Fall 2008 & Spring 2009 Teaching Opportunities for Graduate Students in ENGL and CMPL

Course	Title	Description
LITERATURE COURSES
ENGL 120	British Literature, Chaucer to Pope	Required of English majors. Survey of Medieval, Renaissance, and Neoclassical periods. Drama, poetry, and prose.
ENGL 121	British Literature, Wordsworth to Eliot	Required of English majors. Survey of Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods. Poetry, novels, and plays.
ENGL 122	Introduction to American Literature	This course introduces prospective English majors to the range of American writing from the period of European settlement of the New World through the twentieth century. It proceeds both chronologically and thematically and is usually taught from one of the standard, inclusive anthologies of American literature.
ENGL 123	Introduction to Fiction	Novels and shorter fiction by Defoe, Austen, Dickens, Faulkner, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and others.
ENGL 124	Contemporary Literature	The literature of the present generation.
ENGL 125	Introduction to Poetry	A course designed to develop basic skills in reading poems from all periods of English and American literature.
ENGL 126	Introduction to Drama	Drama of the Greek, Renaissance, and Modern periods.
ENGL 127	Writing About Literature	This course explores how to think and write about literature. It assumes that all of us can begin with our personal responses to literature and use critical thinking and writing skills to develop interpretations exploring the literary aspects of these works and the ways they relate to our lives and culture. The course also extends study of literary works to include items that reflect both historical and contemporary thinking and culture. In addition to familiar poems, plays, essays, and stories, items of study include works of art and images as well as music and film. Class activities include lecture, discussion, group work, and project-based workshops.
ENGL 128	Major American Authors	A study of approximately six major American authors drawn from Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Clemens, Dickinson, Chesnutt, James, Eliot, Stein, Hemingway, O'Neill, Faulkner, Hurston, or others.
ENGL 143	Film and Culture	"Film and Culture" examines the ways in which culture and history shape and are shaped by motion pictures. This course uses comparative methods that groups related films according to contrasts, such as historic or contemporary, mainstream or cutting-edge, English- or foreign-language. The goal of this course is for students to extend more technical, analytical knowledge about films offered in other courses to specific cultural contexts and issues. As such, the course emphasizes discussion and a broad range of screenings, as opposed to canonical film studies topics and movies. The course attempts to pair each week a movie that is likely to be familiar with one that is less accessible. The purpose of this strategy is for students to broaden their perspectives on film by appreciating connections between the past and the present, between established ideas and reinterpretations of those ideas, and between films and filmmakers separated by time, geography, ideology, language, and fashion. By playing the familiar against the unfamiliar, students are asked to use what they already know as a foundation to learn more. More importantly, such oppositions encourage students to rexamine what is "familiar" and why.
ENGL 144	Popular Genres	This course will introduce students to the study of popular genres in fiction. Students will read works drawn from categories as diverse as mystery, romance, westerns, science fiction, fantasy, children's literature, and horror fiction, to name only a few. Articles about the form and cultural function of such genres will be read alongside the primary texts.
ENGL 145	Literary Genres	An investigation of selected literary genres, including epic, drama, poetry (or any of its various forms: lyric, ode, etc.), novels (or any of its various forms: gothic, epistolary, magical realism, etc.), short stories, literary non fiction (such as autobiography, memoir, etc.) that approaches a group of texts as a genre, concentrating on changing definitions of form. This course will locate works within a formal context, often cutting across period or nationality, to focus on formal tradition and critical context.
ENGL 148	Horror	From its origins in Gothic and pre-Gothic literatures and arts, this course examines the complexities and pleasures of Horror. Topics include psychology, aesthetics, politics, allegory, ideology, and ethics
RECITATION SECTIONS
CMPL 121	Romancing the World	Explores the diverse and complex literary mode of romance, how that mode has served in various ways to examine and interrogate the experiences of travel and cross-cultural contact and exchange from classical antiquity to the present. Students will trace ways in which the history of romance as a literary mode is bound up with changing representations of the "exotic" or the "foreign" in both European and non-European literature. Each teaching fellow will lead two recitation sections once per week for 50 minutes each. Lecture taught by Dr. Marsha Collins. Fall 2008 only.
CMPL 131	Savage, Native, Stranger, Other	Introduces students to the discourses and methodologies of Comparative Literature by following the broad trajectory of the discipline as it struggles to reconcile its own, predominantly western, lineage with the recognition of other, lesser known and non-western textual traditions. Each teaching fellow will lead two recitation sections once per week for 50 minutes each. Lecture taught by Dr. Gregg Flaxman. Spring 2009 only.
ENGL 120	British Literature, Chaucer to Pope	Required of English majors. Survey of Medieval, Renaissance, and Neoclassical periods. Drama, poetry, and prose. Each teaching fellow will lead two recitation sections once per week for 50 minutes each. Lecture instructor TBA. Fall 2008 only.
ENGL 142	Film Analysis	The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the vocabulary and rhetoric of film analysis, from the most basic concepts of the cinema (shot, frame, montage) to more complicated ideas about space, time, action, genre, and narrative. In this sense, the aim of the class will be twofold: on the one hand, students will be asked to critically re-consider and re-evaluate the habitual ways we all watch and think about the movies; on the other hand, students will be asked to begin open themselves to cinematic techniques, ideas, and histories that they may not have encountered in the past. Each teaching fellow will lead one recitation section twice a week for 50 minutes. Fall 2008 Lecture taught by Dr. Gregg Flaxman; Spring 2009 lecture taught by Dr. Todd Taylor.
ENGL 225	Shakespeare	A study of representative histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. The aim of the course is to develop strategies for close readings of Shakespearean drama that pay attention to generic expectation, language, and the physical properties of the stage; at the same time, we will seek to read Shakespeare culturally, to recognize the ways these texts participate in their historical moment and in the debates over social ordering, gender, political authority, economic change, and religious and philosophical controversy. Each teaching fellow will lead two recitation sections once per week for 50 minutes each. Lecture instructor TBA. Spring 2009 semester only.
ENGL 284	Reading Children's Literature	An overview of the tradition of children's literature, considering the ways those books point to our basic assumptions about meaning, culture, self, society, gender, economics. Each teaching fellow will lead two recitation sections once per week for 50 minutes each. Lecture taught by Dr. Laurie Langbauer Fall 2008 only.
ENGL 344	American Literature, 1860-1900	Instructors choose authors or topics from the period 1860-1900. The course may be organized chronologically or thematically, but it is not intended as a survey. Each teaching fellow will lead two recitation sections once per week for 50 minutes each. Lecture taught by Dr. Eliza Richards. Spring 2009 semester only.
ENGL 338	Nineteenth-Century British Novel	Important novelists in the tradition, from Austen to Wilde. Each teaching fellow will lead two recitation sections once per week for 50 minutes each. Lecture taught by Dr. Laurie Langbauer Fall 2008 only.