The Department of English has a limited number of seats still available in these classes: ENGL 21500 Contemporary Topics in Science Fiction; ENGL 21900 Shakespeare; ENGL 31200 Dramatic Literature II; ENGL 32400 Literature of the Bible; ENGL 39000 Metamorphoses: Ovid to Rushdie. ENGL 21900 and ENGL 31200 both convey ICC credit.
ICC Courses:
ENGL 21900 Shakespeare (Prof. Matusiak or Prof. Kramer)
ICC Perspective: Humanities
ICC Theme: Identities OR Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation (designation pending)
Prof. Matusiak's Course Description:
This course invites students to read a selection of the major plays (The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale) while engaging with critical questions about dramatic genre in the time of Shakespeare. What ancient and medieval theories of comedy and tragedy did Shakespeare inherit—and how did he adapt these to his own purposes? How did writing for a commercial repertory theater influence his approach to theatrical convention? What cultural and philosophical concerns underlie Elizabethan and Jacobean sub-genres such as “revenge tragedy” and “tragicomedy”? And why ultimately do Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies remain so compelling to us now, four centuries after they were first staged?
Prof. Kramer's Course Description:
This course will introduce Shakespeare’s theatre to both initiates and novices. As we read the plays themselves we will study the political, religious, cultural, and scientific beliefs of Shakespeare’s time; what biography we possess and can conjecture; the workings of the Elizabethan theatre; Shakespeare’s poetic craft; his contemporary and subsequent reputation and that of individual plays; the vexed history of the texts themselves; and the forms and procedures of individual works as well as those of the genres of tragedy, comedy, romance, and history. Using both the background of context and the foreground of the texts, we will approach larger questions of meaning, both for Shakespeare’s time and for our own. Substantial emphasis will also be placed on the question of pleasure–why these plays pleased and still do; and on the question of cultural function, both in Shakespeare’s time and in our own.
ENGL 31200 Dramatic Literature II (Prof. Gleitman)
ICC Attribute: Writing Intensive
Prof. Gleitman's Course Description:
In this course, we will read a variety of modern American, European and Nigerian dramas, beginning in 1879 with Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House and concluding with a play first written and produced in 2014. Each of our plays will engage in some fashion with the following question: Are our identities “real”—intrinsic to who we are and hence stable, accompanying us as we walk through life with reliable consistency—or are they performances, fluid and forever subject to change? Do we construct fictional selves to suit the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves, discarding those selves and replacing them with other ones when our circumstances change? Do our economic and social circumstances, our histories, our loved ones, our genders project identities onto us that are ill-fitting, fundamentally at odds with what we perceive ourselves to be? These are among the questions that our plays will explore. Our playwrights will include Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Wole Soyinka, Tennessee Williams, Brian Friel, Tom Stoppard, Suzan-Lori Parks and Heidi Schreck.
Non-ICC English Courses:
ENGL 21500 Contemporary Topics in Science Fiction: DIY (Prof. Kittredge)
Prof. Kittredge's Course Description:
This course gives students more autonomy in the focus and manner of their study of the field of science fiction. The class begins with an overview of some elements of science fiction, which will include discussion and practice of a variety of critical, presentation and teaching techniques. The second part of the class will have students working in 6-8 person “affinity groups,” each focusing on a particular theme, sub-genre, or aspect of science fiction. The last part of the course will consist of the students teaching each other about the work that they did in the affinity group. The final exam will be based on the information conveyed in the student-taught sessions. The class will also take an active role in ITHACON, the local comic book convention that will be held on Saturday, May 2. Participation in ITHACON is mandatory.
ENGL 32400 Literature of the Bible (Prof. Twomey)
Prof. Twomey's Course Description:
The Bible is the best-known book that most of us have never read. This course considers biblical narratives and poetry as literary and cultural documents. Although reading the Bible will necessarily invoke religious concepts, I teach the course from a scholarly, non-sectarian point of view. I expect that students in the course will be open-minded about the approaches they learn in the course, and that they will not look to the course for affirmation of preconceived religious ideas. The course emphasizes the Bible specifically as literature: how style, characterization, and other literary features of prose and verse enable us to understand biblical texts. The two major units are the historical narratives in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, Esther; and the poetic writings in Psalms, the Song of Solomon, and Job.
ENGL 39000 Metamorphoses: Ovid to Rushdie (Prof. Kramer)
Prof. Kramer's Course Description:
From earliest times, storytellers have imagined people changing shape. While such wondrous tales have long pleased readers, stories of shape changing, or metamorphosis, also address important questions having to do with our identification with or disconnection from our physical beings. What if our bodies do not reflect who we feel ourselves to be? What is our fantasy of alteration—be it reward or punishment—if we are not the body we actually inhabit? The fictions we will read explore how those identifications with and disconnections from our bodies can alter with time, place, contingency, mood, desire. Our authors—Ovid, Shakespeare, Kafka, Woolf, Stevenson, Shaw, Wilde, LeGuin, Rushdie—challenge us to imagine what it would be like to metamorphose into something that reflected our true nature—a beautiful woman, a hideous man, a wolf, a god, a pillar of salt, a cockroach.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20141116230123117