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EnglishHumanities Division FacultyBianca F.-C. Calabresi James P. Carson Jennifer S. Clarvoe Galbraith M. Crump Adele S. Davidson Lewis Hyde Shuchi Kapila John Kinsella William F. Klein P. Frederick Kluge Deborah Laycock (Exeter Program) Perry C. Lentz Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky David H. Lynn Ellen Mankoff Theodore O. Mason Jesse Matz Janet E. McAdams Kim McMullen Claire Messud Ronald A. Sharp Timothy B. Shutt Judy R. Smith Emily Mi Sun Patricia Vigderman The Department of English encourages and develops the ability to read with active understanding and wide appreciation, to write with clarity and grace, and to explore oneself and the world through the intensive study of literature. New StudentsENGL 101-102 is designed for students beginning the serious study of literature at the college level, and as such is especially appropriate for first-year students. ENGL 101-102 or its equivalent, or junior standing, is a prerequisite for further study in English at Kenyon. (IPHS 113-114 is considered the equivalent of ENGL 101-102.) First-year students who present the equivalent of ENGL 101-102 through advanced placement or some other means may select from courses in the department numbered 210-289, or they may seek special permission to enroll in any of the department’s other offerings. Look for the ENGL 101-102 Literature and Language ENGL 210-289 Requirements for the MajorEnglish majors are required to complete the following:
Some courses (e.g., ENGL 410-489) may fulfill distribution requirements, although they are not listed above. See specific course descriptions to determine if the course fulfills one of these categories. Requirements for a Major with Emphasis in Creative WritingStudents wishing to major in English with an emphasis in creative writing are required to complete the following:
Qualified seniors who have taken both introductory and advanced creative writing workshops may, with faculty approval, pursue an Individual Study in creative writing (ENGL 493 or 494); this course is not available to students who have not taken both workshops. ENGL 200, 201, 202, 300, and 301 (Creative Writing) Kenyon/Exeter ProgramThe department directs a program of study at the University of Exeter in England for junior majors who qualify for admission. A member of our department teaches at the university, conducts seminars for Kenyon students, and administers the program. See the director of international education or the department chair for more information. Honors ProgramStudents of demonstrated ability who would like to undertake more independent work are encouraged to enter the Honors Program. Please see the description of the Honors Program in English, available from the department administrative assistant, for details. Senior ExerciseIn order to meet the college-wide requirement of a senior exercise, the English department requires its majors both to take an examination based on a set reading list and to write either a nine- to twelve-page critical essay or a creative project of similar length and scope. The English department regards the examination and critical essay or creative project as equally important. The examination, based on a short reading list of twelve major works or authors of lyric poems, will consist of three parts, to be completed in two timed settings, normally on the Saturday of the week after spring break. The morning two-hour examination will consist of short-answer questions, as well as identifications of and brief commentary on passages reproduced from works on the reading list. The afternoon two-hour examination will require students to write an essay analyzing a lyric poem by one of the poets on the reading list. The reading list will be different for each graduating class, so you should request from the chair of the English department the reading list for your particular class. In addition to taking the examination, every English major will also submit a critical essay or creative project. Only those students who have met the requirements for the emphasis in creative writing will be permitted to submit creative work in partial fulfillment of the Senior Exercise in English. The department envisions that most majors will take the opportunity to revise work previously submitted in their classes. Students may choose one of their best essays or pieces of creative work (perhaps several pieces in the case of poetry) and, by substantially rethinking, rewriting, and (in many cases) doing additional research, attempt to produce a final version that represents the very best work of which they are capable. In a smaller number of cases, students with a strong interest in a subject or author not studied in their written work for previous classes may choose to pursue an entirely new project in order to complete this second part of the senior exercise. In either case, student work on the critical essay or creative project should be undertaken and completed independently. The first step in the procedures for the critical essay or creative project will be for the student to submit to the chair of the English department, usually at a date prior to Thanksgiving break, a brief description of the topic: authors, works, or critical problems to be discussed; the nature of the creative work to be pursued. Students must inform the chair if the project will be a revision of work previously submitted in a course. If so, they should submit a copy of the original essay or creative work along with the proposal. A department committee will examine the topics to ensure that they are appropriate for a culminating exercise in the English major at Kenyon. The second step will be the submission of the completed project, normally in the first month of spring semester. Year CoursesLiterature and Language While there is no standard syllabus for the many sections of ENGL 101-102, all instructors design their courses around a list of challenging texts, drawn from a wide chronological range and chosen to represent major literary genres (tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short story, autobiography, etc.). Class sessions of ENGL 101-102 are based almost exclusively on the discussion of literature. To enable these discussions to be as wide-ranging and intense as possible, class size is limited to allow each student to participate. While ENGL 101-102 is not a “composition” course as such, 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. Throughout the year, each instructor assigns about a dozen essays of short or medium length, and may also require quizzes, hourly examinations, or longer research projects. Specific descriptions of each section of ENGL 101-102 are available through the English department administrative assistant at the beginning of each academic year. This course is not open to juniors and seniors, without permission of the department chair. Enrollment limited. The Epic In this full-year course, we will study in translation Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and will study, in the original, “Book One” of Spenser’s Faerie Queene along with Milton’s Paradise Lost. In addition to close and careful readings of the texts themselves, we will examine the social, theological, and historical contexts in which they were composed, the concerns which they addressed, and the changing visions of admirable conduct and character which they embody. The course will consist of twice-weekly lectures and weekly discussion sessions. Evaluation will be conducted in large part by examination. Enrollment unlimited. First-Semester CoursesIntroduction to Fiction Writing This course is a workshop-style seminar that introduces students to the elements of fiction writing. The course begins with exercises emphasizing various aspects of fiction: place, dialogue, character. Students then write a story based on a situation suggested by the instructor. Later they devise and revise a work of their own. The course assumes a basic English writing competence. It is not a composition course. An important goal is developing the sense of an audience. The course also requires a mature approach to offering and receiving criticism. Prerequisites: submission of writing sample in February 2002 and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Introduction to Fiction Writing See above description. Prerequisites: submission of writing sample in February 2002 and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Introduction to Poetry Writing This course will introduce the student to the writing of poetry, with a special emphasis on poetic forms. Work will consist of (1) the examination of literary models, (2) writing exercises, (3) writing workshops, and (4) conferences with the instructor about the student’s own work. Requirements will include outside reading, participation in class discussion, and submission of a final portfolio. Prerequisites: submission of writing sample in February 2002 and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Creative Nonfiction Workshop Students in this workshop will write imaginative nonfiction in any of its traditional forms: memoirs, reflections, polemics, chronicles, idylls, lampoons, monographs, pamphlets, profiles, reviews, prefaces, sketches, remarks, complaints—anything but the traditional college essay. As in other writing workshops, attention in class will be paid above all to the writing itself, word by word, sentence by sentence. Prerequisites: submission of writing sample in February 2002 and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Theory of Comedy This course will introduce students to a range of critical methods, interpretive strategies, and approaches to literature as we explore connections among theories of comedy and comic texts. Jokes, puns, and the language of comedy; the carnivalesque; the role of laughter; the relation of comedy to aggression and violence; the depiction of gender; the comedy of manners; utopian social impulses; and the cultural work of comedy: these issues will shape our attempt to explore traditional and contemporary definitions of the genre. Authors to be studied include Shakespeare, Austen, Wilde, Shaw, O’Connor, Woody Allen, and David Sedaris. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Film As Text In this course we will discuss film using methods similar to those used in the analysis of literary texts. The purpose will be to examine the “language” of film and to explore film history and theory. The class will acquire a working use of film terms and basic understanding of both narrative structure and formal elements. We’ll look at how Hollywood has shaped and reshaped melodrama as well as at non-melodramatic cinema, including films from other countries. In addition to regular classes, film screenings will be held on Monday evenings, and are mandatory. This course may be counted as credit for the major by students in English or in the Department of Dance and Drama. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Modernism “Modernism” refers to art that aimed to break with the past and create innovative new forms of expression. The Modernists, writing between 1890 and 1939, tried in various ways to make literature newly responsive to the movements of a rapidly changing modern world. Alienated by the upheavals of modernity, or inspired by modern discoveries and developments in psychology, technology, and world culture, Modernist literature reflects new horrors and traces new modes of insight. Experimental, often difficult and shocking, Modernist literature pushes language to its limits and tests the boundaries of art and perception. This course studies the nature and development of Modernist literature, reading key texts in the context of the theoretical doctrines and cultural movements that helped to produce them. The key texts include poetry and fiction by W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes. The secondary material includes essays, paintings, and manifestoes produced at the moment of Modernism, as well as later criticism that will help explain what Modernism was all about. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. The Confidence Game in America A confidence man is not necessarily a crook; he is simply someone in the business of creating belief. Abraham Lincoln, rallying the nation to the Union cause, was a confidence man in the good sense; P.T. Barnum, charging people to see his “Fejee Mermaid,” was a con man of the shadier sort. But how exactly do we tell the difference between the two? More broadly, how does the story someone tells, and the way that it is told, lead us to believe or to disbelieve? This course will touch on some early American documents (a Puritan sermon, Franklin’s autobiography, the Declaration of Independence), but will focus on a group of nineteenth-century writers who both shaped and disturbed American confidence: Ralph Waldo Emerson, P.T. Barnum, Herman Melville, Henry D. Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mark Twain. The term “confidence man” was coined in the United States. It is apt, then, that we read our own tradition, asking as we go: What is the American story? Why do we believe it? This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. American Modernist Literature Modernist literature was written under the injunction to “make it new.” Our discussion will focus on how American modernist writers made it new, and what “it” was, in each case, that they made. We will pay particular attention to the problematics of gender and sexuality and to the permeability of gender boundaries that produced such figures as Djuna Barnes’s “Dr. O’Connor,” T.S. Eliot’s “Tiresias,” and Ernest Hemingway’s “Jake Barnes.” In addition to these three writers, we will read selections from Stein, Faulkner, Hughes, Williams, and Larsen, among others. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Introduction to African-American Literature This course considers the African-American literary tradition from early slave narratives to Wright’s Native Son. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. American Novel, 1950-Present This course involves close examination of ten American novels written after World War II. Consideration will be given to styles and methods: the authorial choices that make the novels what they are. Beyond this, however, we’ll examine these novels as comments on American life. The reading list may be organized around a specific theme—politics, ethnic experience, sport, small-town life—or a combination of themes. In any case, the study of authors whose place in or out of the canon has not yet been determined should give the class an opportunity for intelligent, critical reading. The course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Advanced Fiction-Writing
Workshop This workshop will focus on discussion of participants’ fiction as well as on exercises and playful experimentation. Principally, we will be concerned with how stories work rather than what they mean. This perspective can prove a useful lens for reconsidering works long accepted as “great,” and a practical method for developing individual styles and strategies of writing. Prerequisites: ENGL 200 or ENGL 202, submission of a writing sample in February 2002, and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Advanced Poetry-Writing
Workshop This course begins with two premises: (1) that students of the craft of poetry should be challenged to write in as many different ways as possible, and (2) that students are individual writers with different needs and goals. In this course, we will study a wide variety of poetry. Regular writing exercises will encourage students to widen their scope and develop their craft. Group work and class workshops will enable students to sharpen their critique skills. This course will emphasize discovering the “true” subject of each poem, acquiring the skills needed to render that subject, understanding the relationship between form and content, and, finally, interrogating the role and function of poetry in a culture. Prerequisites: ENGL 201, submission of a writing sample in February 2002, and permission of instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Mean Streets, American Dreams: Hard-boiled Crime Fiction and Film Noir From The Maltese Falcon to Pulp Fiction, the hard-boiled crime novel and film noir have explored the dark side of the American Dream. This course will examine the cultural history of “noir” style, and its influence on the literature and film of postwar America. Readings will begin with classic texts by such authors as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Jim Thompson, then examine the influence of noir style on such “literary” texts as Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Wright’s Native Son, Warren’s All the King’s Men, Capote’s In Cold Blood, and DeLillo’s Libra. By doing so, the course will explore such issues as the relationship between popular and high culture, the politics of literary and cinematic style, the role of the femme fatale in recent gender theory, and the cultural history of the anti-hero as both a commercial product in American popular culture and an expression of literary dissent. The course includes a mandatory film series, tracking the development of film noir as a cinematic style, as well as extensive readings in literary and film theory. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Shakespeare: A study of the sexually marginal, liminal, normative, obligatory in Shakespeare’s England. We will explore early modern representations of sex and gender in Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, discussing the following, among other, issues: Shakespeare and the erotics of whiteness, affective relationships and the emergence of compulsory heterosexuality, sodomy as a criminal and critical category, the viability of Shakespeare as “feminist,” the production of desire and the pleasures of the Shakespearean text. Throughout our discussions we will be concerned with the normative or liminal nature of desiring Shakespearean bodies in the early modern and the postmodern age. This is not a Shakespeare survey: however, while looking closely at the Sonnets, we will also examine a range of the comedies, tragedies, history plays, and pamphlet poems. We will also read a considerable amount of recent theoretical and historical material. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Shakespeare: Strange Fish and Bearded Women This course will examine the role of the cultural “other” in many of Shakespeare’s plays. By looking at figures like the witch, the native/foreigner, or the cross-dressed woman in such plays as Macbeth, The Tempest, Othello, and Merchant of Venice, we will explore the way Shakespeare’s theater shaped—and was shaped by—the cultural expectations of the English Renaissance. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Chaucer The central focus of this course is a close reading of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the author’s Middle English. The appraisal of the achievement of this collection of “tales” will be conducted in the context of some contemporary narratives, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and selections from Boccaccio’s Decameron. The writing required will include text-centered reading examinations, three short essays, and one major research study. Class meetings will be a mixture of student recitations, informal lecture, and open discussion. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. British Romantic Literature A study of works in poetry and prose of the British Romantic era, a period that spans the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the context of industrial and political revolutions, Romantic writers claimed revolutionary status and impact for their own literary practices. We will investigate how these writers transformed and renewed such genres as lyric, epic, romance, autobiography, the critical essay, and the novel. We will address in our readings the following topics: the use of classical and medieval sources and the revival of folk traditions, the turn to nature, the defense of the imagination, the relationship between dream and reality, the place of childhood in art and human development, and the complex relations between writing and femininity. In the course of the semester, we will also consider how the Romantics’ concern with the nature of language and representation formed part of their self-conception as agents of radical social critique. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Twentieth-Century Irish
Literature Henry V’s resident stage-Irishman, MacMorris, poses the pressing postcolonial question “What ish my nation?”—a concern that grows urgent for Irish writers at the beginning of the twentieth century. This course will examine the mutually informing emergence of an independent Irish state and a modern Irish literature, and will analyze the evolution of postcolonial Irish culture. Focusing on texts from the “Celtic Revival,” the Civil War era, the Free state, and present-day Eire, we will analyze literature’s dialogue with its historical moment and with its cultural inheritance. Writers will include Yeats, Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Padraic Pearse, Sean O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, Jennifer Johnston, Brian Friel, and Eavan Boland. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. The Modern Short Story This course is a survey of the modern short story in English, with emphasis upon stories written by Americans beginning with Hawthorne and ending with Oates and Updike, a historical line of what has traditionally been called “The Major Writers of Short Fiction.” The dominant mode of classroom activity will be lecture with opportunity for comment, question, and challenge. Student writing will include short essays in formal analysis, text-centered reading examinations, and one longer essay in the genre of “analytical appreciation” (Henry James’s phrase). The critical approach of the lectures and the writing assignments is based upon the informal critical writings of the short story writers themselves, particularly Henry James, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. All students (including nonmajors) interested in the art of short fiction are welcome. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. African Fiction A survey of African fiction mainly of the latter half of the twentieth century, focusing on the way Africa’s cultural traditions, historical problems, and political objectives have revised and resisted Western narrative forms. The course will ask what narrative forms develop as a result of the dynamics and machinations of power in modern Africa—how, for example, the need to present historical information and political argument to the broadest possible local audience has emphasized realism and favored popular styles; how the important earlier forms of African fiction (the “release narrative,” the “ethnographic narrative,” “resistance” literature) have evolved in recent years; the variety of responses to the Nigerian civil war and other specific major political events and problems; and how the most typical subjects—the impact of modernization on traditional life, the problem of post-independence corruption—have called for unique forms of treatment in different places at different times. Related topics will include the transmission of oral culture into literary form, the impact of external patronage on local literary cultures, the influence of writers and intellectuals educated abroad on literature at home, and, most importantly, the result of the African effort to “decolonize” literary forms of expression. Treatment of these topics will include selections from important works of criticism and nonfiction (including Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Decolonising the Mind, Ayei Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?, Kofi Anyudoho’s The Pan African Ideal in Literatures of the Black World, and Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature, and the African World). Fiction will include novels and stories by Ngugi, Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Hama Tuma, Nuruddin Farah, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, and Bessie Head. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. The Gilded Age This will be a study of American literature and culture from the Civil War to World War I, an era marked by American expansion, industrialization, and the birth of modernism. Authors considered include Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, and Crane. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. American Indian Literature This course will be a study of American Indian literature and cultures. Authors include Erdrich, Momaday, Ortiz, and Silko. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Contemporary American Poetry This is a sampler course in contemporary American poetry, focusing on the poetic generation of Gunn, O’Hara, Merrill, Wright, Plath, Jarrell, Bishop, and Ashbery, with particular attention to issues of voice and form. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. The following are seminars:India 1947: Literature of the Partition The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 is one of the most traumatic events of modern Indian history. Like other historical genocides, this one was marked by a massive dislocation of populations, reinvention of social identities, and the creation of new urban cultures and communities. Even though literature about the Partition has emerged in a steady trickle in the subcontinent since the 1950s, the event has primarily lived as a repressed memory, or an enforced silence. The recent fiftieth anniversary celebrations of independence from imperial rule in the subcontinent brought into the literary marketplace an outpouring of Partition narratives in the form of fiction, autobiographies, oral histories, and memoirs. In this course, we will read a variety of narratives and records of this defining moment of modern Indian history, including works originally written in English as well as works in translation. We will also watch films based on Partition literature. We will discuss how this literature presents a critique of the new nations, how women record the violence of Partition, how “home” gets redefined at this moment of exile, and how literature becomes a critical record of this historical moment. Some of the writers included in the course are Saadat Hasan Manto, Mukul Kesavan, Bhisham Sahni, Khushwant Singh, and Bapsi Sidhwa. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Richard Wright and Toni Morrison This seminar considers the work of two preeminent African-American writers. We will read not only their major fiction but also the critical prose each has written. In addition, we will familiarize ourselves with the secondary literature about Wright and Morrison. The seminar will also concern itself with other important issues surrounding their work, such as the politics of black authorship at different times in the last century, the role of gender in their work, and the relation between their fiction and their imagined readership, among other topics. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Individual Study This course offers independent programs of reading and writing on topics of a student’s own choice. It is limited to senior English majors who are unable to study their chosen subject in a regularly scheduled course. Prerequisites: permission of instructor and department chair. Enrollment limited. Senior Honors This seminar, required for students in the Honors Program, will relate works of literary criticism to various literary texts, including one or two 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 research project in English. The course is limited to students with a 3.2 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. Second-Semester CoursesIntroduction to Fiction Writing See first-semester course description. Prerequisites: submission of writing sample in February 2002 and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Introduction to Poetry Writing See first-semester course description. Prerequisites: submission of writing sample in February 2002 and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Introduction to Poetry Writing The focus of this course will be on experimental, or “linguistically innovative” poetry. This course will introduce the student to the writing of poetry, with a special emphasis on poetic forms. Work will consist of (1) the examination of literary models, (2) writing exercises, (3) writing workshops, and (4) conferences with the instructor about the student’s own work. Requirements will include outside reading, participation in class discussion, and submission of a final portfolio. Prerequisites: submission of writing sample in February 2002 and permission of the instructor. Check with the English department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Enrollment limited. Prosody and Poetics This course introduces students to the fundamentals of prosody and poetics. “Ecstasy affords the occasion” for poetry, Marianne Moore wrote, “and expediency determines the form.” We will read poems from a broad range of historical periods in a range of forms (sapphics, syllabics, sonnets, sestinas, etc.), as well as statements by poets, critics, and theorists about the aims and effects of poetic form. In addition to a series of short critical analyses of poetry, students will practice writing in the forms studied. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Shakespeare We will explore themes of gender, identity, kingship, and desire in the major comedies, histories and tragedies. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. City, Court, and Country House: Urbanity and Pastoral in Tudor/Stuart England This course focuses on the creation of an urban culture in early modern England and the city’s relation to the court and countryside around it. We will look in particular at the ways in which literature defined and reflected changing images of city, court, and country in the period. Topics include the mapping and enclosure of civic and rural space; the city and court as sites of corruption; the country as retreat; cross-dressing and consumption; criminal underworlds; work, mobility, and identity; urbanity elsewhere. We’ll look at the growth of particular genres that discuss urban and rural life—pastoral, city comedy, and the country-house poem, for example—in relation to changing historical and economic circumstances in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Authors include Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, Marlowe, and women writers of the period. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Studies in British Romanticism: Literature in the Age
of Revolution This course will investigate the relationship between literature and politics in the Romantic period by focusing on the various ways writers responded to the French Revolution and its aftermath. We will study how writers embraced, espoused, or rejected revolutionary goals; how a notion of “Englishness” was promoted; how the French Revolution was contrasted to the American. We will examine, moreover, how revolution served as a conceptual model that inspired writers to formulate parallel projects of renewing literary language as well as transforming contemporary notions of gender, sexuality, and race. Readings include critical, autobiographical, and fictional works by Price, Burke, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and the Shelleys, among others. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Victorian Urban Culture This course will explore the culture of the city in Victorian poetry and prose. Victorian notions of “culture,” “aesthetics,” “style,” the “highbrow,” and the “lowbrow” all refer in one way or another to urban scenes and sites, or their polar opposites in rural England or in the grime of industrial England. The representation of these urban sites was connected to Victorian ideas about education, class, and social theory. We will read works by John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, J.S. Mill, Henry Mayhew, Harriet Martineau, and T.H. Huxley. The course is designed as an inquiry into the institutions of Victorian culture. Students will have the opportunity of doing individual and group research on Victorian constructions of religion, sexuality, art, and aesthetics. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Literary Women “What art’s for a woman?” asks Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her question was echoed by many other writers throughout the nineteenth century, nonetheless—or all the more—a great age for literary women. This course will introduce major writers of the Romantic and Victorian periods, exploring the relationships between their lives and works, and examining issues such as women as readers; the education of women; the changing roles of women in the home, in the workplace, and in the community; the growth of the reading public; and the gendering of authorship. We will consider relations between genres as we read fiction (“gothic” and “realistic” novels), poetry, letters, journals, biography, autobiography, and essays on education, travel, literature, and politics. Authors will include Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. American Fiction We will concentrate on American fiction of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, tracing its development from Romantic to Modern. Some of the questions we will pose include: How do the American landscape and revolution figure in this genre? How do American writers translate the British gothic impulse? How do major American cultural/political events—the Civil War, for example—contribute to changes in the genre? How do race, class, and gender affect the way authors shape their fiction? We will read from a broad variety of short stories and novels by writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Crane, Gilman, Davis, and Toomer. This course is open only to sophomores and first-year students with advanced placement credit. Enrollment limited for sophomores. Permission of instructor required for first-year students. Narrative Theory Why do we tell stories—and why do we do it the way we do? What psychological desires do our narratives express? How do they help us to generate our collective cultures, to frame our individual lives, to recreate the past and to imagine the future? What political dictates do our narratives obey, and how do they constitute political resistance? What are the different genres of narrative, and what elements define them? This course asks these and other such questions in order to study the nature, purpose, and effects of narrative, from a range of theoretical perspectives. We will study the history of the English novel (its development out of spiritual autobiographies, news-sheets, and capitalist individualism), the categories of “narratology” (the formal study of narrative), the politics of narrative according to Marxists, feminists, neo-Victorians, and New Historicists, the psychology of narrative (according to Freudians, behavioral therapists, cognitive scientists), and the structure of narrative as described in schools of criticism from formalism to deconstruction to film theory. Readings will include selections from The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt, Narrative Discourse by Gerard Genette, S/Z by Roland Barthes, Reading for the Plot by Peter Brooks, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin, and Dreaming by the Book by Elaine Scarry. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Postmodern Narrative Through discussion and occasional lecture, this course will examine some of the strategies and concerns of postmodern narrative: the critique of representation and a consequent focus on fictionality, textuality, intertextuality, and the act of reading; subversion of “master narratives” and the release of multiplicity and indeterminacy; preoccupation with the discursive construction of the human subject and the interrelationship of language, knowledge, power; and the interpenetration of history and fiction, theory and literature, “high” art and mass culture. We shall consider such writers as Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, J.M. Coetzee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Vladimir Nabokov, Manuel Puig, Ishmael Reed, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson. We shall also engage various theorists and critics of the postmodern (Barthes, Lyotard, Jameson, Eagleton). Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Shakespeare This course will explore Shakespeare’s four dramatic genres: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. We will also sample various critical approaches to the plays and consider Shakespeare’s role in the literary canon and as a cultural icon. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. History of the English Language The first half of this course is devoted to studying the history of English from its Anglo-Saxon ancestor to the emergence of Modern English in the fifteenth century. The historical narrative will be given substance in the close study of selected short texts, including poetry, riddles, and prose texts. The second half is devoted to the emergence of differentiated styles, dialects, and “discourses” after the English Renaissance. The theoretical issues will be given substance in the close study of short texts, primarily letters, diaries, and the informal essay. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Divine Comedy In this course, we shall study the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy in John Sinclair’s Oxford translation. Enrollment limited. The Reformation and Literature: Dogma and Dissent The Reformation deeply influenced the literary development of England and transformed the religious, intellectual, and cultural worlds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The long process of Reformation, shaped by late-medieval piety, the Renaissance, Continental activists, and popular religion, illustrates both religious continuities and discontinuities in the works of poets and prelates, prayerbooks and propaganda, sermons and exorcisms, bibles and broadsheets. This interdisciplinary course will focus on a range of English literature, from the Humanists under early Tudor monarchs to the flowering of Renaissance writers in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras, in the context of religious history, poetry, drama, prose, and iconography. Writers and reformers, such as More, Erasmus, Cranmer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Southwell, Herbert, and Donne, will be examined. This course is cross-listed as RELN 331. Prerequisite: permission of instructor(s). Enrollment limited. Princes and Pariahs: “Other” Victorian Encounters This course examines representations of race and colonialism in the Victorian novel. What kinds of buried or displaced traces of Britain’s slave trade and its colonial exploits in Africa and Asia do we find in Victorian fiction? How do we interpret the brief and marginal presence of “Chinamen,” Indians, blacks, and Jews in this fiction? We will pay close attention to the imagery associated with slaves, dark races, harems, tyrants, and opium addicts. We will also examine the figurative and narrative strategies of novels that represent rebellion, oppression, imperiousness, depravity, and forbidden knowledge by associating them with other cultures and races. We will read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and She by H. Rider Haggard. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Modernism Versus Colonialism The recent development of post-colonial studies has led us to reexamine our understanding of modern literature. Lord Jim, for example, can now be recognized as raw imperial fantasy conjoined with the dark self-destructiveness that ultimately doomed empire itself. Many of the classic texts from the early modern period in Britain (and Ireland), 1900-1930, can be newly illumined in the context of colonial tensions and anticolonial struggles. The collapse of the values underpinning Victorian culture and empire gave rise to modern questions of personal as well as national identity, to the struggle to create new artistic as well as social forms, to the need to understand language and race in new ways. Authors will include Conrad, Yeats, Kipling, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence. We will also read more recent critics and theorists to provide context and comment. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Australian Poetry and Poetic Theory This course will utilize an “historical” approach to Australian poetry to focus on contemporary international cultural and poetic theory. We will challenge assumptions about national identity, through a theory touched upon in Landbridge: an Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry—that of international regionalism. This may best be described as a dialogue in which regional integrity is respected while international lines of communication are established between poetries and poetics. Attention will be given to issues relating to Australian indigenous poetry and cultures, questions of hybridity, gender, ideas of subjectivity and self in poetry—non-linear and non-lyrical-I poetries, linguistic innovation, liminality, and cross-genre. The course will also provide the opportunity to visit Western Australia (optional, through Edith Cowan University, at students’ expense). Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. The Jazz Age We will study in its cultural contexts the remarkable literature that emerges from the so-called Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties, an era framed by the ending of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which authors of narrative and lyric sought a form to capture their transformed visions of what might be called their modern American selves. As we do so, we will also be discussing the parallel developments in other artistic disciplines, including music, fashion photography, and painting. We will read widely, including works by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Toomer, Stein, Eliot, Dreiser, Glasgow, Cather, Larsen, Williams, Faulkner, and Dos Passos. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. The following are seminars:Readings in Twentieth-Century Tragicomedy This course will explore the interaction and interdependence of the tragic and the comic in seven major twentieth-century writers, and will address the question of whether the comedy of nihilism is a distinctly modern form. Authors read will include Italo Svevo, Samuel Beckett, Jane Bowles, Muriel Spark, Thomas Bernhard, Philip Roth, and Peter Carey. We will also look at theories of comedy, including Schopenhauer, Bergson, and V.S. Pritchett. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Childhood in LIterature and Film A critical investigation of the function of childhood in texts and films ranging from Rousseau’s Confessions to contemporary cinema. The course will begin with texts by Rousseau, Wordsworth, Freud, and Proust to consider the privileged position modernity assigns to childhood as formative stage of human development. We will continue by exploring the role of childhood in the project of autobiography, with reference to the above authors as well as films by Truffaut and Bergman. We will examine how filmmakers have raised philosophical questions concerning what it means to become “human” by staging the child’s vexed encounter with language and society in treatments of the historical cases of Kaspar Hauser and Helen Keller. The course will conclude with a meditation on the cinematic use of the child as witness to war and the overthrow of society in films by Rossellini, Clément, Malle, the Tavianis, Tarkovsky, and Boorman. Readings will include psychoanalytic and film theory. In addition to regular classes, film screenings will be held on Monday evenings, and are mandatory. Prerequisites: a film course such as ENGL 219, ENGL 319, ENGL 321, or DRAM 218, and permission of instructor. Enrollment limited. Women in Renaissance
Literature: Masculine/Feminine: Bodies/Voices Is there such a thing as a recognizably “female” voice in the Renaissance? What about a “female” body? By looking at a series of paired, related texts by men and women from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this seminar will seek to uncover what constitutes cultural and biological masculinity or femininity in early modern minds and writings. We’ll look at a range of genres that reflect and instantiate attitudes to gender and sexuality in England—lyric, epic, drama, and prose—as well as medical guides, self-portraits, conduct manuals, and scurrilous tracts. We will also examine works by Marlowe, Cary, Shakespeare, the Sidney circle, Donne, Milton, Phillips, and Elizabeth I, among others, alongside recent historical and theoretical criticism on gender and sexuality in the Renaissance. Prerequisite: written application to the instructor (calabresib@kenyon.edu). Enrollment limited. Individual Study This course offers independent programs of reading and writing on topics of the student’s own choice. The course is limited to senior English majors who are unable to study their chosen subject in a regularly scheduled course. Prerequisites: permission of instructor and department chair. Enrollment limited. Senior Honors Prerequisite: permission of department chair.
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symbol, which designates those courses particularly appropriate for first-year students or sophomores new to the English department curriculum.