Page 119 of Boston College 2005-2006 University Catalog by Boston College University

tion in Ireland, as well as contemporary reinventions and parodies of Ascendancy novelistic forms. Readings include postcolonial and feminist debates about this literature. Vera Kreilkamp EN 752 Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Fall: 3) Meant for graduate students (and advanced undergraduates) seeking a challenge, headed for a Ph.D. program, and/or interested in contemporary theory, this interactive course will examine book-length studies as well as some essays and excerpted chapters. While a psychoanalytic undercurrent runs through much of the material, a variety of theories will be covered, such as deconstruction, feminism, post-colonialism, film, queer, and probably race and Marxist theory. Theorists apt to be included are Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan, Zizek, Butler, Adorno, Agamben, Bersani, Fanon, Bhabha, Deleuze, and Foucault. Frances Restuccia EN 769 Dickens (Fall: 3) Charles Dickens, the first great master of the popular literary marketplace, wrote prolifically in many genres: novels, stories, letters, and several kinds of journalistic essay. This course will center on three pairings of early and late Dickens novels. Along with each pair we will read selected letters, journalism, and biographical/critical materials in order to build up a picture of Dickens characteristic conflicts, and the variations he played on them throughout his career. Our special concern will be to interrogate the interplay between Dickens self-representations and the social structures and attitudes that shape his fiction Rosemarie Bodenheimer EN 775 Seminar: Nabokov (Spring: 3) Cross Listed with SL 575 Open to undergraduates by permission of instructor only See course description in the Slavic and Eastern Languages Department. Maxim D. Shrayer EN 779 Contemporary American Poetry (Spring: 3) The course will focus on recent work by American poets, as well as some critical texts to help us situate the formal diversity and variety of theoretical concerns that characterize contemporary poetry. Probable poets for discussion will include Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, C. K. Williams, Philip Levine, Charles Simic, and others. Tracing out poetic lines of kinship and influence, our aim will be to examine closely not only the poems, but the processes we bring to bear reading them, including our own assumptions about genre, gender, contemporaneity, and culture. Suzanne Matson EN 780 Readings in Theory (Spring: 3) Cross Listed with RL 780 See course description in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department. Kevin Newmark EN 787 Ireland: The Colonial Context (Spring: 3) As Seamus Deane asserts, Ireland is the only Western European country that has had both an early and a late colonial experience. This course spans the major cultural and historical moments and surveys the associated literary production connecting these experiences: from the Elizabethan plantations to post-independent Irelands decolonization. The main objective is to evaluate how Irish culture manifests and/or resists the colonial encounter. Particular attention is paid to the issues of language and authority, and to representations of place, gender, and identity. Students engage with a wide variety of writers and cultural critics. James M. Smith EN 788 Irish Heroic Literature in Modern Adaptation (Spring: 3) Beginning with a study of the ethos of Irish heroic literature in its historical and cultural context, this course will then examine the uses, ideological, aesthetic, and personal, to which that material has been put by Irish writers of the past two centuries. Particular attention will be paid to shifting concepts of authenticity and the degree to which various creative artists have either retained, reinterpreted, or reinvented what they perceived to be the essence of their originals. Among writers to be studied will be OGrady, Yeats, Gregory, Synge, Pearse, Joyce, Stephens, ODuffy, OBrien, Clarke, and Heaney. Philip T. OLeary EN 796 History and Theory of the Essay (Fall: 3) We will investigate the essay by identifying rhetorical elements that connect it to (but also distinguish it from) the short story, poem, and article. Our study will be historical (we will look, for example, at the development of the essay in relation to the rise of the magazine in the mid-18th century and the internet in the late 20th), theoretical (we will read Lukacs, Adorno, Barthes), and experiential (students will read and write both literary and scholarly essays). Readings include essays by Montaigne, Bacon, Johnson, Hazlitt, Woolf, Orwell, Wolfe, Didion, Thurber, Baldwin, White, Dillard, Hornby, Alexie, Sedaris, Orlean, and Kincaid. Lad Tobin EN 801 Thesis Seminar (Fall/Spring: 3) The Department EN 807 Globalization and Culture (Fall: 3) This class investigates the cultural dynamics of globalization. We will explore how works of culture imagine the issues raised by globalization, and how they are products and agents of globalization. We will begin by defining globalization and considering its different historical periods. Did it begin in the 15th century, the 19th century, 1945, or the 1970s? From there we will explore a variety of theoretical approaches to globalization drawn from the fields of English, anthropology, cultural studies, and film studies. We will explore each of these theoretical models through specific works of culture, including movies, novels, short stories, travel narratives. Christina Klein EN 836 Media, Culture, Narrative (Spring: 3) This course proposes to provide a seedbed of common readings and questions for graduate students interested in U.S. literary and cultural history from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Our readings will also concentrate on recent scholarship on the material and cultural placements of various media forms news writings, self-help manuals, popular entertainments, speeches, pulp magazines, and so forth adjacent to (and often constituting) what we now think of as literary expression. Chris Wilson EN 844 Medieval Mystics (Spring: 3) All texts will be read in Middle English, but no previous knowledge is required. Writings about mystical experience make up the most intense, most emotional, and most controversial genre of medieval literature. Mystics lived inner lives that distinguished them sharply from their fel- 116 The Boston College Catalog 2005-2006 ARTS AND SCIENCES

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