ENG 501 - INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS.......................
Prof. Daniel
Hack
Monday 4:00-6:40 pm, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 393742
(B) 476004
ENG
502 - INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS.........................
Prof. Daniel Hack
Tuesday 12:30-3:10 pm, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 080186
(B) 001987
ENG
516/414 - TEACHING SHAKESPEARE...........................................
Prof. Barbara Bono
Wednesday 16:00-18:50, 436 Clemens
Registration Number: 095230
ENG
541 - THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL:
LOGICS OF CANONICITY...........................................
Prof. David
Schmid
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 202855
(B) 432977
ENG
542 - 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY.....................................
Prof. Myung Mi Kim
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
356929 (B) 128263
ENG
547 - CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION.............................................
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
349884
ENG
561 - STUDIES IN THE NOVEL........................................................
Prof. Arthur Efron
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Silverman Libarary, 318 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
110387 (B) 258679
ENG
578 - REALITIES.......................................................................
Prof. Bruce Jackson
Monday 3:30-6:10, 610 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 011456
(B) 203594
ENG
581 - AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE........................................
Prof. Hershini Bhana
Thursday 12:30-3:10,
Registration Numbers: (A) 141625
(B) 368898
ENG
583 - TEXTUAL CONDITIONS..................................................................
Prof. Charles Bernstein
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 438 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 211072
(B) 066575
ENG
594/494 - CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION.......................................
Prof. Mark Shechner
Thursday 7:00-9:40, 436 Clemens
Registration Number: 335322
ENG
595/407 - JAMES JOYCE............................................................................
Prof. Mark Shechner
Monday 7:00-9:40 pm, 538 Clemens
Registration Number: 109851
ENG
599 - PRACTICUM IN TEACHING...............................................................
Prof. Mili Clark
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 130
Registration Number: 385060
ENG
599 - PRACTICUM IN TEACHING...............................................................
Prof. Arabella Lyon
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 412
Registration Number: 281703
ENG
607 - AN ETERNAL BLOT: ENGLISH RENAISSANCE VISUAL CULTURE.........
Prof. Andrew Stott
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 322770
(B) 256597
ENG
609 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN
LITERATURE...........................................
Prof. Kenneth Dauber
Monday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
338165 (B) 051023
ENG
626 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE............................................
Prof. Neil Schmitz
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
391739 (B)
300898
ENG
645 - POSTMODERN FICTION.....................................................................
Prof. Joseph Conte
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
473738 (B)
256111
ENG
647 - BLAKE...........................................................................
Prof. Diane Christian
Monday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
349657 (B)
333524
ENG
648 - PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM..........................................................
Prof. Joan Copjec
Monday 3:30-6:10, 640 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
116063 (B)
483332
ENG
651 - QUEER THEORY..........................................................................
Prof. Tim Dean
Friday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 375626
(B) 454451
ENG
679 - CRITICAL RACE THEORY..................................................................
Prof. Carrie Tirado Bramen
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
164041 (B) 493936
ENG
680 - POETRY & PRAGMATISM..................................................................
Prof. Susan Howe and Prof. Peter Hare
Wednesday/Friday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens (five weeks OCT)
Registration Number: 111402
ENG
682 - LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT...............................................
Prof. James Bunn
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
064993 (B) 438042
ENG 693 - CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN POETRY & POETICS.... ..............
Prof. Scott
Manning Stevens
Monday 12:30-3:10,
Registration Numbers: (A) 172290
(B) 314474
ENG
694 - POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE.............................................................
Prof. Carine Mardorossian
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, 412
Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 038128
(B) 113835
ENG
697 - DEFINITIONS OF AMERICA..................................................................
Prof. Robert Daly
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
462984 (B)
037036
ENG
699 - ETHNOPOETICS....................................................................
Prof. Dennis Tedlock
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 540 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 449432
(B) 000657
CROSS
LISTED COURSES
ENG
506 - HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE........................................................
Prof. David Fertig
Monday/Wednesday 4:00-5:20, 103 Clemens
Registration Number: 114803
ENG
701 X - ITALIAN, FRENCH AND BELGIAN WOMEN FILM DIRECTORS................
Prof. M.E. Gutiérrez
Tuesday 3:10-5:50
Registration Number: 193762
ENG
702 X - PSYCHOANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION..........................................
Prof. Eggington
Registration Number: 315895
ENG
703 X - POETRY FROM ROMANTICISM TO SYMBOLISM...................................
Prof. Bucher
Registration Number: 047458
ENG
704 X - WOMEN DIRECTORS.......................................................................
Prof. Caroline Koebel
Wednesday 18:00-20:50, CFA 232
Registration Number: 025032
ENG
705 X - SEMINAR ON POSTMODERNISM...........................................................
Prof. Henderson
Wednesday 15:00017:50
Registration Number: 494904
L-764
- LAW AS LITERATURE.................................................................................
Prof. Guyora Binder
(Prof. Binder will take up to 6 students from English)
ENG
501- INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof. Daniel Hack
Monday, 4:00-6:40 pm, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 393742
(B) 476004
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.
ENG
502 - INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof. Daniel Hack
Tuesday 12:30-3:10 pm, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
080186 (B) 001987
This
course is identical to English 501: same material, same instructor.
The only difference is the time (and place) the class meets.
Entering M.A. students should register for either 501 A and B or 502
A and B, whichever is more convenient.
See English 501, above, for the course description.
ENG
516/414 - TEACHING SHAKESPEARE
Prof. Barbara Bono
Wednesday
16:00-18:50, 436 Clemens
Registration Number: 095230
This is a course in teaching Shakespeare.
It is designed explicitly for students who imagine that they will be
presented with the challenge and the pleasure of teaching our most prominent
canonical author in junior high, high school, or college settings.
Texts will include some half-dozen of
the most commonly taught Shakespeare plays in each of his four major genres--from
the history plays, I Henry IV; from the romantic comedies, A Midsummer Night's
Dream or Twelfth Night; from the tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar,
Hamlet, Macbeth or Othello; from the romances, The Tempest--coupled with Russ
McDonald's excellent Bedford Companion to Shakespeare as background and source
book. The instructor, herself a
member of the summer 1996 "Teaching Shakespeare Institute" and the
recipient of both the Chancellor's Award and the Milton Plesur Award for excellence
in teaching, looks forward to sharing the intellectual and community-building
force of these plays with her students so that they can share them with theirs.
Format will be highly participatory; evaluation will be largely conducted
around the actual production of materials--journals, exercises, lesson plans,
scenarios, research projects--to be used in future classrooms.
ENG
541 - 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL: LOGICS OF CANONICITY
Prof.
David Schmid
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
(B)
This seminar focuses on novels whose place in the canon is problematic,
for any or all of the following reasons:
the novels in question are seen as examples of an 'inherently marginal'
genre (popular fiction, gay/lesbian fiction, proletarian fiction); they don't
fit prevailing standards of 'minority' literature; they belong to a stage or
aspect of an author's career that has been overlooked by critics; they are seen
as too 'extreme.' We will use criticism
of the novels themselves and the work of Paul Gilroy, Cornel West, Pierre Bourdieu,
Henry Louis Gates Jr., David Palumbo-Liu, and Tony Bennett to discuss how and
why critical/theoretical discourse legitimates certain novels and readings of
novels and delegitimates others. The
reading list is as follows:
Jack
Conroy The
Disinherited (1933)
Chester Himes
Lonely Crusade (1947)
Ann Petry
Country Place (1947)
Patricia Highsmith
Strangers On a Train (1950)
Richard Wright
Savage Holiday (1954)
James Baldwin
Giovanni's Room (1956)
John Rechy
City of Night (1963
Jim Thompson
Pop. 1280 (1964)
Philip K. dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
Joanna Russ
The Female Man (1975)
William Gibson
Neuromancer (1984)
Kathy Acker
Don Quixote (1986)
Dennis Cooper
Closer (1989)
The
purpose of studying these novels is not to enact a bland gesture of inclusion
by incorporating them into "the canon." Rather, we will examine the logics of canonicity themselves.
ENG
542 - 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
DURATION,
LIVED TIME, SOCIAL TIME: WRITING, MAKING AND THE QUESTION OF AGENCY
Prof. Myung Mi Kim
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
356929 (B) 128263
This seminar will be devoted to close readings of American 20th century
and contemporary exploratory long poems in an attempt to consider how the conditions
of writing/making problematize and negotiate with the politic of time; how do
exploratory procedures, their processural character transcribe and mediate historical
consciousness; how does this generative engagement prompt complex, more "accurate"
temporalizations of history (that is, reconfigurations of meaning making)?
What practices (formal, linguistic, rhythmic, etc.) render complication,
a multiplicity of stance and utterance, of what might be brought to speech,
at the site of response--registering possibilities for human agency and collective
action.
It will be our task throughout the semester to observe how the poem questions,
participates in and activates the temporpatial mark.
How does the poem tend the valence of duration, speed, perception, memory,
domestic time, domesticated time, commodified time?
We will track the long poem as it notates interval, disruption, series,
seriality, recurrence, periodicity, interruption, accretion; what is the "time"
of a word, a line-- the page, the book?
In relation--daily and social practices-- the meaning of rehearsing the
Imaginary and its radicalizing potential.
Proposed readings: poem texts in proximity to readings in aesthetics,
science, film theory, philosophy and so on; Georgio Agamben, from Infancy and
History; Michel de Carteau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Bergson; Fabian;
Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past; Morphic Resonance and the Habits
of Nature; Adorno, from Aesthetic Theory (especially his writing on Schonberg);
Trinh Min-ha, from When the Moon Waxes Red; Ivone Margulies, from Chantel; Akerman's
Hyperrealist Everyday; Edmond Jabes, From the Desert To the Book; Blanchot,
The Writing of the Disaster; Barbara Guest, Rocks on a Platter; Zukofsky, from
"A"; Duncan, Bending the Bow; Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1; George Oppen;
Bernadette Mayer; Michael Palmer (most likely, Sun); Nathaniel Mackey; Susan
Howe Pythagorean Silence; Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha Dictee.
Other possible long poems: texts from Charles Olson, Etel Adnan, Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge, Beverly Dahlen and Cecilia Vicuna.
This list is not meant to be definitive, but rather, indicative of the
location of the seminar.
ENG
547 - CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, 436 Clemens
Registration Number:
A workshop course in which students' original work will be discussed.
ENG
561 - STUDIES IN THE NOVEL
Prof. Arthur Efron
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Silverman Library, 318 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
110387 (B)
258679
"The novel is the highest complex of subtle inter-relatedness
that man has ever discovered."
-
D.H. Lawrence
(This
course is open to Ph.D., M.A.H., and M.A. students.)
I will begin by handing out, and elaborating upon, my 3-page statement,
Theory of the Novel. I wrote this
in December 2001, at the conclusion of a graduate seminar with that title. I would like to use it as a take-off point for this new course,
and ask for your final written comment on it when this course ends.
By that time, we will have read a grand total of four novels, plus two
short books about the genre of the novel, and several essays and excerpts on
the history, qualities, traits, human worth, and problems (new and old) of the
novel.
The four novels will come from very different eras and cultures, but
each will have value in itself and as a searching experiment in the development
of the novel--a development that is still going on.
The first is the work that started the "modern" novel on its
way, Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes.
We will read Part Two, published in l6l5.
I will assign only a few chapters of Part One and give you enough information
to enable you to function as a good reader of the second half, written a decade
after the first: it shows Cervantes
at the height of his art, with a subtle criticism of his society, and a fantastic
ability to play with the novel form itself.
We will use the recent translation by Burton Raffel, published by W.W.
Norton in a critical edition.
The second novel will be the longest in the course: Anna Karenina by
Leo Tolstoy, published in l877. This
is arguably the finest achievement of "subtle inter-relatedness" that
the novel ever reached in its period of readable, sharable realism, and is possibly
the greatest novel ever. We will
spend the better part of 4 weeks on it.
For this course, the text will be the new translation, the first in some
40 years, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published in a well-designed
Penguin USA edition in 2002. Third,
we change to a great novel by a woman author, To the Lighthouse by Virginia
Woolf, first published in l927. It
is a memorable example of Modernism at its experimental best, and an unmatched
individual act of imagination. Yet
formally daring as it is, this is also a novel of emotional need within a badly
fractured family.
Fourth and finally, we will read a recent serious novel, The Lost Father
by Mona Simpson, first published in l993.
As the title indicates, here again the family is the novel's subject-matter,
but in a whole different context. It
is fitting that Simpson is the author of a new Introduction to Anna Karenina,
published in 2000.
For the two books that I believe will teach us a great deal about the
art of the novel without enclosing it in theory that is too air-tight for further
growth or for creative re-reading, I have chosen E.M. Forster's Aspects of the
Novel (l927, the same year as his friend Woolf's To the Lighthouse), and Dorrit
Cohn's The Distinction of Fiction (l999, Johns Hopkins University Press).
Both are short, well under 200 pages.
Forster's is written in deceptively conversational, non-systematic lecture-hall
style, but is actually very alert to theoretical issues. At the same time, Forster is always in touch with the experience
of reading novels with characters in them; it is not by chance that he names
two of his chapters "People."
Cohn's is a tightly argued example of what we now call "narratology."
It delves into the short novel or novella as well as the novel, and argues
that there are certain features that distinguish novels and novellas from other
things that many current theories try to pretend are also fictions, such as
Freud's case histories and historical narratives in general.
Cohn also delves into advanced narrative methods, including "simultaneous
narration" and "fictional autobiography." Her
book is not a study of narrative technique as an object in itself, but as part
of a broader "defense of fiction" as an essential of human life.
That defense is also an aim of this course.
I will supplement these two works with my own two essays on the nature
of the novel. These are based on
the primary value of freshly experiencing a novel, even when it is being re-read.
This is an approach I have worked out through my study of Art as Experience,
John Dewey's great work of l934. There
will be additional pieces such as "Why the Novel Matters" by D.H.
Lawrence, excerpts from Bakhtin's The Dialogical Imagination, and from Ortega
y Gasset's Meditations on Quixote. I
will make reference to the new anthology, Theory of the Novel: A Historical
Approach (edited by Michael McKeon, Johns Hopkins, 2000), but will not require
it as a text; at 955 pages it amounts to simply too much Theory to lump into
a course where I want the novel and its readers to be the focus.
We do need some Theory, some sort of ground-map of where we are going
and some understanding of why we are reading novels at all, but these needs
can be met without making Theory into the main show.
As the course unfolds, I will resist (but not dismiss) 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 privileged, 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.
You will have to write a short paper (3 to 5 pages) on a chapter of Don
Quixote, another one of at least 6 pages, on Anna Karenina (to be written when
we are about half way through that novel), one of about 4 pages on some important
aspect of To the Lighthouse, and a final short (2 pages, or longer, if you wish)
"comment" on "My Theory of the Novel."
You will also be asked to lead the seminar discussion with your own presentation
on what we are then reading or on any topic in the field of the novel that interests
you.
No term paper will be required, although if you have an idea for one
and wish to write it and get my comments on it, I will discuss that project
with you and will gladly read the finished paper.
It will not count as part to the course.
I will ask that you take some notes and hand in your notes at one or
two junctures during the course. The
idea here is to enable you to make use of what is being said (including what
is said by other members of the seminar), rather than let it pass into possibly
irretrievable memory.
This is a seminar, and we will have discussion.
You can take part: in fact, please do say something during every seminar
meeting. I won't be lecturing very often at length, especially after
the first few seminars, but will give various mini-lectures all along.
If you would like more information, or want to discuss this course with
me, call me at home, 836-7332; leave your message if you do not reach me.
Or, email me: efron@acsu.buffalo.edu
Prof. Bruce Jackson
Monday 3:30-6:10, 610 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
011456 (B)
203594
A small Charley Russell watercolor depicts a scrawny range cow, ribs
poking through the hide, its whole body tilted inappropriately forward so the
neck and head are too close to the ground.
The cow is dull brown, the surrounding sky and horizon and land a uniform
slate-grey. Two fox or maybe coyotes
look up at us in the lower right. Outside
the watercolor on the bottom left of the overmat is a note: "This is the
real thing painted the winter of 1886 at the OH ranch.
C.M. Russell." Opposite
it on the right and in another hand is this: "This picture is Chas Russell's
reply to my inquiry as to the condition of my cattle in 1886."
There's a signature I can't quite make out.
This seminar is about the attempt to present the world as it is.
It is about the claim some documents (writing, painting, photography,
film) make to literal truth. All
artists, fictive or not, select, edit, frame, present; the techniques are shared
but the claims differ. Are some
things more "true" than others, and what is that claim about and does
it matter and, if it does, how does it matter?
What, if anything, does a documentary book tell us that a good novel
about the same subject doesn't? What
is the truth of personal statements? Is
a photography more valid than a painting?
Does film get closer than words?
Is a diary more reliable than a memoir? Are those comparative questions of any use?
How do any of the people who purport to tell us the real get us to trust
them and where does that elusive quality called "authority" reside?
Is there truth in documents or does it occur in the interaction between
document and auditor? If the former,
how do we get there? If the latter,
what does it have to do with the moment or event or process in time that occasioned
it?
In this seminar, we'll look at and talk about still and moving images
and various kinds of writing that purport to give us access separable from the
documents themselves to the world as it is.
Students will each give one brief oral report about a key primary or
critical work and will write a term paper.
These
are the books I think we'll be reading (I may tune the list over the summer):
Robert
Coles, Doing Documentary Work
George Catlin, North American Indians
Dai Vaughan, For Documentary
Mark Twain, Roughing It
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real
ENG
581 - AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Hershini Bhana
Thursday 12:30-3:10
Registration Numbers: (A)
141625 (B)
368898
This class, as it moves across disciplinary formations and national boundaries,
will explore the traumatized (a black eye?) and thriving African diaspora.
Navigating the terrains of racial and gendered identity, we will look
closely at memory--peering into the corners not only to see what the body remembers
but what recollections place, object and ritual, exude.
Using texts such as Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, Frantz Fanon's
Black Skin, White Masks, Caryl Phillips' The Atlantic Sound and Marcus Wood's
Blind Memory we will look at structures of racial interpolation, the trauma
of blackness continually reinscribed onto the body (a fat lip?) and the survival
of a vibrant and culturally creative African peoples.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the production of visual culture
and visual texts will include work by Betye Saar, Carrie Mae Weems and altars/ritual
objects photographed in Faces of the Gods.
This class is concerned, first and foremost, with issues of redress (a
job?).
Prof. Charles Bernstein
Thursday 12:30-3:l0, 438 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
211072 (B)
066575
The seminar will explore the medium of writing, considering philosophical
accounts of what constitutes a medium (Stanley Cavell, Michael Fried, Clement
Greenberg), critical accounts of how writing and poetry function as a medium
(from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and The Guttenberg Galaxy to Friedrich
Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter and Steve McCaffery's Prior to Meaning),
and various poems, hypertexts, books, and possibly films that investigate these
concerns in practice, which, though not noted as yet, will nonetheless be a
crucial focus of the seminar. Among
the topics to be addressed are textual and bibliographic criticism (especially
through the work of Jerome McGann, including The Textual Condition, Toward a
Theory of Textual Criticism, Black Riders, Radiant Textuality, and Reimagining
Textuality as well as Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, ed. Elizabeth
Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat), the history of the alphabet (through the
work of Eric Havelock), the visual representation of writing (through the work
of Johanna Drucker, especially The Words Made Visible, Alphabetic Labyrinth,
Figuring the Words, and her artist's books), the history and possibilities of
the book (through The Book of the Book, ed. By Steve Clay and Jerome Rothenberg),
imaginary language (through McCaffery and Jed Rasula's Imagining Language) and
writing in digital media. For an
earlier version of this syllabus, go to http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/textual.html.
ENG
594/494 - CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION
Prof. Mark Shechner
Thursday 7:00-9:40 pm, 436 Clemens
Registration Number: 319444
For this Fall, I am subtitling this course "A Reverence for the
Ordinary," and, as the title sounds, we'll go out into recent American
fiction in search of the ordinary. What
is the ordinary? How do we know
it when we see it? Once we see
it, what do we make of it? What
good is it? Is the ordinary special?
If it isn't special, why bother with it? Why read about it? Will
we be bored by it? Excited?
Thrilled? Gratified?
Enlightened? Renewed?
The premise of this course is that some of the very best in American
literature is involved in a search for the ordinary and an effort to show us
that even the act of daily living in the world entirely without enchantment
or magic requires courage, backbone, intelligence, daring and all the other
qualities we normally associate with the literature of the heroic.
And what is more, it gives us, as best it can, a picture of the world
in which we actually live.
Among the writers we are likely to read this Fall are Raymond Carver,
Richard Russo, William Kennedy, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Lorrie Moore and
whoever else strikes me as worth reading and available in paperback.
What we will discover, together, is that although prose fiction has almost
no reading audience any more, it still has practitioners who know what they
are doing and are writing as well as ever.
As for classroom tactics, we basically talk and talk and talk, and I
require talking. Short stories
and novels don't always reveal their meanings instantly to a single reader,
and meanings usually emerge through a pooling of responses and a sharing of
ideas. In the arena of culture,
meaning is dialectical--we work it out together by testing our responses against
each other. We learn what we know
because we discuss what we mean.
So, talk is what we do, and you will be held accountable for being prepared
and ready to participate. There
will also be one paper some time in the middle of the semester and one final
paper or exam.
However, since the course meets just once a week, I am going to set up
both a web site and an electronic bulletin board for the class so that students
can have the opportunity to check in with me and with each other on a regular
basis, in order to keep the discussion alive.
Also, since the course has a dual designation, for undergraduate and
graduate students, I will expect seminar-style research papers from the graduate
students and, perhaps, oral reports as well.
That depends entirely on how many graduate students are in the class
and what kinds of joint activity are appropriate for the number.
Prof. Mark Shechner
Monday 7:00-9:40 pm, 538 Clemens
Registration Number: 109851
James Joyce is arguably the most important writer in the English language
in this century. His novella, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be
the defining story about the development of the soul of an artist in the twentieth
century. His modern epic, Ulysses,
does for the common man what A Portrait does for the artist: reveals the inner
workings of the mind and heart. Ulysses
especially is a long and difficult book in part, though always rewarding to
the careful reader, and much of the time we'll just read it through, page by
careful page, scene by scene. If
we have time--which I rather doubt--we'll take a look at Joyce's last book,
his magnum opus written in a language of puns, Finnegans Wake.
It is difficult at best, but never without reason or meaning.
As for classroom tactics, we basically talk and talk and talk, and I
require talking. Stories and novels
don't always reveal their meanings instantly to a single reader, and meanings
usually emerge through a pooling of responses and a sharing of ideas.
In the arena of culture, meaning is dialectical--we work it out together
by testing our responses against each other.
We learn what we know because we discuss what we mean.
So, talk is what we do, and you will be held accountable for being prepared
and ready to participate. There
will also be one paper some time in the middle of the semester and one final
paper or exam.
However, since the course meets just once a week, I am going to set up
both a web site and an electronic bulletin board for the class so that students
can have the opportunity to check in with me and with each other on a regular
basis, in order to keep the discussion alive.
Also, since the course has a dual designation, for undergraduates and
graduate students, I will expect seminar-style research papers from the graduate
students and, perhaps, oral reports as well.
That depends entirely on how many graduate students are in the class
and what kinds of joint activity are appropriate for that number.
ENG
599 - PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
Prof. Mili Clark
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 130
Registration Number: 385060
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 10:50 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 ENG201 syllabus
An
evaluation of both the 599 seminar and your experience of teaching the
page-design
composition section
ENG
599 - PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
Prof. Arabella Lyon
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 412
Registration Number: 281703
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 201 syllabus, and a detailed evaluation
of 599 and your ENG 101 experience.
ENG
607 - AN ETERNAL BLOT: ENGLISH RENAISSANCE VISUAL CULTURE
Prof. Andrew Stott
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
322770 (B) 256597
Traditional
art history would have it that the indigenous art practice of the English Renaissance
was impoverished compared to its Italian counterpart.
Subsequently, the years of iconoclasm, its censures on sight and the
actual and rhetorical violence of visual prohibition, are taken as evidence
of the isolationist vandalism that accompanies joyless puritan privation.
Yet in seeking to deny Protestant subjects a sumptuous, sensual and dangerously
Catholic visual world, early-modern England was probably more aware of visuality
than any other continental territory.
The presumed toxicity of vision resulted in suspicions and anxieties
about looking unlike those of any other nation for their contemplative intensity.
It
is the aim of this seminar to evaluate the complex visual culture of England
c. 1530-1660. We will take 'visual
culture' to mean an exploration of the objects of vision, but also the discursive
mechanisms that configure and inform ideas of what seeing is, what it means,
its ethics, its tropes, and how it might be policed.
John Donne's warning that 'the eye is the Devil's door' is suggestive
of these difficult negotiations, combining temptation, necessity, and scopophilic
guilt. We will look at the art
of mimetic lure, and read the literature of basilisks and Beatrices who rip
your heart out with a glance.
The
material for this seminar will be derived from a variety of sources.
Visual material will be central, as will readings in Vasari's Lives,
Leon Battista Alberti's Della Pittura, the sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare,
Sidney, Spenser, Daniel and Drayton, the Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry,
Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, and Ben Jonson's masques.
This will be accompanied by a selection of contemporary theorists who
have successfully avoided any direct discussion of English Renaissance visual
culture, but who can hopefully inform our thinking about the period.
Topics
to be covered include: the impact of Reformation and iconoclasm, the status
of vision in the iconophobic sensorium, introduction of perspective, non-mimetic
representational techniques, English Petrarchanism, subjectivity in portraiture,
textual vision and the grammar of looking, classicism and Palladianism, spectacle,
emblem, and imprese.
Seminar
participants are required to give an oral presentation once during the semester
and produce a twenty-age research paper.
ENG
609 - NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Kenneth Dauber
Monday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
338165 (B) 051023
Theory
of American Literature. This course
is designed to give you a roadmap to the variety of ways of talking about classic
American literature through readings in the literature of the period and, more
especially, through a thorough immersion in a wide range of theories about how
that literature is to be approached. Reading
will be heavy, about two books a week--one a primary text and one a secondary
text on the nature of American writing in which that primary text plays a central
role. We will read deconstructions,
works of cultural criticism, ordinary language criticism, feminism, new historicism--some
oldies (like Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel or D. H.
Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature) some newies (Stanley Cavell
on Thoreau and Emerson, Donald Pease on cultural critique), some in between,
some as yet to be determined. The
list will be chosen on the basis of what seems current, what seems enduring,
what I haven't read yet but meant to because it seems promising.
Primary texts will include Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin, some Hawthorne, some Melville, some Emerson, early American
novels (Brockden Brown, Hanna Foster), and a few others.
By the end of the course, if you are faithful, you will have an extraordinary
sense of how the founding period in American literature hangs out, what the
debates about it are, what works and what doesn't.
I tend to be very opinionated about such matters.
The course is designed to enable you to form your own (hopefully different)
opinions, as well.
ENG
626 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Neil Schmitz
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
391739 (B) 300898
What do you have to know to do Civil War studies in American literature?
The list of primary texts is always changing in this ongoing seminar--Sherman's
Memoirs appear and disappear--but certain texts are constant: Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Abraham Lincoln's speeches, Joel Chandler Harris's
Uncle Remus stories, the fiction and cultural criticism of Mark Twain, William
Dean Howells, and Charles Chesnutt, the speeches and autobiography of Booker
T. Washington. This semester Henry
James returns with a tale of revolution and betrayal.
ENG
645 - STUDIES
IN THE NOVEL:
POSTMODERN
FICTION IN THE INFORMATION AGE
Prof. Joseph Conte
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
473738 (B)
256111
One defining aspect of postmodernism has been the paradigm shift from
print to digital culture, from the texts as bound codex to the various emanations
of electronic media. Enthusiasts of this shift in media culture have dubbed our present
condition the "late age of print," while others speak more generally
of a transition from an industrial to an information age.
The period of overlap between the two cultures of print and hypermedia
results in a condition of instability in which competing values and practices
coexist. Print culture retains
an order that is linear, syntactic, privately accessed, and static; and electronic
culture is nonlinear in transmission and organization, interconnected through
various channels, publicly accessed, and quicksilver in its delivery.
As a result, many works and their "delivery systems" display
signs of cross-purposing: the requirement of textual and graphical links in
browsers; books-on-tape for the harried commuter or the visually impaired; full-text
CD-ROM editions of fiction and non-fiction with both "view" and "print"
options. Rather than worry the
decline of five-hundred years of print technology and the erosion of readerly
behavior, or applaud the conversion to incipient dataforms and their promiscuous
linking, one may regard this transitional phase between a print and an electronic
order as an opportunity to study the art of fiction as the medium incorporates
compositional methods and organizational structures presented by the information
age.
During the seminar, we'll read the work of several postmodern novelists
who, though still bound to the print order, are provocatively engaged with the
terms and conditions of the information age, and who invoke the cascade of associative
thought that characterizes the experience of digital media and the Internet.
Where applicable we'll examine their involvement in digital, film, and
other media projects, and visit the scholarly web pages and popular discussion
lists that make these novelists the subject of considerable online activity.
We'll begin with the collaboration of cyberpunk novelists William Gibson
and Bruce Sterling on The Difference Engine, a novel that speculates on the
completion of Charles Babbage's cybernetic
Analytical Engine, propelling the Victorian age of steam into the computer age.
Thomas Pynchon's Vineland introduces the media saturation and base common
culture of television in Ronald Reagan's America.
In Don DeLillo's White Noise, the residents of suburbia are subject to
the superabundance of information and the pervasive penetration of waves and
radiation. In Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2, the "author" combines
forces with a cognitive neurologist whose project is to model the human brain
by means of a computer-based neural network.
Together, they train successive generations of the neural net, eventually
dubbed Helen, to analyze a canonical list of Great Books.
Our readings, however, will also include two examples of hypertext fiction,
Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden and Jane Yellowlees Douglas's I Have Said
Nothing, as proponents of the rhizomatically linked, anti-hierarchical forms
of writing made possible by digital culture.
As a complement to these works of fiction, the seminar will alternate
its attentions with selections from a variety of critical and theoretical texts
on the information age and electronic media, including Espen Aarseth's Cybertext:
Perspective on Ergodic Literature, Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies, Robert
Coover's "The End of Books," Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds. Digital
Delirium, Michael Joyce's Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, George
Landow's Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology, William Paulson's The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World
of Information, Joseph Tabbi's Cognitive Fiction, and Tabbi and Wutz, eds. Reading
Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology.
Seminar participants who are registered intensively will be required
to make a twenty-minute oral presentation and produce a twenty-age research
paper.
Prof. Diane Christian
Monday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
349657 (B)
333524
William Blake stood against the Enlightenment worship of Reason and cited
Imagination as the superior faculty ("What is now proved was once, only
imagined"). He analyzed reason
as the accusatory moral faculty posed against the artistic/religious incorporative
power of imagination ("If Morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour").
He interrogated and reshaped the Christian sense of the erotic ("Men
are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed or govern'd their Passions
or have no Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings").
He literally rewrote Milton in his epic Milton, bringing him back into
time to correct his errors and reform his righteousness; his struggle with Milton
was not a narcissistic 'agony of influence' but a testing of the truth of religious
imagination.
Blake also anticipated radical insights of Feuerbach ("Thus men
forgot that All deities reside in the human breast"), Marx ("The voice
of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money"), Freud ("Blake
illustrated the oedipus complex in The Book of Urizen") and feminism ("Against
the Patriarchal pomp and cruelty labouring incessant").
His is the most powerful analysis of religion, art, morality, war, emotion
and gender in English poetry. To
express it he created his own mythology which combined and thought with all
the wisdom he knew--notably the Bible, artists and poets, and Plato, Bacon,
Newton, and Locke.
This course will consider all his work, poetic and graphic, with emphasis
on the body as the focusing structural metaphor and informing genius.
ENG
648 - PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM: Rhetoric, Psychoanalysis
and Politics
Prof. Joan Copjec and Prof. Ernesto Laclau
Monday 3:30-6:10, 640 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
116063 (B)
483332
The aim of the seminar is to analyze the rhetorical logics structuring
a plurality of contemporary discursive spaces.
In the last 50 years there has been a rhetorical turn in many field,
including epistemology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, mass communications
and literary theory. The form of
this turn has been a putting into question of the possibility, for theoretical
thought, of generating its own closure without an appeal to tropological
movements that introduce rhetoricity into the very structuration of the
conceptual medium.
This seminar will systematically explore the various forms of this rhetorical
turn. In the first section we will
present an outline of the transition from Old to New Rhetoric--i.e., the constitution
of a rhetorical corpus in the classical period and its continuity until Romanticism;
the reasons for its decline in the earlyu 19th century; and, finally, the conditions
of the emergence of a New Rhetoric in the last 50 years. The remainder of the seminar will be devoted to a reconsideration
of key concepts of psychoanalysis and political theory in light of these developments
in rhetoric. The categories of
the real, fantasy, and sexual difference will be the main focus of the psychoanalytic
section, while sovereignty, representation, and hegemony will be the focus of
the discussions of politics and political theory.
Along the way, a number of topics, essential and tangential, will be
touched on, including the relation between rhetoric and ontology and the role
of metaphor in contemporary epistemology and the philosophy of science.
The first section will be taught jointly by Copjec and Laclau; the psychoanalytic
section by Copjec, and the political section by Laclau.
Prof. Tim Dean
Friday 12:30-3:l0, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
375626 (B) 454451
This course examines the founding texts of the new, heterogeneous field of study known as queer theory. We will begin by considering the premise that queer is more than a catchall term or synonym for gay and lesbian, and we will proceed by taking seriously the various critiques of identity that emerged in France during the past half century. This is not a course in lesbian and gay studies, neither is it a course in cultural studies or popular representations of sexuality, though we will try to consider the full range of contemporary erotic practices. In order to trace a genealogy of the concept of queerness, we will return to the beginning of the twentieth century and the basic texts of psychoanalysis, primarily Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. From Freud we will move to Michel Foucault, reading all three volumes of The History of Sexuality and essays on sexual ethics and the care of the self. We will also read one novel, Allan Stein, by Matthew Stadler.
Topics
for discussion include:
*
"gay" versus "queer"
*
essentialist versus constructionist accounts of sexuality
*
minoritizing versus universalizing views of homosexuality
*
the historical emergence of the concept of sexuality
*
techniques of normalization
*
the authority of experience
*
politics beyond identity politics
*
the aesthetics of self-formation, self-care, self-replication, and self-dissolution
*
polymorphous perversity
*
psychoanalytic versus psychological concepts of fantasy and desire
*
transgender phenomena
*
intergenerational sex
*
the range and limits of queer critique
Secondary
readings include work by: Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Arnold
I. Davidson, Tim Dean, Teresa de Lauretis, Samuel Delany, Lisa Duggan, Elizabeth
Grosz, David Halperin, Guy Hocquenfghem, Gayle Rubin, Eva Sedgwick, Michael
Warner, Montique Wittig.
Students enrolled in this seminar should read Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal before our first class meeting.
ENG 679
- CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Prof. Carrie Tirado Bramen
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
164041 (B)
493936
This seminar will explore one of the most controversial fields within
cultural studies. Emerging from
the Critical Legal Studies movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, critical race
theorists examine the employment of race to political, legal and cultural ends.
This course will theorize race and racism as distinct problems and as
problems interconnected with gender, ethnicities, sexuality, classes, nationalities
and cultures. We will review the
major debates in the field ranging from Cornel West's defense of race as the
means to challenge racism to Paul Gilroy's antithetical strategy of doing away
with the category of race altogether in order to imagine a "postanthropological
and nonracial humanism." We
will also reconsider critiques of identity politics and essentialism; the rise
of cosmopolitanism; the distinction between identitarian and non-identitarian
practices; ethnicity versus race; the question of Jewishness and (liminal) whiteness;
critiques of antiracism; the advent of whiteness studies and the problematic
that Robyn Wiegman has recently described as the "hegemony of liberal whiteness."
We will also look at the intersections of race and dietetics, including
Frantz Fanon's discussion of cannibalism and the 'human.' The course will move
beyond the theoretical to include the legal, historical and empirical contexts
of racism within the U.S., and in comparative perspective with Brazil (Howard
Winant) and South Africa (Rob Nixon, George Fredrickson).
Readings
(may) include: David Theo Goldberg and Philomena Essed (eds), Race: Critical
Theories;
Adrien
Katherine Wing, ed. Critical Race Feminism: A Reader; Les Back and John Solomos,
eds. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader; Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lee
Lott, The Idea of Race; James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen; Toni
Morrison, Playing in the Dark; bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters and
Killing Race: Ending Racism; David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings
of a Racial Frontier; Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious; Paul
Gilroy, Against Race; France Twine, Feminism and Antiracism;Francisco Valdes,
Crossroads, Directions and a new critical race theory; Howard Winant, Racial
Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons; Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies:
Theorizing Race and Gender; Gloria Anzaldúa, The Borderlands/La Frontera
Prof. Susan Howe and Prof. Peter Hare
Wednesday/Friday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens (five weeks OCT)
Registration Number: 111402
How far do poets and philosophers think alike?
Authors, ideas and texts we may or may not discuss include: Richard Poirier,
Poetry and Pragmatism; J. L. Austin, "Ifs and Cans" and "Truth;"
poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson; Wallace Stevens' poems from Auroras of Autumn;
sections of Louis Zukofsky's Bottom on Shakespeare; the logical graphs of C.S.
Peirce's logical graphs considered as concrete poetry; Gertrude Stein's Stanzas
in Meditation; Jack Spicer's "The Holy Grail," "Thing Language,"
and "Dictation and Poetry;" some of Richard Rorty's most recent work.
We will also discuss metaphysical ideas of symbolic logicians--counterfactuals,
possible worlds, holes, shadows, paradoxes, and homeless objects, worlds in
which the law of non-contradiction does not hold.
In an intensive four-week seminar during the month of October, we will
meet twice each week for two and one-half hours each meeting.
Full credit will be given for the course.
The requirements are a final paper and an oral presentation.
The final paper won't have to be handed in until the end of the semester
in December.
ENG
682 - LITERATURE AND ENVIRONMENT
Prof. James Bunn
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:(A) 064993
(B) 438042
In this seminar I plan to review some of the more famous paradigms about
Nature that have shaped thought and action in British and American literature.
Some of the socially constructed paradigms about nature that I plan to
explore are: the Sublime, the Wilderness, the Frontier, and Spaceship Earth.
Virtually all of the new disciplines that arose from the Enlightenment--political
science, psychology, economics, esthetics--took their premises from redefinitions
of the state of nature. Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, Kant contributed to a new shaping of human nature by conjecturing
a state of nature. In the opening
sessions I plan for some readings in social philosophy that will allow us to
sample some of the related issues of natural law, natural contract, natural
language. Once these paradigms
had done their work to help justify the American and French Revolutions, they
lost their sway. How did that shift
in sensibility occur in the aftermath of Romanticism?
As texts that will help to chart the shift, we'll read Jefferson's Notes
on the State of Virginia, and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer.
I plan to focus on Jefferson's work as landscape architect and utopian
planner. Crevecoeur's portrayals
of the frontier will allow me to introduce readings in Frederick Jackson Turner's
frontier thesis, a mythic ground that helped set the stage for a cowboy economy
of illimitable resources that exploited and still exploits the environment.
Working back and forth in terms of Transatlantic criticism, we'll devote
a couple of classes to Wordsworth's natural sublime and Coleridge's flirtations
with pantheism. Then I'll shift
to Cooper's Last of the Mohicans in order to explore the mythos of wilderness
and the scout. The paradigm of
wilderness plays itself out in the landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted, in the
photographs of Ansel Adams, and in the concept of wilderness preserves.
(We'll have a slide lecture about Adams's photographs later on.)
We'll also read Walden and maybe Parkman's The Oregon Trail.
In contrast to what I'll call "land(e)scapes," toward the end
of the seminar I'll juxtapose Kenneth Boulding's idea of Spaceship Earth, later
popularized by Buckminster Fuller. Like
the environmental movement itself, this seminar will be under theorized.
In the spring semester I hope to redress this lack in a seminar that
features a semiotics and cognitive science of natural language.
ENG
693 - CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN POETRY & POETICS
Prof. Scott Manning Stevens
Monday 12:00-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
172290 (B)
314474
This
seminar will focus on developments in Native American poetry since the late
1960's.
The
seminar will examine themes and issues specific to Native Americans writing
in English and in their respective native languages. Since all North American Native Peoples descend from non-literate
oral societies, we will focus on the issues of traditional orality as well as
the influence of Modernist Euro-American poetics.
This
will mean that we will have to attend to culturally specific issues based on
tribal affiliation, history, and region as well as, the issue of direct poetic
and literary influences. Carter
Revard, an Osage poet, for instance, is a university professor specializing
in Medieval English literature, while Maurice Kenny, a Mohawk poet, traces the
primary influence on his writing to the poetry of Louise Bogan.
For each poet read in this seminar we will address issues of ethnic identity,
acculturation, and poetic affiliation.
We
will begin by examining some background materials, including recordings of oral
poetics land traditional song. After
some consideration of critical works on ethno-poetics we will look at two late
nineteenth-century Native American poets: E. Pauline Johnson and Alexander Lawrence
Posey. From within this context
we will jump to the poetry of Leslie Marmon Silko and M. Scott Momaday in the
late 1960's and move on to such contemporary poets as Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose,
Carter Revard, Joy Harjo, Maurice Kenny, Roberta Hill Whiteman, Sherman Alexie,
Laura Tohe, James Stevens, Adrian Lewis and others.
Cross-listed
with Indigenous Studies
ENG
694 - POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE
Prof. Carine Mardorossian
Wednesday 12:30-3:l0, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
038128 (B)
113835
Through a focus on literary works, this course seeks to map the transformations
postcolonial studies has undergone over the last few decades as it has redefined,
for instance, the colonial/postcolonial relationship as post/colonial (Bongie).
Indeed, postcolonial writers today seem far less preoccupied with correcting
and reversing colonialist stereotypes than with exploring the forms of cultural
energy generated by the colonial encounter and its resulting displacements.
We will read fiction (short and long), poems, as well as essays from
a selection of countries with a history of colonialism, and we will analyze
these texts in light of the important debates that have been preoccupying postcolonial
critics and theorists since the publication of Edward Said's pioneering Orientalism
(1978). These debates gravitate
around issues of racial and cultural otherness, history and historiography,
representation, agency and resistance, hybridity, the politics of home, the
black diaspora, postcolonial revisionism, globalization, etc.
This theoretical overview will help us better understand and analyze
the intensively hybridized and transnational kinds of writings that have now
achieved a position of prominence in Western literary and academic circles.
Writings such as Salman Rushdie's tales of straddling different cultural
worlds have indeed often been hailed as the model of anti-imperialist literature
and the culmination of the postcolonial.
Some critics have argued, however, that the success of this migrant literature
is not a sign of the West's increasing engagement with alternative perspectives
and aesthetic criteria so much as a celebration of cultural forms that come
closest to Western ideas of high art.
Throughout the semester, we will engage the various sides of this critical
debate and its implications for the works under scrutiny.
We
will read authors such as Ngugi wa Thiongo, Salman Rushdie, Manil Suri, Jean
Rhys, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Keri Hulme, Timothy Nmo, Ousmane Sembene,
Patrick Chamoseau, as well as critics such as Homi Bhabha, Chris Bongi, Partha
Chatterjee, Maryse Conde, Michael Dash, Stuart Hall, Wilson Harris, Graham Huggan,
Neil Larsen, Neil Lazarus, Anne McClintock, Benita Parry, Edward Said, Ella
Shohat, and Robert Young.
The
requirements for the course are faithful attendance, active participation, bi-weekly
responses, one or two presentations, and a final 20- to 25-page paper.
ENG
697 - DEFINITIONS OF AMERICA
Prof. Robery Daly
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
462984 (B) 037036
We shall read, within their reciprocal cultural contexts, several writings
that help to define, create, or revise our national cultures, both the discourse
of nationalism and what Julia Kristeva calls the discourses of "nations
without nationalism." We shall
attend to their interactions with other cultures, with conversations among them,
and with the ways in which they are both representative (participating in the
cultural conversations of their times and ours) and hermeneutic (affording practice
and instruction in the arts of interpretation).
Ecocriticism, feminism, ecofeminism, trauma theory, rhetorical hermeneutics,
literary anthropology, cultural criticism, post-analytic philosophy, postmodern
ethics, cultural theory, and any other theories we find useful will be welcome
in our discussions of these texts but will not replace them.
Each student will do one seminar report (15-20 minutes), and each student
taking the seminar intensively (for full credit) will also do one research essay
on a topic of his or her own choosing.
Texts:
William
Andrews, ed., Classic American Autobiographies (Mentor, Penguin)
[contains Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, and Zitkala-Sa]
Susanna
Haswell Rowson, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Oxford)
Washington
Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Signet)
James
Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Signet)
Catharine
Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts (Rutgers UP)
Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris
Margaret
Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (Norton Critical
Nathaniel
Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Bedford)
Henry
David Thoreau, Walden, 2nd ed., ed. William Rossi (Norton Critical Edition)
Rebecca
Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Bedford)
Henry
James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (Signet)
Though you may, of course, acquire them anywhere you please, these texts will be available in the University Bookstore.
Prof. Dennis Tedlock
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 540 Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A)
449432 (B) 000657
Ethnopoetics
is a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant
others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now. To have any hope of
getting outside we must set aside any notion we may have that these poetries
will necessarily come from a distant time, or from present-day peoples who are
somehow living in the past, or that they will necessarily resemble Homer, or
that they will be less complex than Western or metropolitan poetries, or that
they will have been produced in some kind of isolation from other languages
or cultures.
Ethnopoetics does not merely contrast the poetics of "ethnics"
with just plain poetics, but implies that any poetics is always an ethnopoetics.
Our main interest will indeed be the poetries of people who are ethnically distant
from ourselves, but it is precisely by the effort to reach into distances that
we bring our own ethnicity, and the poetics that goes with it, into fuller consciousness.
Ethnopoetics originated among poets with an interest in anthropology
and linguistics and among anthropologists and linguists with an interest in
poetry, such as David Antin, Stanley Diamond, Dell Hymes, Jerome Rothenberg,
Gary Snyder, Nathaniel Tarn (E. Michael Mendelson), and myself. The emphasis
has been on performances in which the speaking, chanting, or singing voice gives
shape to proverbs, riddles, curses, laments, praises, prayers, prophecies, public
announcements, and narratives.
Practitioners of ethnopoetics treat the relationship between performances
and texts as a field for experimentation. Texts that were taken down in the
era of handwritten dictation and published as prose are reformatted and/or retranslated
in order to reveal their poetic features. In the case of sound recordings, transcripts
and translations serve not only as listening guides but also as scripts or scores
for further performances. An ethnopoetic score not only takes account of the
words but silences, changes in loudness and tone of voice, the production of
sound effects, and the use of gestures and props. Whatever a score may encompass,
the notion of a definitive text has no place in ethnopoetics. Linguists and
folklorists tend to narrow their attention to the normative side of performance,
recognizing only such features as can be accounted for by general rules. Ethnopoetics
remains open to the creative side of performance, valuing features that may
be rare or even unique to a particular artist or occasion.
Special attention will be given to the dialogical dimensions of performances.
At the simplest level this means that in many genres an audience response may
be required, or there may be a division of roles among two or more speakers
or singers. But it can also mean that a single speaker produces multiple contrasting
voices. A poet, instead of settling on just the right words, may give voice
to multiple ways of saying something, thus treating language itself as fundamentally
dialogical. It is simply not true that multivocal discourse is an invention
of novelists, or that poetry must be monological.
Readings will include translations of verbal arts in various African,
Asian, and Amerindian languages. There will also be listenings covering a wide
range of recorded performances. As an alternative to a term paper, a transcription
and/or translation, and/or performance may be acceptable.
The assigned reading, in addition to handouts, will be as follows: Richard
Bauman, Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments; Larry Evers
and Felipe S. Molina, Yaqui Deer Songs/Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry;
Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred; and Dennis Tedlock, Finding the
Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller
and Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya.
CROSS-LISTED
COURSES
ENG
506 - HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Prof. David Fertig
Monday/Wednesday 4:00-5:20, 103 Clemens
Registration Number: 114803
Description
available in Department of History.
ENG
701 X - ITALIAN, FRENCH AND BELGIAN WOMEN FILM DIRECTORS
Prof. M.E. Gutiérrez
Tuesday 3:10-5:50
Registration Number: 193762
Women's cinematic eye. For
over a century with their intelligence and creativity women have been contributing
to the moving image. In l896 the
French, Alice Guy, directed the first film made by a woman, La Feé aux choux.
In this seminar we will critically explore the cinematic production of
some of the major European women filmmakers of all times.
We will engage Agnés Varda's Nouvelle Vague innovations, Liliana Cavani's
crucial output, the exquisite contemporary comedies of Fina Torres and Josiane
Balasko, and many others. Indeed,
through the reading and discussion of filmic and theoretical texts we shall
engage some fundamental questions concerning subjectivity and language, body
and culture. We will examine constructions
of sexual différance and (re)presentations of female/male gender in these three
social, political and historical contexts.
The theoretical framework will be provided by the philosophical writings
of film theorist and filmmakers such as Giulles Deleuze, André Bazin, Marguerite
Duras, Kaja Silverman, Stephen Heath, Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler,
among others.
N.B.
The course and the readings will be in English.
The films will be in Italian and French with English subtitles.
Required
films:
We
will select 11 or 12 films from the following selection:
Coline
Serreau Trois hommes
et un couffin (Three Men and a cradle), Romuald et Juliette (Mama, there's a
man in your bed)
Agnés
Varda Cléo
de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7), Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond)
Liliana
Cavani
Il Portiere di Notte (The Night Porter), Francesco, and The Berlin Affair
Lina
Wertmüller
Sotto sotto, Love and Anarchy or Swept Away
Nicole
Garcia
Place Vendôme
Josiane
Balasko
Gazon Maudit (French Twist)
Fina
Torres Mécaniques
Célestes (Celestial clockwork)
Marguerite
Duras
India Song
Roberta
Torre
Tano da morire
Claire
Devers
Noir et blanc (Black and White)
Aline
Isserman
L'ombre du doute (A Shadow of Doubt) or Claire Denis's I Can't Sleep
Sandrine
Veysset
Y'aura t' -il de la neige à Noël? (Will It Snow For Xmas?)
ENG
702 X - PSYCHOANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATIONS
Prof. Eggington
Registration Number: 315895
This course seeks to examine the enormous influence Freud's discovery
of the unconscious has had on the art and practice of interpretation.
The course will begin by briefly surveying the history of theories of
interpretation, from the religious and mystical to 19th century hermeneutics. Then we will enter into Freud's oeuvre, paying particular attention
to the 1901 text The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as the case studies.
At this point, the course will be structured along a series of interpretive
lineages or strings, in which we will observe the metamorphosis of interpretive
theory as it, in turn, is interpreted and reinterpreted.
Such strings might include, for example, the Schreber string: Schreber's
memoirs-Freud's analysis-Lacan's commentary-Deleuze's critique; the Poe string:
"The Purloined Letter"-Lacan's seminar-Derrida's critique-Barbara
Johnson's commentary; and the Hamlet string: Hamlet-Jones' analysis-Lacan's
reading, etc. Additional readings
will include works by such psychoanalytically inspired readers as Harold Bloom,
Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, and others.
ENG
703 X - POETRY FROM ROMANTICISM TO SYMBOLISM
Prof. Bucher
Registration Number: 047458
The purpose of the seminar is to examine the impact of the ideas of Romanticism
(particularly German Romanticism) on the first generation of French Romantic
Poets (Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny and Nerval).
In a second phase, we will focus particularly on the ways these ideas
were reworked in the supernaturalist perspective advocated by Baudelaire at
the time of the publication of Les fleurs du mal in 1857 (we will discuss the
concept of poetic imagination in L'art romantique and in Salon de 1859).
We will finally consider in which way the Symbolist quest of a poetic
absolute finds its highest forms of accomplishment in both Rimbaud's Illuminations
and Mallarmé's sonnets and prose texts (we will also examine in this light Lautréamont's
Chants de Maldoror). The seminar
will be taught in French. Students
will be required to do at least one oral presentation and to write a final paper
(students in Comparative Literature will have the option of writing their paper
in English).
Prof. Caroline
Koebel
Wednesday 18:00-20:50, CFA 232
Registration Number: 025032
This graduate seminar is motivated by the desire to develop a local critical
community around women in film and seeks a student body comprised of both theoreticians
and practitioners. The semester
will be spent in close analysis of mostly English-language feature films from
the 1990's by a cross-generation of emerging and established filmmakers, including
Lisa Cholodenko, Julie Dash and Jane Campion.
Select examples of the works of pioneering avant-garde filmmakers, including
Maya Deren and Yvonne Rainer, and Hollywood directors, such as Kathryn Bigelow,
will add dimension to the course's broad survey of independent narrative cinema.
The seminar will address in depth such topics as "the male gaze"
and its subversion in given films; the (dis- and re-) remembering of films by
women; reading a film via filmic elements such as mis-en-scene, camera angle
and editing; authorship and speaking subject or voice; and demands for active
spectatorship through the integration of theories and practices that challenge
narrative: Anti-Illusionist Film, Counter Cinema and Feminist Film.
Authors include Christina Lane, Teresa de Lauretis, E. Ann Kaplan, B.
Ruby Rich, bell hooks, Laura Mulvey, Mary C. Gentile, Gloria J. Gibson-Hudson,
Ntongela Masilela, and Mary Ann Doane.
Course work includes weekly screenings and readings, journals, short
essays, a class presentation, and a term paper.
ENG
705 X - SEMINAR ON POSTMODERNISM
Prof. Henderson
Wednesday 15:00-17:50
Registration Number: 494904
This seminar explores notions of postmodernism and of postmodern textuality
and of relations--actual, possible, and potential--between them.
Theoretical work by Jean Beaudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Craig Owens,
Linda Williams, and others will be studied. Films to be viewed include Mayhem by Abigail Child, The Singing
Detective by Stephan Potter, and The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris.
Graphic work to be examined includes Daniel Buren, Francesco Clemente,
Mary Kelly, Anselrn Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Cindy Sherman.
Literary work to be examined includes Poems for the Millenium (vol. 2)
and late stories by J. D. Salinger; drama by Caryl Churchill, Fo and Brecht
will also be sampled. Presentations
by seminar members will expand these issues.