All Courses
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ENGL 132PR - PHILIP ROTH - Winter 2023
Philip Roth was a central and controversial figure in American fiction for over fifty years. He subsequently published over twenty novels in a variety of modes, from the satirical to the experimental to the historical. In his American trilogy, the scope of his fiction expanded to produce a portrait of post-war America as riven, from the McCarthy era to the Clinton impeachment, by the conflict between the quest for purity (political, sexual, ethnic, and racial) and “life in all its shameless impurity.” This course surveys his career from the earliest short fiction to the end of the last century. Roth delighted in provoking his readers and students to be prepared to be offended by his treatment of women, Jews and people of color.
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ENGL 132WE - WALT WHIT EMILY DIC - Winter 2023
This seminar-style course offers an in-depth look at American literature’s two most path-breaking poets: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Considered canonical today, these two were outliers in their own time, unrecognized by the literary establishment and largely unknown to the public, thanks to their unwillingness to conform to literary expectations. A working-class gay man, Whitman was the country’s first urban poet as well as the first to write openly about sex. He also was the first poet in English to completely reject traditional rhyme and meter in favor of a free verse of his own design. A sheltered middle-class woman of ambiguous sexuality, Dickinson evaded conventional expectations about marriage and religion to devote herself instead to an unconventional poetry of fierce interiority that fractured traditional forms and ordinary syntax. This course is limited to 25 students. Students should come to class having read the assigned reading and prepared responses for class discussion.