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English and American Literature and Language

Not all courses are available to SSP students. For example, some courses are offered only for graduate credit. Note especially any listed prerequisites.

ENGL S-36z Summer Seminar--Utopia and Anti-Utopia (31795)
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Francis Abiola Irele
(4 units: UN) M,W 3:30-6 pm, Dana Palmer, Room 101. Tuition $2,125. Limited enrollment.
Summer Seminars are open to Secondary School Program (SSP) students who are juniors or seniors in high school as well as to college undergraduates.

This seminar explores the utopian ideal as embodied in literary, intellectual, and ideological texts that either project an image or offer reasoned conceptions of the perfect society. The ambiguous character of the utopian ideal, which holds out the promise of human fulfillment but has also been the source of great collective misery and human tragedy, is highlighted. The utopian ideal is thus considered in light of the contemporary mood of disillusionment with the idea of progress as well as in light of the preoccupation with what has been called the "dilemma of modernity" in current philosophical debates--especially as these relate to the intellectual temper of the Western world and to the conditions of existence in the underdeveloped world. Members of the seminar focus on a selection of key texts that have influenced the development of modern consciousness. Readings include Plato's The Republic, Hesiod's "Works and Days," Thomas More's Utopia, Marx's and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, Voltaire's Candide, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Eugene Zamiatin's We, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Julius K. Nyerere's Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism.
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ENGL S-37u Summer Seminar--Bob Dylan: The Lyrics in Their Literary, Cultural, and Musical Contexts (31806)
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Richard F. Thomas
(4 units: UN) T,Th 1-3:30 pm, Boylston Hall, Room 203. Tuition $2,125. Limited enrollment.
Summer Seminars are open to Secondary School Program (SSP) students who are juniors or seniors in high school as well as to college undergraduates.

The seminar explores the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan from their earliest manifestations in the 1960s through their current evolutions. Topics include Dylan's creation of personae (folk, protest, country, Christian, gospel); his being "far behind his rightful time," and the creative dynamism involved in innovation versus audience expectation (acoustic to electric, protest to lyrical, counter-cultural icon to Christian); the "classical" punctuations of his fertile career (Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, "Tangled Up in Blue," Oh Mercy, Love and Theft); and the lead-ins and sequences to such classicism (Bringing It All Back Home, Desire, Time Out of Mind); performance and performative repetition and renovation; intertextuality and the creation of narrative patterns and storylines; bootlegs/outtakes as commentary on Dylan's continuing mythology; Chronicles Vol. 1 and its artistic status; Dylan in film, with special attention to Masked and Anonymous.
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ENGL S-70 American Literature: A Survey of Major Writers from the Beginnings to the Twentieth Century (31793)
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Werner Sollors
(4 units: UN, NC) M,W 9:30 am-12 noon, Boylston Hall, Fong Auditorium. Tuition $2,125.

This course offers close readings of selected novels, short fiction, poetry, and drama in the context of American cultural history and of international literary developments. Topics include colonial writing, neoclassical poetry, sentimental, gothic, and historical fiction, the rise of the short story, the American Renaissance, realism and local color writing, melodrama and the literature of slavery and the Civil War, with some focus on writers such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, Royall Tyler, William Hill Brown, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and selected later writers.
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ENGL S-90ix The Indian Novel in English (31805)
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Sharmila Sen
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 1-3:30 pm, Dana Palmer, Room 102. Tuition $2,125. Limited enrollment.

The Indian novel in English has been ridiculed for its Babu English, castigated for representing the preoccupations of urban, upper-class elites, and vilified for purveying spicy postcolonial chic. It also appears with dizzying frequency in bookstore windows, on US college syllabi, and at the top of literary prize lists. How did the Indian English novel evolve from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's nearly forgotten Rajmohan's Wife to Arundhati Roy's internationally celebrated The God of Small Things? From nineteenth-century "false starts" to the late twentieth-century boom period, this course covers such authors as Amitav Ghosh, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie.
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ENGL S-124e Shakespeare (31572)
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William Flesch
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) M,W 1-3:30 pm, William James Hall, Room 105. Tuition $2,125.

This course is a survey of eight plays by England's greatest playwright and poet. We cover all genres (comedy, tragedy, history, and romance), but concentrate on the tragedies, culminating with King Lear. We think about Shakespeare as both writer and theatrical impresario, concentrating on his characters and his language.
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ENGL S-141 The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self (31801)
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Leo Damrosch
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 1-3:30 pm, Boylston Hall, Room 105. Tuition $2,125.

A study of major eighteenth-century autobiographical, fictional, and philosophical texts that explore the paradoxes of the modern self at a time when traditional religious and philosophical explanations were breaking down. Writers to be read include Mme. de Lafayette, Boswell, Voltaire, Gibbon, Diderot, Rousseau, Laclos, Franklin, and Blake.
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ENGL S-162 Theater History (31814)
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Robert Lublin
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 9:30 am-12 noon, Emerson Hall, Room 305. Tuition $2,125.

Theater is endemic to the human condition. Every culture, throughout the course of recorded history, has created forms of performance to satisfy the mimetic instinct. Naturally, the types of performance we find in various places and times demonstrate very different structures and functions, answering the particular needs of the cultures that created them. This course will survey the development of theater from origins to the present. In addition to reading plays, we will consider such issues as the physical form of the stage, various approaches to acting, the changing constitution of audiences, and costume history, all with a mind to exploring the socio-historical forces that influenced the development of the theater.
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ENGL S-163 American Drama Since 1945 (31761)
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Arthur Holmberg
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 6-8:30 pm, Boylston Hall, Room 104. Tuition $2,125.

Examines major plays representing styles from social realism to avant-garde performance and the theater of images. Attention paid to social and historical contexts, to the plays in production, and to the musical. Playwrights include O'Neill, Miller, Williams, Inge, Albee, Hansberry, Baraka, Mamet, Shepard, Piñero, Fornes, Wasserstein, Durang, Wilson, and Woody Allen.
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ENGL S-164d Literature into Film (31811)
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Joseph Luzzi
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 1-3:30 pm, Carpenter Center, Room B04. Required film screening T 4-6 pm. Tuition $2,125.

This course explores the formal and thematic issues in adapting literary sources for cinema by examining how directors translate literary language, metaphors, and allusions into the medium of film. We focus on the cultural, political, and social forces motivating directors in their aesthetic choices. Texts/films include Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now, Death in Venice, King Lear/Ran, Room with a View, The Leopard, and Sense and Sensibility.
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ENGL S-169 The Noir Antihero in American Fiction and Film (31720)
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William Flesch
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) M,W 3:30-6 pm, William James Hall, Room 105. Tuition $2,125.

This is a course on classic film noir as well as some of its neo-noir descendents, and on the literary sources of the genre. Authors include Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Dick, and Palahniuk, in relation to such films as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Blade Runner, and Fight Club.
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ENGL S-176 Modern African American and American Ethnic Literature (31787)
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Werner Sollors
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 9:30 am-12 noon, 1 Bow Street, Room 317. Tuition $2,125.

Close readings of selected works (autobiography, fiction, drama, and poetry) from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Texts to be discussed include Abraham Cahan, Yekl, Hamilton Holt, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans As Told by Themselves, Gertrude Stein, Three Lives, Mary Antin, The Promised Land, James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jean Toomer, Cane, Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings, Langston Hughes, Mulatto, Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, Jerre Mangione, Mount Allegro, Amiri Baraka, Dutchman and selected poetry and prose, Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory, Lawson Fusao Inada, Legends from Camp, Tino Villanueva, Scenes from the movie GIANT, Adrienne Kennedy, In One Act, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey.
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ENGL S-180 Twentieth-Century American Poetry (31714)
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Nick Halpern
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) M,W 1-3:30 pm, Boylston Hall, Room 105. Tuition $2,125.

This course introduces the work of some of the most important American poets of the century just past. We engage in close readings and discussions of poems by T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, and James Wright. We end with close readings of poems by contemporary poets Louise Glück, Franz Wright, August Kleinzahler, and others.
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ENGL S-185 Wit and Humor (31802)
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Leo Damrosch
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) M,W 1-3:30 pm, Boylston Hall, Fong Auditorium. Tuition $2,125.

Emphasizing wit and humor rather than "comedy" as classically understood, the course considers selected texts and films (for example, Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse, Dave Barry, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Monty Python) in the light of theoretical studies by psychologists, sociologists, and critics who have tried to explain why people laugh, want to laugh, and pay to be made to laugh.
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ENGL S-187 Early American Bestsellers (31645)
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Grantland S. Rice
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 3:30-6 pm, 51 Brattle Street, Room 321. Tuition $2,125.

This course explores the emergence of popular fiction in America before the Civil War. Focusing on the historical and sociological conditions that gave birth to such popular genres as the captivity narrative, the autobiography, the epistolary novel, the seduction plot, the literary sketch, the romance, and the exposé, this course examines prose works from settlement to the Civil War. Special consideration is given to issues of authorship, intellectual property, and copyright law. Authors covered include Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Michel Guillaume Saint Jean de Crèvecoeur, Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Susanna Rowson, Washington Irving, George Lippard, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Wilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
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ENGL S-197 Twentieth-Century Literature: Modernism and Postmodernism (31715)
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Nick Halpern
(4 units: UN, GR, NC) M,W 3:30-6 pm, Boylston Hall, Room 105. Tuition $2,125.

This course explores modernist and postmodernist texts. Authors include Freud, Proust, Woolf, Beckett, Bernhard, Nabokov, Pynchon, Calvino, Didion, and Sebald. These works are put in a variety of cultural, political, and literary contexts.
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