UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

 

[CRN – 24848] 2123/001 Creative Writing (W)                                   MW, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                 Jeffers

 

This course is an introductory course to creative writing (fiction and poetry) and is a prerequisite for 3000 and 4000 creative writing courses within the English Department.  This course will not include genre writing (i.e., sci fi, fantasy, romance, mystery, etc.) and since this course is considered “writing intensive,” frequent written assignments will be required of each student throughout the semester.

 

 [CRN – 24387] 2123/995 Creative Writing (W)                                  online                                                                                      Kamau

 

 This online course will consist primarily of weekly online discussions in which the primary focus will be on discussing each student’s writing. Students also will schedule individual chat sessions with me on D2L after their classmates have discussed their submissions on the discussion board. Each participant in the course will be required to submit for discussion one (1) short story and one (1) creative non-fiction essay, both of which will be revised and submitted for further discussion. Grades will be assigned only to revised drafts. First drafts will not be graded. Note: no plot-driven stories (no fantasy, science fiction, mysteries with a “twist”). The focus of the fiction segment of this course will be on developing credible characters—people living in the world as we know it. The main emphasis of the course will be on rigorous analysis of the submitted work of the students. The class also will be required to analyze and discuss selected work of published authors, examining each published work for its technical strengths and flaws. Overall class grades will be determined by the following three (3) components: revisions, participation in the online discussions, and a self-assessment essay (due at the end of the course).

The following textbooks will be assigned as reference texts for the course:

·Mooring Against the Tide, Jeff Knorr & Tim Schell (fiction), and

·Tell It Slant, Brenda Miller & Suzanne Paola Griffin. (creative nonfiction).

Note: students intending to enroll in this course are strongly advised to acquire and begin reading the assigned textbooks before the course begins and have a finished short story completed (or at the very least, an idea for one) before the first day of the course.

[CRN – 14646] 2133/001 Autobiographical Writing (W)                     TR, 10:30-11:45AM                                                               Kates

 

This course is designed to help you develop your skills as a writer:  in increase your control over the process of writing and to hone your awareness of how a sense of audience, persona, tone and other elements of style can influence the ways that readers make sense of and respond to your writing.

[CRN – 14650] 2243/001 Film Narrative (AF)                                     TR, 12:00-1:15PM; W, 7:00-9:00PM                                    Rapf

The primary aim of this course is to learn how "to read" a film, to understand the special ways this medium is structured, and how it helps to structure our world. Film allows us to re-evaluate the past, understand the present, and to cut across the old divisions between the arts and in the process, create a criticism that ignores the academic compartmentalization of the arts and sciences.

 

This course will examine how a film is made, looking at the process from script to screen. After an introduction that will trace the development of motion pictures through the silent era to the transition to sound in the 1930s, "Film Narrative" will focus in depth on the making of the landmark film, Citizen Kane (1941), in order to understand the basic elements of film language. Following a look at major developments in film at mid-century, we will read chapter-by-chapter Sidney's Lumet's Making Movies and Seger & Whetmore’s aptly titled, From Script to Screen. These books will take us through the process of making a film, including the work of the director, screenwriter, cinematographer, art director, editor, and composer. 

 

Wednesday evening screenings, 7-9pm, are required, in addition to class lectures, film clips, and readings.  There will be weekly quizzes, a midterm and final examination, and a final project. A vital component of the course is also a film journal which students are required to keep throughout the semester on their film viewing and reading.

 

It is important that students understand that this course is not comprehensive, AND IT IS NOT ABOUT CONTEMPORARY MOVIES except insofar as understanding how a film works increases our critical ability to respond to what we see in theaters and on television and computer screens today. This course touches on a number of areas of film history, production, theory, and criticism; it omits many others.  Its scope is broad and merely introductory, as is appropriate for a General Education class.  Hopefully, interested students will go on to pursue future film and media courses in areas that are of particular interest.

 

 [CRN – 14662] 2313/002  Intro to Critical Reading and Writing       TR, 9:00-10:15AM                                                                 Bannet

 

The goal of this course is to sharpen and broaden your analytical, interpretative and critical skills by exposing you to a variety of stories, and to a variety of ways of describing, interpreting, discussing and writing about them. We will be doing a lot of close reading, and there will be a reading assignment for each class. While the stories we will be discussing are generally not long, you will be doing a lot of thinking, talking and writing about them.

Texts: 

R. S. Gwynn (ed) Fiction: A Pocket Anthology  (7th edn, Prentice Hall)

Maria Tatar (ed) Classic Fairy Tales  (Norton Critical Edition)

Wilfred L. Guerin et al, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature  (Oxford Univ Press)

 

 

 

 

 

 [CRN – 14667] 2313/003  Intro to Critical Reading and Writing       TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   Bannet

 

The goal of this course is to sharpen and broaden your analytical, interpretative and critical skills by exposing you to a variety of stories, and to a variety of ways of describing, interpreting, discussing and writing about them. We will be doing a lot of close reading, and there will be a reading assignment for each class. While the stories we will be discussing are generally not long, you will be doing a lot of thinking, talking and writing about them.

Texts: 

R. S. Gwynn (ed) Fiction: A Pocket Anthology  (7th edn, Prentice Hall)

Maria Tatar (ed) Classic Fairy Tales  (Norton Critical Edition)

Wilfred L. Guerin et al, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature  (Oxford Univ Press)

 [CRN – 24847] 2313/004  Intro to Critical Reading and Writing       TR, 12:00-1:15PM                                                                 Garofalo

 

This course will focus on learning close reading techniques, on writing short essays that offer close readings, and how to find literary criticism in the databases and library. We will read mostly poetry, some short stories and drama, as well as literary criticism.

 

[CRN – 26777] 2433/001 World  Literature to 1700 (WC)                  TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   Ng

 

What are the writers, texts, genres, and literary developments important to British literary history?  Reading for both continuity and change, our goal is to begin to construct a narrative of literary history, while being aware at the same time that such a history is also contingent and open to revision.  We will think about the changing conceptions of the self and the formation of English identity.  In particular, we will examine ideas of the national self and the national author.  We will be concerned with putting literary texts within their historical contexts, whether social, political, or religious.  Reading texts closely, we will also pay considerable attention to form, structure, and language.  From Middle English texts with their diversity of dialects, regional allegiances, and new vernacular audiences to early modern works influenced by humanism and the Reformation as well as travel to the new world, our readings will provide us with ample material for discussion and for writing.

Text:  Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt, eds.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  8th edition.  Vol. 1.  New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005.

Requirements:  Papers, exams, quizzes, attendance and participation.

 

[CRN – 29094] 2433/002 World  Literature to 1700 (WC)                  TR, 9:00-10:15AM                                                                 Hodges

 

What are the writers, texts, genres, and literary developments important to British literary history?  Reading for both continuity and change, our goal is to begin to construct a narrative of literary history, while being aware at the same time that such a history is also contingent and open to revision.  We will think about the changing conceptions of the self and the formation of English identity.  In particular, we will examine ideas of the national self and the national author.  We will be concerned with putting literary texts within their historical contexts, whether social, political, or religious.  Reading texts closely, we will also pay considerable attention to form, structure, and language.  From Middle English texts with their diversity of dialects, regional allegiances, and new vernacular audiences to early modern works influenced by humanism and the Reformation as well as travel to the new world, our readings will provide us with ample material for discussion and for writing.

Text:  Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt, eds.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  8th edition.  Vol. 1.  New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005.

Requirements:  Papers, exams, quizzes, attendance and participation.

 

[CRN – 14678] 2543/001 English  Literature 1375 to  1700 (WC)       TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   Anderson

In this class we will study English poetry, prose and drama from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Enlightenment.  We will move chronologically, beginning with Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon epic poem, and ending in the Restoration.  Along the way, we will read some of the major authors of world literature, including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.  We will seek to understand the texts themselves, the period in which they were written, and their place in the development of English literature.

 [CRN – 14769] 2543/002 English  Literature 1375 to  1700 (WC)      TR, 3:00-4:15PM                                                                   Anderson

In this class we will study English poetry, prose and drama from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Enlightenment.  We will move chronologically, beginning with Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon epic poem, and ending in the Restoration.  Along the way, we will read some of the major authors of world literature, including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.  We will seek to understand the texts themselves, the period in which they were written, and their place in the development of English literature.

[CRN – 14778] 2733/001 American Indian Lit: Early and Traditional  (MC)   TR, 4:30-5:45PM                                                                      Roppolo

For untold tens of thousands of years, story, in American Indian culture, has manifested itself in many different ways. Story is in ceremony, in daily life, and in written works, in petroglyphs, passed from group to group, individual to individual, ancient generations to future generations, bequeathed to us, helping us understand at least a bit of their work to see how it connects with ours. From ancient codices to oral traditions told in a graphic collection to a sermon preached at an execution to the world’s only Indian Cowgirl novel, this class surveys just a few of the many literary contributions from North America’s Native people from precontact rhough 1945. Writers will include William Apess, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Mourning Dove, Samson Occom, John Joseph Matthews, and Darcy McNickle, among others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 [CRN – 29093] 2773/001  American Literature Survey (WC)             TR, 10:30–11:45AM                                                              Zeigler

 

Topic:  Eventful Histories of Early America.  This survey examines significant writings of the Americas from 1492 to the U.S. Civil War.  To confront such a lengthy, long-ago history, our strategy will be to identify how our readings contend with the novelty and tumult that surround two events: the European colonization of the Americas and the emergence of the United States as a constitutional republic.  We will appreciate with particular acuity in this course that to name these two remarkable events without reference to genocide and slavery would diminish the complexity of what happened and elide a stunning human toll.  While we will investigate key historical events of the period in as much detail as possible, as students of literature we will be most attentive to how textual form shapes historical understanding.  Students will prepare two essays of four to six pages, midterm and final examinations, and a group presentation in defense of one of the witches executed in Salem in 1692.

 [CRN – 24849] 2773/002 American Literature Survey (WC)              TR, 9:00-10:15AM                                                                 Murphy

 

English 2773 is the first course of the two-semester American literature survey that fulfills the survey requirement for the English major. It covers major works of American literature from first contact between Europeans and Natives through the colonial and revolutionary periods to the American Civil War. Major writers studied in the course include Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Grading for the course is based on the student's performance on 2 essays, a midterm exam, a final exam, and regular attendance and participation.

 [CRN – 27485] 3103/001 Topics in Advanced Composition (W)         TR, 9:00-10:15AM                                                                 Carter

 

Subtitle:  Visual Rhetoric.  This course addresses the communicative power of images. Class participants examine photography, film, and various forms of multimedia composition as dynamic transactions between rhetors and their audiences. Using examples from each category, we place visual representations in historical context, assessing their meanings according to the cultural predispositions that reigned when and where the images first appeared. We then consider how those meanings change with time and place, looking especially at how they resonate within our local, contemporary moment. Key texts include Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture (Olson, Finnegan, and Hope, 2008), No Caption Needed (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007), Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Anderson, 2011), and Toward a Composition Made Whole (Shipka, 2011). We will also view and discuss three movies, which include The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995), Mother (Joon-Ho, 2009), and The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011).

 [CRN – 14788] 3103/002 Topics in Advanced Composition (W)                         T, 3:00-5:45PM                                                                      Welch

Subtitle:  Writing and Audience.  This  writing course for any major, focuses on students' current and prospective writing practices. The course (which meets in a traditional classroom that is wired and has wireless access), unfolds in a workshop format in which students compile their writing (and drafts) from the course in individual portfolios that  contain the professor's written comments. The course centers on the students’ writing in a variety of genres primarily through the medium of print. The course also considers the digital screens on which we draft writing and redraft it. For the first month of the class, all grades will be pass/fail.

 

 

 [CRN – 27945] 3123/001 Fiction Writing            (W)                                                         online                                                                      Kamau

 

Course Credo:  “...the university cannot give you an education–it can only help you acquire one for yourselves. The main effort must be made by the students.” –George Lynn Cross, President, University of Oklahoma, 1944-1968.This course is on writing short fiction, i.e. a short story.  Therefore, you will be expected to submit a complete story.  Emphasis is on reading and critiquing each other’s work. Students who have successfully completed ENGL 2123 Creative Writing at OU with a grade of A or B may take this course without providing a writing sample.  Students who completed creative writing elsewhere must submit a creative writing sample for approval.

 

[CRN – 14874] 3133/900 Poetry Writing (W)                                                M, 5:00-8:00PM                                                           Jeffers

 

Students who have successfully completed ENGL 2123 Creative Writing at OU with a grade of A or B may take this course without providing a writing sample.  Students who completed creative writing elsewhere must submit a writing sample of 3-5 of their own poems.  This course is considered “writing intensive” and as such, frequent written assignments will be required of each student throughout the semester. 

 

 

 

[CRN – 29467] 3143/001 Studies in Literacy and Rhetoric (W)                                           TR, 3:00-4:15PM                                                   Tarabochia

Grounded in the scholarship of notable queer theorist and composition teacher Jonathan Alexander, this course examines sex and sexuality as vital dimensions through which to understand issues of literacy and rhetoric. Taking our cue from Alexander, we will “explore more nuanced and sophisticated understandings” of the intersections of rhetoric, literacy, and sexuality as they “function socially, culturally, politically, and personally.” Toward that end, we will examine the rhetoric of sex and sexuality in a range of discourses in order to investigate the ways sexuality and literacy intertwine in 21st century society.  Through intensive reading, writing, and discussion, we will learn “to work knowledgeably, engagingly, and critically” with the discourses of sexuality that shape our personal and collective lives. Writing students produce for class will play a major role in the course.  Additional course texts may include: Excerpts from Alexander’s Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies; Zan Meyer Goncalves’ Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom, Harriet Malinowitz’s Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities, Susan Bordo’s The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, Will Banks’ “Sexualities, Technologies, and the Teaching of Writing,” among other possibilities.

[CRN – 27487] 3213/001 Techno Thrillers w/Screening                        TR, 9:00-10:15AM; T, 7:00-9:00PM                                     Yoch

 

Topics include the machine as Messiah, fighting back against nature, weapons invoking terror, speculations about the future, emergent nanotechnologies, and war fantasies and myths becoming reality.

Study of authors, some in class, including:

·          Neal Stephenson

·          China Miéville

·          Richard Morgan

·          William Gibson

·          Orson Scott Card’s Empire Series

·          Paul McEuen. 

 

Also, selected movies such as:

·          Blade Runner

·          Primer

·          Inception

·          Minority Report

·          The Matrix

 

Recommendations from the class welcome.

[CRN – 29095] 3283/001       Cherokee Literature (MC)                     TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   Nelson

Cherokee  authors have been remarkably prolific, moving from early essays intervening in the Removal crisis and the first American Indian-authored novel into poetry and postmodern prose, with stops for memoirs, humor, science fiction, and more along the way. This course will survey the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry of several major Cherokee authors from the early 1800s up to now, with special emphasis on local writers. Given the rich diversity of the literature, we will approach the works through formalist, feminist, historicist, postcolonial, and other strategies as needed, as we confront crucial problems surrounding questions of assimilation, tradition, nationalism, and resistance. Several short responses papers will be required, as will a longer end-of-term research paper.

        [CRN – 14923] 3313/001 Intro to Literary and Cultural Studies TR, 3:00-4:15PM                                                                   John

 

In this course, “Introduction to Cultural Studies,” we are going to explore the relationship between cultural perception and analytical perspectives.  We will do this by examining material that falls into three categories: CULTURAL PERCEPTION AND WORLVIEW, GLOBAL ECONOMICS, and NEWS & MEDIA ANALYSIS.  We will read philosophical essays, texts dealing with global economy, and analyze news media and film from both western and non-western perspectives.  We will also have in-depth discussions and think about the relationship between knowledge and responsibility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CRN – 14924] 3313/002 Intro to Literary and Cultural Studies                   MW, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                          Keresteszi               

Topic:  Knowledge & Power. This course focuses on influential texts in contemporary cultural theory concerning the role of the intellectual in facilitating social change.  We examine the relationship between knowledge and power within and against the discursive confines of society.  Our readings help us rethink hegemonic notions of history, language, justice, morality, culture and power.  During the semester, with the help of our readings, we will assemble a “toolkit” of theory.  Michel Foucault defines the “notion of theory as a toolkit”: “(i) The theory to be constructed is not a system but an instrument, a logic of the specificity of power relations and the struggles around them;  (ii) That this investigation can only be carried out step by step on the basis of reflection (which will necessarily be historical in some of its aspects) on given situations” (Power/Knowledge, 1980: 145).  We will compare and contrast Eurocentric theory with Afrocentric approaches to knowledge and power.

Readings

                                                                                                     

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth

James, C. L. R. Beyond a Boundary

Said, Orientalism

Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Ngugi, Moving the Center

Lemming, Sovereignty of the Imagination

Films

Xala (Dir. Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 1974––123 min.)

Life and Debt (Dir. Stephanie Black, United States/Jamaica, 2001––80 min.)

        [CRN – 29096] 3403/001 The Graphic Novel (AF)                       TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   Zeigler

 

The books for this class have a lot of pictures, but reading them won’t be easy.  This course -- Graphic Narratives, Comic History -- seeks first to develop and test a narrative theory suited for works of sequential art.  Our further attention to the history of comic books will concentrate on the recent emergence of a “canon” of works of literary esteem.  The comic artists most likely to appear on the syllabus include Jessica Abel, Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Los Bros Hernandez, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware.  Several of the assigned readings will allow us to reflect on the ethical stakes of representing history.  All of the required readings will instruct and reward our understanding of the popular culture of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.  Assignments will include three essays of four to six pages, a group presentation, and a comprehensive final examination.

[CRN – 24857] 3713/001 Intro to American Studies (WC)                   MWF, 11:30AM-12:20PM                                                     Hobson

 

This course presents an opportunity for examining key ideas contributing to the development of American culture.  Manifest Destiny, the Noble Savage/Red Devil syndrome, Puritanism, Democracy(ies), Science vs. Pseudo-Science, Social Darwinism, “Mainstream” or serious art vs. popular arts, the military industrial complex, “Free World” vs. Communism, Finite Planet---these are a few of the notions/ideas that have been prominent throughout the generations of American life, and, hopefully, we will be examining some of them.

[CRN – 28947] HON 3993/006  Literature and Medicine  (H)                TR, 10:30-11:45AM                                                                            Schleifer

 

Prerequisite:  member of the Honors College and completion of HON 2973.  This course uses literary texts and popular descriptions of medical practice as well as other kinds of narrative to examine the relationship between the “art” and the “science” of medicine. Specifically, it examines the ways in which narrative modes of understanding might contribute to diagnostic practices and how the rigors of medical science can help to understand some of the ways literature works. The instructors hope that this course will attract a good mix of students working in the sciences and humanities. This course offers students the opportunity of studying with both a practicing doctor and experienced medical educator and a scholar of literature, language and the relation between science and literature.

[CRN – 29097] 4013/001 Major Figure: Louise Erdrich (MC)             TR, 3:00-4:15PM                                                                   Roppolo

 

Louise Erdrich, Anishinaabe (Chippewa) writer, has enjoyed perhaps more mainstream success than any other American Indian female writer. This course centers on her novels, all centering on a fictional reservation and cast by multiple generations of interconnected families, making for a sort of “Indian soap opera,” but one  richly textured with gender, culture, and history. For those who like reading popular culture series, this class offers the chance to follow a larger story over the entirety of the semester.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CRN – 24877] 4113/001 Literary Magazine Editing and Publishing   R, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                      Simon

 

English 4113 provides an introduction to the writing, editing, and publishing of literary magazines, both print and online. It is designed for students who are planning careers in writing, graduate literary studies, or the wider world of publishing. Students will learn about the place of literary magazines in humanities publishing generally and the larger contemporary landscape in which cultural magazines play a vital role. Topics include the history and present state of U.S. magazine publishing, the status of periodicals in culture and the academy, the economics of the industry, current challenges, and future trends. The internship component is an important feature of the course, offering students the opportunity to write for, edit, and produce an actual magazine: World Literature Today, OU’s award-winning bimonthly of international literature and culture. The course will also draw guest speakers from the pool of publishing experts scattered across the University of Oklahoma campus and in central Oklahoma, thus providing advice and networking opportunities for students interested in exploring professional careers in writing, editing, design, marketing, and/or production.

 

[CRN – 29098] ENGL 4233/001 Major Figures in Criticism/Theory              TR, 3:00-4:15PM                                                                             Leitch

 

This discussion-based course studies books by major figures in contemporary cultural criticism and theory, ranging from Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Said’s Orientalism, and hooks’ Outlaw Culture to Halberstram’s Female Masculinity, Jameson’s Political Unconscious, Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology, and Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Schools, movements, and methods discussed include historicism, philology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, narratology, race and ethnicity studies, feminism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and cultural studies. Among the topics examined are race, gender, social class, multiculturalism, the nation-state, imperialism, and colonialism, postmodernity, popular culture, the arts, media, surveillance society, globalization, ideology, plus resistance and social change.

 

[CRN – 29099] 4283/001 Hip Hop as Poetry (AF, MC)                       TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   John

 

In this class we will examine the phenomenon known as Hip Hop from three different angles.  First, we will examine the social and political context that has produced the music and made it into a cultural phenomenon.  To this end, we will go back as far as the 1950’s and 60’s and watch and discuss documentaries that give us an historical context for understanding the politics, race relations, and social concerns that shaped the U.S. at that time and the Black population within it.  The texts by Chang and Fricke as well as our Wednesday night film screenings will be useful in this regard.  Secondly, we will read several key essays that will help us to understand culture, identity, and language formation as it relates to the African diaspora (Black populations dispersed throughout the Americas).  As part of this segment we will analyze the lyrics from assigned songs and albums, looking at the philosophical worldview, notions of culture, identity, metaphor, proverbial speech and the social commentary at stake.  Finally, we will deal with the poetics of the form through active performance.  Here we will engage the orality of this mode of cultural expression from three angles: inspiration, technique and improvisation.  Attendance and participation is a huge part of the course grade in this class in general, and participation will count for extra on these days.

 [CRN – 27493] 4343/001 Indian in American Popular Culture (NWC, MC)      MWF, 12:30-1:20PM                                                             Hobson

 

This course is about the various appearances and roles, stereotyped and otherwise, that American Indians have traditionally been pigeon-holed into throughout American’s five centuries of recorded history.  After beginning with Captain John Smith and the Colonial era, and toughing on the Romantic period of Longfellow and Cooper, the course ends with analysis of modern-day writers such as Waters, LaFarge and Lafferty, as well as movies and television.

 

 [CRN – 27322] 4513/001 Chaucer                                                        MWF, 12:30-1:20PM                                                             Ransom

 

The course will be an intensive study of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in Middle English.  We will look at the tales in their literary, historical, and cultural milieu and consider the degree to which Chaucer was a product of his environment both in affirming and in challenging the norms of his time and place.

 [CRN – 14952] 4523/010 Shakespeare Comedies  (WC)                                  TR, 10:30-11:45AM                                                   Yoch      

 

Explores a wide-ranging set of Shakespeare’s plays including The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, and King Henry VIII. Classical and vernacular sources, religious dissensions, contrasts between poetry and prose, sexual diversity and subversions, and rivalries in the theatrical marketplace.

A lab section (011, 012 or 013) meets as needed to help in team preparation of a performance, the writing of papers, and sometimes study for exams.  Its primary function is to give students who choose to work on a performance a common time to rehearse, and when they have completed that assignment, it need not meet.

 

 [CRN –14953] 4523/011 Shakespeare Comedies – Performance Lab             M, 2:30-4:30PM                                                                          Yoch                                                         

Must also be enrolled in 4523.010.

 

[CRN – 14954] 4523/012 Shakespeare Comedies – Performance Lab  T, 4:30-6:30PM                                                                      Yoch

 Must also be enrolled in 4523.010.

 

[CRN – 14955] 4532/013 Shakespeare Comedies – Performance Lab  R, 4:30-6:30PM                                                                      Yoch

 Must also be enrolled in 4523.010.

 

[CRN – 29101] 4543/001 Tudor and Stuart Drama                              TR, 10:30-11:45AM                                                                               Ng

 

In this course we will survey sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Authors may include Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. Studying these plays will provide a broader context of the Tudor and Stuart stage, a context in which Shakespeare was a dominant figure. We will examine the playwrights that preceded him and who influenced his art as well as those that followed him and were in turn influenced by him. We may also read one Shakespearean play in order to contrast him to other playwrights of the day.

Course texts: David Bevington, ed., English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 2002); Shakespeare, Hamlet: Norton Critical Edition (new edition), ed. Robert Miola.

Requirements include papers, examinations, short quizzes or responses, small group presentation, attendance and compelling participation.

 

 

 

 

 

[CRN – 29102] 4553/001  Milton                                                           MW, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                 Anderson

This course will study the major poetry and prose of John Milton.  Few poets have been as intimately involved in the great events of their culture as was Milton.  As the young Londoner was beginning his career as a scholar-poet, Charles I was pushing to assert his absolute power as king over Church and State.  When tensions rose toward the end of the 1630s and Civil War broke out in the Three Kingdoms, Milton aligned himself with Parliament against the king.  He supported the Parliamentary forces throughout the Civil Wars and the was an advocate for the execution of the king in 1649.  He played an important role in the government of Oliver Cromwell until his blindness forced him out of politics and back to poetry.  When the monarchy returned to England in 1660 Milton was forced even further into the shadows, where he composed some of his greatest poems, including Paradise Lost, undeniably one of the masterworks of European literature.

Much of our focus in this class will be on Paradise Lost, but we will also read Milton’s earlier poetry and important selections from his political prose.  The aim will not be to reduce Milton’s poetry to a set of political concerns, but rather to understand how the two things complemented each other.  Milton considered Paradise Lost to be a prophetic re-imagining of scripture, but it is nonetheless deeply invested in its political moment and reflects the poet’s best hopes for the English people.  We want to understand how the cosmic perspective of heaven and hell, the fall and redemption, creation and apocalypse comments on the volatile social and political situation of Milton’s England.

 [CRN – 29103] 4573/001 18th Century English Novel                                          TR, 12:00-1:15PM                                                                 Bannet

The stories we will be reading all address the situation of women and/or servants in the violent, changing and rapidly expanding Enlightenment world. Using standards set by morality, Christianity and the law to measure conduct, they explore their protagonists’ options in courtship and marriage, inside and outside the family-household,  during voluntary and forced migrations to other places and other countries (America, France), in times of peace and in times of revolution and war.  Their authors experimented with a variety of novelistic forms: some used letters to open a window into characters’ thoughts and feelings and into the secret places of private life; others used autobiographical story-telling techniques; some used satire and humor to make us laugh; others tried to move us and make us feel.  But all were, in one way or another, debating each other in their common Enlightenment efforts to “improve” relationships in the family, society and the world.  

Texts:

 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (Broadview Press)

Fanny Burney, Evalina  (Broadview Press)

Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (Broadview Press)

Eliza Inchbald, Nature and Art (Broadview Press)

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews  (Broadview Press)

Edward Kimber, The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson  (Broadview)

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Broadview)

Samuel Jackson Pratt, Emma Corbett  (Broadview)

Charlotte Smith, Desmond (Broadview)

 

[CRN – 27494] 4613/001 19th Century English Novel (WC)                 MW, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                 Cottom

 

Subtitle: The Education of Desire. In this course we will study five nineteenth-century English novels: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).  Passionate sexual or romantic desire plays a prominent role in all of these novels, and in each of them characters attempt to "educate" desire into a form that is considered socially proper.   Desire, then, with all the confusions, conflicts, and questions around it, will provide us with one topic for our discussions throughout the semester.  We will also be concerned, though, with the many other issues involved in these works: class relations, economic relations, the roles of men and women in nineteenth-century England, the philosophy of utilitarianism, and contemporary notions of art and literature, to name just a few.  In the end, the interests of the students in the class will determine what we focus on in class. In addition to the novels, we will be reading some essays or additional critical material related to them.  This is a discussion class, and students will be expected to contribute actively to class discussions throughout the semester.  There will be no exams; grades will be based on class participation and four papers ranging in length from five to ten pages.

Texts:

Please note: You must have these specific editions of the texts

Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Norton Critical Edition—1st edition)

Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Norton Critical Edition—4th edition)

Dickens, Hard Times (Norton Critical Edition—3rd edition)

Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Norton Critical Edition—1st edition)

Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Norton Critical Edition—2nd edition)

 [CRN – 29104] 4713/001 Major Authors/19th Century American Lit TR, 9:00-10:15AM                                                                 Sawaya

 

When President Abraham Lincoln first met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-52), he is reputed to have said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”  Whether this anecdote is true or not, Stowe’s novel had a major effect upon debates about slavery and race in the nineteenth-and twentieth-century United States.  Her novel has furthermore been seen, as James Baldwin said critically, as the “cornerstone of American social protest fiction.”  This class examines how some important nineteenth-century American writers responded implicitly and explicitly to the powerful legacy of Stowe’s bestselling novel.  Black and white, male and female, these writers felt compelled by the impact that Stowe’s novel had on politics and culture to respond to the ideas and formal techniques of Stowe’s text; and they did so in vastly different ways.  By examining both Stowe’s text and how these writers responded to it, we will begin to think through definitions of “major” authors and how those definitions change over time.  Debates from the “culture wars” of the 1980s will help us contextualize the ways in which the question of “major” versus “minor” authors has been imagined historically and contemporaneously.

 [CRN – 29105] 4723/001 /19th C. American Nationalism/Transnationalism   TR, 3:00-4:15PM                                                                        McDonald

 

TEXTS: 1.  Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865, Volume B, Eighth Edition.

                    Nina Baym, General Editor. ISBN 978-0-393-93477-9.

               2.  Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1865-1914, Volume C, Eighth Edition.

                    Nina Baym, General Editor. ISBN 978-0-393-93478-6.

               3.  Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Norton Critical Edition.

                     ISBN 0-393-95137-5

               4.  Henry James, Washington Square (this short novel will be handed

                    out).           

              

This course explores American transnational identities before and after the Civil War.  In the first half, we will read a range of traditionally canonical and non-canonical works, including women’s and abolitionist writings, drawn from the pre-Civil War period. In the second half, we will compare those works to a similar range drawn from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, giving emphasis in the final weeks of the semester to the writings of Mark Twain and Henry James. Our focus throughout will be on the ways literature participated in constructing American national identity, and the influence of transnational sources, both European and non-European, in this process.

 

We begin by reading selected works of  Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the context of Jacksonian democracy in the 1820s and 1830s, a time when the United States was engaging in a campaign of expansionism justified by the ideology of manifest destiny. By the 1850s the U.S. had  increased its national borders by 70%, completed its “removal” of Indian tribes to the Midwest, fought its first foreign war, with Mexico, and annexed the territories of Texas, Oregon, California, and New Mexico, thereby creating new opportunities for the expansion of slavery. During this same period, a largely women’s domestic fiction became enormously popular, selling in the hundreds of thousands. Critics in recent years have seen a connection between these two events, asking: Did the separateness of gendered spheres establishing women as guardians of the home, of an intimate “country” from which non-family were excluded, anchor or stabilize an imperialist expansion and racial subjection that turned blacks into foreigners? To consider this and similar questions, we will read Lydia Maria Child’s Letters From New York, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as well as excerpts from Harriet Jacobs and Margaret Fuller.

 

Also important  to our study of antebellum writing is the influence which the tradition of German idealism, often transmitted through English sources, had on a very wide range of writers  of this period. This tradition was attractive because it gave thinkers a humanistic alternative to the anti-religious skepticism and empiricism of the French Enlightenment, affirming Christianity as a form of spirituality, or universal morality, without doctrinal, especially Puritan content. Emersonian “transcendentalism” took its name and philosophical basis from German and English sources. Poe’s romanticism and critical perspective were influenced, in radical ways, by similar sources. And the writings of the abolitionist and women’s movements were often impelled by an anti-institutional imperative which predicated reform less on the specific exigencies of American social history than on universally spiritual and religious values. Among the authors we will read are Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Melville, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass.

 

 In the post-bellum part of this course, the influences of pragmatism, naturalism, and progressivism will be juxtaposed against ante-bellum idealism. Among the works which we will read are stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and William Dean Howells, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Henry James’ Washington Square and Daisy Miller, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and other stories.

 

 [CRN – 29106] 4733/900 American Naturalism and Realism              TR, 4:30-5:45PM                                                                   McDonald

 

Most definitions of literary realism depend on a small, often-repeated group of terms, including "truth," "actuality," "accuracy," "reality," and "objectivity." Such characterizations are not terribly useful, since they apply to good fiction of all traditions. A perhaps more illuminating approach to distinguishing realistic and naturalistic fiction from other types is to concentrate on style, presentation, and narrative techniques. This approach orients critical attention to such questions as: What distinction, if any, is made between the author and narrator? What distinction is made between the narrator and the protagonist or other characters? Is the narrator omniscient or assigned a limited role in the unfolding of the story? How much access is the reader allowed into the thoughts and feelings of the characters? Are such thoughts and feelings dramatized or described?

 

These questions, however, are interesting not so much for their own sake as for what they reveal about the narrator culturally, historically, politically and ethically. The style or mode of representation of any fictional narrator is culturally significant; it is a response in one way or another to social and historical forces, such as modernism, industrialization, the changing role of women in society, the treatment of minorities, etc. In this course, we will survey a range of authors between 1865 and 1914, some of whom may be considered “realists” or “naturalists,” but the vast majority of whom transcend such narrow categories. We will proceed in our study on three levels at once: (1) formalistically, identifying the various narrative techniques used by our authors;  (2) culturally, placing the texts we read in a social and historical context; and (3) politically and ethically, using the work of Emmanuel Levinas to shed light on the relation between self and other reflected in fictional and poetic texts.  Among the authors whose work we will read are Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Emma Lazarus, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, Abraham Caham, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Jack London.

 

The course will stress the development of writing skills through eleven weekly short papers and one long final paper. I have decided to structure the course this way from my sense, supported by the input from students, that the exam structure is not the ideal method for encouraging the creative development of approaches to literary study. Having the opportunity to read student papers on a weekly basis not only allows me to work on an individual level with students on their writing; it also acquaints me with their “way of thinking” and thereby puts me in a better position to offer suggestions and advice.

 

However, there is also a perhaps less attractive feature of this way of structuring a course. Because there are no exams, your grade depends entirely on the papers. What this means in practice is that there will be a heightened importance given to class attendance. Since the papers are closely linked to the lectures and discussions, it is very difficult to make them up. The approaches and methods of reading which I encourage cannot generally be found on the internet or even in the library. The short papers are in fact part of the on-going discussion and debate of the classes; and it is obviously impossible for a student’s paper to reflect that discussion and debate if she/he hasn’t attended class. Moreover, because there are no exams, which the short papers substitute for, it is inevitable in such cases that grades will suffer. Students with demanding work schedules who are often forced to miss classes should therefore think carefully before deciding to take this course.

 

 [CRN – 29107] 4823/001 American Novel since 1920                                                                          TR, 10:30-11:45AM                                                                                                                               Murphy

 

Subtitle: American Experimental Fiction 1920 to the Present. This course will survey the most unusual and influential experiments with narrative form undertaken by American writers over the course of the twentieth century. Students will read and analyze a wide variety of formal innovations, from William Faulkner's extreme streams of consciousness, Djuna Barnes' pseudo-Elizabethan monologues and Lynd Ward's wordless woodcut novels to William S. Burroughs' hallucinatory "routines" and Kathy Acker's plagiarist aesthetics. Larger issues to be considered include the politics of literary form, the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and the future of the book. Grades will be based on students' performance on 3 analytical essays and their participation in class discussions.

Tentative List of Readings:
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Toomer, Cane
Barnes, Nightwood
Ward, Vertigo
Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Nabokov, Pale Fire
Barthelme, The Dead Father
Russ, The Female Man
Acker, Empire of the Senseless
Leyner, Et Tu, Babe?

[CRN – 14961] 4853/001 Capstone: Poems, Poets, Poetry                   TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   Velie

 

This course will teach students to analyze and discuss poetry of all sorts--lyric, dramatic, and narrative. Reading list includes selections from The Norton Anthology of Poetry and works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Eliot, Donne, Stevens, Keats, Wordsworth, and others.  Assignments will include a journal, short and long paper, and a final.

 

[CRN – 14959] 4853/002 Capstone: The Romantic Gothic                    TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                 Garofalo

 

We will study the period in which Gothic literature emerged, the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Our focus will be on the British Gothic novel and we will read authors such as Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliff, and Mary Shelley. We will examine why the literature of horror emerges in this period, what monsters reveal about cultural anxieties, and how the Gothic engages with gender, race, sexuality, and class in a period of economic and social change. Our focus will be on close readings of literary texts, on studying the criticism of the Gothic, and on integrating research into papers.

 

[CRN – 27495] 4853/003 Capstone: Literature and History                  TR, 12:00-1:15PM                                                               Sawaya

 

One of the noteworthy trends in English Studies in the last two decades has been the “historicist” turn.  This capstone seeks to provide a culminating experience in the English major by meditating on the complex relation between literature and history that has become central to debates in English Studies.  While these two areas of study in the humanities have long been seen as connected, the relation between them has also been fractious and contestatory.  We will examine a few of the ways in which the connections between literature and history have been theorized and debated.  We will read selected critical essays by historians and literary critics like Hazel Carby, Jennifer Fleissner, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukacs, Dominick LaCapra, and Hayden White.  However, we will focus our attention on reading fiction from, or about, the turn of the twentieth century that particularly highlights the complex relation between literature and history.  Among the texts we may read are Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime; John Dos Passos’s 1919; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s A New England Nun and Other Stories; Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces; William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham; Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute; and American Girl’s,  Meet Samantha. Students will write two short essays (5-7 pp.) and one long, researched essay (10-15 pp.).   In the last weeks of class, we will workshop the rough draft of the research essay.  The research essay may, but need not be, based on one of the short essays. 

 

[CRN – 29108] 4943/900 Advanced Creative Nonfiction  Writing       online                                                                                      Kamau

 

Credo:  “...the university cannot give you an education–it can only help you acquire one for yourselves. The main effort must be made by the students.” –George Lynn Cross, President, University of Oklahoma, 1944-1968.

Structure:  This hybrid online/classroom will consist of the following: weekly online discussions of submitted creative nonfiction essays and published work (when assigned); classroom sessions that will essentially be wrap-up sessions of each week's discussions, and individual tutorials between the instructor and each student whose work was submitted for the week's discussion. All tutorials will be mandatory.

Requirements:  Each participant in the class will be required to submit for discussion at least two (2) creative nonfiction stories/essays, each of which will be revised and discussed during the semester.  During the early weeks of the semester the class also will be assigned selected readings from the textbook(s) required for the course, and will be required to analyze and discuss selected examples of published creative nonfiction.

Note: Given that this is an upper-level undergraduate and graduate writing course in which the emphasis will be on the students' creative output, students who enroll in this course are strongly advised to familiarize themselves with the genre of creative nonfiction before the semester begins and have at least an idea for a creative nonfiction submission before the semester begins.

 

[CRN – 24394] 4950/900 Special Topics in World Literature Today   TBA                                                                                         Davis

 

In-depth study of selected contemporary international writers/jurors who visit campus as part of the Neustadt and/or Puterbaugh symposiums for World Literature Today.

 

 

 

 

GRADUATE COURSES

 

[CRN – 24877] 5003/900  Literature and Economics                                            R, 6:00-9:00PM                                                                      Schleifer

 

This course will focus on the great transformation in cultural formations during the second Industrial Revolution (~1870-1940), the age of Modernism.  Specifically, it will read American and British Modernist literature in the context of the development of neoclassical or “marginal” economics in England and the continent and Institutional Economics developed by Thorstein Veblen in the United States.  Three major themes inform this phenomena.  (1) The transformation of classical economics (Smith, Ricardo, Marx, etc.) into neoclassical economics (Marshall, Jevons, Keynes, etc.) marked a change of the measure of value from need (use value) to desire (exchange value), and such a transformation can be seen in modernist literary forms.  (2) The rise of finance capital (as opposed to industrial capital) in the second Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new economic class, the lower middle class of information workers, not much more remunerated than the working class, but people who valued their “middle” class status and possessed an ideology of extreme individualism.  (3)  The representations of this class as well as the effects of the same social, intellectual, and personal forces that gave rise to neoclassical economics in the discursive arts.  We should read such authors as Woolf, Joyce, Dreiser, Wharton, Eliot, Forster, Wells, etc.  I hope to call a meeting of interested students this spring to more fully discuss what texts will be most useful to members of the seminar.

 

[CRN – 29110] 5003/001  Biblical Methods                                           MW, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                 Velie

 

Biblical Methods will introduce graduate students in English to the academic study of the Bible. The course will cover major portions of both the Old and New Testaments of the King James Bible, and will focus on the effect the Bible has had on European and American literature.

[CRN – 14964] 5113/001 Teaching College Composition                     TR, 10:30-11:45AM                                                                               Mair

This course is restricted to new English graduate assistants who will be teaching freshman composition sections for the department.

 

[CRN – 29837] 5113/002 Teaching College Composition                     TR, 12:00-1:15PM                                                                 Mair

 

 This course is restricted to new English graduate assistants who will be teaching freshman composition sections for the department.

 

 

 [CRN – 29111] 5223/001 Film, Society, and Ideology                                         M, 3:00-6:00PM                                                                     Rapf

 

 This course is an introduction to some of the major theoretical movements in film and media studies, and a look forward to how new media is altering our relationships to screens of all kinds. The aim is to familiarize the student with "classical film theory" that evolved during the early days of cinema in an attempt to establish this new form as an "art," and "contemporary film theory" that has emerged in an effort to understand the way this now established art form shapes or reflects cultural attitudes, and reinforces or rejects the dominant modes of cultural thinking.  Classical film theory will include the "formalism" of the silent era and the "realist" reaction of the early days of sound. The theory of sound itself will be explored, then we will move into contemporary film theory, drawing on linguistics, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies.   Because recent theoretical approaches have branched out to include media in a much broader sense (television, computers, gaming, etc.), all conveniently lumped together under the label “convergence culture,” this course will try to include some work on “new media.” Theory, as you know, is a way of thinking about something in the abstract.  Over the hundred-plus years of cinema's history, various thinkers have come up with hypotheses, manifestos, models and paradigms to try to explain what the medium is, and how it works on our brains and on our social structures.  Unlike historians or critics, media theorists look at broad questions about the medium  (Is film “art”?  Can it shape our psychologies?  How is it used to maintain or disrupt the structure of our society?).  We will study those theories, and apply them to specific films. We will also spend some time reading about and discussing how to use film, television, and new media in the classroom.

 

 

[CRN – 29112] 5343/001 Native American Fiction                                               T, 4:30-7:10PM                                                                      Nelson

 

American Indian fiction has emerged in the twentieth century as one of the most exciting aesthetic and most challenging political fields in literature today. This seminar will survey several major works in the field of American Indian fiction, with emphasis on the late twentieth century. Without trying to declare a canon, the readings will be geared toward widely read and pivotal novels like Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer-winning House Made of Dawn, short story collections such as Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and films like Zacharias Kunuk’s The Fast Runner that figure prominently in ongoing critical conversations. Aided by supplemental readings from secondary sources, we will join these works’ interrogation of key questions about Native American identity, political and cultural sovereignty, colonialism’s impact on gender, tradition, and representation, and the future of Indian America. Requirements will include several response papers, a presentation, and a major paper due at the end of the term.

 

[CRN – 29113] 5433/001 18th/19th Century Comp/Rhet                        TR, 1:30-2:45PM                                                                   Kates

 

This course in history and historical research and writing is an introduction to 18th-and 19th-century rhetorical theory and practice primarily in Britain and the U.S.  The theme of this year’s course is gender and rhetoric.  Historical issues in the writing of histories of rhetoric and writing instruction for those marginal to traditional rhetoric and academia will be key to our inquiries.  In the mainstream line, rhetorical strategies that develop in classicism are transformed into neo-classical and belletristic rhetorics.  Women’s and other non-mainstream speakers and writers draw from all these and from various earlier alternative traditions as well as continuing or developing their own traditions, genres, and styles. We will sketch the transformations of rhetoric against the backdrop of modernity, industrialism, the rise of professionalism, and other cultural shifts.  We will inquire into Scottish moral philosophy, Romanticism, and Victorianism, paying particular attention to the development of higher education and literacy in the U.S. in the 19th century and emergent forms that develop in response to the entrance of women and hither-to excluded groups, including African-Americans and Native Americans.  Some attention will be paid to non-Western rhetorics, and projects on non-Western rhetorics are welcomed in the class.

Course Responsibilities:

Because the course will operate as a research seminar, attendance and participation are required.  Students will lead discussions and make oral presentations, which will be written and turned in.  Participation on the D2L web online discussion and class communication system is required.  Research projects may be historical articles for journals, thesis or dissertation proposals, or parts of thesis or dissertation projects.  A final exam will be given.

 

 

[CRN – 29114] 5523/001 Alliterative Revivals                                     T, 4:00-7:00PM                                                                      Hodges

 

This class will look at a selection of alliterative poetry, considering their geographical and political concerns, and characteristics of the genre (if there is a genre).  There will be a paper proposal, a twenty-page research paper, and regular participation in class.  The readings will be in Middle English, so students are expected either to be familiar with Middle English or to work hard and fast at the start of the semester to become so.  Readings will include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Saint Erkenwald, The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, Winner and Waster, the Morte Arthure, and excerpts from Piers Plowman.

 

 

 

[CRN – 29188] 5803/001 Black Arts/Black Power                                                W, 6:00-9:00PM                                                                     Keresteszi

 

 This course examines the formation and expressions of Black Power from its Caribbean origins in the 20th Century to its impact on the larger African Diaspora.  Emerging from a matrix of Marxist and Black Nationalist thought and movements, artists, activists and other intellectuals coalesced to form new cultural and social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa.  In our discussions we focus on the cultural exchanges and intellectual engagements between the local struggles for civil rights and the larger global movements for decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean.  We will read and critically engage with a variety of literary, historical, and other cultural texts, including film and music.

Fields: 20th Century American Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, African Diaspora Studies 

READINGS:

Hansberry, Lorraine. Raisin in the Sun

Van Deburg, William. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth

Baraka, Amiri and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing

Foner, Philip S. The Black Panthers Speak

Ture, Kwame and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation

Bambara, Toni Cade. The Black Woman: An Anthology

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice

Carmichael, Stokely (Kwami Ture). Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism

FILMS:
Classified X (Dir. Melvin Van Peebles, USA,1998; 50 min.)

A Huey P. Newton Story (Dir. Spike Lee, USA, 2001; 86 min.)

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Dir. Ivan Dixon, USA, 1973; 102 min.)

Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man (Dir. Robin Shuffield, France/Burkina Faso, 2006; 52 min.)

*A Raisin in the Sun (Dir. Daniel Petrie, USA, 1961; 128 min.)

MUSIC:

Nina Simone

Didier Awadi <http://www.rfimusique.com/musiqueen/articles/094/article_7959.asp>

 

 

[CRN – 29109] 5943/900 Advanced Creative Nonfiction  Writing       online                                                                                      Kamau

See ENGL 4943.