Fall 2009 Short Course Descriptions
(as of 6/15/2009)
FENGL 2113.001 Intermediate Writing for International TAs with Professor
Janis Paul
This course is restricted to international
graduate students. Permission must be
obtained from the instructor.
FENGL 2123.900 Creative Writing with Professor Agymah
Kamau
This is an introductory course in creative writing and is the
prerequisite for fiction writing courses.
Assignments will include a short story and one creative nonfiction
essay. Class discussions will focus on
analysis and discussion of fellow student’s stories and the analysis of
assigned published fiction with an emphasis on the technical aspects of each
work. The course is taught as a studio
workshop rather than a lecture.
FENGL 2133.001 Autobiographical
Writing with Professor
Susan Kates
Students will be writing
essays from personal experience; use of reading and analysis of journals,
diaries, letters and autobiographies as models for writing.
FENGL
2243.001 Film Narrative with Professor Joanna 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.
It has been said that film and media history "allows us to re-evaluate the
past, 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 examines how a film is made, looking at that
process from script to screen. We go through the basic steps involved in the
creation of motion pictures, including the work of the director, screenwriter,
cinematographer, art director, editor, and composer. The course begins with an
overview of film history, and includes an in-depth study of the landmark film,
Citizen Kane. In addition to regularly scheduled classes, "Film
Narrative" requires an evening screening.
F ENGL 2313.001 Introduction
to Critical Reading and Writing with Professor Francesca Sawaya
This
course is a gateway course to the English and Language Arts majors and has
three central goals. First, it seeks to
help you hone your interpretive and close-reading skills, by introducing you to
some of the major theoretical frameworks critics use today to read texts. Second, we will work at applying (and testing
the limits of) these different theoretical frameworks by reading some of the
major literary genres: poetry, fiction,
and drama. Third, we will work on
improving your skills as writers of literary criticism. The texts we are reading in this class come
from different nations and historical contexts, address different audiences,
and deal with a wide range of issues.
They are united, however, by their focus on the question of what role
that literature and the writer/artist play in society.
This
class will mix class discussion and group discussion with occasional short
lectures. I will introduce material and
facilitate discussion, but you are expected to be an active participant in
class discussions and group discussions amongst yourself. There will be short, formal writing
assignments (1-2 pp.) on a regular basis (these may also include formulating
discussion questions). You will also
write three longer essays and have a mid-term exam. Your final essay will have a research
component. I will meet with each of you
individually during the semester to discuss your writing and progress in the
class.
FENGL 2313.002 Introduction
to Critical Reading and Writing with Professor Daniela Garofalo
This course
will examine close reading techniques for literature; we will study how to read
literary criticism and how to integrate it into your own interpretations of
literary texts; this course will teach you techniques for library research
for English papers; we will also examine crucial terms and ideas in literary
criticism such as author function, ideology, etc.; finally, we will study the
relationship of text and context.
FENGL 2313.003 Introduction
to Critical Reading and Writing with Professor Jonathan Stalling
In this introduction to Critical Reading
and Writing, we will be learning to critically engage various kinds of literary
texts: poetry, short stories, and a novel. We will explore these texts through
a series of distinct interpretive strategies through which you will learn how
to “close read,” and situate texts within broader historical/cultural/political
contexts in order to “open” them up to meanings that a casual reading cannot.
This course will also focus on writing literary criticism and introduce/review
various rhetorical strategies and structures to ensure clarity and rigor. Weekly writing assignments, a mid-term, and a
final paper will be due.
FENGL 2313.004 Introduction to Critical Reading
and Writing with Professor David Anderson
This course will focus on the discipline of literary analysis, linking
better, more sophisticated writing to better, more sophisticated reading. The emphasis will be on close reading, which
we will practice both in our class discussions and our written work. Studying fiction, poetry and drama, the aim
will be for students to move beyond simply comprehending a text to gaining
an appreciation of how its form and structure complement and advance its
meaning. In understanding the author’s
craft, students will better understand how to argue convincingly on the page.
The class structure means that each student will receive extensive
individual coaching. There will be four essays produced during the term,
and students will read and comment on one another’s drafts. In addition, there will be ample opportunity
for students to articulate and debate their interpretations in class
discussion. Texts will include three or
four novels and plays interspersed with shorter poems and stories.
Generally speaking, we will devote Monday and
Wednesday classes to discussing texts, while Friday classes will serve as an
opportunity to discuss the expectations and techniques of formal writing.
FENGL 2313.005 Introduction to Critical Reading
and Writing with Professor Joshua Nelson
It’s
been said that all good stories must end in either marriage or death—but in
narratives of interracial relationships, the two are often frighteningly
linked. Unconventional marriages between mixed classes, religions, age groups,
or gender preferences have also prompted controversy. What is so threatening
about marrying out or up, too different or too similar? This course will look
at interrelationships depicted in several genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry,
drama, film, and graphic novel—and introduce key questions for thinking
critically about all kinds of representations. We will also cultivate
strategies of literary study to help us read or interpret texts in a broad
analytical sense and will develop strong writing practices to help us
communicate our understanding.
FENGL 2433.001 World Literature to 1700 with
Professor David Anderson
This course will focus
on the two most influential intellectual movements to have informed modern
Western culture: the Classical tradition
of Greece and Rome, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Thus, English 2433 will offer students an
opportunity to read some of the major monuments of Western literature. In addition to being fascinating and enjoyable,
reading these texts will enrich students’ further studies in European and
American literature, as they provided later authors with inexhaustible sources
of inspiration. In class discussions we
will explore the political, social and intellectual contexts of the period, as
well as the conflicts and interpretive problems within the texts themselves.
We will be reading
texts written across the Mediterranean over a span of two millennia, starting
with the ancient near East in the book of Job, and then progressing to the
golden ages of fifth-century Athens with Aeschylus’ Orestia, and of Augustan Rome in Virgil’s Aeneid. Next will be St.
Augustine’s Confessions, written in
the last days of the Roman empire, and finally we will end with Dante, who
unites Christian and Classical culture in The
Divine Comedy, one of the seminal artistic achievements of the high Middle
Ages.
The course will be a mix of lecture and
discussion.
FENGL 2543.001 English Literature from 1375 to
1700 with Professor Jim Yoch
Read works by
some of the best writers in English including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton,
along with works by lamenting lovers, dashing courtiers, meditative parsons,
religious radicals, learned physicians, warring conservatives and rebels, and
daring wives. Discussions will include
theological and political contexts, relationships with literatures and events
beyond England's shores. Students may
choose ways to involves themselves in the material by writing about, imitating
and/or performing selections.
FENGL 2543.002 English Literature from 1375
to 1700 with Professor Kenneth Hodges
In this course we will begin with Anglo-Saxon riddles, continue with the
poetry of Beowulf, and study sonnets
and other works by such writers as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne and
Milton. There will be other writers and
works in addition to these. With each
reading we’ll be answering various questions (i.e., Beowulf: What separates heroic violence form villainous
violence? Faustus: Why does Faust decide to sell his work in a religious
context?)
Regular
attendance, reading, and participation in discussion are required. There will be three 5-6 page papers plus a
midterm and final exam.
FENGL 2713.900 Introduction to Black Literature
in the United States with Professor Catherine John fulfills
multicultural major requirement
This course is an introduction to Black writing
produced in the United States. Its aim
is to introduce students to important texts and their major concerns. We will pay specific attention to the
struggle in this literature between writing which criticizes racial injustice
on the one hand, and writing focused on celebrations of Black cultural identity
on the other. With this as the guiding
principle we will explore how this literature treats the cultural, political
and national territory described by some as the United States and by others as
“America.” We will view three films and
three documentaries on subjects connected to the course material. We will read poetry, short stories,
sociological and historical essays, non-fiction, dramatic fiction, and an
autobiography. The literature we will
read was written as early as the 1700’s to as recently as the present. We will emphasize some of the literature produced out of the political climate of
the late 60’s and early 70’s and occasionally we will listen to some music.
REQUIRED TEXTS
The Course Reader
contains the required reading material for the majority of this class. It is available for purchase from Crimson & Cream Copy Center in the
Student Union [Rm. 126. 325-4294 (beside the Post Office)].
The other required texts are:
The Blacker the Berry – by Wallace Thurman (at Bookstore)
Assata: An Autobiography – by Assata Shakur (at Bookstore)
FENGL 2733.001 American Indian Literature: Early
and Traditional with Professor Kim Roppolo (counts
as a multicultural course)
ENGL 2733.001 American Indian
Literature: Early and Traditional: This course will cover American Indian oral
traditions, as well as American Indian written literature in English up to the year
1945, by authors such as William Apess, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Mourning Dove, Samson Occom, Charles
Eastman, John Rollin Ridge, George Copway, Alexander Posey, E. Pauline Johnson,
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Francis LaFlesche, John Joseph Matthews, and Darcy
McNickle.
FENGL 2773.001 and
.002 American Literature with Professor Henry McDonald
Throughout
the antebellum (pre-Civil War) period in the 19th century, writers
experienced a deep disenchantment with the direction America as a society was
taking. Among the factors contributing to this disenchantment were the rapid
development of technology, industrialization, and a consumer society; the high
rate of geographical mobility and especially migration to the city; the
exclusion of the middle-class home from a productive role in the economy; the
loosening of ties between family generations; and the replacement of
traditional hierarchical social relationships with modern peer relations. In
this course, we will read a variety of short novels, stories, essays, and poems
in the context of these and other social and historical developments. We will
consider how both the acceptance of and resistance to the forces of modernity
are given literary expression. Among the authors we will read are Washington
Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Margaret
Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Allan Poe.
FENGL 3113.001 (3103) Writing about
Nature/Environment/Science and Technology with Professor Catherine Hobbs
This interdisciplinary advanced composition course
offers students a chance to focus on reading and writing about the natural
world, the environment, and science and technology. Centered on the mode of writing called
“creative non-fiction,” students will write a spectrum of more autobiographical
essays to more “objective” reportorial pieces about our topics. The course aims to develop students abilities
in reading, writing, critical thinking, research, informed discussion, and
creativity.
FENGL 3123.900 Fiction Writing with Professor Agymah 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.
Structure: This hybrid online/classroom will consist of
weekly online discussions of submitted stories and published fiction (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 story 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 two (2)|
short stories, each of which will be revised and discussed during the semester. During the early weeks of the semester the
class also will be required to analyze and discuss selected works of published
authors, looking at each story’s technical strengths and flaws.
Note: Given that this is a course in
which the emphasis will be on the students' creative output, all students
who enroll in this course are strongly advised to have at least one finished
short story, or at the very least an idea for a story, before the first day of
classes.
FENGL 3143.001 Studies in Literacy and Rhetoric with Professor Chris
Carter
This course
investigates American literacy standards as rhetorical structures that shift
with the country’s political climate. We begin by tracing those standards
across the twentieth century, investigating how their seeming neutrality masks
educational/economic ideologies that privilege some groups and disempower
others. Course participants study how women, African Americans, American
Indians, and other historically oppressed groups attempt to make space for
themselves within discriminatory systems of schooling and work, developing
rhetorical strategies that compete with and even help to modify dominant ideas
about literate behavior. In the second half of the course, we consider how
groups establish a sense of communal identity through shared language
practices, and how they use those practices to negotiate with other discourse
communities for power and resources. Finally, students address how electronic
writing technologies influence popular definitions of literacy, asking whether
new media challenge or merely reinforce old social hierarchies.
Over the course of the
semester, each student is expected to write two substantial papers, participate
in class discussion, and lead dialogue for a day. Required texts include: Literacy
in American Lives, Deborah Brandt; The
Violence of Literacy, J. Elspeth Stuckey; Literacy Matters: Writing the Social Self, Robert Yagelski; Voice of the Self, Keith Gilyard; Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl
Glenn; Community Literacy and the
Rhetoric of Public Engagement, Linda Flower; and Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, Stuart Selber
FENGL 3173.001 Histories
of Writing, Rhetoric & Technology with Professor Chris Carter
In this course, we study competing theories of the writing process that
have emerged in the past few decades, looking especially at how expressivist,
cognitivist, and postmodern schools of rhetoric focus on composition as a
recursive series of events rather than solely as a finished product. We then
tie our discussion of process theory to such ancient issues as the relationship
between truth and politics, ideology and persuasion, power and eloquence,
examining why these topics matter in an era suffused with screen(ed)
rhetoric—much of which circulates via televisions, monitors, cell phones, and
other gadgetry while exerting influence throughout the global economy.
FENGL 3253.001 Special Topics in American Indian
Literature with Professor Kim Roppolo (counts
as a multicultural course)
Topic: New American Indian
Fiction: This course will cover recent works by Native American Authors such as
Sherman Alexie, LeAnne Howe, Donald Birchfield, Debra Earling, Adrian Louis,
and others writers not typically taught in 2743.
FENGL 3263.001 Women in Film with professor
Joanna Rapf
Women have played a significant role both in
front of and behind the camera since beginnings of film. This course will look
at both roles, from the “silent” era” up
until the disruption of World War II, the so-called “new age of feminism” in
the 1980s and 1990s, to the present day. This
will not be a comprehensive historical survey! Readings will include some
of the major essays in feminist film theory, including sociological,
psychoanalytic, and cultural studies approaches, and will cover such topics as
"the gaze," scopophilia, voyeurism, fetishism, masquerade, female
narration, and spectatorship. Some of
the material may be controversial and "R" rated.
By focusing on women
and film, this course encourages a reassessment of film history. It
interrogates Hollywood's hegemony by calling attention to and studying the
attitudes women endorse, the roles women play, and the stereotypes they
reinforce or challenge. A screening one evening a week is required.
FENGL
3313.001 and 002 Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies with
Professor Eve Bannet
The purpose
of this course is to teach you different ways of reading literary works and
works of theory and criticism. It will introduce you to the vocabularies,
theoretical understandings, and critical strategies that form the basis of
contemporary literary and cultural studies. It is a challenging course in a
number of ways: a) it will introduce you to new ideas that you will need to
think about and digest; b) it will ask you to read kinds of material you may not
have read before, and read the kinds of things you have read before in new
ways; c) we will be moving fairly fast. You need to plan to spend at least 3 or
4 hours a week outside of class on the reading and writing for this course.
You also need
to plan to attend class on a regular basis, or you will simply not be able to
follow along. If you have commitments this semester which prevent you from
devoting that kind of time, this may not be the best semester for you to take
this course.
Texts will
be: Leitch (ed) The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism (Norton), Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Norton Critical
Edition, 4th ed), Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, ed. Emory Elliott (Oxford)
FENGL
3513.001 Medieval English Literature with Professor Kenneth Hodges
This
class will focus on border crossings and cultural contacts so that we can
discuss ideas of foreignness and ways of defining community before the familiar
colonial paradigms were established. . We will read some romances, such as the
King of Tars and Bevis of Hampton; some travel narratives, such as Mandeville's
Travels; and some drama, such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Two
six-page papers and one ten-page paper are required.
FENGL
3543.001 Eighteenth-Century English Literature with Professor Eve Bannet
The purpose
of this course is to familiarize you with some fundamental enlightenment
concerns, and with ways in which they were expressed and reexamined in
literature. We will be looking at British and some American writings, and at
key texts which Britons and Americans shared.
The
Enlightenment was once described as the Age of Reason or the Age of Democratic
Revolutions (the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the American Revolution of
1776, the French Revolution of 1789). It was considered the time when society
became “modern” (scientific, progressive, and secular). We now realize that it
wasn’t quite like that. “The”
Enlightenment was different in different countries, and usually far more complex
and contradictory than this. The British and American Enlightenments in
particular were involved in different proportions and combinations with
empiricism and utopianism; science and religion, reason and passion, politeness
and violence, philanthropy and slavery, skepticism and didacticism. They were
concerned with the past as much as the future, and obsessed with Mobility,
Trade, God, Virtue and Rank. Literature and print were considered central to
the work of disseminating knowledge and spreading Enlightenment.
Accordingly,
novels and plays used language, observation, imagination, and satire or
sentimentalism not only to re-present their ideas or reevaluate their world,
but also to demand that their readers reason about or react emotionally to what
they read. You are their readers now. So be prepared to talk and discuss your
readings, thoughts and reactions!
There is a
reading and short writing assignment for every class. Together with class
participation, this forms a very large part of your grade. You will not pass
this course if you do not do the work. You should plan on spending at least 5
hours a week in addition to class attendance on this course. If you cannot
commit that amount of time this semester, this may not be the semester for you
to take this course.
Texts
include: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (the
island section – Online) Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Oxford), Elizabeth
Inchbald, Nature and Art (Broadview), Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Oxford),
Joseph Addison, “Papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination,” from The Spectator
(Online) Lindsay (ed), The Beggar’s Opera and Other 18th Century Plays
(Everyman) Kramnick (ed), The Portable Enlightenment Reader (Penguin)
FENGL
3643.001 Special Topics in Non-Western Literature and Culture with
Professor Yianna Liatsos (counts as a multicultural course)
African Women’s Writing. This course offers of close examination of African Women’s writing
while examining the sociopolitical forces that shape their historical
experience, sociopolitical identity, and cultural roles. We will begin with a general discussion of
African feminism and will proceed to read novels from different African regions
and with distinct preoccupations—such as Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (South Africa);
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe); Assia
Djebar, Fantasia (Algeria); Marjorie
Oludhe Macgoye, Present Moment
(Kenya); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple
Hibiscus (Nigeria), and Makuchi, Your
Madness, Not Mine.
FENGL
3653.001 The Bible as Literature with Professor Alan Velie
We will read and discuss
a selection of books from the Old and New Testaments, plus background material
and biblical criticism. You must provide
your own Bible (King James Version).
FENGL 3813.001 Science Fiction with Professor
Tim Murphy
A History of Futures Past. This course provides a historical survey of
science fiction as literature from the 18th century to the present, from
Jonathan Swift and Mary Shelley to Octavia Butler and Stanislaw Lem. Students
will study pulp SF, the Golden Age, the New Wave and Cyberpunk. Through evening
screenings, the course also includes an overview of science fiction film from
Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" to Ridley Scott's "Alien".
Evaluation is based on 2 analytical essays, a midterm, a final exam and regular
attendance/participation.
FENGL 4003.001 Movements in World Literature
(cross listed with MLLL) with Professor Yianna Liatsos (counts as a
multicultural course)
Postcolonialism. This course will acquaint the students with
some key texts of postcolonial theory—by writers such as Fanon, Said, Anderson,
Spivak, Bhabha and Young—and will assist them in applying this theory to important
works of postcolonial fiction such as Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea; J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace; Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; Sia
Figiel, Where We Once Belonged;
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant
Fundamentalist; and Kamila Shamsie, Kartography. The course will spend particular attention on key
terms in postcolonial studies such as diaspora and creolism.
FENGL
4023.001 Literary Movements: Cherokee
Literature with Professor Joshua Nelson
(counts
as a multicultural course)
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 emphasis on local writers. Given
the diversity of the literature, we will approach the works through formalist,
feminist, historicist, postcolonial, and other strategies as needed, as we confront
crucial problems like assimilation, tradition, nationalism, and resistance.
FENGL
4113.001 (4203) Magazine Editing & Publishing in the Humanities with
Professor Daniel Simon
This course provides an introduction to magazine writing, editing,
and publishing in the humanities. It is designed for students who plan a career
in the field and for those who, in their academic or writing careers, expect to
interact with magazine or journal publishers. Students will learn about the
place of magazines in humanities publishing generally and the larger cultural
landscape in which magazines play a vital role. Topics include the history and
present state of U.S. magazine publishing, the status of magazine and journal
publishing in culture and the academy, the economics of the industry, current
challenges, and future trends. An important feature of the course will involve
a practicum offering students the opportunity to edit and produce actual
magazines: World Literature Today and the student publication Windmill.
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 enhancing a sense of community among publishing professionals and students
in training as editors and writers.
FENGL 4263.001 Contemporary Feminist Theory
for Professor Francesca Sawaya
This class provides a historical introduction
to feminist theory from the 1970s to the 1990s by focusing on some key texts of
this period. These texts are
representative of a wide array of contemporary feminisms: including radical,
black and Chicana, post-colonial, lesbian, socialist, post-modern, and
queer. While we will examine how
feminist theorists respond to contemporary events and intellectual
developments, our focus will particularly be on the ways they engage with each
other’s ideas within, as well as across, generations and social divides. The much discussed conflicts between “second”
and “third” wave, “popular” and “academic,” middle-class and working class,
white and ethnic feminisms will be central in our exploration of the varieties
of contemporary feminist theory.
FENGL 4383.001 Civilization and Diaspora with
Professor Catherine John
This course is an
attempt to determine how literature by and about Africa and its Diaspora (the
Black population outside of continental Africa) re-thinks certain predominantly
Western defined concepts. We will try to
define and question three terms in this course in particular: civilization,
progress, and literacy. Subsequently,
the material on the syllabus will be divided into three areas that generally
deal with these three concepts. Although
the ultimate aim of this course is to analyze writings by and about the Black
populations in U.S. and the Caribbean, the material we will draw upon is
interdisciplinary in nature. In addition
to novels, we will read a play, critical essays and short stories. We will also view films and documentaries
from various cultural contexts. The
latter portion of the course will deal specifically with the notion of
literacy. We will define and explore
what is called Diaspora Literacy;
linguistic, philosophical and cultural ways of knowing that come out of African
Diaspora experience.
Required Texts include Malidoma Some. The
Healing Power of Africa; Brodber, Erna. Louisiana;
August Wilson. Joe Turner’s Come and
Gone; Hodge, Merle. Crick Crack
Monkey; Lovelace, Earl. The Wine
of Astonishment; and John,
Maria-Elena. Unburnable
ENGL 4513.001 Chaucer
with Professor Joyce Coleman
At the doorway to a
600-year-old literary tradition stands one of the most seductive and brilliant
writers that tradition ever produced: Geoffrey Chaucer. Always writing himself
into his works as an eminently likeable innocent, and always fun to read just
for the stories, Chaucer endears himself to the serious reader as a linguistic
innovator, a master of form, and a penetrating student of human nature.
This class will
concentrate on Chaucer's works, with some secondary reading as background. We
will further explore Chaucer and his period through a variety of media,
including manuscript facsimiles and animations of selected Canterbury Tales.
FENGL 4523.010 Shakespeare Comedies with
Professor James Yoch
Explores plays on the ardent pursuit of love,
money, rank and power. Discussions and lectures relate Shakespeare’s theatre to
its cultural contexts and will include dramatic history and staging practices,
as well as competitive forces in the entertainment market reshaping poetic,
familial, national, and religious formulas.
Among the readings: The Taming of
the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure,
The Winter’s Tale, 2 Henry IV, Henry V.
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.
FENGL
4613.001 Nineteenth-Century English Novel with Professor Dan Cottom
In
this course we will study five nineteenth-century English novels, all of which
trace a protagonist’s development from childhood or youth to maturity: Jane
Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George
Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Charles
Dickens’s Great Expectations, and
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Accompanied by pain, shame, injury, loss,
anger, confusion, and even death, maturity
in these novels is hard won, if won at all. The complexities of these works
should help us to think through the relationship of the individual to society
not only in nineteenth-century English literature but also in terms relevant to
our understanding of ourselves today.
Constructions of identity—including the very notion of “the
individual”—ideologies of class and gender, the structures of families, the
powers of social conventions, and the vicissitudes of sexual desire are among
the topics I expect we’ll be discussing.
There will be no exams. Grades
will be based on students’ participation in class discussion and on four
papers, ranging in length from four to ten pages.
FENGL 4733.001 American Realism and Naturalism
with Professor Henry McDonald
In this course, we will study the
literatures written and published between 1865 (the end of the Civil War) and
1914 (the beginning of World War I) from a wide range of perspectives.
Although
“realism” and “naturalism” will be discussed extensively, our attention will
not be limited to the literary movements indicated by those terms. On the
contrary, as titles for a literature course, they can be misleading, since
“naturalism” was far too narrow a movement, and “realism” far too broad a one,
to provide a real basis for fruitful study. American naturalism was a
relatively short-lived movement consisting of a handful of major figures (all
men), some of whom challenged the determinism supposedly definitive of
naturalism. On the other hand, “realism,” used in opposition to “romance” or
even “idealism,” is an extremely wide-ranging term which does not admit of a
truly meaningful definition unless it is taken in a formalistic sense as
signifying the practice of a particular kind of narrative discourse, called “free
indirect discourse” (FID). The function of this obscurely named but very widely
practiced technique, as we will learn in this course, is to evoke the
psychological reality of characters in confrontation with their external
worlds. As we will see, the nature of those “worlds” vary with the kind of
literature considered: “Western literatures,” “Naturalistic literatures”
“Women’s literatures” (including regional literatures), “African-American
literatures,” “Native-American literatures,” and “Literatures of Manners and
Morals.” In all cases, we will be interested as much as in the differences and
historical development within these categories or subject types as in the
categories themselves, examining a range of novels, stories, and poetry from
social, cultural, political, and ethical-aesthetic perspectives. Among the
authors we will read are Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Kate Chopin,
Booker T. Washington, Charles Chestnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jack London, Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and
Frank Norris.
FENGL 4823.001 American
Novel since 1920: Race and Culture with Professor Rita Keresztesi
In this course we will study the
diverse and thematically varied literary production of the U.S. during the
interwar period and after, including the Civil Rights era in the 1950s. Besides
reading some of the canonical books of American modernism, we will also read
some lesser-known texts written by immigrant, Native American, and African
American authors. In addition to reading
fiction, listening to music, and watching films from and about the era, we will
examine American culture through the lenses of power and politics.
FENGL 4853.001 Capstone: English Scholarly Writing with Professor
Ron Schleifer
Students will
bring to class their favorite or best paper they wrote as English or English
Language Arts majors. The paper needs to
be at least 10 pages long; and it needs to be a scholarly (as opposed to a
"creative") paper. If students
are unsure of what to bring, they can consult with the instructor, but a 10
page scholarly paper, available before the class begins, is a requirement for
the course. The course will consist of
discussions of each student's paper, including intensive written evaluations by
each member of the capstone class and the instructor. Students will rewrite and expand their papers
based upon class discussion and written evaluations. Rewritten papers will be evaluated a second
time during the semester by the class as a whole; and a second rewrite will be
necessary. The instructor will evaluate
the second rewritten version of the paper.
In addition, students will submit copies of the written comments and
comments directly on papers to the instructor as well as to the fellow student
whose work is analyzed. The first and
second rewrites, along with the formal written comments and the class
discussions, will serve as the basis of the course evaluation. Since each student will be submitting work to
be evaluated and discussed by the class as whole, regular attendance is
particularly important. In addition to
their papers – which will be distributed to the class at least one week before
they are discussed – students will also distribute an important text on their
topic (an article, chapter, or other documentation) that will be discussed
along with their initial versions of their papers.
FENGL 4853.002 Capstone:
Black Arts/Black Power with Professor Rita Keresztesi
fulfills multicultural major requirement
This course examines
the formation of the Black Arts and Black Power Movements of the 1960s and
1970s in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Emerging from a matrix of Marxist
and Black Nationalist ideologies and institutions African American and
Afro-Caribbean artists and intellectuals coalesced to form new cultural and
socio-political movements in the 1960s. In this course we will focus on
the cultural exchanges and ideological engagements between the local struggles
for civil rights and the larger global movements for decolonization in Africa
and the Caribbean. In our studies we will read a variety of literary and
critical texts and genres and engage with other forms of media, such as film
and music produced by artists and intellectuals of the African Diaspora.
FENGL 4853.003 Capstone: Poems, Poets, Poetry with Professor Alan
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.
FENGL
4943.900 Creative Non-Fiction Writing with Professor Agymah 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.
FENGL 5113.001 and
002 Teaching College Composition and Literature with Professor David
Mair
This
course is restricted to new English graduate assistants who will be teaching
freshman composition sections for the department.
FENGL
5483.001 Rhetorical Perspectives on Literacy with Professor Catherine
Hobbs
What does the
term "literacy" mean in this mass media, electronic age where text,
graphics, and video "interanimate" each other? How do our received, Western notions of
literacy relate to problems of illiteracy in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa or
even to literacy in our own inner cities or in rural sites? What is the relationship of literacy to clean
water, for example? What are the
boundaries of literacy? What academic
fields does its study encompass? What is
the current benchmark for illiteracy?
How have different fields, institutions, times, and occupations defined
basic or "functional literacy?"
What other conceptualizations might work better? What about levels of literacy above
"functional"? What do the
newer approaches mean by the watchword "multiliteracies" and other
emerging terms? These and other issues will be opened in this course, including
literacy in relation to such factors as gender, ethnicity, age, class;
liberatory and critical literacies; and views from fields other than rhetoric
and composition such as history, sociolinguistics, political science,
economics, education, communication.
FENGL
5523.001 Topics in Medieval Literature and Culture with Professor Dan
Ransom
Topic:
Chaucer and the Classics.
This seminar will focus on works by Chaucer that draw significantly from
the literature of ancient Rome, especially from the works of Ovid, Virgil, and
Statius. We will read, in Middle
English, Chaucer’s House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, Legend of Good Women, Anelida and Arcite, and, from the Canterbury Tales, the Knight’s Tale, the Physician’s Tale, the Manciple’s
Tale, and perhaps a few brief excerpted passages from other tales. Each student will give two reports in the
course of the term, one on a relevant classical work and one on a scholarly
book dedicated to a relevant classical author, to the use of that author in the
Middle Ages, or to Chaucer’s uses of classical authors. Students will have the option of writing a
term paper on some portion of these materials or of doing a collation project
devoted to a portion of the text of Troilus
and Criseyde. I will provide
guidance, and access to materials, for the collation project.
Texts: Any modern edition (not translation) of the
complete works of Chaucer will serve, and editions by F. N. Robinson (1933 and
1957) can probably be purchased cheaply on-line. The current standard edition, based on
Robinson 1957, is The Riverside Chaucer,
3d edition, general editor Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1987). This edition is somewhat
expensive but is far easier to use than the earlier editions; it has glosses at
the foot of the page, fuller annotations in the back, and a much better glossary. As for the Latin texts, you will need in
their entirety only those listed below (Virgil, The Aeneid and Ovid, Metamorphoses
and Heroides); any modern translation
will do. I will provide access to other
texts.
FENGL 5613.900 Seminar: Nineteenth-Century
English Literature with Professor Daniela Garofalo
Topic: Romanticism and Gender Studies. This course will focus on recent work in
gender studies in the field of British Romanticism.
FENGL 5803.900 Seminar: 20th Century
American Literature: Poetics with
Professor Jonathan Stalling
Postmodern Poetics. This
course will begin with the writing of Roland Barthes and explore “postmodern
poetry and poetics” as an outgrowth of his argument that “the author is dead,”
and his discrimination between “readerly texts” (texts that use standard
representations and signifying practices to obscure any elements that would
open up the text to multiple meanings) and “writerly texts” (or texts that
destabilizes the reader’s expectation of a passive consumption of meaning by
transforming readers—consumers—into writers—producers of meaning). While
Barthes serves as both a historical catalyst for and a powerful theorist of
“postmodern poetics,” we will also explore earlier precedents for “writerly”
poems in the work of Stein, Pound, and Zukofsky whose poetry also paved the way
for the avant-garde poetry of the last three decades (which will be the focus
of this course). The poetry we read in this class will largely turn away from
humanism, centripetal, unified, expressive, discursive, hypotactic, and
subjective “lyric” toward more centrifugal, recombinatory, chance generated
(aleatory) or procedural, disjunctive, paratactic, disruptive poetry with
either polyvalent or absent “voices.” The poets (which is a term that
encompasses both critical and creative writing in this course) we will read
will range from those early modernist examples through the “LANGUAGE School”
(Silliman, Bernstein, Howe etc) and to a variety of new “post-LANGUAGE” schools
(including a group of poets who have taken to the name “conceptual poetry”
(Bök, Goldsmith, Dworkin). We will also
have several guest poets and critics who specialize in this tradition
throughout the semester (names will be posted by the beginning of the
semester). If you have ever been curious about how the world of poetry has
responded to the “linguistic turn” of postmodernism, I am sure you will find
the answers as interesting as pleasurable. As much of the work we will be
reading has not been anthologized in a single volume and much is available free
online, most of our readings will be online (see www.ubu.com, www.epc.buffalo.edu, http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/, and http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/ for example.
Students will participate in weekly discussions and have weekly writing
assignments and a final research paper at the end.
FENGL 5943.900 Creative Non-Fiction Writing
with Professor Agymah Kamau
See ENGL 4943 for
details
FENGL 6113.001 Issues in Contemporary Theory and
Cultural Studies with Professor Vince Leitch
This course
examines significant books of cultural theory published during the past decade.
It focuses on three main topics: (a) identity, (b) media, and (c) political
economy. Required texts include: (a) Craig Womack¹s Red on Red and Walter Benn
Michaels¹s The Trouble with Diversity; (b) Pierre Bourdieu¹s On Television and
the Retort Collective¹s Afflicted Powers (this module is supplemented with
chapters by Susan Bordo); and (c) David Harvey¹s A Brief History of
Neoliberalism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri¹s Multitude, plus Marc
Bousquet¹s How the University Works. The course requires a research paper and
brief in-class presentations on assigned texts.