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No iron spike can pierce a heart as icily as a period in the right place.  ~ Isaac Babel

Undergraduate Literature Course Descriptions

 

L 105  Appreciation of Literature

This course is intended for non-majors and introduces the specific reading demands of poetry, drama, and short fiction. Rather than write papers, students complete a number of workshops which build an experiential connection with literature and place it in context with other humane arts. Students should complete the class with a better understanding of the communal and personal influences which help them make meaning from text.

 

L 115 Literature for Today

This course teaches prerequisite skills for subsequent English courses, and may be centered around literary themes more than generic reading demands. Students are expected to complete written assignments which may include individual essays or comprehensive portfolios. In addition to poetry, drama, and short fiction, the course also introduces the novel. 

 

L202 Literary Interpretation

L202 introduces students to the values, habits, and best practices of interpreting literary works in conversation, class discussions, and written assignments.  It encourages and guides students in examining how literary works engage and illuminate issues and events that constitute contemporary experience.  In the end the course wants students to take literary interpretation seriously as a source of value for their academic careers and for their lives.  The course uses “conversation” as the organizing concept for what constitutes literary interpretation and so asks students to develop their insights into literary texts through conversation in the class with peers.  Those conversations lead to a mapping of individual strengths and predilections in approaching texts and the development of interpretive prowess in reading and placing texts in relevant and significant contexts.  Students put together a portfolio which includes the exercises they have completed in their move toward interested and engaging interpretive practices as well as a paper demonstrating their success in literary interpretation and their sophistication in approaching literary texts. 

 

L203 Introduction to Drama

The purpose of this course is to help students become more perceptive readers and audience members of drama and to learn, from drama, how other people have viewed the world. Our emphasis will be on drama in performance, and so we will view a number of taped performances, as well as one or more live performances if possible. The course will require the reading of six or seven plays, weekly one-page writing assignments, a group project, and a final exam. 

 

L203 Introduction to Drama ARR (online)

This class introduces students to the elements and history of drama in a range of plays from ancient Greece, through Shakespeare and up to the moderns. Informally graded (pass/fail) assignments check student understanding of literary terms and the cause-and-effect in plays. Creative exercises ask students to combine theory and dramatic examples with their own imaginative use of dramatic method. Analytical short essays on topics are narrowly selected to illustrate dramatic analysis (such as providing the interior monologue of a character in a particular scene). Peer review, group exercises, and discussion forums involve students with each others’ ideas.  Class will be conducted through Oncourse. 

 

L204 Introduction to Fiction

Representative works of fiction; structural technique in the novel, theories and kinds of fiction, and thematic scope of the novel. Readings may include novels and short stories from several ages and countries.  Some sections have a thematic focus: see IUPUI Schedule of Classes. 

 

L204 Introduction to Fiction online 

This online version of L204 is delivered through Oncourse, IUPUI’s web teaching and learning environment, and requires basic computer skills such as word processing, use of the Internet, capacity to use or learn how to use discussion forums, Oncourse mail, and occasionally chatrooms. Students should be attentive readers, able to read and follow text instructions as well as capable of working at a regular pace in a course which requires consistent and regular submission of work as a substitute for class attendance. One required orientation meeting will take place on Sat. Jan. 15th, though you may make arrangements with the instructor to orient online. Not recommended for freshmen.   

 

L205 Introduction to Poetry

L205 is a comprehensive introduction to the forms, styles, and statements of poetry.  Students will learn strategies for approaching poems not as hermetic structures with single hidden meanings but as multifaceted expressions that form a part of an ongoing cultural conversation.  Students will learn to identify and understand such elements of poetry as sound, metaphor, line, denotative and connotative word choice, irony, closed and open form, meter, and theme.  Students will write close-reading analyses of poems and comparative essays, as well as short weekly responses to readings via Oncourse.  Students will also venture out to the world of poetry on their own by attending public poetry readings and investigating contemporary poetry on their own or in groups.  Students should prepare to be active members of the class discussion, participating in group work and leading our conversations about course readings and topics.  Text: An Introduction to Poetry (Dana Gioia & X.J. Kennedy) 

 

L207 Women and Literature

This course will center on discussion and writing on literature by women.  We will explore several types of writing: 1) three life stories, including a graphic work by an Iranian woman (“graphic” = pictures, like funnies) and a book by a graduate of IUPUI; 2) a historical progression of novels, so that we can see how the tradition of women’s fiction in English grew; 3) two “what if” novels about different organizations in society. Students will keep journals, do an oral report, write a midterm paper and a final exam, and have fun.

 

  L213 Literary Masterpieces

This course provides you with an opportunity to become familiar with great works that are foundational for modern Western culture. These ancient works still have an up-to-date impact on our lives since our core beliefs are still built, to a larger extent than is often realized, on a foundation established by these ancient, medieval, and Renaissance classics.  Among the material we’ll read is the following:  • Selections from The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer’s great epics of love, war, and return. • Two Greek tragedies: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the drama of a man overthrown by his own devouring need to discover the dreadful secret of his past and Euripides’ Medea a powerful tragedy of love, betrayal, and violent revenge • Plato’s Apology of Socrates, a first person account of Socrates’s bold defense of honest philosophical enquiry before the court which condemned him to death for practicing it. • Selections from Virgil’s epic Aeneid, about the founding of Rome and the clash between love and duty.  • Selections from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. A powerful poetic depiction of a soul’s journey through hell, purgatory and heaven • The course will conclude with the rich and often ribald storytelling of Boccaccio’s Decamaron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.  Emphasis will be placed on making the literature accessible and interesting, relating it to historical events and contexts, and working on important reading and writing skills. Students will actively involved in class discussion through group work and prior responses to "exploratory" questions. Graded work will include two essays and two exams.  Textbook: The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Vol. 1 (7th ed.)

 

  L213 Literary Masterpieces online

This online version of L213 is delivered through Oncourse, IUPUI’s web teaching and learning environment, and requires basic computer skills such as word processing, use of the Internet, capacity to use or learn how to use discussion forums, Oncourse mail, and occasionally chatrooms. On campus orientation meeting will take place Sat. Jan. 15th, though you may make arrangements with the instructor to orient online. Not recommended for freshmen.            This course provides you with an opportunity to become familiar with great works that are foundational for modern Western culture. These ancient works still have an up-to-date impact on our lives since our core beliefs are still built, to a larger extent than is often realized, on a foundation established by these ancient, medieval, and Renaisance classics.  For a list of readings, see the course description for the classroom version. The online course will also include web lectures delivered in the Impatica format, interactive forum postings, self-assessment quizzes, two papers and two exams. 

 

L214 Literary Masterpieces II

Literary masterpieces from Homer to the present.  Aims at thoughtful, intensive, analysis, appreciation of aesthetic values, and enjoyment of reading. 

 

L220 Introduction to Shakespeare

This course will provide students with an introduction to several of Shakespeare’s major plays. Our main goals will be (a) to discuss the ideas and messages in these works and their historical contexts; (b) to analyze and appreciate aesthetic qualities such as characterization, imagery, allusions, and symbols; (c) to improve students’ skills in interpreting and writing about literature; (d) to analyze visual, aural, and other features of the plays in performance through viewing of selected video productions. Students will write two essays of 5 7 pages, and a number of shorter 2-3-page position papers.  Course grades will be assessed according to the following percentages: Attendance and Participation 10% Position Papers 40% Essays 50%  The plays covered will include: Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest. 

 

L245 Introduction to Caribbean Literature

This course will introduce students to the basic themes of Caribbean literature.  Specifically, we will examine the ways in which Caribbean writers present a colonial past and its effect on Caribbean culture in their attempts to “write back” to imperialist thought.  We will examine the politics of decolonization and how writers construct/(re)construct Caribbean cultures and identities.

 

  L301 English Literature Survey I

L301 is a survey of English literature up to the eighteenth century.  This was a period of exciting changes in English society and politics.  It also produced some of England’s most renowned writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift.  Emphasis will be on making the literature accessible and interesting to students, relating it to historical events and contexts, and working on important reading and writing skills.  Students will write two essays of 5 7 pages, and a number of shorter 2-3-page position papers.  Course grades will be computed according to the following percentages:  Attendance and Participation   10%        Response Papers 40%    Essays                 50%  Required Text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1 (7th ed.) 

 

L302 Introduction to British Literature II

Good class for teachers and for preparation for grad school in English. This class samples various literary forms-poems, prose, plays-as it maps the developments of British literature through historical periods roughly defined as Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, and Post-modernism. Using writers from John Keats and Mary Prince through Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney, we will explore literary works both as unique productions of individual authors’ minds and as part of the larger literary and historical worlds of their time. In short, we’ll see where our literary present-and to some extent our society-comes from. Requirements: lots of reading, much class discussion and occasional written exercises, two papers, essay final exam. 

 

L315 The Major Plays of Shakespeare  

A close reading of a representative selection of Shakespeare’s major plays.  

 

L351 Survey of American Literature, 1800-1865

Have you ever wondered why twentieth-century environmentalists use Thoreau’s Walden like a Bible, or how a mother of five small children who had never traveled south of the Mason-Dixon line could have written the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century—a novel about slavery? In L351, find out how Walt Whitman inaugurated the sexual revolution and what prompted the author of The Scarlet Letter to call his literary competitors "a damned mob of scribbling women."

L351 examines American voices of dissent in the early national period, covering fiction, poetry, the slave narrative, and the essay. This thematic survey of transcendental, romantic, and domestic writers includes Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. The course reading and lectures will introduce American Transcendentalism; will situate domestic and non-canonical works in historical context; and will relate cultural difference to the formation of literary genres. Be prepared to read a lot of pages - sometimes more than 100 pages between class sessions.  Classes will consist primarily of discussion. Written assignments include a series of critical journals and two longer papers. Intermediate to advanced writing skill is assumed. Texts required: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B, Fern’s Ruth Hall, and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

 

L352 American Literature, 1870-1920

An historical survey of American literature from the end of the Civil War to 1920, L352 will address the crisis of consciousness that beset writers in a period of rapid urban growth.  We will examine literary Realism and local color; psychological approaches to fiction; the ethical implications of the transition from a community- to society-based literature; and the literary representation of racial, gender, class, and ethnic difference.  Authors include Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser.  Class sessions will be open discussion forums with occasional lecturing to provide background in literary and intellectual traditions.  Texts include The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. C (which includes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Daisy Miller); Wharton’s Age of Innocence; and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.  Students will be evaluated on a reading journal, two critical essays, and class participation.  The journal will constitute 35% of the final grade, the essays 25% each, and participation 15%.  Intermediate to advanced critical writing skill assumed. Reading assignments may sometimes exceed 100 pages per class session. 

 

L354 American Literature Since 1914

This course begins with the American modernists and examines a representative selection of works in a variety of genres to emphasize the diversity of voices comprising twentieth-century American literature.  One of our major goals is to consider the ways in which American literature both reflects and shapes our sense of what it means to be an American.  Individual works are analyzed and placed within social, historical and cultural contexts. Although there are occasional short lectures, the primary format of the class is discussion. The primary text is the Norton Anthology of American Literature; in addition, two novels are usually assigned.  Any courses in earlier American literature, American history, politics, or any other aspect of American studies would be useful for this class.  Requirements: One longer paper of 1800-2000 words; several short writing assignments or tests (depends on the size and composition of the class), class participation, midterm and final exam. 

 

L358 20th Century American Fiction

This course considers fiction—both novels and short stories—beginning with the works of the American expatriates of the 1920s and ending in the contemporary period.  Course size will determine the format of the class, but as much as is practicable, it will be conducted as a seminar, with a great deal of discussion.  Our primary objectives will be 1) to examine the development and diversity of the fictional forms in the twentieth century, 2) to consider the social and historical forces that have affected the fiction writers of the twentieth century, and 3) to consider the achievements of the individual authors whose works we read.  Because the twentieth century has seen a great deal of experimentation in fiction (as well as in other literary and art forms), many of the works we will read will be experimental in form and content.  We will read the equivalent of eight novels (although at least one of the texts will be a collection of short stories), and the selections will include, among others, works of the expatriates, representatives of the Southern renascence and the African-American resurgence in contemporary literature.  Course requirements include two analytical essays of 5-6 pages, class participation, and another major assignment, such as a course journal or a semester project culminating in a class presentation. 

 

L370 Recent Black American Writing

This course will examine black American literature written in the latter part of the twentieth century.  The literary texts we will read and discuss offer various representations of black life, often resisting stereotypical notions of “blackness.”  We will examine the various themes that arise in contemporary black literature as well as examine how these recent works illuminate the traditional themes of an African American literary tradition.  Texts may include Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, Bertice Berry’s Redemption Song, J. California Cooper’s A Piece of Mine, August Wilson’s Fences, Veronica Chambers’ Mama’s Girl, Coleson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever. 

 

L372 Contemporary American Fiction

Examination of representative American fiction since 1955 in its social, cultural, and historical contexts. Topics include such issues as the representation of truth in fiction, intertextuality, and the transgressions of genre boundaries. 

 

L373 Interdisciplinary Approach to English and American Literature

Philanthropy and Literature Philanthropy and Literature examines both the representations of philanthropy and voluntary action in literature (in works such as Major Barbara, A Christmas Carol The Grapes of Wrath, The Good Woman of Setzuan and others) as well as the creation of literature as an act of giving (for example, Waiting for Godot, Heart of Darkness, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Augie Wren’s Christmas Story” [Auster] and others). The course will explore the assumptions and methods appropriate for an interdisciplinary investigation such as literature and philanthropy and the dimensions of giving and voluntary action as they shape the personal cultural lives of people, especially readers of literature. Discussions are likely to pursue questions regarding the values and perspectives that the study of literature and the study of philanthropy share.

 

L376 Literature for Adolescents

First jobs, first cars, first kisses:  you’ll find them all in young adult literature.  This course will focus on literature of the last fifty years when both modern teenagers and books designed specifically for them emerged.  Reading fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and ‘zines, we will address how different genres represent and define the teenage experience.  This literature not only reflects teen lives but also responds to concerns about teens’ reluctance to read and their changing literacies.  The course will be of interest to those wishing an overview of recent reading, publihsing, and writing trends.  While thinking about what roles these books can play in secondary school classrooms, we will primarily analyze them as pieces of literature. 

 

L378 Women in Domestic American Fiction

Before 1900 What roles did fiction writers assign to women in American culture from the revolutionary period through the end of the nineteenth century? How were the interactions of men and women in the domestic space represented by nineteenth-century writers? How did the female bildungsroman take shape in the New World? How did early American fiction represent the transition from girlhood to mature womanhood? How did the valuing of marriage and child rearing change over the course of the nineteenth century? How did early fiction writers talk about the sexuality of American women? How did traditional conceptions of love and marriage evolve during the nineteenth century?  In L378 we will address these and other questions in a series of texts that include Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New England Tale (1822), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1869), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and a variety of short stories. Students will write four position papers and two longer essays. Lots of class discussion and group interaction. Intermediate to advanced writing level assumed.

 

L379 Ethnic and Minority Literature of the United States

This course samples from the multicultural glory that is contemporary fiction in the United States. We will be reading novels by an Afghan-American, a Chicano American, an American Indian, a Korean American, an African American, a Jewish American, and a Latvian American, as well as dipping into a collection of short stories. If you want to know more about our country, you’ll have fun with the writers’ different perspectives and forms. The class will be built around discussion. Students will do oral reports to begin this discussion, do various pieces of writing, along with a midterm and final exam. 

 

L384 Topic: Comics in American Culture ARR TV  

An historical survey of American comic art and artists from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. The course is primarily concerned with how comics have developed and matured as a distinctively American art form, reflecting and commenting on post-W.W. II American society in a variety of narrative forms: comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels. But not simply reflecting American culture, comics themselves have often been at the center of debates about the influence of media in shaping the national character. Equally important to the course are issues of content versus social regulation (which structured the discourse of the Congressional debates concerning juvenile delinquency during the 1950’s) and issues involving the Comics Code Authority, which still governs the content of mainstream comics today. Countercultural comics of the 1960’s and 1970’s as well as alternative comics of the 1980’s and 1990’s round out our investigation of comics in American culture by helping us to understand comics as a system of cultural representations.  Watterson, The Tenth Anniversary Calvin and Hobbes. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics The Essential Fantastic Four, Vol. 1. Robert Crumb, R. Crumb’s America. Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen. Art Spiegelman, Maus. Daniel Clowes, Ghost World. Peter Bagge, Buddy the Dreamer.  Plus materials on electronic reserve (essays on narrative semiotics by Umberto Eco, R. C. Harvey, Martin Barker and others)

 

  L385 Science Fiction  

A survey of British and American science fiction In the twentieth century will examine the various trends, theme, and subgenres in speculative fiction—from elements of fantasy to hard/technical science fiction.  As a class we will discuss 5 traditional novels and one graphic novel.  Students will be expected to select one from the list to work on as a class project (report).  Some readings will change but this is an example of what to expect.  Examples of class Readings:  The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick Neuromancer by William Gibson To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer Watchmen by Alan Moore Examples for report:  The Anubis Gate by Tim Powers The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Car The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

 

  L390 Children’s Literature

Children’s books present an interesting paradox: they are written by adults for an audience of children. As such, these books often tell us as much about adults as they do about children. Moreover, as the Harry Potter phenomenon suggests, adults enjoy children’s books as much as (and sometimes more than) children. Thinking about the many different audiences of children’s books, we will look at how adults and children read these books. Because reading practices have changed over time, we will consider books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that highlight what adults thought about the children they were reading to. This course will take a special interest in books that present children as readers and writers. These books are especially helpful in showing the roles that literature plays in children’s lives. Moreover, we will pay particular attention to illustrated books. Like Alice in Wonderland, we will ask, "What’s the use of books without pictures?" Illustrations introduce children to artistic styles and shape their interpretations of books.  Just as children’s books serve many audiences, so does this class. On one hand, the English department offers it, so we will be spending a good deal of time analyzing children’s books as pieces of literature. On the other hand,  the School of Education requires elementary education majors to take the course, so we will also spend time discussing how children’s literature might be used in the classroom. 

 

L406/606 Topics in Africian-American Literature: Toni Morrison Come on, come all!

Toni Morrison, America’s most recent Nobel laureate in literature, says that her novels aren’t really finished until they’re discussed. Join a group interested in helping to finish those books! Morrison describes herself as "a black woman novelist," sometimes adding "midwestern" let’s see what we think those terms mean for her literature. We will read seven of her novels in the order in which she wrote them, so that we can see her themes develop over time. Ever wanted to know for sure what an author was/is thinking? This course includes a collection of interviews with Morrison. Students will give oral reports to begin discussion, write a paper and a final exam.  In addition, graduate students will read and discuss Morrison’s book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, give oral reports (some on scholarly articles about Morrison’s novels), write an annotated bibliography and a 15-20 page scholarly essay.  A Nobel laureate who’s also been on Oprah twice? How could we miss . . . looking forward to hearing from you. 

 

L411 Literature and Society (South African Literature and Society)

Note: A version of this course is offered as INTG I300, a junior-senior integrator course.  South Africa’s tortured history has been a focus of international attention for much of the twentieth century.  From the 1948 elections, which inaugurated the period of formal apartheid (apartheid, which means “apartness” in Afrikaner, refers to the National Party’s policies of strict racial segregation), to the 1994 elections, which marked the end of apartheid and the beginning of majority black rule, it has been a history of racism, violence, hope, and struggle.  This course aims to integrate historical and political study with the study of South Africa’s rich literary tradition, which includes not only Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer (1991) and, most recently, J. M. Coetzee (2003) but also many other important writers of various ethnic and ideological backgrounds.  Goals of the course will include: (a) to develop methods of reading that pay attention to issues of cultural difference, power, resistance, and negotiation; (b) to become more familiar with the history and literature of South Africa by examining a group of narratives and their historical contexts; (c) to improve students’ skills in analyzing and writing about literature through frequent writing and feedback.  As we move toward these goals, the course will address all of the IUPUI Principles of Undergraduate Learning, especially Core Communication Skills, Critical Thinking, and Understanding Society and Culture.  Response Papers are informal papers of 2-3 pages (double spaced) in which you must make some sort of considered response to the readings.  Their main purposes are to facilitate our class discussions, to improve your writing and analyzing skills, and to generate ideas that can be developed further in the longer essays.  Response Papers are due in class on the days specified in the reading schedule.  You must turn in five (out of a possible six) Response Papers to receive full credit.  Please type or word process them—do not turn in handwritten drafts.  Two essays of 5 7 pages will be the more formal written work of the course.  These are to be analytical papers in which the methods of reading practiced in class will be applied to works from the syllabus.  Specific guidelines and suggested topics will be given in later handouts.  Course grades will be computed according to the following percentages:  Attendance and Participation 10% Response Papers 40% Essays 50% 

 

L431 / M592 Topics:  Literature and Medicine

A course designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in English and the Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine explores the medical world in literature and the arts, in popular culture, and through the institution of the hospital.  Coming to terms with this emerging field of academic study will allow students to explore medical subjects across the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, and the medical genres of the case and the pathography.  In addition to course reading and written work, students will observe medical education in the IU School of Medicine as well as the doctor/nurse/patient interface.  Longer texts include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Abraham Verghese’s My Own Country (1994), Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), Tim Murphy and Suzanne Poirier’s Writing AIDS (1993), and Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man (1979).  Shorter materials will be handed out in class.  Students will prepare a short position paper; a thick text description of an imaginary case; a poem or piece of short fiction to explore the positionalities of a patient and a practitioner; and a final project which may include an analysis of one day in the life of a hospital, nurse, physician, or patient; or a multimedia history of a disease or disorder.  In addition to these assignments, graduate students will also produce an autobiographical pathography.  Students should be prepared to spend time outside of class observing the workings of the Indiana University Hospitals; they will keep informal logs of their observations. 

 

L433 Conversations with Shakespeare

This course is described as "an interdisciplinary and intertextual study of Shakespeare’s work and its influence down to the present day. Students will compare Shakespeare texts with latter-day novels, plays, poems, and films that allude to or incorporate some aspect of Shakespeare’s art." In this offering of the course, we will draw upon theories of chaos and complex systems to study literary works as complex systems and as components of larger complex systems. Regular class attendance, brief weekly essays, and a final group presentation will be required.  Our primary texts will be six of Shakespeare’s plays (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest), as well as such "latter-day" works as Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, Eugene Ionesco’s play Macbett, Neil Gaiman’s graphic short story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from the Sandman series, Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest, W. H. Auden’s long poem The Sea and the Mirror, Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, and Tony Kushner’s plays Angels in America: Millenium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika. We will also read a number of shorter poems and critical essays, see excerpts from a number of other films, and attend the IRT production of King Lear. 

 

L440 Seminar: Joyce’s Ulysses

A reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, perhaps the most influential novel of the past century. An oral report, brief weekly essays, a longer paper, and regular class attendance will be required.  Students planning to take the course are encouraged to read Homer’s Odyssey, The Gospel according to Mark, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before the semester begins. 

 

L495 Individual Readings in English ARR

These courses, available for 1-3 credits, allow you to pursue an individual interest or topic that is not available through regularly offered courses. You need to develop a proposal, detailing what you want to study or write, and discuss it with a faculty member with some expertise in that area. Remember that faculty members have limited time for directing such independent study; they are most likely to work with a student they have previously had in a class and/or a student who has a well-developed proposal and a strong motivation.  Students must be authorized for these courses by a faculty member, who will request a specific section number. 

 

Note:  For a complete listing of courses with days and times, refer to the IUPUI Schedule of Classes. These course descriptions are meant as a general guide to aid in your course selection; syllabi, textbooks, and requirements are given on the first day of class. In some cases, an instructor’s name is given, and that means the description that follows applies when that instructor teaches the course.

 

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