ENGL 470-Gh
(4 cr.)
Sist: American Culture in the 50’s
Seguin, R.
MW
Key to abbreviations:
“A” = Approaches course
“cr” = credits
“HMS” = Honors Mini-Seminar
Clark 252
2:30 - 4:30 p.m.
Few decades have as strong a stereotypical image in
our minds as the nineteen-fifties: placidly prosperous and
suffocatingly conformist. But even a quick survey of the rich
and varied cultural output of these years reveals a great deal
of uncertainty and agitation beneath the surface. The key
writers of the decade offer us a striking landscape of
spiritual yearning, political critique, sexual exploration, and
aesthetic daring. The seeds of the nineteen-sixties were
being sown...
“Til” = “topics in literature”
“SiST” = seminar in selected topics
Writers we will explore will include:
“WL3” = course will facilitate advancement to WL4
Jack Kerouac
“WS” = “Women Studies” cross listing
Vladimir Nabokov
Flannery O'Connor
Ralph Ellison
Allen Ginsberg
Jane Bowles
Truman Capote
Robert Lowell
ENGL 380-78
(4 cr.)
MAA: Faulkner (A)
Travisano, T.
MW
Clark 329
2:55 - 4:55 p.m.
This Approaches Course will explore the work of the
Nobel Prize winning 20th Century American novelist and
short story writer William Faulkner, an author who
“discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil”
in small town Mississippi “was worth writing about and
that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.” Starting
with the local and familiar, Faulkner went deeply into
questions of history, gender, sexuality, social class, race,
ethnicity, popular culture and mythology in stories that are
full of dark humor, inventive in form and style, and still
remarkably relevant today. Faulkner’s work opens itself to
an extraordinarily wide variety of critical approaches and
through his work we will see first-hand how these critical
approaches can be applied effectively to literature of lasting
value.
January Term
2015
ENGL. 247-12
(3 cr.)
ENGL 365-Ef
(3 cr.)
Four Modern American Poets
Modern British Literature
Travisano, T.
Navarette, S.
MTThF
Clark 251
10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Our primary goal in this class will be to read,
experience and develop an understanding of four of the
greatest and most original American poets of the
twentieth century: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens,
Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, exploring one of
these four poets in each of January term’s four weeks.
Other goals will be to develop critical reading and writing skills and to develop an understanding of the art of
poetry and how poets create a working style. Finally,
we’ll work on presentation skills. Class meets every
day but Wednesday.
TTh
Clark 251
12:20 - 1:40 p.m.
This course’s material lies at the center of a web of
radical intellectual influences—stemming from science, philosophy, the visual arts, and politics—that gave distinctive
shape and character to the literature produced in the British
Isles between the years 1880 and 1930. Primary literary
works will include novels and stories by Thomas Hardy,
Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Virginia
Woolf, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and
Flann O’Brien; plays by Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw,
and J. M. Synge; poems by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and W.
B. Yeats. Our conversations about such topics as primitivism, imperialism and nationalism, gender, and aesthetics
will be informed by our consideration of the works of such
worthies as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van
Gogh, Claude Debussy, Werner Heisenberg, Sigmund Freud
and Friedrich Nietzsche. The aim of this course is to outfit
participants with an understanding of Modernism in literature and art, with its characteristic emphasis on what one
scholar describes as the “ambiguous and complex sense of
interiority” experienced by the individual seeking to make
sense of a radically destabilized contemporary world in
which “meaning” and “meaninglessness” became increasingly indistinguishable. Participants should enjoy reading
and conversing; they will take weekly quizzes; write two essays and take two exams.
ENGL 350-Cd
Prose and American Renaissance
Cody, D.
TTh
ENGL. 250-12X
(3 cr.)
Ti/Poetry and Performance
Clark 251
(Also listed as THEA 250-12)
Bensen, R.
10:10 - 11:30 a.m.
Clark 252
“What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles
assumed when he hid himself among women, though
puzzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture. . . .”
(4 cr.)
Yager 416
MTThF
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
MTThF 12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
“A poem comes into its full physical being only briefly
Alchemy, the philosopher’s stone, and the elixir
vitae, angels and devils, intelligent robots, murder,
sexuality, curses and premonitions, witchcraft, madness,
ghosts, poisonous damsels, homunculi, mummies and
pyramids, magic and science, belief and skepticism all
figure prominently in this course, an exploration of the
relationship between seventeenth-century English literary
works (and translations of earlier Continental literature)
and fiction written by American authors during the
nineteenth-century “American Literary Renaissance.”
Major American authors of the period (including Poe,
Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Dickinson)
were not merely familiar with, but also heavily influenced
by, their quaint and curious seventeenth-century English
precursors, and the exploration of these transatlantic
literary relationships sheds light both on the earlier and on
the later works. Relevant authors include the
above-mentioned Americans and Sir Francis Bacon, Pierre
Bayle, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Joseph Glanvill,
John Milton, François Rabelais, William Shakespeare,
Jeremy Taylor, and John Webster. There will be a midterm
and a final examination, and each student will write two
7-10 page papers involving relevant scholarly research.
during the act of reading it aloud. At other times it has only
a half-life consisting of fragmentary memories of having
read it aloud, or else it exists in the abstract state of a written or printed text, which is no more than a graphic reminder of the words that, only when uttered, bring the poem into
material being.”
—M.H. Abrams, “On Reading Poems Aloud,” Cornell
U., 16 April 2009.
The title of the course, “Poetry & Performance,” links two
arts. We will practice them separately at the beginning, devoting half of each day to a writing workshop and half to an acting
workshop. Such will be the first half of the term. The send
half, we will bring the two together—writing and performance—to create a one-hour public presentation for the end of
January Term, and possibly to repeat at the beginning of
Spring Term and the Scholar’s Showcase in May. Our morning poetry workshop (in Clark 329) will be devoted to reading a variety of poetry from Garrison
Keillor’s anthology
and dramatic literature as well, and to writing poems based
on ideas we generate from our reading and discussions. We
will present and critique our work in class, learning to revise
and enrich our work in both sound and sense. We will consider styles of oral presentation, including oral interpretation and slam poetry, using the Smith and Kraynak book.
ENGL 331-Gh
(4 cr.)
Chaucer (A)
Darien, L.
TTh
Spring Term
2015
Clark 329
2:30 - 4:30 p.m.
Chaucer is one of the great writers not only of the
British tradition, but in all of world literature. Like
Shakespeare, Chaucer is distinguished for the variety,
quality, and quantity of his works and for his pervasive
influence on Western culture. But Chaucer is, of course,
much less widely studied, perhaps because of the perceived
distance between his language and culture and ours, a
distance that seems to grow greater every year.
The truth is that Chaucer is different. Chaucer’s
language, Middle English, is hard, at least at first. The
culture about which he wrote is also very different from
ours and must be understood in order to truly appreciate
his poetry. So studying Chaucer is not easy.
Then why do it? Because Chaucer’s poetry truly is
great: it’s profound, it’s funny, it’s profane, it’s beautiful,
it’s not to be missed. After a few weeks, you’ll wonder why
you ever worried about the language in the first place. And
you’ll be glad you took up the challenge to study something
different and difficult – after all, isn’t that why you’re here
at Hartwick in the first place?
Please note that this course is being offered as an
Approaches course. This means that beside study the works
of Chaucer (in Middle English), we will also be studying
critical theory, and the critical reception of the works of
Chaucer. If you have any questions about whether or not
this course would be appropriate for you, please contact
me.
ENGL. 323-Ef
(3 cr.)
Contemporary Drama
Shaw, M.
TTh
Clark 248
12:20 - 1:40 p.m.
In contemporary American Drama we will read and
analyze some of the most acclaimed plays of the past fifty
years or so. We will look at the social and theatrical details
that make each play significant. We will read such
playwrights as Hansberry, Albee, Shepherd, Vogel, Mamet,
Fornes, LaBute, Shawn, Gotanda, Valdez, Mitchell/Trask,
Smith, among others. We will also explore some of the
important theatrical institutions.
ENGL. 150-5W (1 cr.)
HMS: Reading Contemporary Poetry
Travisano, T.
Clark 252
W 12:20 – 2:20 p.m.
This one-credit Honors Mini-seminar will focus
on one of the great literary events of the recent past;
the extraordinary development of a wide array of
literary voices and styles that emerged in the period
defined by Contemporary American Poetry, that is,
roughly the period between 1950 and the present. We
will explore the work of several of the key figures in
Contemporary American Poetry, including Elizabeth
Bishop, Robert Lowell, Alan Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath,
Adrienne Rich, and Carol Frost. We will be taking a
step-by-step approach to exploring this ongoing
literary dialog and in the process we will come to
understand much about how poets and other artists
respond to the complex and invigorating cultural and
historical currents that surround them. We’ll also take
a step-by-step approach to developing our skills in
reading and interpreting poetry. I hope to show that
there’s nothing occult or mysterious about reading
poetry: it simply calls for exceptional alertness and
attention to the words out of which it is made.
ENGL. 190-03 (3 cr.)
Intro to Literature & Criticism
Travisano, T.
Clark 248
MWF 10:10 - 11:05 a.m.
This course will develop reading and analytical
skills while exploring a sequence of poems, stories and
plays that emphasize the possibilities of continual
renewal that writers and other artists can achieve by
returning to pre-existing literary themes and motifs
and “making them new.” This process of renewal can
occur by placing established stories, images,
characters, and ideas in fresh contexts or new cultural
situations and by subjecting these motifs to freshly
developed or experimental literary methods. It is
fitting that Ezra Pound—a key inspiration for this
course—discovered the phrase “Make it New” in his
researches into ancient Chinese literature and history.
Although we won’t make an obsession of it, we’ll focus
on the intersections between three related but
contrasting themes: “Metamorphoses,” “Encounters
with the Uncanny” and “Romantic Comedy.” Most of
the assigned readings fit into one or more of these
categories. We’ll also be comparing our assigned
readings with various treatments of what we read as
they appear other media, particularly visual art and
film.
ENGL 312-Cd
(4 cr.)
Creative Writing-Poetry
Suarez Hayes, J.
T
Clark 252
10:10 a.m. –12:10 p.m.
“Poetry is a vocal, which is to say, a bodily art. The
medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside
the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the
mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art
as dancing.”
Robert Pinsky, from The Sounds of Poetry (1998)
For the fourteen weeks we have together, I will expect
you to be completely immersed in poetry: yours, your
colleagues’, as well as that of master poets both contemporary
and removed in time, and to open yourselves to language and
poetry and all the mysteries and struggles involved in its
making. I will expect you to learn to be careful readers,
thoughtful critics, close observers, fully engaged participants,
celebrants, dancers on the page.
We will read widely, learn how poems are made, learn
about our own poem-making process, listen to poets read,
read aloud ourselves, and hold workshops regularly to discuss
our poems. You will write several annotations on our
readings during the term, keep a writer’s notebook, and at
term’s end, turn in a portfolio of finished poems. Our final
exam will be a public reading of our work .
I expect from you a strong degree of writing
competency: you must know how to use the English language
well in order to make the jump from the everyday to warp
speed—to poetry.
I also expect tenacity and diligence, as well as
imagination. Wings are wonderful, but one also needs feet.
ENGL 300-II
ENGL. 221-04
(2 cr.)
(3 cr.)
Teaching Assist in Composition
Classical Mythology
Suarez Hayes, J.
Darien, L.
T
Clark 230
6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Training and practice in the teaching of writing.
Students will serve as tutors at the Writing Center, working
with Level I students and walk-in appointments under the
supervision of the Coordinator. Tutors will assist the
Coordinator with development of teaching strategies and
materials and will discuss samples of their own writing.
Open to students of strong writing ability regardless of
major who have been recommended by faculty.
Consent of Coordinator required early in term preceding
enrollment. May be taken twice for credit. Tutors who
complete two semesters are eligible to continue as paid
tutors. Offered every term.
*By permission of Instructor only.*
MWF
Clark 251
11:15 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.
Students in this class will learn about classical
mythology through the study of the original “classics”:
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Vergil’s Aeneid; and
Ovid’s Metamorphoses (all in translation, of course).
Knowledge of these masterpieces is absolutely essential
for understanding Western literature, history, culture.
In addition, each student will explore a topic of
their own choosing and present their research to the
class, as well as completing a short paper on their
subject matter. In the past, students have chosen to
explore a wide range of issues, from an examination of
how the ancients might have treated battlefield
wounds through Shakespeare’s use of Ovid to the
employment of classical characters and storylines in
modern videogames.
ENGL. 250-04 (3 cr.)
Ti/Form & Technique of Fiction
Delanoy, B. Clark 252
MWF 11:15 a.m. – 12:10 p.m.
Form and Technique of Fiction is a hybrid
literature class made specifically for writers and
students interested in the writing process. Through
careful study of stories and novels, prescriptive writing
exercises, and engagement with criticism, students will
have a greater appreciation for and understanding of
the creative process. We will be reading many
contemporary authors, including Chris Bachelder,
Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart, Lorrie Moore, and
Andrea Barrett. We will also read essays on writing by
Peter Turchi, Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson, Joan
Silber, and others.
ENGL 268-Ab
(3 cr.)
Iblc/Unruly Women
Navarette, S.
TTh
Clark 251
8:40 –10:00 a.m.
“Unruly Women” takes as its subject the outrageous acts
and everyday rebellions (to recruit Gloria Steinem’s phrase) of
women who, throughout the twentieth century, interrogated and
resisted the gender constructions and ideologies that were
formalized by the mid-eighteenth century with the establishment
of a powerful middle class, the monied members of which were
eager to include among their holdings women who, in their roles
as wives, daughters, and mothers, could be showcased as
household tutelaries—installed as angels in the house.
Josephine Baker’s notorious “banana dance”; Hillary Clinton’s
vexed and ridiculed attempt to update the role of “First Lady”;
the photographs of performance artist Cindy Sherman; Eve
Ensler’s and Judy Chicago’s respective attempts to de- and
remythologize the “V-word”: outrageous acts such as these will
serve as instances in which three controlling entities or
conditions (“women,” “power,” “disobedience”) in the
construction of gendered ideologies and behavior converged, and
the convergence itself reflected, altered or modified popular
conceptions and stereotypes. These “real-life” acts of
disobedience will be considered alongside similar acts staged by
fictional characters who are depicted by their creators as being
unable to contain themselves within their designated spheres
and obey the normative dictates at work within the larger
context of their eighteenth-, nineteeth-, and twentieth-century
Western cultures and societies. Representations of rebellious
women in literature, film, and the press will provide course
participants with an opportunity to focus on the ways in which
feminine “waywardness” manifested itself within narrative
constructs shaped by various overlapping contexts—political,
social, cultural, economic. Literary texts will include Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Erica Jong’s Fear of
Flying (1973), and films will include The Women (Cukor, 1939)
Thelma and Louise (Khouri, 1991), Passion Fish (Sayles, 1992),
and Laurel Canyon (Cholodenko, 2002).
ENGL. 264-78 (3 cr.)
ENGL. 250-05 (3 cr.)
Supernatural Horror in Lit
Family & Social Change in American Fiction
Cody, D.
Clark 251
MW 2:55 - 4:15 p.m.
It might be convenient to think of this course as a Gothic
castle filled with chambers, crypts, and dungeons, each of them
containing a frightful ghoul or spectre waiting to pounce upon
the innocent and unsuspecting visitor. On the other hand, it
might also profitably be regarded as a guided tour of the haunted
mind of Western culture; as a chance to learn about ourselves by
studying the things that make us very, very afraid. In any case
we will familiarize ourselves with the literary traditions of
supernatural horror in all their varied forms, including the
traditional Gothic (with its Byronic villains, clanking chains,
slimy dungeons, and bleeding nuns) the Psychological (in which
we learn that, as Emily Dickinson puts it, “One need not be a
Chamber—to be Haunted—”), the Antiquarian (with its blending
of hallucinatory psychosis and supernatural malevolence in a
dark, apocalyptic world) and the Cosmic (with its fusion of
ecstasy and horror, its sensual and poetic glimpses of other
worlds and other modes of perception). Sub-categories or culde-sacs to be explored at one’s own risk include Horror and the
Invisible, the Visual Imagination, Freudianism, Disease, the
Conte Cruel, and Decadence. Readings include classic tales by
Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, John Buchan, Robert W.
Chambers, Emily Dickinson, Hans Heinz Ewers, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Hope Hodgson,
M. R. James, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, J. S. Le Fanu,
Matthew G. Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan
Poe, M. P. Shiel, Bram Stoker, Horace Walpole, and
H. G.
Wells. There will be two examinations, and two 7-10 researched
essays.
Seguin, R.
Clark 251
WF 12:20 - 1:40p.m.
This course will focus on the ways that novelists in
the 20th-century US have turned to the family as a way of
exploring the decisive trends and currents of the
moment. The family, that is, is the very channel whereby
diverse and often subterranean social forces are transmitted
into the daily lives of individuals. The tumultuous changes
that modern America underwent—the great waves of
immigration that reshaped its cities and the very character
of its people, the cycles of economic boom and bust that
brought euphoria and despair and fostered new modes of
living, the Sixties and their hopes and betrayed
promises -- become an informing presence in the lives of the
fictional families we will examine.
Texts we will read may include the following:
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers
Willa Cather, The Professor's House
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Junot Diaz, Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections