. Undertaken in the spring semester; students register with the Senior Honors form.