31 - 40 of 124 results for: ENGLISH

Use of new digital methodologies to explore why certain texts create the feeling of suspense. Does the effect of tension or fear result from just subject matter, or is there a deeper linguistic pattern that creates this experience for readers? Reading includes some of the key works of suspense from the last three centuries: books by Walpole, Poe, Doyle, Collins and Christie along with critical essays that explore their effect on readers. We will also work together to create a new digital model of the lexical and syntactic features of these works to uncover the reoccurring hidden patterns of language that help explain why we are affected by literary suspense. No previous technical experience is necessary.

introduction to literature of the 19th century with emphasis on the portrayals of love that pervade it. How 19th century poets and novelists imagined love and how it was shaped for them by genre, geography and gender. Does love redeem? What are the barriers to love? Readings include fiction by Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Wilde, James and Hardy, and poetry by Keats, Browning, Rosetti, Tennyson, and others.

The marriage plot in British fiction. Novels include Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure and Mrs. Dalloway.

The ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Examines the idea of a theater from the religious street theater of Medieval York, though Shakespeare's Globe, and onto the mental theater of the Romantic reader and the alienation effects of Brecht's radical playhouse in the 20th cent

Why do so many contemporary writers create fictions that contend with the past by rewriting, revising, or otherwise `talking back¿ to their literary forebears? Is everything intertextual or are post-WW II experiments in intertextuality characteristic of historical, cultural, and geopolitical changes particular to the twentieth century? How does intertextuality inform narrative voice, constructions of authorship, character portrayal, political and aesthetic interpretation, and contemporary claims to¿or critiques of¿ fame and canonization? Students will be encouraged to make comparative connections with the contemporary media scene, while comparing EM Forster and Zadie Smith; Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham; George Orwell and Margaret Atwood; Charotte Bronte and Jean Rhys; Oscar Wilde and Tom Stoppard.

(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143.) African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals, trickster tales, and slave narratives to recent developments such as black feminist theory, postmodern fiction, and hip hop lyricism. We will engage some of the defining debates and phenomena within African American cultural history, including the status of realist aesthetics in black writing; the contested role of literature in black political struggle; the question of diaspora; the problem of intra-racial racism; and the emergence of black internationalism. Attuned to the invariably hybrid nature of this tradition, we will also devote attention to the discourse of the Enlightenment, modernist aesthetics, and the role of Marxism in black political and literary history.

(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 143A.)Readings from American Indian literatures, old and new. Stories, songs, and rituals from the 19th century, including the Navajo Night Chant. Tricksters and trickster stories; war, healing, and hunting songs; Aztec songs from the 16th century. Readings from modern poets and novelists including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, and the classic autobiography, Black Elk Speaks.

A survey of the American novel and short story since WWII focusing on themes of mass media and mass marketing, technology and information, poverty and prosperity, race and ethnicity. Included are works by Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros and others.