This College Writing course is designed to introduce students to the critical reading and writing they will do in college. Students will hone their analytical skills by thinking about the philosophical, ethical, and political questions that arise when we ask: "what is good art?" In addition to reading the work of such philosophers as Danto, Beardsley, Goodman, and Dayton, we will engage Bob Fosse's film Cabaret.

This course introduces students to some of the questions they should be asking as English majors: what is a text? Why are some texts considered literary? How do professors and scholars think about texts, and why should we care? Such questions are centered around short stories by O'Connor, Salinger, Gilman, Hawthorne, poetry from a range of writers, The Waste Land, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Lolita, and True West. These primary texts will be supplemented by numerous critical readings.

This seminar, crossed-listed as American Studies 362, familiarizes students with the "Beat Generation"--as it was constructed by the Beats themselves and by the culture in and against which they wrote and lived. Students are invited to rethink what they know about the Beats by taking a cultural studies approach that reads poetry and novels against essays, photographs, memoir, music, religious tracts, and other relevant material.

This course is an introduction to 20th-century American literature suitable for both majors and non-majors. Students will learn close reading skills by focusing on works by Hemingway, cummings, Eliot, Faulkner, Larsen, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sexton, Morrison, and DeLillo.

This is an advanced seminar that introduces students to the varied and complex works of literature written in the United States during the 1950s. Central course texts include work by Salinger, Okada, O'Connor, Nabokov, Ellison, Childress, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Mailer, and Roth. We also consider the films Blackboard Jungle and Imitation of Life.

This course covers some of the most interesting and consequential American novels of the twentieth century. Writers we study include Chopin, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Hurston, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Pynchon. The course is organized chronologically, but there are some recurring themes and motifs that will help us connect these novels: varied attitudes toward history reflect how a writer views his or her place in the modern world; a growing interest in people and ideas traditionally overlooked in literature reflects an expanding sense of who and what counts as significant; formal innovations reflect a writer’s sense that his or her world cannot be expressed with conventional formal structures.

A pervasive cultural movement that appeared after the Second World War, postmodernism has exerted widespread influence on our everyday lives. Interested observers can locate evidence of a postmodern sensibility in numerous aspects of postwar culture, from art and architecture to “highbrow” novels to examples of popular culture like cartoons and video games. In English 369, we focus on literary postmodernism. Because it is a complicated and conflicted term, one of our broad course goals is to develop our own definition(s) of postmodernism. In order to do this, we think about the primary characteristics of the postmodern as articulated in fiction and critical theory. Readings include work by Barnes, Doctorow, Didion, Pynchon, Nabokov, Silko, Borges, Barth, Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, White, Jameson, and Hutcheon.