DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

FALL 2007

 

 

                                                           

 

 

ENG 501 – INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS

                       

                        Prof. Andrew Stott

                        Tuesday 9:00-112:00, Clemens 436

                        Registration Numbers: (A) 440488  (B) 316692

 

           

 

All new students in the English Department’s M.A. Program are required to take English 501, which is designate3d 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 501 A 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 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 the B section of this course counts toward the five intensive seminars required for the degree.)

 

             

ENG 517 – ELIZABETHAN-JACOBEAN LITERATURE

Prof. Jim Swan

                        Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

                        Registration Numbers: (A) 020388  (B) 291261

What is public space? Where is it? And what or where is private space?  When Hamlet says the signs of grief and mourning he displays are merely “actions a man might play,” while he has “that within which passeth show” (i.e., surpasses, escapes representation) he points to a space of ultimate privacy, beyond the reach of word or image.  At first, this might seem a surprising thing to say in a theater, a place for seeing and listening. But it reminds us how, in a theater, what interests us is precisely what is not shown, or cannot be shown.  Consider, on the other hand, George W. Bush’s characteristic public gesture: his hand on his chest and the words, “In my heart I believe…[fill in the blank].”  The trope of sincerity and personal conviction, the illusion that “that within” is available for public display.  Consider too the cinematic medium in which this gesture gets made, its promise of a view of things as they are, and the inevitable close-up of—the truth of—the face.  (I recently asked undergraduates to say what difference it makes that the recent film of a Shakespeare play cuts much of the poetic dialogue from a very intense scene.  Most said it made no difference at all; some said the missing lines would just get in the way: they could see everything in the actors’ faces.)

 

The seminar will explore, in part, the relation between the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage and the media in which plays written for that stage are most commonly viewed today, with readings in early modern and 20th/21st century theater, film, and performance theory.  The seminar will also explore a series of questions concerning early modern representation of a public, political culture, chiefly on the stage, and how that relates to the American, TV-standard representation of today’s public sphere and political process.  For instance, to what extent do our media substitute the private and “personal” for the public and political?  How are we to read Hillary Clinton’s recent web-based video announcement of her run for the presidency? Downloadable and playable anywhere at home or on the road, on a plasma widescreen, a laptop, an iPod, it’s Hillary at home on her couch speaking to us on ours, offering “a conversation, with you, with America.”  In what sense is this a public moment? (Is “home theater” a contradiction in terms?)  To get a handle on such questions, we will read selections from Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, and from recent criticism of their work, linking their analysis of private and public spheres to our reading of early modern plays.

 

Likely texts include: Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, Richard II, Henry I

V, Henry V, Much Ado, Hamlet, Macbeth; Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday; Jonson, Bartholomew Fair; Dekker & Middleton, The Roaring Girl; Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

 

Each student will be asked to “kick-off” discussion of a text assigned for one of the seminar meetings.  This does not mean a full, formal presentation, but two or three questions that identify areas of interest in the text.  At the end of the semester, a substantial essay will be due.

 

 

ENG 522 – MILTON

 

            Prof. Scott Stevens

            Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

            Registration Numbers:  (A)  449216  (B)  350672

 

            This course will cover the range of Milton’s poetry and prose with primary attention to major works such as Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.  We will follow the development of the poet from his early lyric works through his political and polemical prose, culminating in his great Christian epic.  Students will greatly benefit from a familiarity with the English Bible and Greco-Roman mythology.

 

            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 525 –  THE ROMANTICS

 

            Prof. Susan Eilenberg

            Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412

            Registration Numbers:  (A) 184056   (B) 415852

 

            This course is designed as a semi-survey of five English romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, with a minor amount of Blake) whose anxieties about the possibility or impossibility of representation produced what amount often to inexplicit allegories of reading.  It is a semi-survey only because while considerations of proper survey-style breadth largely determine the outlines of the syllabus, loyalty to close reading and the often disorderly questions it develops will determine the manner of our procedure through that syllabus.  So although the romantics wrote more than anyone might reasonably attempt to read in a single semester, we will try to get through as much of the major material writings as we can, concentrating, however, on those pieces that have recently been at the center of critical debate.  I would like to pursue questions about the economy of creation and loss (which means of course questions about mourning and multiplication), about sympathy (what makes it possible, what makes it dangerous), about commensurability (also incommensurability, adequacy, and the sublime) and, especially, about analogy, identity, and the materialization of the figure.  I would hope to maintain a balance between plain reading, close and massive, and thesis-mongering.

 

            Each student will present a short, informal essay before the class, deliver a response to someone else’s informal essay presented before the class, and write a longer formal essay to be handed in at the end of the term.

 

 

ENG 537 – POETRY AFTER GETTYSBURG

 

            Prof. Cristanne Miller

            Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

            Registration Numbers:  (A)  184056   (B)  415852

 

            This seminar asks what effect the American Civil War had on the genre of poetry, looking briefly at poetry written before and during the war, and then with greater intensity at poems written between 1865 and 1900.  Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman defined with great power and persuasiveness the potential of a national poetic before the war.  Whitman, in particular, not only proclaimed that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” but that to the extent that you follow his directives (“This is what you shall do”), the reader also becomes a poem in his or her own “very flesh,” down to “the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body” (1855 Preface).  The Civil War disrupts this ebullient concept of a “United” United States, and poetry written both during and after the war manifests that disruption.  Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson write at length in response to the war—Melville publishing his first book of verse, and Dickinson writing nearly two-thirds of her total poetic production between 1861 and 1865.  Why do no poets emerge following the war that posterity has judged to be great until the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century?  We will look at how late nineteenth-century poets grapple with cultural, national, and generic crises in their verse.  Do they turn to realism? Nostalgia? Descriptive detail?  And what do these patterns mean, for individual poets, for poetry as a genre, and for understanding the beginnings of modernism?  These are questions we will consider through work of male and female poets, Caucasian and African American, writing from urban and rural areas and from local and international perspectives, and voicing perspectives characterizing both the North and South.

 

            Students in the seminar will be required to work intensely on a single poet, of their choice.  In addition to Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson, all students will read work by Frances Harper, Sarah Piatt, Henry Timrod, Sidney Lanier, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Stephen Crane.  As context for the focus on poetry and this generation’s attempt to construct a workable poetics, we will read Theodor Adorno on the relation of lyric poetry to cultural crisis, various authors on the politics of nostalgia (including Freud), some historical work on the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, and some critical synopses of late nineteenth-century American poetry and culture—including parts of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, Mary Loeffelholz’s  From School to Salon, Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets, and Shira Wolosky’s Poetry and Public Discourse: American Poetry 1855-1900.  While the focus of the course is quite specific in its location in the United States following the Civil War, the methodology and questions we will pursue might provide a model for students thinking about the intersection of genre (particularly poetry) with cultural studies in any period of great social unrest or change.

 

 

ENG 578 – MisREADINGS:  THE FICTION WRITER AS CRITIC, THE CRITIC       

                              AS FICTION WRITER

 

                        Prof. Dimitri Anastasopoulos

                        Wednesday 7:00 – 9:40, Clemens 436

                        Registration Numbers:  (A) 239869   (B) 144218

 

In this course, we will read the novels and critical essays of selected fiction writers in order to investigate the terms by which they elaborate, critique, and/or misread (as the case may be) the writing of other novelists.  Taking Maurice Blanchot’s fictions as well his theories of fiction and fictional language as the lynchpin of the seminar, the class will begin by reading several of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories (ex. “The Nose” and “The Overcoat”), before turning to Nabokov’s critical work on Gogol and Nabokov’s novel Lolita.  From the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way), we will then turn to Beckett’s critical book on Proust as well as Beckett’s novel Watt.  From Franz Kafka’s The Trial, we will turn to Blanchot’s several essays on Kafka, then to Blanchot’s fictions Thomas the Obscure and Madness of the Day.  We will continue on to Helene Cixous’ comparative essay of Blanchot’s fiction and the novels of Claice Lispector, then to a reading of Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star and Cixous’ novel Promethea. 

 

Finally, we’ll end with a consideration of Robbe-Grillet’s “New Novel” project and its execution in the fiction Jealousy.  The structure of this course, in other words, will take on a “chain-link” approach that connects writers to writers, their fictions, as well as their theories on writing in order to investigate the poetics of writers as they describe them in their own terms.  We will ask questions such as: why does Nabokov deem Gogol a “ventriloquist” (with regard to the question of realism), or Gogol’s fictions “four-dimensional?”  What do thee terms reveal about Nabokov’s own techne, and the problems of narration he undertakes to resolve in his own work?  By investigating the roles of both writer and critic with which writers have alternately played during their careers, this course hopes to answer not just how writers think about fiction when they write, but to also identify the problems with which they struggle—how they choose to elaborate the questions they have asked  themselves about fiction in critical forms.

 

 

ENG 583 – THE TRANSATLANTIC TURBINE: Contemporary Anglo-American

                        Poetic Negotiations

 

                        Prof. Steve McCaffery

                        Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 438

                        Registration Numbers: (A)  234615   (B) 145968

 

 

            This course explores formal and politico-cultural negotiations between British and American poetry from the 1970s to current.  From the creative aftershock of the New American Poetry (first formulated and anthologized in 1960) the course traces similarities, divergences and anfractuosities that will sometimes strengthen, yet often critique, the feasibility of national cultural constructions and period groupings.  We will engage a number of questions: why did British poetry fall so radically out of favor in the 1970s?  What influences helped formulate the “new (i.e. post-Larkin) British poetries?  Why did sound and concrete poetry find a salient base in England and not America?  How did British presses and small press magazines help formulate the New American canon and vice versa?  Why did a British Language Poetry take root and manifest as a radical disjunctive poetics but was never theorized by its practitioners?  What comparative “schools” can be traced? 

 

The course will engage numerous theoretical texts and some critical books but will not sacrifice integral study of the poems themselves.  In addition to seminar discussion, the dynamic of the course will be enhanced by a number of visitors?  both poets and scholars of the area.  The course is also designed to encourage students to explore the fecund resources of the Poetry Collection and textual research within the archives will be strongly encouraged.

 

 

ENG 584 – POETICS

 

                        Prof. Myung Mi Kim

                        Thursday 12:30, Clemens  318

Registration Numbers:  (A)  275192   (B) 473998

 

            (Description not yet available.)

 

 

ENG 585 – CULTURE AND CONTACT: THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1400-1800

                                   

Prof. Erik Seeman   (History Department)

                                    Wednesday 4:00-6:40, Park 532      

Registration No. 421496

 

Between 1400 and 1800, the peoples of Europe, Africa, North America, and South America became enmeshed in an increasingly dense web of cultural contacts.  Out of curiosity, desire for trade, and lust for power arouse a new entity: the Atlantic World, with origins in all four continents but with a cultural vocabulary all its own.

 

Students will engage with this vibrant and growing field in several ways: through the theoretical literature on cultural contact and colonization; using primary sources written by the colonizers and the colonized; and by reading important secondary books.

 

The themes we will explore include: the role of Africans in the Atlantic world and the persistence of African culture in the New World; the role of coercion and domination in the interactions in the Atlantic world; the links between global economic shifts and the lived experience of ordinary people; religion as an agent of imperialism and a buttress of resistance; the role that travel writing and contact narratives played in “possessing” the New World.

 

Requirements for this class are two short papers, a class presentation, and one 12-15 page final paper, in addition to informed participation in discussion.  Class discussion will constitute the majority of the final grade, with the written assignments making up the balance.

 

The syllabus may be viewed at http://buffalo.edu/~seeman/534syllabus.html

 

Because of its interdisciplinary nature, this course is appropriate for graduate students in English, American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Anthropology.

 

Readings include Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991); Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: The Seventeenth Century Lives (1995); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (1992); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688); and Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways (1555).

 

 

ENG 599 – PRACTICUM IN TEACHING

 

                        Prof. Mili Clark

                        Thursday 9:00-12:00, Clemens 128A

                        Registration Number:  208748

                       

 

            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 128A).  We will begin at 9:30 in Clemens 128 with hands-on work at the computers, including the instructor’s station.  We will model in advance how to teach the various elements of the page-design syllabus.  At 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, 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 613 – NOVEL EPISTEMOLOGIES

 

                        Prof. Ruth Mack

                        Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

                        Registration Numbers:  (A) 372690 (B)  094320

 

This is a course on the novel—or, more precisely, on “novel.”  Our first set of questions will be about the novel’s ways of knowing.  We will look to the historical moment when the novel genre was consolidated in eighteenth-century Britain, and we will examine some of the epistemological discourses that the novel made its own.  Since the novel tended to devour every genre and philosophical position in its path, this will mean reading (and reading about) everything from newspapers, to romances, to philosophical treatises.  Here we will be concerned primarily with how what we now call the novel perpetuates philosophical and cultural ways of knowing the world and with how those ways of knowing are connected to eighteenth-century modernity.

 

Our second set of questions follows from the first and may be less kind to the novel.  We will look at the novel’s newness.  What if the name does not say it all?  How is the novel different from a romance if it borrows its plot?  What separates a novel from a criminal biography or a newspaper?  Is it still a novel if it calls itself a “life” or a “history”?  These questions—and their implications—have dominated twentieth- and twenty-first century views of the genre.  We will be concerned with the cultural stakes of the novel’s “newness”—both with what is gained and lost in claiming something new and with the cultural and aesthetic value of the new.

 

There will be assigned reading for the first day of class (please check your email or my office door).

 

Texts I am considering for the course are: John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks; Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela and Love in Excess; Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom; Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild; John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill); Ann Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance.   We also will read later theorists of the novel, among them Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Lennard Davis, Nancy Armstrong, Homer Brown, and Catherine Gallagher.

 

Requirements (intensive): annotated bibliography, short presentation paper, final 20-pp. paper.

 

 

 

ENG 625 – STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: CRITICAL RACE

                    THEORY IN A NINETEENTH CENTURY US CONTEXT

 

Prof. Carrie Bramen

                        Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

                        Registration Numbers:  (A) 356929   (B)  004059

 

This course will explore how race was constructed as a concept in the nineteenth century through a wide range of primary readings in literature, philosophy, autobiography and legal case studies.  We’ll begin the course by stepping back into the eighteenth century and examine how anthropological writings by Kant, Blumenbach, and Herder shaped nineteenth century understandings of the term.  Then we’ll turn to nineteenth century theories of polygenesis, proslavery tracts, early black atlantic studies, sentimentalism and abolitionism, to name but a few of the thematic rubrics of the course.  Some of the questions we’ll ask include: What were the competing theories of race in the nineteenth century?  How does a notion of racial difference construct the ‘human’?  How does whiteness evolve as the identity in the nineteenth century? And how does race become an organizing structure for a certain way of seeing culture, reading literature, and configuring aesthetic beauty (the octoroon, for instance, was seen as the apex of beauty in the 1840s).  We’ll supplement our readings with historical scholarship about the period, including Walter Johnson’s Soul By Soul: Life inside the antebellum slave market, George Stocking’s Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays on the History of Anthropology and George Fredrickson’s The Black Image in the White Mind.  Finally, we’ll attempt to grapple with a fundamental methodological question: Can nineteenth century conceptions of race be analyzed using contemporary race theory?  If so, then we’ll need to reflect on the significance of ‘anachronism’ as a critical practice within historical scholarship.

 

Possible Primary Sources:  The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott; George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!  Or, Slaves Without Masters (1857); Martin Delany, Blake, W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Piutes, Ida B. Wells, The Red Record, Abolitionist speeches, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred,  Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought?, Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Jacobs,  Lincoln (speeches), Mark Twain Pudd’nhead Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition.

 

Likely Secondary Sources:  Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solomos; Race Critical Theories, ed Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg; Robyn Wiegman, “Anatomy of a Lynching,” Annette Gordon-Reed, Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, Ezra Tawil, The Making of Racial Sentiment; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, Thomas Gossett, Race (Rpt. Oxford UP).

 

Requirements:  Weekly one-page reading responses; seminar paper (15-20 pp). 

 

Summer reading:  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton Critical Edition), George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind.

 

 

 

 

 

ENG 653 – CRITICAL THEORY

Prof. James Holstun                                      Reg. Nos. (A) 163266

            Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538                                   (B)  454246

                                   

Like Visine®, the Atlantic gets the red out. In this course, I’ll argue the upside of bloodshot. We’ll begin with works by Marx and Engels: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx’s early phenomenology of alienated labor), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (his account of a fascist coup), and excerpts from The Grundrisse (on method), The German Ideology (on strangely familiar “Young Hegelians”), and Capital I and III (on commodity fetishism, surplus value, primitive accumulation, and the mode of production).

 

We’ll then turn to three clusters of twentieth-century marxist cultural theory that tend to be actively ignored in the US. First, Georg Lukács: we’ll read his History and Class Consciousness, the founding text of the western marxist tradition, along with his recently-discovered defense of this work against proto-Stalinist critics, Slavoj Žižek’s “Georg Lukács as the Philosopher of Leninism,” and Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. We’ll also read some of Lukács’s critiques of modernism, some chapters of his Historical Novel, all of Aesthetics and Politics (a.k.a. “The Brecht-Lukács Debates”), and Fredric Jameson and Michael Sayeau on reification and narrative in Conrad.

 

We’ll then turn to the marxist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the real innommable of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, reading excerpts from Situations and The Critique of Dialectical Reason (including all of its preface, published separately as Search for a Method), Jameson on the Critique, Thomas Flynn on the repressed debate between Sartre and Foucault, some Sartre literary criticism, and Ed White’s “The Ourang-Outang Situation” on Sartre, slave rebellions, and Poe.

 

We’ll conclude with Red theories of imperialism and culture, including Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Fanon’s “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, and essays by Sartre, Aijaz Ahmad, Sumit Sarkar, Neil Lazarus, Barbara Harlow, and Benita Perry.

 

I’ll try to be clear, not vatic, and I don’t assume any prior knowledge of marxist literary criticism and theory. Everyone will write weekly semiformal short essays (half an hour’s writing or so), with the goal of an informed and committed melee rather than designated presenters and listeners. If you take the seminar intensively, you’ll also write a long paper—perhaps synthesizing your work for the semester in an analytical review essay on a significant work of historical materialist theory, history, or criticism in your field. You’ll have a light week late in the semester to give you time to do the necessary reading.

 

Texts at Talking Leaves Bookstore and Queen City Imaging. I’ll distribute a CD with various materials for you at the beginning of the semester. I’ll firm up the syllabus late this summer—write me for details at jamesholstun@hotmail.com.

 

 

ENG 680 – TRAUMA, HISTORY AND THE BODY IN

                                                ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Prof. Susan Moynihan

                        Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412

                        Registration Numbers:  (A) 413270   (B)  119739

 

            This seminar will critically engage contemporary theories of trauma in the interpretation of Asian American and Asian diasporic literature.  Emphasizing the impact of the deconstructive school of trauma theory, particularly the influence of Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth, we will consider the basis of such approaches in Freud and Lacan, lines of tension as with Ruth Leys and Dominick LaCapra, the implication of trauma theories for literary and cultural criticism as with Leigh Gilmore’s “limit-cases” of autobiography or Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, as well as the implications for theorists of Asian American and the Asian diaspora such as Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Leslie Bow, and Rey Chow.

 

            Theories of trauma are relevant for the study of Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, certainly because the legacies of colonialism, war, internment, and genocide easily can be seen as traumatic in terms of the violent fracturing of lives, but also because the dynamics of trauma can illuminate, on the level of culture, politics, and the nation, the desire and yet inability to represent and reconcile historical events and catastrophic occurrences.  Trauma is marked by a crisis in time, knowledge, and narration—a crisis that opens up possibilities in how we think about the subject, history, and reference.  Our readings of the texts will contend with Orientalist projections, the trauma of racialization, and negotiations of silence and inscrutability.  We will consider how trauma is registered on the racialized body and how it shapes the constructs of the immigrant and refugee; how sexual trauma plays out in relation to projections of the foreign and the strange; and how trauma impacts modes of belonging and transnational affiliations.  Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s  Blu’s Hanging will be discussed regarding the crisis it created in the formation of Asian American Studies as an epistemological project and as a political coalition.

 

Possible literary texts include the following:

            Alexander, Meena.  Shock of Arrival

            Chee, Alexander.  Edinburgh

            Galang, M. Evelina.  One Tribe

            Him, Chanrithy.  When Broken Glass Floats

            Keller, Nora Okja.  Comfort Woman

            Lê thi diem thuy.  The Gangster We Are All Looking For

            Lim, Shirley Geok-lin.  Among the White Moon Faces

            Ng, Fae Myenne.  Bone

            Okada, John.  No-No Boy

            Ondaatje, Michael.  In the Skin of a Lion

            Yamanaka, Louis-Ann.  Blu’s Hanging

and selected stories of G.S. Sharat Chandra, Lan Samantha Chang, Jocelyn Lieu, Aimee Phan, and Javaid Qazi.

 

 

ENG 682  - MYTHOLOGY

 

                        Prof. Diane Christian

                        Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 610

                        Registration Numbers:  (A)  204164  (B) 022095

 

 

            “Mythology is somebody else’s religion” Robert Graves remarked when the publishers of The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology first forced him to exclude Biblical Mythology in their compendium.  Mythology, Barthes proposes, is “a type of speech” where meaning is transformed into form, where we can study “ideas-in-form.”  The course will survey historical ideas about mythology from Plato to Voltaire to Levi-Strauss, but we’ll concentrate on primary myths about gender from the ancient to the modern world.  Genesis, for example, offers two versions of gender origin: male and female created in the divine image and Adam molded from clay from whose rib Eve is made.  Ideas and laws about nature, order and sex are based on the stories.  Eurynome is an originating and controlling female in ancient Greece and Atum a parallel male in Egypt.  We’ll look at mythic moves between male and female and at ideas of conflict, dominance, and eros.   We’ll consider how genders form and relate in primal myths from around the world and take longer looks at Hebrew, Greek, Dogan, Mayan, and Science (Darwin, Hardy) stories.

 

 

ENG 684 – READINGS IN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

 

                        Prof. David Schmid

                        Thursday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 538

                        Registration Numbers:  (A) 334627   (B)   409014

 

 

Exactly what happened to the discipline of cultural studies when it was ‘exported’ from its original home in Britain to the American academy, along with the reasons for what happened, have been the source of much controversy.  The conventional way of telling the story of this move has emphasized its post-lapsarian dimensions, with Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies playing the role of Eden, and the United States being typecast, once again, as a cultural and political wasteland.  Although this version may not be entirely inaccurate, it is neither helpful nor nuanced, and this seminar will be dedicated to building a more detailed and constructive sense of what exactly we mean by American Cultural Studies.  We will begin by reviewing some of the most direct overlaps between the British and American versions of cultural studies, in the form of international conferences.  We will then discuss some of the ‘classic’ texts of American cultural studies (although we will also be calling into question the very notion of ‘classic,’ that is, canonical cultural studies texts), followed by some of the most exciting work currently being done in the field.  Throughout the seminar, we will put pressure on both the utility and practicality of the idea that cultural studies can or should be thought of primarily in terms of national traditions.  We will therefore conclude the seminar by focusing on the emergence of transnational cultural studies, a field that we will study in much greater detail at a later date.

 

Course Texts:

 

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.

Lawrence Grossberg et al (eds.) Cultural Studies.

Michael Denning. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America.

Michael Denning.  The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century.

Janice Radway. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.

Janice Radway. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste,, and Middle-Class Desire.

Andrew Ross. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.

Gina Dent (ed.). Black Popular Culture.

Henry Giroux. Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies.

Douglas Kellner. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern.

Tricia Rose. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.

Leerom Medovoi. Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity.

Rob Latham. Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption.

Mary Celeste Kearney. Girls Make Media.

José David Saldivar. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies.

 

Requirements:

Students taking the class extensively are required to write short (22-3 page) response papers for each of our meetings, and a 5-7 page mid-term page.  Students taking the class intensively are also required to write a 20-25 page research paper.

 

 

 

ENG 685 – DOCUMENTARY PRAXIS

 

                        Prof. Bruce Jackson

                        Monday 3:30-6:10 – Clemens 610

                        Registration Number:  332374

 

 

            This is a seminar in documentary praxis: making documentary and looking at how other people make documentaries.  All participants will be required to do a presentation on the work of a major documentary artist in any visual medium (Fred Wiseman, Sebastiao Salgado, George Catlin, Walker Evans, Errol Morris) and undertake a documentary project of their own in any medium.  We’ll deal with definition of a project, ethics of doing it, editing, and what comes next. 

 

Participants will present work in progress during the semester and a final project, or something close to it, at the end of it.  Projects can be already in progress when the semester begins.

 

 

 

ENG 697 – DEFINITIONS OF AMERICA

 

                        Prof. Robert Daly

                        Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

                        Registration Numbers:  (A) 366307  (B)  397473     

 

 

            We shall read, within their reciprocal cultural contexts, several writings that help to define, create, or revise our national cultures, both the discourse of nationalism and what Julia Kristeva calls the discourses of “nations without nationalism.”  We shall attend to their interactions with other cultures, with conversations among them, and with the ways in which they are both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their times and ours) and hermeneutic (affording practice and instruction in the arts of interpretation).  Ecocriticism, feminism, ecofeminism, trauma theory, rhetorical hermeneutics, literary anthropology, cultural criticism, post-analytic philosophy, virtue ethics, cultural theory, and any other theories we find useful will be welcome in our discussions of these texts but will not replace them.

 

            We shall explore these works as what Richard Lanham has recently called acts of attention, ways of schooling us in “the economics of attention” through which we alternately participate in the world and reflect upon it, ways of developing what he calls “proleptic agility,” the ability to respond quickly and well to new experiences because we have already thought about variations on the complex patterns they enact. [The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.]

 

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 [The Way We Argue Now. Princeton, Princeton UP, 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.”

 

            In Jonathan Culler’s words, we shall explore the roles that literature “and narrative technique play” in rethinking “the conditions of possibility of the nation” [The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007].

 

            Each student will do one seminar report (15-20 minutes), and each student taking the seminar intensively (for full credit) will also do one research essay on a topic of his or her own choosing.

 

Texts:

William Andrews, ed., Classic American Autobiographies (Mentor, Penguin)

            [contains Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, and Zitkala-Sa]

Susanna Haswell Rowson, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, ed. Cathy N. Davidson

            (Oxford)

Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Signet)

James Fennimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Signet)

Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts

            (Rutgers UP)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris

            (Norton Critical Edition)

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Larry J. Reynolds

            (Norton Critical Edition)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Bedford)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 2d ed., ed. William Rossi (Norton Critical Edition)

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Bedford)

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (Signet)

 

            These texts will be available at Talking Leaves Bookstore.

 

 

ENG 699 – ETHNOPOETICS

 

                        Prof. Dennis Tedlock

                        Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538                 

Registration Numbers:  (A)  224544    (B) 005925

 

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 fully 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, Gray 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 diction 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.  Linguistics 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.

 

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