ENGLISH

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

ENGLISH

REQUIREMENTS

Humanities Division

The Department of English teaches students to read with active understanding and wide appreciation, to write

with clarity and grace, and to explore themselves and the world through the intensive study of literature.

NEW STUDENTS

ENGL 103 and 104 are designed for students beginning the serious study of literature at the college level, and as

such are especially appropriate for first-year students. Either ENGL 103 or ENGL 104, or junior standing, is a

prerequisite for further study in English at Kenyon. Students may register for a maximum of one (1) unit of 100-

level courses in English, and students may not go back to take a 100-level course after taking a 200-level course.

More advice for new students is available on the English Department website.

ENGL 210-289

Students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104 should advance to one of the courses numbered 210-289. These

courses have been designed for and are limited to sophomores and first-year students. Like the department's 100-

level courses, these classes are small in size, so that classroom interaction can be discussion-centered and more

time can be devoted to helping students with their writing. These courses provide an introduction to fundamental

terms, techniques and methods for the advanced study of literature. Students may expect to learn some of the

following: how to do a close reading of a literary text, how to conduct research in literary study (including an

introduction to library and information resources, and basic reference tools), some of the basic principles of

different approaches to literary criticism, important terms used in literary analysis (including prosody in poetry

courses), and the proper documentation of sources. While the subject matter of these courses sometimes parallels

that of courses for upper-level students (e.g., Shakespeare, postcolonial literature), all are intended as

introductions to a focused and intensive consideration of particular genres, themes, periods or critical questions.

ENGL 310-389

These are courses grounded in the advanced study of literature in English, as well as in the variety of critical and

theoretical approaches to literature. These courses examine literary works from a range of historical periods,

written in a wide variety of genres, and contributing to different national traditions. Through the reading of

influential critical books and articles or through the instructors' modeling of different critical practices, these

courses aim to teach students about the various modes of literary criticism, theory and scholarship that constitute

the current state of literary study. Thus, these courses aim to make students critically self-aware. Some of these

courses will situate literary texts in their historical and cultural contexts. Others will focus on the formal concerns

of genre and style. Many will require that students conduct independent research. When the subject matter of

these courses overlaps with that of an ENGL course numbered from 210 to 289, these courses will provide more

intensive critical study than the broad introductions of the lower-division courses. By taking courses at both

curricular levels, students will thus have the opportunity to specialize in a period or genre. The prerequisites for

these courses are ENGL 103 or 104 and an ENGL course numbered from 210 to 289. For students with junior

standing, the course prerequisites are waived, since such students have typically written enough analytical essays

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

to be prepared for advanced work in literary study. While these courses will constitute the bulk of the coursework

of most English majors, non-majors are encouraged to enroll since contemporary literary study frequently draws

upon knowledge and techniques from other disciplines.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MAJOR

English majors are required to complete a minimum of five-and-one-half (5.5) units, eleven courses total, offered

or approved by the department. To graduate as English majors, students must meet the following requirements:

 Completion of half (.5) unit of ENGL 103 or 104

 Completion of at least five (5) units above the 100 level, three (3) units of which should be at the 300 level

or above. The remaining units may be completed at the 200-level or above, at the discretion of the

student in consultation with his/her advisor

 Distribution of coursework above the 100 level must fulfill the following criteria:

o Completion of at least one (1) unit, 2 courses, of study of literature written in each of the

following historical periods (please see the English Major Distribution Requirements or check

specific course descriptions to see which requirements they satisfy):

 Pre-1700

 1700-1900

 Post-1900

o Completion of half (.5) unit in courses designated "Approaches to Literary Study." Courses in this

category foreground a variety of methods, critical paradigms and theories for reading and

analyzing literature, language and culture. They are intended to help students think self-

consciously and more systematically about tools and methods that can be applied broadly within

the discipline. Such courses will be designated as meeting the "Approaches to Literary Study"

requirement in their course description. The half (.5) unit of coursework in "Approaches to

Literary Study" may not also count toward the historical distribution requirement.

o Completion of at least two additional elective courses from any of the department's offerings

above the 100-level. Based on the individual curricular choices they have made within the major,

students may petition to have a maximum of half (.5) unit of literature courses taken in a

department other than the English Department be counted toward their major as an elective.

Students will need to present solid arguments about how and why such courses are integrated

with the English major.

o Completion of the Senior Seminar: ENGL 405 or ENGL 410

 ENGL 405: Senior Seminar in Creative Writing

Offered in more than one section each spring semester, this seminar is required for

English majors pursuing an emphasis in creative writing. The course will involve critical

work on a topic chosen by the instructor (such as “Reliable and Unreliable: Investigating

Narrative Voice,” “Beginnings and Endings,” “The Little Magazine in America,” and

“Documentary Poetics”) to provide context and structure for students' creative work.

Students should check online listings for the specific focus of each section. Although not

primarily a workshop, this seminar will require students to work on a substantial

creative project (fiction, nonfiction, or poetry). Prerequisite: This course is open only to

senior English majors who are completing the emphasis in creative writing.

o ENGL 410: Senior Seminar in Literature

Offered in several sections, this seminar will require students to undertake a research paper of

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

their own design, within the context of a course that ranges across genres, literary periods and

national borders. Students will study literary works within a variety of critical, historical, cultural

and theoretical contexts. All sections of the course will seek to extend the range of interpretive

strategies students can use to undertake a major literary research project. Each student will

complete a research paper of 15-17 pages. Prerequisite: This course is open only to senior

English majors. However, if the enrollment cap has not been reached after the enrollment of

senior English majors, then seniors who have declared the English minor will be permitted to

enroll.

o Students pursuing honors will take the ENGL 497 - Honors Seminar rather than ENGL 405 or 410 -

Senior Seminar.

 Completion of the Senior Exercise

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MAJOR WITH EMPHASIS IN CREATIVE WRITING

Students wishing to major in English with an emphasis in creative writing are required to complete the following:

 To have taken two-and-one-half (2.5) of the five-and-one-half (5.5) units of course credit before the spring

semester of their senior year in the following areas:

 To meet all requirements for the regular English major.

o One section of any of the following:

 ENGL 200 Introduction to Fiction Writing

 ENGL 201 Introduction to Poetry Writing

 ENGL 202 Creative Nonfiction Workshop

o One section of any of the following:

 ENGL 300 Advanced Fiction Writing

 ENGL 301 Advanced Poetry Writing

 ENGL 302 Advanced Creative Nonfiction

o One literature course primarily in the genre of the emphasis (poetry, prose-fiction, or nonfiction),

normally to be taken before the advanced workshop in the genre. Note: This course might also

fulfill a period or approaches requirement.

o One course to be chosen from among the following:

 An additional workshop, at any level, in the genre of the emphasis

 An advanced individual study in the genre of the emphasis

 An additional workshop, at any level, in any other genre

 An additional literature course primarily in the genre of the emphasis

o ENGL 405 Senior Seminar in Creative Writing or ENGL 497 Honors Seminar.

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); this course is not available to students who

have not taken both workshops.

Students who are unable to take the advanced creative writing workshops may petition the English Department to

count two introductory workshops in a single genre as fulfillment of the two-workshop requirement for the

emphasis, as long as these workshops have been taken with different instructors. ENGL 150 may count as a

prerequisite for 300-level creative writing courses. Introductory courses in fiction and creative nonfiction (ENGL

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200 and ENGL 202) may serve as prerequisites for advanced courses in both genres (ENGL 300 and ENGL 302).

Students pursuing the Creative Writing Emphasis must take at least one of their two primary workshops (200- and

300-level) at Kenyon.

ENGL 200, 201, 202, 300, 301 and 302 (Creative Writing)

Admission to all 200- and 300-level creative writing workshops is based on the submission of a writing sample and

permission of the instructor. ENGL 200 or 202 is a prerequisite for ENGL 300; ENGL 201 is a prerequisite for ENGL

301. ENGL 200 or 202 is a prerequisite for ENGL 302. Creative writing courses are open to non-majors. For specific

course offerings, sample requirements and submission deadlines, check with the English Department

administrative assistant.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MINOR

English minors are required to complete a minimum of two-and-one-half (2.5) units, 5 courses, offered or

approved by the department. Students must meet the following requirements:

 Completion of one half (.5) unit course in each of the following historical periods (please see the English

Major Distribution Requirements or check specific course descriptions to see which requirements they

satisfy):

o Pre-1700

o 1700-1900

o Post-1900

 Completion of two electives

 Completion of at least two courses at the 300 or 400 level.

Please note that only one of ENGL 103 or 104 can count toward the minor. No courses taken off campus (except in

the Kenyon-Exeter program) can be applied toward the minor.

SENIOR EXERCISE

In order to meet the college-wide Senior Exercise requirement, the English Department requires its majors to take

an examination based on a set reading list. The examination is based on a short reading list of a major work or set

of lyric poems by twelve different writers; it will be completed in two timed sittings, normally on the Saturday of

the week after spring break. The morning two-hour examination will consist of short-answer questions and a short

essay, 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 extended 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 students should

request from the chair of the English Department the reading list for their particular class.

Reading lists, by year, are available on the English Department website.

HONORS

Students of demonstrated ability who would like to undertake more independent work are encouraged to enter

the Honors Program. In order to be eligible for the Honors program, students must have a 3.5 grade-point average

in their English courses and a 3.3 grade-point average overall. The Honors Program consists of the following:

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

 ENGL 497 The Honors Seminar (to be taken fall of the senior year). Students register with a Senior Honors

form.

 ENGL 493 Directed Individual Study (undertaken in the fall semester). In the directed Individual Study

course, the student begins a substantial critical essay of approximately 50-80 pages in length or a creative

project of commensurate scope. Students register with an Individual Study form.

 ENGL 498 Directed Individual Study (undertaken in the spring semester). In the Senior Honors course,

pursued mainly in a continuation of the fall Individual Study format, the student completes the Honors

essay or project and defends the work in written and oral exams. Students register with a Senior Honors

form.

 A written examination set by the English Department, to be taken in the spring of the senior year and

based on a reading list that combines the Senior Exercise reading list for the current and the subsequent

graduating classes

 An oral exam, to be taken soon after the written exam, and conducted by outside examiners on both the

thesis and the reading list for the written exam

 Evaluation of the thesis, written exam, and oral exam by outside examiners

Please see the description for the Honors Program in English, available from the department administrative

assistant, for details. Detailed and complete information about the Honors Program is also available on the English

Department website.

KENYON-EXE TER PROGRAM

The department directs a year-long program of study at the University of Exeter in England for junior majors and

non-majors who qualify for admission. A member of our department teaches at the university, conducts seminars

for Kenyon students, leads numerous co-curricular excursions, and administers the program. See the director of

the Center for Global Engagement or the department chair for more information.

TRANSFER CREDIT POLICY

Students wishing to transfer credit for courses taken elsewhere must petition the department before taking the

courses in question. At its discretion, the department may award a maximum of one half (.50) unit of elective

credit toward the English major for a journalism course taken at another institution.

COURSES

ENGL 103 INTRODUCTIO N TO LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

Credit: 0.5

Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single

theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short

story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close

attention to each student's writing. 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. During the semester,

instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations and research

projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of the department chair. Offered

annually in multiple sections.

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

ENGL 104 INTRODUCTIO N TO LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

Credit: 0.5

Each section of these first-year seminars approaches the study of literature through the exploration of a single

theme in texts drawn from a variety of literary genres (such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, epic, novel, short

story, film and autobiography) and historical periods. Classes are small, offering intensive discussion and close

attention to each student's writing. 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. During the semester,

instructors will assign frequent essays and may also require oral presentations, quizzes, examinations, and

research projects. This course is not open to juniors and seniors without permission of department chair. Offered

annually in multiple sections.

ENGL 122 INTRODUCTIO N TO ANGLO-SAXON

Credit: 0.5

This course is a seminar in the general field of Old and Middle English literature. Class meetings will be conducted

in a combination seminar and workshop fashion. The primary work of the course will be reading and translating

Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry, supplemented by readings in Anglo-Saxon culture and history. It is open to all

without regard for major or class year. First-year and sophomore students with an interest in medieval literature

are particularly welcome, but this course is open to all students at all levels. This course meets the pre-1700

requirement.

ENGL 150 CREATIVE WRITING: A MULTI -GENRE WORKSHOP

Credit: 0.5

This open-enrollment, multi-genre writing course will give students the opportunity to develop as creative writers

and readers through a series of writing assignments and workshops. In addition to poetry and short fiction, areas

of focus may include creative essay, playwriting, screenwriting and multimedia works. Students will conclude the

course by revising and polishing a selection of their original work as a final portfolio. This class will be limited to 12

students, with three seats reserved for each class year. It will not be open to students who have already taken

workshops at Kenyon.

ENGL 200 INTRODUCTIO N TO FICTION WRITING

Credit: 0.5

This course introduces students to the elements of fiction writing. While each section of the course will vary in

approach and structure, activities and assignments may include intensive reading, workshops, writing, short and

flash fiction, and exercises emphasizing various aspects of fiction such as place, dialogue and character. Students

should check the online schedule for specific descriptions of each section. Check with the English Department

administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Prerequisite: submission of writing sample and permission of

instructor. Offered annually in multiple sections.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 201 INTRODUCTIO N TO POETRY WRITING

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

Credit: 0.5

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 variety of types of poetry. Regular writing exercises will encourage students to widen their

scope and develop their craft. The 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. In addition to weekly reading and writing assignments,

students will submit a process-based portfolio demonstrating an understanding of the revision process and a final

chapbook of eight to 12 pages of poetry. Check with the English Department administrative assistant for

submission deadlines. Prerequisite: submission of writing sample and permission of instructor. Offered annually in

multiple sections.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 202 CREATIVE NONFICTION WORKSHOP

Credit: 0.5

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. Check with the English Department

administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Prerequisite: submission of writing sample and permission of

instructor. Offered annually.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 203 CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP: FICTION AND OTHER HYBRID FORMS

Credit: 0.5

This course is a workshop in which students will experiment with writing that bridges some of our usual ideas

about genre. Hybrid writing deliberately mixes fictional technique with nonfiction, essay and lyric. It is the literary

form of our time, in which story, wit and meaning emerge from the collapsing distinction between the fictive and

the factual. Hybrid form is variously categorized as fiction, memoir, New Journalism, lyric essay, autobiography,

nonfiction novel, prose poetry. It can draw on philosophy, reportage, memoir, scholarship, blogging and other

forms of nonfiction prose, but it's always working with the pleasures and skills associated with fiction and lyric:

voice, character, place and language. We'll look at some good practitioners (examples are Lydia Davis, David Foster

Wallace, Dave Eggers, Maxine Hong Kingston, Edward P. Jones and Philip Roth) as we focus on questions of finding

shape, structure, and art when the old lines of genre have been blurred. The course requires openness to giving

and receiving criticism, and is intended to extend the craft possibilities for students working in creative writing.

Check with the English Department administrative assistant for submission deadlines. Prerequisite: submission of a

writing sample and permission of instructor. Offered annually.

Instructor: Vigderman

ENGL 204 WRITING FICTION, NONFICTION A ND OTHER NARRATIVE FORMS

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Credit: 0.5

This course is an introductory workshop in which students will develop skills in a range of narrative strategies,

reading a variety of texts: fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and graphic novels and memoirs, as well as blog essays and

other relatively new formats and styles of literary expression. As these multiple forms are explored in the course of

the semester, students will write new material each week, with an emphasis on understanding structure, pace,

setting, time, dialogue, character and narrative voice. Students will be encouraged to experiment with fiction and

nonfiction approaches to the same material. The workshop will pay rigorous attention to language and form,

sentence by sentence, and will also focus on developing insights and strategies for revision. Students in this class

are assumed to possess basic English writing competence and mature ability to give and receive thoughtful

criticism. Permission of instructor required.

ENGL 210 PROPER LADI ES AND WOMEN WRITERS

Credit: 0.5

"We think back through our mothers if we are women," Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One's Own. Taking

Woolf's meditation on women and creativity as our point of departure, we will examine a range of fictional, poetic

and polemical writing produced by British women from the late 18th century through the early 20th century, a

period that witnessed increases in the literary and cultural opportunities available to female writers, as well as

challenges to those opportunities. We will explore debates over "proper" education for women; the role of

culturally sanctioned "plots" (most notably, romance and marriage plots) in shaping women's lives and narratives;

complex negotiations between public and private experience, particularly between work and domesticity; and the

aims and achievements of women's activist and political writings. When has it been possible, or desirable, for

female writers to "think back through [their] mothers"? If a tradition of women's writing exists, what motivates

and characterizes it? How did these women writers create new plots -- or terminate familiar ones -- in response to

incommensurable or uncontainable desires and allegiances? How did these writers respond to traditions they

inherited from their predecessors, whether male or female? Course authors will include Woolf, Wollstonecraft,

Austen, Gaskell, Eliot and Barrett Browning, among others. Students will write two essays and a final exam. This

course fulfills a requirement for the Women's and Gender Studies Concentration and meets the "approaches to

literary study" or the 1700-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken

ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: Heidt

ENGL 211 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL THEORY AND PRA CTICE

Credit: 0.5

Autobiographical writing allows us to study the complicated cultural and personal dynamics of self-making, as

individual authors define (and show themselves to have been defined by) their sociohistorical circumstances. How

do writers confront or capitalize on such intersections of the personal and the historical? How and why do

autobiographers translate life experiences into writing? How do they grapple with elements of experience that are

difficult to represent in language? Is truth necessary to -- or even possible in -- autobiographical writing? How have

writers' gendered, sexualized, classed, raced or geographically located identities shaped the possibilities and

purposes of autobiographical narrative? And where is the line between autobiography and biography? In this

survey of classic and experimental autobiographical texts, as well as of major developments in autobiographical

theory, we will consider broad questions of identity, time and memory, and narrative through close attention to

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specific works' subjects, structures and histories. Authors may include Augustine, Thomas De Quincey, Harriet

Jacobs, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston and Art Spiegelman,

among others. Students will write two essays and several reading response papers and will lead one class

discussion. This course meets the "approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to

first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: Heidt

ENGL 212 INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY

Credit: 0.5

What gives a literary text its meaning? Does a text simply contain meaning, or is that meaning shaped by social

contexts, history, even the act of reading itself? Literary theory attempts to answer these questions by examining

the ways in which we interpret the texts we read. This course will introduce students to some of the most

important movements in literary theory over the last century with a particular focus on structuralism and

poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction and postcolonialism. In addition, we will read short stories

and two or three novels to develop our skills at reading and writing with theory. This course meets the

"approaches to literary study" requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken

ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 213 TEXTING: RE ADING LIKE AN ENGLISH MAJOR

Credit: 0.5

From basic techniques of critical analysis to far-reaching questions about language, literature, culture and

aesthetics, this course will introduce students to many of the fundamental issues, methods and skills of the English

major. Topics will range from the pragmatic (e.g., how do you scan a poem? what is free indirect discourse? how

do you use the MLA bibliography, OED, JSTOR?) to the theoretical (how does a genre evolve in response to

different historical conditions? what is the nature of canons and canonicity? why are questions of race, class,

gender and sexuality so important to literary and cultural analysis?). Students will be given many hands-on

opportunities to practice new skills and analytic techniques and to explore a range of critical and theoretical

paradigms, approaches which should serve them well throughout their careers as English majors. Our discussions

will focus on representative texts taken from three genres: drama (Shakespeare's The Tempest), the novel

(Shelley's Frankenstein, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway), and lyric poetry (a variety of poems representing four centuries

and several traditions). This course fulfills the "approaches to literary study" requirement for the major. It is open

only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104 and is strongly recommended for

anyone contemplating an English major.

ENGL 214 GENDER BENDERS

Credit: 0.5

In the planetary analogy through which pop psychologists have articulated gender difference, men are from Mars

and women from Venus. Presumably, this suggests an irreducible difference that always separates males and

females. Critical gender, feminist and queer theorizations have, however, enabled us to look beyond such

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simplistic binaries. How can fiction reenvision categories of sexual difference? What newer figurations of gender,

sexuality and the seeming immutability of such signifiers do writers play with and complicate? In this course, we

will examine some of these gendered imaginings and pay particular attention to the fluidity of gender boundaries,

in-betweenness, third space and exclusion by exploring global fiction. In so doing, we will look beyond the

heterosexual and heteronormative to identify multiple axes of desire, identity and identification. This course fulfills

the post-1900 or "approaches to literary study" requirement for the major. It is open only to first-year and

sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every two years.

Instructor: Murthy

ENGL 215 PROSODY AND POETICS

Credit: 0.5

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 meets the "approaches to literary study"

requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: Clarvoe

ENGL 216 THEORY OF C OMEDY

Credit: 0.5

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 meets the "approaches

to literary study" requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or

104. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Davidson

ENGL 217 THE ART AND CRAFT OF ANALYTICAL WRITING

Credit: 0.5

Participants in this course will become more aware of opportunities for creativity and self‐challenge in the multi‐

layered and recursive writing process and will become more practiced in the art of writing. They will learn to better

articulate objectives at each stage of the writing process and to make distinctions between the many choices for

techniques and methods available to them for improving their own writing and that of fellow writers. Objectives

include: to learn a wide range of rhetorical, literary, and theoretical strategies; to connect theory with practical

experience and reflective practice in order to learn more about how best to engage with different kinds of student

writers and different forms of academic prose across disciplines; to question assumptions about writing in order to

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begin establishing a perspective for self‐evaluation and assessment, to become more confident at employing a

wider range of writing skills and more qualified to suggest interventions to other writers at various stages of the

writing process; and to learn to analyze various types of writing and engage with them in a variety of recursive

processes for exploration, composition and revision. This course meets the “approaches to literary study”

requirement. Permission of instructor required. Offered annually.

ENGL 219 FILM AS TEXT: ALFRED HITCHCOCK IN CONTEXT

Credit: 0.5

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 will look at several

films by Alfred Hitchcock to explore both the elements of film construction and a particular directorial style, while

also studying a selection of other films that offer variations on Hitchcock's themes and methods. In addition to

regular classes, weekly evening film screenings will be held and are mandatory. This course may be counted for the

major by students in English or in the Department of Dance, Drama and Film. This course meets the "approaches

to literary study" requirement. This course is cross listed in the Department of Film for diversification purposes. It

is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered in most years.

Instructor: Vigderman

ENGL 220 STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE

Credit: 0.5

An introduction to the major plays, this course emphasizes questions of language and modes of reading as the

entryway into key themes and topics (e.g., gender, identity, kin/g/ship, desire) within the Shakespearean corpus.

An initial in-depth study of a single play will enable us to acquire a base knowledge of rhetorical strategies,

considerations of performance and thematic development that we will subsequently apply to our readings of other

plays. Assignments reinforce reading and writing strategies. This course meets the pre-1700 requirement. It is

open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 223 WRITING MEDIEVAL WOMEN

Credit: 0.5

We will read the most important works written in Middle English by women, placing these in the context of

continental traditions of women's writing. Our readings will range across time, space and genre: from the letters

exchanged by history's most famous ill-fated lovers (Abelard and Heloise), to some of the most sophisticated works

of theology produced in the Middle Ages (by Julian of Norwich and Hildegard von Bingen), to the first

autobiography in English, in which a married mother of 14 travels around the world on pilgrimage, challenging

clerics and stirring up trouble along the way (The Book of Margery Kempe). We also will read writing by women in

lesser-known genres: purgatory vision letters, parenting manuals, as well as some of the advice and conduct

literature written by men that shaped expectations of female behavior. Most texts will be in modern translation,

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with a few short pieces in Middle English (no previous experience expected). This course meets the pre-1700

requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: O'Neill

ENGL 224 CHAUCER: CANTERBURY TALES

Credit: 0.5

Chaucer's final great work (profound, moving, sometimes disturbing, often hilarious) can be considered both a

medieval anthology and a framed, self-referential narrative anticipating modern forms and modern questions.

Reading in Middle English, and exploring the social and historical contexts of Chaucer's fictions, we will pay special

attention to Chaucer's preoccupations with the questions of experience and authority, the literary representation

of women, the power of art, and the status of literature itself. This course meets the pre-1700 requirement. It is

open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 226 TOLKIEN'S M IDDLE AGES

Credit: 0.5

J. R. R. Tolkien was not just a beloved novelist but also a distinguished scholar who edited, translated and analyzed

medieval poetry including Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In this

course, we will study the literature that gave rise to Tolkien's fiction in order to explore how medieval literature

continues to shape contemporary popular culture. In this vein, our reading of medieval texts will pay particular

attention to "popular" genres such as purgatory vision narratives, romances and drama. While our reading will

primarily focus on the medieval narratives that inspired Tolkien, there will be occasional student-led opportunities

to connect this medieval material to Tolkien's own fiction and poetry. This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement.

It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: O'Neill

ENGL 227 LOVE, SEX AND DESIRE IN MEDIEVA L ROMANCE

Credit: 0.5

From the invention of Valentine's Day, to the notion of love as a sickness, to the articulation of courtship as a game

with specific rules, many of our ideas about and expectations for romantic love come to us from medieval

literature. Yet in the popular medieval genre of adventure story known as "romance," things do not always go

according to love's rules: Men fall in love with other men, women resist getting married, and married women

seduce their unsuspecting houseguests. In this course, we will explore the complex messages about love and sex

encoded in medieval romances. Our readings will include poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer, the anonymous romances

Roman de Silence and Amis and Amiloun, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, and the

rules of love offered by both Ovid and Capellanus, and other medieval texts as well as contemporary works of

theory and criticism. This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement. It also counts toward the Women's and Gender

Studies concentration. Prerequisite: first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

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ENGL 231 ELIZABETHAN AGE

Credit: 0.5

This course examines the profound cultural matrix that shaped the golden age of English literature. The course will

focus on nondramatic poetry, especially that of Sidney, Shakespeare and Spenser, with attention to the

development of the Renaissance lyric and the Renaissance conception of the vocation of poet. The sonnet will be

studied extensively in relation to gender and love relations, and to the cult of the individual. We also will examine

the origins of Elizabethan drama and the relation of emblem, allegory and spectacle to Elizabethan drama and

epic. How does Elizabethan literature represent, celebrate and critique the power relations found in Renaissance

social institutions? Using contemporary critical and cultural theory, we will analyze the roots of Elizabethan

nationalism, the emergence of London as a central literary milieu, and the iconic dominance of Queen Elizabeth in

the literary and cultural landscape of the late 16th century. Students who have taken another course under this

number may receive credit for this. This course meets the pre-1700 requirement. It is open only to first-year and

sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered two of every three years.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 232 RENAISSANCE POETRY

Credit: 0.5

This study of the Renaissance poem opens up a delicate world of intensely structured language. We will develop

strategies of micro- and macro-reading for understanding how sparks of meaning lattice across a poem to create a

whole effect: we will see how a single letter can change everything, how much a single word can do, a single line, a

stanza within a poem, an entire sonnet within a series of sonnets. We will explore ways poems draw us into their

worlds by transforming us into the "I" of the lyric speaker, by articulating our own emotions in a beautiful and

intricate arrangement of words designed to amplify or soothe. In the light of early modern poetic studies as well as

contemporary methodologies (e.g., George Puttenham, Roman Jakobson), this course examines the major

Renaissance poetic movements and poetics of the 16th and early 17th centuries, including the works of

sonneteers, popular ballad writers, the Cavalier Poets, the Metaphysical Poets and others. This course meets the

"approaches to literary study" or the pre-1700 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students

who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

INSTRUCTOR: STAFF

ENGL 235 MODERNS AND EARLY MODERNS

Credit: 0.5

When T. S. Eliot declared that there had been a disassociation of sensibility that set in after the early 17th century

metaphysical poets, he was deliberately claiming a connection between his own work and the writing from this

earlier period that he admired. This course will investigate this affinity between early modern literature and the

literature of the 20th century. In the process, we will consider the importance of early modern literature in forming

the critical taste and formalist methods of reading that were central to the New Criticism. This course meets the

pre-1700 and 20th century requirements. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken

ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: Staff

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

ENGL 240 EARLY 18TH -CENTURY LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

We will begin this course by spending several weeks on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (examining in passing

another work of the 18th century inspired by Gulliver's Travels, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). Satire is

one of the predominant forms of the 18th century and finds its grotesque complement in the graphic arts. We will

study various examples of visual satire -- notably the "progress" narratives of William Hogarth. We will examine

the emergence of the novel in this period, focusing on its multi-generic character. We will explore the overlapping

of categories -- history and fiction, travel and novel, news and novels, philosophy and fiction -- in works such as

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's epistolary account of her travels to Turkey, Eliza

Haywood's spy/masquerade novel Fantomina, and Susanna Centlivre's play about metamorphosis, A Bold Stroke

for a Wife. Periodical literature first appears in the long 18th century. We will explore the phenomenon of

spectatorship in this period in relation to the institution of the masquerade, the science and philosophy of

empiricism, and the rise of the penitentiary and systems of surveillance. This course meets the 1700-1900

requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered

annually.

Instructor: Laycock

ENGL 243 SATIRE, SEN SIBILITY AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Credit: 0.5

This course presents a survey of 18th-century literature from Jonathan Swift to such writers of the 1790s and early

19th century as Mary Wollstonecraft, Olaudah Equiano and Maria Edgeworth. Early 18th-century literature is

dominated by satirical works that ostensibly aim at reform through ridicule, even while the great satirists doubt

that such an aim can be achieved. Beginning in mid-century, the literary movement of sentimentalism and

sensibility rejects the satirical impulse and embraces sympathy, immediacy and the "man of feeling." Throughout

the period -- indeed already satirized by Swift and Pope -- Enlightenment ideals are explored and debated in a new

public sphere. These ideals include progress, secularism, universal rights, the systematization of knowledge and

the growth of liberty through print and education. Through an examination of works in a variety of literary genres

(prose and verse satire, periodical essay, novel, tragedy, comedy, descriptive and lyric poetry, and travel writing),

the course will introduce students to such authors as Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Samuel

Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Thomas Gray. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. It is

open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Carson

ENGL 251 STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM

Credit: 0.5

This course will focus on the lyric poetry of the Romantic period, from William Cowper to John Keats. We shall also

consider criticism, autobiographical writing, essays and novels by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Keats. In this

course, we shall investigate two central claims: first, that Romantic poetry is not simply nature poetry but rather

philosophical poetry about the interrelationship between natural objects and the human subject; and, secondly,

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that Romanticism develops a notion of aesthetic autonomy out of very specific political and historical

engagements. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students

who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

Instructor: Carson

ENGL 254 LITE RARY WO MEN: 19TH-CENTURY BRITISH LITE RATURE

Credit: 0.5

"What art's for a woman?" asks Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her question was echoed by many other writers

throughout the 19th 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

Bronte, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, George Eliot and

Christina Rossetti. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement and the approaches to literary study

requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered two

of every three years.

Instructor: Mankoff

ENGL 260 MODERNISM

Credit: 0.5

"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 T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,

James Joyce, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner and Ezra Pound. 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 meets the post-1900 requirement. It is

open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

Instructor: Matz

ENGL 262 IRISH CLASS ICS

Credit: 0.5

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

This course will survey two centuries of "Irish Classics" by reading, in translation, poems and narratives from the

vibrant Gaelic literary tradition and by returning to their Irish milieu a number of classic texts that have been

conscripted into the canon of "English Literature." We will encounter "the greatest poem written in these islands in

the whole 18th century," according to one critic - a traditional keen composed by an Irishwoman over the body of

her murdered husband - and we will read Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, "the first significant English novel to

speak in the words of the colonized," according to another critic. We will ask what happens to Jonathan Swift's

Gulliver's Travels or Oscar Wilde's glittering The Importance of Being Earnest or Bram Stoker's brooding Dracula

when we restore it to a Hibernian context. We will read a bawdy Irish epic once banned in Ireland, analyze early

lyrics by W.B. Yeats, consider Joyce's Dubliners, and conclude with some rousing examples of the Irish political

ballad. This course fulfills the 1700-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who

have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every other year.

Instructor: McMullen

ENGL 263 WRITING THE MODE RN CITY

Credit: 0.5

In this class, we will explore how cities are written -- not only how they are written about, but also how they are

constructed, both imaginatively and concretely, through disciplines ranging from poetry to architecture. In doing

so, we will try to understand how cities give rise to modern literature and to modernity more generally. In the

works of novelists that may include Dickens, Bellow, Balzac, Ellison, Joyce, Zadie Smith, Rushdie and Woolf, we will

consider urban landscapes that offer unprecedented economic, political, social and intellectual opportunities. At

the same time, we will see how urban life threatens to increase the commodification of experience and how new

organizations of social space impose ever greater levels of control and surveillance, calling for new tactics in both

literature and daily life. By reading poets such as Apollinaire, Ashbery, Baudelaire, Brooks, Cullen, Eliot, Hughes,

McKay, O'Hara, Williams and Whitman, we will explore the role of the crowd, its race and its class. Theoretical

works by authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Houston Baker, Walter Benjamin, Michel De Certeau, Ann Douglas, Jane

Jacobs, Frederick Jameson, Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford will frame discussions of literary texts. This course

meets the "approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore

students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

Instructor: Hawks

ENGL 265 POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

From Heart of Darkness to Midnight's Children to Wide Sargasso Sea to Pushing the Bear, the novel has lent itself

to various and provocative imaginings of national identities. Novelists have not only imagined their own nations

but they also have imagined "other" nations as well. This class examines how national identities are represented in

these novels and to what purpose. We also identify and explore the outer reaches and limitations of postcolonial

theory as we apply its critical frameworks to the analysis of 19th- and 20th-century novels that have come to

define and/or challenge national identities in Africa, India, the Caribbean and the United States. This course meets

the "approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore

students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every other year.

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ENGL 266 VIOLENCE AN D THE BODY: NARRATIVE INSURGENCY

Credit: 0.5

In his "Critique of Violence," the German philosopher Walter Benjamin raises the question: "Is any nonviolent

resolution of conflict possible?" In this course, we will investigate this question through an exploration of literary

and theoretical writings that shed light on the historical experience of decolonization. Decolonization was often

imagined as a "new day," free from oppression and strife. In reality, however, independence from the colonizer

was almost always marked by many manifestations of violence. Why was decolonization such a violent

phenomenon? How did violence express itself in response to race, class, gender, and religious and linguistic

difference? How did the various anticolonial nationalisms imagine everyday life after independence? How was

literature -- novels, poems, short stories, plays and film -- shaped by the struggles of anticolonial resistance and

decolonization? And finally, how do fictional texts represent everyday life after decolonization? These are some of

the questions that we will explore in this course. We will begin with an exploration of a few critical writings on

violence: Frantz Fanon's "Concerning Violence," Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," Mohandas K. Gandhi's

Hindu Swaraj, Hannah Arendt's "Reflections on Violence" and excerpts from Edward Said's Culture and

Imperialism. We will use the questions and responses that we generate from our discussion of these theoretical

texts to frame our subsequent analyses of literary texts. Our literary texts will include writing from India, Sri Lanka,

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Jamaica and Zimbabwe. Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World, Earl

Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance, Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Tsitsi

Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Baburao Bagul's "Mother" are some of the works that we will read in the

context of the course. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every year.

Instructor: Fernando

ENGL 270 AMERICAN FICTION

Credit: 0.5

We will concentrate on American fiction of the 19th and the 20th 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 Hawthorne, Melville, James, Crane, Gilman, Ellison and Silko. This course meets the 1700-1900

requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered

annually.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 273 LATINO/LATI NA LITERATURE AN D FILM

Credit: 0.5

This course serves as an introduction to the literature and film produced by and about U.S. Latinos and Latinas, and

to the theoretical approaches, such as borderlands theory, which have arisen from the lived experience of this

diverse group. By focusing on the Latino/a experience, and situating it squarely within an American literary

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

tradition, the course examines the intersections of national origin or ancestry with other identity markers such as

gender, race and sexuality. We take an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to connect literature and film with

history, political science, psychology, art, sociology and so on. Thus, students read not only literary works, both

visual and written, but also related works in other disciplines that speak to the issues raised by the texts.

Specifically, the course critically explores the effects and literary expressions of internal and external migration,

displacement and belonging, nation and citizenship, code switching and other ways in which Latinos and Latinas

have made sense of their experiences in the United States. Beginning with 16th-century accounts by Spaniards in

areas that would eventually become part of the United States, and moving to the present day, the class familiarizes

students with the culture(s) of a group that plays an important role in our national narrative, and with the issues

that this group grapples with on our national stage. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. It is open only

to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every other year.

Instructor: García

ENGL 274 HOPE AND HATE: RE ADING RACE AND RECONSTRUCTION

Credit: 0.5

The late 19th century was a pivotal moment in African-American social and intellectual history. During

Reconstruction, African Americans were elected to positions in state and national government. Later in the

century, however, unprecedented racial violence threatened the social, political and economic gains achieved

during Reconstruction. As the nation as a whole was still attempting to heal the wounds of sectional division

caused by the Civil War, African Americans were also meditating on what it means to be a people. African

American literature written during this time incorporates such meditations, chronicling African Americans' attempt

to negotiate between the two poles of hope and hate, and urging individual readers to commit to the common

cause of racial uplift. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore

students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every one or two years.

Instructor: Schoenfeld

ENGL 280 AMERICAN LITERARY MODERNISM

Credit: 0.5

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 can

be used to fulfill requirements in American studies as well as (in some years) the Women's and Gender Studies

Concentration. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students

who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered annually.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 282 BEYOND BORD ERS: INTRODUCTION TO TRANS-AMERICAN LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

This course examines the literatures of the Americas through the critical lenses of contact zone, border and

transnational theories. From Laura Esquivel's Malinche to Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo to Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me,

Ultima to Esmeralda Santiago's America's Dream this class explores the clashes between races, cultures, genders,

classes, nationalities and worldviews that characterize this richly creative region, both in the hemispheric and U.S.

sense of "America." By examining mostly novels but also poetry, including the love poems of Pablo Neruda, we will

seek a better understanding of this richly creative and fascinating area of literary study. This course meets the

"approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students

who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: García

ENGL 283 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

Through literature and film, this course offers an introduction to contemporary Native American culture. We will

screen several films, including Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals, Arlene Bowman's Navajo Talking Picture, and short

films by emerging Native filmmakers. Our readings will include works by writers visiting campus (recent visitors

have included Gordon Henry, Diane Glancy, Diana Garcia, LeAnne Howe and Allison Hedge Coke). We will take an

interdisciplinary approach, locating these texts and authors within their appropriate historical and cultural contexts

and focusing on issues of identity, sovereignty and community. We'll also consider the ways Indians are depicted in

and respond to popular culture. Other texts will include the anthology Nothing But the Truth, Louise Erdrich's

Tracks, Gordon Henry's The Failure of Certain Charms and Other Disparate Signs of Life, and Sherman Alexie's

Smoke Signals: A Screenplay. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and

sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

ENGL 284 DEMONS, GRE AT WHITES AND ALIENS : REPRESENTING AME RICAN FEAR

Credit: 0.5

This course engages questions such as: "How have U.S. writers and filmmakers represented fear, and why?" "What

are the major themes in American horror?" "What is the relationship of American horror to American history and

to ongoing national issues, especially those involving race, class, sexuality and gender?" To answer these

questions, we do close reading analysis, read critical and theoretical essays, and apply historicist and cultural-

studies approaches to examine specifically "American" novels, short stories and films that seek to incite fear in one

way or another. We look at canonical works, such as those of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James, and also at works

considered "mass market," such as those of Stephen King and the film Jaws. Our mission is to uncover how these

texts are cast as specifically "American" and why this is significant to our understanding of the texts and their

historical contexts. We also compare how the written and visual "fears" between the texts, and between written

texts and films, work differently and similarly. This course fulfills either the 1700-1900 or the post-1900

requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every

year.

Instructor: García

ENGL 286 TRANSGRESSI VE FRIENDSHIPS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

Race, class, gender, religion: These categories can be the basis of identity politics that divide as much as they unite.

This course will consider the significance in American literary texts of friendships that transgress these categorical

divisions. We will contemplate what makes such transgression possible in individual instances, and why these

instances are so exceptional. We will expand the discussion to explore the tension between the individual and the

community in the formation of identity. Texts are likely to include: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Ernest

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Toni Morrison's Sula, Langston Hughes' and Zora Neale Hurston's play Mule

Bone, Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif" and others. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. It is open

only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104. Offered every other year.

Instructor: Schoenfeld

ENGL 288 AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

This course introduces students to the literature written by African Americans between 1845 and 1940. Rather

than approach this material as a survey would, this course focuses instead more narrowly on central texts

indispensable to any further study of African-American literature. Our goal will be to engage a limited number of

texts and authors, but to do so in a deeper and more detailed fashion than a survey course would allow. Writers to

be covered include, but are not limited to, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois,

Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. This course meets the 1700-

1900 or the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and sophomore students who have taken ENGL

103 or 104. Offered annually.

ENGL 289 AMERICAN NOVEL, 1950-PRESENT

Credit: 0.5

This course involves close examination of 10 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. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. It is open only to first-year and

sophomore students who have taken ENGL 103 or 104.

Instructor: Kluge

ENGL 300 ADVANCED FICTI ON WRITING

Credit: 0.5

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 at every level. As we consider narrative strategies and

practical methods for developing individual styles, along with approaches to revising work, we also will read, as

writers, a variety of outside texts. Check with the English Department administrative assistant for submission

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

deadlines. Prerequisite: ENGL 200 or 202, submission of a writing sample and permission of instructor. Offered

annually.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 301 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING

Credit: 0.5

This course sets out to trouble your assumptions -- both conscious and unrecognized -- about poetry: writing it,

reading it, responding to it; its purpose, its nature, its public and private selves. We will explore revision in the

fullest senses of the word, aiming not only toward compression and economy but toward expansion and explosion,

toward breaking down the boundaries between what constitutes -- for you as writer and reader -- poem and not-

poem. We will reverse the usual order of things: Our workshopping will focus on canonized poems, and you should

expect to engage fully in your role as poet-critic when you respond to classmates' work, approaching it as you

approach texts in the literature classroom. We will explore poetry's technologized face through blogs and

webzines, even as, Luddite-like, we hand write, cut, paste, find and memorize poetry. This class requires intensive

reading (and attendant thoughtful response) in poetry and poetics, enthusiastic engagement with exercises in

critique, revision and poem-making, and a final project, demonstrating your advancement as both critic and poet

during the course of the semester. Texts will likely include several volumes of contemporary poetry, selected

critical essays, manifestoes, writings on process, and readings by visiting writers. Prerequisite: ENGL 201,

submission of a writing sample, and permission of instructor. Check with the English department administrative

assistant for submission deadlines. Offered annually, in one or two sections.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 302 ADVANCED CREATIVE NONFICTION

Credit: 0.5

Students in this workshop will write imaginative nonfiction in any of its many forms and will be especially

encouraged to work on a single, long piece over the course of the semester. As with all writing workshops,

classroom discussion will require an openness to giving and receiving criticism. Outside reading will include essays

and at least one book-length work by acknowledged masters of the form. To better explore questions of craft,

written responses to these readings will be due each week. Check with the English department administrative

assistant for submission deadlines. Prerequisite: ENGL 200, 202, 203 or a similar course, submission of writing

sample and permission of instructor.

ENGL 310 NARRATIVE THEORY

Credit: 0.5

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

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

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 the Freudians, behavioral therapists, cognitive scientists) and the structure of

narrative as described in schools of criticism from formalism and 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. This course meets the "approaches to literary

study" requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered

every other year.

Instructor: Matz

ENGL 311 TIME AND NARRATIVE

Credit: 0.5

Long ago, in answer to the question, "What is time?" St. Augustine wrote: "If no one asks me I know but when

someone does I do not." Time continues to be hard to define or explain. But where philosophy and physics fail,

some say, narrative succeeds. Narrative engagement, as the creative record of history, or the form of personal

recollection, or the way to trace the succession of moments in an ordinary day, may be the cultural form through

which we truly understand the meaning of time. To test this theory, this course will read narrative fiction that

experiments with the representation of time, to see: (1) what such fiction has to say about time, and (2) how the

problem of time determines the forms, styles, and techniques of narrative fiction. Primary texts will include novels

and stories by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, and others.

Secondary reading will include philosophical treatments of time, literary-critical accounts of the time-narrative

relationship, and cultural histories of time's changing meanings. This course meets the "approaches to literary

study" requirement. Prerequisite: junior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered every other

year.

ENGL 312 POSTMODERN NARRATIVE

Credit: 0.5

Through discussion and occasional lecture, this course will examine some of the aesthetic strategies and cultural

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 will 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 also will engage

various theorists and critics of the postmodern (Barthes, Lyotard, Jameson, Eagleton). This course meets the

"approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement in English. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or

ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: McMullen

ENGL 313 LAND, BODY, PLACE IN LITERATURE AND FILM

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Credit: 0.5

This interdisciplinary course critically examines cultural expressions of the relationship between humans and their

environment. Important concerns will include historical and culturally constructed connections between gender

and nature, between human and nonhuman animals, environmental racism, and the erotics of landscape. Course

readings will focus on texts outside the Western canon; primary texts will likely include the films Atanjurat: The

Fast Runner, Grizzly Man, and Brokeback Mountain; novels by J.M. Coetzee, Kamila Shamsie, and Sabina Berman.

Secondary readings will draw upon animal studies, ecocritical, queer, and postcolonial theories. This course meets

the "approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL

210-291 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: McAdams

ENGL 315 THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK

Credit: 0.5

History of the Book is an introduction to the history of material texts. It investigates the production of writing from

scribal manuscript to modern digital media, with a focus on the hand-press era (c.1450-1830). Our goal is to

become proficient at reading material forms in conjunction with the texts they contain and to place these

materials in historical context. During the course, we will examine topics including: shifting notions of authorship

and audience; the processes of manuscript and print production; the economics of printing and bookselling;

libraries and organization of knowledge; methods of illustration; mise-en-page, and paratexts; and textual editing.

The class is taught in Special Collections in the Olin Library, where we learn how to handle rare materials and

become familiar with the physical structure and layout of books. This course meets the "approaches to literary

study" requirement, or one of the pre-1700 or 1700-1900 period requirements. Prerequisite: junior or senior

standing, or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 316 POSTCOLONIAL POETRY

Credit: 0.5

This course will examine primarily Anglophone poetry written by Caribbean and African poets during the 20th

century, a period marked by assertions of new national and cultural identities as colonized nations achieved

political independence from imperial powers. Students will consider how indigenous cultural expressions from

these regions interact with European forms and traditions, and how such encounters transform both indigenous

and imperial cultural forms. How do poets "write back" to the metropole to reclaim occluded or distorted cultural

meanings or identities? How are these identities then bolstered or contested, both within poems and beyond

them, by transnational identities proposed by Negritude or Pan-Africanism? How do commitments to a particular

language, gender, race, religion, caste, or class complicate the unifying nationalisms of decolonized regions? We

will also attend to literary genre. Why would postcolonial subjects choose to write poetry, particularly when the

novel has been so often identified as the principal literary form for articulating modernity, empire and secular life?

Do lyric poems provide different ways of thinking about the postcolonial condition than novels do? Should these

genre boundaries developed within European traditions even be deployed when examining non-Western

literature? Finally, students will consider the relationship between postcolonial writing and postmodern literary

strategies like appropriation, mimicry, hybridity and pastiche; how and why do postcolonialism and

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postmodernism intersect? Exploring these questions, students will gain a more nuanced understanding of a world

of Anglophone poetry that has developed beyond, though frequently in dialogue with, the literary cultures of

Britain and America. This course fulfills either the "approaches to literary study" or the "post-1900" requirement.

Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Hawks

ENGL 317 POETRY AND THE VISUAL ARTS

Credit: 0.5

From Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, to Keats' great "Ode on a Grecian Urn," to John

Ashbery's meditation on Parmigianino's painting in "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," poets have attempted to

capture works of visual art in words. This course will consider examples in this tradition, from classical to

contemporary poets, as well as a range of theories of ekphrasis. We will explore the various ways that such poems

offer (as the root meaning of ekphrasis indicates) a "speaking out" or a "telling in full" of what is silent in a

painting, sketch, sculpture, monument, photograph, or fresco; from ancient Greek bronzes to the miraculous

boxes of Joseph Cornell. The fascination with ekphrasis also should suggest, however, ways that the visual arts, at

their best, evoke more than the merely visible, just as great poetry evokes that which is beyond words. This course

meets the "approaches to literary study" requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or

permission of instructor. Offered every one or two years.

Instructor: Clarvoe

ENGL 318 SCIENCE FIC TION AND FANTASY

Credit: 0.5

As a genre, fantasy has seen a sudden leap in popularity over the last two decades, primarily as a result of novels

for children, such as those by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, and of film or television adaptations, such as those

of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Despite these events it remains one of the most marginalized genre

categories in fiction, both in academia and in culture more generally -- a marginalization that is all the more

striking considering the general acceptance of magic realist novels as part of literary culture. In this course we will

reread the genre of fantasy for continuities with the wider history of the novel, focusing particularly on allegory,

the bildungsroman, children's literature and historical narratives. This course meets the "approaches to literary

study" requirement or the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or

permission of instructor.

Instructor: Brown

ENGL 320 SHAKESPEARE

Credit: 0.5

Who and what is "Shakespeare"? The wealth of Shakespeare's legacy allows us to offer many versions of this

course, all of which will focus on Shakespeare on the page and on the stage. Sometimes this course may examine

the role of the cultural "other." Looking at figures like the witch, the native/foreigner, or the cross-dressed woman

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in such plays as Macbeth, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, we will explore the way Shakespeare's theater

shaped -- and was shaped by -- the cultural expectations of the English Renaissance. At other times the course may

query the concept of Renaissance self-fashioning in the sonnets and in plays such as Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and

Antony and Cleopatra. We may also explore what Shakespeare read as he composed plays such as A Midsummer

Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Tempest -- and how writers since Shakespeare have responded to and re-

visioned his work in the form of lyric poems, new plays, novels and films. Now and then, the course may focus on

"the history plays," or the relationship of comedy and tragedy to the romances. No matter which version of

Shakespeare is offered, a close reading of several of Shakespeare's plays will always shape and center this course.

This course meets the pre-1700 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or

permission of instructor. Offered annually.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 322 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Credit: 0.5

This course treats the history of English from Anglo-Saxon through the Renaissance in English literature to the era

of Samuel Johnson and the creation of his great dictionary. The first half of the course provides an introduction to

both Anglo-Saxon and Middle English language and literature. Students acquire sufficient grasp to read the

citations in the Oxford English Dictionary from the medieval period. In the Anglo-Saxon portion of the course, the

study focuses on short texts including poetry, riddles and varieties of prose. In the Middle English and Early

Modern English portions of the course, the array of texts is broader and includes the Renaissance sonnet tradition,

family correspondence and miscellaneous prose. Particular attention is given to the emergence of differentiated

styles, dialects and "discourses" in the 17th and 18th centuries, and to the early stages of English language study

following models of philology created to treat Latin and Greek. This course meets the "approaches to literary

study" or pre-1700 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of

instructor.

ENGL 324 EPIC TO ROMANCE

Credit: 0.5

Primary readings in this course present the tradition of heroic narrative from Beowulf to Le Morte D'Arthur. In the

last third of the semester, we will explore the meaning of this tradition in the context of the world of heroic

narrative from Gilgamesh to Clint Eastwood, depending upon the interests and knowledge of class members. This

course meets the "approaches to literary study" or the pre-1700 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior

standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Klein

ENGL 325 CHAUCER

Credit: 0.5

With a focus on major works -- Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women and The

Canterbury Tales -- we will consider Chaucer in the context of medieval literature and as a writer who anticipates

modern questions of gender and authority. Reading in Middle English, and exploring the social and historical

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contexts of Chaucer's fictions, we will pay special attention to Chaucer's preoccupations with the experience of

reading, the revisioning of romance, the metamorphosis and translation of texts, and the status of the book itself.

This course meets the pre-1700 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or

permission of instructor.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 331 THE REFORMATION AND LITERATURE: DOGMA AND DISSENT

Credit: 0.5

The Reformation deeply influenced the literary development of England and transformed the religious, intellectual

and cultural worlds of the 16th and 17th 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, prayer books and propaganda, sermons and exorcisms, bibles

and broadsheets. This interdisciplinary course will focus on a range of English literary texts, 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 meets the pre-1700

requirement. This course is the same as RLST 331. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or

permission of instructor. Offered annually.

Instructor: Davidson

ENGL 336 17TH-CENTURY POETRY

Credit: 0.5

This course will examine the poetry of England's most radical age, a period of revolution, religious dissent and the

birth of modern science, of apocalyptic visions and utopian dreams. We will consider how these changing ideas

about politics, religion, science and sex shaped the poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, George

Herbert, Katherine Philips, John Milton, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell and others. This course meets the pre-

1700 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered

every other year.

ENGL 338 MILTON

Credit: 0.5

This course will undertake a close reading and analysis of the great English epic Paradise Lost in the context of

Milton's political and literary career: his early experiments in lyric poetry and masque; his radical support --

through prose, the writings of "[his] left hand" -- of revolution, freedom of the press and divorce; and his personal

response to imprisonment and the death of his political hopes in the restoration of the English monarchy under

Charles II. As we examine issues of freedom, authority and authorship in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, we

will consider Milton's revisioning of classical epic and drama and of biblical texts. And as we explore the attempt

"to justify the ways of God to men," we will pay particular attention to Milton's account of gender and his

examination of the literary imagination and the creative process. We also will consider the responses of other

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great writers, from Milton's time to our own, to this most provocative and enduring epic. This course meets the

pre-1700 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 339 THE RESTORATION ON STAGE AND SCREEN

Credit: 0.5

This course focuses on the plays of a period (roughly 1660-1720) deemed to be one of the most licentious in

history, both morally and politically. We shall examine the ways in which contemporary playwrights and film

directors explore and critique not only Restoration society but also modern society through the lens of Restoration

plays. Peter Greenaway's Draughtsman's Contract (1982), set in 1694, is a brilliant reconstruction of the

Restoration's preoccupation with sex and property but it also is a film that reflects on the art of filmmaking, thus

taking us into the modern world through the perspective of the 17th-century artist and forcing us to confront the

ways in which we see the past. The Restoration period was an important moment of transition in theater history:

women (as actors) were introduced to the stage (displacing boys playing women's roles), and female playwrights

had a new and influential voice. We will examine the rise of the actress in the Restoration and also in modern plays

that attempt to recreate the sexual dynamics of this cultural shift. This course meets the pre-1700 or the 1700-

1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Laycock

ENGL 341 TRAVEL AND TOURISM IN 18TH -CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

In this course, we will concentrate on the literature and discourse of travel in the later 18th century. This is the

period of the "grand tour," the rise of tourism and the tourist industry, and the increasing preoccupation of writers

with the issue of cultural identity -- are human beings everywhere ("from China to Peru") the same, or are there

important essential or cultural differences between them? Is there such a thing as national identity and, if so, what

attempts can be made to preserve or construct that national identity? What are the relationships of so-called

civilized cultures to "primitive" or undeveloped ones? Many travelers in the 18th century embarked on the grand

tour to Italy, to examine the origins of a culture the English sought to reconstruct in self-consciously "neoclassical"

forms, but travelers also ventured north -- to Scandinavia, to the polar regions, to the Celtic fringes of Britain --

hoping to find and observe people existing in a state of nature. We will examine how various writers use travel as a

"vehicle" to explore such larger issues as the history of human society and notions of progress. We also will study

issues of perception -- how travelers regarded and transformed what they viewed. In addition to reading 18th-

century tour guides, we will study representations of the sublime and picturesque in landscape painting, landscape

gardening, and theater design. We also will examine the horror of travel in the 18th century by examining

narratives of the slave trade. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing

or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered every other year.

Instructor: Laycock

ENGL 342 18TH-CENTURY NOVEL

Credit: 0.5

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This course aims to define the novel, to trace the causes of its rise in 18th-century England, to study some great

and various examples of the genre from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, and to learn about a historical period quite

different from our own even though we may find there some of the roots of our own culture. The novel will be

defined against epic, romance, drama, historiography and newswriting. Various types of novel also will be

distinguished: fictional biography and autobiography, epistolary fiction, the picaresque, the fictional travelogue,

the Oriental tale, sentimental fiction and Gothic fiction. Particular attention will be paid to authorial prefaces,

dedications and advertisements to determine what the novelists themselves thought about the emerging genre

and how they imagined their relationship to the reader. This course also will provide an introduction to such major

theorists of the novel as Mikhail Bakhtin, Ian Watt and Michael McKeon. This course meets the 1700-1900

requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered annually.

ENGL 351 THE ROMANTI C PERIOD

Credit: 0.5

This course will explore some of the complexities and contradictions in the literature of the Romantic period. A

period that came to be identified with the work of six male poets in two generations (Blake, Wordsworth and

Coleridge; Byron, Shelley and Keats) also is the period in which the English novel achieves considerable subtlety

and broad cultural influence. In addition to the poets, then, the course will include works by such novelists as

Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth. While lyric poetry becomes increasingly dominant and the sonnet undergoes a

revival in this period, there remains a poetic hierarchy in which epic and tragedy occupy the highest positions. The

course will therefore include dramatic poems, whether or not such works were intended for performance, and a

consideration of the epic impulse. The course will examine the tension between populism (and popular

superstitions) and the elitist alienation of the Romantic poet, and the relationship between political radicalism and

both Burkean conservatism and an abandonment of the political ideals of the French Revolution in favor of

imaginative freedom. In addition, this course will introduce students to recent critical studies of Romanticism. This

course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of

instructor. Offered every other year.

Instructor: Carson

ENGL 354 PAGE, STAGE , SCREEN: 19TH -CENTURY NOVELS TRANS FORMED

Credit: 0.5

In the 19th century British writers brought into the world innumerable fictional characters and plots that have --

for good and ill, and in forms as low as cereal boxes and as high as acclaimed novels -- served as cultural

touchstones for more than a century. In this course, we will explore a handful of fictions that have undergone

particularly provocative transformations into novelistic, theatrical, and cinematic productions. Throughout the

semester, we will use our close readings of fictions, plays and films (as well as of ephemera like cartoons) to

consider theories and practices of adaptation in both the 19th and 20th centuries. What kinds of plots seem most

to have enthralled or even possessed 19th- and 20th-century readers and viewers? How do those plots change

when they undergo shifts from textual to visual media? We also will explore the cultural and critical discourses that

have grown up around particular works. Course texts will include Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Shelley's

Frankenstein, Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and

Stoker's Dracula, as well as numerous film adaptations of each novel. Students will produce two formal writings

and weekly film response papers and also will participate in a group research presentation. Students enrolled in

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this course must enroll in a mandatory weekly film screening. This course meets the "approaches to literary study"

or the 1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Heidt

ENGL 356 VICTORIAN P OETRY AND POETICS

Credit: 0.5

This course will serve as a wide-ranging exploration of Victorian poetic culture. Our primary focus will be Victorian

poetry in all its forms -- including lyric, ballad, elegy, narrative and epic -- and its staggering range of subjects

sacred and profane: love, grief, social injustice, doubt, sadomasochism, religious devotion, pet dogs, travel,

madness and poetry itself (among many others). We will read works by Tennyson, the Brownings, the Brontes, the

Rossettis, Arnold, Clough, Hopkins, Swinburne and Hardy, examining the formal and topical conventions and

innovations of their verse. We also will examine mechanisms of fame and obscurity as they shaped these (and

other) poets' careers, and we will discuss a number of female poets whose critical and canonical fortunes have

risen in recent years, including the dramatic monologist Augusta Webster and the duo who wrote as Michael Field.

We will consider the relationship of poetry to other arts (especially painting) and literary forms (such as the novel);

we also will discuss the role anthologies, periodicals, reviews and the development of English literature as an

academic discipline played in the circulation and consumption of poetic works throughout the 19th century.

Students will write two formal essays and several three-to-four-page poetry explications and also will perform at

least one poem during class. This course meets the "approaches to literary study" or the 1700-1900 requirement.

Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Heidt

ENGL 357 19TH-CENTURY NOVEL

Credit: 0.5

This course will introduce students to the wide range of questions, scandals, lessons, and pleasures to be found in

nineteenth-century novels. We will attend to questions of how the nineteenth-century novel differed from its

predecessors and successors how the novel, as a genre, grappled with the nineteenth century's relentless social,

political, and technological changes and how novels functioned within and across national boundaries and literary

traditions. How were nineteenth-century novels packaged and marketed? Who read them, and how did they read

them? How have they survived into other media (including authorial public readings and theatrical and cinematic

adaptations) since their initial publications? How might careful study of another era's fictional literature help us

both to understand that era and to reexamine our own historical and cultural moment? This course meets the

1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing OR ENGL 210-291 OR permission of the instructor.

ENGL 358 VICTORIAN GHOSTS

Credit: 0.5

In the 19th century, Britain was nothing if not haunted -- by (among other things) history, doubt, science, political

unrest, desire and sexuality, other parts and peoples of the world, and the unfathomable complexities of the

human psyche. This course will provide an intensive introduction to Victorian literature and culture through an

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examination of its ghosts. Among the literary works we will read are fictions by Emily Bronte, Hardy, Eliot, Gaskell,

Dickens, Pater, James and Wilde; poetry by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne and Hardy;

and autobiographical writing by Oliphant. We will explore extraliterary movements and phenomena that illustrate

how Victorian people attempted to document and/or make contact with ghosts, including spiritualism, spirit

photography and psychical research. And we will give some consideration to the ways the Victorian period has

haunted its successors. Students can expect to complete two major essays and a final exam, deliver at least one

oral presentation, and compose occasional short reading papers or discussion questions. This course meets the

1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Heidt

ENGL 359 MIDDLEMARCH

Credit: 0.5

This course will afford us an opportunity to concentrate on and to luxuriate in one novel, George Eliot's

Middlemarch (1871-72), and to consider how close study of a single literary work can afford a window onto the

cultural, political, and intellectual developments of a complex historical period. During our first read, we will move

through this eight-part novel at roughly the pace at which you might have encountered it in a course on the

Victorian novel or on George Eliot's works more broadly. On our second read, we will move at the much slower

pace of one part per week, bringing various contextualizing materials to bear upon our rereading. This course will

thus function both as a chance to become deeply conversant with an iconic British novel and also as an experiment

in slow reading and in rereading. We will engage with questions of literary form and formal close-reading, of

cultural and biographical contexts, of publishing and reception history, and of changing critical and theoretical

perspectives. Students will take a midterm exam, design and conduct part of a class session, and write a final

research essay. This course fulfills part of the 1700-1900 requirement for English majors. Prerequisite: junior or

senior standing, ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Heidt

ENGL 362 20TH-CENTURY IRISH LITERA TURE

Credit: 0.5

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 20th 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 revolutionary and 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. We will consider multiple genres (drama, poetry, fiction and film) and such writers as Yeats,

Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Padraic Pearse, Sean O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O'Brien, Seamus

Heaney, Brian Friel, Eavan Boland, Colm Tóibin and Conor McPherson. This course meets the post-1900

requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered annually.

ENGL 363 WRITING THE GLOBAL CITY

Credit: 0.5

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What makes and defines a city? Is there an essence that unites Tulsa and Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro and Riga? What

happens if we shift our gaze, instead, to comparing New York, Delhi and Shanghai? Some of the characteristics that

make these three cities similar include their cosmopolitanism, their renown as economic and political hubs, and

their location as sites of cultural activity. In contrast with Tulsa and Riga, then, these cities become global cities.

Since the 1990s, globalization theorists have increasingly focused on the city as the site of contestation between

the local and the global. In this course, we will read cultural and literary texts that challenge and complicate how

we read cities: between exemplifying the nation in a microcosm and embodying globality. Some of the writers we

read in this course may include Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, Monica Ali, China Miéville, and Jeet Thayil. Students

should contact the instructor to find out what specific texts will be adopted. This course meets the post-1900 and

"approaches to literary study" requirements. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL 210-291.

Instructor: Murthy

ENGL 364 THE MODERN SHORT STORY

Credit: 0.5

This course will focus on the American short story since 1900. The story is not simply a shorter fictional narrative

than the novel. It is a genre with a distinct pedigree. For the first three-quarters of the 20th century, writing short

stories for commercial venues such as the Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker, and even Playboy offered

financial support to many authors while they were also writing novels or screenplays. Hemingway, Fitzgerald and

Porter are just a few examples. More recently, creative writing workshops and university-based M.F.A. programs

have proliferated, and the short form, ideal for workshop discussion, received new life. Finally, throughout the last

century, the short story was often also the site for counter-narratives and other experimentation. In this course,

we will read five or six stories each week. We often will read multiple examples by the same author. And though

each week will concentrate on stories largely from the same era, there will be significant differences in styles,

subjects, and technique. We will discuss how the stories work, how the authors' themes and techniques develop

over time, and how they influenced each other. As the semester progresses, students will assume increasing

responsibility for leading discussions. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior

standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Lynn

ENGL 365 THE MODERN NOVEL

Credit: 0.5

For at least 100 years now, novelists have experimented with ways to make fiction "modern," to make it better

able to reflect and resist the perils and pleasures of modernity. This course explores the ways they have done so,

tracing the evolution of the modern novel from its origins in the realist fiction of the 19th century to its

contemporary incarnations. We will consider such authors as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James

Joyce, E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Anthony Burgess and Salman Rushdie. This course

meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of

instructor. Offered most years.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 366 AFRICAN FIC TION

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Credit: 0.5

This course is a reading of African fiction since the middle of the 20th century, focusing on the way Africa's cultural

traditions, historical problems and political objectives have revised and resisted Western narrative forms. What

narrative forms develop as a result of the machinations of power in modern Africa? How, for example, does the

need to present historical information and political argument to the broadest possible local audience favor realism

and popular styles? How has the globalization of the African novel complicated questions of genre, style, and even

the very category of African fiction? Some of the topics that the course will touch upon may include the impact of

modernization on traditional life, the transmission of oral culture into literary form, the impact of external

patronage on local literary cultures, the influence of writers educated abroad on literature at home, the result of

the African effort to "decolonize" literary forms of expression, and the transnational turn in African fiction, and

newer movements in African literature including Afro-Futurism. The thematic focus of the course may vary from

year to year; students should contact the instructor to find out what specific focus and texts that will be adopted.

In addition to plays, short stories, and novels, we will read selections from critical and nonfiction works. This

course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission

of instructor. Offered every third year.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 368 DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS

Credit: 0.5

Exile, Edward Said writes, is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self

and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. What is it about leaving one’s native home that

evokes this essential sadness? Is a native place always a true home? What are the social, cultural, emotional, and

political challenges that accompany leaving home as well as arriving in a new country? What does it mean to

return home as a member of the diasporic community abroad? How do we distinguish between the various types

of migrations-- exile, refugee, expatriate, and émigré? How do writers imagine the various hybridity--linguistic,

cultural, religious, gender, and sexual-- that result from these complicated crossings? We will interrogate these

questions related to diasporic living, through an examination of an array of literary and theoretical writings. This

course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing, or ENGL 210-291 or permission of

instructor.

ENGL 369 CANADIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Credit: 0.5

In this course we will examine works of modern authors from English- and French-speaking (in translation) Canada,

as well as works by native Canadian writers, some who choose to write in either of the two "official" languages.

We will consider issues of national identity both within an officially bilingual, multicultural Canada, and within a

North American context -- Canadians defining themselves in relation to a powerful neighbor to the south. We will

thus begin by focusing on Canadian writers, filmmakers and musicians as they characterize that border or

"medicine line" along which so many Canadians choose to live, against which so much of Canadian identity is

defined, and over which they constantly trespass. In the process, we also will examine the many ways in which

Canadians characterize the United States and Americans. We will concentrate on writers (Margaret Atwood,

Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Gabrielle Roy, Leonard Cohen) who have very self-consciously, and from very

different perspectives, contributed to the task of defining what constitutes Canadian culture, the Canadian

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multicultural "mosaic." Some of Canada's most renowned poets also are musicians. We also will hear from them.

And, as some of Canada's strongest representations of cultural difference have appeared in the form of films

sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada and Telefilm Canada, we will view and study some of these in

relation to the literary works we will be reading. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior

or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor. Offered annually.

Instructor: Laycock

ENGL 370 TRANSNATION AL SOUTH ASIA

Credit: 0.5

The course offers an exploration of literary texts from writers based in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh

and/or the South Asian diaspora. It examines how South Asia as a category is imagined and evoked, as well as how

the literary classification changes the way we approach and read the text. To what extent is a reading of a text

bound with the national literary canon? In what ways are literary texts informed by the social, historical, and

political conditions while also participating in the transformation of the public sphere? What are the ways in which

South Asian writers articulate a specifically postcolonial imaginary within a global discourse? What, indeed, counts

as a South Asian text? In addition to poems, plays, short stories, and novels, we will read critical and nonfiction

works. Topics to be examined in the course may include borders and locations, traumas and triumphs of

decolonization, formation of the national canon, and articulation of identity within and outside the nation. The

thematic focus of the course may vary from year to year students should contact the instructor to ascertain the

specific focus and texts that will be adopted. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or

senior standing or ENGL 210-291 or permission of instructor.

ENGL 371 WHITMAN AND DICKINSON

Credit: 0.5

"I celebrate myself and sing myself, / And what I shall assume you shall assume," asserts Walt Whitman. Emily

Dickinson queries, "I'm Nobody -- who are you?" This course will focus in depth on the poetic works of these two

19th-century American poets, paying attention to the development of their distinctive poetry and their careers,

their publication history and reception, the relationship between their work and lives, and their influence on

subsequent generations of writers. We will pay particular attention to their formal innovations and poetic

principles. Students will write weekly response papers, including projects in poetic imitation, and two longer (nine-

to-12 page) essays. This course fills the 1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing or ENGL

210-291 or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

ENGL 372 THE GILDED AGE

Credit: 0.5

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 James, Wharton,

Cather, and Crane. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL

210-291; or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Staff

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ENGL 373 LITE RARY AMAZONS: 19TH -CENTURY U.S. WOMEN WRITERS

Credit: 0.5

This course traces American women's authorship between the 1840s and the early 1900s from a multi-ethnic

perspective, from Margaret Fuller's feminist manifesto "Woman in the 19th Century" in 1845, to Elizabeth

Keckley's autobiographical account of her work as a seamstress for the Lincoln White House in 1868, to Edith

Wharton's heartbreaking The House of Mirth (1905). Focusing on literature selected to provide a wide exposure to

the study of U.S. female writers, the course sets each author within her historical context and examines the ways

in which the texts address issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, class and other identity

categories pertinent to the definition of American-ness. Is there such a category as American women's writing?

And, if so, how might we define its national and generic parameters? The course explores these questions through

biographical and critical lenses currently under debate in this field, such as separate spheres, true womanhood,

republican motherhood, sentimentalism and manifest domesticity, among others. The course provides students

with a solid foundation in some of the most well known but also some of the least studied texts written by 19th-

century American female authors. This course fulfills the 1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior

standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor.

Instructor: García

ENGL 375 F ROM COOPER TO CRANE: U.S. FICTION IN THE 19TH -CENTURY

Credit: 0.5

This course covers major United States fiction from roughly 1840-1900. We will concern ourselves with the

fictional representations of an emerging national identity, focusing on such questions as the individual's relation to

nature, westward expansion, slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath. In doing so we will be particularly interested

in the development of fiction as a literary form, considering the relation of fictional romance to literary realism and

then taking up the question of aesthetic form as realism is elaborated later in the century. One important issue to

be considered is why the novel plays such an important role in developing conceptions of U.S. identity during the

period. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or

permission of instructor.

ENGL 378 RACE IN THE 19TH -CENTURY LITERARY IMAGINATION

Credit: 0.5

This course will consider the role played by the concept of "race" in the development of 19th-century American

literature. Specifically, we will concern ourselves with how "whiteness," "blackness," and "Indianness" become

constructed as important categories and as literary "figures" in the developing literary production of the period.

Readings will include Puritan histories and narratives, as well as works by Wheatley, Jefferson, Cooper, Melville,

Twain, Cable and Du Bois, among others. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. It can be used to fulfill

requirements in African diaspora studies as well as in American studies. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or

ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor. Offered every other year.

Instructor: Mason

ENGL 381 ANOTHER AME RICA: NARRATIVES OF THE HEMISPHERE

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Credit: 0.5

This course serves as an introduction to the literature in English of Latin American and U.S. Latino(a) writers.

Through both written works and films, we examine the themes, critical issues, styles and forms that characterize

the literature of this "other" America. The course expands the notion of what is widely considered as "American"

literature by examining works (some originally written in English and others translated into English) produced in

both the hemispheric and U.S. contexts of "America." We begin with the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the Colombian

Gabriel García Márquez, and the Mexican Laura Esquivel, using rhetorical and cultural analysis to discuss how

issues of colonization, slavery, the clash of cultures and U.S. intervention are represented within the texts. We

then migrate north into the United States to read essays by Gloria Anzaldúa and Chérrie Moraga, poetry by Miguel

Piñero, and a memoir of migration by Esmeralda Santiago. These and other texts help us to explore questions such

as: What general similarities and differences can we identify between Latin American and Latino(a) literature? How

are individual and national identities constructed in popular films by Latin Americans, and by U.S. filmmakers

about Latino(a)s? Is there a difference between Hispanic and Latino(a)? This course fulfills either the "approaches

to literary study" or the "post-1900" requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or

permission of instructor. Offered every other year.

Instructor: García

ENGL 382 THE JAZZ AGE

Credit: 0.5

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 also will be discussing the parallel

developments in other artistic disciplines, including music, fashion photography and painting. We will read widely,

including works by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Eliot, Dreiser, Cather, Larsen, Faulkner and Dos Passos. This

course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission

of instructor.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 383 UNLEARNING NATIVE AMERICA

Credit: 0.5

An introduction to the field of Native American studies, this interdisciplinary course critically examines an array of

cultural expression by contemporary Native writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and performers. While the course

emphasizes the way Native people represent themselves, we begin with the powerful stereotypes of Native

Americans that continue to circulate (hence, the unlearning aspect of the course), then look to the ways Native

artists and writers appropriate, refute, and rewrite these images. As we read, screen, and listen, we all attend to

the political, regional, and tribal contexts informing these works, through supplementary reading in history,

political science, gender studies, and other disciplines. Key critical issues will include nation and sovereignty,

indigenous feminism and two-spirit traditions, displacement and community, and the role of humor. Texts to be

studied may include Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko, Bad Indians by Deborah Miranda, When My Brother Was

an Aztec by Natalie Diaz, such films as Reel Injun, Smoke Signals, and The Fast Runner, and work by such visual and

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performing artists as the 1491s, Steven Paul Judd, and Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith. This course meets the

"approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or permission of

instructor.

ENGL 384 IMAGINING AMERICA IN THE NOVEL

Credit: 0.5

This course is a general introduction to major American novels from 1900 to 1955. Our central question will be:

How is American national identity imagined and represented in fiction? We also will consider the relation between

a general national identity and various regional identities in the South or the Midwestern prairie. Are these

identities more in conflict or in concert? The course will investigate how national identity also can be connected

with other forms of identity, such as race, class and gender. We also will interest ourselves in the craft of the

authors under consideration including Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, William

Faulkner, John Dos Passos, and Ralph Ellison. This course is designed for non-majors and majors alike. It meets the

post-1900 requirement. This course may be taken for credit in American studies. Prerequisite: junior or senior

standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor. Offered annually.

Instructor: Mason

ENGL 385 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY

Credit: 0.5

The young Robert Lowell, before he attended Kenyon, wrote to Ezra Pound, "If the 20th century is to realize a

great art comparable to that of Chaucer or Shakespeare, the foundation will have to be your poems." James

Wright, some years later, wrote his Kenyon honors thesis on "The Will in the Thought and Art of Thomas Hardy."

This course offers a sampling of contemporary American poets of the generation of Lowell and Wright and later

generations, including Ashbery, Bishop, Gunn, Jarrell, Merrill, O'Hara, Plath, Olson, Ginsberg, Duncan, Rich and

Baraka. We will pay particular attention to their dynamic and widely varying relationships with the traditions they

inherited and transformed, and we also will attempt to locate their poems within social and political as well as

aesthetic contexts. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL

210-291; or permission of instructor. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 386 TONI MORRIS ON

Credit: 0.5

Pleasurable doesn't seem like a word that would apply to the harrowing story of a mother who kills her child rather

than allow her to be enslaved. Yet Toni Morrison, consummate artist and Nobel laureate, writes prose so beautiful

that one could describe reading such a story as, in some sense, pleasurable, even as this beauty deepens the

powerful and sometimes painful effect of her words. In this class we will read most of Morrison's novels, some of

her short fiction, and some of her critical work. We will discuss the craft involved in the creation of Morrison's

stunning prose, Morrison's position relative to both American and African-American literary canons, as well as the

themes of Morrison's literature, including (but not limited to): race, gender and love (familial, amorous, platonic

and, perhaps most importantly, self). This course fulfills the post-1900 requirement. This course can be used to

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fulfill requirements in African diaspora studies as well as in women's and gender studies. Prerequisite: junior or

senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor. Offered every other year.

Instructor: Staff

ENGL 387 MODERN AME RICAN POETRY

Credit: 0.5

"The 20th century is much more splendid than the 19th century." Wrote Gertrude Stein in Picasso. "It is a time

when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself, it is a more splendid thing than a

period where everything follows itself. So then the 20th century is a splendid period. Not a reasonable one in the

scientific sense, but splendid." This course provides a survey of American poets exploding onto the literary scene in

the early 20th century: Stein, Masters, Pound, Eliot, Williams, H. D., Moore, Stevens, Toomer and Frost. We will

consider ways in which this poetry, as Stein might suggest, splendidly cracks conventions of poetic representation,

narrative, form, voice and genre to explore what it might mean to be "modern." This course will conclude with a

consideration of issues of canon-formation -- and cracks in the canon. This course meets the post-1900

requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor.

Instructor: Clarvoe

ENGL 388 STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

In Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny observes that African American women are

"de mule uh de world." Her response to this situation is to marry her granddaughter to a man whose wealth might

take Janie off her feet. Janie, in contrast, wants a man whose charm will sweep her off her feet. To what extent do

historical circumstances, expressed in this case as generational differences, shape the meaning of marriage for

African American women? What other kinds of hopes are invested in the institution of marriage in African

American women's writing (and lives)? When might marriage cease to be regarded as a viable avenue for

expanding African American women's opportunities? How do African American authors negotiate the loaded issue

of African American female sexuality both within and outside of marriage? What circumstances could make death

an African American mother's greatest gift, as in Toni Morrison's novel Sula, for example? What circumstances

could make abandonment a generous gesture, as in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl? These are

just a handful of the questions that will stimulate our discussion over the course of the semester. Note: Though the

texts in this course span from 1861 to 1991, this course fulfills the post-1900 requirement for the English major.

Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor.

ENGL 389 GENDER SEXU ALITY IN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

This course posits that gender and sexuality do not merely intersect with Native American indigenous cultures but

are produced by and through them. In the course, we will explore the complex relationships among gender,

sexuality and tribal sovereignty, beginning with such questions as: How did European invasion of the Americas

affect the traditionally high status of Native women in their own communities? And, what is the relationship

between the imposition of European gender binaries and sovereign self-definition? We will focus on the ways

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Native women and Two Spirit writers represent their cultures in novels, poetry, memoir and film. Texts for the

course will likely include Ella Deloria's Waterlily, Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians, the

anthology Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, and the films Soft Things, Hard Things and Two

Spirit. Critical readings will focus on such topics as Indigenous literary nationalism, trauma and queer indigeneity.

This course fulfills a requirement for the Women's and Gender Studies Concentration and meets the "approaches

to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. This is an inter-disciplinary course not open to first-year students.

Offered every two years.

ENGL 395Y THE KENYON-EXETER SEMINAR

Credit: 0.5

Designed to take full advantage of the rich historical and cultural heritage of the British Isles, the Kenyon-Exeter

Seminar focuses on two different themes: "plays in production" and "literature and landscape." "Plays in

production" focuses on the drama, stagecraft, history and culture of British theater. Students see and study 15 to

20 plays ranging from works by Shakespeare and other Renaissance and classical dramatists to the most avant-

garde of contemporary writers; from “original practices” at London’s Globe Theatre to “immersive theater” in

London warehouses to cutting-edge productions staged by boundary-defying companies. The goal is to trace the

actual process of production from play-text to cultural reception all across Britain's theatrical history, in the

context of close classroom attention to the theory and practice of performance. "Literature and landscape"

integrates analysis of literary texts with study of the distinctive geographic and social landscapes that inspired and

shaped them. This part of the course balances literary study with travel throughout England and the British Isles.

Subjects include the poetry and journals of William and Dorothy Wordsworth in the context of their surroundings

in the Lake District and elsewhere; William Butler Yeats’ poetic reinvention of the Irish landscape; the country-

house tradition of Chatsworth and Stourhead as it helped determine Jane Austen’s approach to questions of

property and community; and the complex social and cultural history of London legible in the work of writers

ranging from William Blake to Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith. This part of the course also centers on an extended

sojourn across a broad region of Britain or Ireland—typically, one to two weeks in Scotland’s Highlands and cities

or in the Republic of Ireland. Other sites include Dartmoor, Bath, Lyme Regis, Stonehenge, Tintagel, and many

more, all with a view toward immersion in the worlds of British literature. This course meets two half-units of any

of the department’s distribution requirements, as confirmed by the course’s instructor. Prerequisite: only open to

participants in the Kenyon-Exeter Program.

ENGL 396Y THE KENYON-EXETER SEMINAR

Credit: 0.5

See description for ENGL 395Y.

ENGL 404 SCIENCE WRI TING

Credit: 0.5

In recent years, there has been a renaissance of science writing for the common reader that combines literary and

scientific merit: from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time to Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for

A Hat, from Dava Sobel's Longitude to Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a series of books that

explore scientific questions in a style that transcends the conventions of academic science writing or popular

history have brought important questions from physics, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, and mathematics to

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wider public attention. Short form science journalism has become one of the most important areas of literary

nonfiction, recognized both by annual awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and

two different series of Best of American Science Writing anthologies. This interdisciplinary science writing course

will combine literary analysis of exemplary essays on scientific topics with a writing workshop that requires

students to do close observation of scientific processes, conduct independent research and interviews, interpret

data, and present scientific information in highly readable form. Weekly readings will be selected from prize-

winning science essays and the Best of American Science and Nature Writing series. We may also read one book-

length work of science writing. Weekly writing assignments will include journals, observational accounts of science

experiments, exercises in interpreting scientific data, interviews, narratives and a substantial research essay. No

prerequisite.

ENGL 405 SENIOR SEMINAR IN CREATIVE WRIT ING

Credit: 0.5

Offered in more than one section each year, this seminar is required for English majors pursuing an emphasis in

creative writing. The course will involve critical work on a topic chosen by the instructor (such as "Reliable and

Unreliable: Investigating Narrative Voice," "Beginnings and Endings," "The Little Magazine in America" and

"Documentary Poetics") to provide context and structure for students' creative work. Students should check online

listings for the specific focus of each section. Although not primarily a workshop, this seminar will require students

to work on a substantial creative project (fiction, nonfiction or poetry). Students pursuing honors will take ENGL

497 rather than the Senior Seminar. Prerequisite: open only to senior English majors who are completing the

emphasis in creative writing.

ENGL 410 SENIOR SEMINAR IN LITERATURE

Credit: 0.5

Offered in several sections, this seminar will require students to undertake a research paper of their own design,

within the context of a course that ranges across genres, literary periods and national borders. Students will study

literary works within a variety of critical, historical, cultural and theoretical contexts. All sections of the course will

seek to extend the range of interpretive strategies students can use to undertake a major literary research project.

Each student will complete a research paper of 15 to 17 pages. Senior English majors pursuing an emphasis in

creative writing are required to take instead ENGL 405. Students pursuing honors will take ENGL 497 rather than

ENGL 410. Prerequisite: senior standing and English major or permission of instructor.

ENGL 412 THE ARTS OF MEMORY

Credit: 0.5

Memory is the mother of the muses because, as Vladimir Nabokov once noted, all art must work with materials

that Mnemosyne, with mysterious foresight has stored up and made available. That gathering up implies, however,

that the memory-work of creation is always double, for the creative spirit necessarily consigns to oblivion vastly

more material than it ever retains. In this seminar we will study the double life of memory and forgetting by

surveying ancient mythology and philosophy (Hesiod, Homer, Plato, Aristotle) the tension between oral and

written literature, the rhetorical tradition of memory palaces (Cicero and others), the Christian Middle Ages (Saint

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Augustine), and finally some modern theorists (Nietzsche, Foucault) and practitioners (Proust and Nabokov). This

course meets the "approaches to literary study" or the post-1900 requirement. Permission of instructor required.

Instructor: Hyde

ENGL 419 HARD-BOILED CRIME FICTION AND FILM NOIR

Credit: 0.5

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 authors such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell

Hammett, James 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. This course meets the "approaches to literary study" requirement.

Permission of instructor required. Offered every other year.

Instructor: Lobanov-Rostovsky

ENGL 420 SHAKESPEARE : THE MAJOR TRAGEDIE S

Credit: 0.5

We will undertake an intensive investigation of Shakespeare's major tragedies -- Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and

Macbeth -- as enduring literary and dramatic legacies and as products of a unique cultural and historical moment.

How do the tragedies emerge from the landscape of early modern London and in the context of contemporaneous

non-Shakespearean drama? What do the plays tell us about the Jacobean theater and the printing house? How do

these dramas compare with early tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar? How do the tragedies

negotiate religious, racial, cultural and gender difference? Does a coherent Shakespearean theory of tragedy

emerge? What is the literary afterlife of these plays? Substantial independent work and full seminar participation

are required. This course meets the pre-1700 requirement. Permission of instructor required.

Instructor: Davidson

ENGL 453 JANE AUSTEN

Credit: 0.5

This course will focus on the works of Jane Austen - from a selection of her juvenilia, through the six major novels,

to the unfinished Sanditon. Additional texts for the course will include Austen's letters and a biography of the

author. The class will consider film adaptations of Austen's novels, both as these films are positioned within and as

they escape from the nostalgia industry of costume drama. Austen's works will be situated formally in relation to

the novel of sensibility, the Bildungsroman, the comic novel, the tradition of the romance genre, and the

development of free indirect discourse. Her novels also will be considered in relation to the late 18th-century

development of feminism, controversies over women's education, and the formulation of the separate sexual

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spheres. Ultimately, the course will address how an author who claimed to work with "so fine a Brush" on a "little

bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory" responded to such major historical events as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic

Wars, English radicalism and the abolition of the slave trade. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement.

Permission of instructor required. Offered every other year.

Instructor: Carson

ENGL 461 VIRGINIA WOOLF

Credit: 0.5

This course examines the novels, stories, essays, letters and diaries of Virginia Woolf, seen as contributions to

Modernist aesthetics, feminist theory, narrative form, the history of sexuality, avant garde culture, English literary

history and literary psychology. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Permission of instructor required.

Instructor: Matz

ENGL 462 JAMES JOYCE

Credit: 0.5

Language, race, history, commodity culture, gender, narratology, imperialism, decolonization, sexuality: If the list

reads like an encyclopedia of modern/postmodern preoccupations, it's because the text it references -- James

Joyce's Ulysses -- stands at the de-centered center of so many discussions of 20th-century culture. With a brief

review of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as our preamble, we will spend the majority of our

seminar following Leopold Bloom through the Dublin day that left its traces on so many aspects of modern and

postmodern culture. In the process, we will engage several of the major theoretical paradigms that shape

contemporary literary studies. Preferred preparation: a course in Modernism/ modernity, the novel as genre,

literary theory, Irish literature or Irish history. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Permission of

instructor required. Offered two of every three years.

Instructor: McMullen

ENGL 469 ATWOOD AND ONDAATJE

Credit: 0.5

In this course we will examine the works of two of the most internationally recognized Canadian writers: Margaret

Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. Both have won the prestigious Booker Prize. Both have had their works translated

into a variety of media (film, drama, opera). Their works have come to be emblematic of the Canadian

postmodern, and both authors have worked at defining Canadian identity -- its mosaic assemblage of subject

positions, from colonial to postcolonial. We will read a wide selection of their writings, which engage issues of

postmodernism, postcolonialism, the Canadian long poem, the documentary collage and the relationship between

history and fiction and between literature and film. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Permission of

instructor required. Offered occasionally.

Instructor: Laycock

ENGL 471 HAWTHORNE: NATION AND TRANSNATI ON IN HAWTHORNE'S FICTION

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Credit: 0.5

Herman Melville, who dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne, described the latter as the "American Shakespeare."

Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries (with the exception of Melville himself), Hawthorne wanted to be

(and be recognized as) the great American writer. But while by the end of his life he had established himself as a

respected and largely admired author, the fame and financial success he craved seemed to elude him. This course

explores the bulk of Hawthorne's work, more specifically his novels and his short stories (his "sketches" and

"tales"), in search of an answer to two important questions: (1) How and why is "the nation" (the developing

"American" nation of the 19th century between the 1830s and 1860s) reflected (or not) in Hawthorne's writing?,

(2) How and why is Hawthorne's writing transnational (that is, how does it move beyond the American nation itself

to find sources and issues of discussion)? In attempting to answer these questions, we will try to gauge whether

Melville was correct in comparing Hawthorne to Shakespeare. We will read the latest biography on Hawthorne, his

five completed novels, his most famous short stories and other writings and a number of critical essays by his

contemporaries and by modern scholars who have tried to make sense of this most perplexing and fascinating of

the 19th-century U.S. authors. This course meets the 1700-1900 requirement. Permission of instructor required.

Instructor: García

ENGL 472 THE CONFIDE NCE GAME IN AMERICA

Credit: 0.5

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 focus on 18th- and 19th-century writers who both shaped and disturbed

American confidence: Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, P. T. Barnum, Herman Melville, Henry D. Thoreau,

Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. The term "confidence man" was invented 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? And what is our

"art of reading" such that we might know when belief is warranted and when it isn't? This course meets the 1700-

1900 requirement. Permission of instructor required.

Instructor: Hyde

ENGL 473 FAULKNER

Credit: 0.5

In this seminar we will conduct intensive and critically sophisticated readings of all of Faulkner's major works. We

will pay special attention to issues of race and gender as we confront Faulkner's representations of Southern

culture. We will read widely in critical and cultural theory and engage in theoretical discussions of narratology as

we explore Faulkner's innovative and complicated narrative strategies. Prior reading of at least one major novel is

highly recommended. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Permission of instructor required. Offered

occasionally.

Instructor: Staff

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

ENGL 483 CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS AMERICA N POETRY

Credit: 0.5

How do indigenous writers bear witness to history? How are they influenced by concerns of community, audience

and tradition? These are some of the questions we will consider in this exploration of poetry by contemporary

Native American writers. We will read works by major poets such as Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), Linda Hogan

(Chickasaw), Joy Harjo (Muskogee), Carter Revard (Osage) and Diane Glancy (Cherokee), as well as from the

emerging generation. We'll view taped interviews and two films, Sherman Alexie's The Business of Fancy Dancing,

based on his poetry collection of the same name, and Cedar Sherbert's Gesture Down, based on the poetry of

James Welch. Other secondary materials will include memoirs and essays written by the poets, as well as readings

in contemporary poetics and indigenous theory. This course fulfills the post-1900 requirement. Permission of

instructor required.

Instructor: McAdams

ENGL 487 THE MULATTO IN AME RICAN FICTION

Credit: 0.5

The mulatto balances precariously on the razor-thin edge of the color line between black and white. In the

antebellum era, the mulatto's proximity to whiteness made the mulatto an attractive object for abolitionist

sympathy. In the Jim Crow era, that proximity made the mulatto a threat to the security of white privilege. In our

present moment, this figure has all but disappeared, though it seems to be re-emerging in a new form with Tiger

Woods, Cablinasian and Vin Diesel, "multiracial movie star." This course will explore representations of the mulatto

in American fiction and culture. In addition to reading some great works of literature, by authors such as William

Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt and Mark Twain (to name only a few), we will use our discussions about

the trope of the mulatto to consider some of the more perplexing theoretical issues concerning race in America.

We'll begin with concerns generated specifically by the mulatto, such as passing (the "problem" of the racially

ambiguous body), racial allegiance, biological determinism (nature/nurture), hybrid degeneracy and the mulatto's

"tragic" marginality. From there, we'll move to the big questions, including, but not limited to: What is race? What

is its determining factor: physical features, ancestry, culture? Can it be chosen or rejected? The course will

concentrate on fiction of the Jim Crow era, a period of particularly intense struggle over the significance of race,

but may also draw on other disciplines, such as science and law, and other historical moments. This course fulfills

the post-1900 requirement. It can be used to fulfill requirements in African diaspora studies. Permission of

instructor required. Offered every two years.

Instructor: Schoenfeld

ENGL 493 INDIVIDUAL STUDY

Credit: 0.25-0.5

Individual study in English is a privilege reserved for senior majors who want to pursue a course of reading or

complete a writing project on a topic not regularly offered in the curriculum. Because individual study is one option

in a rich and varied English curriculum, it is intended to supplement, not take the place of, coursework, and it

cannot normally be used to fulfill requirements for the major. An IS will earn the student .5 units of credit,

although in special cases it may be designed to earn .25 units. To qualify to enroll in an individual study, a student

Kenyon College Course Catalog 2017-18

must identify a member of the English department willing to direct the project. In consultation with that faculty

member, the student must write a 1-2 page proposal for the IS that the department chair must approve before the

IS can go forward. The chair’s approval is required to ensure that no single faculty member becomes overburdened

by directing too many IS courses. In the proposal, the student should provide a preliminary bibliography (and/or

set of specific problems, goals and tasks) for the course, outline a specific schedule of reading and/or writing

assignments, and describe in some detail the methods of assessment (e.g., a short story to be submitted for

evaluation biweekly; a thirty-page research paper submitted at course’s end, with rough drafts due at given

intervals). Students should also briefly describe any prior coursework that particularly qualifies them for their

proposed individual studies. The department expects IS students to meet regularly with their instructors for at

least one hour per week, or the equivalent, at the discretion of the instructor. The amount of work submitted for a

grade in an IS should approximate at least that required, on average, in 400-level English courses. In the case of

group individual studies, a single proposal may be submitted, assuming that all group members will follow the

same protocols. Because students must enroll for Individual Studies by the seventh class day of each semester,

they should begin discussion of their proposed individual study well in advance, preferably the semester before, so

that there is time to devise the proposal and seek departmental approval before the registrar’s deadline.

ENGL 497 SENIOR HONORS

Credit: 0.5

This seminar, required for students in the Honors Program, will relate works of criticism and theory to various

literary texts, which may include several 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 project in English

literature or creative writing. The course is limited to students with a 3.33 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. Undertaken in the fall semester; students register

with the Senior Honors form as well as the individual study form. Permission of instructor and department chair

required.

ENGL 498 SENIOR HONORS

Credit: 0.5

See description for ENGL 497. Undertaken in the spring semester; students register with the Senior Honors form.