Fall 2011 English Courses Updated 8 9 11 ENLS 2000 01 TR 11 00am 12 15pm Nair Supriya Literary Investigations The purpose of this course is to acquaint you with some of the literary and theoretical skills in the discipline of English with particular emphasis on critical reading research and writing practices You will focus on how to analyze and interpret texts by examining both what is within the text as well as in its political historical and social contexts You will also be comparing texts structurally ideologically and thematically The theme of this course will revolve around the nature of the human and non human as addressed by literary and cultural texts the question of human identity in its relationship with other beings and a changing world We will begin with some creation stories Who are we Where did we come from and go on to discuss literary works that address our evolution in different ways Mary Shelley s Frankenstein Bernard Pomerance s The Elephant Man Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man Kazuo Ishiguro s Never Let Me Go and end with science fiction and the equally complex question of the cyborg The final section of the course will include ecocriticism particularly the critique of the anthropocentric bias of human history and note the ways in which science and the humanities reconstitute post human identity in contemporary times Assignments include midterm and final exams and a short research paper ENLS 2000 02 MWF 10 00am 10 50am McKeown Adam Literary Investigations This course is an introduction to the practice of literary criticism the purpose of which in simplest terms is to make written artifacts more interesting and accessible to a community of readers through thoughtful relevant commentary There are no set rules for what makes commentary thoughtful or relevant like any other kind of writing criticism succeeds or fails according to whether or not an audience finds it meaningful and compelling Successful criticism however tends to be informed by trends conventions traditions habits of mind controversies and even specialized language understood by the community of dedicated readers to which it is addressed This class will introduce you to many of these elements of successful criticism so that you can better develop your interest in written artifacts into effective critical commentary ENLS 2000 03 MWF 12 00pm 12 50pm Johnson TR Literary Investigations This course serves as the gateway into the English Major As such it will provide students with the conceptual tools and rhetorical strategies essential to the academic study of literary texts More specifically it will acquaint English majors with and give them opportunities to practice with the conventions of analysis argument and research that they will need in order to write successfully in their upper level courses To situate this introduction to these skills within a particular context the course will focus on F Scott Fitzgerald s The Great Gatsby considering the novel from nine different critical perspectives and within broad historical trajectories To guide us through the former we will use Lois Tyson s survey of contemporary critical theory and we will trace the latter through Fitzgerald s autobiographical essays that are collected in The Crack Up the Norton Critical Edition of Horatio Alger s Ragged Dick with its attendant archive of resources both film versions of Scarface and finally through the radical counter narrative of the Jazz Age and the American Dream Ishmael Reed s Mumbo Jumbo Students will post regular short responses to a Discussion Board develop an annotated bibliography compose two short personal response essays two longer papers and take an exam ENLS 2000 04 TR 9 30am 10 45am Michael Rubenstein Literary Investigations This class serves as an introduction to the practice of literary criticism Though we will study several different modes of literary investigation from textual and genetic criticism to feminist and psychoanalytic approaches the focus of this class will be the concept of fictionality Why do we spend time reading about characters who never existed and events that never happened Do fictions make truth claims and if so then what is the nature of such claims Fiction as we understand it today has a history and in this course we ll study how it s become our contemporary common sense At the beginning of the semester we will read a few short stories together tentatively to include Edgar Allan Poe Herman Melville Elizabeth Bowen Tillie Olsen V S Naipaul and Junot Diaz and then move into theory and criticism that we can use to help us gain more and more insight into our shared texts and to model the practice of criticism ENLS 2000 05 TR 2 00pm 3 15pm Kohler Michelle Literary Investigations This course is an introduction to the history and practice of literary analysis We will practice identifying interpretive problems in literary texts and accumulate an understanding of the methods of reading research and writing that allow us to respond to these problems in productive relevant original ways Primary texts include Douglass s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Dickinson s poetry Melville s Benito Cereno Chopin s The Awakening and James s The Turn of the Screw We will supplement these texts with readings in literary criticism and theory ENLS 2010 01 MWF 12 00pm 12 50pm Bender Ashley Introduction to British Literature I This survey course will introduce students to early British literature from the Medieval period through the Restoration and eighteenth century Students will read representative texts by major authors of each period and readings will cover a range of genres including poetry drama fiction and nonfiction This course covers such an extensive period of British literary and cultural history approximately 10 centuries As such we will discuss the the continuities and discontinuties that exist among these texts and question how periodization both helps and hinders our investigation of the literature and the cultural political and social contexts in which these texts were written Other topics of discussion will include issues of gender class and identity and we will investigate the use of literature as a means to define British national identity The required text for this course is the Norton Anthology of British Literature vols A B and C ed Stephen Greenblatt et al ISBN 978 0393928334 which is on order at the Tulane bookstore ENLS 2020 01 TR 2 00pm 3 15pm Travis Molly Introduction to