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W U Home English 101: Masterpieces of Literature is an introductory course designed to help students appreciate the literary record of human relationships with nature, the supernatural, and each other. Each course examines a particular question or condition as it is represented in a restricted number of literary works, with core readings from the Bible, Greek or Roman classical literature, Shakespeare, literature by women, and literature by writers of color.
Prerequisites: English 1 or permission of the department chair.
Masterpieces of Literature fulfills Area B1 of the "Preparing for Global Citizenship" General Education Curriculum.
Note that "Coming of Age" and "Sexualities" count for Women's Studies credit.
This course will examine how writers from different historical eras and cultural contexts write about family, in every sense of that word.
Sample Reading List: Bible: Book of Ruth, Song of Songs, Abraham and Isaac, Parable of the Prodigal Son; Classical: Euripedes, Medea, The Trojan Women, Oedipus the King; Shakespeare: Taming of the Shrew, Othello, King Lear; Morrison, Beloved; Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain; Kincaid, Annie John; Smiley, A Thousand Acres; Tan, The Joy Luck Club; de Queiroz, Dora Doralina; Okri, The Famished Road; pa Chin, Family; Walker, The Color Purple; Lessing, "To Room Nineteen" Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper" Chopin, The Awakening; Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera; Mahfouz, Palace Walk; Austen, Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion Chaucer, marriage group of Canterbury Tales; Ibsen, A Doll's House, Wild Duck, Ghosts; Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Moliere, The Miser; Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf; de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves; Lawrence, "The Odour of Chrysanthemums" or Women in Love; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Fontane, Effi Briest; Wharton, The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables Balzac, Eugenie Grandet, Pete Goriot; Gosse, Father and Son; Haruf, The Tie That Binds; Tolstoy, Anna Karenina or "The Kreutzer Sonata"; Eliot, Middlemarch; Ford, The Good Soldier
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The courtroom is a place where one's telling and interpretation of stories can mean the difference between life and death, so the analysis of literature and the practice of the law are already intertwined. This course explores the connection further by focusing on literary works which deal with the principle of justice and the application of the law. Is the law always the agent of justice, or can those two sometimes be in conflict with one another? What problems or opportunities arise out of an individual's confrontation with the law? What is the relationship between the individual and society, and how does the law serve the needs of each? Is justice ever subjective or is it always an absolute?
Sample Reading List: Bible: Cain and Abel, Job, trial before Pilate; Classical: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Plato, Dialogues, Aeschylus, Oresteia, Sophocles, Antigone;; Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Detained or The Trial of Dedan Kimaathi; Nawal el Saadawi, Innocence of the Devil; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Kafka, The Trial; Glaspell, Trifles or A Jury of Her Peers; Sophie Treadwell, Machinal; William Godwin Caleb Williams.
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This course looks at texts that represent moments of contact, conflict, or exchange between different cultures, or between a society and those individuals the society has designated as "different" in some crucial way.
Sample Reading List: Bible: Exodus or Daniel; Classical: Aeschylus, Persians, excerpts from Herodotus or from Xenophon, Anabasis; Shakespeare: Othello or The Tempest; Flaubert, Salammbo, or Egyptian travel journals; Kipling, Kim; Forster, A Passage to India; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Salih, Season of Migration to the North; Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"; Carpentier, Harp and Shadow; Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Ngugi, Petals of Blood; Dinesen, Out of Africa; Desai, Clear Light of Day; Jhabvala, Heat and Dust; Montaigne, "On Cannibals"; Cesaire, A Tempest; Tournier, Friday; Bradford, excerpts from Of Plymouth Plantation; Handsome Lake, "How America Was Discovered"; Rowlandson, A True History of the Captivity and Rescue . . .; Benjamin Franklin, "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America"; Emerson, "Beauty," from nature; Apess, "An Indian's Looking Glass for the White Man"; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Cabeza da Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America; Chateaubriand, American travel journals.
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This course looks at texts that represent the forces and processes that are part of maturation, especially those related to gender identity. This course focuses on gender issues and includes feminist perspectives.
Sample Reading List: Bible: Genesis, second creation story; Classical: Sophocles, Philoctetes, Euripedes, Hippolytus; Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet; Austen, Emma; C. Bronte, Jane Eyre; E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Butler, The Way of All Flesh; Kogawa, Obasan; Swartz-Bart, The Bridge of Beyond; Morrison, Sula, Piercy, The Longings of Women Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban Laye, The Dark Child; Ibsen, The Wild Duck; Kingston, "No Name Woman" from The Woman Warrior; Viramontes, "The Moths"; Erdrich, Love Medicine; Hemingway, "Indian Camp"; O'Brien, "Sister Imelda"; Kincaid, "Girl"; Monroe, "Royal Beatings" & "How I Met My Husband"; Haruf, "Private Debts, Public Holdings"; McCullers, "Like That"; Salinger, Catcher in the Rye; Yamamoto, "Seventeen Syllables"; Mishima, Confessions of a Mask; White, A Boy's Own Story; Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Okri, The Famished Road; McCarthy, Blood Meridian; Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Mason, "Shiloh"; Kafka, "The Judgment."
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"Who am I?" This is the quintessential question that all human beings ask. In this course, we will examine how writers from different historical eras and cultural contexts write about themselves, or use various narrative strategies to construct a sense of self. We will also examine numerous theories that seek to explain what constitutes the "I" that locates the self as a palpable center of self-awareness, as well as how genre limitation affects an account of personal history.
Sample reading list: Biblical: Paul's epistles, Job, selected Psalms; Classical: Augustine's Confessions, Ovid's Exile Poetry, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy; Shakespeare: Sonnets; Non-western: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon; Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother; Patrick Chamoiseau, School Days; Nawal el Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women's Prison, The Woman Doctor; Camara Laye, The Dark Child, Simone Schwartz-Bart, The Bridge of Beyond, Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memories; Ruth First, 117 Days; Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles.
Other possible texts: Nancy Mair, Plaintext, Carnal Acts; Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass; Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road; Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh's Army; Judith Ortiz Cofer, Silent Dancing; Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School; Paul Auster, Invention of Solitude; Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face; James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain; Griffith and Campbell, The Book of Jessica; Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness; Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; The Confessions of Rousseau.
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This course is designed to help students appreciate the literary record of romantic relationships. Specifically, the course will explore how writers from different historical periods and cultural milieus address the issue of human sexuality. We will pose such questions as: is sexuality innate or learned behavior?, have attitudes toward sexuality changed over time?, do men define sexuality on different terms than women?, do homosexuals and bisexuals define sexuality on different terms from heterosexuals? Note: same-sex relationships will be routinely read about and discussed in the class.
Sample Reading List: Bible: David and Jonathan, Song of Songs; Classical: Sappho, Plato, Symposium, Catullus, Ovid; Shakespeare: Sonnets or one of the comedies; Reinaldo Arenas; Kush (film); Mañuel Puig; Lesie Finsberg, Stone Butch Blues; Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin; Balzac, Sarrasine; Tennessee Williams; Nella Larsen, Passing; Jeanette Winterson
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This course looks at texts that represent moments of sudden change, upheaval, and transformation, both within societies and within individuals.
Sample Reading List: Bible: Exodus and Sermon on the Mount; Classical: Antigone; Shakespeare: Julius Caesar; Bhagavad Gita; Greene, The Power of the Glory; Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Chopin, The Awakening; Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat; Stendhal, The Red and the Black; Marlowe, Edward II; Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard; Hawthorne, "My Kinsman Major Molineux"; Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood; Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
