This course will explore the literature of several American women authors who address issues central to female experience and identity including: love and marriage, relationships, motherhood, being a daughter, a sister, a step-mom, a step-daughter, a professional. We will read writers who portray a range of female experience from pre-adolescence to later years. In addition to the core texts, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”, students will read selected short stories by woman authors including: Grace Paley, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Tillie Olsen, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Sexton, Louise Erdrich, and/or Toni Cade Bambara.

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
Instructor: Erik Wessler
Texts: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
This senior seminar will read, discuss, and write about love. We will examine love from a variety of perspectives, including Pride and Prejudice, which views love from the head, and Wuthering Heights, which views love from the heart. Throughout the semester we will study ancient as well as modern psychological theories of love from such works as Plato’s Symposium, Helen Fisher’s Why We Love, and Robert Sternberg’s The New Psychology of Love. We will write several expository or narrative essays that apply our understanding of what we read, think, and feel about the complicated emotion we call love.

THE DIVIDED HERO
Instructor: Erik Wessler
Texts: William Faulkner’s Light in August and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Joe Christmas and Rodion Raskolnikov, two of literature’s most alienated and angry young men, face off in an epic cage match. Which man is more twisted, hateful, and violent? Which man is more isolated from himself and others? Eliciting both pity and fear, these two novels explore in excruciating detail the mythic quest to discover through thought and action one’s identity. We will read these thick novels, discuss them at length, and write a number of analytical as well as narrative essays.

From Beowulf’s nemesis Grendel to the headless giant in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and then, of course, the arch-monster the devil himself, British literature has been fascinated with ghastly incarnations of evil. Why? How are these imaginary monsters related to political upheaval? And why are the various evil monsters of literature often so much more interesting than its bland, insipid heroes? Why are we fascinated by the grotesque? We will attempt to understand the significance of monsters in early British literature as well as understanding the significance of the monster that continues to inhabit the core of the human heart. How are the two related? At the same time we will begin to explore in what sense writing about literary texts involves not only the construction of arguments about literature, but also the construction of new understandings of ourselves and the worlds that surround us. Part of the power of literature is to enter into worlds we had not ourselves imagined, and through this, in part at least, re-imagine ourselves.

The theme of Freshmen English is Journeys, and we will be traveling alongside some very strange and troubled folk: Christopher, Odysseus, Janie, Holden, Walter, Benedick and Beatrice, to name but a few. They come to us from suburban London, Ancient Greece, twentieth-century America and Shakespearian England. What can we learn from them? What have they to do with us? Hopefully, the answers to those questions will be the beginning of your own journeys as readers and writers. When reading literature, we have to understand that to know what happens is only the beginning; it’s what we do with what happens that counts. To think about why characters make certain choices, why they believe the things they believe, is to begin to ask the same questions of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. The overriding ambition of this course is to have you, even for an instant, look at the world differently, look at it through eyes not your own, and through that different perspective, even for a moment, look at yourselves and your own presumptions differently. That’s it! But think about what that means—literature allows you the opportunity to step into other worlds and step out of your own boxes—that’s huge! Alongside this new way of looking, we will be constantly working on developing and improving how we write about literature and the world. What is an argument? Why is it important and/or useful to write about literature? How do I convince an audience of my position?

Addressing students’ wishes to read material that is current, this class will cover literature published in 2006 and 2007. All of the texts were finalists for or winners of major, well-known literary honors such as the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Students will examine several literary genres to best wonder about how contemporary conditions may affect what authors write about, which books win awards and other cultural questions.

Comedy—The Theatre of Laughter
Comedy is the dramatization of the renewal of self and of social relationships. Comedy’s wide range includes everything from the broad slapstick of farce to the sophistication of “high” comedy. It calls attention to the follies and joys of life while providing an outlet for the spirit of anarchy and rebellion; it reminds us that a sense of humor may be indispensable to survival. This course will examine the great comic traditions of theatre from the Greeks to the present. Playwrights may include Aristophanes, Molière, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Wilde, Shaw, Sondheim, and Brooks. This discussion-based seminar will include dramatic readings of selections and the viewing of DVD versions of productions. Students will write analytical papers and be expected to complete nightly readings.

This course will explore the genre of literary non-fiction, autobiography, and new journalism, as well as the non-fiction novel and the personal essay. Students will explore the question: How do writers recreate actual events in a spellbinding fashion?

Texts will include:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, Alex Haley, Ossie Davis (afterword)

The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote