Graduate Student Teaching Opportunities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature (2009-2010)

LITERATURE COURSES
Course	Title	Description
ENGL 121	British Literature, 19th and Early 20th Century	Survey of Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. Poetry, novels, and plays.Fall and Spring.
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. Fall and Spring.
ENGL 123	Introduction to Fiction	Novels and shorter fiction by Defoe, Austen, Dickens, Faulkner, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and others. Fall and Spring.
ENGL 124	Contemporary Literature	The literature of the present generation. Fall and Spring.
ENGL 125	Introduction to Poetry	A course designed to develop basic skills in reading poems from all periods of English and American literature. Fall and Spring.
ENGL 126	Introduction to Drama	Drama of the Greek, Renaissance, and Modern periods. Fall and Spring.
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. Fall and Spring.
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. Fall and Spring.
ENGL 129	Literature and Cultural Diversity	Studies in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, Native American, Anglo-Indian, Caribbean, Gay-Lesbian, and other literatures written in English. Fall and Spring.
ENGL 141	World Literatures in English	This course will be a basic introduction to literatures in English from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other Anglophone literary traditions. Fall 2009 only.
ENGL 143	Film and Culture	This course 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. Fall and Spring.
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. Fall 2009 only.
RECITATION SECTIONS
Course	Title	Description
CMPL 120	Epic and Lyric Traditions	This course focuses on the development of epic and lyric genres, from ancient Greece through the seventeenth century. Students will learn about changing conceptions of poetic genre and literary decorum as well as about the various challenges to "epic" values issued by poets working across a wide range of lyric traditions (pastoral, georgic, love lyric, and the satire/epigram tradition). Fall 2009 Lecture taught by Dr. Clayton Koelb; Spring 2010 lecture taught by Dr. Jessica Wolfe.
CMPL 123	Literature and Politics from Classical Antiquity to 1750	Examines comparative literary texts in the context of developments in political thought and practice from classical Greece up through the eve of the French Revolution. Students will read representative literary texts from different cultures and historical periods side by side with appropriate works of political philosophy. Spring 2010 only. Lecture taught by Dr. Shayne Legassie.
CMPL 132	Performance and Cultural Identity in the African Diaspora: African, Afro-American, and Carribean Linkages	Explores theories on the existence of the African Diaspora, cultural identity/-ies, and the manner(s) in which "performance" contributes to the articulation of experiences within the Diaspora. Students will read and discuss literary texts for their ability to present "performance" in terms of social dramas, social performances, and cultural performances. Fall 2009 only. Lecture taught by Dr. Rebecka Fisher.
ENGL 120	British Literature to 1800	Required of English majors. Survey of Medieval, Renaissance, and Neoclassical periods. Drama, poetry, and prose. Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 lectures taught by Dr. Reid Barbour.
ENGL 121	British Literature, 19th and Early 20th Century	Required of English majors. Survey of Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. Poetry, novels, and plays. Fall 2009 only. Lecture taught by Dr. Beverly Taylor.
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. Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 lectures taught by Dr. Gregg Flaxman.
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. Fall 2009 lecture taught by Dr. David Baker; Spring 2010 lecture taught by Dr. Mary Floyd-Wilson.
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. Fall 2009 only. Lecture taught by Dr. Laurie Langbauer.
ENGL 320	Reading Children's Literature	An introduction to Chaucer's major poetry: Troilus and Criseyde, the "dream" poems (e.g., Parliament of Fowls), and The Canterbury Tales. Fall 2009 only. Lecture taught by Ted Leinbaugh.
ENGL 338	Nineteenth-Century British Novel	Important novelists in the tradition, from Austen to Wilde. Fall 2009 only. Lecture taught by Dr. Laurie Langbauer.
ENGL 347	The American Novel	The development of the American novel, from the late eighteenth century through the twentieth century. May proceed chronologically or thematically. Fall 2009 only. Lecture taught by Dr. Eliza Richards.