ENG 501 - INTRODUCTION
TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof. Daniel Hack
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 297734 (B) 144707
ENG 502 - INTRODUCTION
TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof. Barbara Bono
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A)425570 (B) 159511
ENG 516 - SHAKESPEARE
Prof. Barbara Bono
Wednesday 4:00-6:40, Keeva
Registration Number: 423125
ENG 522 - MILTON
Prof. Susan Eilenberg
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 411007 (B) 179082
ENG 535 - THE
PURITAN TRADITION
Prof. Robert Daly
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 131177 (B) 189686
ENG 537 - 19TH
CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Kenneth Dauber
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 403132 (B) 154232
ENG 547 - CREATIVE
WRITING
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 137582
ENG 551 - BIBLE
AS LITERATURE
Prof. Diane Christian
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 463601 (B) 093067
ENG 564 - TRADITIONAL
NARRATIVE
Prof. Bruce Jackson
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 610
Registration Numbers: (A) 180949 (B) 476640
ENG 575 - UTOPIAS,
SCIENCE FICTION, AMERICA
Prof. James Bunn
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 378970 (B) 244297
ENG 584 - POETICS
Prof. Myung Mi Kim
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 119364 (B) 245209
ENG 589 - ADVANCED
LITERACY
Prof. Stefan Fleischer
Thursday 4:00-6:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 225283
ENG 593 - THE
JEWISH WRITER IN AMERICA: PART I
Prof. Mark Shechner
Thursday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 303971
ENG 594 - BEGINNING
JOYCE
Prof. Mark Shechner
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 225421
ENG 595 - AMERICAN
CLASSICS AND CULTURE
Prof. Robert Daly
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 421394
ENG 599 - PRACTICUM
IN TEACHING
Prof. Mili Clark
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 130
Registration Number: 011718
ENG 599 -
PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
Prof. Arabella Lyon
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 412
Registration Number: 219241
ENG 607 - STUDIES
IN RENAISSANCE
Prof. Jim Swan
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 038968 (B) 063492
ENG 625 - 19TH
CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Prof. Carrie Tirado Bramen
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 093841 (B) 174076
ENG 628 - STUDIES
IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
THE NEW YORK AVANT-GARDE, 1913-1929
Prof. Joseph Conte
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 294855 (B) 455656
ENG 648 - AFFECTIVITY
AND POLITICAL RADICALISM
Prof. Joan Copjec
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 023347 (B) 484979
ENG 649 - EMBODIMENT
AND INJURY: THE INJUNCTION
TO REMEMBER
Prof. Hershini Young
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 427754 (B) 042599
ENG 653 - MONSTROUS
CULTURAL STUDIES
Prof. David Schmid
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 153026 (B) 146243
ENG 679 - AMERICANIST
COLLOQUIUM
Prof. Stacy Hubbard
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 317568 (B) 244300
ENG 680 - FEMINIST
THEORY
Prof. Carine Mardorossian
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 223021 (B) 427823
ENG 684 - EMBRACING
UNCERTAINTY WHILE CONCENTRATING ON DETAILS: MOBY-DICK and THE PRINCIPLES OF
PSYCHOLOGY
Prof. Susan Howe
Monday/Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 383546
ENG 694 - VOICES
Prof. Dennis Tedlock
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 540
Registration Numbers: (A) 401823 (B) 474159
CROSS-LISTED COURSES
ENG 701 - LITERATURE
& PHILOSOPHY STUDIES: QUEER AMERICAS…33
Prof. Ramon Soto-Crespo
Tuesday 7:00-9:40
Registration Number: 340589
ENG 703 - HISTORICAL
INQUIRY
Prof. Patrick McDevitt
Wednesday 4:00-6:40
Registration Number: 458773
ENG 704 - IMAGINING
NATURE
Prof. James Bono
Monday 1:00-3:40
Registration Number: 040008
ENG 705 - ROMANTIC
AGE
Prof. Henry Sussman
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640
Registration Number: 289701
ENG 706 - POETICS
OF PROGRAMMABLE LITERATURE
Prof. Loss Pequeño Glazier
Tuesday 12:00-2:30
Registration Number: 104981
ENG 501A and B - INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof. Daniel Hack
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 297734 (B) 144707
All new students in the English Department's M.A. Program are required to take either English 501 or English 502, both of which are designated Introduction to Scholarly Methods. Each of these courses is in turn divided into two sections, A and B, which have different formats: the A section is a conventional seminar, whereas the B section does not have a common meeting time, but instead consists in individual advisement tailored to your specific needs. All new M.A. Program students must enroll in one of the A sections (i.e., English 501A or English 502A), and full-time students should also enroll in the corresponding B section. (You can enroll in the A section on-line, but to enroll in the B section you must contact Bill McDonnell, Assistant to the Chair, at 645-2575 x10l9, or mcdonnel@acsu.buffalo.edu.)
English 501A is intended to enhance your familiarity and facility with the kinds of questions literary scholars ask today and their strategies for answering them. We will therefore tour some of the landmarks of contemporary theory, study various critical approaches, and gain a grounding in research methods. To make our survey more focused, we will use several literary works as shared reference points and test-cases. The longest of these works will be Charles Dickens's 1861 novel Great Expectations. Please read Great Expectations before the semester begins, as I will not be allotting time for it during the term.
I will ask you to write frequent, short responses to the assigned reading. Research into the composition, publication, and critical history of a text of your own choosing (in consultation with me) will form the basis of longer writing assignments and an oral presentation.
(Please note that while both the A and B sections of this course can count toward your eight-seminar requirement for the M.A. degree, and while the A section is required for all new M.A. students, neither the A nor B section of this course counts toward the five intensive seminars required for the degree.)
ENG 502A and B - INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof. Barbara Bono
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 425570 (B) 159511
Either ENG 501A and B or ENG502A and B: Introduction to Scholarly Methods is the required course for all new students in the M.A./Credentialing Program within the English Department at the University at Buffalo.
It combines an introduction to the state of the profession with an introduction to the specific resources for graduate study within this Department and University, together with a specific scholarly and theoretical "case study" drawn from the area of interest and expertise of the principal instruction professor. For Fall 2003 Professor Bono will lead students through an exemplary scholarly unit on recent theoretical and cultural studies of the significance of early modern drama in the middle of her section of the course. Before and after this unit Professor Bono will organize various invitational presentations involving other members of the Department on topics such as library and electronic resources, scholarly publication, conference work, the teaching of rhetoric and composition, seminar paper writing and revision, and various disciplinary sub-fields and theoretical approaches. She will also advise each M.A. candidate at the point of entrance to the program, at fall and spring term registration, and at further crucial stages of progress toward the degree.
The focus of the course will be each student's rapid and successful acculturation within the Department and the profession: therefore students will be encouraged to get to know as colleagues each other, their fellow graduate students throughout the program, and the professors within the Department, and to bring to the seminar a number of short writing exercises for discussion, revision, and review. If they wish they will also receive explicit advice on the writing and revision of writing samples and personal statements for further professional applications.
Students may enroll for the course either for 3 credits in the "A" section alone, or for 6 credits in both the "A" and the "B" sections, depending on the time they wish to devote to this course relative to their other course selections within the program. All new M.A./Credentialing Program students must enroll for either the English 501A or 502A section. In addition, this instructor will arrange a regular meeting time for the English 502B section. This "B" section is envisioned not as a common meeting time, but rather as a time regularly set aside for advisement. All students, whether they elect the course for 3 or for 6 credits, will have ample access to advisement opportunities. [Please note that while both the "A" and "B" sections of this course can count toward your eight seminar requirement for the M.A. degree, and while the "A" section is required of all new M.A./Credentialing Program students, neither the "A" nor the "B" sections of this course counts toward the five intensive seminars required for the degree.]
ENG 516 - SHAKESPEARE
Prof. Barbara Bono
Wednesday 4:00-6:40, Keeva
Registration Number: 423125
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.
Shakespeare's texts--in their linguistic density, their dramatic intensity, their cultural awareness, their communal impact--did important and controversial cultural work in their own day, and they can continue to do so now. In this course we will use some of the methods of the Folger Shakespeare Library's long-standing NEH-sponsored "Teaching Shakespeare Institute"--journal writing, wordplay, soliloquy analysis, adaptative and improvised scenarios, scene work, comparison of videos--coupled with the instructor's historical focus on the confluence of political and sex-gender issues, to remake and reinvigorate Shakespeare's texts for today's students.
Class will focus on three of the most commonly taught Shakespeare plays from his four major genres--from the romantic comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream; from the history plays, I Henry IV; from the tragedies, Hamlet; from the romances, The Tempest--coupled with Russ McDonald's excellent Bedford Companion to Shakespeare as background and source book. In addition, we may take illustrative examples from other plays commonly taught in the lower-grade curriculum: from the romantic comedies, Twelfth Night; from the histories, Richard III and Henry V; from the tragedies Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear; from the romances, The Tempest. 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 522 - MILTON
Prof. Susan Eilenberg
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 411007 (B) 179082
I would like in this course, devoted to readings of Milton's poems and some of his most important prose writings, to focus on the problem of Miltonic excess, that too-muchness that confronts not just us, Milton's overwhelmed readers, but also the principal characters of Milton's writings, who tend, in the face of such abundance, to feel themselves impaired. Much of what is most interesting (to me) in these writings are those peculiar and peculiarly recurring structures, scenes, or objects suggesting at once plenitude and deprivation: the glass Comus offers the abstinent Lady, the apple Satan offers Eve, Eve herself as she appears before a bewildered Adam, the banquets Satan sets before Christ, images of paradisal fertility and of chaotic violence. Imaging relationships of obligation, identification, incorporation, and denial, provoking the deepest ambivalence, these scenes and objects mark those points at which a fantasy of absolute and absolutely gratifying plenitude, an abundance that precludes measurement or choice but that carries the threat of overwhelming the subject, is transformed into its apparent antithesis, a fantasy of strict economy structured around scarcity, quantification, and debt. The consequence is a body of work in which the requirements of economic logic are systematically enforced and undermined: with no medium between all and nothing at all, all signs liable to convert into their opposites, the world becomes pure excess and any is too much.
All this, of course, is just another way of describing what happens in the course of what is usually called temptation.
Students will be asked to present one short essay before the class and to write four short (5-6 pp.) papers, due at intervals during the term, in place of the usual long seminar paper.
ENG 535 - THE PURITAN TRADITION
Prof. Robert Daly
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 131177 (B) 189686
We shall focus on not only the constellation of ideas and habits subsumed under the category of Puritanism, but also on the Puritans' characteristic modes of perception and discourse, some of which inform later America literature and culture. We shall consider how tradition works (or does not) in America by focusing on various views of our first two centuries. We shall discuss the historicity of texts and textuality of history, the ways in which writers respond to each other in an extended conversation, the ways in which they reconfigure the past as a toolkit from which they draw in order to act, and the ways in which they tinker, mustering the past and invoking the future on the great palimpsest of America.
Recent developments in cultural theory, the "turn to ethics," the earlier "turn to history," cultural criticism, literary anthropology, rhetorical hermeneutics, trauma theory, ecocriticism, post-analytic philosophy, various historicisms, and any other isms you bring with you may be of some help, but you do not need to know all or any of these to do well in this seminar. You should feel free, not obligated, to use any lens that helps us understand early American writings. We shall read, among others, the Iroquois creation allegory, William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Edward Johnson, Nathaniel Ward, Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, John Wise, Mary Rowlandson, Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Edwards, Sarah Kemble Knight, Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, Susanna Haswell Rowson, and Catherine Maria Sedgwick. Despite the plethora of names, the reading load will not be heavy. The thinking and discussing load will be heavy.
Each student taking the seminar for full credit will be expected to participate in seminar discussions, give one seminar report (15-20 minutes) on a topic chosen at the first meeting, and to write one research essay (12-24 pages), on a topic of his or her own choosing. This essay should conform to the current freemasonry of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. Each student taking the seminar extensively will be expected to do everything except the research essay.
ENG 537 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE:
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Prof. Kenneth Dauber
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 403132 (B) 154232
Quite incorrectly, at least politically, this course will offer a defense of a now pretty universally discredited concept. We seek to revive Crevecoeur's old question, long since fallen into desuetude, "What is an American?" or at least what is American literature as the nineteenth-century founders of American literature conceived it, what is different about it, special, philosophically significant. Our premise is that nineteenth-century American fiction is, in fact, philosophy by another name, indeed philosophy taking the un-classically philosophical form of fiction necessary for articulating an unclassical conception of selfhood, community, writing, and reading.
We'll probably do a little spade-work in American predecessors in England, some Locke and Hume, perhaps, and later, in connection with American sentimentality, perhaps Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. But mostly we will read the major works of nineteenth-century American prose from Brockden Brown through Emerson and Thoreau, Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hawthorne, Melville, and some others.
By the end of the course, you should have a pretty good map of the terrain of nineteenth-century American literature and the contentiousness of debate around the kind of tradition it is or isn't and should or shouldn't be.
ENG 547 - CREATIVE WRITING FICTION
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 137582
A workshop course in which students' original work will be discussed.
Prof. Diane Christian
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 463601 (B) 093067
The course will consider central texts from the Hebrew
and Christian Bibles, Genesis to Revelation, focusing primarily on the biblical
narrative and secondarily on the chief interpretive traditions--religious, historical,
anthropological and psychological. We'll look at the idea of authority in the
speaking, acting-in-history God and in the priestly, prophetic and scholarly
voices of interpretation. We'll examine especially ideas of religion and violence,
particularly Girard's theory of sacrificial limiting violence as the essence
of religion, and at biblical structuring of violence in Cain, Abraham, Moses,
ings, Christ and priestly authority. We'll also read Freud's Moses and Monotheism
which rewrites Moses as Egyptian and oedipal and a key to understanding violence
and anti-Semitism.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote that to consider the Bible as Literature is to profane
the text and we'll consider that as well--the ideas of sacredness, profanation,
literature and society.
ENG 564 - TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE
Prof. Bruce Jackson
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 610
Registration Numbers: (A) 180949 (B) 476640
An examination of narrative texts, genres, modes, contexts of performance, methods of transmission, and analytical and descriptive models appropriate to them. We'll read and talk about mythology, folk epic, heroic sagas, Märchen, legends, folktales, ballads, personal narratives, film westerns, toasts, rap and hiphop, and perhaps grand opera.
ENG 575 - UTOPIAS, SCIENCE FICTION, AMERICA
Prof. James Bunn
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 378970 (B) 244297
Beginning with Thomas More's invention, many utopian narratives use some scientific mechanism by which to project an ideal government upon the new scene of America--the New World. In this seminar we shall explore the intersections of ideal and illusory governments, the projective technologies of new skills, and the ecocritism of America as Green World.
To set the stage, three early texts:
Plato's Republic--the earliest advocacy of techne--Frankfort School
More's Utopia--the New Historicist critique
Shakespeare's Tempest--postcolonial criticism
In the discourse about Western cultural studies, the discovery and colonization of Amerigo's Mundus Novus reoriented the idea and the narrative of The Future. This new space doubled the size of the known world, and it became the scene for the projection forward (Heidegger's "thrownness") of a brave new world. Under the new world order America seemed to become a dream screen for projecting hypothetical communities in a new space-time. A new kind of narrative was being forged, one that celebrated economic and technological advent into a secular future. What kind of fiction advocates social forecasting? How is its ideal future plotted? How does disillusionment suffuse a subplot? What remains? How are scripts sequenced for this new kind of writing?
Later Texts:
Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance--a review of real communal experiments
Thoreau's Walden--the machine in the garden
Twain's Connecticut Yankee--civil war as technological monster
Modern Texts:
Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents--the downfall of western civilization
because of the domination of nature
Propaganda films by Riefenstahl and Capra--filmic projection
2001--in lieu of HAL
Leguin, Left Hand of Darkness--border crossings
Atwood, Handmaid's Tale--a woman's dystopia
For the hidden machinery of technology we'll read Heidegger, Benjamin, and Athusser. For some intersections between nature and culture we'll devote a couple of seminars to the posthuman, the postmodern, urban ecology.
Prof. Myung Mi Kim Wednesday 12:30 3:10, Clemens 436 Registration Numbers (A) 119364 (B) 245209
This course explores imaginative and expository acts their relation and their liberatory potential to refunction both the creative and the discursive. We will be studying and generating forms of thinking and writing that propose new objects of thought: the poem as literary criticism? Literary production viewed as production of theoretical knowledge? Discursive modes alert to the poem's compositional procedures? One of our tasks in this course is to undertake close readings of texts that problematize the line between literary and scholarly practices in the service of shifting generic, disciplinary, and discursive boundaries. A related task: it may be useful to envision this course as a practicum in extending the terms of expositoryiimaginative/academic/transdisciplinary writing. Whether you are testing new discursive modes, preparing essays in constructed forms, or rehearsing critical stances that allow for the reflexive and dialogic your exploratory writing will be integral to refining our work for the semester: a poetics of thought.
Texts:
The First Constellation:
Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America
H.D. Tribute to Freud
Rachel Blau du Plessis, from The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice
Harryette Mullen, Freeing the Soul: Literacy & Liberty in Slave Narratives
Lyn Hejinian, Oxota, The Language of Inquiry
Susan Howe, from The Birthmark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary
History and
The Non Conformist's Memorial with special attention to Melville's Marginalia
Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing
Robert Duncan, The KD. Book
A Second Reading Constellation (possibilities):
Laura Riding Jackson, The Telling
Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael
Amiri Baraka, Blues People
Charles Bernstein, A Poetics
Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomenon Appear to Unfold
James Clifford, from Routes
Trinh Min Ha, from When the Moon Waxes Red and Cinema Interval
Jacques Derrida, Glas
Georgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose
Prof. Stefan Fleischer
Thursday 4:00-6:40, Clemens
Registration Numbers: 225283
I see this course as especially appropriate for students pursuing an MA in English, whose goal might be to teach at the high school or junior high school level; for students who are presently in the first or second year of a teaching assistantship and who want to further develop their repertoire in teaching literature, writing, media, cultural studies for first-year and sophomore college courses. The course is also open to undergraduates (permission of the instructor required) who are thinking of teaching at the high school or college level. All such students, undergraduate and graduate both, are encouraged to sign up.
The aim of the course: provide grounding in theory and practice of teaching high school and entering college 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 traditional canons, as well as items "outside,") newspapers, journals of opinion, film and television narrative drama, documentary, photographs, paintings, advertising, and communications/ information as disseminated in the medium of the Internet.
But advanced literacy, as opposed to mere functional 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 student's awareness of his or her standpoint vis-à-vis the matter under study. We will try to map all this by means by means of topical survey and case study.
Some topics:
1). 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 (1970) and Rose, Where Did you Get That Red? (1973) Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (1967), H. R. Kohl, The Open Classroom (1969), and always in the background the influential figure of Paolo Freire.
An enlightening example of this 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 Ways 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 and college pedagogy, including a critical study of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (1987).
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 (212,000) of American High School seniors took the AP Literature exam and between 10 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). A study of two films: Al Pacino's Looking for Richard and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, as attempts at making Shakespeare "accessible" to contemporary audiences.
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.
6). Throughout, we will use Robert Atwan's Convergences, a very handsome, indeed slick, 1st year writing textbook as a compass and guide for critical understanding of present theory and practice.
Requirements: a seminar presentation and an end of term paper. Frequent impromptus on the readings. Some interviews student-to-student on habits of reading and cultural interests. I will encourage students to design their own research agendas.
Most readings will be on reserve or on-line at "Blackboard."
To be purchased: Atwan's Convergences, and Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance
Books will be available Talking Leaves.
ENG 593 - THE JEWISH WRITER IN AMERICA: Part I
Prof. Mark Shechner
Thursday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 303971
Writing in America - I mean, the United States - by people of Jewish descent has been traced as far back as the 18th century, to one Haim Isaac Karigal, whose sermons in the Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, have survived in print. And he was by no means the only Jewish writer of the 18th century. This course on Jewish writers in America will start at the beginning and work its way forward to one or two of the very latest "Jewish" novels, whatever that word might happen to mean just now. This will take a full year to do, and I would be looking for students who would want to take it all the way through.
For the first semester, Fall 2003, we will start at the beginning and end somewhere in the 1940s - maybe. In the second semester we will rush from the post WWII era to something like the present. We will work from anthologies, novels, and history texts, and the major anthology will be the Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, edited by Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein.
As in all my classes, 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 ask from graduate students a seminar-style research paper and, perhaps, oral reports as well. How we conduct the graduate portion of the course depends on how many graduate students are in the class and what kinds of joint activity are appropriate for that number.
What kind of student do I expect? Well, to put it bluntly, you don't have to be Jewish. You only have to be interested in good writing and a lively literature and a rich and vibrant history.
Prof. Mark Shechner
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 225421
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 practice, 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 ask from graduate students a seminar-style research paper and, perhaps, oral reports as well. How we conduct the graduate portion of the course depends on how many graduate students are in the class and what kinds of joint activity are appropriate for that number.
Four books are in order for the course, and all are available at Talking Leaves Bookstore, 3157 Main Street. They are:
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce: Ulysses
Don Gifford: Notes for Joyce: Ulysses
Harry Blamires: The Bloomsday Book
Students will be expected to have the books handy in class, since we will be making frequent reference to them.
ENG 595 - AMERICAN CLASSICS & CULTURE
Prof. Robert Daly
Tuesday 3:30-6:00, Clemens 538
Registration No. 421394
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 and beyond. 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 Sedwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Zitkala-Sa, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Susan Power. 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.
Texts:
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. 3rd 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).
Power, Susan. The Grass Dancer (Berkley Books, New York).
ENG 599 - PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
Prof. Mili Clark
Thursday 9:30-12:00, Clemens 128
Registration Number: 011718
This section is for incoming TAs and continuing TAs, 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 128A). 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 128A 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:
4 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: 219241
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: (1) 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 - STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE
Prof. Jim Swan
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 038968 (B) 063492
This will be a seminar in comparative performativity,
concerned with the question of the performative across historical moments: Elizabethan,
Jacobean and -- across the threshold of the English Revolution--Restoration
drama (Congreve, The Way of the World). Also, across artistic genres (theater,
spectacle, the portrait and portrait-miniature), and across cultures: England,
Spain (e.g., Calderón, The Doctor of His Honor), Italy (e.g., the Teatro
Olimpico, designed by Palladio and staging, as its first production, Sophocles'
Oedipus in 1584). And then, again with Spain, a visit with the cunning and brilliant
painting of sovereignty and the performative by Velázquez: Las Meninas
Of central interest will be a sequence of four Shakespearean plays (Twelfth
Night, Much Ado, Othello, Hamlet), and Shakespeare's fascination with the interpretation
of performance and the performance of interpretation--two fundamental modes
of the performative. Also, selections from Shakespeare's contemporaries, including
Marlowe (Tamburlaine), Jonson (Volpone or The Alchemist), and Beaumont (The
Knight of the Burning Pestle).
As one further comparative gesture, we will look at the early modern encounter between Western and Islamic--mainly Turkish--paradigms of representation, art, and technology, attending mainly to the art of painting--featured in the marvelous, recently translated novel, My Name is Red, by the contemporary Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk. (Remember, it is "a malignant and a turban'd Turk" that Othello, just before his suicide, wants us to know that he killed for insulting the Venetian state.)
Informing and surrounding our work will be the philosophical tradition concerned with performativity, including J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, and Judith Butler. There will be selected readings in these and other, similarly concerned writers.
All students will prepare, and give a presentation
on, an annotated bibliography on texts related to the concerns of the seminar.
Taking the seminar "extensively" means also writing a substantial
essay due at the end of the semester.
ENG 625 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
Prof. Carrie Tirado Bramen
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 093841 (B) 174076
In the conventional narrative of US literary history, the Civil War is typically cast as the dividing line separating popular women's sentimental fiction of the antebellum period from the more 'serious' postbellum realist tradition of Twain, James and Howells. This course will complicate this notion of separate literary spheres by exploring the vexed issue of sentimentalism and domesticity, together with an expansive and multicultural look at women's writing from the start of the century to its end. We will explore the literary tradition of sentimentalism (and a selection of the vast critical work that accompanies it), which will include the tensions between private and public spheres and the question of emotionality, while at the same interrogating the limits of this tradition. Has 'sentimentalism' become an ever-expanding trope to describe all women's writing of the period? What women's writing falls outside of its parameters?
We'll also address the debate on female authorship. Were women of this period claiming to write through the unconscious in the sense of Ida BN. Wells's phrase, "I am only a mouthpiece"? Were they, in other words, writing from a position of authorial innocence (Ann Douglas), or were they confidently and self-consciously asserting themselves as public figures (Judith Fetterley)? We'll combine women's writing with feminist criticism about this period to cover a range of issues including: invalidism, disease and the intellectual woman (Alice James); the construction of the "family"; the relationship between creativity and motherhood (Phelps); the death of innocent children (Stowe, Fern); transatlantic responses to John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women; abolitionism (Jacobs, Child) versus white Southern womanhood (Mary Chesnutt); empire and American womanhood (Amy Kaplan); photography and the Native American woman: the case of Zitkala-Sa.
Texts (tentative):
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie
Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Mary Chesnutt, A Diary from Dixie
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It?
Pauline Hopkins, Hagar's Daughter
Sui Sin Far, "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian"
Louisa May Alcott, Work
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis
Alice James, The Diary of Alice James
Zitkala-Sa, "Autobiographical Sketches"
Karen Kilcup, ed. Nineteenth Century American Women Writers: An Anthology
(Blackwell)
Secondary materials by Jane Tompkins, Ann Douglas, Gillian Brown, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Shirley Samuels, Lori Merish, Lorna Romero, June Howard, Sandra Zagarell, Rosaura Sanchez, Joycelyn Moody, Laurence Lerner, Susan Gilman, Julie Ellison.
ENG 628 - STUDIES IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Joseph Conte
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 294855 (B) 455656
This seminar will address the formation of a New York Avant-Garde during the period between the Armory Show of 1913 and the Stock Market crash of 1929. The collocation of poets, composers, artists, and photographers in and around Manhattan creates an early nexus of American modernism that both borrowed from and sought to distinguish itself from European modernism. Although Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot had already departed a "half-savage" country for London and Paris, French artists such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp sought refuge in New York from conscription during World War I. The advent of Post-Impressionist, Cubist and Dadaist art in America-introduced with scandalous success at the Armory Show and the Independents Exhibition of 1917-stirred the sedate arts community in New York. As William Carlos Williams recalls, "it was not until I clapped my eyes on Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase that I burst out laughing from the relief it brought me." The new European art movements collide with the raw commercial and industrial power of an American city, with its skyscrapers, mechanization, and violent pursuit of business. The New York Avant-Garde is born of this confrontation.
One focus of attention will be the Others group, founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and photographer Man Ray, that brought the local American writers and artists into collaboration with European émigré artists in flight from the destruction of the first World War. Among the work by members of this collective centered in Grantwood, NJ, we will read William Carlos Williams' early poetry and his improvisatory compositions in Kora in Hell (1920). In her early poetry Marianne Moore describes New York as "the savage's romance / accreted where we need the space for commerce." In her bricolage of text and observation, she finds "it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity… but 'accessibility to experience'" that compels her lifelong residence in New York.
A second overlapping circle formed around the wealthy patron Walter Conrad Arensberg, in whose West 67th St. apartment Marcel Duchamp worked on the Large Glass (1915-23). Arensberg introduces Wallace Stevens to Duchamp, and the flamboyance of Stevens's first book, Harmonium (1923), owes much to this connection. Mina Loy, a frequent contributor to Others and an associate of Arensberg, composes the poetry of the New Woman in Lunar Baedecker (1923), declaring open revolt against patriarchal prescriptions of the female artist and sexuality. Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery on Fifth Avenue and the journal Camera Work served as a principal meeting place for photographers, artists, and writers. We will examine the formulation of American poetry poetry and painting from this period offer a useful point of comparison for developments and cross-fertilizations in both arts. Finally, we'll listen to the articulation of an American voice in the collaboration of Virgil Thompson (in New York) and Gertrude Stein (in Paris) on the opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1928).
The requirements for the course are a twenty-page research paper relevant to the issues and authors described above, and a twenty-minute presentation on an issue of critical interest to the class, accompanied by a short synopsis for distribution to class members.
ENG 648 - AFFECTIVITY AND POLITICAL
RADICALISM
Prof. Joan Copjec and ENESTO LACLAU
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 023347 (B) 484979
This seminar is about politics and passions and the
various ways they intersect. The underlying premise is that political radicalism,
in its classical forms and as exhibited by "new social movements,"
demands analysis not just of events, acts, and ideology but also of the passions
that shape and are shaped by them.
We will begin with a definition of the subject, with presentations by both Copjec
and Laclau.
The section of political radicalism presented by Professor Laclau will address
the changes in the notion of political subjectivity which were involved in the
strategic oscillation of the radical political discourse of the West. The thesis
is that strategic mutations have always involved considerable changes in the
ontological presuppositions on which political action is based. Most of these
changes are not explicit and have to be traced through new articulations of
the various moments of strategic calculation. Reference will be made to the
class-based discourse of classical Marxism, to the various versions of Leninism,
anarchism, the Gramscian turn, and finally to more contemporary attempts at
a new approach to politics: Fanon on anti-colonialism, 1968 mobilizations, multiculturalism,
Italian autonomism, anti-globalization movements, etc. A set of proposals will
be put forward concerning the notions of antagonism, politico-hegemonic articulations,
and strategic issues concerning subjectivity in the contemporary world.
In her section of the seminar, Professor Copjec will focus on two major concepts:
catharsis and shame. We will discuss the reasons why acatharsis of the emotions
became a political and aesthetic goal during the classical period; why catharsis
was taken up and abandoned by psychoanalysis; and how some theorists are attempting
to recuperate the notion today. We will then shift our attention to the sudden
explosion of interest in the phenomenon of shame in an attempt to determine
what motivates this interest in queer theory and elsewhere and develop our own
understanding of this quintessentially social passion.
ENG 653 - CRITICAL THEORY: MONSTROUS CULTURAL STUDIES
Prof. David Schmid
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 153026 (B) 146243
We live in a time of monsters. Channel-surf for a moment, or take a trip to your local video store and you will see the depth of the modern obsession with monstrosity, whether it be in the 'fictional' form of Beauty and the Beast, Silence of the Lambs and Alien, or in the 'real' form of Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh and the shadowy world of international terrorism. Cultural studies not only shares this interest in monsters but is often described as being monstrous itself. Cultural studies apparently preys upon harmless disciplines, sucking all the life from them or turning them into zombies, mindless servants of their new interdisciplinary masters.
The aim of this seminar, therefore, is two-fold. First, to take monstrosity seriously as a cultural discourse by inquiring into both what kinds of monsters Britain and the United States have produced and the very social uses to which these monsters have been put. Second, to enquire into the reasons for cultural studies' preoccupation with monsters, thereby enhancing our understanding of the central concepts and methodologies of the field. What contributions do monsters make in determining the form and limits of 'normal,' non-monstrous identity? How have cultural monsters laid down blueprints for 'appropriate' relations between different races, genders, and classes? What are the presuppositions and interests that structure cultural studies? How did these assumptions and interests lead to the field's current interest in monstrosity? These are some of the questions that will (re)animate our discussions.
In order to facilitate these discussions, we will read and view an eclectic collection of fiction, non-fiction, films, critical essays, and cultural studies texts. The emphasis throughout will be on reciprocity: how does a familiarity with cultural studies enhance our understanding of cultural monsters and how does an examination of monstrosity shed light on the founding assumptions of cultural studies? Although in the course of the class we will consider a wide variety of famous and not-so-famous monsters, for the most part, our discussion will be organized around three distinct, but also thoroughly interrelated, models of monstrosity:
I - The Vampire
As one of the most extraordinarily productive and long-lived cultural monsters,
we will examine the vampire at length. Texts will include Bram Stoker, Dracula;
Anne Rice, The Tale of the Body Thief, and Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories.
Taking our cue from the
work of Richard Dyer, part of our emphasis will be on vampirism as a metaphorization of queerness.
II - Celluloid Monsters
We will watch some films that continue a theme we will discuss when working
on vampirism--the equation of monstrosity with the penetration of the 'fragile'
human body. Films will include Predator, The Terminator, and Alien. These films
will also allow us to focus on American culture's frequently 'monstrous' conception
of technology.
III - The Serial Killer
The serial killer is perhaps the most complex and interesting contemporary cultural
monster. Through examining true-crime and fictional accounts of serial murder,
as well as watching The Silence of the Lambs and Natural Born Killers, we will
see how the serial killer has become a multi-accentual sign, able to articulate
the social agendas of a bewildering variety of mutually hostile groups and interests.
Among the cultural studies texts that we will read alongside the above-mentioned materials will be work by writers that specifically address issues of monstrosity, such as Donna Haraway ("The Promises of Monsters"), Judith Halberstram (Skin Shows), Barbara Creed (The Monstrous Feminine), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Monster Theory), and Carol Clover (Men, Women, and Chainsaws). But we will also be reading work by those who speak more generally about the founding premises of cultural studies, such as Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Anela McRobbie, Meghan Morris, Tony Bennett, and Raymond Williams. This reading will give us the opportunity to discuss such key cultural studies concepts as identity, subjectivity, deviance, transgression, subcultures, consumption, leisure, and sexuality.
Requirements: Students taking the class extensively are required to write a series of short reading responses and a 5-page mid-term paper. Students taking the class intensively are also required to write a 20-page research paper.
ENG 679 - AMERICANIST COLLOQUIUM
Prof. Stacy Hubbard
Wednesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 3l7568 (B) 244300
This is a "sampler" course for first- and second-year graduate students who anticipate concentrating their studies in American literature and culture. It is intended as an eclectic introduction to both the field and to the department's resources in the field. We will be reading recent and classic works of American literary and cultural criticism and exploring some of the key debates that have shaped American studies. The bulk of the semester will entail visits from faculty in English and neighboring departments to discuss their areas of specialization and to present their own recent research (students may also be required to attend several talks by visiting speakers outside classtime). Probable topics include: Native American traditions; transnationalism; American exceptionalism; sentimentalism; realism and naturalism; African-American women's writing; intersections of modernist poetry and the visual arts (with some discussion of the resources of UB's Poetry Room); queer writing; Latino/a literatures; feminist revisions of the canon; contemporary American fiction and the art of book-reviewing; and approaches to popular or "pulp" genres (with some discussion of UB's Kelley collection of pulp fiction). Though this is not a comprehensive historical survey, we will anchor our critical discussions with readings of canonical and not-so-canonical works of literature (poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose) around which critical debates have arisen.
We will also spend some time investigating the major
Americanist journals (American Literary History, American Literature, Arizona
Quarterly, Legacy, etc.) and looking at special issues of other journals (such
as Representations and PMLA) which focus on the current status of American studies.
Writing assignments will include one
4-5 page review of a recent critical or literary work; an 8-page review essay
on a topic of your choice; and a 10-page (conference length) interpretive paper
on a work of American literature (or a cultural topic). Students registered
for extensive credit are required to complete only the first two assignments.
Prof. Carine Mardorossian
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 223021 (B) 427823
In this course, we will explore the ways in which various feminisms construct the relation between feminist practice and feminist theory, feminist activism and academic feminism, identity and community. Contemporary feminism is unsure whether its success in the academy is a positive political inheritance or a betrayal of its radical political origins. We will engage this debate by exploring the history of the movement as well as the various contexts that have informed the field's institutionalization. What is the relationship between women's studies and the university? In what ways is women's studies still the academic arm of the women's movement? What is the scope and shape of activism today? How do we define it in light of the postmodern challenge to nearly every category that is central to the women's movement? If feminism cannot maintain a grounding in the categories such as "women" and "experience", then what is left of feminism (pun intended)?
We will focus on the period commonly referred to as second wave feminism in the U.S. and read a number of primary classic texts produced by the women of the movement. We will examine the relationship between the second wave and the New Left, Black Power, the Anti-War movement, and the Gay Liberation Front, and reassess radical feminism in light of contemporary theoretical paradigms. An understanding of the public sphere and the problematics of history is crucial for anyone working to transform political and disciplinary logics, so we will also read scholarship that interrogates the public sphere and the assumptions on which it depends. Last but not least, we will analyze how globalization has influenced the meaning of collective actions especially in postcolonial countries where the anti-imperialist and national liberation movements have been superseded by so-called social movements such as human rights, women's or peasant movements.
ENG 684 - ENBRACING UNCERTAINTY WHILE CONCENTRATING ON
DETAILS: MOBY-DICK AND THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY
Prof. Susan Howe with help from Peter Hare
Monday/Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
October 13 - November 21
Registration Number: 383546
A five week seminar mid-October-mid-November. Requirements: A final paper and an oral report. Although we meet for a period of five weeks, twice a week, from mid-October to mid-November, participants in this seminar will receive a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. It is understood that during the weeks leading up to our meetings you will be reading Moby-Dick and sections from The Principles of Psychology. I hope to have a couple of visiting lecturers to be announced.
On 1 June 1851 Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel
Hawthorne: "In a week I go to New York to bury myself in a third story
room and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through
the press. That is the only way I can finish it now.--I am so pulled hither
and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the grass-growing mood
in which a man ought always to compose,--that I fear will seldom be mine. Dollars
damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning upon me.--I shall at last
be worn out and perish like an old nutmeg-grater….What I feel most moved
to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether write the other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."
In May of l890 (a year before Herman Melville died) William James was in the
final throes of completing the manuscript for The Principles of Psychology.
He called it "the enormous rat which….ten years' gestation has brought
forth." "No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the
book," he wrote to his editor Henry Holt, "No subject is worth being
treated of in 1000 pages! Had I ten years more, I could rewrite it in 500; but
as it stands it is this or nothing--a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated,
dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st that there is no such
thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable.
Moby-Dick was written on the cusp of Darwin and the Civil War, The Principles on the cusp of the 20th century. While both American authors need to believe in something, they acknowledge there are no certainties to be found in religion or science. If Melville anchors his metaphysical and moral vision in material details of the whaling industry, for William James, technical details of raging controversies in psychology carry similar allegorical and revelatory force.
Prof. Dennis Tedlock
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 540
Registration Numbers: (A) 401823 (B) 474159
Both speaking and writing entail the representation of a multiplicity of voices. We will explore different ways of representing and describing voices in a broad spectrum of genres, dealing with such phenomena as inner voices, authoritative voices, split voices, direct quotation, free indirect discourse, intertextuality, and dialogue and dialogic. Examples will be drawn from both written sources and sound recordings. Perspectives will include those of linguists, anthropologists, and literary theorists.
CROSS-LISTED COURSES
ENG 701 - LITERATURE & PHILOSOPHY STUDIES: QUEER
AMERICAS
Prof. Ramón Soto-Crespo
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 2l9
Registration Number: 340589
Prof. Patrick McDevitt
Department of History
Wednesday 4:00-6:40
Registration Number: 458773
This course is intended as an introduction to the main issues which have informed the modern historical profession. To this end, the class will examine how historians read documents, pose questions, draw inferences from sources, craft theories, narratives and interpretations. We will also study the ways in which the orthodoxies and orthopraxies of professional historians have mutated over time in response to changing social and cultural conditions and concerns. Ideally, studying transformations in historical writing will encourage the self-reflective awareness of underlying methodological assumptions that inform our own work.
ENG 704 - IMAGINING NATURE: Technologies of the Literal, the Scientific Revolution, and Beyond (Year-long Seminar, 2003-2004)
Prof. James Bono
Department of History
Monday 1:00-3:40
Registration Number: 040008
This year-long seminar is intended to provide students with an opportunity to formulate and conduct an intensive research project. Whether taken for three or for six credits (see below), the goal will be for each student to produce a substantial research paper of publishable quality by the end of the second semester.
While the focus will be on the history of science and medicine during the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and (especially) the seventeenth centuries, the seminar is open to students whose interests fall outside strict definitions of these chronological and topical parameters. "History of science and medicine" will be conceived quite broadly to include not only the physical and natural sciences, but also the "human sciences" and virtually any technique, practice, or discourse involving or invoking "nature" or representations of nature. (Thus, for example, aspects of literary and artistic representation; discourses and practices of the body or gender, of naturalized social categories, of the display of nature or natural objects-and much more-are fair game for this course.) Chronologically, students whose research interests fall within earlier or later periods (through the twentieth century) are encouraged to participate and to develop research projects within their specific periods.
Central to the emergence of modernity and of modern science since the seventeenth century has been the turn from the symbolic to the literal. Whether favoring a simple, unadorned descriptive language-the so-called "plain style" of Bacon and the Royal Society of London-or insisting upon the concrete visual representation of natural phenomena, the "sciences" and medicine sought to reproduce and exhaustively catalogue the literal in nature-nature as literal-as a foundation for the production of knowledge of nature. This research seminar will focus upon the careful historical examination of all kinds of technologies that were adopted-or adapted-to produce the literal as an object of knowledge and cultural authority. Among the technologies that we shall explore are: reading (books and the Book of Nature); visual technologies and the function of images, illustrations, and all kinds of visual representations; mapping, diagramming, and modeling; the production of tables, lists, and other technologies for the storage, organization, and retrieval of information; mathematical representation; laboratory practices; instruments as technologies for accessing specific and precise realms of the literal; museums, cabinets of curiosities, and natural history as technologies for the construction of "objects" as literal constituents of a natural world; classification techniques; botanical gardens; and much more!
Students pursuing research projects in later periods may wish to explore more recent "technologies of the literal": for example, photography; film; experimental narrative techniques; computer simulations and digital modeling; etc.
During the Fall semester, the seminar will meet infrequently. We shall begin by exploring some of the issues noted above and relevant examples of scholarly research in order to define problems, research issues and methodologies, and conceptual approaches that will be useful to students in selecting and defining a research project of their own. Students will be required to select and define such a project within the first part of the semester, and will then be provided individualized guidance to enable them to conduct primary research and formulate a detailed research prospectus during the first semester. Over the break, and during the second semester, students will be required to continue their research in a more focused and sophisticated manner. During the Spring semester, 2004, we'll meet frequently in a seminar format to refine research projects, explore in greater depth and sophistication methods and approaches for critically examining "technologies of the literal," and, most importantly, share, criticize, edit, and revise drafts of substantial research papers. Final drafts will be presented to the seminar as a whole and discussed in depth.
Students MUST participate in BOTH the Fall and Spring semesters. Students must enroll for 3 credits during the Fall semester. During the Spring semester, students may choose to enroll for additional credits, up to a maximum of 3 additional credits. Work loads, and the specific length and complexity of the final research paper, will vary according to the number of credits the students has enrolled for overall during the academic year. Prospective students should consult with Professor Bono as early as possible before enrolling for the Fall semester.
ENG 705 - ROMANTIC AGE
Prof. Henry Sussman
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 640
Registration Number: 289701
The basic assumption of this course is that Romanticism is what Maurice Blanchot would call a "limit-experience," a rupture not only in the ideological configurations and socio-political formations that constituted Europe but also in the revolutionary measures that were installed to correct absolutism. Anticipating the radical thrusts of modernism, Romanticism announces an end, an eschaton, but also a horizon of beginnings, some horrific. (This is why its productions appeal to a range of writers as diverse as Blanchot, de Man, and Deleuze and Guattari.) In the sphere of literary performance, aesthetic experimentation in doubling, fragmentation, the image (and related issues of perspective and framing), organicism, and irony proliferates as a means of coping with the environment of radical change and of figuring it.
In seeking an overview of the aesthetic contracts of Romanticism, we will be examining the Kantian sublime, as formulated in The Critique of Judgment, and Kierkegaardian notions of repetition and irony (called from Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology). German pretexts to the works and achievements of British Romanticism will include Goethe's drama, Faust, Kleist's novella, "Michael Kohlhaas," and E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales, "lle de Scudéry" and "The Sandman" (the latter read in conjunction with Freud's seminal essay, "The Uncanny"). On the British side, we will be reading such works as Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, related poems, and selected sections from the Prelude; Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," and Books of Thel and Urizen; P.B. Shelley's "Mont Blanc," "Epipsychidion," and "The Triumph of Life"; and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And we will close the course by scanning the American horizon for the vicissitudes of German and British Romanticism in works by Herman Melville: "Benito Cereno" and Pierre.
Because the repercussions of European Romanticism extend far beyond the archival repository of this set of experiments, students will be able to incorporate a wide range of relevant literary and theoretical texts into their written interventions. They will also be encouraged to explore the visual and musical aftershocks of Romanticism.
ENG 706 - POETICS OF PROGRAMMABLE LITERATURE
Prof. Loss Pequeño Glazier
Tuesday 12:00-2:30
Registration Number: 104981
Programmable literature or new media writing that uses programming/ interactivity to generate varying content for different readings, is a truly dynamic field of digital media poetics. This course will provide detailed readings of works by John Cayley, Philippe Bootz, Neil Hennessey, Judd Morrissey/Lori Talley, Simon Biggs and others. The concept of "literature" will extend to other implementations of programmability, including diverse types of textual art machines. We will consider the grammar of programming languages, differentiating programming code from its "cousins", scripting languages and simple mark-up. A survey of programming languages, algorithmic thinking, and text manipulation programs will be included, depending on student interest. We will look at some Language Poetry practices as relating to programmability. We will consider the relation between programmed variance and scholarly textual criticism. Theories of programmability will be central to the course and will include a look at foundational writings, including Turing, Babbage, Kittler, and others. Questions that will be raised include how meaning is made when texts have multiple content, how such multiple content can be tracked, and how you "crack the code" or read between the variants to locate issues at the core of such works.
Course requirements:
Reading, oral presentation, final project, digital or paper, desirable: a programming
project, text manipulation project, or variance analysis, digital or traditional.
Suggested text: TBA.
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