DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
SPRING 2002
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ENG 522 - MILTON
Prof. Mili Clark
Tuesday 12:20-15:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 046491 (B) 036477
ENG 525 - ROMANTICS
Prof. Susan Eilenberg
Tuesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 154470 (B) 147493
ENG 527 - MYTHOLOGY
Prof. Diane Christian
Thursday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 260344 (B) 153628
ENG 545 - MODERN LITERATURE
Prof. Nathan Grant
Tuesday 12:30-15:l0, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 420315 (B) 040495
ENG 549 - CREATIVE WRITING POETRY
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 19:00-21:40, Clemens 412
Registration Number: 245301
ENG 584 - POETICS OF ADJACENCY: SMALL PRESS, INNOVATIVE POETRY, MEDIA THEORY AND HYPERTEXT
Prof. Loss Pequeño Glazier
Wednesday 12:30-15:l0, Baldy 110
Registration Number: (A) 309604 (B) 029887
ENG 589/489 - INTENSIVE SURVEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
Prof. Max Wickert
Monday 16:00-18:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 473329
ENG 593/493 - MULTICULTURAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Prof. Robert Newman
Tuesday 16:00-18:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 184045
ENG 607 - STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
Prof. James Holstun
Monday 12:30-15:l0, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 464464 (B) 393015
ENG 609 - STUDIES 19C AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Neil Schmitz
Monday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 093023 (B) 493367
ENG 648 - PSYCHO-ANALYTIC CRITICISM
Prof. Joan Copjec
Wednesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 117412 (B) 409912
ENG 652 - LITERARY THEORY 2
Prof. Joseph Conte
Wednesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 364532 (B) 000599
ENG 679 - LEVINAS
Prof. Jill Robbins
Wednesday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 200251 (B) 034624
ENG 684 - WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION
Prof. Mili Clark
Registration Number: 488622
ENG 685 - TRANSATLANTIC STUDIES
Prof. Scott Stevens
Thursday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 346609 (B) 388789
ENG 689 - CONTEMPORARY AVANT-GARDE VISUAL PROSODY
Prof. Ming Quian Ma
Thursday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 071969 (B) 442208
ENG 690 - RHETORICAL DELIBERATION
Prof. Arabella Lyon
Monday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 041623 (B) 220368
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CROSS-REGISTERED COURSES
ENG 701 - BLACK POETICS
Prof. Christian Onikepe
Monday 16:10-18:50, Park 250
Registration Number: 421383
ENG 702 - WOMEN DIRECTORS
Thursday 12:00-15:20, DFA 232
Registration Number: 175782
ENG 704 - CULTURAL HISTORY SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Prof. James Bono
Tuesday 16:00-18:40, Park 532
Registration Number: 147302
DESCRIPTIONS
ENG 522 - MILTON
Prof. Mili Clark
Tuesday 12:20-15:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 046491 (B) 036477
When Milton was an advanced undergraduate at Cambridge University, he argued that poetry lifts us from the sullied mundane through the strange pleasure of rhetoric to move, or displace, us from where we are to an all-seeing prospect. All history, all literature and art, all science are open to us (a couple of centuries later Shelley would make the same claim for poets/poetry as positioned at the center of all time.
…your mind should not consent to be limited and circumscribed by the earth's boundaries, but should range beyond the confines of the world. Let it reach the summit of knowledge and learn to know itself and at the same time to know those blessed minds and intelligences with whom hereafter it will enter into eternal fellowship.
The strange pleasure of rhetoric which animates poetry usurps the psyche of the reader/hearer; it animates the reader/hearer until sh/e is a poem (like a poem?). Classical in origin, such a theory of poetic efficacy suits the youthful Milton who dreamed of achieving status with the greats of the past, Ovid, Homer, Virgil. The problem with the theory is that if rhetoric can indeed exercise such control of the reader/hearer, what is to prevent an evil poet from using its power for his own evil ends? Is the psyche of the reader/hearer passive before the coercive power of rhetoric, or can the reader/hearer seize the power inhabiting a text and use it to propel his not-so-blessed desires toward their objects? Such questions came to occupy the mature Milton in Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained and from the core of his argument against censorship in Areopagitica, where Milton downplays rhetoric's power, arguing that nothing can separate a fool from his folly or deflect a good man from his goodness. In fact, in
Areopagitica, the relationship between a text and the reader/hearer's psyche is less important than the relationship between texts, as though the texts do battle with one another, the good texts winning out over the evil texts in the mind of the reader/hearer.
In addition to reading Milton's major poems and some prose, we'll do some background reading on classical-medieval-renaissance poetic theory.
Response papers, a presentation, and a final paper.
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ENG 525 - THE ROMANTICS
Prof. Susan Eilenberg
Tuesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 154470 (B) 147493
This course is designed as a semi-survey of five English romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and a very minor amount of Blake) whose anxieties about the possibility or impossibility of representation produced what amount often to inexplicit allegories of reading. It is a semi-survey only because while considerations of proper survey-style breadth largely determine the outlines of the syllabus, loyalty to close reading and the often disorderly questions it develops will determine the manner of our procedure through that syllabus. So although the romantics wrote more than anyone might reasonably attempt to read in a single semester, we will try to get through as much of the major material writings as we can, concentrating, however, on those pieces that have recently been at the center of critical debate. I would like to pursue questions about the economy of creation and loss (which means of course too questions about mourning and multiplication), about sympathy (what makes it possible, what makes it dangerous), about commensurability (also incommensurability, adequacy, and the sublime) and, especially, about analogy, identity, and the materialization of the figure. I would hope to maintain a balance between plain reading, close and massive, and thesis-mongering.
Each student will present a short, informal essay before the class, deliver a response to someone else's short, informal essay, and write a longer formal essay to be handed in at the end of the term.
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ENG 527 - MYTHOLOGY
Prof. Diane Christian
Thursday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 260344 (B) 153628
"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 origin and gender from the ancient to the modern world. Genesis, for example, offers two ideas 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 these 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 we'll take longer looks at Hebrew, Greek, Dogon, Mayan and Science (Darwin) stories.
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ENG 545 - MODERN LITERATURE
Prof. Nathan Grant
Tuesday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 420315 (B) 040495
While Walt Whitman, looking both in and beyond the Gilded Age in Democratic Vistas (1870) envisioned a new American art that was "commensurate with the people," he exhorted the American consciousness to cherish and advance the
highest of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the peculiar combinations and the outshows of that city, age, or race, its particular modes of the universal attributes and passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and gods, wars, traditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys (or the subtle spirit of these),
having been pass'd on to us to illumine our own selfhood, and its experiences--what they supply, indispensable and highest, if taken away, nothing else in all the world's boundless storehouses could make up to us, or even again return.
This variegated selfhood of the American consciousness would be articulated anew--and perhaps more definitively--in naturalism's contest with realism and with the Left consciousness that nourished that contest. While realism's effects of middle-class choice and alterity with come into crisis in the 20s, these elements are both counterbalanced and in conversation with naturalism's effects of a suspended despair and an active determinism. It is this conversation that aids the realization of Whitman's hope for the 20th century.
Authors and titles may include Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country; Frank Norris, The Octopus; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: A Novel of the Thirties; William Faulkner, Light in August; Willa Cather, The Professor's House.
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ENG 549 - CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 19:00-21:40, Clemens 412
Registration Number: 245301
A workshop course in which students' original work will be discussed.
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ENG 584 - POETICS OF ADJACENCY: SMALL PRESS, INNOVATIVE POETRY, MEDIA THEORY AND HYPERTEXT
Prof. Loss Pequeño Glazier
Wednesday 12:30-3:l0, Clemens
Registration Numbers: (A) 309604 (B) 029887
We will be looking at the role of adjacency in poetry and at how adjacency informs the literary object. This will involve a look at the impact of adjacency on literary culture in the second half of the twentieth century in the context of the little magazine (their relationship to literary communities and the culture of adjacency of authors within particular magazines), specific innovative poets (e.g., Albiach, Bernstein, Coolidge, Creeley, Eigner, Fourcade, Graffi, Hocquard, Howe, Kim, Raworth, Retallack,. Waldrop, and other poets in translation, possibly including Cuban poets), media theories/adjacency of online presence (Kate Hayles, Pierre Levy, Janet Murray, etc.), and concepts of hypertext (M. Joyce, Landow, Bolter, Rosenberg, scholarly and experimental hypertext projects). Specific authors and texts will be announced later.
The broader context of adjacency in cultural and literary production, both print and digital, will serve as a grounding for the examination of specific works. Namely, we will look at the poetics of adjacency/disjuncture of adjacent lines in poetry, taking our investigation down to the dynamic that gives the poem its "edge."
The seminar will also be informed by a planned Humanities Computing Symposium to take place at UB in April, 2002. The symposium will have panels and practica on literary computing projects, and will bring numerous leading scholars in the field to Buffalo. Students should plan to attend these events. In addition, visits by specific poets will also be included in the course context.
Course Requirements: Students will be asked to give two oral presentations. One will be a literary history of a little magazine (historic or current), electronic journal, small press, media theory, form of hypertext practice/hypertext project, from the perspective of adjacency. The second will be a presentation on "micro-adjacency", the poetics, politics, and aesthetics of the adjacency within texts of specific poets (those named above or others). The final project will be a paper or Web-based project on a topic related to course content and may include literary histories of little magazines/digital projects, examination of the poetics of individual authors (or an author page project), investigations of concepts of community and space as represented in media theories, taxonomies of hypertext practice/critiques of hypertext theories, or other related topics.
The seminar can accommodate particular interests/areas of investigation students might have. I would be pleased to hear of any specific interests before the semester begins.
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ENG 589 - INTENSIVE SURVEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE/Formation
of the British Canon
Prof. Max Wickert
Monday, 15:30-l7:30, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 473329
"English Literature" as an academic discipline is a recent arrival. It was not taught in universities until Hugh Blair was named Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh in the 1770's and not until rather later elsewhere (Oxford did not acknowledge it as a formal subject until 1885). Still, the idea that there were texts uniquely expressive of "Englishness," untranslatable and worth perpetuating and privileging, is as old as the Venerable Bede's celebration of Caedmon in 73l. The millennium between Bede and Blair saw the emergence of a canonical accumulation of works around an often fuzzy axis that leads through Chaucer, Caxton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, and Pope to Samuel Johnson and beyond.
The forces that determined the emergence of that canon, the works, genres and authors that it includes or excludes, the assumptions that its formation implicitly perpetuates or suppresses, and the difference for good or ill that its very idea makes have recently become increasingly problematic topics. Yet it is still widely assumed that standard (if frequently re-edited) anthologies like The Norton Anthology of English Literature embody, if not the essential, yet an indispensable repository of knowledge for anyone who would claim expertise in the subject. English 489/589 functions both as an intensive introduction to the canon (or what remains of it) and as a forum for questions about its continuing value.
Undergraduates who enroll in the course must register for both English 489 and English 49l. (These courses are not available separately.) They will read all of the selections in Volume One of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, which will be the basis for three weekly one-hour lectures per week, plus one weekly two-hour late-afternoon seminar involving ancillary presentations (conferences, guest lectures, discussion workshops, audio-visual supplements, factual drills). For them the most concrete benefit of the course will be as a grounding in materials that are widely considered standard, and which tend to be important parts of placement test like the Graduate Record Examinations and of other qualifying mechanisms, including job interviews. This course is the famous "Supersurvey," which has shepherded many advanced majors in the past toward graduate school and/or the teaching of English.
Graduate students should register for English 589 as for a formal three-hour, once-weekly graduate seminar. While they are welcome to audit the 489 lectures in addition, they are not required to do so. They are, however, expected to keep abreast all the 489 reading assignments. In consultation with the instructor, they will take turns in devising appropriate presentations for the 49l workshops which will constitute the first two hours of most seminars and may take a variety of forms: readings of seminar papers followed but by question periods on particular texts, authors, issues, or periods; audio or video presentations to supplement reading assignments; staged debates; round-table responses to occasional faculty guest lecturers or to selected undergraduate papers; etc. The undergraduates will be excused from the seminar's final hour-and-a-half , which is reserved for graduate-level discussion.
Whatever form these seminars take, they should, ideally, have some bearing not only on the week's reading assignments, but on questions that relate them to the formation of the English literary canon, such as: How, when, by whom and for whom was that canon established, constructed, and/or altered? Do canonical authors explicitly or implicitly think of themselves as constituting, modifying, conforming to or defying the canon, or of writing in its shadow? What contextual perspective does a particular work presuppose (that is, presumed familiarity with other texts; assumed exclusions related to theme, class, mode, race, status, ethnicity, language, genre, etc.)? In what way are they related to concepts of "nationhood" or assumptions of ethnic "mainstreaming"? Apart from the obvious value of a refresher course in the British tradition, the chief benefit of English 589 to graduate students might be to foster a habit of recognizing and critically confronting the institutionalized values implicit in the English canon, or perhaps in any canon whatever.
Evaluation and grading:
Undergraduates--regular attendance, active participation in the generation of quiz materials, regular short factual quizzes, objective mid-semester examinations, at least two
medium-length (6-8 page) papers, comprehensive final examination (half objective, half essay.)
Graduate students--at least two individual projects, with an extensive written report on at least one of them.
Required texts for both undergraduate and graduate students:
Stephen Greenblatt et al. (edd.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume One (Norton)
Max Wickert, A Chronology of English Literature (Makin' Copies)
Robert M. Adams, The Land and Literature of England (Norton)
Additional required texts for graduate students:
Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford)
Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries (MLA)
Recommended texts for undergraduates (good books to own, but easily accessible in the Reference section of Lockwood Library):
Margaret Drabble, Oxford Guide to English Literature (Oxford)
Ian Ousby, Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge)
Recommended additional texts for graduates (I will try to place these on reserve):
Franklin Court, Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford)
Volumes in the 'Critical Heritage Series' (Routledge) on Chaucer, Spenser, Chakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Johnson
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ENG 593 - BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Prof. Robert Newman
Tuesday 16:00-18:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 184045
(Auto) Biography involves a paradox: individual lives are to be understood in terms of the cultural and historical forces that shaped them and yet also as unique and individual reactions to such forces. We will explore this paradox in relation to a number of classic and contemporary (auto) biographies: for the classical examplars, Augustine, Rousseau, Boswell, Frederick Douglass, Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), Mary Antin, Jacob Riis, for the contemporary, such key texts as Marianna DeMarco Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, Sherman Alexie's "Smoke Signals" (a movie), Charles McBride's Color of Water, Carolyn See's Dreaming, Hard Luck and Good Times in America, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Debra Dickerson's American Story, and other possibilities among those books that examine life anew from the perspectives of race, class, ethnicity and gender.
We will also look at a recent text dealing with the criticism and theory of (auto)biography.
Requirements include a critical essay, an optional (auto)biographical essay, class attendance and participation. As to the final paper, this may be the chance for you to do the family biography you've always wanted to do!
Graduate students (enrolled under ENG 593) will be expected to submit a reading list of additional primary and secondary texts for analysis and reporting on to the class as a whole.
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ENG 607 - STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE: COMMONWEALTH: LITERATURE AND CLASS STRUGGLE IN TUDOR ENGLAND
Prof. James Holstun
Monday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 464464 (B) 393015
This will be a perverse class. It will be a class in marxist theory, but we won't be talking much about industrial proletarians, Fredric Jameson, or postmodernists. It will be a survey of sixteenth-century English literature, but we won't focus primarily on the court of Elizabeth or the London stage. Instead, we'll be talking about the transition between feudalism and capitalism; we'll focus on peasants, small producers, courtiers, and radical intellectuals in sixteenth-century England; and our imaginative vantage point will be Mousehold Heath outside Norwich, where, in 1549, Robert Kett and twenty thousand "campmen" brought England closer to a social revolution than it has come between 1381 and the present.
We will be reading Marx's phenomenology of small production in The Grundrisse, his discussion of primitive accumulation in Capital I; his presentation of the central marxist concept of the mode of production in Capital III; and his fascinating late studies of the Russian peasant commune in Teodor Shanin's Late Marx. We'll also be reading from a wide array of historians, political theorists, and literary critics, including excerpts from R.H. Tawney's The Agrarian Problem in Sixteenth-Century England, Annabel Patterson's Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, David Norbrook's Poetry and Politics, Richard Halpern's The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Louis Adrian Montrose's "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism, Andrew McRae's God Speed the Plow. We'll read some selections from the historians' debate over the nature of the "Commonwealth Men": a group of Early Tudor clerics, intellectuals and social theorists with a critical relationship (or not) to absolutist monarchy and agrarian capitalism.
Our primary texts will include some relatively familiar works: More's Utopia, Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, Sidney's Old Arcadia, some excepts from Spenser's The Faerie Queene and all of his View of the Present State of Ireland; and Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part Two. But we will also be reading further afield in the poetry, prose, and drama of the earlier Tudor era: anonymous poems of agrarian complaint, commonwealth poetry by the great Robert Crowley (including his masterpiece, Philargyrie of greate Britayne), Tudor interludes by John Heywood (Gentleness and Nobility) and Nicholas Udall (Respublica), an anonymous play entitled Iacke Strawe, economic theory by Sir Thomas Smith, sermons by Hugh Latimer. And we will be reading a selection of literary and historical meditations on Kett's Rebellion of l549, including Holinshed, Sir John Cheke's The Hurt of Sedicion, Alexander Neville's Norfolke's Furies, petitions from the campmen and Protector Somerset's responses to them, and excerpts from John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie.
Among the questions we'll consider: the transition debates (feudalism to capitalism); the structure, power, and cultural representation of peasant rebellion; ideology and class treason (More, Somerset, Heywood, Kett); aristocratic hysteria and the gibbet (Cheke, Spenser, Sidney, Sackville and Norton); Catholicism as a class-revolutionary ideology (Heywood, Shakespeare); imperialism and primitive accumulation (More, Spenser); Shakespeare as a commonwealthsman; English accentual verse, before the mixed blessing of iambic pentameter (and some discussion by Anthony Easthope); theoretical and applied utopia (More and Mousehold Heath); petitioning as a symbolic act; structural analysis as ethics, and ethics as structural analysis. In our last class, we'll consider the continuing history of primitive accumulation and agrarian class struggle by reading some manifestos by contemporary Amazonian Forest People and by the Zapatistas of Chiapas, and some writings on the ecclesiastical base communities in Brazil.
I'll ask you to write weekly informal essays (half an hour or so) and an end-of-the-semester paper. I don't necessarily expect you to have any heavy prior acquaintance with either Renaissance literature or marxist theory. Texts at Talking Leaves Bookstore, 3158 Main Street, near the South Campus (Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., 837-8554); and at Queen City Imaging, 3173 Main Street (right across the street from Talking Leaves), 832-8100; qci.pce.net. Please contact me if you want to know more about the course.
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ENG 609 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Neil Schmitz
Monday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 093023 (B) 493367
In this seminar we attempt to do 2lst Century Civil War studies. We look at the Civil War and post-Civil War construction of the new national narrative done in a revised Unionist discourse. So we start with Abraham Lincoln who, revising Daniel Webster, reprograms the Unionist cultural narrative. We will do three major speeches, one of them, the most important, the Gettysburg Address. In fact, with Lincoln, we circle the Unionist sublime, the National Cemetery, the Memorial. Then we focus on what happens to Confederate discourse, to secessionist thought and theory, and we read in that field the central post-Civil War post-Confederate texts: Mark Twain's Mississippi sequence, Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, George Washington Cable's cultural critiques, Thomas Nelson Page's neo-Confederate fiction, Charles Chesnutt's Conjure, then straight to Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, the great modernist geniuses, of whom we ask, what is the Confederate thing?
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ENG 648 - PSYCHO-ANALYTIC CRITICISM: History and Sexuality
Prof. Joan Copjec
Wednesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 111742 (B) 409912
The History of Sexuality ought to have disappointed you. There were two things wrong with it: its notion of history and its notion of sexuality. Foucault tried to remove sex from the processes of history and make it only a product of one historical moment, the regime of modern power. Deleuze argues that Foucault knew immediately he had backed himself into a corner by making it impossible to "conceive a 'power of truth' which would no longer be the truth of power, a truth that would release transversal lines of resistance and not integral lines of power." Sketching an image of Foucault as a kind of theoretical Richard Serra, bending the force of his own ideas back to create the titled are of The Use of Pleasure, Deleuze makes a seductive argument for giving Foucault a second chance. We will read The Use of Pleasure alongside chapters from Deleuze's Foucault and The Fold, and Freud's "The Uncanny." Our purpose will be to place sex back into the very process of history, to forge an antihistoricist concept of history. Films and artwork (yet to be selected) will be brought in as primary texts to help us develop our argument.
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ENG 652 - LITERARY THEORY: THE POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM
Prof. Joseph Conte
Wednesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 364532 (B) 000599
Although the mass media have adopted the term "postmodern" (more or less as a synonym for "nifty") to describe the current period in cultural history, there have been a number of competing and often irreconcilable definitions of the poetics of postmodernism. If we accept Jean-François Lyotard's proposition that the postmodern is defined by "incredulity toward metanarratives," it's no wonder that there have been so many differing petit récits regarding the quality, product, and theory of postmodernism. We'll begin our reading, then, with Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, paying particular attention to his claims for the impact of science and informational technology in the postindustrial age. The issue of periodization and/or cultural shift arises in Ihab Hassan's The Postmodern Turn, which argues that postmodern indeterminacy and immanence represent a rupture from--rather than a belated version of--modernism. Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postlmodernism, investigates the function of irony and parody in mass media and high art forms, relating these methods to feminist practice. Frederic Jameson counters with a less flattering description of art, literature, and popular culture as pastiche occasioned by an overheated consumer economy in his analysis of late capitalism, most recently collected in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Jameson's position is supported in part by a reading of Perry Andersons' historical overview, The Origins of Postmodernity.
Particularly relevant to the problem of provenance in American culture, Jean Baudrillard argues that the simulacrum has been substituted for the real, making it impossible to trace our cultural icons to some authoritative source. In defense of popular culture we'll visit one of the inaugural essays in the field, Leslie Fiedler's "Cross the border--close the gap: Postmodernism." Another Buffaloian (emeritus), John Barth, offers the complementary view from the heights of self-conscious, reflexive fiction in his essays "The Literature of Exhaustian" and "The Literature of Replenishment." Literary theory, however, has had no exclusive purchase on postmodernity. The eclectic appropriations of postmodern architecture and the visual arts are the subject of Charles Jencks's What is Post-Modernism? In an extension of Lyotard's concerns regarding the new science, we'll read an account of the influential field of the cybernetic organism, Donna J. Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. At various points in the semester we'll consult at least one other history of the period, Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern.
The preceding is necessarily presented in the manner of a reading list rather than as metanarrative of its own regarding postmodernism. Our discussion will be studded with as many references to individual works of postmodern art, architecture, poetry, fiction, and digital media as time permits.
Seminar participants who are registered intensively will be required to make a twenty-minute oral presentation and produce a twenty-page research paper.
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ENG 679 - LEVINAS
Prof. Jill Robbins
Wednesday, 12:30-15:l0, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 200251 (B) 034624
This course centers on a reading of Levinas's 1961 Totality and Infinity, with special emphasis on Sections I and III. Our reading will be cross-referenced with key philosophical essays by Levinas in the decade preceding and the talmudic readings he produced throughout his professional career. We will attend closely to the influential interpretations of Levinas by Derrida, Blanchot and Lyotard.
Texts: Levinas, Totality and Infinity; Collected Philosophical Papers; Nine Talmudic Readings; Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"; Adieu, and selections from Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation and Lyotard, The Differend.
Requirements: one fifteen to twenty-page paper.
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ENG 684 - WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION
Prof. Mili Clark
Registration Number: 488622
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ENG 685 - TRANSATLANTIC STUDIES
"The Literature of the Encounter: From Columbus to Rowlandson"
Prof. Scott Stevens
Thursday 12:30-15:l0, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 346609 (B) 388789
This seminar will focus on a body of texts that chronicle and contemplate the interaction between European cultures (especially that of England) and the peoples of the 'New World.' The course posits that a coherent study of such texts will produce a better understanding of this epoch-making and cataclysmic aspect of early modernity. 'Encounter' is a reciprocal experience and indicates that various peoples came into contact with one another and not that one group 'discovered' another. These texts represent a series of paradigms that have repeated themselves many times in the long history of the European invasion of and immigration to the western hemisphere. Authors such as Raleigh, Harriot, Hakluyt, Bradford, Eliot, Williams and Rowlandson will be read in conjunction with a variety of recorded responses from Native American sources. Critical readings will also accompany each week's seminar.
The primary requirements are consistent attendance and active participation. Each student will be ask to give a 15 minute oral presentation on a selected critical text once during the semester. And, finally, a 15-20 page paper will be due at the end of the course.
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ENG 689 - CONTEMPORARY AVANT-GARDE VISUAL PROSODY: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Ming-Qian Ma
Thursday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 071969 (B) 442208
This seminar will concentrate on the visual experiments in Language poetry since the l970s.
Its theoretical premise is that, in direct contrast to the tradition of visual poetry foregrounding representation, as is evidenced, among many other examples, in the works of George Herbert, Ezra Pound, and ee.cummings, experimental praxes in contemporary visual poetry articulate the tension between form and its dis-content, interrogating language itself as an epistemic field constructed as much linguistically as visually, with the power to represent its representation.
Experimental visual prosody will then be read as a radical rethinking of the ocularcentric paradigm in Western culture, a paradigm that privileges, since antiquity, what David Michael Levin describes as a "vision-generated, vision-centered interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality" as language construct.
The critical approach of the seminar is interdisciplinary, closely engaging diverse forms of typographical lay-out and design from different perspectives in terms of a negative-epistemology whereby to bring into visibility not the external world but the normative parameters--whatever the kinds--within which meaning is traditionally constructed.
Rather than reconstruct meaning out of texts by recycling the conventional strategies of hermeneutics, the ultimate goal of the seminar is to isolate and identify the mechanisms constitutive of the myth of sense-making, with an effort to explore and theorize the significance and ramifications of this visual prosody as a critique of what might be called "the grammar of the eye."
The reading list will include, but not limited to, George Herbert's concrete poems, Ezra Pound: Selected Cantos, Guillaume Apollinaire: Calligrammes, Susan Howe: Singularities, Jackson MacLow: Representative Works: 1938-1985, Bruce Andrews: Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened, Joan Retallack: Afterrimages, Johanna Drucker: History of the/my Wor(l)d, Lyn Hejinian: My Life, Christian Bok's Crystallography, and others.
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ENG 690 - RHETORICAL DELIBERATION
Prof. Arabella Lyon
Monday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 041623 (B) 220368
"…man is by nature a political animal…man alone of animals is furnished with the faculty of language…language serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse, and it is peculiarity of man…that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and other similar qualities; and it is association of these things which make a family and a city." Aristotle Politics 125a7-17
Aristotle easily could begin our discussion of deliberation and democratic education, but after brief nods to the rise of Athenian democracy (sophists, Plato, Aristotle), we will focus on the American tradition of pragmatism. Much of classical rhetoric is concerned with politics, specifically deliberation (legislative decision-making) and education. It, however, assumes a shared social meaning and a common good; this assumption of communality serves to make classical theory only a starting point to understanding the cacophony of voices, technologies, suspicions, and opportunities in the cultures of late capitalism.
To understand what deliberation might be in this century, we will read theorists commonly seen as rhetorical, theorists such as C.S. Peirce, Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, Stephen Mailloux, though mostly Burke. As well, we will read broadly, possibly engaging theorists as diverse as Seyla Benahabib, Rey Chow, Amy Gutman, Lani Gaunier, Henry Giroux, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. We range this broadly as I hope this course can serve as both an introduction to rhetorical theory and as a context for thinking and writing about American rhetoric and education at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
We live in a society of proliferating visions of what is the good, but proliferation seemingly has not enriched our political sphere. Throughout these readings, we might seek a therapeutic model of deliberation and education for a society clutched by consumer capitalism, or we may simply want to juxtapose them with the wisdom of the ancients. In either case, we will gain an understanding of what it entails for a group of people to come to a course of action.
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CROSS-LISTED COURSES
ENG 701 - BLACK POETICS
Prof. Christian Onikepe
Monday 16:10-18:50, Park 250
Registration Number: 421383
(Description not yet available)
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ENG 702 - WOMEN DIRECTORS
Prof. C. Koebel
Thursday 12:00-15:20, CFA 232
Registration Number: 175782
In this course, we will look at specifically English-language productions from the 1990's, including a cross-generation of emerging and established filmmakers like Jane Campion, Julie Dash, and Mary Harron. Each seminar will focus on one movie and attendant readings. In considering specific instances of women's presence in feature film directing, we will also face "uncomfortable truths" (Manohla Dargis) regarding the under-representation of women directing both studio and independent productions. Some pioneering films (Shirley Clarke's Cool World and Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle) that have influenced contemporary directors will provide historical context. We will further partake in a broad debate about women and cinema through diverse readings by B. Ruby Rich, Christina Lane, Jacqueline Bobo, Linda Nochlin, Judith Mayne, Manohla Dargis, and others covering film theory and production, feminism, postcolonial studies, textual analysis, technology, and cultural criticism. Course work includes weekly screenings and readings, response papers, a class presentation, and a term paper.
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ENG 704 - READINGS IN THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Prof. James Bono
Tuesday, 4:00-6:40, Park 532
Registration Number: l47302
This seminar will provide an intensive introduction to major historiographical issues and approaches in recent scholarly work on the history of science and medicine and in recent attempts to write cultural histories of specific facets of science and medicine. The course is intended to serve the needs of a broad range of students from history and from disciplines such as anthropology and literature, who have an interest in science, medicine, technical knowledge and practices, the body, sexuality, or related topics and their relationship to culture and society. Through specific assignments, reports, and a term paper attempts will be made to shape the course to the needs of individual students, both those specializing in the history of science or medicine and those whose major interests are in other aspects of history or in other disciplines. Intensive and extensive readings on a variety of periods and places (chiefly, but not exclusively, focused upon Europe and America) from antiquity to the twentieth century will form the core of this course. The course will proceed through brief and intensive discussion of readings and reports.
This semester (Spring 2002) we shall focus chiefly upon the cultural history of medicine, with special attention given to the history of the body and sexuality from antiquity to postmodern cyberculture. We'll address such topics as the body in ancient Greek and Chinese medical traditions; medicine, natural philosophy, and notions of sexual difference in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Europe; the female body, the saintly body, and the criminal body in late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe; monsters, marvels, and monstrous bodies from the 13th through the 18th centuries; the new cultural history of Renaissance anatomy; women, gender, the birth of modern political economy, and 17th and 18th century science and medicine; race, gender, and racialized bodies in European and American scientific and medical discourses; hermaphrodites and the scientific study of sexuality from the late Renaissance to the 20th century in Europe and America; Foucault's History of Sexuality; and virtual surgery, technoscientifically altered human bodies, informatics, and the "posthuman" body.
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