The diploma requirements in English are intended to establish competence in writing and reading. All Juniors take English 100 and may not take English 200. For new Lowers, this requirement is fulfilled by successful completion of English 200, English 300, and English 310. New Uppers fulfill their requirement by successful completion of English 301, English 310, and three terms of English electives.Uppers whomiss the spring term of English 310 must take English 570 or English 588 during their Senior year. International students who are new Uppers usually begin the sequence with English 301. Oneyear American students and some one-year international students will begin with English 520, for one or two terms, followed by electives in the spring term; these international students must be placed by the chair of the department. The remainder of the one-year international students begin with English 400/1, /2, followed by a course designated by the department chair in consultation with the students’ teachers. Any course so designated will fulfill diploma requirements. Seniors who are returning international students continue the sequence or select in accordance with placement by the department. Related courses, whose prerequisites vary, are listed elsewhere in this booklet.

Students in yearlong Senior electives may select the elective for the winter or spring term, as may any other Senior. All English courses meet for four prepared classes a week unless the course description states otherwise. No failed course may be made up simply by passing a makeup examination.

ENGL-100/0 An Introduction
(a yearlong commitment)
English 100 provides an introduction to the study of language and literature at Andover. In this Junior course, which cultivates the same skills and effects pursued throughout the English curriculum, students begin to understand the rich relationships among reading, thinking, and writing.

English 100 assents to Helen Vendler’s notion that “every good writer was a good reader first.” Accordingly, English 100 students work to develop their ability to read closely, actively, and imaginatively. They study not only what a text means but also how it produces meaning. They seek to make connections as they read—perhaps at first only connections between themselves and the text, but eventually connections within the text and between texts as well. All the while, however, English 100 students revel in the beauty, humor, and wisdom of the literature.

Over the three trimesters, English 100 students read literature of various genres and periods. Every class reads Homer’s Odyssey and at least one play by William Shakespeare. For the rest of the syllabus, teachers turn to a great many authors. Among those whose work is most regularly selected are Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck, and August Wilson.

English 100 students practice several types of writing, primarily in response to what they read. They write at times in narrative, expressive, and creative modes, but their efforts focus more and more on critical analysis. They learn to conceive of writing as a craft to be practiced and as a process to be followed. Through frequent assignments, both formal and informal, English 100 students come to value writing as a means of making sense of what they read and think. Attending carefully to their writing at the levels of the sentence, paragraph, and full essay, they learn to appreciate the power of the written critical argument. Although their work is substantially assessed throughout the year, students will not receive grades during the fall trimester. At the end of the term, their report cards will indicate “Pass” or “Failure.”

Lively, purposeful class discussions reinforce the lessons of reading and writing, and often leave students with especially fond memories of their English 100 experience. The course prepares our youngest students well for the further challenges of their education at Andover.

ENGL-200/0 Writing to Read, Reading to Write
(a yearlong commitment)
FALL TERM—During the fall term of English 200, classes focus on the process of writing. Students write often, virtually every day. Students will be exposed to a variety of rhetorical modes, such as narration, description comparison/ contrast, cause/effect, definition, example/ analogy, classification, and argument. By the end of the term, students should be able to organize, develop, and write cogent essays in four or five of these modes. Extensive revision will be encouraged, typically with peer reading. Teachers may use poems and stories from R.S. Gwynn’s Literature: A Pocket Anthology not as critical texts but as “inspirational” ones that will serve to generate a writing exercise. They also may choose to use a collection of essays by a particular writer and/or the online “Andover Reader.”

Additionally, the fall term works consciously on vocabulary development, usually drawing material from the essays, and grammar, using a text such as The Everyday Writer, The English Competence Handbook, or The Grammar of Alistair Barnstable. Grammar and sentence structure study will deal with the usage problems observable in the class, especially addressing such topics as run-ons and fragments, agreement of subject-verb and pronoun-antecedent, accurate modification, correct pronoun case, and punctuation.

WINTER TERM—In the winter term, students continue to work on the sentence and the paragraph, but the texts are anthologies of poetry and short fiction, and the subject matter is literature. While the course introduces literary terms and strategies for understanding poetry and fiction, the literature serves mainly as an opportunity to work on writing skills, reinforcing the lessons of the fall term and introducing argument and persuasion as patterns of thought that can guide the writer logically through a discussion about a poem or short story.

SPRING TERM—In the spring, each teacher chooses one or two works, including a novel, with which the class will spend the term working. Students continue to write in the modes introduced in the fall term and focus on organizing the essay and on incorporating research into it. Attention is given to anti-plagiarism training in which the responsible use of sources, particularly the Internet, is addressed.

English 300 and 400 emphasize writing about literature as a way to discover meaning; both encourage open discussion. Gradually, these courses stress longer and more sophisticated literary analyses. While emphasizing the analytical— both the close reading of texts and the focused writing that asserts a thesis and supports its points with extensive textual evidence— these courses also encourage other forms of expression, such as journals, narratives, role-plays, and parodies.

ENGL-300/4 The Story of Literature (T2)
(a two-term commitment)
All literature tells one story, the story of people’s experiences—their dreams, their desires, their acts, their mistakes. Inspired artists in every tribe and civilization have created tragedies, comedies, satires, and romances. Students in this course explore these forms by reading short stories, poems, novels, and plays from various historical periods and countries. English 300 is deeply concerned with the imaginative elements that lift a work out of its immediate circumstances and place it within the human community of culture. Texts common to all sections are Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (Term 1) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (Term 2). Substantial attention is given to women and ethnic writers. Authors commonly elected by teachers include Emily Bronte, Ralph Ellison, Jane Austen, and Toni Morrison.

ENGL-301/4 The Seasons of Literature
for New Uppers (T2)
(a two-term commitment)
For new Uppers, English 301 conforms in spirit and essence to English 300 but with more intensive attention to expository writing.

ENGL-310 Shakespeare
No writer has influenced the literature of the English-speaking world so much as William Shakespeare. He was both of his age and for all time. English 310 employs the perceptual and writing skills learned in the prior two terms and presents new, more complex problems and perspectives. Films and student performances of Shakespeare’s plays complement the study of the plays as literary texts. A common text shared among all sections is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

ENGL-400/1 American Studies for
ENGL-400/2 International Students
Primarily for, but not limited to, one-year students from abroad who are not yet ready for English 520, this course provides intensive training in reading, literary fundamentals, and expository writing. The focus of this course is on American culture, values, and traditions as reflected in literature and other media. One or two terms of this course will provide students with the reading and writing skills required for success in other Senior electives. (Dr. Vidal)

Specialized Courses, with the exception of English 520, are open to students who have successfully completed English 200 and 300 or 400. (A very few Uppers each year will be allowed to take a Senior elective in addition to the winter term of English 300 and/or English 310. Permission for this special privilege must be granted by the English chair.) Courses at the 500 level may require more than the standard four to five hours per week of homework. Each course has four class periods a week, unless specifically stated otherwise.While none of the department’s electives requires yearlong participation, students may choose to remain in a yearlong elective. The courses below are offered in the academic year 2007–2008, unless otherwise indicated.

ENGL-520/1 Strangers in a
ENGL-520/2 Strange Land
This course for one-year students explores how strangers adapt to new places and new modes of being. Does one reinvent oneself, conquer the new, or seamlessly assimilate? Works to be considered might include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, and poetry by Yosef Komunyakaa, Elizabeth Bishop, and Carolyn Forché. In both terms, the emphasis will be on close reading and textual analysis. (Ms. Curci)

ENGL-534/1 Gothic Literature:
Living in The Tomb
The course traces trends in Gothic forms, from its origins of the damp and dark castles of Europe to the aridity of the contemporary American landscape. Students will identify gothic conventions and themes such as the haunted house, family dynamics, apparitions, entrapment, secrecy, and the sublime. Students will read novels, short stories, and poetry spanning roughly 200 years in order to explore questions about the supernatural, the psychology of horror and terror, the significance of fantasy and fear, the desire for moral closure, and the roles of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Probable selections include The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole; Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe; Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier; Dracula, by Bram Stoker; The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James; stories by Poe, Faulkner, Gaskell, Irving, Hawthorne, Gilman, Jackson, Cheever,DeLillo, Carver, and Oates; and poetry of Christina Rossetti,Thomas Gray,William Cowper, Louise Gluck, and Sylvia Plath. Possible films include Affliction, The Royal Tenenbaums, A Simple Plan, Psycho, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (Mr. Tortorella)

ENGL-535/2 Politics, Subversion, and
the Heroic Tradition in
Children’s Literature This course considers the role of the imagination in communicating and effecting cultural change. Students will be asked to apply a variety of critical theory for interpretation and discussion of the literature. Themes this course will explore include alternative realities, the nature of dreams, the function of the subconscious, and the use of allegory. Probable selections include The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll; Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie; The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame; The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling; TheWizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum; The Pied Piper of Hamelin, by Robert Browning; The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett; A Child’s Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis; and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Mother Goose, writings of Carlos Castaneda, and essays by Bettelheim and Zipes. Possible films include The Red Balloon and The Point. (Mr. Tortorella)

ENGL-536/1 Children in Literature:
Growing Up in a ChangingWorld
What does it mean to be a child? What defines a “good” or “bad” kid? Is there a certain age or type of behavior that separates children from adults? When and how do we “grow up?” Are our expectations for boys and girls different? Should they be? This course will explore how our conceptualization of childhood has changed over time by looking at a variety of sources: philosophical and psychological texts about children and representations of children in literature and film for adults, as well as some works aimed at young readers.

We will focus on the emergence of self within contexts of family and community, exploring the processes of identity formation in both Western and non-Western narratives. We will pay particular attention to an analysis of gender roles and of education within these stories, pondering the ways in which different societies and their values become perpetuated through their fictional children.

Readings include Alcott, LittleWomen;Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Barrie, Peter Pan; Yezierska, Bread Givers; Golding, Lord of the Flies; Amado, Captains of the Sands; and poetry by Blake,Wordsworth, andDr. Seuss. Excerpted material includes Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education; Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; Rousseau, Emile; and a variety of fairy tales. Theory by Freud, Bettelheim, and Ariès is featured, as are films Central Station, Black Shack Alley, and Finding Nemo. (Dr. Vidal)

ENGL-537/2 Gender Roles in
ContemporaryWorld Fiction
Love, family, and passion have always been popular literary themes in a variety of cultures. However, there are different ways in which each culture approaches these subjects, especially as they relate to gender roles and the relationships between men and women (as well as men and men and women and women). In this course, we will go on a “trip around the world,” examining gender in a variety of contemporary cultural settings and comparing the fictional works that we will study to what we experience on a daily basis in American society. From traditional romantic obsession and rigid sex roles to challenges of these traditional roles and expectations, our texts will provide a variety of issues and perspectives to frame our discussions.

Readings include Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (Brazil); Rifaat, A Distant View of a Minaret (Egypt); Puig, Kiss of the SpiderWoman (Argentina); Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe); Ensler, Necessary Targets (Bosnia). Films include The Crying Game, Thelma & Louise, The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Strangers in Good Company, Angels in America, and excerpts from episodes of Sex and the City. (Dr. Vidal)

ENGL-538/1 Atomic America:
ENGL-538/2 American Literature
ENGL-538/3 1945–Present
Atomic America is a three-term elective, though students may opt to take any one term. (Winter and spring terms, however, will not be offered in 2007–2008.) Dealing mainly with literature, but also drawing on film and music, the class covers the period from 1945 to present in the United States with each term focused on particular decades.

The fall term looks at the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the Cold War, civil rights, and “the sixties” by reading literature and other texts in the context of history. For instance, students read short fiction and listen to the shifts in jazz in order to illuminate the changing political rhythms that produced civil rights in the 1950s. Students finish the fall term by tackling “the sixties,” the turbulence on campuses, and the radical shifts in the anti-war and civil rights movements.

The winter term asks what happened to that political activism in the ’70s and ’80s, as it is reflected mainly in the literature from the period. This term begins to sketch out the shifts from the social and political explosions of one atomic America into what has become an atomized America characterized by a tendency toward separation, specialization, and privatization.

The spring term looks at the late ’80s to the present. The first half of the spring term reflects the further atomization of America through the seemingly opposed political trends of multiculturalism and a general cultural conservatism: contracts with America, gated communities, niche marketing, the ascendance of personal technologies, etc. During the latter half of the spring term, the class will try to confront this social atomization directly by engaging in service- learning opportunities. In small groups of, say, four students, participants will read about a population that reflects atomization—recently these texts have included literature about the elderly, AIDS victims, illegal immigrants, and prisoners—and then weekly they will visit, work with, serve and be served by these people so as to break down the barriers that might exist. Students will then write a final paper that reflects on the literature and their experience. (Dr. Kane)

ENGL-539A/1 Being, Thinking, Doing
Through reading and discussing the expression of human values in selected works, students in this philosophy and literature course explore two broad questions: “How do people live their lives?” and “How should people live their lives?” Within this framework, students think reflectively about the beliefs they and their society have developed, and they look at the emergence of different epistemological, ethical, and political ideals and responses to life. Readings may include Agee and Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Bonfoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Percy’s The Moviegoer, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and selections from Aristotle, Epictetus, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. (Mr. Fox)

ENGL-539B/3 Cinema Symbiosis
As the historian Daniel J. Boorstin points out, with the addition of sound in the late 1920s, film became what the composer Richard Wagner had sought: the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. Utilizing aspects of architecture, literature, music, painting, photography, and theater, film became the most popular form of art in the world and the dominant form of the 20th century.

This intensive course introduces students to the study of film, helps them develop the skills necessary to read and analyze film, and provides them with a survey of some of the major movements and genres in film history. Students screen films by Charles Chaplin, Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, and Martin Scorsese, among others. In addition, students read critical essays on each film and study several literary works—perhaps ones by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Bibhutibhushan, Bandopadhyay, Russell Banks, Anthony Burgess, Arthur C. Clarke, Dashiell Hammett, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, or Flannery O’Connor—that have been adapted to the screen.

Students must be able to screen films two evenings each week and should expect to devote approximately 12 hours each week to the course, including class time. (Mr. Fox)

ENGL-540A/1 NonfictionWriting
ENGL-540A/2
ENGL-540A/3
(Students may take terms 1 and 3, or 2 and 3, but not terms 1 and 2.) This is a writing workshop for students interested in becoming skilled writers. In this course writers will develop their talents in the art of essay writing. The course requires that the student write extensive pieces in a number of nonfiction modes: personal essay, analysis, argument, and feature writing. While there are not always daily assignments, students can expect to be writing nightly. They also can expect to read extensively in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers. Students are encouraged to submit their work for publication. In the spring term, the focus shifts to consider the art of the memoir. Students write short autobiographical exercises and read several examples of memoirs in preparation for writing an extended piece about their own experience. Texts may include Richard Wright, Black Boy; Annie Dillard, A Writer’s Life; Paul Monette, Becoming a Man; and John Gould, The Withering Child.

ENGL-541A/1 Writing Through the
ENGL-541A/2 Universe of Discourse
ENGL-541A/3
This is a course for students interested in experimenting with many different genres of writing. Throughout the term, students create a portfolio of writing that includes essays, poetry, short fiction, literary criticism, autobiography, and letters. The course is designed to serve all kinds of students, but particularly those who would like to gain confidence in their writing skills. Once a week, students are invited (not required) to join a Community Service writing workshop with Lawrence elementary school students.

Readings include texts from a variety of cultures. Authors include Malcolm X, Martin Espada, Julia Alvarez, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Piri Thomas, Raymond Carver, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoi, Stephen Biko, Louise Erdrich, Nikki Giovanni, Sandra Cisneros, Don DeLillo, William Blake, Amy Tan, Sherman Alexie, Rita Dove, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Gabriel García Márquez, Anthony Morales, Bruce Smith, and Maya Angelou. (Mr. Bernieri)

ENGL-541B/3 Media Studies:
A Journey Through the Looking Glass
What does it mean to be fully literate in the information age? How do images and language collaborate to affect our perceptions of self and of the world that beckons us beyond the threshold of graduation? This course will engage students’ abilities to critically read and meaningfully produce a variety of messages in a fastmoving world of information management. Working from the premise that all messages are constructed, and the corollary that those constructions are driven by explicit and hidden agendas, we will examine the intersection of truth and truthiness with desire and commodification in themultimediamessages that we produce and consume every day. Students will approach the idea of reading from an interdisciplinary perspective, and projects will include creative expression and analytical writing. Our texts: news, advertising, reality television, pop music, blogs, and social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube. Our quest: Who are we?Who do we wish to be?What’s cool?Where is the truth? (Ms. Tousignant)

ENGL-543/2 James Joyce
ENGL-543/3
Five class periods. The first term is devoted to Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist; the second termto Ulysses.The purposes of the course are to develop the skill to read important and difficult works without the aid of study guides or other secondary material, and to follow the development of Joyce as an artist. Although the course may be taken in either term, the student gains a better sense of Joyce’s genius by enrolling for two terms. (Mr. O’Connor)

ENGL-550A Great Traditions in Literature:
The Epic Poem
(not offered in 2007–2008)
This course studies the development of the epic poem through Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern contexts. Texts include The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Metamorphoses, and Moby Dick (even years); Paradise Lost and The Inferno (odd years). (Mr. McGraw)

ENGL-550D Yeats and the Irish Tradition
(not offered in 2007–2008)
Since the establishment of Ireland’s independence in 1921, the unique contribution of this nation’s literature and culture has gained increasing international recognition.W.B. Yeats, the first of four Irish Nobel laureates and one of the dominant poets of the 20th century, played a key role in the revival of Irish culture. The course will focus not only on Yeats’ poetry and drama, but on the great artists who preceded and followed him. Poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as art, music, and film, will be considered as part of this course, including some of the following: Poetry: Selected Poems, W.B. Yeats; Opened Ground, Seamus Heaney; The Water Horse, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Fiction: The Year of the French, Thomas Flanagan; Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane; Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth. Drama: Selected Plays, W.B. Yeats; The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea, J.M. Synge; Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett; Translations, Brian Friel. Film: Michael Collins (director, Neil Jordan), The Field (director, Jim Sheridan), Cal (director, Pat O’Connor). (Mr. O’Connor)

ENGL-550G Words and Music
(W)
Open to Seniors and Uppers. This two-credit course serves as both a music course (MUSC- 380) and an English course (ENGL-550G) and receives a credit in each department. As a double course, it requires more homework than that of a regular elective.

“If music be the food of love, play on …” Literature and music have long been intertwined, composers being inspired by words to turn them into chants and songs, writers writing prose and poetry that aspire to the state of music. Following a chronological path, we will study Gregorian chant and Renaissance motets, Shakespeare (especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream), classic poems and Classical opera, Romantic song and lyric poetry, Yeats and Joyce (“The Dead”) and Celtic music, and modern and contemporary literature, song, and musicals (including Eliot’s Four Quartets, Argento’s Diary of Virginia Woolf, Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues, and Sondheim’s Into theWoods).We will examine the music effects of poetry, the treatment of language in songs and chant, and theme and form in both music and literature. Students will write short critical papers and work on small composition assignments; they also will be tested on listening assignments (to sharpen their aural skills). Toward the end of the term, the class will collaborate in the writing/composition of an original music or light (possibly rock) opera, which will be performed during the assessment period. Because of the amount of independent work in the course, the Dean of Studies’ Office will review schedules of students seeking to take this course as part of a four-course schedule. Prerequisite: Music 220, Music 270, or permission of the instructor. (Dr. Fan/Dr.Warsaw)

ENGL-560A/1 Great Themes
ENGL-560A/2 from America: Land,
ENGL-560A/3 Conflict andWar, Family
This course is a study of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in which men and women struggle for identity and self-realization in a world of change and cultural upheaval. The readings for each term, drawn from a variety of cultures, will be organized on central motifs (fall: The Land; winter: Conflict and War; spring: Family) and students will trace connections between the nature of ideas and the forms of expression. Texts may include Thoreau, Walden; Faulkner, The Bear; Cather, O Pioneers!; MacLeod, Island; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; O’Brien, Going After Cacciato; McCarthy, Blood Meridian; Faulkner, The Unvanquished; Kennedy, Very Old Bones; Faulkner, Light in August; and Morrison, Jazz. (Mr. Stableford)

ENGL-560D Modern American
(W) Literature—Rosebud:
The Restless Search for an American Identity
Students who take ENGL-560D must also take Art 420. As a culture we always have been fascinated by identity, by quests to forge one or by the machinations to invent one. American artists Edward Hopper, Robert Frank, and Beverly Buchanan, for example, reflect observations of self and describe the identity of others relative to the world around them. Many of our enduring American works of literature and film, such as The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and Citizen Kane, center on the search for self. For most of us, the search for identity is an unending process in a constantly changing, more global America. This exploration will be brought into focus through film, literature, and the visual arts in a two-credit multidisciplinary course. Students will be required to write papers, lead discussions, view weekly films (scheduled in addition to the four class periods), and present projects shaped from their evolving ideas about identity. Possible texts include Continental Drift, Banks; The Awakening, Chopin; The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Fuhrman. Films include The Last Picture Show; Elephant; Gas Food Lodging. (Mr. Bardo)

ENGL-560F/1 An Introductory Survey
ENGL-560F/2 of African American
ENGL-560F/3 Literature
This seminar course offers an overview of African American literature through reading and writing assignments, discussions, student-led seminars, and visiting lecturers on art, music, and history. Trips to museums and jazz or blues club performances enhance the students’ appreciation of cultural contexts. In their end-of-term projects, which may be literary or more broadly focused in African American art or history, students pursue interests developed during the term, but their projects may focus beyond the literary periods covered in a particular term.The fall term focuses on the vernacular tradition (from worksongs to rap), on the literature of slavery and freedom, on the literature of Reconstruction, and on the literature of the New Negro and the early years of the Harlem Renaissance. In the winter, students read the literature of the later years of the Harlem Renaissance and African American expressions of realism, naturalism, and modernism. In the spring, Black Arts Movement and African American literature since 1970 are the foci of the course. (Mr. Sykes)

ENGL-560G/1 Literature of the CivilWar
Historian Shelby Foote said, “Any understanding of this nation has to be based on an understanding of the Civil War.” But how can one possibly understand the Civil War? Since the conflict began, countless Americans have tried to make sense of it—through letters, journals, memoirs, photographs, songs, poems, novels, films, and histories. In this course, we will attempt to reach some understanding of the CivilWar and its legacy. Although our approach will necessarily be interdisciplinary, our principal focus will be the various literature of the war. The writers we study most likely will include, but not be limited to, Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Mitchell, Toni Morrison, Robert Penn Warren, Walt Whitman, and C. Vann Woodward. (Mr. Domina)

ENGL-570/3 The Play’s the Thing:
Advanced Shakespeare
While most of us meet Shakespeare in a book, his true home is on the stage. The course will cover three plays in depth, and close reading and textual analysis will be our primary focus. Emphasis also will be placed on learning to direct, stage, and speak Shakespeare “trippingly on the tongue,” so that we can appreciate and learn from the Bard the way he intended. (Ms. Curci)

ENGL-571A/1 The Short Novel:
ENGL-571A/2 Risk and Romance
This course uses a mix of seminar classes, films, and regular, individual student-teacher conferences to examine experimental short novels from around the world. Students learn to draw conclusions about the artistic and social forces that gave rise to these novels. Each term draws comparisons among works by Vonnegut,Mann, Joyce, Walker, Puig, Rulfo, Enchi, Duras, Achebe, Hemingway, McCullers, Camus, Salinger, Garcia, and others. (Mr. Peffer)

ENGL-571B/3 Fresh Fiction: Advanced
WritingWorkshop in Contemporary Storytelling
This course is open to students who have completed a creative writing course successfully or who have an abiding enthusiasm for composing fiction.

Inspired by the freshest voices in fiction and screen writing today, this workshop allows writers to explore the artistic and thematic frontiers of contemporary storytelling. Over the course of the term students will work to create their own collections of stories or a novella. Gutsy stories, original characters, and vigorous editing/rewriting are our aims. Companion readings from writers like Zadie Smith, Chang Rae Lee, Sandra Cisneros, Khaled Hosseini, Nathan Singer, Bobbie Ann Mason, the Coen Brothers, and Jim Jamusch will offer inspiration. (Mr. Peffer)

ENGL-572A/1 Welcome to the Apocalypse
Confronted with the complexity of the world’s problems, one easily can feel likeWile E. Coyote, well beyond the cliff ’s edge, staring at the abyss below. Presented as a Senior seminar this course will explore critical issues facing us, such as refugees and immigration, wealth and resource disparities, terrorism and individual rights.

Central to our collective endeavor will be examining through fiction and weekly films the interconnections between various conflicting forces, as well as the search for solutions. The term will culminate with class projects devoted to addressing local and global issues.

Readings include Waiting for the Barbarians, GraceLand, Saturday Snow, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Imagining Argentina, Death and the Maiden. Films include The Constant Gardener, Dirty Pretty Things, Tstosi, Osama, Darwin’s Nightmare, Elephant, Do the Right Thing, Hotel Rwanda. (Mr. Bardo)

ENGL-573/1 History and the Novel
ENGL-573/2
ENGL-573/3
AsWorldWar I ended, VirginiaWoolf, a novelist who had once planned to be a historian, wrote, “The history books will make it all much more definite than it is.” This course considers the ways that some novelists seem to offer their own form of history in the indefinite, symbolic world of fiction.

FALL TERM—Jane Austen and the Threat of the Modern. Readers of our time tend to find her world very tranquil, but Austen lived in the midst of revolutions—the American, the French, the Industrial, and the Romantic. Reading Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion, students will consider in particular Austen’s response to Romanticism and to the changes in her society.

WINTER TERM—Charles Dickens and Victorian London. The city, which Wordsworth believed posed a threat to the imagination, has, oddly enough, inspired some of the most visionary novelists. The text this term will be Bleak House, an extraordinary blend of comedy, Gothic mystery, and social protest, told through intersecting double narrative. Students also will study paintings and photographs of London and read poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, and Eliot.

SPRING TERM—World War I in Fiction. Students will study the ways in which World War I and its aftermath became the subject of some of the most innovative fiction of the early 20th century. The central text will be Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway. Other possibilities are To the Lighthouse, also by Woolf; D.H. Lawrence’s The Ladybird; Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House; Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier; Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and short stories by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. (Dr. Fulton)

ENGL-574 The Longest Novel Ever Written
Anthony Powell, who died in 2000, wrote a massive 12-volume comic novel called A Dance to the Music of Time. It consists of more than a million words, several hundred characters, and 2,948 pages. The novel follows the life of its English narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, who resembles Powell himself in many ways: Eton and Oxford student in the 1920s, London writer during the 1930s, Army officer during World War II, mature novelist in the postwar period. Powell has a sophisticated satirical eye as he describes the British intelligentsia, some of them based on actual people. The characters, however, with their extraordinary names and manners— Charles Strongham, Dicky Umfraville, Myra Erdleigh, Bijou Ardglass, Scorpio Murtlock, and above all, the odious Kenneth Widmerpool—far transcend any real-life models. We will read four volumes a term (each of which stands as an independent novel). Thus, each term can stand alone, although a student may choose to follow the entire sequence during the course of the year. (Mr. Gould)

ENGL-576/1 Journalism
ENGL-576/3
This course on print journalism recognizes the challenges all journalists face in their efforts to be fair and also accurate as they struggle to gather information and churn out lively copy under deadline pressure. The course is designed to teach essential journalistic judgment, basic skills for gathering and verifying news, and interviewing and writing techniques. Students will receive weekly assignments on deadline for news articles, feature stories, columns, and editorials, and all students will work as both reporters and editors as the course progresses. Weekly lectures will cover significant events in the history of journalism, First Amendment issues, current events, and concerns in both print and electronic journalism, and will include discussion of fairness, objectivity, transparency, independence from faction, intellectual honesty, and diversity, among other important topics.The core text, The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach andTom Rosenstiel, will be supplemented with information and exercises on www.Newseum.org, the Freedom Foundation’s Museum of News Web site. Distinguished Andover alumni currently working as professional journalists will be enlisted for guest lectures and to edit students’ articles.

Journalism in the spring continues the work from fall term; however, the spring course is open to all and no experience is necessary. The course begins with a brief overview of significant current events in American journalism before turning to the study of advanced skills in reporting, writing, editing, and shooting photographs for newspapers. The emphasis spring term will be on in-depth feature stories, news packages, and investigations. Initially students with journalism experience will act as editors for newcomers to the field.

Readings for the course are the New York Times; the Boston Globe; excerpts from the News About the News, by Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert Kaiser; Naked in Baghdad, by Anne Garrels; and The Elements of Journalism, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. Films will include Absence ofMalice, All the President’sMen, The Year of Living Dangerously, and Silkwood. (Ms. Scott)

ENGL-577/2 The Literature of TravelWriting
WINTER TERM—The British scholar Paul Fussell writes that “successful travel writing mediates between two poles: the individual thing it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is ‘about,’ on the other. A travel book will make the reader aware of a lot of things—ships, planes, trains, donkeys, sore feet, hotels, bizarre customs and odd people, unfamiliar weather, curious architecture, and risky food. At the same time, a travel book will reach in the opposite direction and deal with these data so as to suggest that they are not wholly inert and discrete but are elements of a much larger meaning, a meaning metaphysical, political, psychological, artistic, or religious—but always, somehow, ethical.”

In the course, students will read excerpts from travel literature over time and write three travel essays of their own. Writers will include Herodotus, Pausanius,Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, RalphWaldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Freya Stark, D.H. Lawrence, Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, Margaret Atwood, Annie Dillard, and David FosterWallace. (Ms. Scott)

ENGL-578/1 Feasts and Fools:
ENGL-578/2 Revelers and Puritans
ENGL-578/3 in Literature and Life
This course examines what Jean Toomer called “the good-time spirit” and its opposite, as manifest in major literature, including drama and film. Along with critical writing on literature, the students occupy themselves with parties and festivities in their lives, as well as in other cultures. Personal essays may lead to anthropological, architectural, performative, and semiological research projects, creative writing, and reports. Texts have included Mrs. Dalloway, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Love in the Time of Cholera, Vile Bodies, LikeWater for Chocolate, The Custom of the Country, A Year in Provence, House of Sand and Fog, selected short stories, and poetry. Films include Babette’s Feast, Much Ado About Nothing, and Table Manners. (Dr.Wilkin)

ENGL-581/3 Contemporary
American Poetry
This course will introduce students to poets and movements that have shaped the direction and contours of American poetry since World War II. Students first study the Beat Movement and then explore the so-called “schools” of poetry— Black Mountain, New York, Confessional, et al. The course finishes with an exposure to poetry that is happening right now, which includes bicultural and multicultural poets. Most class time will be spent deriving themes through discussions of poets, poems, poetic movements, criticism, and theory. Poets include Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Dylan, Waldman, Bukowski, Creeley, Olson, Levertov, Ashbury, O’Hara, Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Bishop, Rich, Dove, Hass, Kinnell, Hogan, Nye, Springsteen, and Colvin. (Mr. Tortorella)

ENGL-582A Contemporary
Caribbean Literature:
Better than Spring
Break in Jamaica
(not offered in 2007–2008)
Bearing a historical legacy of slavery and colonialism, the Caribbean today is viewed by many people as a tourist paradise, a place to relax and have “fun in the sun.” Nevertheless, the fact that, in recent years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded twice to Caribbean authors (St. Lucian Derek Walcott and Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul) is an important indicator of the quality of the cultural production in this archipelago. In this course, we will examine Caribbean literature from various islands, investigating their significance as representatives of a “common” (?) Caribbean experience. Through our responses to different literary texts (novels, plays, poems, essays), as well as to film and music from the region, we will ponder the issue of identity (both individual and collective), trying to articulate what it means to be “Caribbean” nowadays. Writers include Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Jacques Roumain, Jamaica Kincaid, Julia Alvarrez, Rosario Ferré, Esmeralda Santiago, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and V.S. Naipaul. Films include Sugar Cane Alley and Strawberry and Chocolate. The course includes a service-learning component with the Dominican and Haitian immigrant communities in Lawrence. (Dr. Vidal)

ENGL-582B/ Brazilian Cultural Studies
HIST-SS578
(S)
Four class periods. See also HIST-SS578. One of the largest countries in the world and with a diverse population, geography, and economic base, Brazil is poised to become one of the “giants” of 21st-century global development. This course will look into important moments in the political, economic, literary, and artistic histories of the country in the 19th and 20th centuries, attempting to understand how Brazil came to be what it is today and what it could become in the future.We will pay specific attention to the nation’s formative years after independence from Portugal in 1822, the coffee boom of the early 20th century, the Vargas and Kubitschek regimes, the military dictatorship of the 1960s and ’70s, and the new democratic period of recent years.These historical moments will be studied through the lens of the literature, film, art, and music being produced at the time. Of special interest will be the work of Machado de Assis, Gilberto Freyre, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Amado, the participants in the 1922Week ofModern Art movement, and the protest songs and films depicting life under the military regime. A student in this course is elegible for credit in either English or history. A student who wishes to receive English credit should sign up for ENGL-582B; a student who wishes to receive history credit should sign up for HISTSS578. (Dr. Vidal)

ENGL-583 Writers in Depth
(F-W)
The writers for 2007–2008 are Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two immensely popular figures who, with Faulkner, defined and critiqued the social order of their day. The course examines these writers as they perceived themselves and were perceived by others. Students learn of the artistic and societal influences on their short stories, novels, and memoirs, with the central question being what their writing means to us. The course also will consider what their biographers and critics have said about them. Students will keep a journal on their reading and class discussion, write frequent short papers, conduct a seminar, and do a term project. Hemingway texts include In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and A Moveable Feast; Fitzgerald texts include The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, and Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. (Ms. Kelly)

ENGL-585 CreativeWriting: Poetry
(F-W-S)
This course is for students committed to reading and writing poetry. Students will be asked to write about poetry in addition to composing their own poetry. Although students are not expected to submit portfolios or samples of their work to qualify for this class, they must be serious about writing poetry. Previous experience helps, but it is not necessary. (Mr. Lychack)

ENGL-586 CreativeWriting: Fiction
(F-W-S)
This course is for students committed to reading and writing short fiction. Students will be asked to write about short fiction in addition to composing their own short fiction. Although students are not expected to submit portfolios or samples of their work to qualify for this class, they must be serious about writing fiction. Previous experience helps, but it is not necessary. (Mr. Lychack)

ENGL-587/1 Neither Fear Nor
Courage: Modernism
Across the 20th Century
In the waning hours of the Belle Époque, under the calamitous shadow of a devastating world war, the advent of the 1900s in Europe and America witnessed a profound change in the established social order. A breach of faith in the ability of traditional literary modes to represent the dissonance of modern life ensued. This course will examine stories of character in crisis: the modern hero’s struggle to find moral order and certainty in a world that no longer makes sense according to conventional structures of meaning. From the birth ofmodernismthrough its recent legacy, students will read fiction and poetry that seek new ways of conceiving the human self as a creature of alienation and longing.

FALL TERM—Students will read masterpieces of high modernism written in English, including The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot; To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf; and Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner.

WINTER TERM—Students will move beyond the Anglo-American tradition to works not originally written in English, wandering among immortal gypsies, flying carpets, pandas in the mist, and elusive promises of impossible love. Where does the yearning soul find peace? What magic lurks in the darkest dreams?Works include poetry by Andre Breton and two novels: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian. (Ms. Tousignant)

ENGL-588/1 Adapting Shakespeare
ENGL-588/2
From Japan to America’s heartland, Shakespeare’s work has had such an extraordinary influence on countless novelists, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers that Shakespeare himself never could have anticipated. This course will seek to explore that influence by examining the texts from which Shakespeare created his own adaptations, studying his plays, and focusing on contemporary film and book adaptations that respond to them. For the final project, students will have the opportunity to create their own Shakespearean adaptation in any form they choose: a painting or drawing, a song or musical piece, a short story or scene, a poem, a dance, costuming, etc. Students may elect to take one or both terms of this course. Possible films and works over the two trimesters may include Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (excerpts), Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lee Blessing’s Fortinbras, Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s Gertrude Talked Back, Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Morrissette’s Scotland, PA, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Junder’s 10 Things I Hate About You, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, O’Haver’s Get Over It, the Shakespeare episode of Star Trek, Salman Rushdie’s Yorick, and Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad SleepWell. (Ms. Grieco)

ENGL-590A/3 Mirror, Mirror: Images of Men andWomen
In reading literature we look for ourselves. The images of men and women we encounter reflect ourselves, and they recast us: our views of male and female ideals, our standards for sexual interaction. Through the study of novels, poems, plays, and film, we will sort through various and conflicting images of men and women, looking for what seems true and false in society and in ourselves. We will begin with the Cinderella story, reading Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, screening excerpts from Pretty Woman, Rebecca, Rocky, Coming Home, and The Karate Kid. Then we will consider the battle of the sexes, reading poetry through the ages, as well as The Color Purple and plays (Maugham’s The ConstantWife, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carole Braverman’s Yiddish TrojanWomen), and screening excerpts of The Color Purple, with clips from Adam’s Rib, Psycho, Goldfinger, Dangerous Liaisons, Diva, and (if time permits) La Cage aux Folles and The Birdcage. Students will keep a journal, write in-class paragraphs and critical papers, and write a film treatment and screenplay excerpt. (Dr. Fan)

ENGL-590B/1 Relic and Ritual:
Renewal in the Mythic Past and Future
This course looks to myths—which give the world meaning—to connect us to a mysterious primal past and (when those myths are recast as science fiction and fantasy) to provide visions for our future. From Anglo-Saxon legend to Shakespeare, from Victorian poetry to the modern novel and to film, we will trace this search for meaning and identity in the quests for sacred objects; and we will look at how we seek renewal in the rituals embedded in our fictions. Readings include Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and related poems by Heaney, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Eliot’s TheWaste Land and The Four Quartets, John Gardner’s Grendel, and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony. We will view excerpts from the Indiana Jones series and consider (fleetingly) the twin phenomena of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter—as well as examine heroes like Superman, Batman, and James Bond, not to mention Luke Skywalker and the captains of the starship Enterprise (and other figures sprung from myth). We will make regular visits to the PeabodyMuseum of Archeology, and we will acquaint ourselves with the museum’s collection, working to achieve an anthropological and archeological perspective. Students will keep a journal, write in-class paragraphs and critical papers, present a film clip with mythic relevance, and devise a creative project involving an object from the Peabody. (Dr. Fan)

ENGL-591/2 The Novel After Modernism
In the middle of the 20th century, writers began to move past both the period and the styles that we still call “modern.” What does it mean for a novel to be past modern? Postmodern? Past postmodern? Can a contemporary novel still be a modern novel? In this course we will study the recent progress of the novel genre. We will read aggressively, studying four or five novels per term. In the winter we will read the work of American novelists; in the spring we will read the work of international novelists. Our authors may include Russell Banks, J.M. Coetzee, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, Gabriel GarciaMárquez, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, José Saramago, and Zadie Smith. (Mr. Domina)

ENGL-592 A Hard Rain:
(S) An Interdisciplinary
Senior Seminar
This five-hour course serves as both an art course and an English course and results in a credit in each department. As a double course, it requires more homework than that of a regular elective. This course examines through literature, film, art, and music, various social and political movements that emerged in America during the 1960s as the country fought an internally divisive war in Vietnam. Students must enroll in both courses. Class meets for a single five-hour course block, with one additional required film per week. Homework is the equivalent of a two-credit course. Assignments include written work, art projects, and a final presentation that responds to the course’s themes. Readings include The Things They Carried, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and essays, poems, and other selections from The Portable Sixties Reader. Weekly films (viewed in addition to regularly scheduled classes) include Atomic Cafe, Hearts and Minds, Coming Home, Full Metal Jacket, Bamboozled, and The Graduate. Because of the amount of independent work in the course, the Dean of Studies’ Office will review schedules of students seeking to take this course as part of a four-course schedule. Seniors may take this course to fulfill the second term of their art requirement. (Mr. Bardo/Ms. Veenema)

ENGL-593/1 PlayWriting
Each student is expected to write at least one one-act play in addition to certain exercises in monologue, dialogue, and scene-setting. The class reads aloud from students’ works in progress, while studying the formal elements in plays by important playwrights and reading selected literary criticism focused on drama. (Mr. Heelan)

ENGL-594/3 The American Dream
in Literature and Film
Mark Twain observed, “Virtue never has been as respectable as money.” In this intensive survey course, we will study the pursuit of the American Dream in literature and film and focus on the stories of those who fulfill it, fall short of it, stay true to it, or distort it. Short stories, novels, and films may include Ralph Ellison’s Did You Ever Dream Lucky?; Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener; TennesseeWilliams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; Edward Albee’s The American Dream; Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; Philip Roth’s American Pastoral; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or The Great Gatsby; Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day; Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club; The Godfather, Part I; Wallstreet; A Place in the Sun; and poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Carl Sandberg. (Ms. Grieco)

ENGL-595A/1 Last Acts: Remember Me?
“I got shot,” Tupac Shakur declares at the opening of his posthumous film Resurrection, and the viewer asks, “How did he know that was going to happen?” This course begins with some basic questions: How will I be remembered? Can I influence that memory? This is a course that looks at literature and other cultural texts (film, photography, music) produced as a response to those questions, works that the instructor calls automortography: a genre that centers on acts of self-representation in the face of death and the mode of reading that such a genre produces. Automortography, then is not only how someone consciously or unconsciously anticipates and scripts one’s death, but also how the audience reads works through the lens of that writer’s death, thus touching on the larger question of how we memorialize others (i.e., in museums and memorials). In the course, we will explore a range of texts from Keats to Tupac so as to understand these figures, their predicaments and contexts, and why we need and how we use this mode of reading. In taking several diverse cases together, we might ask, “Are they keeping it real or is this genre a ploy or performance?” Potentially drawing on examples ranging across disciplines, literary figures to consider may include Sylvia Plath, Reinaldo Arenas, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Jane Kenyon, May Sarton, William Gaddis, Malcom X, and Mark Twain. (Dr. Kane)

ENGL-595B/2 Troubling Literature:
Contesting Authority
in and Through Literature
What do Keanu Reeves and Osama bin Laden have in common? They both play the part of postmodern prophets, the former in TheMatrix, and the latter on the news. They both reflect a widespread dissatisfaction with the same technologies and virtual realities that helped produce them. Such figures use themedia even as they see themedia as symbolizing the demise of their fundamental beliefs. The idea of this course comes from the troubling of traditions in recent literary works (by the likes of Sebald, Calvino, Pynchon, etc.) and the resurgence of fundamentalisms in the United States and around the globe. An example: In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeni, the leader of Iran, issued a fatwa (a death sentence) for the Indo-British writer Salman Rushdie because he felt Rushdie’s novel, Satanic Verses, was heretical.While we may or may not use this novel, the situation epitomizes the relationship of modes of writing that seek to trouble accepted truths and a mode of reading that characterizes fundamentalism. Rather than being strictly bound by period or locale, the course will explore the relationship of these subversive or troubling and fundamentalist modes. By looking at the intersections and relation of these works, we can gain a greater appreciation for the source of some of today’s conflicts in the United States and around the globe. The course will ask the question: Are we to or how can we read a text literally? In addition we will address wider questions of meaning, authority, and context. What makes something sacred or canonical and who gets to decide, and what does it mean to trouble the sacred?Texts will be drawn from a variety of contexts. (Dr. Kane)