Spring 2009 Short Course Descriptions
(1/7/2009)
ENGL 2123.001 Creative Writing with Professor Honoree 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.
ENGL 2133.001 Autobiographical Writing with Professor Susan 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.
ENGL 2133.002 Autobiographical Writing with Instructor Lynn Lewis
In this course, students will read, analyze, and compose autobiographical texts within the broader category of identity. Each of us has many identities: as a member of a family, as a student and scholar, and as a citizen. This course will encourage students to explore these identities through such topics as identity as history, identity as place, identity as traveler, and identity as "the things we carry." In addition, students will have the opportunity to compose texts using a variety of methods, including images, sounds and alphabetic texts and to consider how these affect their identities as writers. Prior computer knowledge is not necessary beyond an ability to use word processing software, e-mail, and basic Internet research techniques.
ENGL 2233.001 Drama with Professor Jim Yoch
This course explores plays with particular attention to their social contexts, characters in love or war, acting styles and theatrical conventions.
ENGL 2313.001 Introduction to Critical Reading and Writing with Professor Ron Schleifer
Introduction to Critical Reading and Writing is a course that aims to develop skills in reading and writing. Specifically, it will examine the conjunction of the interpretations of literature and the interpretations in the understanding and discussion of poems, prose fiction, occasional critical essays, and the drama. The course will require weekly writing assignments, a seminar paper (10-15 pages), an early draft of the paper, and possible rewrites of the long project.
ENGL 2313.900 Introduction to Critical Reading and Writing with Professor Vince Leitch
In this course English majors and minors read novels, short stories, poems, and plays written by American authors during the interwar period from roughly 1914-1941 but mainly during the “roaring twenties.” One of the main goals of the course is broadening critical reading skills: students study psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, formalism, and deconstruction a examples of critical approaches to literature and culture. Another gain goal is improving critical writing: students write critical essays and analyze and evaluate them in class during periodic workshops. Throughout the course, basic terms, concepts, and conventions of literary and cultural study are highlighted for discussion.
ENGL 2413.001 Introduction to Literature with Instructor Craig Wise
This course familiarizes students with different genres of fiction from American and English literature--short story, novel, poetry, and drama—and connects the selections to contemporary cultural issues. While class discussions are based on cultural aspects of the selected works such as gender, social class, and race, the emphasis is on the student’s analytical interpretation of the work, close reading, how and why the selection means what it does to the student. The bulk of the reading and discussion is based on short stories and two short novels, but considerable emphasis is also given to poetry.
Students are evaluated according to their performance on several in-class quizzes,
(or possibly 4 or 5 one page position papers) a mid-term examination, a short research paper, (6-8 pages) and a final examination.
ENGL 2413.002 Introduction to Literature with Professor Ken Hodges
This class will cover the basics of literary analysis, focusing on form and close reading of poetry, drama, and prose fiction. We'll read a variety of poems, a Shakespearean play, and a number of short stories. In addition to weekly short assignments, there will be three six-page papers.
ENGL 2443.001 World Literature 1700 to Present with Instructor Dan McRaniels
With World Literature 1700 to the Present, we will examine different narratives and their ideologies in an attempt to answer several strategic questions concerning the evolution of individuals, communities and whole nations. We will cover artistic movements from Chinese Theater to French Surrealism along with certain governing philosophies from the Enlightenment period in Europe to the postmodern period in the modern industrial world. Through the examination of this wide array of literary movements and ideas we will begin to trace a narrative that rebels against the ever expanding forms of an industrial bureaucracy in an ever expanding world.
ENGL 2653.001 English Literature 1700 to Present with Professor Alex Bain
This course surveys literature and its backgrounds during the centuries between Great Britain’s recovery from the Civil War/Commonwealth period (1642-59) and the unfinished present of its “post-imperial” condition. In short, we will try to tell the story of a nation by looking at the stories that nation told about itself. We’ll examine poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction, autobiography, sociology, film, and music, and look at some major themes that these artistic forms tried to grapple with. These themes include London’s increasing centrality to national consciousness; 18th-century battles between the freedom of trade and the freedom of persons; 19th-century tensions between religious doubt and national optimism; the collapse of the Empire and the claims made by new kinds of British citizens; and the ongoing problem of how, by whom, and for whom the nation should be governed. As we acquaint ourselves with some of the most enduring and endearing characters, stories, and images of this long history, we’ll see how literary forms and techniques function in relation to the ideas they wish to convey, and how innovations in literary style have affected changes in other realms of social behavior.
ENGL 2653.002 English Literature 1700 to Present with Professor Ron Schleifer
The purpose of this course is to make a broad survey of English literature from the eighteenth century through twentieth century. The survey will attempt describe the major concerns of the times expressed in the literature of the period. At the same time, it will attempt to describe a broad spectrum of questions that students can bring to the study of literature. The course will require weekly writing assignments, a short paper (6 pages), and a seminar paper (10-15 pages), which can incorporate the work of the shorter paper.
ENGL 2743.001 American Indian Literature: Modern & Contemporary with Professor Geary Hobson
This course is a continuation of American Indian Literature: Early and Traditional, which is offered during fall semesters. The modern period of Indian literature begins about 1934 and continues to the present day. The fall course is not a prerequisite for this course.
ENGL 2883.001 American Literature Survey (Civil War to Present) with Instructor Orit Rabkin
The course will focus on American Literature written starting in 1865. We will read the canonized authors, those authors that are regarded as the most important writers in American literary history like Mark Twain or Stephen Crane and later Robert Frost and Ernst Hemingway. Along side, we will also read some wonderfully interesting writers that are less known generally but are read more and more in the universities as well as elsewhere. For example, we will read Zora Neale Hurston who made it to Oprah's reading club. We will read Jewish American and Native American authors, too such as Bernard Malamud, Phillip Roth, and Scott Momaday.
Having taken the course, students will leave with an understanding of the literary forces that shaped America in the period following the Civil War, through the First World War, and through the Second World War. What these writers talked about then still impacts the way we write and think about the world today. In order to get a better sense of these writers, we will also watch a few films in class.
Books: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volumes C and D, and a short course packet.
ENGL 2883.001 American Literature Survey (Civil War to Present) with Professor Tim Murphy
English 2883 is a historical survey of American literature in all genres from the end of the Civil War to the present. In conjunction with English 2773, American Literature to 1865, this course fulfills the core survey requirement for the English major.
In this course students will study major figures in American literature from the late 19th century onward, including Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. duBois, Henry Adams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and/or others. The course will be run as a lecture-seminar in which student participation will be expected and included as a graded element. The other graded elements of the course will be an in class midterm and final exam and two 7-10 page analytical essays on issues and figures covered in the course.
ENGL 3103.001 Topics in Advanced Composition with Professor Chris Carter
Subtitle: Visual Rhetoric. This course addresses the communicative power of the image, focusing especially on the rhetoric of photography, advertising, film, and digital iconography. Using various examples from each category, we place still and moving pictures in historical context, assessing their possible meanings in terms of the cultural predispositions that reigned when the images first appeared. We also consider how those meanings change with time, concentrating particular attention on how they resonate within our contemporary moment.
ENGL 3103.002 Topics in Advanced Composition with Professor Susan Kates
Subtitle: Writing about Place. This course will focus on the exploration of writing about place. We will read numerous works by writers who concentrate on both rural and urban environments and explore the relation between echo psychology and autobiographical writing. The reading load will be significant as will the writing.
ENGL 3123.900 Fiction Writing with Professor Agymah Kamau
ENGL 3183.995 and .996 Authoring in the Information Age with Instructor April Whitman
This course examines the authoring of information in traditional paper documents, Power Point presentations, and web sites with emphasis on delivery, arrangement/architecture, and design for communicating through language and graphics. Topics include the analysis and influence of rhetorical contexts, accessibility and retrieval of information, and usability testing. Online course.
ENGL 3193.001 Writing with Writers with Professor Michelle Eodice
This course is focused on writers and writing. First, we will review the history of writing instruction, peer tutoring, and collaborative learning. Then we will read about more recent concepts of writing consulting and discuss models, such as writing across the curriculum, writing fellows, and writing coaches. The course will include reading, writing, discussion, presentations, practice, and participatory activities. Each experience will lead to developing new strategies for dialoging with writers and facilitating learning.
ENGL 3213.001 Detective Fiction & Film with Professor Alex Bain
From Sherlock Holmes to C.S.I., from The Naked City to Sin City, the detective story has offered a thrilling and disturbing take on modern America. For over 150 years, the genre has set iconic figures like the amateur detective, the “private eye,” the cop, the sociopath, and the femme fatale in motion across the landscape and psyche of the nation, often blurring the lines between law and lawlessness, not to mention “literature” and “pulp,” along the way. This course traces the development and problems of the genre from its 19th-century transatlantic roots, to the emergence of its unruly multi-media siblings, hard-boiled crime fiction and film noir, to its recent revisionist past. We will examine how some of detective fiction’s most significant and stylistically ambitious practitioners have explored crime, justice, social mobility, race and gender relations, knowledge, professional labor and accountability, and the power of art. Readings will include fiction (both short and long) by Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Hammett, Cain, Chandler, Highsmith, Himes, Ellroy; as well as critical and contextual readings. Films may include Double Indemnity; Chinatown ; Blade Runner; Memento. NOTE: There will be periodic film screenings for this course (no more than 4); they will be held outside the normal class hours (see schedule for times), and attendance is mandatory. Please do not sign up for this course if a conflict of any kind prevents you from attending screenings.
ENGL 3313.001 Introduction to Literary & Cultural Studies with Professor Jim Zeigler
This course examines competing ways of reading that have initiated, inspired, transformed, and antagonized the discipline of literary study, particularly in universities across the United States since the emergence of “English” as a field in the late 19th century. An introduction to the history and practice of literary and critical theory, this class in methodology begins with the observation that all reading (even holiday reading for pleasure) is informed by at least a tacit theory of how we arrive at an understanding of a text’s meaning and any convictions about its value. Our course will also promote the notion that “theory” is an exciting field within literary and cultural studies. Course texts include The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Mos Def’s “Rock-n-Roll,” David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, various pictures of theatrical cross-dressing, and at least one monologue by Edward Norton.
ENGL 3313.002 Introduction to Literary & Cultural Studies with Professor Johnathan Stalling
In English 3313, “Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies” (Prerequisite: 2313), students will focus on close readings of literary texts through different theoretical approaches (Structuralist, Poststructuralist, Feminist, Multi-Ethnic, New Historicist etc.). Using key literary terms and techniques, students will engage larger cultural and historical issues leading up to the rise of multiculturalism in the last several decades. Students will participate in class discussions, write weekly responses or answer questions, write one formal essay, and take a mid-term and final exam.
ENGL 3313.900 Introduction to Literary & Cultural Studies with Professor Yianna Liatsos
This course is designed to introduce undergraduates to literary and cultural criticism, and in this particular section we will focus on the topic of heterodoxy and aesthetic representation—that is, on the potential of the arts to challenge the sociopolitical status quo. We will explore this theme by reading some key theoretical texts—by thinkers that include Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Said, and Butler—alongside literary works—by Ibsen, Joyce, and Salih. Please note that since the texts we will focus on are fairly complex, they requite extensive and careful reading. Moreover, since the weekly assignments build on each other, you have to be consistent in completing them and in attending class on a regular basis. Failure to do this will guarantee your inability to follow along.
ENGL 3423.001 Film & Other Cultural Expressions with Professor Joanna Rapf
The “other expressive forms” of this course title will primarily be literary --novels, plays, and short stories -- although there will be the opportunity to examine music, painting, and other art forms, including television, in a term paper. We will study adaptation theory as it has evolved from the early years of Bluestone talking about “paraphrase,” Linden about “transformation,” Balàzs about “re-interpretation,” to McFarlane’s more recent exploration of “translation,” and current work in “redaction theory.” Dudley Andrew has pointed out that every representational film can be regarded as an “adaptation,” but this course will focus on how one expressive form is “transformed” when adapted for a different medium.
ENGL 3533.001 Seventeenth Century English Literature with Professor Su Fang Ng
The seventeenth century in England was a period of immense changes. Debates over the roles of the monarchy and of the state church culminated mid-century in the unprecedented regicide of Charles I and the establishment of an English republic. Although that revolution was not a lasting one, for the monarchy returned in the Restoration of 1660, the challenge to authority conducted on all levels transformed the major social institutions—the monarchy, the church, and the family. Reading the literary works of this period of great political and religious upheaval, we will be concerned with both literary and cultural issues. We will investigate how the misogynistic culture of the Jacobean court encouraged the production of tragedies obsessed by sexual sin, perversion, and violence. We will discover how religious debates over ceremonialism become embedded into both religious and secular poetry. We will consider how works such as Milton’s great religious epic, Paradise Lost, and Behn’s prose narrative, Oronooko, are concerned with the nature and place of monarchy--from the perspectives of a radical republican and a royalist, respectively.
Texts include Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 2006; and Ford, John. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Brian Morris. New York: Norton, 1968.
Requirements: Papers, exams, quizzes, attendance and participation.
ENGL 3573.001 Arthurian Legend with Professor Ken Hodges
This course will look at literary representations of King Arthur (not archaeological or historical materials) from the middle ages to the twentieth-century. Authors will include Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer Malory, Tennyson, and Twain. Four six-page papers are required.
ENGL 3613.001 Nineteenth Century British Literature with Professor Daniela Garofalo
This course will explore the poetry, drama, and novels of the late Romantic and Victorian period, examining in particular nineteenth-century British concerns with the status of the empire, industrialization, consumer culture, and religion.
ENGL 3713.001 Introduction to American Studies with Professor Geary Hobson
Introduction to American Studies 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 we will be examining them.
HON 3993.009 Honors Colloquium: 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 be in the Honors College to take this course.
ENGL 4133.001 History of the English Language with Professor Dan Ransom
We shall study the development of the English language from its earliest known origins up to its current forms. This endeavor will involve consideration of the sounds of the language, how these changed, how we are able to track the changes, and how they affected the grammatical structure of the language. We will also look at how the vocabulary of English has evolved over time, how historical circumstance encouraged changes in the lexicon, and how the peculiarities of modern spelling came about. We will investigate the formalizing of English, a relatively modern undertaking, and how it has affected the language and our perception of English. Finally, we will examine some of the specific features and varieties of American English.
ENGL 4013: Major Figure: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Road to Middle Earth with Professor Joyce Coleman
This is a condensed 8 week course (Jan 20 – Mar 12)
Millions of people now know J.R.R. Tolkien as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Far fewer know that his "day job" was teaching Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Literature at Oxford University. Tolkien built Middle Earth out of his fascination with language and with such medieval and heroic texts as Beowulf, the Elder Edda, the Volsungssaga, the Kalevala, and Sir Orfeo.
In this course we will retrace Tolkien's "road to Middle Earth," reading his famous works against the medieval texts that inspired them, along with biographical material and his own critical writing about literature and fantasy. Students will be invited to pursue some of the many fascinating byways to this "road" in their class reports and papers.
SPOILER ALERT: Since so many people have already read The Lord of the Rings, class discussion will include references to the later chapters and conclusion of LoTR. If you haven't already read the book, it is strongly recommended that you do so before class begins; if you can't manage it, be aware that we will talk about the whole book throughout.
ENGL 4203.001 Carnival Literature with Professor Rita Keresztesi
This course examines the historical, cultural and political aspects of Carnival celebrations in Europe and the Americas. Through studies in theory, fiction, film, performance, and music we trace the subversive and liberatory power of Carnival. Starting with Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the carnival celebrations of medieval Europe, we then move on to studying how Carnival celebrations were transformed in the colonial context, particularly in the Caribbean. Carnival in the New World is a synthesis of European elements, such as Christianity and masquerade, and African elements, primarily music, masking and dance, which have each facilitated resistance and rebellion. We use the concept of Carnival as a theoretical tool to study the processes of decolonization and nation-building in Trinidad after Independence.
ENGL 4273.001 Women Writers with Professor Francesca Sawaya
In the late 1970s, galvanized by the women’s movement, feminist literary critics began to examine what they argued was an alternative women’s tradition in American literature to that of the mainstream literary canon: namely women’s literary regionalism. Writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Kate Chopin, Zitkala-Sa, Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, Anzia Yezierska, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, were seen as providing critiques of the central themes and ideas that had informed American fiction and American criticism.
This class on American women’s writing has two main goals. First, it aims to present a broad survey of some of the central texts in the canon of American women’s regional writing, particularly focusing on the period from the Civil War to World War One. Second, it seeks to introduce students to the theoretical and critical debates that women’s literary regionalism has elicited. The debates about regionalism, particularly in the last twenty years, have been quite lively and provide us with a window into the larger debates that have shaped contemporary feminist literary theory and criticism.
Relying therefore both on primary texts and an enormous body of literary criticism, we will examine some of the central questions that have emerged in relation to women’s literary regionalism. These questions include but are not limited to: What is regionalism? Is it a viable and useful explanatory term for certain kinds of writing? Why does regionalism seem to have been a form in which the first “professional” women writers in the U.S. excelled? Does this form register the limitations that women intellectuals faced as they attempted to present their ideas in public forums? Or does the form reveal the ways women contested and expanded the canon of acceptable ideas in U.S. intellectual debates? Or even finally, is regionalism a useful category at all for describing the rise of the professional woman writer? In addition, what accounts for the disappearance of women regionalists from standard literary histories before the 1970s? More broadly, what are the theoretical or methodological reasons for arguing that men and women writers have different literary traditions, and likewise what are the problems with doing so? And how do these questions about literary tradition and gender intersect and/or clash with issues of class, ethnicity, and/or race?
ENGL 4283.001 Hip Hop Phenomenon with Professor Catherine 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 come forward to the present, reading texts and watching 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. 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. Third, we will deal with the poetics of the form through active performance.
ENGL 4403.001 Special Topics in Comparative Literature with Professor Johnathan Stalling
As Americans enter what many scholars are already dubbing the “Pacific Century,” it is increasingly important to explore the potential transpacific configurations of twentieth-century literature and poetry. Unlike comparative literature or comparative philosophy and religion, which trace the similarities and differences between distinct discourses, we will explore how both Chinese and American poetry have from the very birth of twentieth century been drawing heavily upon one another’s poetry and philosophy for inspiration. So as American students enter this new era, it is not only important to know more about different ways of seeing the world, but also see how these ways of seeing are unfixed, dynamic, and always in a state of interpenetration (what we might call interfluence). This is not an easy story to tell but is a very interesting one as it will help students acquire a basic understanding of China’s “Three Teachings” (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism), as well as Classical Chinese poetics, cosmology, and an understanding of how these discourses have changed as they enter America through our poetry. This is perhaps one of the most exciting stories in American literature and one that I believe you will enjoy exploring. We will also have the opportunity to meet and speak with China's most well known author Mo Yan (the recent Newman Prize Winner), and one of America's most well-known Chinese American poets, Arthur Sze. Very cool. You will have weekly writing assignments, a mid-term and a final paper.
ENGL 4443.001 Contemporary African Literature with Professor Yianna Liatsos
This course will examine the literary representation of violence by authors writing across the African continent today. Specifically, our analyses of selected works and writers will explore the following themes: 1. how anti-colonial liberation warfare is remembered and informs contemporary identity struggles; 2. how attempts toward the national catharsis of post-genocide Rwanda and post-apartheid South Africa have been unsuccessful in ridding the two countries of cruelty and bloodshed; 3. how child soldiers come to terms with their violent and violated childhood while struggling to reinvent themselves in the midst of ruined societies; and 4. how the memory of slavery informs the desire for rootedness and home. We will read novels, autobiographies, poetry, and hybrid texts, alongside watching films and reviewing key critical essays in the field of African literature.
ENGL 4533.010 Shakespeare Tragedies with Professor Jim Yoch
The course goals are: 1) To read creatively and to interpret skillfully the works of Shakespeare; 2) To become comfortable with the language; 3) To learn to write adeptly about feelings, thoughts, moral constructs, rhetorical patterns that Shakespeare shaped in his plays; and 4) To participate in the large community of new friends in the audiences and commentators, directors and playwrights who have had a good time with Shakespeare for four centuries.
ENGL 4593.001 Writings By and About Medieval Women with Professor Ken Hodges
What made a good medieval woman? The answers are surprisingly complicated and diverse, and are often obscured by modern critics’ tendency to project modern ideas back into the past. This course will look at medieval women though medieval writings, including the Lais of Marie de France, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, the religious writings of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, and possibly some instructional texts such as the Ancrene Wisse and The Book of the Knight of the Tour Landry. A number of the readings will be in Middle English, so experience with Middle English is advised (although not strictly required); there will be one six-page paper, one prospectus, and one twenty-page paper for the course.
ENGL 4713.001 Majors Authors in 19th Century American Literature with Professor Francesca Sawaya
James Baldwin famously called Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin a “cornerstone of American social protest fiction.” This class examines how three major nineteenth-century writers—Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt—responded implicitly and explicitly to the ideas and form of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in their fiction. Two central questions we will examine are: (1) What are some of the central debates about “social protest” fiction, especially Uncle Tom’s Cabin? (2) How have these debates about social protest fiction, and the way they have changed over the centuries, shaped our ideas about who is a “major” author? Among the texts we will read are:
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Herman Melville: Benito Cereno, The Confidence Man
Mark Twain: Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Charles Chesnutt, Journals, The Conjure Woman, The Marrow of Tradition, The Colonel’s Dream
ENGL 4723.001 Issues in 19th Century American Literature with Professor Henry McDonald
Subtitle: Realism Between the Civil War and World War I. 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, these terms 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 Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Hunter Austin, Sarah Winnemucca, Charles A. Eastman, Zitkala Sa, Helen Hunt Jackson, Booker T. Washington, Charles Chestnutt, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, Henry Adams, Emma Lazarus, Abraham Cahan, and Jane Addams.
ENGL 4853.001 Capstone: Freedom & The State with Professor Catherine John
This Capstone will focus on the relationship between concepts of freedom and notions of the state or the community. We will examine a variety of works from different genres and cultural contexts looking at how freedom is defined individually and collectively in various societies while also considering how the idea of the nation, the community, or the collective is imagined. We will examine the form of each of the texts we study and discuss the significance of the genre and how the information is applicable and useful in work and everyday life. We will also do a variety of genres of writing, ending with and including a research paper.
ENGL 4853.002 Capstone: Nineteenth-Century Monsters with Professor Daniela Garofalo
This course will explore literature in the nineteenth century that is obsessed with the unnatural, the supernatural, and the fantastic. Our focus will be mostly on Britain but we will also read works by American and continental writers. We will read classic works such as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but also lesser known poems such as Southey’s Thalaba about the making of robots. We will explore literature that represents nineteenth-century anxieties about science, religion, social upheaval, empire, women, slavery, and industrialization.
ENGL 4923.900 Advanced Fiction Writing with Professor Agymah Kamau
ENGL 4933.900 Advanced Poetry Writing with Professor Honoree Jeffers
Advanced Poetry Writing is designed for the undergraduate poet who has had experience with creative writing in general and poetry in particular, and who wants to learn how to become a serious poet. Prerequisites for this class are ENGL 2123, ENG 3133, and the permission of the professor to enroll. Course objectives are to 1) learn, on an advanced level, how to discuss the critical and creative means of poetry in a workshop setting manner; 2) how to write critically about creative texts, in this case, poetry, and 3) learn how to write in both traditional form and free verse.
ENGL 5223.001 Film Theory with Professor Joanna Rapf
The aim of this course is to familiarize the student with the "classical film theory" that evolved during the early days of cinema in an attempt to establish this new form as an "art," and more contemporary film and media theories that have emerged in an effort to understand the way this now established art form shapes and/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 newer film and media theories, drawing on linguistics, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. There will be an emphasis on current work in feminist media theory, along with an exploration of how to use film and other forms of media -- perhaps including gaming -- in the classroom.
Students will be required to see at least one assigned film a week, on their own, outside of class, in addition to doing the readings. Since this is a seminar, class participation is the core of the course, and each student will give two in-class reports on a specific topic during the semester. I also require a journal where, hopefully, ideas will germinate for a major term project due at the end of the seminar. There will probably also be pop quizzes and a take-home final.
USER FEE and SCREENINGS: $35.00. Students enrolled in this course must plan on viewing at least one film outside of class each week. Probable Texts: still to be decided. Probable Films: still to be decided.
ENGL 5313.900 Literary Criticism with Professor Rita Keresztesi
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”: “(ii) 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).
ENGL 5343.001 Native American Fiction with Professor Alan Velie
Subtitle: Masterpieces of the American Indian Renaissance. This course will feature novels and poetry by contemporary Indian writers including Scott Momaday, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and Sheriman Alexie.
ENGL 5403.900 Issues in Composition, Rhetoric & Literacy with Professor Chris Carter
This course introduces some major areas of inquiry in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy studies from the nineteenth century to the present. Beginning with debates about the meaning and institutional status of CRL, we examine historical work on the consolidation of the field while tracking the intellectual currents that inform its research and pedagogies. We pay particular attention to theories of composition as an ongoing, recursive process, emphasizing the various and competing teaching techniques that have emerged from those theories. Keeping the process movement in mind, we then investigate how our condition as embodied, socially situated subjects influences how we define, acquire, and profess literacy. Like the keywords “composition” and “rhetoric,” “literacy” is a fluid and contested term tied to histories of race relations, personal and cultural identity-formation, gender dynamics, class politics, and technological innovation—to name only a few of the more prominent issues that motivate research. After becoming familiar with these issues, we address what Paula Mathieu calls the “public turn” in the field, considering the advantages and limitations of service learning and community-based writing projects. We conclude by linking process theories, embodied literacies, and public pedagogies to questions of audience reception, taking up the premise that engaged listening is no less rhetorical than composing.
ENGL 5453.001 Writing
Histories of Rhetoric with Professor Catherine Hobbs
In this seminar, we will
discuss a broad range of theoretical and methodological issues having to do
with the writing of histories. Along with readings, discussions, and
presentations on historiography, we will analyze the history of histories of
rhetoric in rhetoric and composition in English as well as communication
studies. You should leave the class with a good understanding of the
changes and continuities in histories of rhetoric over time, especially since
the challenges of the mid-1980s. You will also learn something about how
to do responsible researching and writing of histories of rhetoric.
ENGL 5543.900 Renaissance Drama with Professor Su Fang Ng
This seminar will explore early modern England’s fashioning of a national identity in a rapidly globalizing world. Although globalization has been seen as a modern, post-Cold War phenomenon, in fact it has a much older history. In this course we will contextualize globalization historically, paying close attention to its premodern forms. We will focus on the ideological and cultural consequences of England’s efforts to enter profitable Old World trade routes—formerly dominated by the Ottomans and their Venetian allies but then challenged by the Portuguese. To do so, we will analyze England’s engagement with its racial and religious others (Jews and Muslims) and with foreign states (particularly the Islamic empire of the Ottomans) and consider its development of new methods of capital accumulation (through the joint-stock companies). These contacts with the larger world meant a reshaping of English identity, including its imperial identity. However, we need to revise our scholarly understanding of English imperial destiny as largely aspirational and imaginative. While England experimented with colonization in Ireland and in the Americas, it did not achieve a territorial empire like the Hapsburgs or the Ottomans. The English focused mostly on trade exchanges rather than establishing colonies. Thus we will pay attention not to the largely unsuccessful New World colonies, but English mercantile activities in Asia and piratical activities everywhere. The consequent rise in luxury consumption (of imported goods) was also seen as changing the character of the English nation. European rivalry in Asia led to clashes that put pressure on foreign relations within Europe itself. In thinking about questions of war and peace that this gave rise to, early modern thinkers developed modern international law. Thus, we will also consider not just England’s relations with the Ottomans but also their tense and intimate relationship with that other pirate nation, the Dutch seaborne empire, their Protestant allies and rivals. Our readings include literary works, travel accounts (Argensola, Smith, and others), and key theoretical works by early modern thinkers of international law. We will also read a selection of secondary works by historians of empire and of premodern global economies.
Reading List may include:
Plays: Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great I and I; Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl; Fletcher, The Island Princess; Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West; Dryden, Amboyna
Poetry: Dryden, Annus Mirabilis; Marvell, The Character of Holland; Milton, Paradise Lost (selected books)
Treatises: Hugo Grotius, Mare Liberum (The Free Sea); John Selden, Mare Clausum; Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies
Travel accounts:
Nabil Matar and Daniel Vitkus, Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption; Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, The Discovery and Conquest of the Malucco and Philippine Islands
Selections from secondary works:
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected Histories
Andre Gunder Frank, Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
ENGL 5613.001 Nineteenth Century British Literature with Professor Dan Cottom
Subtitle: Literature and Labor. The topics raised, questions posed, and directions taken by our discussions throughout this semester will be determined in large part by the interests of those in the class. The works we will be reading are by no means solely concerned with "literature and labor," and I would expect that we'll address fascinating issues involving art, education, sexuality, science, gender, and gentility, to name just a few. Overall, though, this course is devoted to the conception of work in nineteenth-century English literature, and this should provide a basis for our discussions and a ground for a developing analysis throughout the course of the semester. We will be reading four major Victorian novels—Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72), and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895)—alongside relevant contemporary writings by Alfred de Vigny, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Carlyle, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Paul Lafargue, Henry Mayhew, John Ruskin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Students will be responsible for short weekly writings and a final term paper; class participation will also be required. There will be no exams.
This class is premised upon the idea that work took on a new meaning in the nineteenth century. It goes without saying that work had always been a hard fact of life. In the nineteenth century, however, it became something more than the burdensome toil it had been from time immemorial. In this era work became spirit. As in the dialectic of the master and slave in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (1807), work came to be internalized in and as culture.
Nineteenth-century writers and artists would try to trace out a distinguished genealogy for their attitude to work, digging up precedents such as the ancient motto laborare est orare, "to work is to pray." Carlyle often liked to recall this bit of inspiration, and John Rogers Herbert made it the subject of an 1862 painting. The modern conditions of life in the nineteenth century, however, made it serve ends quite quite different from those of St. Benedict, the sixth-century founder of monasticism to whom it is attributed. As far as the organization of work was concerned, in this century the master had changed. Think only of how marginal a role the dramatization of work plays in the entire corpus of Shakespeare's drama, and then think of how central its description is to nineteenth-century novels by writers such as Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Émile Zola, and Thomas Hardy, and one cannot help but see the difference.
Culture had formerly been seen as a monopoly of the leisured ranks of society. Prior to the nineteenth century, speaking of "folk culture" would have been nonsense, "primitive culture" an oxymoron, and "popular culture" an ironic jibe. Yet these formulations and others like them were created in the nineteenth century as the social, economic, and political developments of recent times culminated in the new-found power of the middle classes to define matters of the spirit in terms of their own cherished self image, as the triumph of dignified labor. Where work had once been seen as punishment, the sweat-beaded brow a legacy of original sin, its redemptive promise was now emphasized. Formerly seen as the antithesis to culture, which might be symbolized by the pale, sensitive hand of a lady or gentleman of leisure, work now increasingly came to be seen as a moral virtue, a spiritual discipline, the surest mechanism of social control, and, if not the ultimate origin of all values—for here most would still nod to the Deity—at least their proximate source.
The study of political economy was exemplary in its startlingly modern postulation, by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, of labor as the foundation of all value. Work was such an all-absorbing reality in this age, however, that even many of those who vociferously criticized the premises of political economy, such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, still preached the gospel of work as the salvation of humankind. Through our readings over the course of this semester, we will try to explore the significance of this changing conception of work.
ENGL 5703.900 Rhetorical Cultures of the Cold War with Professor Jim Zeigler
This American Studies seminar will examine the rhetorical culture of the early years of the Cold War with attention to the influence of anticommunism on electoral politics, Hollywood cinema, gender norms, consumer habits, public intellectuals, the Civil Rights Movement, and even literary aesthetics. Four primary questions will organize our course. First, how did a constellation of government programs, voluntary civil associations, and popular culture in the long decade of the 1950s engender the potent social fiction of a national anticommunist consensus? (And how interesting were the intellectuals and artists who refused to subscribe to this common sense?) Second, how did the normative cultural narrative of the anticommunist consensus function to disqualify and impede progressive political interests? Third, how did the public intellectuals and literary artists affiliated with an emergent counter-culture and the Civil Rights Movement contend with the network of Cold War tropes, arguments, and narratives that was well-suited to impugn dissent as treachery or, worse, perversity? Finally, how since the dissolution of the Soviet Union has a U.S. discourse of Cold War triumphalism served to justify retroactively illicit government activities and undemocratic social norms?
The first two questions will involve us in crucial but standard concerns of scholarship on the culture of the Cold War. Our third and fourth questions will lead us to more novel terrain that will inform individual research projects. Provided presentations and essays contribute to our collective understanding of the rhetorical culture of the Cold War, graduate students who work in other fields will be encouraged to develop topics that pertain to their primary interests. For example, graduate students in CRL may enjoy the chance to receive credit for an American literature course while investigating the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke. Graduate students who work in earlier periods of American literature may inquire into how the culture of the Cold War informs the reception history of select texts from the 18th or 19th centuries. Obviously, I will also be keen to discuss and read projects committed entirely to the texts and concerns of the early years of the Cold War.
Enthusiasts of Gramsci’s political writings would be right to discern that the relationship between the first half of the course and the third unit will be loosely analogous to the distinction between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic social formations. The first half of the itinerary, questions one and two, might also be characterized in terms of Foucault’s work on disciplinary regimes, and the writers discussed in the third unit of the course will be measured against Edward Said’s work on intellectuals who speak truths that distress normative culture. The final unit will afford us the chance to measure our cumulative historiographical work alongside descriptions of globalization as the bequest of democratic capitalism’s victory in the Cold War.
Cold War texts and authors most likely to be required for the course include: the films Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil; a choice episode of I Love Lucy; the jailhouse letters of “atomic spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; transcripts of testimony before HUAC by the Hollywood Ten, J. Edgar Hoover, and others; political treatises by Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Hannah Arendt, and Aimé Césaire; the ex-Communist conversion narratives of The God That Failed; the essays and drama of James Baldwin; Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives; novels by William Burroughs and Jim Thompson; literary criticism by C.L.R. James; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; and the HUAC performance of Women Strike for Peace. The recent scholars of Cold War culture who will be most instructive to the seminar include Ellen Schrecker, Michael Rogin, Lynn Spiegel, Elaine Tyler May, Lizabeth Cohen, Mary Dudziak, Donald Pease, and Edward Said. On the topic of Cold War triumphalism, we’ll read portions of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Jacques Derrida’s inspired rebuttal in Specters of Marx.
Course requirements include regular participation, a presentation in the format of an academic conference (with atypical verve, please), as well as a 20-25 page essay that contributes new knowledge to our collaboration.
ENGL 5713.001 Nineteenth Century American Literature with Professor Henry McDonald
Subtitle: Late Nineteenth Century American Literature (Huck Finn: Racist Trash? As recently as 2006 yet another book was published calling for the removal of Huckleberry Finn from the bookshelves of schools and libraries on the grounds that it was “racist trash” harmful to the mores of children and young adults. What makes such indictments, issued mostly by educators, critically significant is that when the novel, during the first half of the 20th century, was established as the classic work from which “all modern American literature comes,” in the words of Ernest Hemingway,” a judgment seconded by William Faulkner, Lionel Trilling, Ralph Ellison, and countless others, it was given such a status precisely as a standard bearer of the liberal tradition. Huckleberry Finn had been the novel, along with the poetry of Walt Whitman, which had overthrown the genteel tradition of 19th century New England by being “rough, coarse, and inelegant,” and by featuring a hero who lies, uses profanity, steals – and, condemns himself to Hell in order to free his African-American friend, Jim, who is a slave.
In this course, we will begin our study of the “literary languages” of the late 19th and early 20th century United States by examining the so-called “classic status” of Huckleberry Finn and why so many critics, and not just educators, have not only altered their judgment of such status but have expressed indifference about the novel’s banning. We will then read a number of works clustered around the same time period, influenced by similar social, cultural, and political forces, but made up of very different kinds of “literary language” expressing very different purposes of what literature is supposed to “do.” Among the authors we will read are Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Henry Adams, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin (stories), Mary Hunter Austin, Sarah Winnemucca, Charles Eastman, Helen Hunt Jackson, Emma Lazarus, Abraham Cahan, Jane Addams, Charles W. Chesnutt (stories), W.E.B. Dubois (The Souls of Black Folk), James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man) Stephen Crane (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets), Henry James (Daisy Miller: A Study) and Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie).
In conjunction with these works, we will read selected writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and (the later) Jacques Derrida. Our theoretical focus will be structured by the distinction between “morality” and “ethics” that has gained currency in recent years. Traditionally, in the work of Kant, morality had been defined in terms of the universal norms of reason guiding a person’s behavior, and had been privileged over ethics, which had been associated with the more personal and less strictly rational aspects of our moral interactions with others in the world. In recent years, however, thanks in large part to the influence of the thinkers mentioned above, morality has been subjected to a radical critique such that justice can no longer be equated with reason defined in terms of universality; it requires recognition of the incommensurability of the other person. Ethics begins where morality, as Nietzsche urged, ends; the two meet only at a semantic aporia where the moral basis of the self is confronted with its own cognitive impossibility. Which is to say, in less theoretical terms, that literature gains an “ethical” status, becomes a vehicle for the expression of “the other” – of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed – only by dramatizing the impossibility of moral self-development, of moral self-constitution, of what, in short, used to be the principal aesthetic justification for the novel ever since the time of the bildungsroman, the novel of self-culture and self-education. Is this, perhaps, the underlying issue that has sustained debate about Huckleberry Finn over the course of almost a century – and which, more than charges of racism or complicity with the post-Reconstruction era in which the novel was written, is responsible for the presumed overthrow of its classic status? Such, at least, will be among the critical and theoretical issues we will examine in this course.
ENGL 5923.900 Advanced Fiction Writing with Professor Agymah Kamau
See ENGL 4923 for description.
ENGL 5933.900 Advanced Poetry Writing with Professor Honor Jeffers
See ENGL 4933 for description.