DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome.

Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.

Course Description: We'll read a range of Shakespeare's plays: comedies, histories, tragedies, and tragicomedies, from early in his career to his final works. The course will introduce the plays by introducing them back into the context of the theatre, literary world, and culture in which Shakespeare originally wrote them.  We will think about Shakespeare’s contexts and how they matter: a theatre on the outskirts of ever-expanding Renaissance London; a financially successful acting company in which he played the simultaneous and often overlapping roles of writer, actor, and co-owner; a world of reading and writing in which words, plots, and texts were constantly being re-circulated into new plays; the rich possibilities of the English language around 1600.  We will centrally consider the ways in which these theatrical, literary, and cultural questions register within the plays themselves.  What do words, plays, stories do—how do they work—in Shakespeare’s plays?  Who or what is an audience or an actor in these plays?  How do Shakespeare's plays stage issues such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, social class, entertainment and the media -- and how does his approach to these issues continue to speak to our own era?

Teaching method: Lecture and discussion, required discussion section.

Evaluation method: Essays and exams.

Plays will include: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, As You Like It, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen (by Shakespeare and his collaborator, John Fletcher).

Course Description: This seminar will introduce you to some of terms--and through these terms, to some of the materials, methods, theories, and arguments--that have become central to literary study today. By coming to know these terms, we will begin to come to terms with literary study in other, broader ways--to think about what the study of texts might have to do with reading, writing, and thinking in twenty-first century American culture.

The seminar is organized around the following terms: writing, author, culture, canon, gender, performance. Some of these terms are of course familiar. Initially, some will seem impossibly broad, but our approach will be particular, through particular literary texts and critical essays. Throughout the course we will also return to two important terms that aren’t a part of this list: literature (what is it? who or what controls its meaning? why study it?) and readers (who are we? what is our relation to the text and its meaning[s]? what does “reading” entail? what is the purpose of reading? what gets read and who decides?).

Teaching method: Mostly discussion.

Evaluation method: Mandatory attendance and active participation. Shorter papers, some of them revised, and one longer final paper. No exams.

Texts Include: Mostly fiction and poetry, including some of the following: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Emily Dickinson’s poetry; Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III; Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope’s Year; Critical Terms for Literary Study (eds. Lentricchia and McLaughlin; second edition).

Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.

Course Description: This seminar will deliciously discuss its central question- how authors cook up national identity in literature- by exploring food culture from early America to the present. Foodways, or the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical period, are a powerful lens through which to explore eaters’ national and cultural identities and reveal social inequities. How does what you eat reveal who you are in American life? Beginning with early American Indian cuisine and Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, we will investigate how the “nation” was contested through depictions of food in literature. What kinds of food and eating habits were depicted as “savage”? How “civilized” is the sentimental myth of the First Thanksgiving, memorialized in Lydia Maria Child’s popular poem, “Over the River and Through the Wood”? Travelling through the 19^th century, we will examine how foodways define gender, race, and citizenship in the American republic. How can studying nineteenth-century foodways help us to understand who does (and who doesn’t) belong to the nation? Finally, we will arrive in the 20^th- and 21^st-century to focus on how contemporary writers of color take up foodways to deconstruct dominant national narratives. What can our current foodie moment teach us about how eaters perceive of their national identities today?

Teaching method: Discussion.

Evaluation method: Close-reading posts; 2 short essays (3-5 pages) and one longer essay (5-7); participation and attendance.

Texts Include: Readings may include Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; and selections from works by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, as well as from contemporary cookbooks and food memoirs such as The Sioux Chef and The Cooking Gene.

Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore.

Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.

Instructor Bio: Meaghan Fritz’s research and teaching interests concern nineteenth-century American literature and print culture, women’s and gender studies, and legal studies. Professor Fritz has taught courses in the Northwestern English Department and the Northwestern University Writing Program, where she received a teaching award. Her pedagogy is distinctly interdisciplinary, placing historical, cultural, and political artifacts alongside literature to encourage students to think of reading and writing as part of an ongoing and historical conversation. She is also a self-proclaimed foodie, and enjoys teaching courses focusing on food, gender, and national identity.

Teaching Method: a mixture of lecture and discussion

Evaluation Method: based on attendance and discussion; essays.  This course is cross-listed in Gender Studies and English.

Texts include: Plays: The Two Noble Kinsmen, Philaster, Edward II, The Man of Mode, Sodom, The Importance of Being Earnest, Patience, A Streetcar Named Desire, Angels in America. Films: Tea and Sympathy, The Boys in the Band. Theory: Butler, Dryden, Edelman, Foucault, Halperin, Koestenbaum, Miller, Montaigne, Sedgwick, Sontag, others.

Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time.

Teaching Method: Class discussion and lecture.

Evaluation Method: Papers, class presentation, class participation.

Texts Include: Paradise Lost by John Milton.

Course Description: In the summer of 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein: The New Prometheus .  Itwas a hit in its own time.  But it faded into relative obscurity – at least in the academy. Frankenstein would rarely if ever be found on Romantic lit syllabi until the mid 1970s when feminist theorists resuscitated Frankenstein and many other texts written by women in the nineteenth century.   Soon Frankenstein was on many syllabi.  By 2018, ten out of fifteen students in a Northwestern first-year seminar on the novel had read Frankenstein in high school.

In this class we will study this trajectory. We will start by studying the novel as paradigmatically “Romantic,” a direct engagement with John Milton’s Paradise Lost and of course the Prometheus myth. We will then focus on the evolution of Frankenstein, from a novel about “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” as seen through the lense of feminist criticism to, as one recent critic put it, “the first novel about the weather.”  The title of a very recent study, Frankenstein: The First 200 Years, nods to the novel’s staying power, and its ability to attract new audiences.  As we read and analyze the criticism over time, as well as other primary works that are contemporary with or pay homage to Frankenstein, together we will theorize about why this is so. 

Writing assignments will build incrementally toward a final research paper.  Because of the range and sheer magnitude of critical approaches available to them, in doing their research and writing their papers students will be asked to articulate their own “Frankenstein.”

Texts include: All students will need to have a copy of the 1818 edition Frankenstein.  (There was also an 1831 edition.)  As long as it is an 1818 edition, any published edition will do, used or new, borrowed or owned.  Frankenstein is also available electronically.  Almost all other required readings will be available electronically through our Canvas site.

Course Description: Performer and activist Josephine Baker famously declared, “I have two loves: my country and Paris.” In this seminar we will examine the works of African American writers such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes who flocked to Paris at the height of 20^th-century literary modernism seeking inspiration, relief from racial prejudice and sexual policing, economic and creative support, and greater artistic freedom. Our inquiries will center on the sometimes-dueling allegiances many African American artists felt to the U.S. and their adopted home of Paris. How did visiting Paris free some artists from the racism, social alienation, and restrictive literary traditions associated with writing “American literature”? How did expatriating empower others to reflect anew on American life, politics, and literary forms? Was it possible for authors to escape their American-ness abroad? Did Paris live up to the hype? We will debate national and canonical boundaries, questioning what defines African American literature and authorship in this particularly transnational literary movement.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Close-reading posts; 2 short essays (5-7 pages); participation and attendance.

Texts include: In addition to Baker, we will explore the works of novelists, poets, artists, and musicians, ranging from James Baldwin to Chester Himes, Louis Armstrong to Billie Holiday, and Gwendolyn Bennett to Langston Hughes. I will occasionally assign critical or theoretical works in addition to our primary literary texts. 

Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore

Instructor Bio: Meaghan Fritz’s research and teaching interests concern nineteenth-century American literature and print culture, women’s and gender studies, and legal studies. Professor Fritz has taught courses in the Northwestern English Department and the Northwestern University Writing Program, where she received a teaching award. Her pedagogy is distinctly interdisciplinary, placing historical, cultural, and political artifacts alongside literature to encourage students to think of reading and writing as part of an ongoing and historical conversation. She is also a self-proclaimed foodie, and enjoys teaching courses focusing on food, gender, and national identity.

Course Description: This course uses interdisciplinary and intersectional methods to study the representations of race in African literatures from different linguistic and racial backgrounds. The role of translation (inter-lingual and cultural) in the depiction of race will be central to our discussions. We will read texts originally written in Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese and indigenous African languages to examine how writers come to terms with the idea of race. Who is an African and who is not? Is race biological or socially constructed? How are non-black races (e.g. Arabs, white, Indians etc.) represented in African writing? How is the “black” in Africa different or similar to “black” in other parts of the world? How do “black aesthetics” and “black arts” in Africa differ from similar concepts in black-diaspora cultures? How does racism intersect with other forms of oppression in African societies? How are internal racisms represented in African contexts? How are representations of race in canonical writing (e.g., Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice) treated in African translations and allusions to those texts? Performing both distant and close readings of African writers, we will read primary texts in terms of the techniques individual artists use to treat race matters.  Theory texts will include excerpts from well-known works on the black race by Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Fanon, Memmi as well as newer African and African-diaspora engagements with these texts by such scholars as Charles Mills, Emmanuel Eze, Achille Mbembe, Toni Morrison, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Stuart Hall.

Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, debates, role-play, one-on-one meetings, and small group discussions.

Evaluation Method: Two 6-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, take-home exam, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded).

Readings (May change)

• Mia Couto’s Every Man is a Race,  ISBN-13: 978-0435909826.
• Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Longman.  ISBN-13: 978-0582308459.
• Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. New York Review of Books, ISBN-13: 978-1590173022.
• Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit. Grove Press. ISBN-13:978-0802170064.
• Bessie Head’s Maru, Waveland Press, ISBN-13: 978-1478607618.

Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 304-0-20.

Course Description: How have revolutions shaped the modern world? How have artists, writers, historians, and musicians participated in, memorialized, and critiqued revolutionary movements? This course will take a comparative approach to the study of the modern revolution, beginning with the Mexican and Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century, then moving back in time to the American, Haitian, and French revolutions. Drawing from a variety of humanities disciplines, we will seek to understand how revolutionary movements begin, the contingencies of revolutionary action, and what happens when revolutions become institutionalized into state apparatuses. Texts will include Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (The Underdogs) (1915), Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1920s), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938), and selections from Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Washington Irving, and The Federalist Papers.

This small-enrollment, discussion-based seminar will travel to Mexico City the week before fall quarter begins (Sept 10-15) to visit a variety of sites associated with the Mexican Revolution. Course enrollment is by application only.

Teaching Method: Discussion

Evaluation Method: Three essays and an exit interview.

Texts:

• Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (978-0198745631)
• Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs (978-0451531087)
• Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry (978-0393324235)
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (978-0199569717)
• C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins (978-0679724674)

Note: This course is combined with Humanities 310-6-20.

Course Description: Recent scholarship on the history of abolitionism has placed renewed emphasis on the importance of religious communities within the early antislavery movement of the eighteenth century. Together, we will explore how the concerns of these religious traditions carry forward into the larger national projects of American abolitionism in the nineteenth century. How does renewed attention to this early period help us bring into focus the contributions of radical Black abolitionists? How do the shifting concerns of these various communities and coalitions compete or collaborate? To answer these questions, we will read from a broad selection of early antislavery writing, while also looking toward Octavia Butler’s genre defying novel, Kindred (1979), as a lifeline to the present. We will explore abolition as a religiously inflected literary genre and will investigate how antislavery work inspired new forms of communication and literary style. Together we will read novels, poems, pamphlets, sermons, and personal narratives, paying attention to these emergent abolitionist forms.

Teaching Method: Discussion, collaborative group work.

Evaluation Method: Participation and preparation; two essays (5-7 pages); and a final collaborative project with in-class presentation.   

Texts include: Readings will move between novels, poems, speeches, journals, and narratives. Voices include: Anthony Benezet, Octavia Butler, Paul Cuffee, Ottobah Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Lemuel Haynes, Benjamin Lay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, Phyllis Wheatley, John Greenleaf Whittier, and John Woolman.

Note: This course fulfills the Area V (Ethics and Values) and Area VI (Literature & Fine Arts) distribution requirements.

Instructor Bio: Ean High’s research and writing join ongoing efforts to revitalize critical knowledge of religious life and expression in the study of American literature. His work has been supported by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Libraries of Haverford College. His commitment to the classroom has been recognized by a teaching award from the Northwestern English Department.

This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get.

Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops.

Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback.

Texts Include: TBA

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only

Course Description: Literature is dead! Long live literature! Since the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s critics, writers, and just about everyone has freaked out at one time or another about the fates of literature, print, and literacy in the digital age. Turning the volume down on both technophobic and technophilic reactions to this situation, we will start from literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s radically pluralistic vision of the novel in order to think about literature itself as an expansive and elastic category of mediated aesthetic expression uniquely responsive to digital technologies. More concretely, this research seminar is designed to do two things: to introduce students to key issues and developments in literary form and culture catalyzed by the rise of the web; and to teach students research skills in the service of drafting and crafting a self-designed research paper of approximately 12–15 pages. Possible texts include: short stories by William Gibson and Kristen Roupenian, novels by Allie Brosh and Dennis Cooper, and electronic literature by William Poundstone, Frances Stark, John Cayley, Thomson and Craighead, and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

Required Texts: Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half ISBN: 978-0224095372; Dennis Cooper, The Sluts ISBN: 978-0786716746.

Course Description: This course will read against the accepted tradition of the American Revolution as an essentially rational, Lockean, and non-terroristic Revolution.  We will examine American Revolutionary writing as a rhetorical battlefield in which a multiplicity of voices and a plurality of forms—history, letters, notes, autobiography, novel, epic, lyric, pamphlet, and journalistic piece—struggled over the cultural and political formation of America and the American. 

We shall pay particular attention to the rhetorics of Revolution—the language, images, myths, and forms through which the American Revolution and the American republic were imagined and constituted in and through writing.  We shall focus in particular on sites of contest, contradiction, resistance, and taboo in Revolutionary writing: the representation of “citizens” and “others”; conflicts between reason and passion, liberty and slavery, civilization and savage, progress and blood; anxieties about nature, the body, gender, human psychology, race, and madness; the terrors of democracy, mob violence, slave insurrection, and political faction; and debates about the excesses of language, print, and representation itself.  We shall read relevant political and cultural theory—from Locke and Kant to Nancy Fraser, Gilroy, and the Frankfurt school—and consider various past and recent contests about the meaning of the American Revolution.

Evaluation Method: Book review/oral presentation on a major critical, historical, or theoretical work (3-4 pages); critical essay on a subject of the student’s choosing (10-12 pages); Canvas postings; class participation.