Spring 2010
Please note that all honors courses have computer holds on them. Before you can register for the courses, you need to email Robert Brunner at rbrunner@nvcc.edu. Tell him what course you want, provide the section number (some courses have multiple sections), and include your student identification number. If you are eligible for the course, Robert will remove the hold, notify you in an email, and then you can register for the course. Robert does not register for you; he removes the hold, allowing you to register.
12718 English 111, 020A, R 04:30P-07:20P, Room AA127A, TBA
The description for this course will be posted in the near future.
16676 English 111, 021A, T 07:30P-10:20P, Room AA 127A, Daily, D.
Much Ado About Something
W. H. Auden in a celebrated essay implies that three quarters of modern literature is concerned with one subject, love. He also suggests that the two great
modern erotic myths are the myth of Tristan and Isolde or
the world well lost for love and the counter myth of
Don Juan. This course will analyze various literary works in relation
to these polarities. We will be using Barthes’A Lover's Discourse as a starting point and then move chronologically from Shakespeare’s
Sonnets, Much Ado About Nothing, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Nabokov’s Lolita,
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, concluding with Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and
Winterson’s Written on the Body.
Required work for the course involves discussion, writing essays, and presenting the findings of a research project to the rest of the class. For further information about this course, contact Ms. Daily at ddaily@nvcc.edu.
12776 English 112, 001A, MW 09:30AP-10:45A, Room AA 0440 Brunner, R.
This course will, for the most part, explore American literature from the Civil War to the present. The one exception will be Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, with which the course will begin. With that novel, we will look at the Romantic reaction to the eighteenth century's emphasis on logic and science. Shelley and her Romantic counterparts clearly opposed this emphasis, and she dramatizes that opposition vividly in her early nineteenth century novel. From that point, we will explore a subset of Post Civil War American culture with Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence, a scathing satire of how life "should be conducted" according to upper class American society. Representing the early twentieth century will be the cryptic short stories of Ernest Hemingway, a revolutionary stylist in American literature, and a man who captures the Post War War I despair after a generation of politicians had, with their blundering, almost destroyed life in western Europe. Following Hemingway's stories, we will switch genres to Arthur Miller's drama--and his view of the American Dream gone sour in the life of Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, one of the great plays of American culture. We will conclude the course with two creative and dynamic novels: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the great story of an African-American's search for identity in segregated America and then Tim O'Brien's tantalizingly imaginative novel In the Lake of the Woods, a story that explores the effects of the Vietnam War on one prominent American family. For more information, contact Robert Brunner at rbrunner@nvcc.edu.
12778 English 112, 002A TR 09:30A-10:45A AA121A, Burton, J.
Modernism and the “Lost Generation”
The best American literature of the first half of the 20th century was made in Paris. After the disappointment called the Great War, young veterans, who would turn out to be America’s greatest modern writers, returned to Paris to begin to forge their art. They had witnessed first hand the most devastating political and martial failure of their time. They had enlisted to serve a noble end, but they wound up wounded by the war’s failure and the stupidity of their elected leaders. This group of artists came to be called the “lost generation” because all former values were lost to them and they felt lost, disconnected from and disaffected by those who made the worlds in which they existed. Instead of embracing the failed values of their parents’ generation, they sought meaning in art, believing that art was a sufficient end in itself. The lost generation said “no” to romantic ideals and made art that embodied their negativity. Art cannot serve a public good, they thought, and, in fact, art should do all it can to separate itself from political, religious, and traditional systems of belief.
On nearly any given evening in the mid 1920’s, the artists and writers of this lost generation could be found in Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. They came to give birth, without knowing it, to Modern art by nurturing one another while making art triumph over politics, religion, and even history. The ‘20s in Paris were a heady time. Artists could live very well on very little money in post-war Paris. The lost generation artists who had been to Europe during the war also learned that the American values they were raised to cherish were not tolerant of art as they saw it, and could not guide them as they tried to live fully in the City of Light. In Paris, the lost generation could make its own rules, defy many others, and make art which refused to serve an end other than its own.
Students will read: Ernest Hemingway, The Stories, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and A Moveable Feast;
e.e. cummings, Selected Poems; T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Writings; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
For further information about this course, contact Jon Burton at jburton@nvcc.edu.
12780 English 112, 003A, M 07:30P-10:20P AA0254 Schroder, C.
For this incarnation of English 112 Honors, we will use The New York Review of Books (NYRB) as our primary text. That means that our text will be changing monthly and that we ought to keep abreast of current events at the political, social and cultural levels.
Making use of the NYRB will allow us to familiarize ourselves with one of the most influential cultural texts in the U.S. regarding the ways in which the nation looks at itself – not to mention, one of the best written publications anywhere. This is not to suggest that the NYRB is widely read, rather, that those who read it (and those who write for it) are widely influential in their fields of expertise.
Simultaneously, we will be working at acquiring and perfecting the tools to articulate our viewpoints, both orally and in writing, in a rational manner in order to develop a method of thinking and arguing within ourselves as well as with others.
14114 History 122, 002A, MW 11:00A-12:15P, AA 0440, Windham, J.
The United States from the Civil War to the Present
Honors Options
An honors student may take a regularly scheduled class for honors credit if the instructor approves. To earn honors credit in a regularly scheduled course, you should propose a project to the instructor (or ask for the instructor's suggestions about a project) either before you enroll in the course or during the first or second week of the course. If the professor agrees to give you honors credit, you will work on the project throughout the semester, meet several times outside class with the professor, and then submit the project about two weeks before the end of the semester. To receive honors credit, you must pick up a blue form--The Honors Option Form--on Mr. Brunner's desk (room AA252), fill out your part, give it to the instructor to sign, and then bring the form with a week remaining in the semester to Mr. Brunner . When the form is processed, your records will show the honors credit.
Follow this link to learn more about honors options.
