UB FACULTY

SAMPLE COURSES

Readings in the Cultural History of Science and Medicine. The place of science and medicine--and of such phenomena as the body, sexuality, disease, technical knowledge, observation, laboratory practice, collecting and museum display, patronage, and the transmission of knowledge and practices--within the cultures of the ancient world, the middle ages, the Renaissance, early-modern Europe, and the modern world will be explored through a reading and discussion of the work of scholars such as Roy Porter, Joan Cadden, Michel Foucault, Thomas Laqueur, Barbara Duden, Donna Haraway, Lisa Cartwright, and N. Katharine Hayles.

Foucault

History and Theory. The objective of this course is to stimulate critical inquiry about the fundamental assumptions of historical research and writing. From Foucault and Geertz to Dominick LaCapra, Donna Haraway, Marshall Sahlins, Joan Scott, Bruno Latour, and Michel de Certeau, this course will examine the implications of "theory" and its impact on the writing of history from poststructuralism and postmodernism to the new cultural history.

Austin Booth, Humanities Specialist at Lockwood Library.  In addition to having taken her MLS at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she is completing her dissertation on Secret Agents: Concealment and Disclosure in Victorian Culture.  Her responsibilities include collection development in English and American literature, media studies, and philosophy as well as research instruction in both traditional, print works and electronic resources.   Her interests are the politics and history of information culture, particularly the relationship of women and secrecy.  Her current projects include articles on the politics of secrecy in Wives and Daughters and Villette and editing an anthology of cyberfiction by women.

James Bunn, Professor of English, received his Ph.D. from Emory University. His historical fields of study are 18th-century British literature and Romanticism; his approach is semiotic, with a strong interest in the history of science. The author of The Dimensionality of Signs, Tools, Models: An Introduction (Indiana UP, 1981), his recent articles include "The Attractive Poles of Coleridge's Science" (forthcoming), "Availing the Physics of Least Action" in New Literary History (1995), and "The True Utility of Shelley's Method in his Defense" in English Romanticism: Preludes and Postludes (1993). The former Dean of The Faculty of Arts and Letters and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at UB, he was in 1986 a Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art.

Literature and Society: Utopias, Science Fiction, America. In this seminar we shall explore the intersections of ideal and illusory governments, the technologies of skilled workers, and the ecocriticism of America as Green World. To set the stage we will study three early texts in the light of recent cultural critique: Plato's Republic as seen through the Frankfurt School, More's Utopia viewed through the lens of New Historicism, and Shakespeare's The Tempest considered by post-colonial theory. Then, emphasizing dystopian threats, we will follow with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, and Twain's Connecticut Yankee and conclude with a number of recent films (e.g. Twelve Monkeys) and narratives (e.g. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sheila Griffith's Slow River). For the hidden machinery of technology, we'll round up the usual suspects--Heidegger, Benjamin, Althusser, and especially Baudrillard.

Paradigms Lost: Natural Law and Natural Language. Rousseau's Social Contract sets the paradigm for the idea of natural rights common to the American and French Revolutions. But after the French Revolution failed, a new governing model for social norms--based in the folk history, the tradition, the customs of a particular people in a local region--gradually supplanted natural law and natural language. This new paradigm lent itself to myths of Progress, the Future, the Destining of a Nation. It could also be used to institute a might-makes-right argument that sets justice only in the dictation of the state. This shift in juridical models is one way to think about the shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism, together with subsequent issues of Modernism and Postmodernism. We will study Locke, Hume and Rousseau on social contract; Swift on Gulliver's body; Rousseau and Herder on the origin of languages; Wordsworth and Coleridge on the poetic language of nature; Wollenstonecraft on the arbitrary power of sex; Shelley's monstrous body-symbol of age; and Constable and Turner on the visualization of natural languages.

Mili Clark, Associate Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She takes occasional relief from her responsibilities as Director of Composition to teach her earlier great enthusiasms, Milton and Romantic poetry, on the graduate level.

Robert Daly, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Comparative Literature, took his Ph.D. at Cornell. He studies modernity before modernism, particularly the ways in which literature both encodes and mitigates colonization.  He has written God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978) and twenty-some articles in which he tries to read American and English literature as inextricably interwoven with the rest of world literature, and literature itself as both representative and hermeneutic.

The Puritan Tradition focuses on the conversations that Puritans, European, Native Americans, Anglicans, Africans, Antinomians, Quakers, Shakers, Baptists, Deists, Romantic prototranscendentalists, and others had with each other and have with us still.  Among the many theoretical lenses useful for viewing these writings are Hans Blumenberg's "reoccupation thesis" and Kathy Eden's notion of useful economies among ancient rhetorics, medieval exegeses, and current hermeneutics.  In Hawthorne's words, "Let us thank God for having giving us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages."

Jonathan Dewald, Professor of History, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.  His chief interests revolve around the formation of the nobility and shifting economic arrangements in early modern France.  He is the author of several books, including The Formation of a Provincial Nobility: The Magistrates of the Parliament of Rouen, 1499-1610 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), Pont-St-Pierre, 1398-1789: Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modern France (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1579-1715 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) (winner of the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association), and The European Nobility, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), and many articles on local and familial politics, the juridical system, and economic change.

European Cultural History.  This seminar examines the development of European thought and sensibility between the 15th and the 19th centuries.  It will attempt both to establish a broad overview of the period and to explore some issues of theory and method that underlie recent interpretations.  A recurring question in the course will be that of theory's place in contemporary cultural history, and thus some of the readings will be drawn from adjoining disciplines that have been especially influential on recent historical practice.

Susan Eilenberg, Associate Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from Yale University.  The author of Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (Oxford: Oxford UP 1992), she is interested in the economics of literature--its tropes and practices of ownership, debt, expenditure, excess, and possession--especially in the British literary tradition from Shakespeare through to the Romantics.  In addition to publishing several articles on the Romantics, she writes frequently for The London Review of Books.

Milton.  This course focuses on the problem of Miltonic excess, that too-muchness that confronts not just us, Milton's overwhelmed readers, but also the principal characters of Milton's writings.  Much of what is interesting (to me) in these writings are those structures, scenes or objects suggesting at once plentitude and deprivation: the glass Comus offers the abstinent Lady, the apple Satan offers Eve, Eve herself as she appears before a bewildered Adam, the banquet Satan sets before Christ, images of paradisical fertility and of chaotic violence. Imaging relationships of obligation, identification, incorporation, and denial, provoking the deepest ambivalence, these scenes and objects mark those points at which a fantasy of absolute and absolutely gratifying plentitude, an abundance that precludes measurement or choice but that carries the threat of overwhelming the subject, is transformed into its apparent antithesis, a fantasy of strict economy structured around scarcity, quantification, and debt.  The consequence is a body of work in which the requirements of economic logic are systematically enforced and undermined.

Romantics.  This course will be devoted to a study of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, four linguistic malcontents whose anxieties about the possibilities of representation produced some of our most provocative critical mythologies, inexplicit allegories of reading.   Although the Romantics wrote more than we can possibly read in a semester, we will have a look at all but the most unreadable of their poetry and prose, concentrating, however, on their major writings, particularly those pieces now at the center of critical controversy.  I hope to maintain a balance between plain reading, close and massive, and thesis-mongering.

My Sect Thou Seest: Literature and the Public in the English Revolution.  After surveying some backgrounds in early Stuart Court culture (patronage poetry and masques), we will concentrate on the writings of the 1640s and l650s, the most neglected decades in early modern British literary history.  We will discuss the conversations (between genres, political philosophies, genders) that define the public sphere of revolutionary England, including the writings of patriarchal theorists and radical women prophets, courtly poets and tyrannicidal theorists, strict Calvinists and orgiastic antinomians.  We will consider contemporary critical debates over public sphere theory, subversion and containment, and the rhetoric and practice of political opposition in 17th-century England.

Eliza and Jael: Early Modern Anglo-American Women Writers.  After beginning with Anne Askew's 16th- century Protestant captivity narrative, this course moves between the Massachusetts Bay Colony and 17th-century England, taking up the work both of royalist Anglicans (Elizas) and radical sectarians (Jaels).  We will consider poetry, fiction, and political and religious prose by Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, Anne Wentworth, Margaret Fell Fox, Katherine Evans and Susan Chevers, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Rowlandson, and Aphra Behn.  We will read a wide array of literary and social theory by postmodernist and materialist feminists, considering the forms of collective praxis available to and created by early modern women, with emphasis on women's work; gender, sexuality, and maternity; domesticity as limit and as basis for women's political activity; and the Protestant culture of voluntary religion as a medium for women's collective self-transformation.

Shaun Irlam, Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, received his M.A. in English literature from the University of Cape Town, and his Ph.D. from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University.  His research and teaching interests include eighteenth-century English and French literature and aesthetic theories; early modern cultural studies; post-structuralist and post-colonial theory; Anglophone and Francophone African and Caribbean literatures; spatial studies and human geography.  He is author of Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford UP, 1999).  His present research is on the sentimentalization of empire in 18th-century literature, a project that explores adaptations of poetic genre to colonial ideology and the politics of landscape, as well as the co-articulation of the poetics of the sublime and of imperialism.  He is also developing a project on postcolonial African fiction and the poetics of space, and has published on Mariama Ba and Sony Labou Tansi.

Imperial Geographies: Poetry and Empire in Britain, 1688-1797.  The 18th century in England witnesses the formation and alignment of the great imperial forces that will shape the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  In the period those peculiarly modern phantasmatic geographies are drafted into existence: private property, national territory, and cartographic space.  We will chart the circulation of these signifiers in 18^th century topographical poetry.  We will also explore the developments in technology, aesthetic theory, spatial imagination, literary ideology, ethnography and anthropology that facilitated the synthesis of an imperial consciousness and an imperial geography.  Readings will include texts by Addison, Anne Barbauld, Blake, Collins, Cowper, Defoe, Grainger, Gray, Mandeville, Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope, Frances Seymour, Swift, Thomson, and Young.

Imagining the Nation: Early Modernity in Britain, 1688-1742.  This seminar examines some of the modes of consciousness of early 18th century English society, arguably the first society in history to undergo the revolutionary transformation to capitalist modernity.  Covering the period from the Glorious Revolution (1688) to the end of the Walpole administration (1742), and focusing on selected writings of Defoe, Locke, Swift, Mandeville, Gay, Addison and Steele, and others, we shall examine some of the processes involved in synthesizing this modern nation-state.  We shall focus on various demographic and collective modalities, including the function of Credit and the formation of a credit-consciousness, the emergence of the National Debt as an instrument of power and source of national anxiety, the construction of a public sphere, the invention of "political arithmetick," and finally, contemporary theories of the "Imagination."

Goethe

Travel and Gender in the 18th Century.  Through readings of travel literature in the 18th century, the seminar will investigate how writers in Britain and France managed the boundaries of Europe as well as the discursive limits of the Enlightenment.  During a period of unprecedented global expansion and technological development European subjects travelled their own societies as well as the globe in increasing numbers.  Since this new mobility of ordinary men and women accompanied the entrenchment of print-capitalism and the rise of the book as a commodity, travel- narratives proliferate as never before. Linda Colley has remarked, "men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what they are not."  We will examine how travel narratives conjure figures of alterity through which gendered and national identities are negotiated and determined. Readings will be selected from the following: Behn, Swift, Sterne, Montagu, Montesquieu, Diderot, Janet Schaw, Eliza Fay, Goethe, and Lady Anne Barnard.

David Johnson, Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Modern Languages, received his Ph.D. from SUNY at Buffalo.  He studies the formation of cultural identity in the Americas from 1492 to the late 20th century.  He is the co-editor of Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), and has published essays in American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, The American Review, Chasqui, Centennnial Review, and Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus.  He is completing a co-authored book on the end of anthropology tentatively titled Anthropology's Wake.

Aporias of Encounter: The Experience of America.  This seminar reads the edges of modernity, its two endings: its landfall in 1492 and its late 20th-century babelian collapse.  We will sight the borders of cultural formation, locating them in the encounter among others, in order to theorize the economy of subjectivity and propose a not-yet-European and no-longer-Amerindian American space.  After reading recent theoretical texts devoted to principal metaphors of contact (hybridity, dialogue, conversion/colonialism), we will focus on four particular New World "experiences": 1) contact/conquest: Columbus and Cortes; 2) captivity: Cabeza de Vaca and Mary Rowlandson; 3) Caribbean: Wilson Harris, Fred D'Aguiar, Caryl Philips, V.S. Naipaul; 4) (auto)ethnography: Rigoberta Menchu, Elena Poniatowska, Zapatista documents

Reading Adam Smith.  The startling thing about Adam Smith is that he's not all that he's cracked up to be--i.e. a completely laissez-faire/market-above-all theorist.  To convince yourself of this, read Book V, Wealth of Nations, on "The Expenses of the Sovereign or Commonwealth," in which Smith details the nature and necessity of public money spent on Defense, Justice, "Public Works," education, etc.  In actuality, Smith combines market-oriented utilitarian considerations (he who benefits pays, "user fees") with a persistent concern for what the "public" should or may have to do (if no one can pay, the public must pay, if tolls don't work then a graduated income tax will be necessary [!]).  All of this relates to the basic (inter) national and historicized myth that Smith adumbrates--the shift from "barbarous" to "civilized" society.  Civilized or "commercial" society, in other words, requires public and governmental participation if the "invisible hand" of the market is to work as it should.  The course will cover Adam Smith's major works, economic, psychological- moral, and rhetorical.  In addition, we will locate Smith's views in the context of literary debates on economic and social matters in Swift, Defoe, Mandeville and Pope and perhaps the nineteenth-century American maverick Orestes Brownson in order to see how literary people used character, satire, essay, novel, irony and myth as ways of coming to terms with the newly-arrived "dismal science" of economics.

Eric Seeman, Assistant Professor of History, received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.  He studies early American history and transatlantic exchanges within the context of the history of religion. Author of Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999).  Articles on 18th-century African-American religiosity, deathbed scenes, conversion narratives, attitudes towards sexuality and celibacy.  He is working on a book titled Deathways: Cultures of Death and Dying in Early America which studies the interactions of attitudes toward death among Indians, Africans and Europeans in the eastern half of North America to 1800.

Charles Stinger, Professor of History, received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.  He is the author of Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversi (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance (Albany: SUNY P, 1977) and The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), which won the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association in 1985 for best work in Italian history, as well as numerous articles on patristics, Renaissance humanism, and the cities of Florence and Rome.  His current interests include the image and idea of the city in Renaissance Italy.

Early Modern European Core Course.  This reading course is intended to provide a graduate-level introduction to the study of European History in the early modern period (c. 1400-1789).  Each weekly session will take up a different work of modern historical scholarship as it relates to issues or problems of the European encounter with the New World, the Reformation controversies, the scientific revolution, the military revolution, the absolutist state, the evolution of the nobility, and the Enlightenment.  Throughout, we will be attentive to the role of gender as it impinges upon or is reflected in historical developments, and to diverse modern concerns in methodology and theories of interpretation.