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ENG 603  British Literature     Dr. Rachel Anderson

Monday, PEW campus

Arthur: A King for All Ages

This course will examine literature written in what we now call Great Britain from the early medieval period to the present.   The focal point for this course will be the quasi-historical, mostly legendary figure of King Arthur.  He has evolved from a Celtic warlord to a medieval king and his court at Camelot has proved a rich source of literary inspiration.  His popularity has only grown in the past few decades as he has been played by Sean Connery and Clive Owen in film and turned into a high-school jock in a popular young-adult novel series.  The major question this course will explore is: Why Arthur?  What is so enduring about this particular figure that we’re still telling and retelling his story over a thousand years?

During the semester, we will survey British literature via Arthurian texts.  Some texts may include the Welsh Culwyc ac Olwen, Wace’s Roman de Brut, Layamon’s Brut, the Stanzaic and Alliterative Morte Arthure, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, parts of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Dryden’s King Arthur or The British Worthy, Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.

ENG 624  The Genre of the Novel and the Idea of Realism     Dr. Mack Smith

Thursday, PEW campus

The novel, derived from the French nouvelle, meaning new, is a relatively new genre.  It became the popular art form that it has remained until today because it gives to its readers a convincing portrait of the real world. Its relatively recent rise occurred during the Age of Reason and empiricism, in which knowledge was said to come from an interaction of the human mind and external reality.  The scientific method, also, influenced realist methods.  Because of its ability to represent (or re-present) reality, or the things of the world, through extensive descriptions, the novel has become the literary form most associated with realism, which derives from the Latin res, or thing.  Realism is an artistic approach in which the purpose of the art form is to portray such an accurate picture of reality that its verisimilitude, or life-likeness, is so strong as to create the illusion of the real.  We are all familiar with realistic paintings that create a photographically accurate portrayal of their subjects.  However, unlike painting, which can create visually accurate imitations through the color and form produced by paint, the realistic novel has to use an abstract medium, language, to produce its illusion.  This has created a dilemma for novelists, since throughout the ages the philosophic attitude toward the ways words and objects relate to each other has been a source of continued debate.  Do words correspond directly to their objects or are they just arbitrarily connected by convention?  Or, worse, is the connection of word and object a product of social forces whose motive is power and domination?  The dilemma has also been exacerbated by changing notions of reality.  The novels we will read present the way the philosophies of language of the particular period in which they were written influence the novelists' conception of how the language of his or her novel relates to reality, thus affecting their means of representation.  We will also consider how conceptions of human reality have changed, also complicating the realist mission.  We will examine four novels.  Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, the epitome of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, which signaled a shift from realism to impressionism, The Age of Innocence, which perfected the limited omniscient point of view, introducing a psychological reality, and, finally, the apotheosis of the novel form, Ulysses, whose multiple perspectives questioned the notion of a stable reality that can be objectively described.

 

ENG 651  Period: Medieval and Renaissance Visions of Heaven & Hell     Dr. Kathleen Blumreich

Tuesday, PEW campus

This semester, we will read and discuss several medieval and Renaissance “visions” of heaven and hell. Our purpose will be threefold: to explore the intertextuality of these works; to determine—as best we can—how literary conceptions of the afterlife reflected and/or influenced popular attitudes toward piety, salvation, dogma; and to gain better understanding of why these works are still worth studying. Although our focus will be on texts composed from a Christian perspective, seminar members will be encouraged to consider depictions of heaven and hell that appear in other faith traditions. Tentative, and not all-inclusive reading list: The Voyage of St. Brendan, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, The Divine Comedy (Dante), Piers Plowman (Langland), Paradise Lost (Milton).

 

ENG 661  Author: E. E. Cummings     Dr. Michael Webster

Monday, PEW campus

The poetry and prose of E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) is both a part of and apart from modernist and avant-garde trends in Anglo-American literature of the first half of the twentieth century. This course will explore how Cummings came to write his funny, lyrical, tender, satirical, idiosyncratic, genre-bending, and typographically-challenging works, placing them in the context of avant-garde and modernist experiments of the time. Close reading of Cummings’ prose and poetry will be supplemented with examples of analogous or influential avant-garde and modernist texts from authors like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore.

 

TEXTS:

Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Ed George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1994.

---. The Enormous Room: A typescript edition with drawings by the author. 1922. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1978.

---. Him. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Reprinted. New York: Liveright, 1955, 1970. [Available as a course packet]

---. EIMI. 1933. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 2007.

---. i: six nonlectures. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.

Friedman, Norman. (Re) Valuing Cummings: further essays on the poet, 1962-1993. Gainesville: University P of Florida, 1996. [Recommended only]

Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980.

Various articles from Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society [on reserve and on line at http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/Index.htm .]

 

ENG 661  Author: Philip Roth     Dr. Rob Franciosi

Wednesday, Allendale Campus

Fifty years after he burst on the American literary scene with the publication of Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth remains one of our nation’s most prolific, celebrated, and controversial writers. And at age seventy-six he shows no signs of slowing down, with two new Roth novels to be published in 2009-2010.

This seminar will survey Philip Roth’s achievement over the last five decades, with attention paid both to his fiction and nonfiction. One of the few living writers to be published by the Library of America, and to be mentioned regularly for the Nobel Prize, Roth nevertheless continues to provoke readers and critics. We will consider some of those provocations, as well as the qualities that make Philip Roth’s voice one of the most distinctive and memorable in our literature.

Texts  (subject to change)

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

The Ghost Writer (1979)

The Counterlife (1986)

The Facts (1988)

Patrimony (1991)

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

American Pastoral (1997)

Exit Ghost (2007)

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Subject to change (Official schedules and registration will be available in March):

Spring/Summer 2010

ENG 600        Introduction to Grad Studies

Mack Smith    M/W, 1^st 6 wks       DEV

ENG 651         WWI Poets

Jim Persoon    Th, 12 wks             Allendale

ENG 661         Mediterranean Literature   

Ivo Soljan         T, 12 wks              Allendale

ENG 624         Travels in the American Novel

Emily Garcia    M/W, 2^nd 6 wks     DEV

 

 

Fall 2010

ENG 605        American Literature

Avis Hewitt     W                           DEV

ENG 655        History of Literary Criticism

Dean Frederick Antczak     T/R 4:00-5:15        Allendale

ENG 661        Milton

Kathleen Blumreich     Th               DEV

ENG 651        Old English Language/Literature

Rachel Anderson        M                DEV

ENG 663        Shakespeare               

Jo Miller         T                             Allendale

 

 

Winter 2011

 

ENG 616         World Literatures

Corrina McLeod         W                 Allendale

ENG 614         Literature of American Minorities

TBA                M                           DEV

ENG 624         Romance

Ben Lockerd   T                             DEV

ENG 624         Poetry

Michael Webster        Th                DEV

ENG 661         Roth

Rob Franciosi  W                            DEV

 

 

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All courses are subject to change.

Please contact us if you have any questions about the schedule.