2002 FALL SEMESTER

EN:205:01 Creation of Black Identity in Literature
  B. Johnson
This course will examine the history of Black characters in canonical British and American literature, beginning in the Renaissance period and continuing through the 20th century. The focus of the course will be an exploration of the significance and the presence and purpose of a Black literary figure and its relation to the historical and cultural periods. The course will include an examination of a variety of works, including Shakespeare's Othello, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Behn's Oroonoko, Morrison's Sula, and Ellison's Invisible Man.

EN:205:02. Wilderness Literature
  S. Bowers
This course fulfills both the sophomore literature core requirement and counts toward the English major. We will read several different kinds of writing about such experiences as mountain climbing, river running, and solitary encounters with wilderness. Discussion format.

EN:205:04 Women in the Middle Ages
  K. Mura
This course will include readings of historical and literary figures. We will read lyrics, saints' lives, plays, autobiographical writings, and romances by such figures as Marie de France, Chaucer, and Christine de Pisan.

EN: 205:05 Middle East in Literature
  K. Holmberg, A. Minu-Sepehr
Historians contend that the Middle East may present the last challenge to Western thought. Who are Middle Easterners? What are their concerns? On what basis do they challenge the Western paradigm? In addressing these questions we will study a collection of great literary works from and about the Middle East. Students will be exposed to best-selling authors scantily known in the West; to the most renowned work of an Egyptian Nobel laureate; to postcolonial debates; to avant-garde film; and they will have the rare opportunity to meet an American author who has spent the last twenty years visiting and writing about a Middle Eastern village barely touched by the West.

EN:220:01 American Literature to 1865
  A. Winans
This course will examine topics central to early American writing and culture: exploration and genocide, religion and revolution, gender and nation-building, and slavery and abolition. We will read poetry, histories, speeches, short stories, essays, autobiographies, and other texts written between the late fifteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century as we consider what makes American literature "American."

EN 350:02 Austen and the Brontės
  D. Hubbell
"Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff…they are the stupidest things in creation." In the early 19th century, novels got a bad rap as being a frivolous, sensationalist waste of time, suitable for society girls who had nothing better to do, but certainly not for gentlemen of refined taste. Of course, as Jane Austen points out, this was all a pose: much like TV today, thousands secretly read what they publicly scorned. Austen and the Brontės helped change that, transforming the novel from a strictly female, low brow genre to the high brow, serious art form to which great male writers like Dickens, Hardy, James, and Joyce aspired.

We will read Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Emma by Jane Austen; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontė, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontė, and study the way the Brontés and Austen revised the various novel traditions they inherited-the gothic, the sentimental, the picaresque, and manners. We will see how, in the hands of Austen and the Brontės, the novel became a vehicle for penetrating social analysis, refined instruction on morals and manners, high literary style, and reinforcement of humanistic ideals; eventually outstripping all other genres as the most demanding and complete form for representing human nature and modern civilization. This class will offer an exciting opportunity to understand the way our cultural values have been shaped by literature, to understand the radical nature of Jane Austen's contention that "the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

EN:350:03 Life and Works of Isabel Allende
  K. Mura
We will read a selection of novels, short stories, and memoirs by this well-known and widely-read Chilean writer. Isabel Allende writes passionately about her native land, its people, and their dreams. She also writes about her experiences as an expatriate, living in South America and later in the United States.

EN: 350:01 Shakespeare: Cultural Performances
  R. Sachdev
Shakespeare has become big business again, in Hollywood, on the television, and in the music industry. This course will try to reap the benefit of this current popularity by drawing on various multi-media resources available. Hence along with reading the plays and the sonnets, we will be listening to, watching, and performing Shakespeare as well. The discussion will be centered on reading the language and the historical context of the plays but with a close understanding of our own responses to Shakespeare's world and his plays.

EN: 360:RW Read/Write Children's Lit
  D. Hubbell
A seven-week, two-credit course for those interested in reading children's literature in an effort to learn to write children's literature. Students will learn to read critically as writers. One paper option for the course will be to complete a manuscript for children.

EN: 360: SW Read/Write Novella
  D. Hubbell
A seven-week, two-credit course for those interested in reading novellas critically as writers who are interested in learning to write a novella themselves. Assigned readings will help students comprehend the particular problems of this longer form. One option toward a final grade will be to complete the draft of a novella.

EN:360:01 Poetics
  K. Holmberg
Poetics is a course designed to give students a greater insight into the ways in which the formal features of poetry generate and support meaning. A hands-on course, in which students will actually try out the meters, forms, and devices they are studying, this course will look at the ways poetic forms evolve and are adapted; we will work with the idea of precursors, studying for example a Shakespearean sonnet on the seasons next to one by Richard Wilbur; a traditional hymn next to a poem by Emily Dickinson.

EN:420:W1 Rewriting the American Renaissance
  A. Winans
This class focuses on one of the most fascinating creative periods of American literary culture, an era that has traditionally been known as the American Renaissance (1830-1860). Our readings will include many of the most well-known canonical works of the era in additional to newly-reclaimed works by former slaves, women, and working-class writers. As we explore a diverse range of texts, we will consider how these texts self-consciously redefine and question what it means to be "American." Possible authors include Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Stowe, Jacobs, Douglass, Hawthorne, Fuller, Wilson, and Fern.

2003 SPRING SEMESTER

EN:180 Intro to Creative Writing
  T. Bailey
Creative Writing for NON-MAJORS. An elective for NON-MAJORS who have not had the opportunity to take a course in creative writing while at Susquehanna. Students will produce finished work in the three interrelated genres of creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Taught by writers from the Writer's Institute.

EN:360:01 Poetics of Translation
  S. Bowers
Some of the most important and innovative poetry of our time was not written in English: for example, the work of Czeslow Milosz of Poland, Pablo Neruda of Chile, and Anna Akmahtova of Russia. Yet most of us can read this poetry only in translation. Fortunately, many of our best American poets have translated these texts. But what happens in the movement from one language to another? Once translated, has the original poem become a new one? With the help of faculty experts in Modern Languages and History, we will study both these translations and the idea and practice of translation. Discussion format.

EN: 390: W1 Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England
  R. Sachdev
There were no women actresses on stage when Shakespeare's plays were originally being performed; young boys dressed up as women to play female roles. What happens to the famous romance of Romeo and Juliet when we realize that Romeo was in bed with a boy? The "love" between men was not only confined to the stage, however; Shakespeare's famous sonnet sequence is mostly addressed to a young man. Other poets also wrote sonnets in praise of men. Did women too write poetry in praise of other women? Yes, even though we never hear of women writers from the early modern period. Women were writing, and writing poetry, drama, romances, and pamphlets about women's superiority! If women were writers, were they also lawyers and doctors? Is that why Shakespeare gives us the portrait of a woman as a brilliant lawyer? In this class, we will read male and female works to come to an understanding of what being "male" and "female" meant in early modern England.

EN:390:01 King Arthur and His Court
  K. Mura
This course will cover a survey of Arthurian literature from its earliest references to the present day. We will read about well-known figures, such as King Arthur, Guenivere, Lancelot, and Gawain. In addition, we will read about the adventures, quests, and romances of lesser- known knights in the Arthurian tradition. A variety of films will be included in our discussion of modern-day representations of Arthurian material.