Prerequisites: Required for all first-year students. Enrollment restricted to Barnard. May not be taken for P/D/F. Consult department bulletin board for section times.

[For more information, see course website ]. Close examination of texts and regular writing assignments in composition, designed to help students read critically and write effectively. Sections of the course are grouped in three clusters: I. Legacy of the Mediterranean; II. The Americas; III. Women and Culture. The first cluster features a curriculum of classic texts representing key intellectual moments that have shaped Western culture. Offering revisionist responses to the constraints of canonicity, the last two clusters feature curricula that explore the literary history of the Americas and the role of women in culture.

Prerequisites: Consult department bulletin board for section times.

Close examination of texts and regular writing assignments in composition, designed to help students read critically and write effectively. Sections of the course are grouped in three clusters: I. Legacy of the Mediterranean; II. The Americas; III. Women and Culture. The first cluster features a curriculum of classic texts representing key intellectual moments that have shaped Western culture. Offering revisionist responses to the constraints of canonicity, the last two clusters feature curricula that explore the literary history of the Americas and the role of women in culture. Meets three times a week.

Prerequisites: Application process and permission of instructor. Does not count for major credit.

Exploration of theory and practice in the teaching of writing, designed for students who plan to become Writing Fellows at Barnard. Students will read current theory and consider current research in the writing process and engage in practical applications in the classroom or in tutoring.

Prerequisites: Can count towards major.

English composition above the first-year level. Techniques of argument and effective expression. Weekly papers. Individual conferences. Some sections have a special focus, as described.

Short stories and other imaginative and personal writing.

Practice in writing short stories and autobiographical narrative with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting.

Varied assignments designed to confront the difficulties and explore the resources of language through imitation, allusion, free association, revision, and other techniques.

A workshop to provoke and investigate dramatic writing.

Prerequisites: Some experience in the writing of fiction. Conference hours to be arranged.

Advanced workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story.

Prerequisites: Previous experience or introductory class strongly recommended.

Assignments designed to examine form and structure in fiction. Fall instructor: M. Swann; Spring instructor: M. Keane

Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Fall semester in 2009-2010.

Weekly workshops designed to critique new poetry. Each participant works toward the development of a cohesive collection of poems. Short essays on traditional and contemporary poetry will also be required.

Explores how to apply a literary sensibility to such traditional forms of journalism as the personal essay, general essay, profile, and feature article.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 14 students.

Effective oral presentation in speeches, discussions, and interviews. We will explore the reciprocal relationship between active listening and extemporaneous speaking, well-organized writing and spontaneous remarks, rhetorical strategy and audience analysis, historical models and contemporary practice.

Speaking involves a series of rhetorical choices regarding vocal presentation, argument construction, and physical affect that, whether made consciously or by default, project information about the identity of the speaker. In this course students will relate theory to practice: to learn principles of public speaking and speech criticism for the purpose of applying these principles as peer tutors in the Speaking Fellow Program.

Poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction, with special attention to the slave narrative. Includes Wheatley, Douglass, and Jacobs, but emphasis will be on less familiar writers such as Brown, Harper, Walker, Wilson, and Forten. Works by some 18th-century precursors will also be considered.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 25. Sign up on the fourth floor of Barnard Hall.

Despite popular conceptions insisting that the ideal Renaissance woman was silent, as well as chaste and obedient, many women in the early modern period (c. 1550-1800) defied such sentiments by writing, circulating and publishing their own literature. Under the influence of humanism, a generation of educated women arose who would become both the audience for and contributors to the great flowering of literature written in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. As we examine how these women addressed questions of love, marriage, age, race and class, we will also consider the roles women and ideas about gender played in the production of English literature. We will read from a range of literary (plays, poetry, and non-literary (cookbooks, broadside, midwifery books) texts.

A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Autumn: Beowulf through Johnson. Guest lectures by members of the department.

Exploration in Black Theatre, specifically African-American performance traditions, as an intervening agent in racial, cultural and national identity. African-American theater artists to be examined include Amiri Baraka, Kia Corthron, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angelina Grimke, Langston Huges, Georgia Douglas Jognson, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrian Piper and August Wilson. (Also listed as AFRS 3144.)

Chaucer as inheritor of late-antique and medieval conventions and founder of early modern literature and the fiction of character. Selections from related medieval texts.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

New ideas of the mind�s relation to the world. New perspectives, the emergence of new forms, experimentation with old forms, and the search for an appropriate style.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

The development of modern concepts of subjectivity and authority. The rise of art and the artist. Myth versus science. Knowledge versus experience. Humanism, Rationalism, Empiricism. The tension between belief and doubt. The exploration of limits and the limitless. Definition of the beautiful and the sublime.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

Humanism, reformation, and revolution: the possibilities of human knowledge; sources and strategies for secular and spiritual authority; the competing demands of idealism and experience.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

The tension, conflicts, and upheavals of an era in the arts, religion, politics, aesthetics, and society.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students.

A critical and historical introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances.

Lyric poetry about love, sex, death, and God in Donne and others (e.g., Herbert, Lanyer, Wroth, Herrick, Marvell, Phillips). Prose about science, politics, religion, and philosophy (e.g., Bacon and Cavendish, Hobbes and early communists "The Levellers") in what has been called the "century of revolution."

Description for Fall, 2009:Seventeenth-century poetry and prose: Sex, love, and God in lyric poetry, John Donne to Rochester (1600-1678); politics and religion in prose of the English Revolution (1642-1660), including political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the female prophet Anna Trapnel, and the first communist, Winstanley.--Guibbory

Renaissance English Drama: An examination of three major Renaissance dramatists who wrote in a wide range of genres and styles. The course will take account of larger developments in English drama in late Elizabethan and earlier Stuart times, and there will be nods in the direction of Shakespeare, but the focus will be on Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster.

The novel in its cultural context, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis. Reading selected novels from Austen to W.G. Sebald.

This course will examine the �rise� of the eighteenth-century British novel from its unruly and disreputable origins to its arrival as a respectable and accepted genre. Along the way we�ll consider how the novel was affected by and effected changes in gender, sexuality, authorship, and political and social institutions. Readings to include Behn, Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, Cleland, Sterne, Wollstonecraft, and Austen.

Poetry, art, and aesthetics in an industrial society, with emphasis on the role of women as artists and objects. Poems by Tennyson, Arnold, Christina and D.G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Elizabeth and Robert Browning; criticism by Ruskin, Arnold, and Wilde; paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler; photographs by J.M. Cameron.

Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Fall of the 2009-10 academic year.

Early American histories, autobiographies, poems, plays, and novels tell stories of pilgrimage and colonization; private piety and public life; the growth of national identity; Puritanism, Quakerism, and Deism; courtship and marriage; slavery and abolition. Writers include Bradford, Shepard, Bradstreet, Taylor, Rowlandson, Edwards, Wheatley, Franklin, Woolman, and Brown.

Course traces the literary, theoretical, and historical development of drama from the 1850s onward, treating the plays of (among others) Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Soyinka, Churchill, and critical/theoretical texts by Nietzsche, Freud, Brecht, Artaud, Butler, and others.

Examines formal changes in the novel from nineteenth-century realism to stream of consciousness, montage, and other modernist innovations. Contexts include World War I, technology, urbanization, nostalgia, sexuality and the family, mass culture, psychoanalysis, empire and colonialism. Representative works from authors such as James, Forster, West, Ford, Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce.

Prerequisites: To be taken only for P/F. Departmental sign-up required. Only registering for the course through eBear or SSOL will not ensure your enrollment.

Various topics presented by visiting scholars in courses that will meet for two to four weeks during each semester. Topics, instructors, and times will be announced by the department. Students must attend all classes to receive credit for this course. For more information, please consult the English Department's web page .

Prerequisites: Registration in each section is limited. Departmental registration required.

Provides experience in the reading and analysis of literary texts and some knowledge of conspicuous works of literary criticism. Frequent short papers. Required of all majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring term even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take BC3193 in the autumn term.

Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Fall of the 2009-2010 academic year.

What is literature? Does it tell the truth? What is its relation to the other arts? How do we judget it? How can we talk about it? Such questions form the matter of a conversation among philosophers, writers, and, latterly, �critics� that has gone on for two-and-a-half thousand years. Their responses both influence and reflect the literature contemporary with them. Readings from critics and theoreticians from the Classical world to the beginnings of poststructuralism, with attention to contemporaneous literature.

Modernist responses to cultural fragmentation and gender anxiety in the wake of psychoanalysis and world war. Works by Woolf, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stein, Hemingway, Toomer, H.D., Pound, Lawrence, Barnes, and other Anglo-American writers.

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing. Enrollment limited to 15 students. Attend first class for instructor permission.

Explores the transformation of social organization and consciousness by and as media technologies during the long 20th century. Students will read influential works of media analysis written during the past century, analyze film and digital media, and explore political and media theory generated since the rise of the internet.

Interpretive strategies for reading the Bible as a work with literary dimensions. Considerations of poetic and rhetorical structures, narrative techniques, and feminist exegesis will be included. Topics for investigation include the influence of the Bible on literature, combined with the more formal disciplines of biblical studies.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and chair required. In rare cases, with the permission of the chair, a special project in conjunction with a course may be taken by other English majors.

Senior majors who are concentrating in Theatre or Writing and have completed two courses in writing or three in theatre will normally take the Special Project in Theatre or Writing (BC3996 x or y) in combination with an additional course in their special field. This counts in place of one of the Senior Seminars. In certain cases, Independent Study (BC3999 - see below) may be substituted for the Special Project.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

How do poets� letters inform our understanding of their poetry? From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, poets have used their intimate correspondence to �baffle absence,� as Coleridge remarked. This course will examine the ways several masters of the letter (including Cowper, Keats, Dickinson, Eliot, Bishop, and Lowell, among others) shaped their prose to convey spontaneity in paradoxically artful ways, illuminating their major work as poets and making the private letter a literary form in its own right.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

Artistic and literary responses to technological change that transformed the idea of what it means to be human, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Shelley's Frankenstein, from La Mettrie's Man-Machine to Ridley Scott's Alien.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

A philosophical exploration of notions of 'political love' from Aristotle's happiness to Martin Luther King's agape. In what way is love the foundation of human community, and what is a revolutionary conception of love today?

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and Department Chair.

Senior majors who wish to substitute Independent Study for one of the two required senior seminars should consult the chair. Permission is given rarely and only to students who present a clear and well-defined topic of study, who have a department sponsor, and who submit their proposals well in advance of the semester in which they will register. There is no independent study for screenwriting or film production.

(Lecture) Key texts of 15th- and 16th-century humanism in their rhetorical and philosophical contexts, including works by Petrarch, Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Sidney, and Montaigne.

Prerequisites: Required for all first-year students. Enrollment restricted to Barnard. May not be taken for P/D/F. Consult department bulletin board for section times.

[For more information, see course website ]. Close examination of texts and regular writing assignments in composition, designed to help students read critically and write effectively. Sections of the course are grouped in three clusters: I. Legacy of the Mediterranean; II. The Americas; III. Women and Culture. The first cluster features a curriculum of classic texts representing key intellectual moments that have shaped Western culture. Offering revisionist responses to the constraints of canonicity, the last two clusters feature curricula that explore the literary history of the Americas and the role of women in culture.

Prerequisites: Can count towards major.

English composition above the first-year level. Techniques of argument and effective expression. Weekly papers. Individual conferences. Some sections have a special focus, as described.

Short stories and other imaginative and personal writing.

Practice in writing short stories and autobiographical narrative with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting.

Practice in writing short stories and autobiographical narrative with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting.

Varied assignments designed to confront the difficulties and explore the resources of language through imitation, allusion, free association, revision, and other techniques.

Advanced workshop to facilitate the crafting of a dramatic play with a bent towards the full length form.

Prerequisites: Some experience in writing of fiction. Conference hours to be arranged.

Advanced workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story.

Prerequisites: Previous experience or introductory class strongly recommended.

Assignments designed to examine form and structure in fiction. Fall instructor: M. Swann; Spring instructor: M. Keane

Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Fall semester in 2009-2010.

Weekly workshops designed to critique new poetry. Each participant works toward the development of a cohesive collection of poems. Short essays on traditional and contemporary poetry will also be required.

Explores how to apply a literary sensibility to such traditional forms of journalism as the personal essay, general essay, profile, and feature article.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 14 students.

Effective oral presentation in speeches, discussions, and interviews. We will explore the reciprocal relationship between active listening and extemporaneous speaking, well-organized writing and spontaneous remarks, rhetorical strategy and audience analysis, historical models and contemporary practice.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students.

Shakespeare's plays as theatrical events. Differing performance spaces, acting traditions, directorial frames, theatre practices, performance theories, critical studies, cultural codes, and historical conventions promote differing modes of engagement with drama in performance. We will explore Shakespeare's plays in the context of actual and possible performance from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. Sign up in English Department.

Performance conventions, dramatic structures, and cultural contexts from 1660 to 1800. Playwrights include Wycherley, Etherege, Behn, Trotter, Centlivre, Dryden, Congreve, Farquhar, Gay, Goldsmith, and Sheridan.

Prerequisites: Not offered in the 2009-10 academic year.

Romantic and post-Romantic fantasy that examines the transformative role of imagination in aesthetic and creative experience. Challenges accepted boundaries between the imagined and the real, and celebrates otherness and magicality in a disenchanted world. Authors include Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Shelley, Tennyson, Carroll, Tolkien, LeGuin, Garcia Marquez.

We will consider the image and role of the cowboy in fiction, social history, film, music, and art. Readings will include Cormac McCarthy's "The Border Trilogy" among other things. Limited to 14.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 30 students.

A century of American literature seen through the lens of works by women who were all Barnard undergraduates. Topics include Jewish immigration, the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, feminism, black pride, sexual liberation, the rise of ethnic American identity, the "downtown" scene of the 1980s, etc. Authors may include Antin, Millay, Hurston, Calisher, Chang, Jong, Shange, Gordon, Quindlen, Janowitz, Danticat, Lahiri, and others.

Reading, from multiple perspectives, the great "metaphysical writers" on these big issues, including faith. John Donne's Devotions and selected Sermons; Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy(i.e., madness and depression); Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall, and Richard Crashaw's bizarre poems "St. Mary Magdalene or The Weeper" and "Hymn to St. Teresa" will be included.

A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Spring: Romantic poets through the present. Guest lectures by members of the department.

Exploration in Black Theatre, specifically African-American performance traditions, as an intervening agent in racial, cultural and national identity. African-American theater artists to be examined include Amiri Baraka, Kia Corthron, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angelina Grimke, Langston Huges, Georgia Douglas Jognson, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrian Piper and August Wilson. (Also listed as AFRS 3144.)

Competing constructions of American identity in the United States date back to the early republic when a newly emerging nation struggled with the questions: What makes an American American? What makes America America? From colonial times forward, the stage has served as a forum to air differing beliefs as well as medium to construct new beliefs about Nation, self and other. The texts we will read, from colonial times through WWI, explore diverse topics such as politics, Native American rights, slavery, labor unrest, gender roles, and a growing immigrant population.

Explores, through fiction, poetry, essays, and film, the historical context and cultural content of the African American migration from the rural south to the urban cities of the north, with particular emphasis on New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.

The significance of colonial encounter, statehood, and dispossession in Palestinian and Israeli cultures from 1948 to the present, examined in a range of cultural forms: poetry, political tracts, cinema, fiction, memoirs, and travel writing. Authors include: Darwish, Grossman, Habibi, Khalifeh, Khleifi, Kanafani, Oz, Shabtai, Shalev, and Yehoshua.

Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Spring of the 2009-10 academic year.

A survey of medieval literatures of the British Isles, and related European texts, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Although the course covers many genres and topics, the legends of King Arthur will be a connective thread. Medieval literature and the British Isles as colonized space. Literature before the invention of �England.� The multi-ethnic and multilingual culture of the British Middle Ages. The challenge of texts originally accompanied by illustrations. Selfhood as more a social than a private entity. Two papers, mid-term, and take-home final.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

New ideas of the mind�s relation to the world. New perspectives, the emergence of new forms, experimentation with old forms, and the search for an appropriate style.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

The development of modern concepts of subjectivity and authority. The rise of art and the artist. Myth versus science. Knowledge versus experience. Humanism, Rationalism, Empiricism. The tension between belief and doubt. The exploration of limits and the limitless. Definition of the beautiful and the sublime.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

Humanism, reformation, and revolution: the possibilities of human knowledge; sources and strategies for secular and spiritual authority; the competing demands of idealism and experience.

Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above.

The tension, conflicts, and upheavals of an era in the arts, religion, politics, aesthetics, and society.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students.

Critical and historical introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances.

Lyric poetry about love, sex, death, and God in Donne and others (e.g., Herbert, Lanyer, Wroth, Herrick, Marvell, Phillips). Prose about science, politics, religion, and philosophy (e.g., Bacon and Cavendish, Hobbes and early communists "The Levellers") in what has been called the "century of revolution."

Description for Fall, 2009:Seventeenth-century poetry and prose: Sex, love, and God in lyric poetry, John Donne to Rochester (1600-1678); politics and religion in prose of the English Revolution (1642-1660), including political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the female prophet Anna Trapnel, and the first communist, Winstanley.--Guibbory

Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes and selections of Milton�s earlier poetry and prose (defenses of free press, divorce, individual conscience, political and religious liberty) read within the context of religious, political, and cultural history, but with a sense of connection to present issues.

Romantic writers in their intellectual, historical, and political context, with reference to contemporary movements in philosophy, music, and the plastic arts. Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P.B. Shelley, and Keats. An emphasis on close reading of the poetry.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60. Sign-up with department.

Works by Jane Austen, Emily Bront�, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. While attending to form and style, we will focus on the relation of these fictional worlds to the historical and social realities of the period. Attention will be paid to how the novels reflect or challenge Victorian ideas about ambition, desire, sexuality, education, labor, domesticity, and global empire.

Texts from the late Republican period through the Civil War explore the literary implications of American independence, the representation of Native Americans, the nature of the self, slavery and abolition, gender and woman's sphere, and the Civil War. Writers include Irving, Emerson, Poe, Fuller, Thoreau, Douglass, Stowe, Jacobs, Whitman, and Dickinson.

American literature in the context of cultural and historical change. Writers include Twain, James, DuBois, Wharton, Cather, Wister, Faulkner, Hurston.

American fiction, literary and cultural criticism since 1945. Topics include: the authorial and critical search for the great contemporary American novel, the particularity of "American" characters, genres, aesthetics, subjects, the effect of these debates on canon formation and the literary marketplace. Authors may include: Bellow, Ellison, Nabokov, Kerouac, Didion, Pynchon, Morrison, and Lahiri.

Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments. Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion. Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O' Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others.

Course traces the literary, theoretical, and historical development of drama from the 1850s onward, treating the plays of (among others) Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Soyinka, Churchill, and critical/theoretical texts by Nietzsche, Freud, Brecht, Artaud, Butler, and others.

Selective survey of fiction from the ex-colonies, focusing on the colonial encounter, cultural and political decolonization, and belonging and migration in the age of postcolonial imperialism. Areas covered include Africa (Achebe, Aidoo, Armah, Ngugi); the Arab World (Mahfouz, Munif, Salih, Souief); South Asia (Mistry, Rushdie, Suleri); the Carribean (Kincaid); and New Zealand (Hulme).

Prerequisites: To be taken only for P/F. Departmental sign-up required. Only registering for the course through eBear or SSOL will not ensure your enrollment.

Various topics presented by visiting scholars in courses that will meet for two to four weeks during each semester. Topics, instructors, and times will be announced by the department. Students must attend all classes to receive credit for this course. For more information, please consult the English Department's web page .

Prerequisites: Registration in each section is limited. Departmental registration required.

Provides experience in the reading and analysis of literary texts and some knowledge of conspicuous works of literary criticism. Frequent short papers. Required of all majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring term even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take BC3193 in the autumn term.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and chair required. In rare cases, with the permission of the chair, a special project in conjunction with a course may be taken by other English majors.

Senior majors who are concentrating in Theatre or Writing and have completed two courses in writing or three in theatre will normally take the Special Project in Theatre or Writing (BC3996 x or y) in combination with an additional course in their special field. This counts in place of one of the Senior Seminars. In certain cases, Independent Study (BC3999 - see below) may be substituted for the Special Project.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

Interdisciplinary examination of the idea of happiness from Aristotle to the present. Short readings in a variety of literary and other texts.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

Explores theories and representations of the crowd, mass behavior and ideas about the individual in the period between the two World Wars. Looking mostly at fiction and film from the U.S. and Germany between 1918 -.1939, the course centers on representations of Berlin and New York. Films by Lang, Ruttmann, Rosselini, Wenders, Von Sternberg, Vidor, Chaplin, Sheeler and Strand, Engel, Berkeley and others.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

�The empty spirit / In vacant space�: gothicism, transcendentalism, and postmodern rapture. Traces of the sublime in the American literary landscape, featuring Brown, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, Reed, Pynchon, Robinson, and Harding.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

The first half of the course is grounded in readings from Bible, Augustine, Petrarch and Donne, but students may then explore the relation and intersection between sexuality, sin, and spirituality up into the present, and cross-culturally.

Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.

This seminar reviews the emergence of poetry anthologies from the 18th century to the present, while sampling a wide variety of lyric poetry (Neoclassical and Romantic to Modernist and Contemporary) and re-examining such issues as what it is we value in poetry and how we might reinvent the "canon" we have inherited. Students will create their own anthologies and have the option to do editorial or critical projects for their final submissions.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and Department Chair.

Senior majors who wish to substitute Independent Study for one of the two required senior seminars should consult the chair. Permission is given rarely and only to students who present a clear and well-defined topic of study, who have a department sponsor, and who submit their proposals well in advance of the semester in which they will register. There is no independent study for screenwriting or film production.

How did Renaissance writers imagine Eros? What obstacles does he meet? How does he relate to other kinds of love? To loss and to wit? Readings include Plato, Ovid, and Petrarch for background, then Stampa, Ariosto, Rabelais, Lab�, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Rabelais, Wyatt, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne.--A. Prescott