Sweet Briar College

2010-2011 Catalog In this course, we will examine Early Modernliterature written by women- as well as literaturewritten by men about women- that exploreswomen’s various roles in both personal andpublic Renaissance settings. Offered alternateyears. May be counted as an adjunct course towardthe minor in gender studies. III.W, V.2, V.5.Prerequisites: One 100-level ENGL course andpermission of the instructor. Study at an intermediatelevel of selected topics in literature orwriting to be pursued by individual studentsunder the immediate supervision of a departmentmember.Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission.This course explores Romantic poets and Gothicnovelists, focusing on key Romantic ideas such asthe artist as hero, the sublime, nature and the imagination,the irrational, and revolution. It will thenstudy parallel developments in painting throughthe examples of Constable, Delacroix, and Turner,and in music through the examples of Beethoven,Chopin, Liszt, and Berlioz. Offered alternate years.V.1, V.2.Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor,department chair, and dean. This course isgraded P/CR/NC only.Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. Astudy of the major western playwrights, dramatictheories, and theatrical styles of the twentieth century.The dramatists studied will include Ibsen,Chekov, Synge, Pirandello, O’Neill, Williams,Miller, Beckett, Ionesco, Hansberry, Pinter, andWilson. Offered alternate years. V.2, V.6a.Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission.This course is designed to suggest the range,variety, and possibilities of the novel today.Readings will come from all across the Englishspeakingworld. Their diversity will itself be acentral theme. Since these works also registerdeep responses to social changes and historicalcrises, discussions will often focus on relationsbetween literary texts and their wider contexts.Offered alternate years. Not open to studentswho have credit for ENGL 398. III.W, V.2.Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission.This course will study the conjunction betweensex and death in the nineteenth-century novel.It will explore the relationship between prostitutionand death, criminality and death, and carnallove and death in the novels of Flaubert, Zola,Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, ThomasHardy, and Mary Shelley. Theoretical worksto be studied are those of Foucault, Freud, andDarwin. Offered alternate years. V.2.Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission.This course focuses on the poetry of Yeats,Lawrence, Eliot, Stein, Millay, and Hughes. Wewill study their distinctive poetic achievementsin relation to relevant traditions and contexts.In particular we will examine how their poetryreflects or contests modern ideas about the self,the nature of language, the significance of poeticforms, and the purpose of poetry. Offered alternateyears in the fall semester. May be counted asan adjunct course toward the minor in gender studies.III.O, V.2.Prerequisite: Sophomores with permission. Astudy of a wide range of poetry in Englishfrom the mid-twentieth century to the present.Poets may include Auden, Larkin, Bishop,Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Brooks, Rich, Heaney,and Walcott. We will focus on questions ofform, technique, and interpretation while relatingthese works to relevant movements and traditionsas well as to the writers’ lives and times.Offered alternate years in the spring semester.May be counted as an adjunct course toward theminor in gender studies. III.O, V.2.