Spring 2009 English MA Course Guide -

Schaumburg Campus

Department of Literature and Languages

440  Literature and Enslavement

Kimberly Ruffin                                             

(Th 2:00- 4:29 pm)

The period of enslavement in African-American literary history included an energetic mix of oral and written forms including song, speeches, folktales, poetry, and narratives.  This broad span of verbal art encompasses artistic, socio-political, and cultural concerns.  We will examine works by authors writing during the period (Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton) and works by contemporary authors (Toni Morrison, Frank X Walker).  In addition to close reading of the primary materials, students will learn historical contexts and apply theoretical approaches to literary analysis. 

442  Imagining Terror

Ellen O’Brien                                                                     

(M 6:00 – 8:30 pm)

This course examines twentieth and twenty-first-century literary representations of terrorism in the works of Anglophone writers from around the world.  Including a range of authors from Africa, South Asia, North America, Ireland and the UK and incorporating texts from the early 1900s through 2005, we will study how various literary genres—from lyric poems to political thrillers to postmodernist plays—are used to imagine the experiences of political terror and to comment on the historical contexts in which terror arises.  A tentative list of authors includes: S. Heaney, M. McGuckian, P. Muldoon, C. Carson, E. McNamee, M. Ondaatje, N. Farrah, W. Soyinka, S. Rushdie, J. Conrad, and D. Lessing.

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