DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

FALL 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ENG 501 - INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS

            Prof.  Andrew Stott

            Tuesday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 412

            Registration Number:  (A) 498168  (B) 117044

           

            All new students in the English Department’s M.A. Program are required to take English 501, which is designated Introduction to Scholarly Methods.  This course 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 the A section, and full-time students should also enroll in the B section.  (You can enroll in the A section on-line, but you will be enrolled in the B section automatically.)

 

            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 in test-cases.

 

            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 518 – ELIZABETHAN JACOBEAN DRAMA

          Prof. Barbara Bono

          Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412   

          Registration Numbers: (A)  112798  (B) 367659

 

          Shakespeare’s plays were written in an age of theater that also produced a host of other major playwrights—Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, etc.—and literally dozens of masterful plays.  Theater under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I was both elite and popular.  It was orthodox, confirming religious and political pieties, exorcising social discontent, and it was subversive, threatening traditional boundaries and articulating hitherto unspoken fears.  It was performed in the centers of power—the courts, great houses, and banqueting halls of the mighty—and it was marginalized, censored, played out in the suburbs, amid the stews and the bear-bating.  In 1642 the public theater was suppressed, but in 1649 it arguably performed its “last act” in a process Franco Moretti has described as the “deconsecration  of sovereignty,” the literal execution of the King.  “That thence the royal actor borne,/ The tragic scaffold might adorn;/ While round the armed bands/ Did clap their bloody hands” (Andrew Marvell, “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”).

 

          In this course we will study these distinctions among and contradictions within Elizabethan and Jacobean drama through an historical survey reaching back to the native origins of English drama and looking ahead to Charles’s deposition.  We will use paperback editions of Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 and A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John Cox and David Scott Kastan as background resources; to them we will add a paperback edition of critical essays, Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass.  I will also make available additional critical work on the drama of this period—coordinated with our weekly readings—by new historicism, sex and gender system, and cultural materialist critics such as Catherine Belsey, Michael Bristol, Karen Coddin, Walter Cohen, Frances Dolan, Jonathan Dollimore, Margaret W. Ferguson, Susan Frye, Marjorie Garber, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson, Jean Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Louis Adrian Montrose, Stephen Mullaney, Gail Kern Paster, Phyllis Rackin, Valerie Traub, Frank Whigham, and others.  Our primary text will be the new Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama (2002).

 

          Our focus will be on certain specific historical and symbolic moments in the history of the early modern English theater as a way of establishing the central cultural importance of the drama, frequently with an implied or explicit Shakespearean comparison.  Thus we will begin by discussing the “place” of the early modern English drama through studying how it negotiates its limits, “beating the bounds” of the regional city or town in the medieval cycle plays, renegotiating those limits in royal entry pageantry and a play such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), written shortly after James’s entry into London as King.  We will read John Lyly’s court-centered Endymion (1588) as a heightened dramatic example of the “cult” of Elizabeth, erected against a background of royal pageantry, fetishizing her virginity against the Spanish threat, and compare Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a self-conscious remembering and displacement of that fantasy.  We will study those early blockbusters of the purpose-built public theater, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1586) and  Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (c. 1592), as examples of the frustrate rising  the anonymous Arden of Feversham (1592).  We will review the good Machiavellianism, the positive historiography of Shakespeare’s second tetra logy of history plays (Richard II [595], 1 Henry IV [1597],

2 Henry IV [1597-98], Henry V [1599]) as a prelude to discussing ways in which it is complemented and supplemented by a city-based model of production and reproduction in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599) and presages turn-of-the-century anxiety culminating in plays such as Julius Caesar (1599) and Hamlet (1600-1602), and in the Essex rebellion (160l) and the death of the old Queen (1603).

 

          James’s tragicomic accession at the end of 1603 (that “Wonderfull Yeare,” as Dekker suggestively titles it in his pamphlet) will form the occasion for us to read Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) as a self-conscious look backward at the dominating passions of the Elizabethan age, their dramatic expression, and their commercial renegotiating in the seven years “sin’ the king came in” (1.2.165).  It will also be the occasion for us to return strongly to the issues of gender and sexual politics in transvestite comedies such as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1599) and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness  (1603), Shakespeare’s Othello (1603-04), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613), and the first

female-authored play in English, Lady Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613).  Finally, it will provide us with the occasion to speculate on the increasing difficulty of government and surveillance (John Marston’s The Malcontent [1604] and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure [1604]), of holding together a kingdom “unified” from two formerly independent states and committed to a policy of irenic martial diplomacy abroad (Shakespeare Scottish play, Macbeth [1605-1606] read against Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens [1609], or tragicomedies by Beaumont and Fletcher such as Philaster [1608-1610]), and of unifying an audience sensibility riven by distinctions of belief systems and class (Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle [1607-1610]).\

 

          Pace and format will be contractually determined between the instructor and the individual student, depending upon the student’s background for the work, graduate program, and section choice (A or B).  One likely “A” format is brief bi-weekly response papers, a critical review, and either an extended seminar paper or a briefer mock-conference presentation.  If you have questions, come see me and we’ll talk about how this course fits into your plans.

 

 

ENG 535 – THE PURITAN TRADITION

            Prof. Robert Daly  - Wednesday 3:309-6:10, Clemens 538 

            Registration Numbers: (A)  458784  (B) 363484

 

            We shall read the first two centuries of American literature, comprising American Indians, Puritans, Enlightenment philosophes, and others.  We shall focus on their characteristic modes of perception and discourse, from which later Americans have developed both epic ideals and deleterious ideologies.  We shall consider how tradition works for good and ill.  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, network 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 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 Sewell, Jonathan Edwards, Sarah Kemble Knight, Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, Susanna Haswell Rowson, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick.  Despite the plethora of names, our reading will be selective and focused, and 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.  Each student taking the seminar extensively will be expected to do everything except the research essay.

 

 

ENG 549 – CREATIVE WRITING POETRY

          Prof. Myung Mi Kim

          Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412

          Registration Numbers:  379971

 

Poesis—A seminar on the interarticulation of:

 

*practice:  the practice of the language, the making of the poem, the making of a book.  Writers will work on and present a substantial group of poems or excerpts from a manuscript in progress, each time they are scheduled for formal discussion.

*process:   acute observation of process, ways of working (how do you generate raw material?  notate form?  do you compose?  do you construct?  what are the material conditions under which you write?)  Further, attention to the seminar itself as process—the meaning of reading others’ work, not to exercise the instruments of critique, but to respond, and the attendant meanings of engendering and participating in a dialogic engagement with fellow poets.

*poetics:  readings in poetics throughout the semester; how are you theorizing and articulating your poetics?

*study:  for example, research the production of a book of poems whose status as a book   

             you find compelling; i.e., examine its genesis, drafts, publication history and so

             on (to be rendered as a 15-20 minute seminar presentation as well as a brief

              essay).

*making:  by the close of the semester, a final creative/critical project that manifests the

            “making of a book” (in whatever manner you pursue this), accompanied by a

            theoretical introduction or afterword.  You may also choose to work on a critical

            paper that expands on your seminar presentation or pursues an issue of particular

            interest to you in poetics.

 

This seminar seeks to explore the complex confluences of arts, attentions, intellection and (questions of) agency that come to bear on the practice of poetry.  Basic expectations include: extensive presentations from a poetry manuscript (or poems) in progress; an active role in responding to the vision/project of fellow writers; careful consideration of process; attention to a study of poetics and to theorizing one’s own poetics; a seminar presentation anchored by a 3-5 page paper as described above, and a final project (chapbook or book-length work), including a theoretical essay (or other critical work to be determined in conversation).         

 

 

ENG 561 – STUDIES IN THE NOVEL

            Prof. Arthur Efron

            Thursday 3:30 – 6:10, Clemens 436

            Registration Number:  212551 

 

This course is open to Doctoral, Master’s, and Master of Arts in the Humanities graduate students.

 

            “The Novel is the highest complex of subtle inter-relatedness that

                        man has ever discovered.”           - D.H. Lawrence

 

            I will begin by handing out my 3-page statement, MY THEORY OF THE NOVEL.  I would like to use it as a point of departure for this course, and ask you to keep it in mind as we go on.  I will supplement it with a published essay of my own on the nature of the novel as a literary experience.  I will ask for your written comment on my condensed 3-page statement at the end of the course.  By that time, we will have read five extraordinary novels, four of them from recent years, plus excerpts from 3 great novels of the past, and several essays on the history, qualities, human worth, and problems (new and old) of the novel.

 

            The five novels may be unrelated (although that may prove to be a mere assumption ); they may be considered as separate entities within the vast world of novelistic fiction.  Each will have value in itself and as a searching experiment in the development of the novel.  The required novels to be read in depth are: Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (a novel about which I have recently published a book), The Known World by Edward P. Jones, The Kite-Runner by Khaled Hosseini, An Empty House by the Chilean novelist, Carlos Cerda, and Secrets by the Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah.  The 3 great novels of the past from which we will read excerpts are The Tale of Genji, written a thousand years ago by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, written some 400 years ago, and Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1877.  Theoretical and historical writings to be distributed will include work by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, M.M. Bakhtin, and Dorrit Cohn.  Additional short readings will be required, as interest and time allow.

            My own essay on the nature of the novel is based on the primary value of freshly experiencing a novel, even when it is being re-read.  This is an approach I have worked out through my study of Art as Experience, John Dewey’s great work of 1934.

 

            We need Dewey in order to develop a groundmap of where we are going in this complex field.  We also need an understanding of why we are reading novels at all.  I want to present an approach that defends the integrity of the novel (and of literature itself), rather than a neutral description.  As the course unfolds, I will resist (but not dismiss) the notions that there is no such genre as the novel, that the novel is dead, that it

 

is about to be buried by the Web, or that it can be reduced to “writing,” “power,” “the market,” “bourgeois culture,” “language,” “the body,” “fictionality,” or “narrativity.”  We will try to understand why it is that the modern novel, developed largely in the Western world, is having so many rebirths in the rest of the world today.  I will defend the concept of character, with all of its imaginary intimate knowledge of the human being in society.  There can be no worthy sense of fictional character without relying on two other cultural concepts that now seem to be in disrepute: the self and individuality.  Very well, we will take a few steps to re-repute them.

 

            Requirements: papers of 5 or more pages, on at least 3 of the required novels, and a brief written statement on each of the 3 great novels of the past.  The topics for these will be assigned, but will allow for your own decisions and choices.  Papers will be due immediately as we read our way into the novels and into the course; no missed or long-delayed papers.

 

            You will also be asked to lead the seminar discussion with your own short presentation on what we are then reading (including the critical or theoretical excerpts, not just the novels themselves) or on any topic in the field of the novel that interests you.

 

            No term paper will be required, although if you have an idea for one and wish to write it and get my comments on it, I will discuss that project with you.  If you do write a term paper, I will waive several of the short papers for the course.

 

            I will ask that you take notes and hand them in at some point during the course.

 

            This is a seminar, and we will have discussion.  You can take part: in fact, please do say something during every seminar meeting.  I won’t be lecturing at huge length, but will give various mini-lectures all along.

 

            If you would like more information, or want to discuss this course with me, call me at home, 836-7332; leave your message if you do not reach me.  Or, email me:    efron@buffalo.edu

 

 

ENG 583 –  CORE POETICS:

                             Philosophy, Poetics and the Concept of Voice

          Prof. Steven McCaffery

          Wednesday 12:30-3:10,   Clemens 438

          Registration Numbers: (A) 241501  (B) 401696

 

          This course examines the 20th century interrelation of a western philosophic tradition with that of a parallel tradition in poetics that focuses upon the mutating function and constructions of “voice” as a key concept, metaphor, and mythologeme in both traditions.  What establishes the truth of voice?  Why is voice, for some philosophers and poets, the quintessential marker of authentic presence while for others it designates the fundamental site of negativity?  These and related questions are examined in a range of philosophic readings from Plato through to David Applebaum and Avital Ronnell.  Although the course has a contemporary focus, it investigates relevant key thinkers from previous centuries including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Condillac, Kant, and Hegel.  Contemporary philosophers include Derrida, Bataille, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas.  An anchor text in this course’s reading is Giorgio Agmaben’s Language and Death.  The Place of Negativity.  These voices of philosophy within Philosophy are assessed and read against a parallel series of poetic texts and theories that similarly invest poetic voice in variant destinies and purposes.  Included in discussions are Charles Olson’s, Julia Kristeva’s, and Helene Cixous’s radical fusion of the body and language; the conceptual and material liberation of voice from speech by the zaum (i.e. trans-rational) poetry of the Russian Avant-Garde; the Italian Futurist “words in freedom”; the Dada sound poem; the anti-voice poetry of the Language Poets; and the irreducibly graphic texts of Concrete and Visual poetry.  The course concludes by examining the phenomenon of disembodied and mechanical voice briefly analyzing the early voco-automata of Descartes’ friend Marin Marsenne and moving through Becket’s Not-I and Krapp’s Last Tape to the electro-acoustic audio poetry of the present time.

 

ENG 584 – POETICS:  AMERICAN POETRY OF WAR

            Prof. Susan Howe

            Tuesday/Thursday 3:30-6:10,  Clemens 412

            Registration Numbers: (A) 140667  (B) 325477

 

            In Company of Moths the poet Michael Palmer asks, “How will you now read in the dark?”  Given where we are right now in 2005, I thought it would be interesting to read some American poets writing about war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  In this seminar we will read some Emily Dickinson poems written circa 1860; Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866); Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps and Sequel (1865); BLAST July, 1915 “The War Number” with poems by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot; Eliot’s The Four Quarters (1943); H.D.’s Trilogy (1942-44) and The Gift (1941-43); Wallace Stevens’ The Auroras of Autumn (1950); and Michael Palmer’s most recent book Company of Moths (2005).

 

            Three poet/critics will visit this five-week intensive seminar (two three-hour meetings each week) from late August through September.  James Longenbach, author of Fleet River and Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, among other books, will talk to us about Stevens and Auroras.  Elizabeth Willis, author of The Human Abstract and Second Law, will read from an essay in progress titled “A Public History of the Dividing Line:  H.D., Freud, The Bomb and the Roots of Postmodernism.”  Finally, Michael Palmer will discuss his new work.

 

Requirements:  A final paper 15-20 pages, and an oral report (10-20 minutes).  Final papers to be handed in at the end of the semester.  Although we meet for a period of five weeks, twice a week, from the end of August to the end of September, it is understood that during the summer before our meetings you will familiarize yourself with the work of the poets and critics listed above.  I hope that students will also attend the poetry readings by Longenbach, Palmer, and Willis.  These will be held in the Poetry Collection as part of the reading series hosted by the Poetics Program.

           

 

ENG 595 – AMERICAN CLASSICS/CULTURE

            Prof. Robert Daly

            Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

            Registration Number: 343764

 

            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 Sedgwick, 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.

 

            Each student will contribute to seminar discussion, give one seminar report (15 minutes), and write a research essay (12-24 pages) on a topic of his or her own choosing.

 

Texts:

Andrews, William L., ed Classic American Autobiographies (Mentor,         Penguin), contains Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, and Zitkala-Sa.

Rowson, Susanna Haswell.  Charlotte Temple.  Ed. Cathy Dividson            (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 9:00-12:00

          Registration Number: 451414

 

          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 9:00 to noon, 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 9:00 in Clemens 128 with hands-on work at the computers, including the instructor’s station.  We will model in advance how to teach the various elements of the page-design syllabus.  At l0:50 we will adjourn to Clemens 128A to discuss readings in computer-mediated writing and their relevance to our teaching.

 

Requirements:

          Attendance:

-As with your own students, your 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 599 – PRACTICUM IN TEACHING

          Prof. Arabella Lyon

          Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 436

          Registration Number:  004162

 

          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. James Holstun

          Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

          Registration Numbers: (A)  439963  (B)  374681

 

          In this course, we will read most of the work of Edmund Spenser, the foremost narrative poet in English between Chaucer and Milton and one of the greatest innovators in poetic form in all of English literature.  We will read his prose political tract, A View of the State of Ireland and a selection of his shorter poetry, including his sonnet sequence Amoretti; Mother Hubberds Tale; his colonial wedding poem Epithalamion; his avant-gardist collection of pastoral ecologues, The Shepheardes Calendar; and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.

 

          But we will spend most of the semester reading all of his massive, mesmerizing, and frequently horrifying Faerie Queene: an allegorical chivalric epic about the life of the courtier, sexuality and gender identity, proper and libelous speech, empire and conquest, the struggle between Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity, history and the apocalypse.  Among the questions we will consider: Spenser’s relationship to the late-Tudor Elizabethan court and the mid-Tudor commonwealth; the politics of anachronism and metrical innovation in Spenser’s writing; friendship, sexuality, and queer theory; knights, giants, and primitive accumulation; imperialism and the Irish Spenser; and Spenser’s career-long fretful obsession with that suppurating jewel, the Tudor gentleman.

 

          We will also be reading a good deal of Spenser criticism, from Shelley to contemporary critics (emphasis on the latter).  I intend this course as a rigorous introduction, so Spenser novices and interested non-Renaissance specialists are absolutely welcome.  Course texts available at Talking Leaves: The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems (ed. Oram et al.); The Faerie Queene (ed. Hamilton, Yamashita, and Suzuki); A View of the State of Ireland (eds. Hadfield and Maley).  Also, a book of readings and study guides, available at Queen City Imaging (3173 Main Street;

832-8100).  Please         feel free to contact me if you have any questions:

jamesholstun@hotmail.com.

 

 

ENG 625 – 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Prof. Neil Schmitz

          Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers: (A)  187093 (B) 273656

 

 

          We start with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, with its new statement of the sacred phrases, its new description of “that nation” and “this nation.”  The Address, especially its several telling lines, that first sentence, the final sentence, is something of a moveable figure in the seminar, a construction, a logic, a program, Lincoln on the raft with Huck and Jim, Lincoln in deep private consultation with Isabel Osmond.

 

          We look at important literary situations in the postwar emerging new nationalist narrative.  What is the project in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and what is the project in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady?  A new sorting of persons takes place.  We will look at the epiphanies that drive Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.  We will look at the naturalist reporters, Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” Gertrude Stein, Three Lives, and consider the situations of Charles Eastman’s From Deep Woods to Civilization and William Wells Brown’s My Southern Home.  A presentation and a final paper.

 

 

ENG 645 – POSTMODERN FICTION: Postmodern Fiction in the Information Age

          Prof. Joseph Conte

          Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers: (A) 452608   (B) 310798

 

          One defining aspect of postmodernism has been the paradigm shift from print to digital culture, from the text as bound codex to the various emanations of electronic media.  Enthusiasts of this shift in media culture have dubbed our present condition the “late age of print,” while others speak more generally of a transition from an industrial to an information age.  Yet a complex dynamics of incommensurability arises in periods of technological overlap, in which the competing values and practices of the two cultures of print and hypermedia coexist.  Print culture retains an order that is linear, syntactic, privately accessed, and static; and electronic culture is nonlinear in transmission and organization, interconnected through various channels, publicly accessed, and quicksilver in its delivery.  As a result, many works and their “delivery systems” display signs of cross-purposing and redundancy: the presence of textual and graphical hyperlinks in web browsers; multiple media formats for works previously classified as either “books” or “films;” and full-text CD-ROM scholarly editions of classic works of literature interconnected with archival manuscripts, historical and critical source materials.  Rather than lament the decline of five-hundred years of print technology and an attendant erosion of readerly skills, or applaud the conversion to incipient data forms and their promiscuous linking, one may regard this transitional phase between a print and an electronic order as an unprecedented opportunity to study the art of fiction and the postmodern subject as each undergoes a cognitive restructuring in which vestigial skills of information acquisition and production are gradually exchanged for inventive ones.

 

            During the seminar, we’ll read the work of postmodern novelists who, though still bound to the print order, are provocatively engaged with the terms and conditions of the information age, and who invoke the cascade of associative thought that characterizes the experience of digital media and the Internet.  Where applicable we’ll examine their involvement in digital, film, and other media projects, and visit the scholarly web pages and popular discussion lists that make these novelists the subject of considerable online activity.  Our readings will include the collaboration of cyberpunk novelists William Gibson and Bruce Sterling on The Difference Engine, a novel that speculates on the completion of Charles Babbage’s cybernetic Analytical Engine, propelling the Victorian age of steam into the computer age.  Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland introduces the media saturation and base common culture of television in Ronald Reagan’s America.  In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the residents of a college town are subjected to the superabundance of information, the pervasive penetration of waves and radiation, and a toxic cloud from a chemical accident.  In Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, the “author” combines forces with a cognitive neurologist whose project is to model the human brain by means of a computer-based neural network; in his Plowing the Dark, parallel plots relate the sensory deprivation of a hostage in an empty room in Beirut and the efforts of a

Seattle-based group to project a virtual reality on the blank walls of “the Cavern.”  We will also examine an example of hypertext fiction, Jane Yellowlees Douglas’s I Have Said Nothing in concert with her critical theory of digital culture in The End of Books.

 

            As a complement to these works of fiction, the seminar will alternate its attentions with selections from a variety of critical and theoretical texts on the information age and electronic media, including Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature, Sven Birkert’s The Gutenberg Elegies, Robert Coover’s “The End of Books,” Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris, ed. The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction,  N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, Friedrich Kittler’s Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, Michael Joyce’s Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, William Paulson’s The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information, Mark Poster’s What’s the Matter with the Internet? and Joseph Tabbi’s Cognitive Fictions.

 

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

 


ENG 647 (AMS 622) FIELD METHODOLOGY

PROF. BRUCE JACKSON
Monday 3:30 6:10, Clemens 610
Registration Number: 077874


Most literary research is grounded in documents already in place: nooks 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, buts 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 – PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM:

                   Identification and the Social Bond

          Prof. Joan Copjec and Ernesto Laclau

          Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 640

          Registration Numbers: (A)  360458  (B) 172494

 

This seminar takes Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as its central text.  We will read this text carefully in order to try to clarify in what the process of identification consists.  How does it permit the individual subject to perceive herself not only as unique, but also as a member of a group?  How is it that identification with others is constitutive of one’s own identity?

 

          Professor Laclau will lead the discussions of Freud’s precursors and contemporaries in an effort to isolate the specific contribution of Psychoanalysis to the theory of group identity.  Here we will examine the phenomenon of hysteria, studied by Janet and Charcot prior to Freud, and that of “mental contagion” as defined by the sociologists of Freud’s time.  Professor Copjec will lead the discussions of theories since Freud; Balibar, Ranciere, Agamben, and of course Lacan, most surely.  The focus of this part of the seminar will be the relations that obtain between identification and various emotional ties.  Freud has a few provocative things to say about this, but they have not been sufficiently followed up.  Our reflections on affect and identification will lead us back to our discussions of hysteria and mental contagion and, time permitting, to the theory of the “state of exception.”

 

 

ENG 680 - PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY

          Prof. Ruth Mack

          Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436

          Registration Numbers:  (A)  218206  (B) 073007

 

          Enlightenment theories of “progress” and “universal” history often are opposed to more modern theories of history, which stress plurality and the recognition of difference.  But such a contrast assumes that there is only one Enlightenment philosophy of history.  The goal of the first part of this course is to investigate the terms in which eighteenth-century British and French writers interrogated and qualified ideas of progress and universality and in which they questioned and determined the subject of history.  This does not mean that we will direct our energies toward an enthusiastic defense of Enlightenment.  Rather, reading fiction, philosophy, and historiography, we will treat the relation between history and the emerging concept of “culture” as one that interested eighteenth-century writers, however satisfactory or unsatisfactory their answers to the problems it presents.  Thus, we will examine the perspectives of historical foreigners (or “strangers”) like Baron de Montesquieu’s Persians, Charlotte Lennox’s Quixote, and Edward Gibbon’s barbarians.  And we will consider the problems narrative history (and narrative more generally) poses for representing more than one society or set of customs.

 

            In the second part of the course, we will focus on responses to eighteenth-century philosophies of history as they emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the work of Hegel, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Hayden White, and Michel de Certeau.  At the end of the course, we will consider the implications of what we have read for theories of postcolonial history, in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha.

 

            Enlightenment texts will include Lord Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and TheSpirit of the Laws, Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society.  (French texts will be read in translation).

 

 

ENG 682 – AMERICANIST COLLOQUIUM

Prof. Carine Mardorossian

          Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers: (A)  486948  (B) 090779

 

          This course will compare a number of texts and documents from South, Central and North America (including the Caribbean) and examine the ways this literature reflects, produces, and contests images of American cultural identity.  As we move across the diverse ethnic and linguistic traditions that constitute the cultural context of the Americas, we will seek to identify the parallel narrative anxieties about race, gender, class, genealogy, and narrative authority that define texts from the region.  How does each of our readings create or define “American” cultural identity?  What are the key literary themes common to the literature of the Americas?  How do various narratives about “American” identity represent the relationship between the individual and the community, culture, and the state, home and abroad, self and other?  What are the commonalities among the writings produced by postslavery societies in the New World?

         

          The course will consist of weekly guest lectures given by various faculty members across the College of Arts and Sciences as well as by outside speakers.  Students are expected to complete the weekly assigned readings and come prepared to discuss them in light of the lecture.  Requirements include attendance, active participation, biweekly responses, a book review, and a final research paper.

 

ENG 684 – CONTESTED REPRESENTATIONS

            Prof. Scott Stevens

            Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

            Registration Numbers: (A)  004888  (B) 329766

 

            Cultural historians often regard the preceding years of the Stuart dynasty (1603-1649) to be the culmination of the Renaissance in England and the beginning of the transition to the early modern period.  Therefore, understanding several of the key issues that led to this epoch-making chapter in English history is of importance across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.  This course focuses on the literature and fine arts of the first half of the seventeenth century.  Special attention will be given to placing the authors and artists studied within the contexts of the controversies surrounding monarchial power and the Stuart court which mark this pivotal century in British history.  Major poets such as Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, and Marvell will be read with regard to intersecting debates on aesthetics, religion, and politics in early Stuart England.  We will also attend to the role of Oxford & Cambridge Universities as important centers of intellectual and theological debate and dissent in the period.  This will allow us to better understand the place of the university as a catalyst in social and cultural developments.

 

            Aesthetic developments and debates in the fine arts are likewise central to understanding Stuart culture.  Court patronage allowed England contact with some of the major aesthetic movements of the seventeenth century by recruiting artists with international reputations.  Thus, van Dyck, Mytens, Hollar, and Rubens contributed works that would have a lasting effect on English painting.  Representation became a hotly contested subject in the areas of religious iconography, royal portraiture, court masques, and theater.  We will spend a considerable amount of time on visual materials to better understand the various debates over mimesis, iconoclasm, and political propaganda I this period.  The course will provide students with a means of assessing the inter-connection of disparate artistic movements with the English Revoluti8on of the 1640s.

 

            Students will be expected to give a 15 minute presentation on the application of a contemporary theoretical approach to either a literary or art historical issue germane to the course.  A seminar length paper (20-25 pages) will be due at the end of the semester.

 

 

ENG 699 – ETHNOPOETICS

          Prof. Dennis Tedlock

          Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 540

Registration Numbers: (A) 277376  (B)  387915

 

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 Tam (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 motion 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 monological.

 

            Readings will include translations of verbal arts in various African, Asian, and Ameridian languages.  There will also be listenings veering a wide range of recorded performances.  As an alternative to a term paper, a transcription and/or translation, and/or performance may be acceptable.

 

            The assigned reading, in addition to handouts, will be as follows:  John Miles Foley, How to Read on Oral Poem; Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred; and Dennis Tedlock, Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation and Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visitors of the Living Maya.  Books are available at Talking Leaves, 3158 Main Street.

 

 

ENG 707 – MYTHOLOGY

          Prof. Diane Christian

          Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 610

          Registration Numbers: (A) 081198  (B) 039936

 

          “Mythology,” said the great mythographer Robert Graves, “is somebody else’s religion.”  Depending on the prism—comparative religion, anthropology and sociology, folklore, psychology, literature, philosophy—it is sacred narrative, social structure, popular wisdom, allegory, nonprint narrative, synthetic rather than analytic thinking.  It is seen as both the deepest cultural code and fabulous misleading fiction.

 

            In content this course will consider origin and sexual myths, sacred narratives from ancient and modern times and wide geographic distribution.  (From the ancient world Sumerian, Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek myths particularly; from the modern Dogon, Darwinian, Hopi and Quiche especially.)  Methodologically we’ll use Plato, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and Bruce Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth, with some attention to the 2500-year-old debate about fiction and falsehood.

 

          Because the working classical definition of myth is sacred narrative believed as true, Darwin fits and is important.  We’ll read his texts on origin and sex mythically—literally and imaginatively.  In all we’ll take Blake’s proverb that “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth” as a guide.  We’ll find in these texts enduring and fresh figures for figuring the hardest human questions.  The three questions we’ll set will be where does the world come from, where are humans in it, how do sex and violence figure our story?