Department of English
Graduate Course Descriptions
FALL 2001

Thursday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 406351 (B) 075087

Monday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 247972 (B) 149520

Wednesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 477447 (B) 419312

Tuesday 7:00 –9:40, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 092895

Monday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 239438

Monday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 048175 (B) 138016

Tuesday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 419618 (B) 395391

Tuesday 4:00-6:40, Clemens 436

Registration Number: 294388

Thursday 4:00-6:40, Clemens 17

Registration Number: 037241

Wednesday 4:00-6:40, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 105073

Thursday 9:30-l2:00, Clemens 130

Registration Number: 315226

Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 042464

Wednesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 117419 (B) 013174

Prof. Jim Swan

Tuesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 318

Registration Numbers: (A) 097765 (B) 074462

Tuesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 077352 (B) 148234

Prof. Arthur Efron

Thursday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers (A) 396803 (B) 200706

Wednesday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 400446 (B) 310129

Thursday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 438

Registration Numbers: (A) 334285 (B) 158236

Thursday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 267921 (B) 484504

Tuesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 195844 (B) 081541

Monday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 610

Registration Numbers: (A) 167328 (B) 171404

Thursday 3:30-6:l0, Baldy l05

Lab Tuesday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 102

Registration Number: 145264 (One number for both Lab and Seminar)

Monday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 398316 (B) 387437

Monday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 640

Registration Number: 469549

Thursday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 640

Registration Numbers: (A) 238084 (B) 377548

Registration Numbers: (A) 181848 (B) 497714

Prof. Koebel

Registration Numbers: (A) 042373 (B) 452653

ENG 501 – INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS

Prof. David Schmid

Thursday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 406351 (B) 075087

English 501 A and B: Introduction to Scholarly Methods is a required course for all new students in the M.A./Credentialing Program within the English Department. The two sections of the class are designed to serve complementary but different functions. The "B" section is your opportunity to receive individual advisement tailored to your specific needs. This is where you come for advice and information on such professional matters as the state of the academic job market, how to write a conference paper proposal, how to write a statement of purpose for graduate school applications, how to choose a subject for and write a seminar paper, etc. Although we will touch on all of these subjects during our "A" section meetings, we will not spend much class time on them because you are a diverse population of students, with varying professional ambitions, and therefore what may be very useful to one may be useless to another.

With this diversity in mind, the "A" section of this course is designed to give you grounding in a body of knowledge that will be useful to all of you, regardless of your ultimate professional goals. Over the last thirty years, the profile of literary theory in the academy has risen to such an extent that a knowledge of the field is indispensable to those of you who are planning to attend graduate school and teach at the college level. For those of you for whom the M.A. is the terminal degree, a familiarity with literary theory will make you better (more knowledgeable, more rigorous, more cynical) readers, and it will also help you to get the most out of the seminars at UB. For those of you coming to literary theory for the first time, this will be a sometimes difficult but ultimately rewarding experience. For those of you with some prior familiarity with this material, this will ac t as both a review and an opportunity to extend your knowledge.

We will be making extensive use of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory and John Storey’s What is Cultural Studies? In addition, articles by a wide range of theorists will be available from the class website. We will also be discussing Madonna’s long and varied career and Marlon Riggs’s final film, Black Is, Black Ain’t.

All new M.A./Credentialing Program students must enroll for the English 50lA section. Full-time students should also enroll for the 50lB section in addition to the rest of your program. This section will not have a common meeting time, but rather will be a time periodically set aside for individual advisement. All students, whether they choose to take the class for 3 or 6 credits, will have ample opportunities for advisement.

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Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 247972 (B) 149520

This will be, essentially, a reading course in American Literature from Benjamin Franklin through Herman Melville—which is not to say, however, that discussion will not be maddeningly abstract and theoretical. It is only that, since my premise is that American literature becomes American in response to the theoretical question "What is American literature" asked in advance of the literature’s arrival, theory is rather a matter generated out of the literature’s own engagement with itself than a matter of application post facto. That is, we need to read the literature as theory itself. For what evolves out of it often challenges regnant theories—varieties of post-structuralism, new historicism, cultural studies, evolved out of somewhere or something else—and really demands a response in its own right.

Ideologically, my own position on the question of "What is American literature" is highly suspect. Frankly, I miss the old exploded belief in American exceptionalism. I think there is such a thing as American exceptionalism and, worse yet, that it is a good thing. But I hope you will challenge such arrantly old-fashioned liberalism, and, at any rate, we will certainly read texts that challenge it.

In addition to Franklin’s Autobiography, we will read a couple of early "women’s" novels, a work or two of Brockden Brown, (Cooper?), Poe, Emerson, stowe, Hawthorne (several), Melville (two or three), and probably some secondary works as well. Reading will be heavy, probably two books a week.

There will be class presentations on the readings every week.

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ENG 541 – THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL

Wednesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 477447 (B) 419312

Postmodernism was named and theorized ex ante by Onis (l934), Olson (l95l), Toynbee (l954), Mills (l959), Howe (l959), Levin (l960), Fiedler (l965), Hassan (l97l), and probably others. Anderson, Jameson, and Harvey agree that it emerged as a pervasive cultural force only in the early l970’s, but even this notion remains contested, so it won’t hurt too much to descend to specifics. We shall explore this matter and others by actually reading some novels. We shall pay attention to the cultural conversations and the cultural work of the novel in our time and place by considering the distinctions, imbrications, binary oppositions, commonalities, reciprocities, eddies, and swirls of these and other categories.

We shall read, within the reciprocal economies of their cultural contexts, some modern and some postmodern American novels, along with some in which the borders between these categories seem quite permeable. We shall explore questions of agency. We shall consider these texts as both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their times) and hermeneutic (affording practice and skills in the arts of interpretation); as enacting both a "hermeneutics of suspicion" and a "hermeneutics of empathy"; as enabling "paranoid reading," "reparative reading," an "ethics of reading," and any other modes of reading members of the seminar care to do. And we shall attend to the various ways in which the texts thematize interpretation, including, in Kathy Eden’s words, "not only the traditional analogy between reading and the journey home but also that between the literary work read and a carefully woven tapestry."

Each student taking the course intensively (for full credit) will be expected to participate in seminar discussions, to give a seminar report on one of the texts, and to write a research essay on a subject of her or his own choosing. Those taking the course extensively will be expected to do everything but the research essay. Finally, a postmodern gesture, the unconvincing, self-justifying rationalization: though you may think I know only the earlier writers (if them), I have published on Cather, Fitzgerald, Gardner, and postmodernism.

Wharton, Edith. Summer. Harper Collins

Cather, Willa. My Antonía. Houghton Mifflin.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Norton Critical Edition.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner’s.

Pynchon , Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49: A Novel. Harper Collins.

Gardner, John . October Light. Vintage, Random House.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New American Library.

Powell, Padgett. Edisto: A Novel. Henry Holt & Co.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Ivy Books, Ballantine.

Momaday, N. Scott. The Ancient Child: A Novel. Harper Collins.

Morrison, Toni. Paradise. Penguin.

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Tuesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 092895

A workshop course in which students’ original work will be discussed.

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Monday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 239438

This class will be primarily a workshop in writing poetry, with much of the class time taken up with a discussion of the students’ own work. From time to time, in an effort to encourage experimentation, I will make specific assignments in particular genres or modes. Students should own a good anthology of English and American poetry (like the complete Norton) and will be asked to buy and read two or three books of contemporary poetry during the semester.

The aim of the course is to make students better critics of their own work. No prerequisite is required, though I do assume that those who enroll have written some poetry and that they will be ready and willing to write about a poem a week throughout the semester. At the end of the semester each student will turn in revised versions of seven poems written from the course. Finally, because this class depends in part on the willingness of students to criticize each other’s work, class attendance is mandatory. Do not enroll in this course if you plan to attend only fitfully.

You don’t need my permission to enter this course; but in the unlikely event that more than fifteen students enroll, I will have to do some selecting.

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Monday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 048175 (B) 138016

The course will cover most of the Hebrew and Christian Bible texts, with attention to traditional and modern exegetical methods. The first goal will be good literary readings, the second a survey of competing critical strategies toward the stories—including religious, psychological, anthropological, historical and artistic. We’ll read Genesis in conjunction with Darwin and biohistorical constructions of religious myth; we’ll read Exodus against Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

We’ll also consider rabbinical and patristic traditions of interpretation and ideas of sacred text and authority, ancient and modern. Finally, in a time when iconoclasm is suddenly resurgent in destroying l500-year-old Buddhist statues, we’ll explore some iconic and anti-iconic history of the Biblical texts and the central iconographies of Genesis and the Apocalypse (Revelation). Specifically, in Genesis, Adam and Eve, the snake, the tree, the garden and the God; in the Apocalypse, second Adam Christ, the woman clothed with the sun, the snake bound, the Heavenly City Jerusalem with the garden within—tree and water of life restored.

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Tuesday 3:30- 6:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 419618 (B) 395391

At her death in May l886 Emily Dickinson left nearly eighteen hundred poems, most of them unpublished. In November 1890 the publication of Poems by Emily Dickinson was an immediate success, to the surprise of its editors. We will pay particular attention to the changing manner in which her work coupled with a myth of her life has been presented to readers ever since. Living, as she did, in a period when old meanings (antebellum, Civil War, postDarwinian, gilded age) were in process of dissolution, and new technologies (photography, telegraphy, the typewriter) were in process of development; increasingly what she may want to represent in her writing is process itself. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, spiritualism, psychical research, and automatic writing encouraged a fluid and volatile kinship between writing and drawing. William James says that "the word ‘or’ names a genuine reality." Dickinson was an inveterate reviser. In a time when old meanings are broken down ‘ors’ and ‘ifs’ attach themselves to form. Her handwritten poems and letters constantly call into question what is translatable into print and what is not. Perhaps more than any other poem (apart from Shakespeare) Dickinson is a creation of her editors.

We will consider the possibility that the poems she sewed into packets were meant to be read as serial poems. We will pay attention to the use of aphorisms, puns, anagrams; we will look closely at word variants, punctuation marks, handwriting, crosses, crossovers and erasures. Emily Dickinson read to write. We will consider her reading in and borrowings from various sources including Webster’s Dictionary, the Bible, and The Springfield Republican, along with the history and culture of the Connecticut River Valley where she spent her life. We will also touch on similarities between her later prose fragments and the existential graphs of her contemporary and fellow New Englander the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Making use of the Johnson and Franklin variorum editions of the Collected Poems, Franklin’s facsimile edition of The Manuscript Books, and the Three Master Letters as well as Marta Werner Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios; Scenes of Reading Surfaces of Writing, and her recent hypertext edition Radical Scatters; Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, we will read her poems, letters, and prose fragments in chronological order, concentrating (in the case of the poems) on particular fascicles and sets. All of these will be on reserve. I will provide packets for sale to those taking the course. It is strongly recommended that you purchase the recent three-volume variorum Poems of Emily Dickinson (edit. Ralph Franklin) or the earlier three volume variorum Thomas H. Johnson edition. However, due to the cost of these sets, this is not a must. Be warned that the new one-volume paperback (Franklin) edition from Harvard University Press has removed all word variants.

I am hoping to have two guest speakers but this has not been definitely decided. All students will be asked to prepare one seminar report (l5-20 minutes) and each student who is taking the course intensively will write a final essay (l5-20 pages).

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Tuesday 4:00-6:40, Clemens 436

Registration Number: 294388

Unlike most of our other courses, this one will not be limited by period or genre. We shall explore American classics, in their cultural contexts, from the Puritans to the Postmoderns. We shall attend to the family resemblances of an American tradition in literature. This tradition of recycling and revision includes and connects Mary Rowlandson, Susanna Haswell Rowson, Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Zitkala-Sa, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and N. Scott Momaday. We shall consider what these texts meant in the conversations of their own times and what they may yet mean in ours. Like Vergil, we shall try to bring the Muses home.

Andrews, William L., ed. Classic American Autobiographies (Mentor, Penguin), contains

Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, and Zitkala-Sa.

Rowson, Susanna Haswell. Charlotte Temple. Ed. Cathy Davidson (Oxford).

Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Signet).

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts

(Rutgers UP).

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 3^rd ed. (Norton Critical Edition).

James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (Signet).

Wharton, Edith. Summer (Signet).

Cather, Willa. My Antonía (Houghton Mifflin).

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (Scribner’s).

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon (New American Library).

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club (Ivy Books).

Momaday, N. Scott. The Ancient Child: A Novel (Harper Collins).

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Thursday 4:00-6:40, Clemens 17

Registration Number: 037241

This course is intended for those students pursuing an MA in English, whose specific goal is to teach at the high school or junior high school level. The course is also open to undergraduates who are thinking about the same kind of career. Such undergraduates are encouraged to sign up. The aim of the course: provide grounding in theory and practice of teaching high school students to achieve an advanced literacy. To me, the term advanced literacy suggests a well-developed ability to read critically, to analyze and interpret texts in a range of media, including literature (items in the traditional canon, as well as items outside), newspapers, journals of opinion, film and television narrative drama, advertising, and communications/information as disseminated in the medium of the internet.

But advanced literacy also requires a developing self-awareness, an understanding of the social, political, cultural matrix inevitably interweaving the student with the work under study. It is the job of the teacher to develop a critical self-consciousness, to develop the students awareness of his or her standpoint vis-à-vis the matter under study. We will try to map all this by means of topical survey and case study.

Some topics:

l). The development of a 60s-70s strain of idealistic, even Utopian pedagogy with a particular focus on the figures of Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies and Dreams (l970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (l973), Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (l967), H.R. Kohl, The Open Classroom (l969).

An enlightening example of the pedagogy put into practice can be found on the website http://www.middlebury.edu/~publish/middmag/features/swope/swope.html

Here Mr. Swope gives an extensive account of teaching Wallace Stevens 13 Way of Looking at a Blackbird to a class of public middle school children, many of them recent immigrants, in a poor neighborhood in Queens, N.Y.

2). The impact of the culture wars of the last 20 years on high school pedagogy, including a critical study of E.D. Hirschs Cultural Literacy (l987).

3). A critical study of the Educational Testing Service AP (Advanced Placement) English Literature program. AP courses are intended to promote the highest standard of a well-developed literacy among high school students. Past tests are widely distributed and make for valuable, interesting, challenging case study material. There is no doubt that most high school AP English teachers teach to the test. Last year, an astonishing number (l89,000) of American High School seniors took the AP Literature exam and between 20 and 20% of these students scored high enough to be given Sophomore standing in English courses at most American universities. The critical questions are: Is this a good thing? If so, why so? If not, why not?

4). Casebook study of an easy Shakespeare play (Julius Caesar or Macbeth) and a hard play (Hamlet) frequently taught in high schools.

5). A case study of structuralism/semiotics, with a particular focus on excerpts from Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (The Writing Lesson) and Roland Barthes, Mythologies.

The point of case study #5 would be to see how such theoretical texts have applications in high school classes and in such assignments as watching specific television programs and reading specific magazine advertisements. Recent issues of Jane magazine, for example, provide rich resource material.

Requirements: a seminar presentation and an end of term paper.

Most readings will be on reserve.

Two texts should be purchased: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (2^nd edition), Minnesota, l996.

Robert Scholes: Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English.

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Wednesday 4:00-6:40, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 105073

This course, which is dual-listed for students at both the senior level and graduate MA-level, is designed to get students beyond the basic routines of composition and the jargons and codes of "lit-crit" in their writing. Thus it is ideal for students who envision journalism as a career or as an active supplement to an academic career. It takes "composition" and your capacity for clarity and organization for granted and moves on to the next step: being interesting.

The course will permit you to think about and work on matters of voice and style. A writer of any kind who wishes to make headway with his/her writing must have a voice, a distinctive signature that is his or hers alone. You’ll spend a lot of time learning how not to sound like a generic, Brand X clone of some other unfortunate Brand X clone. (Voice is defined in a novel by Philip Roth as "something that starts from down behind your knees and ends up above your head." True, but you still have to work at it.) We’ll spend a lot of time on resource building: where do words come from? Where do phrases come from? Where do phrases come from? What is a sentence rhythm and how can I develop it? How do arguments really work? How many drafts of an essay or review do I have to write before it is any good? (I’d say ten if it is not important, twenty if it really matters.)

I’ll ask every student to find and adopt a master stylist and apprentice him/herself to that master. Apprenticeship and a degree of mimicry are key to writing well. Your own voice begins in the shadow of another’s voice.

Among the many requirements of good writing is to really know something, know it down to its depths, and each student will work on a semester-long project that would be potentially, maybe even actually, publishable at the end of the semester.

Since the class will be writing and reading-intensive, I shall limit it to 22 students, ideally balanced between eleven undergraduates and eleven graduates, and a decision will be made at the end of the first week of class on the basis of a sample of writing you submit on the first day. I’m looking for students who already can write and are serious about practicing and polishing that skill.

1. A sample of earlier writing to be submitted on the first day of class. Ideal length, 7 – l5 pages.

2. Regular attendance: Attendance is simply required, and I will take roll. To get anything out of a course that meets just once a week you have to be in it, and students who are not in it should not expect to make up for lost class time through exams or papers. In a course that meets once a week, students who miss more than two classes for any reason will suffer an automatic lowering of grade.

3. Two books: a thesaurus and a portable dictionary. They are indispensable tools, and I’ll have a number ordered for the course through Talking Leaves Book Stores at 3158 Main Street.

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Thursday 9:30-12:00, Clemens 130

Registration Number: 315226

This section is for incoming TAs, and continuing TAs who are interested, who will be teaching a computer-mediated version of composition—specifically the page-design sections.

We will meet every week on Thursday mornings from 9:30-12:00, half the time in our Composition Computer Classroom (Clemens 128) and half the time in our Composition seminar room (Clemens 130). We will begin at 9:30 in Clemens 128 with hands-on work at the computers, including the instructor’s station. We will model in advance how to teach the various elements of the page-design syllabus. At l0:50 we will adjourn to Clemens 130 to discuss readings in computer-mediated writing and their relevance to our teaching.

Requirements:

Attendance:

As with your own students, you may miss one week (one meeting)

Due during the semester:

6 response papers on the readings

Due at the end of the semester:

A statement of your teaching philosophy

An ENG 20l syllabus

An evaluation of both the 599 seminar and your experience of teaching the page-design composition section

 

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Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 412

Registration Number: 042464

This seminar offers an opportunity to explore the issues and ideas that arise in teaching composition at UB. It is taught collaboratively (by Dr. Arabella Lyon and several experienced TAs) in order to respond to the varying needs and concerns of new TAs. Our class time will be dedicated to two related goals: (l) creating a forum in which participants will be able to draw on each other’s experience in the classroom in order to develop new teaching strategies and (2) exploring some of the current debates and controversies surrounding the field of composition theory and practice. Toward these goals we will read from current and past work in composition theory and consider how this work might inform our classroom practice. The seminar will enable participants to begin placing their individual pedagogies within the context of larger departmental and national debates surrounding the field of Composition Studies.

Requirements for the course include regular and engaged participation, two short papers, one presentation of an issue or problem in composition studies and its relationship to classroom practice, a philosophy of teaching statement, a 20l syllabus, and a detailed evaluation of 599 and your ENG 101 experience.

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Wednesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 117419 (B) 013174

The argument of this course is that genealogy is complicated by gynecology: that systems of patriarchal, patrilineal descent are complicated by the necessary presence of the feminine as at least their "material" cause. To the extent that language itself is the product of a gendered consciousness, this is an argument that is as true for systems of textual production as it is for systems of biological reproduction. And it is an argument perhaps especially relevant to a culture—that of "Elizabethan" England (1558-1603)—whose material conditions of production and reproduction were rapidly changing (the impact of instruments of mass production such as printing, the movement from a relatively stable feudal economy to a relatively unstable protocapitalist economy, consequent anxieties about social mobility and legitimacy, etc.), and where "the leader of the work" (dux femina facti) was notoriously and problematically a woman—the long-lived Elizabeth I.

In this course we will read a significant portion of the literature of Elizabethan England—and the literature of the years immediately following it, when her cousin, James I, ostentatiously and problematically re-introduced patriarchal norms—as the paradoxical product of the imaginative space created by the presence of woman. Primary texts will include the court and aristocracy-centered works of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser—for Sidney "An Apology for Poetry" (c. 1581-83) and portions of his prose romance, The Arcadia (c. 1579-1585), and for Spenser The Shepheardes Calender (c. 1579) and significant portions of his romantic epic, The Faerie Queene (c. 1580-96) and then will shift, through the common participation in the sonnet genre of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, to the predominantly popular drama of the period.

In the second half of the course we will likely proceed through comparison between the well-known works of Shakespeare and those of some of his lesser-known contemporaries: for example. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594-96) with John Lyly’s court-produced coterie drama Endymion (1588) as templates for romantic comedy in the age of the Virgin Queen; the Henriad (1597-99) with Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599) for complementary interpretations of the construction of political power from above and below; Hamlet (1600) with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c, 1586) for the historiography of revenge; Othello (1603-1604) with the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1588?), Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) , John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613?) and Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) for male paranoia about female sexual fidelity; Measure for Measure (1604) with Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) as early mediations on the change to the Jacobean regime; the implicit opposition to Jacobean absolutism thematized by the treatments of witchcraft, hysteria, and midwifery in late Shakespearean pays such as Macbeth (1605-1606), King Lear (1606), and The Winter’s Tale (1610-1611); the divided audience sensibility and kingdom thematized in both comic and tragic modes by Jacobean plays such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (1608-1610) and The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607-1610?).

Secondary criticism will likely include texts by new historicist, sex-gender and cultural materialist critics such as Janet Adelman, Catherine Belsey, Margaret Ferguson, Susan Frye, Jonathan Gil Harris, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Howard, Constance Jordan, Jeffrey Masten, Linda Levy Peck, David Kastan, Franco Moretti, Louis Montrose, Stephen Mullaney, Karen Newman, Patricia Parker, Gail Kern Paster, Eve Sedgwick, Roy Strong, Peter Stallybrass, Leonard Tennenhouse, Frank Whigham, and Deborah Willis.

As the length and ambition of the reading list implies, I might—depending on student interest and the shape of our spring curriculum—like to turn this course into a two-semester offering, with the dramatic materials reserved for S2002. Students will be asked to write brief, informal biweekly response papers to facilitate in-class participation. In addition, each student will be required to write a brief (c. 3-5 pages) formal review "article" on some relevant piece of recent secondary criticism, and a formal final paper (c. 10-35 pages in length, depending on the student’s programmatic needs) that can be summarized as a twenty-minute mock conference paper delivered out loud at the course’s end.

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Prof. Jim Swan

Tuesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 318

Registration Numbers: (A) 097765 (B) 074462

This course explores both the cultural and the epistemological situation of drama and the stage in Shakespeare’s time: questions of art, genre, and the philosophy and politics of performance. All the usual cultural topics relating to money, power, and sex will be in play but addressed through the situation of performance.

We will read a fair number of Shakespeare’s plays, considering not only the historical conditions of performance (on the stage and in film and video) but the demands of the plays themselves, and their language, to be read and understood as drama. Likely candidates are AMND, Romeo & Juliet, Richard II, Henry IV (1 & 2), Henry V, Much Ado, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Winter’s Tale. Certainly no more than this number, maybe fewer—since we will also be reading contemporary writing on rhetoric and performance (including Castiglione and Machiavelli), contemporary attacks on the stage, and recent (20^th/2lst century) theories of performance and performance art.

Late in the semester, students will do in-class presentations on research related to the topics of the seminar. A substantial essay will be due at the end of the semester.

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Tuesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 077352 (B) 148234

Poetic texture is comprised of at least three valences: a considerations of genre (the work as governed by the restrictions of a densely inscribed lyric, the languorous extrapolations of the meditative sequence, the desultory shifting of attachment in the series, or the comprehensiveness of epic); b. considerations of form (traditional or invented; serious or light; arbitrary constraint or motivated compulsion); and c. considerations of compositional method (the various strategies by which the poet deploys the materials of the poem).

In describing problems of poetic texture and compositional method, I want to apply the somatic metaphor introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari near the end of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: "the smooth and the straited." One can distinguish "smooth texts" from "striated texts" according to the presence or absence of striation. One examines the body of the text to determine whether its tissue is arranged in parallel sheets or transverse striations. The text may be marked by the continuity or discontinuity of perception, a mellifluous or harsh enunciation, and a laminar or disturbed surface. One can evaluate the consistency or fragmentation of authorial voice, the hypotactic or disjunctive qualities of syntax, regular or irregular rhythms, the presence and variety of source materials, and the relative constraint by or liberation from formal devices. "Smooth texts" texts maintain a consistent voicing; practice either a normative or a regularly-irregular syntax; refrain from difficult allusions; and suppress or restrain formalism. "Striated texts" display aspects of collage, broken syntax, polylogism, dense allusion, and procedural forms that tend to ripple and contort the language of the poem.

A fair amount of attention will be paid to questions of genre, poetic form, and literary history in the accession of modernism by postmodernism. The reading list for the seminar will thus be comprised of texts from various poetics and genres in both the late modern and postmodern period. We’ll examine the structure of the epic in Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (1948) and Ronald Johnson’s Ark (l996). The long meditative poem will be represented by Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (1932) and John Ashbery’s Flow Chart ( l99l). We’ll pry apart modern and postmodern proceduralism in such works as John Wheelwright’s Mirrors of Venus (l938), Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (l978), and Joan Retallack’s Afterrimages (l995). The crafts of weaving and quilting, or texere, are found both in Marianne Moore’s lyrics and in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (l987). Figures of the intensive or normadic intellect may also bring us, time permitting, to poetry and prose by Clark Coolidge, David Antin, Pierre Joris, Ann Lauterbach, and Nathaniel Mackey.

Seminar participants who are registered intensively will be required to make a twenty-minute oral presentation and produce a twenty-page research paper.

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Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 396803 (B) 200706

The course is open to Doctoral, Master’s and M.A.H. candidates.

The novel, D.H. Lawrence wrote, is "the one bright book of life," and "the greatest form of human inter-relatedness ever discovered." I am going to try to elaborate on this vision. This course will work to develop a theory of the novel for the present that can have practical benefits for students, teachers, and people who are not in academic life. We will read four very different novels. But we will not go into them trying to read them according to any theory. The four are: Don Quixote Part One, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the recently published novel by Charles Baxter, nominated for the National Book Award, The Feast of Love.

The Theorizing will come afterward. I will use as a background text Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (Duke University Press, l996), especially its selections from Henry James, M.M. Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, Wayne Booth, William H. Gass, Gerard Genette, Gerald Prince, George Levine ("Realism Reconsidered"), Tzetan Todorov, John Barth, Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., Peter Brooks, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Barbara Foley, Joanne S. Fry (on "a Feminist Poetics for the Novel"), and Linda Hutcheon.

We will back these up with some longer major texts on the novel. We will read Lawrence’s five short essays on the novel, Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf’s "Modern Fiction" and her long but neglected essay, "Phases of Fiction." Among recent books, we will examine The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Doody (Rutgers University Press l996). I will assign statements on the novel by living novelists, such as those by Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Milan Kundera, because they seem to lead into a world of novel readership that no doubt is not high-falutin’ enough for the professional scholar, but is about why people actually read. (Yes, I know: there are professional scholars who are among these "people," but if you follow them around and hear what they say informally, about novels they like, you will often hear much more naïve statements than they would ordinarily admit to). We will also check some of the current graduate work going on at the newly founded Center for the Study of the Novel (at Stanford); it has a website. The journal published at Brown University, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, will be a valuable aid.

We will also have at least a look back at what earlier novelists have had to say: Fielding’s preface to Joseph Andrews, for instance, is about due, and so is the now-forgotten opposition to the novel, represented perhaps by Samuel Johnson’s essay, "On Modern Fiction."

Modestly, I will include in this company my two published essays on theory of the novel, and talk about my third one, in progress. The course will give me a chance to see if my own book on Don Quixote, published thirty years ago, should be retired from its quest, and if my essay on Whuthering Heights and the sexual body can still illuminate that work. I also want to introduce some small part of my new booklength manuscript on Hardy’s Tess and the aesthetics of experience, as developed by John Dewey. From Dewey’s democratic perspective, we should be able to understand why some not very polished novels such as the Harry Potter series become important in the imaginations of young readers who might go on to become readers of the difficult "greats."

Generally, I will resist (but not ignore) the notions that there is no such genre as the novel, that the novel is dead, that it is about to be buried by the Internet, or that it can be reduced to "writing," "power," "the market," "bourgeois culture," "language," "the body," "fictionality," or "narrativity." We will try to understand why it is that the modern novel, developed largely in the Western world, is having so many rebirths in the rest of the world today. We might ask, for example, What will China gain now that it is allowing novels to be published, after having stifled novel production for decades? I will defend the concept of character, with all of its culturally priviledged, imaginary interior knowledge of the human being in society. Character, as E.M. Forster knew, has been hard-won through the creative struggles of the great novelists. There can be no worthy sense of fictional character without relying on two other cultural concepts that now seem to be in disrepute: the self and individuality. Very well, we will take a few steps to re-repute them.

Term paper, l5-35 pages, on a novel to be chosen from a long and varied list that I will distribute, and whatever theory or theories you think would best bring out its value. You will be asked to lead discussion at least once in the seminar, and to turn in several short (as short as half a page) interim comments on the readings and discussions. Discussion will be fostered, cajoled, encouraged, and risked.

The course can also be seen as a "stealth" campaign, pretending to be devoted to a theory of the novel but actually offered to honor and encourage those of us who love to read novels, who find a lot of value in that activity, who think that great novels do exits, and that these as well as some of the less-than-great ones, are a true benefit to human society. Any theory we develop should help to further rather than impede the experiencing of novels, and leave room for new novels that won’t fit the theory.

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ENG 648 – THE DESTITUTION OF THE ONE

Wednesday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 400446 (B) 310129

Okay, call it "The Impersonal." That’s what it seems to be called by a number of thinkers at the moment. That’s what Leo Bersani calls it in Caravaggio’s Secrets. We will begin with a reading of this text and some essays by Laplanche on the concept of the "enigmatic signifier" to try to determine the genesis of the notion of the impersonal from this particular psychoanalytic route. The notion seems to result from the fierce attack on the ego which Lacan initiated, but rather than remaining at the level of simple assault, this "impersonal turn" signals a positive attempt to articulate what the subject is beyond ego. The ego has fascinated us for so long, however, that everything else seems colorless, vague. Bersani’s book is itself rather enigmatic, on first blush. But beneath this colorless, "generic" exterior may lie the sexiest nexus of ideas to come along in a long time.

After looking carefully at Bersani and essays by others who have begun to follow in his path, I want to turn to another enigmatic texts, a philosophical one this time: Plato’s Parmenides. Here we encounter a destitution of the One that undoubtedly had consequences for psychoanalytic thought, eventually grounding Lacan’s assault on the ego.

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Prof. Charles Bernstein

Thursday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 438

Registration Numbers: (A) 334285 (B) 158236

The seminar continues the investigations in "Modernisms" in the Spring, 2001 (see syllabus on-line at the EPC). This semester, the focus will be on mostly American but also a couple of British poets in the generation immediately following Stein, Pound, Stevens, and Eliot, those born from l889 to 1909. In June, I will post to the EPC (and Core-L) a detailed syllabus, but I expect that the poets considered will include, "Objectivits" Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Lorinne Neidecker; their UK counterparts Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid; poets in and around the Harlem Renaissance, including Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer, Melvin Tolson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance, plus Hart Crane, Laura Riding, John Wheelright, Ogden Nash, and Abraham Lincoln Gillespie. For reference, Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery for its look at the 30s, the DuPlessis/Quartermain collection The Objectivist Nexus, and possibly volume two of the Library of America’s anthology of 20^th century American poetry, which covers this period. In the background, we will be considering the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein for Showboat, as well as those of E.Y. Harburg, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart; and the blues of Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemmon Jefferson, and Ma Rainey; and watching the films of (or reading the scripts or listening to performances of) Groucho Marx, George Burns & Gracie Allen, and Hennie Youngman.

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19^TH CENTURY BLACK AMERICAN WRITING

Prof. Nathan Grant

Thursday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 267921 (B) 484504

The title is borrowed from David Erdman’s book on William Blake, but the sentiment remains accurate: African American writers of the l9th century are compelled, beyond the popularity and insurgency of the escaped slave narrative, to produce a different kind of literature, a literature critiquing not only slavery as the law of the land, but also slavocracy, the cultural condition that defined the nation. Though there is a good deal of prose to consider, some of our attention will also be devoted to poetry. E.g., George Moses Horton, dubbed "the colored bard of North Carolina," wrote the poignant "Division of an Estate" in l845, the same year as the appearance of Douglass’s Narrative. Both express the dangers of slavocracy not through the fiery rhetoric of revolution, as did David Walker in l829 and Henry Highland Garnet in l843, but rather by discussing the debilitation of the body politic through illuminating aspects of depth psychology, inviting reader speculations about the future of a republic that continued its insistence upon inequity.

As suggested in the paragraph above, the conversations on slavery during the period encompass a wide range of issues and perspectives, and employ the efforts of many conversationalists. Not only black progressives, but also white abolitionists and observers are party to them. Authors include Alexis de Tocqueville, William Wells Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Wilson, Frank J. Webb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances Harper, Lydia Maria Child, Martin R. Delany, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt.

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ENG 681 – FEMINIST THEORY AND METHOD

Tuesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 195844 (B) 981541

In this course, we will discuss and analyze the various theoretical paradigms that inform influential feminist theories in literary studies, cultural studies, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, gay and lesbian studies, and cultural history. We will begin the semester with a study of the established narratives of second wave feminism before turning to the role academic feminism has played since the seventies. We will explore the way various feminisms construct the relation between theory and practice and between identity and community. Special attention will be paid to the ruptures within the category "woman" that have emerged in recent years from a variety of perspectives. We will examine the strongly contested relationship between feminism and postmodernism and ask whether feminists can continue to maintain a grounding in the categories of "women" and "experience" in light of postmodernist critiques of these very categories.

Readings will include essays by Amanda Anderson, Seyla Benhabib, Susan Bordo, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Hazel Carby, Drucilla Cornell, Alice Echols, Leslie Feinberg, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosemary Hennessy, bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, Toril Moi, Mary Poovey, Denise Riley, Joan Scott, Barbara Smith, Gayatri Spivak, Patricia Williams.

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Prof. Bruce Jackson

Monday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens 610

Registration Numbers: (A) 167328 (B) 171404

During his great years—1929 through 1942—William Faulkner was the most experimental of American fiction writers: he developed or found a different narrative mode for each of his major novels. He is one of the few American novelists who was truly polyphonic: his characters’ utterances scan so specifically you usually don’t need "Sutpen said" or "Quentin said" to know who’s talking (a good thing, since he often doesn’t bother to write "Sutpen said" or "Quentin said."). We’ll read and discuss Faulkner’s major novels , several of his short stories, one of the biographies, and some criticism. Students will do one brief oral report on a critical or biographical work or on one of the novels we’re not reading, and a term paper.

Thursday 3:30-6:10, Baldy l05

Lab Tuesday 3:30-6:l0, Clemens l02

Lab Registration Number: 145264

(Lab registration will serve as seminar registration.)

An exploration of the American cinema as a unique economic and cultural institution. The course examines the psychology and politics of moviegoing; the nature and methodology of Hollywood narrative forms; the roles played by the studio system,

The star system, and the genre film in determining a body of work that triangulates the relationship between art, myth, and commerce. We’ll start with a study of film methods, techniques, etc., drawing examples from the work of the silent masters: Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, Stroheim’s Greed, Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. And then the transition to sound: Chaplin’s Modern Times (resistance to the word; Hawks’ His Girl Friday (word triumphant); Sternberg’s Scarlet Express (image triumphant); Welles’s Citizen Kane (integration of word and image). Next a brief look at the Studio system, (late 30’s-early 50’s): Wilder’s Double Indemnity (the genre film); Tourneur’s The Cate People (the B-film); Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (acting). We’ll end with an overview of major trends in serious contemporary filmmaking: Altman’s The Long Goodbye (deconstruction of genre); Kibrick’s 2001 (aestheticizing the surface); Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (personal obsessions); Lynch’s Blue Velvet (dream narrative). Naturally we’ll supplement this tentative survey with taped excerpts from other films; the relevant chapters in David Cook’s A History of the Narrative Film; handouts, etc. (The actual list, still to be determined, may be somewhat different from the titles above.)

As one might deduce from the foregoing, the course views American film history not as a chronology of names, dates and places, but rather an evolving nexus of ideas, problems and issues. Throughout, the focus will be twofold: aesthetics and intellectual history. The goal will be to have each film double as l) an expressive formal structure, a unique example of classical Hollywood narrative, of stylistic postures and practices; and 2) a major representative of various trends and problematics in social and cultural history, film theory and critical methodology.

A number of short analytic papers and oral presentations will be required. Films will be shown on Tuesday at 3:30 and discussed on Thursday at 3:30. The Thursday class is of course mandatory; the Tuesday class is not. Students may view the film by any means available to them (tape, dvd, etc.) so long as it is seen before the class meets on Thursday. Media and MAH candidates are urged to sign on; a back ground in film is not a prerequisite.

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Monday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 398316 (B) 387437

Asian American literature is characterized by ongoing discursive negotiations with dominant ideologies of "Americanness" and with Asian Americans’ unique positions in American history and culture. Since the late l980s, Asian American literary studies has seen a "paradigm shift" from cultural nationalism toward diasporic positioning. This course will explore the formations of Asian American literary traditions and critical discourses, while engaging with current debates over the implications and effects of the paradigm shift.

We will read twelve major post-WWII prose works, with attention to their historical and literary contexts, along with selected portions of theoretical and critical texts. In addition to examining the ways in which ideologies of the nation-state and ethnic cultural nationalism shape Asian American narrative strategies, generic hybridity, and critical discourses, we will investigate the challenges Asian American narrative strategies, generic hybridity, and critical discourses, we will investigate the challenges Asian American literary and critical writings pose to identity constructions which are based on naturalized categories of difference in a binary scheme of opposites. Required readings consist of primary texts and selected readings of Asian American criticism, and theoretical discourses on nationalism, diaspora, and travel writings.

Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart.

Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge.

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. DICTEE.

Chin, Frank. Chickencoop Chinaman.

Okada, John. No-No Boy.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly.

Jen, Gish. Typical American.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men and The Woman Warrior.

Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker.

Mukherjee, Bharati. The Holder of the World.

Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter.

Secondary Readings I (selected chapters)

Chu, Patricia P. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian

Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature.

Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural

Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.

Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjects in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures.

Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier.

Secondary Readings II (selected chapters)

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

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Monday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 640

Registration Number: 469549

This course will explore four related theoretical and conceptual frameworks which each posit the specific set of relations between time and matter—those developed by Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, who form not only an historically continuous strand of materialism, but who also actively engage with the work of each other as predecessors. Each provides an understanding of time as an active and open-ended force, instead of, as is more common in Western thought, the passive counterpart of space; each provides an account of life as the dynamic intrication of matter and time; and each develops an understanding of time which privileges the place of the future rather than the past in time’s functioning. In this sense, each must be understood as a theorist of becoming. This course will concentrate on the understanding of time and becoming that each of these thinkers offers to present-day theoretical and political concerns.

Thursday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 640

Registration Numbers: (A) 238084 (B) 377548

This seminar will center on the theological dimension of key texts by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. At stake is neither theology as a discourse on the attributes of God nor even the legacy, within contemporary discourse, of Judaism and Christianity as positive religions. We will examine the way in which the question of God is intertwined with two indicants in particular, the thought of the trace and the discourse of the other. Thus to follow out the theological motif in the writings of Derrida and Levinas will require a close study of the very discourses—of difference, alterity, and the ethical—in which the question of God is necessarily embedded. Other topics which are interlaced with theological questions, and which will come into consideration, include the question of being, the subject, community, the proper name, the demonic.

Readings include: Derrida, "How Not to Speak," Given Time, The Gift of Death, "Faith and Knowledge;" Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," "Enigma and Phenomenon," "Existence and Ethics," "The Temptation of Temptation," "God and Philosophy;" and supplementary texts by Heidegger ("Phenomenology and Theology"); Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling); and Jean-Luc Nancy ("Of Divine Places").

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Thursday 2:00-5:00, Clemens 606

Registration Numbers: (A) 181848 (B) 497714

This course offers a grounding in some of the dominant methodologies of American Art History, while simultaneously exposing students to debates surrounding the construction of gender and sexuality. Theoretical texts are paired with Art Historical essays in an effort to explore identity formation in both theory and practice. With emphasis on the works of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, the seminar will begin to explain the multiple and evolving ways in which sexuality and gender have been interpreted.

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Tuesday l:00-3:50

Registration Numbers: (A) 042373 (B) 452653

This course about the field of media curating will provide students with the tools to conceptualize, develop, and—with the purpose of combining practice and theory—realize curated media programs and events. In addition to engaging in a step-by-step process to reach this goal, we will review diverse strategies taken by contemporary curators across the united States, view select programs of media art (film, video, web art, etc.), read various materials, and attend outside lectures and screenings. Special attention will be paid to the often novel approaches of activist collectives and individuals and/or groups confusing distinctions between artist, curator, and educator. As media curating is a relatively untheorized mode of cultural production, the course is an experiment in paving new territory and forging articulations—through debate, articles, media programs, and so on—of curatorial strategies, histories, and theories. Cataysts for the course’s own cultural productions will include feminist and postcolonial thinkers, like bell hooks, Judith Butler, Homi Bhaba; activist and roaming artist-curators such as Group Material, Termite TV, and Fred Wilson; alternative media exhibition groups such as Other Cinema in San Francisco, as well as the Filmmaker’s Cooperative in NYC; and finally, critics like Liz Kotz, Manohla Dargis, and Jim Hoberman.

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