100- and 200-level |
300-399 |
400-499 |
A complete up to date listing of English Department course descriptions can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/.
For all English classes, registered students must be present at each of the first two meetings to claim their places. Any student who does not meet this requirement may be dropped from the course. NOTE: If you must miss a class due to religious observances, contact the instructor or leave a message for the instructor with the department (764-6330).
Take me to the Fall Time Schedule
Primarily for Juniors and Seniors
407. Topics in Language
and Literature. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for
credit with department permission.
Section 001 – Reading Old English. This course is an introduction
to the earliest texts written in English over a thousand years
ago. We will begin with Old English, the language spoken by our
forebears until the unpleasantness at Hastings – the Norman Conquest.
Since Old English is so different from Modern English as to seem
like another language, the first object of this class will be
to master the rudiments of the structure and vocabulary of the
earliest attested form of English. The reward is being able to
read an excitingly different corpus of prose and poetry. We will
conclude with the study of the later texts which continue the
Anglo-Saxon tradition alliterative tradition. My chief aim is
to help you develop a new appreciation of where our language, culture, and intellectual traditions come from. This course satisfies the Pre-1600 Literature requirement for English concentrators.
Cost:1 (Toon)
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Times, Location, and Availability
412/Film-Video 412. Major
Directors. (3). (HU). Laboratory fee ($35) required.
May be repeated for a total of nine credits with department permission.
Section 001 – Alfred Hitchcock and the Art of the American Film.
In this course, will study the career, development, and influence
of Alfred Hitchcock, with special attention to his American films
of the 1950s and '60s and their influence on such contemporary
artists as Martin Scorsese, Bryan de Palma, and Mel Brooks. We
will be interested in assessing the range of Hitchcock's art, its relation to the technical vocabulary of the classic Hollywood
film, and the ways that it extended the possibilities of cinema
for his successors. We will also be interested in Hitchcock as
a canny observer of American culture, and the ways in which his
subversive and mordant commentary critiques as it depicts the
ideological and social practices of that culture. Requirements:
midterm, final, journals; previous film courses helpful but not
necessary. (Freedman)
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Times, Location, and Availability
415. Interdisciplinary
Approaches to Literature. (3). (Excl). May be repeated
for a total of six credits.
Section 001 – Research and Technology in the Humanities.
This upperclass and graduate-level course fosters both sharpened
general analytic and presentational skills and technical mastery
of a broad range of modern computer-based technologies for collaboration
and for gathering, manipulating, analyzing, and presenting electronic
data in the humanities, both locally and via networks, with special
attention to creating and publishing "compound documents" (e.g., Web sites and CD-ROMs). The course begins with
five weeks of intensive technical training and proceeds to five
weeks of discussion of works that question the impacts of technology.
By the middle of the term, restrained only by time and their imaginations, students also will be working in self-selected groups on creating
sophisticated multimedia products using a variety of techniques
to address some substantial issue in the humanities. Technical
topics include at least information gathering from digital sources, HTML authoring, hypertext documents or novels, collaborative technologies, the meaning of the digital revolution, text analysis, and image
manipulation. Cost:2
(Rabkin)
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Times, Location, and Availability
417. Senior Seminar.
Senior concentrator in English. May not be repeated
for credit. (4). (Excl).
Section 001 – Literature and the Law. From antiquity to the
present, artists have been irresistibly drawn to the law as an
institution and justice as an ethical concept as thematic material
for their story telling. Based on intensive reading of works by
or from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, the Apocrypha, Shakespeare, Melville, Schnitzler, Kafka, Koestler, Camus, Duerrenmatt, R.
Shaw, Bolt, and P. Roth, our discussions will examine how these
selections treat the legal process as an object of analytical
interest in itself, as an example of procedurally and ethically
complex social phenomena, and as a testing ground for propositions
of morality. We will also study some films. Limited class size
should allow each student a chance to lead discussion. Requirements:
one short paper, a longer critical/analytical essay, and your
actively, intelligently participating presence. We will study
how some artists' fascination with the law helps us come to terms
with themes of ethical content within a social context. (Bauland)
Section 002 – Representations of "America" in World Literature. It was from out of Czechoslovakia Franz Kafka writes about Amerika, and from Trinidad that Earl Lovelace produces the short story, "Joebell and America." The West African J.P. Clark's America, Their America presents us with yet another narrative, as does the Italian novelist Silvana Giorgetta, with her Posthumous America. You get the point, I hope. We will use selected narratives, and a variety of genres, from several cultures and periods to explore the reality and/or the myth of "America." It should be interesting to see what "America" inspires or provokes, and where. All in all, our con/texts will be as much out of Australia as from Iran; as much Polish and Dutch as French and North African. Along the way, the likes of Columbus and De Tocqueville (France); Matthew Arnold and Charles Dickens will help us along. So, too, Alejo Carpentier's novel, Concierto barocco – as well as some music from Vivaldi (Montezuma), Dvorak (New World Symphony), and Puccini (Madame Butterfly). (Johnson)
Section 003 – Telling Stories and Storytelling. Why
are so many stories – whether poems, short stories, novels or
films – about the process of storytelling? For example, what happens
when the narrator of a novel suddenly becomes a character in the
story he/she is telling? Or when the novel we are reading suddenly
seems to be about us as readers of that very novel? What about
films – like Hitchcock's Rear Window – that question the process of looking and hence of our activity as an audience?
In this seminar we will read and view a wide variety of stories, novels, poems, and films that raise these and other related questions
as well as the larger questions they point to: what is the relationship
between fiction and reality, between reading a text or viewing
a film and living a life? Come prepared to read, look, discuss, and write several papers of 4-5 pages. (McDougal)
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Times, Location, and Availability
423. The Writing of Fiction.
Open to seniors and graduate students; written permission
of the instructor is required. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for
credit.
Section 001. In this class we'll be writing, reading, and talking about fiction. Students who sign up for the class should
expect to complete fifty pages of fiction; they should be willing
to revise what they already have written. Participation in class
discussions will be essential to the success of the course. Students
interested in applying to the course should get on the waitlist
at CRISP and bring a manuscript to the first class meeting. Cost:1 (Baxter)
Section 002. A workshop course in the nature and technique
of prose fiction. Classroom discussion will focus on student work
- with an average expectation of 10,000 words to be submitted
during the term. Revision, written critiques of the work of other
seminar participants; attendance at the Visiting Writer Series
of readings will also be expected. Permission of Instructor required.
Students who wish to enroll in the course should get on the Wait
List at CRISP, then bring a manuscript for review to the first
class session. A list of admittees will be posted soon thereafter.
(Delbanco)
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Times, Location, and Availability
425. Advanced Essay Writing.
Open only to seniors and graduate students. (3).
(Excl).
This is an advanced writing course based on the premise that nonfiction
can be as creative, moving, provocative, and eloquent as our best
stories, novels and poems. We will read a great many essays, articles, and books to see how masters of the genre use the various forms, styles and voices of fiction and poetry to handle nonfiction material.
For our own pieces, we will draw on personal experience as well
as research, interviews, excursions to new places and scientific
(or not-so-scientific) experiments and inquiries. Students may
shape the course around subjects that interest them (literature, the arts, popular culture, history, politics, science, travel);
everyone will be held to the same high standards of literary creativity
and rational thought. Our time will be evenly divided between
mining published work for inspiration and critiquing student essays
(each student will write and rewrite 40-50 pages of new material).
(Pollack)
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Times, Location, and Availability
429. The Writing of Poetry.
Written permission of instructor is required. (3).
(Excl). May be repeated for credit.
This course is a poetry-writing workshop. Students will circulate
and discuss their poems written during the term, as well as analyze
a selection of poetry and criticism by eminent contemporary poets.
We shall use an anthology of recent poetry as our central text.
Students should be prepared to devote considerable time to composition
and revision, and to extensive commentary on their fellow students'
writing. Each student will keep a journal of readings, ruminations, and materials for poems. Some experience in creative writing courses
is desirable, though not essential. Permission of the instructor
is required. Leave a sample manuscript of 3-5 pages in Professor
Goldstein's mailbox, 3161 Angell Hall, during the week before the first day of class, or bring a manuscript to the first class.
A class list will be posted on the professor's office door after the first day of class. Cost:1
(Goldstein)
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Times, Location, and Availability
431. The Victorian Novel.
(4). (Excl).
Many issues that concern us today really took flight in the Victorian
period – issues of class, gender, sexuality, politics, popular
culture, family life, and more. And that period's most characteristic
literary form, the novel, provides a hugely entertaining and suggestive
way of thinking about these issues then and now. Our aim in this
course is to explore the substantial pleasures of reading Victorian
novels – they were, in effect, the popular miniseries of their
day – and to enrich our understanding of these novels by keeping
an eye to their relevant social contexts. Our primary emphasis
goes to canonical authors such as the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. But we also explore the formation of canonical value
by looking to one or two texts from less traditionally celebrated
authors. Coursework includes three papers, a presentation, and a reading journal. (Thomas)
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Times, Location, and Availability
434. The Contemporary
Novel. (4). (Excl).
This course covers a broad spectrum of contemporary writers and types of fiction. As well as establishing the specific themes
and narrative methods of these literary figures and groups of
novels, the course also seeks to discover similar concerns, ideas, and techniques especially in relation to recent social and cultural
developments. The course will approach these works with traditional
critical methods, but also examine the ways that recent critical theory opens up the text for us. The class will read Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant,
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, Toni Morrison's Sula, D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel, Don Delillo's White Noise,
Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters,
and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Students
will write three short papers and take a midterm and final examination.
(Konigsberg)
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Times, Location, and Availability
440. Modern Poetry. (3).
(Excl).
In this course, where the reading will range from British poetry
of the late 19th Century to American writing of our own time, we will focus on the poets' struggle to "dislocate language
into meaning" (T.S. Eliot). We'll try to connect the famous
difficulty of the arts in our time to the new relation between
words and things that develops in the economies and social systems
of the modern period. Although poetry can be generally defined
as writing that foregrounds the medium rather than the message, it is only during the modern eras that poetry takes as its primary
task the dismantling and remaking of that medium. In addition
to reading widely in modern poetry, we will also read prose that
is innovative as language-work: e.g., the short stories
of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. (Levinson)
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Times, Location, and Availability
443/Theatre 321. History
of Theatre I. (3). (HU).
See Theatre and Drama 321.
(Walsh)
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Times, Location, and Availability
446. World Drama: Congreve
to Ibsen. (3). (Excl).
Section 001 – Staging the World? This course will explore the literary dramatic canon of the late 17th, 18th, and 19th century
and the history of theatrical performance between Renaissance
and Modern Drama. We will attempt to imagine how the plays would
have been staged then, could be staged now. Since traditional
academic method makes the history of drama one of printed dramatic
texts, we will explore how theater also is a cultural creation
made of choices based on visual art, architecture, music. The theater also never escapes and rarely avoids reproducing representations
of gender, of race, of sexual orientation, of age, all things
human and inhuman. We will consider together the theater from
countries not included in the canon of "world drama,"
as well as the canonical works. Requirements include short papers, one extended project, active class participation and collaborative
mock staging projects. (Skantze)
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Times, Location, and Availability
447. Modern Drama. (3).
(Excl).
Section 001 – From Ibsen to Brecht. This course will examine the rise of modern drama in the Western world by concentrating
on the work of Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shaw, Pirandello, and Brecht. Emphasis will be placed on learning how to read a dramatic
text for its performative qualities and its potential for enactment.
Although no previous experience in the study of drama or theater
is required, the course will begin by concentrating on the differences
between the modern repertory and the forms we associate with Classical
and Shakespearean dramatic conventions. Other topics of consideration
include: the transformation from melodrama to modern drama, the
social consciousness of the twentieth-century stage, and the rise
of the female figure as subject of dramatic inquiry. Requirements:
There will be three papers of 5-7 pages each, a midterm, and a
final exam. Cost:2
(Brater)
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Times, Location, and Availability
449/Theatre 423. American
Theatre and Drama. (3). (HU).
See Theatre and Drama 423.
(Cardullo)
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Times, Location, and Availability
461. English Romantic
Literature. (3). (Excl).
Section 001 – True Lies: British Romantic Literature. I offer this course for a generation of students who would like a reason
to take seriously the dusty fictions of the past. I invite them
to experience a literature that established the norms of feeling, thought, and action structuring both The English Patient
and most of the videos on MTV. This is (among other things) a
quest literature, and the quest is for a more various, authentic, and intense career in living (and dying) than any social structure
could accommodate. I teach this course in order to explore the
pleasure-principle threading through the poetry and fiction of the age, and to see what it can teach us about the pleasures on
offer in our own cultural economy. I call the course "True
Lies" as a double reference: first, to the entertainment
industry of our own time, and second, to both Sir Philip Sidney's
and Percy Bysshe Shelley's definition of poetry as a higher form than history and philosophy, not despite the "lies"
or fiction that poetry trades in, but because of them. Poetry
"feigns images of virtue and vice" to show both the
reality behind the appearance and the ideal beyond it. Readings:
Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron. Fiction:
Scott, Radcliffe, De Quincey, Austen. (Levinson)
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Times, Location, and Availability
469. Milton. (3).
(Excl).
In this course, we will study the work of a poet whom many consider
to be the most compelling, and the most maddening, in the language.
His subjects were large: the loss of paradise, the origins of
sin, the interdependence of free will and obedience, longing and intellect, sex and the state. His technical mastery – his sheer
prosodic command – is unsurpassed. His career confounds our latterday theories of separate realms: Milton was at once an ivory tower
intellectual and a practical servant to the Commonwealth, a poet
of empire and an anti-imperialist. His prose tracts make the case
for regicide and revolution, for radical reform in religion, governance, and relations between the sexes, but he was also a consummate
spokesman for unreconstructed patriarchy. Reading broadly in the
major poems (especially Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes) and selected prose, we will try
to understand how this poet and his era – the complex social, political, and religious unfolding of the English Reformation
- transformed the written word. Student contributions will include
regular class particiapation and two essays. The longer second
essay will involve use of secondary critical sources. (Gregerson)
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Times, Location, and Availability
473. Topics in American
Literature. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for credit
with department permission.
Section 001 – Three Modernist Poets: Pound, Eliot, and Stevens.
The course will examine what three major writers – Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens – have to teach us about the kinds
of relations possible among art, society, and individual experience.
We will consider their chief works both in themselves and as responses
to personal, political, and literary problems such as the construction
of modernism, the impact of two world wars and the psychological
problems of twentieth-century life. The readings are primarily
poetry, both lyrics and longer works like Pound's Mauberley
sequence, Eliot's Waste Land, and Stevens' Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction with some critical prose by the
authors themselves. We proceed by a mixture of lecture and discussion.
There are two papers (about six pages each) and a final examination.
This course satisfies the American Literature requirement for
English concentrators. Cost:2
(Bornstein)
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Times, Location, and Availability
482. Studies in Individual
Authors. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for credit
with department permission.
Section 001 – Hawthorne, Melville, James. The course will
focus mostly on Hawthorne and James, with attention to some of
Melville's shorter writings. Texts are likely to include: Hawthorne, tales and prefaces, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance,
perhaps The House of the Seven Gables, and some late
essays; Melville, "The Piazza," "Bartleby," Billy Budd: Sailor, perhaps other short fiction, and a few Civil War poems; James, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of
a Lady, "The Aspern Papers," "The Jolly Corner,"
and perhaps The Bostonians and/or "The Beast in the Jungle." We'll consider Hawthorne's influence on James, Hawthorne's and James' conceptions of the artist and the romance
writer, and Hawthorne's and James' differing treatments of men
and women, America and Europe, and the moral problems of the man
of sensibility in love or in isolation. We will also be concerned
with how Hawthorne influenced Melville differently, how Melville's
writings on the Civil War compare with Hawthorne's, and how Melville's
treatment of New York as capitalist space anticipates James' .
Bi-weekly response papers, two 5-7 pp. papers, and a final. (McIntosh)
Section 002 – The Stages of Arthur Miller. This course
will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Death
of a Salesman by offering a complete overview of the work
of U-M alumnus Arthur Miller. Beginning by examining his earliest
work, the prize-winning entries that garnered him two Hopwood
Awards, we will move on to consider the series of plays which
have established his international reputation: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge, Incident
at Vichy, his adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, After the Fall, The Price, and The American Clock
(inspired by Stud Terkel's Hard Times). Emphasis will
be placed on the history of these plays in production, both in the U.S. and abroad. This course will take advantage of the holdings
of Miller's work in the Shapiro Library's video collection, and students will also be introduced to the collection of original
Miller manuscripts in the University of Michigan's Rare Books
Library. There will be three short papers of 4-5 pages each, plus
a final term project. This course satisfies the American Literature
requirement for English concentrators. Cost:1
(Brater)
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Times, Location, and Availability
492. Honors Colloquium:
Drafting the Thesis. Admission to the English Honors
Program and permission of instructor. (3). (Excl).
This course assists you in conceiving and writing an Honors thesis
- your most important piece of work in English Honors. In the
initial weeks we examine research methods in the humanities and clarify the nature of the Honors thesis (how it differs from a
term paper, for example). The remainder of the course is devoted
to nurturing and strengthening your individual project through
a linked series of tasks (topic statements, notes on secondary
sources, bibliographies, drafts of sections). You present your
work in progress to the class, and read and critique your classmates'
drafts. By the end of the term, you will have a 20- to 30-page
draft of your thesis and a strongly focused sense of what changes
and additions are needed before you turn in the final version
in March. You should also have a clear sense of the demands and rewards of advanced work in literary studies. (Howard, Thomas)
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Times, Location, and Availability
497. Honors Seminar.
Junior or senior standing, and permission of instructor.
(3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of 9 credits.
Section 001 – Renaissance Bodies. During the Renaissance, several social practices brought intense attention to the human
body. Human dissection allowed anatomists to explore a corpse's
interior; Galenic medicine enabled practitioners to regulate health
and disease; and harsh punishments and torture were used to discipline
an unruly populace. At the same time, this era witnessed the flowering
of love poetry and the rise of public theaters dedicated to the
performance of the extremes of corporeal passions: homoerotic
and heteroerotic desires, madness, jealousy, revenge. Using the
discourses of anatomy, medicine, and punishment as a context, we will examine how the body is represented in Renaissance drama
and poetry. Noting that the body is positioned according to hierarchies
of gender and status, we will pay particular attention to how
male and female authors make the body `speak' the `truth' about
its internal workings, its desires and its passions. This course
satisfies the Pre-1600 requirement for English concentrators.
Cost:1 (Traub)
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Times, Location, and Availability
100- and 200-level |
300-399 |
400-499 |
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