En 1 a
English Composition for ESL Writers
9 units (3-0-6 or 4-0-5)
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first term
An introduction to English composition for students whose first language is not English and who need focused instruction before taking a freshman humanities course. This course offers fundamental strategies for composing fluent standard written English and for constructing academic arguments. Students are assigned to En 1 a based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.
Instructor:
Geasland
En 1 b
English Composition for ESL Writers
9 units (3-0-6 or 4-0-5)
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second term
Continuation of En 1 a for students who need additional instruction before taking a freshman humanities course. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.
Instructor:
Geasland
En 2
Introduction to College Writing
9 units (2-2-5)
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first term
A course in developing forceful academic essays, for students who need more focused attention to writing before entering freshman humanities courses. It emphasizes analytic and argumentative writing and critical reading. The class features small seminar discussions and weekly conferences with the instructor. Students are assigned to En 2 based on a writing assessment that is required of all incoming students. Not available for credit toward the humanities-social science requirement.
Instructor:
Staff
Hum/En 5
Major British Authors
9 units (3-0-6)
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offered by announcement
This course will introduce students to some of the genres of English literature, including poetry, drama, and prose fiction, by studying major authors from different periods. Sometimes the course will cover a wide range of authors, while at others it will concentrate on a few. Authors might include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, George Eliot, or Joyce.
Instructors:
Gilmartin, Haugen, La Belle, Mandel, Pigman
Hum/En 6
American Literature and Culture
9 units (3-0-6)
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offered by announcement
Studies of American aesthetics, genres, and ideas from the birth of the nation to the present. Students will be introduced to the techniques of formal analysis. We will consider what constitutes evidence in relation to texts and how to develop a persuasive interpretation. Topics may include Nature's Nation, slavery and its aftermath, individualism and the marketplace, the "New Woman," and the relation between word and image.
Instructors:
Jurca, Weinstein
Hum/En 7
Modern European Literature
9 units (3-0-6)
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offered by announcement
An introduction to literary analysis through a sustained exploration of the rise and aftermath of modernism. What was the modernist revolt of the early 20th century, how did it challenge literary tradition and existing social forms, and to what extent have we inherited a world remade by modernism? While the course will focus on British and Continental literature, writers from other parts of the world whose work closely engages the European tradition may also be considered.Authors may include Flaubert, James, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Yeats, and Eliot.
Instructors:
Baskin, Gilmartin, Haugen, Pigman
F/En 30
Introduction to Film
9 units (3-0-6)
This course examines film as an art and as an institution from 1895 through the present. Students will acquire the basic vocabulary and techniques of film analysis, focusing on questions of form (mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound) and narrative, as well as an understanding of the historical development of the medium with an emphasis on the American, European, and Asian contexts. Topics will include the early cinema of illusion, the actuality film, the transition to sound, the Hollywood star system, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, Dogma 95, and Hong Kong action cinema. Not offered 2009-10.
En 84
Writing Science
9 units (3-0-6), third term
Instruction and practice in writing about science and technology for general audiences. The course considers how to convey complex technical information in clear, engaging prose that nonspecialists can understand and appreciate. Readings in different genres (e.g., magazine and newspaper journalism, reflective essays, case studies, popularizations) raise issues for discussion and serve as models for preliminary writing assignments and for a more substantial final project on a topic of each student's choice. Includes oral presentation. Satisfies the Institute scientific writing requirement and the option oral communication requirement for humanities majors.
Instructor:
Youra
En 85
Writing Poetry
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
Students will develop their poetic craft by creating poems in a variety of forms. The lecturer will provide guidance and direction, supervise class discussions of students' works, and assign outside reading as needed. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, and 88 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit.
Instructor:
Hall
En 86
Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing
9 units (3-0-6)
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second term
The class is conducted as a writing workshop in the short-story and personal essay/memoir form. Modern literary stories and essays are discussed, as well as the art and craft of writing well, aspects of "the writing life," and the nature of the publishing world today. Students are urged to write fiction or nonfiction that reflects on the nature of life. Humor is welcome, although not genre fiction such as formula romance, horror, thrillers, fantasy, or sci-fi. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit.
Instructor:
Gerber
En 87
Writing Fiction: The Imaginary
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
Students will develop their talents for writing imaginary short stories other than science fiction. A number of models will be proposed to them for inspiration, e.g., folk tales, tales of the supernatural, fables, stories of "magic realism," examples of surrealism and the "absurd," and so on. The lecturer will provide guidance and direction, supervise class discussions of students' works, and assign outside reading as needed. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit.
Instructors:
Hall, Magun
En 88
Memoir: Writing the Self
9 units (3-0-6)
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second term
Whereas a diarist writes from an ever-moving present, the art of memoir demands remembering, standing far enough back to shape experience and give it meaning, to discover a "story line" one never suspected existed, to find continuity in seeming randomness. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit.
Instructor:
Magun
En 89
News Writing
9 units (3-0-6)
This course teaches the basic skills of news gathering and reporting. Students learn how to research stories, conduct interviews, structure news articles, and produce balanced copy. They also work on developing concise and effective prose. In addition to writing several articles, assignments include reading and discussing material from professional newspapers as well as analyzing and editing the writing of peers. The course covers other topics relevant to responsible news writing, such as journalistic ethics, the tradition and responsibilities of free speech, and the social function of the press in a democracy. Affiliation with the California Tech is not a requirement for enrollment. Students may apply one term of En 85, 86, 87, 88, and 89 to the additional HSS requirements, and all other courses in this series will receive Institute credit.
Instructor:
Staff
En 92
Literature of the Holocaust
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
Elie Wiesel has written: "At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man . . . It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz." This class will explore the reverberation of this premise in the literature that grew out of the holocaust experience, as well as the shifting aesthetics of "holocaust literature" over the last half century. Put simply, can there be "an aesthetics of atrocity"? What are the responsibilities of art and literature to history? Should a perpetrator of genocide ever engage our moral imagination? In an attempt to grapple with these questions, students will read works, both fiction and nonfiction, by a range of authors, including Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Ida Fink, Cynthia Ozick, Tadeusz Borowski, Bernard Schlink, and W. G. Sebold. Not offered 2009-10.
En 93
Women on the Edge
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
This class will consider how women's writing in the 20th century often flouts the conventional portrayal of woman as ministering angel preoccupied with the needs of family without much regard to her own. Writers to be read include Kate Chopin, Colette, Marguerite Duras, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, Elfriede Jelinek. Not offered 2009-10.
Instructor:
Magun
En 98
Reading in English
9 units (1-0-8)
Prerequisites: instructor's permission.
An individual program of directed reading in English or American literature, in areas not covered by regular courses.
Instructor:
Staff
En 99 ab
Senior Tutorial for English Majors
9 units (1-0-8)
Students will study research methods and write a research paper. Required of students in the English option.
Instructor:
Staff
En 113 ab
Shakespeare's Career
9 units (3-0-6)
A survey of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist. The first term will study his comedies and histories; the second, his tragedies and tragicomedies. Students will need to read one play per week.
Instructor:
Pigman
En 114 ab
Shakespeare
9 units (3-0-6)
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second term
A close study of Shakespeare's plays with an emphasis on his language, dramatic structures, characters, and themes. Each term will concentrate on a detailed consideration of three or four of Shakespeare's major plays. The first term is not a prerequisite for the second.
Instructor:
La Belle
En 116
Milton and the Epic Tradition
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
Epic poetry is a competitive and self-referential genre. Virgil imitates and revises Homer, Dante makes Virgil his guide through hell and most of purgatory before leaving him behind, and Milton transforms the entire epic tradition. Since Milton's engagement with and criticism of the epic are essential elements of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, we will focus on his dialogue with Homer, Virgil, and Dante and their differing conceptions of heroism. Not offered 2009-10.
Instructor:
Pigman
En 119
Displacement
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
The literary fascination with people who change places, temporarily or permanently, over a short distance or across the globe, in works dating from our lifetimes and from the recent and the remote past. How readily can such stories be compared, how easy is it to apply traditional categories of literary evaluation, and, in the contemporary world, how have poetry and prose fictions about migration survived alongside other media? 21st-century works will receive considerable attention; other readings may include Virgil, Swift, Flaubert, Mann, Achebe, Nabokov, Didion, Morrison.
Instructor:
Haugen
En 120
Books
9 units (3-0-6)
This class examines not only the long history of book production in the West, but also the multifarious uses to which books have been put. Historical topics might include political advice manuals (Machiavelli), prophecies of world destruction (Nostradamus), and the cult of the national author (beginning with Shakespeare's fans in the 17th and 18th centuries); closer to our time, potential topics include scientific books that also became best sellers (Darwin and Freud), metafictions, and the rise of the book club. The emphasis is on the circulation of books as physical objects. Not offered 2009-10.
En 121
Literature and Its Readers
9 units (3-0-6)
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first term
The course will investigate readers who have made adventurous uses of their favorite works of literature, from Greek antiquity through the 20th century. Sometimes those readers count, at least temporarily, as literary critics, as when the philosopher Aristotle made Sophocles' Oedipus the King the central model in his wildly successful essay on the literary form of tragedy. Other readers have been even more experimental, as when Sigmund Freud, studying the same play, made the "Oedipus complex" a meeting point for his theory of psychology, his vision of human societies, and his fascination with literary narrative. It will discuss some basic questions about the phenomenon of literary reading. Does a book have a single meaning? Can it be used rightly or wrongly?
Instructor:
Haugen
En 122
The 18th-Century English Novel
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
The realistic novel as a surprising, even experimental moment in the history of fiction. How and why did daily life become a legitimate topic for narrative in the 18th century? The realistic turn clearly attracted new classes of readers, but did it also make the novel a better vehicle for commenting on society at large? Why were the formal conventions of realistic writing so tightly circumscribed? Authors may include Cervantes, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Walpole, Boswell, and Austen. Not offered 2009-10.
En 123
The 19th-Century English Novel
9 units (3-0-6)
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first term
A survey of the 19th-century novel from Austen through Conrad, with special emphasis upon the Victorians. Major authors may include Austen, Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Gaskell, Brontë, Collins, Trollope, Stoker, Hardy. Not offered 2009-10.
En 124
20th-Century British Fiction
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
A survey of the 20th-century British and Irish novel, from the modernist novel to the postcolonial novel. Major authors may include Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Orwell, Amis, Lessing, Rushdie. Not offered 2009-10.
En 125
British Romantic Literature
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
A selective survey of English writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Major authors may include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Austen. Particular attention will be paid to intellectual and historical contexts and to new understandings of the role of literature in society.
Instructor:
Staff
En 126
Gothic Fiction
9 units (3-0-6)
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second term
The literature of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural, from the late 18th century to the present day. Particular attention will be paid to gothic's shifting cultural imperative, from its origins as a qualified reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, to the contemporary ghost story as an instrument of social and psychological exploration. Issues will include atmosphere and the gothic sense of space; gothic as a popular pathology; and the gendering of gothic narrative. Fiction by Walpole, Shelley, Brontë, Stoker, Poe, Wilde, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison. Film versions of the gothic may be included.
Instructor:
Staff
En 128
Modern and Contemporary Irish Literature
9 units (3-0-6)
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offered by announcement
The development of Irish fiction, poetry, and drama from the early 20th-century Irish literary renaissance, through the impact of modernism, to the Field Day movement and other contemporary developments. Topics may include the impact of political violence and national division upon the literary imagination; the use of folk and fairy-tale traditions; patterns of emigration and literary exile; the challenge of the English language and the relation of Irish writing to British literary tradition; and recent treatments of Irish literature in regional, postcolonial, and global terms. Works by Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Friel, O'Brien, Heaney, Boland, and others.
Instructor:
Gilmartin
En 129
Enlightenment Fiction
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
What was the fate of fiction in an Age of Reason? Historians have questioned whether a conventional sense of the Enlightenment adequately accounts for European culture in the 18th century, and the literary imagination can seem particularly unsuited to generalizations about progress, optimism, reason, and social order. This course will consider experimental narratives and philosophical satires from the English and Continental tradition, as well as early Romantic responses to the Enlightenment. Readings may include Defoe, Sterne, Voltaire, Diderot, Mary Shelley, Hoffman, and fairy tales from the brothers Grimm. Not offered 2009-10.
En 130
Vital Signs: Literature and the Human Body
9 units (3-0-6)
A literary history of the human body, from the Renaissance to the present. Often overlooked in intellectual life, our bodies nevertheless play a crucial role in our everyday mental, emotional, and social experience. But the language of the body is difficult to read. With the aid of thinkers from Plato to Marx and Freud, as well as film and drama, students will explore the significance of the body through a wide range of poetry and fiction. We will consider the following questions: What can literature teach us about the body that science cannot? How does literature represent and communicate bodily experience? What is the relation between writing and performative arts such as singing and dancing, religious rituals, or sport? What is the fate of the body in a technologically advanced culture such as ours? Authors studied may include Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Stein, Hughes, and Levi.
Instructor:
Baskin
En 131
Poe's Afterlife
9 units (3-0-6)
This course focuses on Edgar Allan Poe and the considerable influence his works have had on other writers. Authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, and Philip Roth have used Poe's stories as departure points for their own work. We shall begin by reading some of Poe's s classic short stories, including "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," "The Purloined Letter," and others. We shall then explore how and why Poe's stories have been so important for authors, despite the fact that his reputation as a great American writer, unlike Hawthorne's and Melville's, for example, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Instructor:
Weinstein
En 132
American Literature Until the Civil War
9 units (3-0-6)
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second term
The course will analyze the literature of this period, from the Puritans through Melville, to determine how various writers understood their relationship to a new world of seemingly unlimited possibility. Authors covered may include Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Hannah Foster, Harriet Jacobs, Emerson, Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Not offered 2009-10.
En 133
19th-Century American Women Writers
9 units (3-0-6), second term
This course will analyze many of the most popular novels written in the 19th century. How might we account for their success in the 19th century and their marginalization (until recently) in the 20th century? Why were so many of these texts "sentimental"? How might we understand the appeal of "sentimental" literature? What are the ideological implications of sentimentalism? Authors may include Stowe, Warner, Cummins, Alcott, Phelps, Fern, etc.
Instructor:
Staff
En 134
The Career of Herman Melville
9 units (3-0-6), first term
The course will focus on Melville's works from Typee through Billy Budd. Special emphasis will be placed on Melville's relations to 19th-century American culture.
Instructor:
Weinstein
En 136
The Fiction of Charles Dickens
9 units (3-0-6)
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Oliver Twist Dombey and Son Bleak House Our Mutual Friend
An overview of the Great Inimitable's fiction, concentrating on four texts representative of different phases of his novel-writing career and their relationship to the changing world of Victorian Britain: ,,, Not offered in 2009-10.
Instructor:
Sutherland
En 137
African American Literature
9 units (3-0-6)
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second term
This course analyzes some of the great works of American literature written by African Americans. This body of writing gives rise to two crucial questions: How does African American literature constitute a literary tradition of its own? How is that tradition inextricable from American literary history? From slave narratives to Toni Morrison's Beloved, from the Harlem Renaissance to Alice Walker, from Ralph Ellison to Walter Mosley, African American literature has examined topics as diverse and important as race relations, class identification, and family life. We shall analyze these texts not only in relation to these cultural issues, but also in terms of their aesthetic and formal contributions. Not offered 2009-10.
En 138
Twain and His Contemporaries
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
This course will study the divergent theories of realism that arose in the period after the Civil War and before World War I. Authors covered may include Howells, James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and W. E. B. DuBois. Not offered 2009-10.
En 141
James and Wharton
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
The course covers selected novels, short fiction, and nonfiction writings of friends and expatriates Henry James and Edith Wharton. It will consider formal questions of style and genre as well as the literature's preoccupation with describing and defining American modernity, despite the authors' shared ambivalence toward their native country. Students will read as many as, but no more than, five novels. Texts covered may include The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Ambassadors, selections from The Decoration of Houses, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. Not offered 2009-10.
En 145
American Ethnic Literature and the Drama of Assimilation
9 units (3-0-6)
From the idea of the melting pot to contemporary debates about multiculturalism, ideas about assimilation have been crucial to understanding what it means to be American. As a nation of immigrants, the United States has produced countless narratives that describe the struggles of newcomers to adapt to an alien culture while they are also trying to negotiate a meaningful relation to their native culture. We will be reading novels, autobiographies, sociology, and other texts that address the meaning of assimilation and consider the costs, benefits, and the very possibility of joining the cultural mainstream. Not offered 2009-10.
En 148
Modern American Poetry
9 units (3-0-6)
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first term
A study of modern American poetry in its historical and literary context. Exploring some of the most innovative and difficult writing in the English language, this course confronts the startling range of poetic composition in the United States in the 20th century. Poets studied will include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg among others.
Instructor:
Baskin
En 150
Fundamentals of the Art of Poetry
9 units (3-0-6)
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first term
What is poetry? Why and how should one read it? What "weapons'' does the good poem deploy in order to give pleasure? How does an inexperienced reader develop into an expert and a sensitive one? To illustrate the nature, functions, and resources of poetry, a wide-ranging selection of poems will be read and discussed.
Instructor:
Mandel
En/F 160 ab
Introduction to Classical Hollywood Film
9 units (3-0-6)
This course introduces students to Hollywood films and filmmaking during the classical period, from the coming of sound through the '50s. It will cover basic techniques and vocabulary of film analysis, as we learn to think of films as texts with distinctive formal properties. Topics include the rise and collapse of the studio system, technical transformations (sound, color, deep focus), genre (the musical, the melodrama), cultural contexts (the Depression, World War II, the Cold War), audience responses, and the economic history of the film corporations. Terms may be taken independently. First quarter covers the period 1927-1940. Second quarter covers 1941-1960. Not offered 2009-10.
En 170
Drama from the Middle Ages to Molière
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
A study of major dramatic works from the 15th to the mid-17th century. Students will read medieval plays like Abraham and Isaac and Everyman; British Renaissance works including Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and two Shakespearean plays; several Spanish comedias of the Golden Age, among them the original Don Juan play; and Molière's masterpieces: Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. Not offered 2009-10.
En 171
Drama from Molière to Wilde
9 units (3-0-6), third term
A study of French plays of the age of Louis XIV, featuring Molière and Racine; English comedies of the 17th and 18th centuries, including Sheridan's The Rivals; masterpieces of German drama of the Romantic age, among them Schiller's Maria Stuart and Goethe's Faust; The Inspector General by the Russian Nikolay Gogol; Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac; Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and other works as time permits.
Instructor:
Staff
En 172
Drama from Ibsen to Beckett
9 units (3-0-6)
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second term
A wide international range of plays will be studied, beginning with major texts by Ibsen and Chekhov, and concluding with Ionesco and Beckett. In between, students will read important plays by G. B. Shaw, Sean O'Casey, Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Miller, and others. Not offered 2009-10.
En 180
Special Topics in English
9 units (3-0-6)
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See registrar's announcement for details
Instructor:
Staff
En 181 a
Classics of Science Fiction: 1940-70
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
This course will aim to examine, critically, the achievements of one of the many "golden ages" of science fiction. Among the authors examined will be Pohl and Kornbluth, Bradbury, Bester, Vonnegut, Wyndham, Heinlein, Dick, Herbert, Ballard, Le Guin, Asimov, Clarke, Silverberg, Aldiss. The course will aim to give formal and generic definition to the texts examined and to reinsert them into the period of their original publication. Not offered 2009-10.
En 181 b
Hardy: The Wessex Novels
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
This course will examine the body of work that the late Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy published under the general title The Wessex Novels, that is, the sequence of works from Far from the Madding Crowd to Jude the Obscure. The six main novels will be read critically to give a sense of the totality of this greatest British regional novelist's achievement. Not offered 2009-10.
En 181 c
Classics of Science Fiction: The 1960s
9 units (3-0-6)
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third term
This course will aim to examine critically the achievements of one of the many "golden ages" of science fiction. Among the authors dealt with (but not necessarily restricted to) in the course will be Pohl and Kornbluth, Bester, Dick, Asimov, Clarke, Aldiss, Ballard, Le Guin, Wyndham. The course will aim to give formal and generic definition to the texts covered and to reinsert them into the period of their original conception and publication. Not offered 2009-10.
En 181 d
Jane Austen, Our Contemporary
9 units (3-0-6)
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first term
This course will examine in sequence, and in depth, the major novels of Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. In addition to intensive reading, attention will be given to the many adaptations of Austen's novels in other media.
Instructor:
Sutherland
En 181 e
Dickens and the Dickensian
9 units (3-0-6)
The adjective "Dickensian" makes an almost daily appearance in today's newspapers, magazines, and other media sources. It is used to describe everything from outrageous political scandals, to Bollywood musicals, to multiplot novels. But what does the word really mean? And what part of Charles Dickens's output does it refer to? This class will consider some of Dickens's most famous works alongside a series of contemporary novels, all critically described in "Dickensian" terms. The main concern will be equally with style and form, and 19th-century and present-day circumstances of production (e.g., serialization, mass production, Web publication, etc.). Authors considered (aside from Dickens) may include Richard Price, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Jonathan Franzen.
Instructor:
Staff
Published Date:
July 28, 2022