DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
FALL 2004
ENG 501 – INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof.
Daniel Hack
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A) 099541
(B) 219423
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 Wendy Belz, Assistant to the Chair, at 645-2575 x. 10l9, or wmbelz@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 study
various critical approaches , gain a grounding in
research methods, and tour some landmarks of contemporary theory. 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 Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. Please read Jane Eyre 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 502 A and B – INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof.
Barbara Bono
Wednesdays
Registration Numbers: (A) 138969 (B) 079309
Either ENG 501A and B or
ENG 502A 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
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 2004 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 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 501
A 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 525 – THE ROMANTICS
Prof.
Susan Eilenberg
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A) 210059 (B) 143626
This course is designed as a semi-survey of five English romantic
poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, and a minor amount
of Blake) whose anxieties about the possibility or impossibility of representation
produced what amount often to inexplicit allegories of reading. It is a semi-survey only because while considerations
of proper survey-style breadth largely determine the outlines of the syllabus,
loyalty to close reading and the often disorderly questions it develops will
determine the manner of our procedure through that syllabus. So although the romantics wrote more than anyone
might reasonably attempt to read in a single semester, we will try to get
through as much of the major material writings as we can, concentrating, however,
on those pieces that have recently been at the center of critical debate. I would like to pursue questions about the economy
of creation and loss (which means of course too questions about mourning and
multiplication), about sympathy (what makes it possible, what makes it dangerous),
about commensurability (also incommensurability, adequacy, and the sublime)
and, especially, about analogy, identity, and the materialization of the figure.
I would hope to maintain a balance between plain reading, close and
massive, and thesis-mongering.
Each student will present a short, informal essay before the
class, deliver a response to someone else’s informal essay presented before
the class, and write a longer formal essay to be handed in at the end of term.
ENG 528 – VICTORIAN LITERATURE: Ethics and the Novel
Prof.
Daniel Hack
Tuesday
Registration Numbers:
(A) 402244 (B)
436233
Recent years have seen a marked literary turn in moral philosophy and a corresponding ethical turn in literary criticism. This course will take stock of these developments while asking:
1) How do Victorian novels define and value the realm of ethics in relation to its others,” such as aesthetics, politics, and “nature”?
2) In what ways do novels promote particular ethical approaches or stances? Does a formal practice such as omniscient narration have a particular ethics? Does realism?
3) What cultural work does the novel perform through its treatment of ethics? Or, more pointedly, what are the ideological implications of the answers to the preceding questions, especially with regard to gender, class, and ethnic and national identity?
We will pay special attention to Victorian representations and mobilizations of various forms of detachment: disinterestedness, impartiality, objectivity, cosmopolitanism, professionalism. As a number of critics have recently demonstrated, there may be something left to learn from the Victorian treatment of these stances despite, or because of, the widespread current commitment to the epistemological inevitability and ethical and political virtues of situatedness.
In addition to the novels listed below, we will read moral philosophy (from Hume and Kant to Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum), critiques of moral philosophy (e.g., Marx and Nietzsche), the work of various unclassifiable Victorian writers (e.g., Arnold, Ellis, Huxley, Wilde), and recent theory and criticism. Feel free to contact me (dhack@buffalo.edu) for more information or the final version of the reading list (as it never hurts to start on the novels ahead of time).
Probable novels: Charles Dickens, David
Copperfield or Our Mutual Friend;
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South;
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister;
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda;
George Meredith, The Egoist; George
Gissing, The Nether-World;
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure.
ENG 537 – THE AMERICAN 1890s
Prof.
Carrie Bramen
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A) 436164 (B) 195899
William James predicted that the year 1890 would be known as “the great epochal year in American literature.” With the publication of his Principles of Psychology, his brother’s The Tragic Muse, and Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes, James confidently saw the 1890s as a new era of American letters. That period, however, also marked a time of endings. The deaths of such figures as Melville, Whitman, Whittier, Stowe and Holmes represented the passing of the Civil War generation, who were the first to witness the consequences of national expansion and industrial progress.
This course will explore the literary, intellectual and cultural history
of this transitional decade. It was
a time when the cultural authority of the Genteel Tradition was seriously
scrutinized and challenged, as well as a period when writers of the regional
and cultural ‘margins’ gained literary access through the proliferation of
new magazines. Apart from regionalism,
the most direct challenge to the Genteel Tradition was a rise of the mass
media. Critics such as William Dean
Howells grew anxious about the commodification of
literature and championed realism as a belligerent and moral campaign against
emerging forms of mass culture. We
will look at the debates concerning realism in relation to pragmatism, emergent
psychological theories of “multiple selves,” the new literature of “sexual
inversion,” the
Spanish-American War, immigration, the historical and ideological impact of
Plessy versus
Among the texts that we will be reading are: William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes, Frank Norris’ McTeague, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars, Hamlin Garland’s Crumbling Idols, Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in imperio, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (though published in 1888, this book was a best-seller throughout the 1890s); Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings; Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; José Martí, Nuestra América. In addition to primary sources, we will also read a range of contemporary criticism about this period, including work by Jackson Lears, Walter Benn Michaels, Amy Kaplan, Alan Trachtenberg, June Howard, John Higham, Louis Perez, Susan Gillman, Richard Brodheard and others.
Assignments: one-page reading responses; short periodical assignment; seminar paper (l0-l5pp).
ENG
539 – 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE:
Emerson and the Women
Prof. Stacy Hubbard
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 218615
(B) 079274
In this course, we will be reading selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson with an eye to his influence on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the writings of American women. Emerson’s impact on American thought and literary practice has been diverse and profound. Through his vision-centered epistemology, his advocacy of radical presentness, his conception of language as “furtive” and “fluxional,” his emphasis on the primacy of experience and the authority of the self, Emerson sets in motion many of the crucial strategies and debates of American political, psychological and literary discourse. Emerson the revolutionary, the reformer, the conservative, the masculinist, the feminist, the religious thinker, the scientific thinker, the classicist, the vernacularist—there are as many Emersons as there are readers of Emerson.
We’ll be reading some of his most incisive, influential, faithful and resisting readers, and in particular those women contemporaries and inheritors who have found Emerson’s legacy either enabling or oppressive (or both). What can “self-reliance” mean for women of Emerson’s era or ours? How might Emersonian “work” or “experience” be available to women? To what extent is Emerson’s notion of the self empowering or antithetical to the nineteenth century women’s movement and twentieth century feminism? What is Emerson’s relation to sentimental writing and the literature of mourning? What might the meanings of Emerson’s anti-traditionalism and anti-institutionalism be for women thinkers and writers? How do Emerson’s ideas about American literature, nature and language open spaces for women’s writing or close them off? And, lastly, what elements of Emerson’s experiential and experimental style--the improvisational, anecdotal, aphoristic, oracular, associational, circular and allusive style of the essays—live on in feminist poetics?
We will read a wide selection of Emerson’s writings and survey, to the extent that we can, the vast body of Emerson criticism. We’ll also read fiction, political writing, and poetry by women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and smaller selections from significant male “Emersonians.” Readings will include selections from Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Louisa May Alcott’s Work; Frederick Douglass’s “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”; selected poems of Emily Dickinson; selected poems and essays of Marianne Moore; William James’s “A World of Pure Experience” and “The Stream of Consciousness”; several of Henry James’s “Prefaces”; Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of America and selections from
Lectures
in
N.B: Students enrolling in the course should read around in Robert Richardson’s biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire during the summer months, so as to have some foundation for our discussions in the Fall.
Requirements for the course include one oral presentation, a 5-page paper on a single Emerson essay, and a 15-page research paper at semester’s end.
ENG 541 – THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL
Prof.
Robert Daly
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A)
347177 (B)
448737
With its focus on connections, more than just on the individual or
the collective, the novel has become increasingly the genre of our time and
place.
So we shall pay attention to
the cultural conversations and the cultural work of the novel, to the ways
in which it works to challenge and enlarge our epistemology and sense of options,
whether we consider ourselves modern, postmodern, or something completely
different.
Postmodernism
was named and theorized ex ante by Onís (1934),
Olson (1951), Toynbee (1954), Mills (1959), Howe (1959), Levin (1960), Fiedler
(1965), Hassan (1971), and probably others. Anderson, Jameson, and Harvey agree that it
emerged as a pervasive cultural force only in the early 1970’s, and Eagleton (2003), Colebrook (2004), and others suggest that
it died early in our own century, possibly to be replaced by “network culture”
(
We
shall read, within the reciprocal economies of their cultural contexts, some
modern, postmodern, and contemporary American novels, along with some in which
the borders between these categories seem quite permeable.
We shall explore questions of agency.
We shall consider these texts as both representative (participating
in the cultural conversations of their times) and hermeneutic (affording practice
and skills in the arts of interpretation); as enacting both a “hermeneutics
of suspicion” and a “hermeneutics of empathy”; as enabling “paranoid reading,”
“reparative reading,” an “ethics of reading,” and any other modes of reading
members of the seminar care to do. And
we shall attend to the various ways in which the texts thematize
interpretation, including, in Kathy Eden’s words, “not only the traditional
analogy between reading and the journey home but also that between the literary
work read and a carefully woven tapestry.” Finally we shall track out a few
Deleuzian connections and explore the ways in which writers
both describe and perform the transient syntheses of American culture.
Each student taking the course intensively (for full credit) will be expected to participate in seminar discussions, to give a seminar report on one of the texts, and to
write
a research essay on a subject of her or his own choosing.
Those taking the course extensively will be expected to do everything
but the research essay.
Texts:
Wharton, Edith.
Summer. Harper Collins.
Cather,
Willa. My Ántonia. Houghton Mifflin.
Anderson, Sherwood.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott.
The Great Gatsby. Scribner’s.
Pynchon,
Thomas. The Crying of
Morrison, Toni.
Song of Solomon. New
American Library.
Powell, Padgett.
Tan, Amy.
The Joy Luck Club. Ivy
Books, Ballantine.
Momaday,
N. Scott. The Ancient Child: A Novel. Harper Collins.
Power, Susan.
The Grass Dancer.
Morrison, Toni.
These texts will be available at Talking Leaves Bookstore,
ENG 569 – LITERATURE & PSYCHOLOGY
Prof.
Jim Swan
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A) 357817 (B) 01958
ENG 575 – PALESTINIAN LITERATURE
Prof.
James Holstun
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 294457 (B) 184374
—Deir
Yassein Memorial,
Palestinian culture since 1948
In
June 1969, Golda Meir declared in the
In this course, I’ll suggest that Alon was dramatically wrong and that the brilliant and under-read body of Palestinian literature provides one of the best retorts to Meir’s attempted erasure. We will focus on Palestinian culture and society since Al-Nakbah (“The Catastrophe”) of 1948, during which Zionists drove 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. We’ll do some work in history, journalism, and film, but will concentrate on a wide sampling of the best Palestinian imaginative writing available in English translation. We will read
1. Five novels: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud, a political mystery; Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, a socialist realist novel of occupation, labor, and resistance; Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, a Nabokovish-modernist novel of identity and the first Arab novel in Hebrew; Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Prairies of Fever, a postmodernist novel of exile; and Emile Habiby’s Saeed the Pessoptimist, his communist comic masterpiece, which revises Candide, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Good Soldier Schweik.
2. Short
fiction by Liyana Badr (“Land of Stone and
Thyme,” about the siege of
3. The avant-garde play, Darkness, by the Balalin Company of Jerusalem.
4. Palestinian resistance poetry by Abu Salma, ‘Abd al-Raheem Mahmoud, Harun Hashim Rasheed, Ibrahim Tuqan, Zakariyya Muhammad, Tawfiq Zayyad, Fadwa Tuqan, Samih al-Qasim, and particularly Mahmoud Darwish, the most popular poet in the contemporary Arab world (selections from Adam of Two Edens and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, “State of Siege,” about the al-Aqsa Intifada). We’ll also look at the struggles of these poets to write something other than resistance poetry.
5. Oral histories in Homeland (by Alice and Staughton Lynd and Sam Bahour), which interviews a wide array of Palestinian working people in Palestine and in the US, and in Adam Katz’s reconstruction of the Tantura Massacre (1948) through interviews with participants on both sides.
6. Interviews with and autobiographical essays and memoirs by Mourid Barghouti (I Saw Ramalla), Darwish (Memory for Forgetfulness), Jean Genet (Prisoner of Love), Habiby, Ghada Karmi (In Search of Fatima), Khalifeh, Edward Said and Jean Mohr (After the Last Sky), Shammas, and Fadwa Tuqan (Mountainous Journey).
7. Criticism
by Kamal Abdel-Malek, Hanan Daud Mikhail-Ashrawi, Rachel Brenner,
Ami Elad-Bouskila, Habiby,
Kanafani, Hilary Kilpatrick, Barbara Harlow, and
Edward Said. We’ll use Fredric Jameson and Aijaz
Ahmad’s debate about
8. Writings by Zionist, anti-Zionist, and “post-Zionist” Jews, including Uri Avnery, Tony Cliff, Alan Dershowitz, David Grossman, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Benny Morris, Moshe Nissim, Ilan Pappe, Elie Wiesel, and A. B. Yehoshua.
We’ll also view Mohamed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin alongside Zionist critiques of the film, Ramzy Baroud’s oral histories in Searching Jenin, and reports on Jenin by human rights organizations. We’ll discuss colonialism and space (checkpoints, architecture, and bulldozers) in connection with two films from 2002: Emily Jacir’s experimental From Texas with Love (if I can lay my hands on it) and Elia Suleiman’s brilliant comedy, Divine Intervention, which struggles to escape traditional Palestinian heroic-romantic narrative while maintaining solidarity with his people.
We’ll
be looking not just at
In
the cool light of summer, I’ll probably have to winnow that reading list down
a little, but this will still be a challenging class.
You’ll be writing weekly semiformal short essays and talking in class
regularly, and those of you taking the class intensively will also write a
seminar paper. I don’t assume any familiarity with Palestinian
culture, but if you’d like to do a little summertime prep, have a look at
Joe Sacco’s great graphic novel Palestine (three copies in UGL) and Ilan Pappe’s A History of Modern Palestine (just out). Talking Leaves and Queen City Imaging will stock
some texts, and I’ll give you the rest on a CD-ROM at the beginning of the
semester. If you’d like to k now more
or talk about the course, please contact me at jamesholstun@hotmail.com.
ENG 578 – BLAKE: ‘The
Divine Body’:
IMAGINATION,
RELIGION, EROS & WAR
Prof.
Diane Christian
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 011672 (B) 232204
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
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 n 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,
This course will consider all his work, poetic and graphic, with emphasis
on the body as the focusing structural metaphor.
ENG
584 – BETWEEN VISUAL AND VERBAL: Wallace
Stevens and Others
Prof. Susan Howe
Tuesday/Thursday
August 3lst-October 30
(Due to holiday schedule,
10/l6 seminar will meet 10/l7
at hours to be worked out.)
Registration Numbers: (A) 422895 (B) 174372
In this seminar, using early and late poems by Wallace Stevens as a way into our discussions, we will explore dialectical relationships between the visual and the verbal in certain writers and artists. These relationships are dynamic and fluid. Our understanding of the betweenness of the visual and the verbal will give us insight into other kinds of dynamic interdependencies: nuances, vaguenesses, blurred boundaries, thresholds, ambiguities.
Some works and artists we will discuss: Henry James, The Birthplace; William Shakespeare, Introduction to The Tempest and perhaps The Sacred Fount; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass (The Green Box) and Etant donn; John Ashbery, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
Ulla
Dydo will visit the seminar on Tuesday, October 14 to discuss
Gertrude Stein (topic to be worked out), Alan Filreis will visit the seminar on Thursday, October 23 to
discuss Stevens’ The Man with the Blue
Guitar. (The original manuscript
of the Stevens poem with its title from a painting by Picasso is in U/B’s
Poetry Collection. We will also look
at David Hockney’s fine press edition, The Blue Guitar/A group of etchings; accompanied here by the poem, The
Man with the Blue Guitar.)
Requirements: A final paper to be handed in at the end of the semester and an oral/visual report.
Texts
(available at Talking Leaves):
Ashbery,
John, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
James, Henry. The
Sacred Fount, other James texts will be provided in xerox
handouts.
Stevens, Wallace,
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose. Library of
Stein, Gertrude. Stein,
Writings 1932-1946, Library of
On
Reserve at Silverman:
Duchamp,
Marcel. In the infinitive, A
typotranslation byRichard
Hamilton and Ecke Bonk
Of Marcel Duchamp’s White Box.
Dydo,
Ulla. Gertrude Stein: The
Language That Rises.
Filreis,
Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World.
ENG 586 – CRIME FICTION
Prof.
David Schmid
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A) 098415 (B) 061047
The consummate `guilty pleasure'
of academics, crime fiction, was for
many years dismissed as not worthy of serious critical attention while
also consumed avidly behind closed doors. Recently, however, there has been
an explosion of critical work about crime fiction that helps explain the resilience
of this diverse and complex popular genre. The aim of this seminar is to survey
a selection of both the most important examples of mystery writing and some
of the most influential examples of recent criticism. Our focus throughout
the semester will be on the narrative techniques used by crime fiction writers
to create character, structure plot, and maintain suspense. As we can tell
a lot about a society from the way it discusses crime and punishment, we will
also study how these novels and short stories provide miniature social histories
of the periods in which they were written.
Course Texts
Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Terror and Detection
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Dorothy Hughes, In A Lonely Place
Cornell Woolrich, I Married A Dead Man
David Goodis, Down There
Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers On A Train
Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem
Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
Sara Paretsky, Blood Shot
Barbara Wilson, Murder in the Collective
We will also read a wide
range of critical work on crime fiction, including pieces by Roland Barthes,
Franco Moretti, Catherine Belsey, Ernest Mandel, Sean McCann, Frank Krutnik,
Sally Munt, W.H. Auden, G.K. Chesterton, and many others.
Requirements: Students taking
the class extensively are required to write short (2‑3 page) response
papers for each of our meetings, and a 5‑7 page mid‑term paper.
Students taking the class intensively are also required to write a 20‑25
page research paper.
ENG
593 – CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION
Prof. Mark Shechner
Thursday,
Registration Number: 018931
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 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
594 – BEGINNING JOYCE
Prof. Mark Shechner
Tuesday,
Registration Number: 269332
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 on 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 599 – PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
Thursday
Registration Number: 228195
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
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 ENG 201 syllabus
An
evaluation of both the 599 seminar and your experience of teaching the page-design composition section
ENG 625 – 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof.
Neil Schmitz
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A) 251978 (B) 122176
A study
of post-Civil War American writing: Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry
James, Kate Chopin, W. E. B. Du Bois. At the core
of the seminar, these texts: Mark Twain’s
Portrait
of a Lady, Chopin’s The Awakening, and selected stories, Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk.
We will also read Sara Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life Among The Paiutes and Geronimo’s His Own Story. We have always before us the Dawes Severalty Act and the Plessy
Ferguson Decision, two momentous postwar decisions made by Abraham Lincoln’s “new nation” concerning Native America and African America.
ENG 647 – FIELD METHODOLOGY
Prof.
Bruce Jackson
Monday
Registration Number: 160172
Most literary research is grounded in documents already in place: books on a shelf; manuscripts in an archive; letters collected, catalogued, and boxed. But warehoused documents are not the only sources for literary scholars, and they aren’t even the primary sources for scholars in folklore, oral history, anthropology, sociology, and recent biography and history and public policy. For those scholars, the stuff to be analyzed and interpreted comes from interviews with and observations of living people from fieldwork.
Participants in this seminar will design and carry out a project of field research and will engage in extensive discussions of their work. Subject matter and medium are completely open: you can document a poet, a rock band, a crook, a cop, a cookie store, a process, a group; you can do it with still camera, notebook, audio or video tape recorder or film. Whatever.
There is no syllabus. Our discussions will focus on research project definition and design, fieldwork ethics, collection and management of data, and the organization of data into a product: article, film, sound recording or program, thesis. I’ll ask you to read two books: one a methodological text on how to do fieldwork, the other a collection of essays by several interesting people on how their fieldwork projects began to make sense to them, or how they learned that what they thought they were doing wasn’t what they in fact were doing. We will probably add some reading as we go along—items that come out of our specific discussions.
Some participants may finish a product during the semester, but a finished product isn’t a requirement (though at least a rough draft of one is); our concern will be on designing and carrying out the field research, and with understanding the substantive, methodological, and ethical questions raised by one another’s work.
Past participants in this seminar have been graduate students in American Studies, English, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Media Study, Communications, Sociology and History.
ENG 648 – (CANCELED) PSYCHOANALYTIC
CRITICISM
Prof.
Joan Copjec
Tuesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 348112 (B) 023096
In this seminar we will read Lacan’s most overtly political seminar, “The Underside of Psychoanalysis,” which was delivered in 1969-1970 in response to the student uprisings of May ’68. This is the seminar in which the famous “four discourses” are developed, naming the “university discourse” alongside the “discourse of the master,” the “discourse of the hysteric” and the discourse of “the analyst.”
Lacan does not attempt to quash the student rebellion, as some conservative old fossils did, nor does he side with the radicals as some avuncular, liberal-minded professors attempted to do. Rather he out-radicalizes the students, accusing them of being unwitting flunkies of the university against which they pretended to be in revolt. Of all the lessons Lacan will draw in the seminar—philosophical, political, analytic—none is more fascinating or timely than the one that exposes the links between the university and capitalism.
The focus will be on this rich seminar, but we will also read a number of texts by theorists who were students in May ’68: Jacques-Alain Miller, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, among others.
ENG
651 – THE POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM
Prof. Joseph Conte
Thursday
Registration
Numbers: (A) 348112 (B)
023096
Although the mass media have adopted the term “postmodern” (either as a high gloss shorthand for technological advances or, in disparaging contexts, as a synonym for factitious philosophizing) to describe the current period in cultural history, there have been a number of competing and often irreconcilable definitions of the poetics of postmodernism. If we accept Jean-François Lyotard’s proposition that the postmodern is defined by “incredulity toward metanarratives,” it’s no wonder that there have been so many differing petit récits regarding the quality, product, and theory of postmodernism. We’ll begin our reading, then, with Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, paying particular attention to his claims for the impact of science and informational technology in the postindustrial age. The issue of historical periodization and/or cultural shift arises in Ihab Hassan’s The Postmodern Turn, which argues that postmodern indeterminacy and immanence represent a rupture from—rather than a belated version of—modernism. Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism, investigates the function of irony and parody in mass media and high art forms, relating these methods to feminist practice. Frederic Jameson counters with a less flattering description of art, literature, and popular culture as pastiche occasioned by an overheated consumer economy in his analysis of late capitalism, most recently collected in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Jameson’s position is supported in part by a reading of Perry Anderson’s historical overview, The Origins of Postmodernity.
Particularly relevant to the
problem of provenance in American culture, Jean Baudrillard
argues that the simulacrum has been substituted for the real, making it impossible
to trace our cultural icons to some authoritative source.
In defense of popular culture we’ll visit one of the inaugural essays
in the field, Leslie Fiedler’s “Cross the border—close that gap: Postmodernism.” Additional supporting arguments for
The preceding description necessarily presents contending arguments regarding postmodernism, and so it remains a reading list rather than offering a metanarrative of its own. Our discussion will be studded with as many references to individual works of postmodern art, architecture, poetry, fiction, and digital media as time permits.
Seminar
participants who are registered intensively will be required to make a twenty-minute
oral presentation and produce a twenty-page research paper.
ENG 652 – AMERICAN LITERARY THEORY
Prof.
Kenneth Dauber
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 178978 (B) 349306
This will be, essentially, a reading course in American Literature from Benjamin Franklin through Herman Melville, which is not to say, however, that discussion will not be maddeningly abstract and theoretical. It is only that, since my premise is that American literature becomes American in response to the theoretical question “What is American literature” asked in advance of the literature’s arrival, theory is rather a matter generated out of the literature’s own engagement with itself than a matter of application post facto. That is, we need to read the literature as theory itself. For what evolves out of it often challenges regnant theories—varieties of post-structuralism, new historicism, cultural studies, evolved out of somewhere or something else—and really demands a response in its own right.
Ideologically, my own position on the question of “What is American literature” is highly suspect. Frankly, I miss the old exploded belief in American exceptionalism. I think there is such a thing as American exceptionalism and, worse yet, that it is a good thing. But I hope you will challenge such arrantly old-fashioned liberalism, and, at any rate, we will certainly read texts that challenge it.
In addition to Franklin’s Autobiography, we will read a couple of early
“women’s” novels, a work or two of Brockden Brown,
(Cooper?), Poe, Emerson, Stowe, Hawthorne (several), Melville (two or three),
and probably some secondary works as well.
In addition to a final paper, there will be class presentations on
the readings every week.
Prof.
Tim Dean
Monday 7:00 pm-9:40 pm, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 239654 (B) 433025
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
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.
ENG 679 – AMERICANIST COLLOQUIUM
Prof.
Hershini Young
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 418559 (B) 326650
This course is designed for first- and second-year graduate students who anticipate concentrating their studies in American literature and culture. It aims to introduce students to both the field and to the university’s resources in the field. We will be reading American literary and cultural criticism and exploring many of the key issues that have shaped American studies. The class constitutes a departure from the traditional seminar format with one professor; instead each week will entail visits from faculty in English and neighboring departments who will discuss both their own research and how their research relates to the fields of American literature and culture. Probable topics include: Native American traditions; transnationalism; American exceptionalism; creative writing; African-American writing; black visual arts; queer writing; Latino/a literatures; feminist Southern histories, and whiteness studies.
Assignments
will include one 4-5 page paper (to be distributed to all class members) on
the reading assigned during the week of your choosing and a l5-page paper
in a topic related to class discussion, due the last day of class.
Students registered for extensive credit need only write 10 pages for
the final paper.
ENG 682 – LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The Country and the City: Writing In/Of Place
Prof.
James Bunn
Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 409207 (B) 011649
In this survey we shall start with two books that have shaped most contemporary cultural studies about the relations between the country and the city. Raymond Williams’ book, with that title, and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden have staged an opposition between two environments that are more permeable than the cliché between nature and culture may allow. To test this idea we’ll read some current environmental books, such as Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and Michael Pollan’s Weeds Are Us, both of which suggest that humans and other species have co-evolved in ways that complicate the traditional divide between nature and human technology.
What technologies have carried people out to nature and back to culture? What energy paths have they followed—trails, roads, highways—and how do these media of transport and communication help to describe a place? For this task we’ll study some of the flow patters in Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus. But writing too is a technology. We shall also explore the traditional idea of the “spirit of the place,” beginning with D.H. Lawrence, in order to see how different rhythms of writing (and of voice) characterize the country and the city.
For many environmentalists, cities are anathema.
For many city dwellers, nature is what you step around carefully on
the curb. So, finally, we shall end
with an urban ecology that sustains communities in cities and other places.
Early Ideas of Wilderness: Mary
Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, Bartram’s
travels through
The Frontier and the cowboy economy: Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, some of Frederick Jackson Turner’s essays, Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
Ideas of Community: Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring, Nicola Griffith’s
ENG 685 – LITERATURE OF THE ENCOUNTER
Prof.
Scott Stevens
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 195935 (B) 462520
This seminar will focus on a body of texts that chronicle
and contemplate the interaction between European cultures (especially that
of
The
primary requirements are consistent attendance and active participation.
Each student will be asked to give a l5-minute
oral presentation on a selected critical text once during the semester. And, finally, a l5-20
page paper will be due at the end of the course.
ENG
699 – ETHNOPOETICS
Prof. Dennis Tedlock
Tuesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 324261 (B) 303266
Ethnopoetics is a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant other, 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 that 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 poetics 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 and scores for other 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 gesture 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 dimension 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 monlogical.
The assigned reading, in addition
to handouts, will be as follows: Richard Bauman, Folklore,
Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainment; Dell Hymes,
Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics; Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred; and Dennis Tedlock,
Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni
Storyteller and Breath on the Mirror:
Mystic Voices and Visions of the living Maya.