Course Descriptions

Undergraduate Courses

• English 306A: Children's Literature. Mary Galbraith TTh 9:30-10:45 a.m.
  
  Tut, tut, child! Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.
  —The Duchess in Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland
  This class will be devoted to first refuting the Duchess’s pronouncement and then breathing new life into it. We will review the history of books for children and find the ones that critique the Duchess’s boring insistence on morals: fairy tales, hut tales, and wonder tales, literary novels for children, and artistic picture books. Then we will explore the ways children’s literature provides the basis for a more nuanced view of morality that is not preachy or condescending to children.
  
  
• English 401: Children's Literature. Philip Serrato. MW 2:00-3:15 p.m.
  
  Children’s literature is an intriguing and fascinating genre. Far more often than not, the picture books, chapter books, pop-up books, and mystery novels typically categorized (if not dismissed) as children’s fare work in complicated ways that are sometimes problematic, frequently brilliant, and always interesting. This semester we will explore some of the amusing, surprising, and even shocking aspects of a number of books for children. As we come face to face with sadistic barbers, spoiled brats, abused dolls, an idiosyncratic redhead, and a shark with some really sharp teeth, we will examine what books like The Secret Garden, Where the Wild Things Are, The Raggedy Ann Stories, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Castaway Pirates are really about. In all honesty, as we delve ever deeper into these and other works, mucking about in their messier elements, you can expect that we will engage ideas and meanings that—hopefully for better but maybe for worse—you would never expect to find in books defined and marketed as literature for children. Granted, for some people, thusly scrutinizing books with which they may have some emotional attachment (e.g., Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon, Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree) can be traumatizing. For me, it is a lot of fun and enables a profound appreciation and respect for the genre.
  
  Reading List
  Heinrich Hoffman Struwwelpeter
  Robert Munsch Love You Forever
  Shel Silverstein The Giving Tree
  Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden
  Johnny Gruelle Raggedy Ann Stories
  Robert Arthur The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot
  Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  Gary Paulson Nightjohn
  Juan Felipe Herrera Downtown Boy
  Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are
  Jim Murphy An American Plague
  Astrid Lindgren Pippi Longstocking
  Mary Downing Hahn The Doll in the Garden
  Anthony Brown Voices in the Park
  Ray Marshall and Wilson Swain The Castaway Pirates: A Pop-Up Tale of Bad Luck, Sharp Teeth, and Stinky Toes
  David Levithan Marly’s Ghost
  Rita Williams-Garcia Jumped

Undergraduate/Graduate Courses

• English 502: Adolescence in Literature. Philip Serrato. MWF 11:00-11:50 a.m.
  
  This semester we will survey a broad yet by no means comprehensive swath of literature for and about adolescents. For the sake of some historical perspective, we will begin with Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, the Nancy Drew mystery The Hidden Staircase, and the German drama Spring’s Awakening. After investigating the (perhaps surprising) nature, politics, and implications of these texts, we will delve into more recent fare. As we proceed through texts such as Monica Sone’s autobiographical Nisei Daughter, Joseph Bruchac’s folktale-inflected horror yarn Skeleton Man, Laurie Halse Anderson’s historical Forge, and Ron Koertge’s story of an unlikely friendship, Stoner and Spaz, we will plot some of the multifarious ways that authors have both depicted adolescence and written for adolescents. Our overarching aim is to develop critically and theoretically sophisticated methodologies for examining and understanding the representation of adolescents and adolescence in literature and other media in different historical and cultural contexts.required.

  Reading list:
  Horatio Alger Ragged Dick
  Carolyn Keene The Hidden Staircase
  Frank Wedekind Spring’s Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy (Smith & Kraus 1575255138)
  Monica Sone Nisei Daughter
  Walter Dean Myers Fallen Angels
  Juan Felipe Herrea Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box
  Neal Shusterman Unwind
  Virginia Euwer Wolff Make Lemonade
  Francesca Lia Block Weetzie Bat
  Ron Koertge Stoner & Spaz
  David Levithan Boy Meets Boy
  Brian James Zombie Blondes
  Joseph Bruchac Skeleton Man
  

Graduate Courses

• English 727: Poetry and Childhood. Joseph Thomas. Wednesdays, 7:00-9:40 p.m.
  
  In this course we will explore contemporary notions of “the child” and their representations in and correspondences to poetry written for and about young people. Informed by Randall Jarrell’s claim that Modernism is an extension of Romanticism (“End of the Line”) and Charles Bernstein’s related argument that the line between Modernism and Postmodernism is blurrier than generally believed, this course traces the legacies of Romanticism and its constructions of childhood from the early 20th century to the present, exploring the intersections between these constructions and our ideological assumptions about poetry and poetics. We will read widely, engaging the poetry of authors as varied as Joe Brainard (I Remember), John Ciardi (The Reason for the Pelican), T.S. Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats), Robert Frost (You Come Too), Lyn Hejinian (My Life), Langston Hughes (The Dream Keeper), Randall Jarrell (The Bat-Poet), June Jordan (Who Look at Me), Robert Lowell (Life Studies), Theodore Roethke (I am! Says the Lamb), Carl Sandburg (Early Moon), and Gertrude Stein (The World Is Round, To Be, a Book of Alphabets and Birthdays).