DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
FALL 2006
For more information about the
Department of English
visit our web site at
http://cas.buffalo.edu/english
ENG 501 – INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
Prof.
Andrew Stott
Tuesday
Registration
Numbers: (A) 270868 (B) 472044
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 509 –
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE - CHAUCER
Prof. Mili
Clark
Tuesday
Registration Number: 226433
The luf so
short, the craft so long to lerne…
Once they acclimatized themselves to Middle English, my undergraduate Chaucer students used to exclaim, “Chaucer is so modern!” (or “so timeless. His characters can be found everywhere today;” or “I have an aunt who’s just like the Wife of Bath”). I would never discourage undergraduates from believing this commonplace if it is what keeps them reading Chaucer. However, Chaucer’s works—his characters, his tropes, his sentiments—comprise the strata of an archeology.
Compressed, sometimes neatly, sometimes haphazardly, beneath the surface e of his texts, are genres, themselves within genres, which, the deeper you dig, the farther back in the particular site of a text you go, you unearth other authors, other texts, other centuries, other cultures. The tale of Constance in The Man of Law’s Tale, for instance, takes you down through saints’ lives to the Greek Romances; the imperiled virtuous heroine does not stop with Chaucer but continues up through Renaissance drama and the Victorian novel to the serials of the silent film; though the 20th century is full of imperiled heroines, I’m not sure their virtue matches that of their predecessors, and if not, do they belong in this particular archeology?
On the whole, Chaucer’s attitude toward the archeology of texts was positive. Textual layering provides richness and authenticity, and, very important for the medieval writer, keeps the past alive in the present. If old books were gone, the key of remembrance would be lost, says Chaucer in the poem to the Legend of Good Women. Not endued with modern ideals of originality, medieval poets expected to “redo” the texts of poets that came before them, as Chaucer composed his own versions of French dream visions, Italian narratives, and vulgar tales (fabliaux) from everywhere. Still, he does lament that past poets have taken all good grain from the field of literature and left him “glenyng here and there good grain from the field of literature and left him “glenying here and there….to fine an ere / Of any goodly word that [they] han left.” When a genre, a tale, or a trope, has been done and redone by successive poets, what is left for the present poet to do? Rather than blend himself into a poetic tradition by adding his layer to the strata of literary archeology, Chaucer became the archeologist, exposing the workings of genres, tales, tropes, characters. Like my undergraduates, he claims at least once that tropes and national cultures and languages are but dressing on the essentials of human nature. Whatever the customs and forms of speech of the ancient Trojans, they succeeded as well in love as we do today, he comments on the text his is writing (Troilus and Criseyde). However, at the end of the latter work (is it the first novel in English? Or a proto-18C closet drama?), he seems to say that those who lived before Christianity were essentially different from those who came after.
Well, this course description is a long prologue to a tale in itself. We’ll read the dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde, and most Canterbury Tales, along with some key Chaucerian sources. Because I want graduate students to read Chaucer for their own pleasure and enlightenment, and because we will be reading in Middle English, I am not requiring a major paper at the end of the course. We’ll have collaborative in-class presentations, weekly response posting to Blackboard, surveys of the literature on particular texts (annotated bibliographies).
NOTE: There is only an “A” section. You can count ENG 509 as one of your seminars or as an extra seminar (which won’t affect your seminar requirement.).
ENG 522 – MILTON
Prof. Susan Eilenberg
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A)
322736 (B) 303573
I would like in this course, devoted to readings of Milton’s poems and some of his most important prose writings, to focus on the problem of Miltonic excess, that too-muchness that confronts not just us, Milton’s overwhelmed readers, but also the principal characters of Milton’s writings, who tend, in the face of such abundance, to feel themselves impaired. Much of what is most interesting (to me) in these writings are those peculiar and peculiarly recurring structures, scenes, or objects suggesting at once plenitude and deprivation: the glass Comus offers the abstinent Lady, the apple Satan offers Eve, Eve herself as she appears before a bewildered Adam, the banquets Satan sets before Christ, images of paradisal fertility and of chaotic violence. Imaging relationships of obligation, identification, incorporation, and denial, provoking the deepest ambivalence, these scenes and objects mark those points at which a fantasy of absolute and absolutely gratifying plenitude, an abundance that precludes measurement or choice but that carries the threat of overwhelming the subject, is transformed into its apparent antithesis, a fantasy of strict economy structured around scarcity, quantification, and debt. The consequence is a body of work in which the requirements of economic logic are systematically enforced and undermined: with no medium between all and nothing at all, all signs liable to convert into their opposites, the world becomes pure excess and any is too much.
All this, of course, is just another way of describing what happens in the course of what is usually called temptation.
Students
will be asked to present one short essay before the class and to write a single
long essay to be handed in at the end of the term.
523 – EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIES
Prof.
Ruth Mack
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A)
251183 (B) 142998
The Enlightenment is often
depicted as the period that preceded the Historical Age, as a time when
history-writing was pervasive and prominent but lacked a full-blown theory of
history. To some extent of course this
is true; there was no grand eighteenth-century philosophy of history of the
sort Hegel would produce in the nineteenth century. But this means only that philosophies of
history existed elsewhere in the earlier period: in philosophy but also in
historiography, poetry, essays, and fiction.
Those varied philosophies, as they appeared in the context of
eighteenth-century
We will consider what the
label “history” meant over the course of the century. Why, for instance, were literary texts that
we now call novels termed “histories”?
Such a question will not just require us to rethink generic categories;
it will require us to ask further questions about eighteenth-century
understandings of the relationship between truth and fiction and of the
relationship between present and past.
We will also consider the legacy of questions asked and answered in this
earlier period for the theory and criticism of our current moment. Thus we will spend some time with questions
about history—and particularly about its relation to literature—as they matter
for twentieth- and twenty-first century philosophers, historians, and literary
historians.
Our eighteenth-century
reading will include Lord Bolingbroke’s Letters
on the Study and use of History, Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, Henry Fielding’s The
History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society, and James Macpherson’s
Ossian poems. More modern authors will
include Michael Foucault, Hayden White, Frederic Jameson, and the New
Historicists.
ENG 537 – 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Transatlantic
Encounters: Nineteenth Century Travel Narratives
Prof. Carrie Bramen
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A) 007687 (B) 001545
This course will explore how the “
Another dimension of the course will be the American abroad, a farcical figure in British and French comedies of the nineteenth century, beginning with Richard Peake’s 1824 satire “Americans Abroad.” We’ll then turn to Henry James’ attempt to reimagine this figure in his novel The American, and we’ll also turn to Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, where Twain asks the overwhelming questions about travel: why do we do it? And why is tourism so frequently accompanied with disappointment? Anticlimactic feelings seem to be an integral part of the touristic experience.
We’ll also
examine what happens to the archetype of the “American abroad” when the
traveler is African American. We’ll read
Frederick Douglass’ account of his trip to
To get
started, we’ll look at contemporary examples of the genre: Baudrillard’s
Finally, the theoretical dimension will explore differences among migrants, refugees and tourists; the touristic gaze: cosmopolitanism versus imperialism; the formation of anti-Americanism (a coin termed in the 1780s) through travel writing; and the role of this ‘minor’ genre in the codification of national distinctions.
ENG 541 – 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL
Prof.
Robert Daly
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 161559 (B)
382056
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 its use as a propaedeutic
to ethics, 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
Onis (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) land 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.
We shall also focus on agency and action, on what
difference these thoughts make in our lives.
As Hawthorne suggested long ago, “Thought has always its efficacy,” and
as Amanda Anderson argued more recently in The Way We Argue Now: A Study in
the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006), “We must keep in mind that the
question, How should I live? Is the most basic one; the response, As a knower,
is simply one modification thereof.” We
“must acknowledge the priority of normative questions and the fundamentally
practical structure of human action and understanding.”
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
Gardner, John. Grendel. Vintage.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New American Library.
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 542 – 20TH
CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
Prof. Myung Mi Kim
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A) 340830 (B) 174850
“AMARE SINASM”
“A MERRY CANISM”
“A LMER IN CAN ISM”
“A MARR CAN ISM”
Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha
The Word
(Le Mot)
1975
9 color slides, 5 color photographs
Radical poetic practice in 20th century and contemporary American poetry is marked by ruptured and multiply attenuated ethno-national and linguistic displacements. This seminar explores poetic practices that tend the conjunctural, chiasmatic, and transitive. We study the work of poets who problematize and animate transhistorical, heterocultural, and translingual consciousness.
Here’s a brief glimpse at some of the underlying concerns of the course: a critique of the ideology of monolingualism; non-teleological frames for tracking the movements, schools, affiliations that inform the innovative tradition in 20th century American poetry (e.g., experimental modernist women poets, objectivists, Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, diasporic avant-garde American poetry); renegotiating such notions as documentary poetry, standard and non-standard language practice, and cultural materialist poetics.
The course will unfold in four movements, guided by but not bound to chronology. The texts mentioned below are indicative (rather than definitive) of the reading list:
I. Zukofsky,
80 Flowers, Prepositions, the
Catullus translations. Stein, essays on “grammar, punctuation, composition” and so on, The Geographical History of
II. Amiri Baraka, Olson, Olson-Creeley, The Mayan Lettes. Robert Duncan: here I’m particularly interested in how we as a class might work with the Duncan Archive housed at The Poetry/Rare Books Room.
III. Barbara Guest, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian. The first iteration of ethnopoetics, for example, Alcheringa, Vol. 1, #1, Autumn 1970.
IV. Susan Howe. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing, Song of the Andoumboulu. Mackey and Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERsations. Brathwaite, The History of the Voice, Rosmarie Waldrop. Current iterations of ethnopoetics. Cecilia Vicuna. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multimedia, installation, and film work.
Prefatory and theoretical groundwork includes readings on
the history of American linguistics, especially, missionary linguistics. Whitman, Primer. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories, Global Designs:Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking. Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and
Hybridities.
Basic requirements: weekly responses with emphasis on close readings of primary texts, a series of short/interrelated class presentations, and a seminar paper.
ENG 551 – BIBLE AS LITERATURE
Prof.
Diane Christian
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 290522 (B)
257565
The
course will cover most of the Hebrew and Christian texts, with some attention
to traditional and modern exegetical methods.
The first goal will be good literary readings, the second a survey of
competing critical strategies toward the stories—including religious,
psychological, anthropological, historical and artistic. We’ll read Genesis in conjunction with
Isaac Bashevis Singer said that to read the Bible as
Literature profanes the text. This is
the standard religious reading which privileges a ‘sacred’ text as God-given
and different from all other writing.
We’ll think about that argument of authority and about the derivation of
moral norms from mythic (sacred narrative) stories. Adam and Eve establish heterosexual marriage;
Abraham constructs a people, a land claim, and child sacrifice; Christ changes
child sacrifice to self-sacrifice and the interface of God and man.
One of the richest and most controversial repositories of
human wisdom and history, the Bible remains the book to understand and the
literary strategy a good one.
ENG 581 – AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof.
Hershini Young
Tuesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 403734 (B) 422602
This class will introduce
students to contemporary African American literature and literary theory. The course will stress non-traditional
understandings of African American Studies, focusing on notions of black
performativity, queer studies and the influence of diasporas on contemporary
re-formulations of blackness, gender and sexuality. Given the course’s diasporic or
circum-Atlantic bent, we will read black studies located in other countries,
such as Kobena Mercer’s Welcome to the
Jungle and excerpts from South African historian, Zine Magubane. We will attempt to theorize sites of
articulation for subject formations previously deemed impossible. We will also think critically about the
various intersections of complex identities and how these operate, if one moves
away from additive models. The readings
are interdisciplinary, insisting both on the inadequacy of disciplinary
constructs to address the issues facing black studies and on the inherent
problems with disciplinary formations whose borders are teaming with spectral
presences.
ENG 583 – CORE POETICS
Theory
and Practice of the Avant-Garde
Prof.
Steve McCaffery
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 088719 (B)
493301
This course examines the
historical continuum of a formally radical poetics from 1870 to the present
day. After mapping out some broad
theorizations of the Avant-Garde, we will examine in depth several texts and
movements: including Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Des”; Italian parole in liberta, Russian zaum
or transrational language; collage; Dada and Surrealism, Pound and Vorticism,
Gertrude Stein’s early cubist poetics; the poetics of Fluxus; the formally
inventive poetics of the 1970 and 80s, and the conceptual poetics of Vito
Acconci and Kenneth Goldsmith. The
material will be studied against certain persistent interrogations: should the
Avant-Garde be considered as historical circumscribed and if so is it feasible
to speak of a contemporary avant-garde?
What are the relations of formal innovation to such socio-political land
cultural issues as postmodernity, globalization, gender and race?
Required Texts
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms.
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment.
Kryzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity,
the Avant-Gardee, and the Event.
A Course Kit will make
available several shorter texts.
ENG 584 – POETICS (5 weeks) August 29 – September 28
Prof.
Susan Howe
Tuesday/Thursday
Registration Numbers:
(A) 253061
Rivers of
electricity: Beginning with
Emerson’s “The Poet” and “Experience,” we will explore ways in which Emily
Dickinson in the 19th century and Hart Crane and Robert Creeley in
the 20th, through their varied writing practice, make permeable the
guarded borders between image and word, poetry and prose, individual and
community, history and the present.
Although poems will be our central consideration as well as critical
prose and correspondence, in the case of
Visiting speakers to the seminar will include Marta Werner,
Robert Von Hallberg, Elisa New, and Charles Bernstein.
This is an intensive seminar consisting of two three-hour
sessions a week between August 29 and September 28. You will be expected to attend all
sessions. Requirements are an oral
report, and a final 10-15 page research paper to be handed in at the end of the
semester.
ENG 599 – PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
Prof.
Mili Clark
Thursday
Registration Number: 321246
This section is for incoming TAs and continuing TAs who
will be teaching a computer-mediated version of composition—specifically the
page-design sections.
We will meet every week on Thursday mornings from 9:30 to
12:00, half the time in our Composition Computer Classroom (Clemens 128) and
half the time in our Composition seminar room (Clemens 128A). We will begin at
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 599 - PRACTICUM IN TEACHING Prof. Barbara Cole
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 436, Reg. No, 175577
English 599 has two primary purposes:
(1) to foster a community of peers to enhance and support your development
as a teacher; and, (2) to introduce you to the field of rhetoric and composition.
Participants come to this seminar with diverse types and levels of teaching
experiences. Whatever your background, we will work together to develop your
individual pedagogical theories and practices. In keeping with our two-fold
purpose, seminar meetings will be divided; the first half will be devoted
to 'theoretical considerations of key essays in the field of composition while
the second half will concentrate on translating theory into classroom praxis
and specific teaching strategies. Our methods will include the traditional
approaches of academic study (reading, analysis, research, critical writing)
as well as the techniques distinct to composition studies (analysis of student
texts, classroom observation, reflections on practice).
Course Requirements include active
engagement; reading responses; a short paper based on classroom observation;
completion of the 101 syllabus; your 201 syllabus; a sample lesson plan; and,
your philosophy of teaching statement.
ENG 599 - PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
Prof. Erica D. Galioto
Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 538 - Reg. No. 401798
This course is a practicum in writing instruction for first-year graduate Teaching Assistants in the Department of English. Our primary concern will be the joining of composition theory and practical methods. In our weekly discussions, we will explore the current debates surrounding composition theory, as well as the past basis for such controversies. As we move these theories into their practical applications, we will consider how they might inform and challenge our own classroom practices. Drawing on our varied experiences as both teachers and students, we will develop new teaching strategies and activities that will address the diverse learners in our own composition classrooms. We will also conduct workshops on lesson planning, assignment sequencing, assessment grading, and syllabus constructing, to name a few. The participants in this seminar will begin to form personal pedagogics that are situated in the larger field of Composition Studies, but are also very much rooted in their own classroom practices.
Requirements:
Attendance: Regular participation with one allowed absence
During the Semester: One short paper, four response papers on the readings
that connect the theory to classroom practice, and voluntary sharing of ENG
101 hand-outs. At the End of the Semester: A philosophy of teaching statement,
an ENG 201 syllabus, and an evaluation of 599 and your ENG 101 experience.
ENG 645 – STUDIES IN THE NOVEL: Postmodern Fiction
And Information
Culture
Prof.
Joseph Conte
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A) 392047 (B) 229118
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 digital media 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 a selection of
cyberpunk fiction, such as the twentieth-anniversary edition of William
Gibson’s Neuromancer; and his Pattern Recognition, which delves into
the post-Cold War world of multinational corporate communications. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash features a Hiro Protagonist whose digital avatar pursues
a virus capable of infecting the cerebral cortex. 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.”
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, possibly including Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature, Sven
Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies,
Robert Coover’s “The End of Books,” Jane Yellowlees Douglas’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, and My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects
and Literary Texts, 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?, Joseph Tabbi’s Cognitive Fictions,
and Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb.
Seminar participants who are registered intensively will be required to make a twenty-minute oral presentation and produce a twenty-page research paper.
ENG 648 – KIAROSTAMI / CORBIN / LACAN
Or:
“Paris/Tehran”
Prof. Joan Copjec
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A)
407501 (B) 166565
This is a seminar about
1) the films of the contemporary Iranian
filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami—one of the darlings of the international film
circuit and of Cathiers du cinema and subject of a book by Jean-Luc Nancy; and
about
2) why his films, made in
It is a seminar, then, about
1a) film and 1b) filmic representation in
general; and about the theory of
the subject.
2a) the Lacanian subject and
2b) the subject of Islamic philosophy as interpreted by Henry Corbin, friend
and colleague of Lacan, influential theorist of Oriental mysticism, and the
person responsible for introducing Heidegger into French thought. We will focus particularly on the way
Kiarostami, Cobin, and Lacan translate paradigms of hidden authority into
metapolitical terms. For all three
thinkers, God has “ceased to be Eternal in heaven” and has drifted into an
unconscious or hidden realm, leaving the human subject “unsponsored,”
responsible for its own destiny, yet curiously bound to “angels of
history.” We will attend to the critique
of historicism evident in each of the thinkers as well as the “angelology” that
guides their critiques.
The focus of the seminar will
be evenly divided between Kiarostami’s films (which you will be asked to view
outside the class) and the theoretical texts by Lacan and Cobin we will use to
unlock the films.
ENG 653 – CRITICAL THEORY: Foucault
& Co.
PROF.
TIM DEAN
Friday
Registration Numbers: (A) 225987 (B)
427594
This seminar proposes to read
intensively the major works of Michel Foucault and his associates, in order to
get a stronger grasp on the following questions. What
has been Foucault’s influence on the humanities over the past quarter
century? How has his thinking about the
discursive construction of subjectivity and about disciplinary society
re-oriented literary study? What is the
relation between Foucault’s work and new historicism? What are the implications of Foucault’s
critiques of Marxism and psychoanalysis, of existentialism and
phenomenology? Against which
intellectual currents is his thinking reacting?
How should we situate Foucault in relation to structuralism and
post-structuralism?
We will approach these
questions by focusing on topics in which Foucault made decisive interventions:
authorship; subjectivity; ethics; power; deviance; madness; illness;
criminality; sexuality. In order to
assess how Foucault’s thinking on these topics shifted over the course of his
career, we will begin with early works such as Madness and Civilization and chart a trajectory to his late work on
ethics in the final volumes of The
History of Sexuality. To gain a more
complete picture of the context in which he was working, we also will read work
by Nietzsche, Canguilhem, Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and Pierre Hadot,
as well as recent essays by Foucault’s American critics and defenders.
Students interested in the
course should read Didier Eribon’s biography of Foucault before the semester
begins.
ENG 680 -CRITICAL AND CLINICAL: Fantasy and the Construction of Psychoanalytic Knowledge
Prof. Steven Miller
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 420928 (B) 387006
This seminar is an introduction
to the questions that arise in relation to one of the major objects of psychoanalytic
research. Fantasy is a particularly rich topic because of its problematic
status. Although it often emerges within analysis as the memory of a primal
scene, fantasy is neither history nor fiction. Closer attention to the texts
of Freud and Lacan in which the "concept" of fantasy is elaborated
will show that it is rather an impossible construction (a "transcendental
illusion") that determines the subject's relation to enjoyment. How do
psychoanalytic theory and practice go about elaborating this construction?
Moreover, fantasy is both something that emerges for the first time in the
psychoanalytic clinic (as its signature "discovery") and something
whose stakes cannot (perhaps) be articulated in strictly psychoanalytic terms.
Throughout the semester, therefore, we will pay constant attention to the
fact that, in order to articulate the problematic status and meaning of fantasy,
texts of psychoanalytic theory almost always turn to literature, art, philosophy,
or politics. This will enable us, in turn, to explore the way in which psychoanalytic
theory might or might not function as "criticism."
Our readings for the semester will be divided into three sections. First,
through close readings of Freud's case history of the Wolf Man and Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (along with some of his shorter texts) we will examine
the relationship between the structure of fantasy, symptom, repetition, transference,
and the death drive. Second, through readings of Lacan's Kant avec Sade and
selections from the works of Gilles Deleuze we will elaborate the relation
between fantasy, philosophy, literature, perversion, and enjoyment. Third,
we will examine some contemporary works of psychoanalytic criticism (Dolar,
Grosrichard, Zizek) in order to consider the relation between fantasy ideology,
and the political constitution of the social link.
ENG 682 – 19TH C BRITISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE:
Transatlantic Print Culture
Prof.
Daniel Hack
Monday
Registration Numbers:
(A) 480497 (B) 018760
This course will be transatlantic in two, overlapping senses: not only will we study both American and British materials, but also we will attend to the transatlantic circulation of ideas, tropes, and texts (and people too, for that matter). Our approach will be informed by—and serve as an introduction to—the study of the history of the book. This means that we will attend to the ways in which texts have been produced, packaged, distributed, and consumed; we will think about the works we read as physical and economic artifacts as well as linguistic ones; and we will reflect on the grounds for and possible limits to such an approach. We will also want to think about the ways in which the texts we read invite or resist the kinds of attention we will be paying them—we will ask, that is, how texts represent or theorize their own materiality, commodification, readership, and mobility.
We will spend much of our time in the 1850s, a decade of
especially intense transatlantic interaction, including the original
publication in
Using the resources of the Poetry and Rare Books Collection, students will conduct research on a nineteenth-century American or British text or periodical of their own choosing, in consultation with me. Requirements include regular response papers, one or two oral presentations, and (for those taking the course intensively) a term paper.
Likely texts include: William Wells Brown, Clotel; Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative; Charles dickens, Bleak House; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; and articles from Frederick Douglass’ Paper. We will also read criticism and theory by Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gérard Genette, Paul Gilroy, Jerome McGann, Meredith McGill, Walter Benn Michaels, Jennifer Wicks, and many others. The syllabus may evolve some, but Bleak House will remain on it no matter what; if you have never read it, you might want to get a head start over the summer. (Watching the miniseries doesn’t count.)
Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
ENG 684 – CULTURAL STUDIES: The British Tradition
PROF.
DAVID SCHMID
Friday
Registration Numbers: (A) 365884 (B)
499670
In an essay entitled, “Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a Manifesto,” Cary Nelson argues presciently that “of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America since the seventies, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural studies.” Nelson goes on
To describe the “casual dismissal” of the history of
cultural studies as “an interested effort to depoliticize a concept whose whole
prior history has been preeminently political and oppositional.” As an
antidote to the ignorance and opportunism that has characterized too many
appropriations of cultural studies in the
Richard Hoggart, The
Uses of Literacy
Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary”
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (selections)
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (selections)
Raymond Williams, Keywords (selections)
Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (selections)
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s
Stuart Hall et al (eds), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain
David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (selections)
Women’s Studies Group, Women
Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination
Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey (eds), Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies (selections)
Dick Hebdige, Subculture:
The Meaning of Style
Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
Paul Willis, Learning
to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs
Prof. Bruce Jackson
Monday, 3:30 6:10, Clemens 610 Registration Number: 358158
Faulkner was the most various of America's experimental writers: he delivered or found a different narrative mode for each of his major novels. He is also one of the few American novelists who was truly polyphonic: his characters' utterances scan so specifically you usually don't need "Sutpen said" or "Quentin said" to know who's talking (a good thing, since he often doesn't bother to write "Sutpen said" or "Quentin said."). We'll read and discuss Faulkner's major novels, several of his short stories, and some criticism. Students will do one oral report on a critical or biographical work or on one of the novels we're not reading, and a term paper.
ENG 699 – ETHNOPOETICS
Prof.
Dennis Tedlock
Tuesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 285127 (B) 292182
Ethnopoetics is a decentered
poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside
the Western tradition as we know it now. To have any hope of getting outside we
must set aside any notion we may have that these poetries will necessarily come
from a distant time, or from present-day peoples who are somehow living in the
past, or that they will necessarily resemble Homer, or that they will be less
complex than Western or metropolitan poetries, or that they will have been
produced in some kind of isolation from other languages or cultures.
Ethnopoetics
does not merely contrast the poetics of “ethnics” with just plain poetics, but
implies that any poetics is always an ethnopoetics. Our main interest will
indeed be the poetics of people who are ethnically distant from ourselves, but
it is precisely through 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. Contrary to M. M. Bakhtin, it is simply not true that multivocal
discourse is an invention of novelists, or that poetry must be monological.
The
assigned reading, in addition to handouts, will be as follows: John Miles
Foley, How to Read an 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 Visions of the living Maya.
Books are available at Talking Leaves,
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 128683 (B) 129173
This course will provide an introduction
to the research areas, faculty, and resources available in the field of American
literary and cultural studies. The majority of meetings will feature guest
lectures by faculty members of the Department of English and other related
departments; attendance at some events outside of class time may be necessary.
Given the structure of the course, the purpose is less to provide a comprehensive
historical overview than to offer an introduction to faculty members of interest,
to suggest the vast range of specializations, and to model the development
of research projects. The weekly lectures, assigned readings, and discussions
will address the following issues: the relationship between literary form
and concepts of nation and history; the development and impact of select literary
movements; the politics of canon formation; American exceptionalism; the nation-state,
transnationalism, borderlands, and diaspora; empire, imperialism, and (neo)colonialism;
indigeneity, immigration, and assimilation; racial formations and theories
of ethnicity; class and culture; gender dynamics, sexuality, women's writing,
and feminist and queer theories; and interdisciplinary approaches to studies
of American literature.
In addition to exploring possible
research areas, we will meet with a research librarian to become familiar
with significant resources in the field. We will review relevant journals,
professional organizations, and listservs. This course requires weekly attendance
and active participation in discussions. Written requirements include a conference
proposal and conference-length paper, a research proposal with bibliography,
and a final research paper.