ENG
518 - ELIZABETHAN/JACOBEAN DRAMA
.
Prof. Barbara Bono
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 098799 (B) 107702
ENG
524 - 18TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE
Prof. Ruth Mack
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 394492 (B) 428108
ENG
539 - 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
..
Prof. Stacy Hubbard
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 535 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 132587 (B) 246959
ENG
541 - 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL
.
Prof. Robert Daly
Wednesday 3:30-6:10,
436 Clemens
Registration Numbers
(A) 168169 (B) 161195
ENG
549 - CREATIVE WRITING POETRY
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 7:00-9:40, 412 Clemens
Registration Number:
147459
ENG
568 - WRITING AND THE BODY: DISCOURSE, PERFORMATIVES,
MEDIA
Prof. Jim Swan
Monday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 488713 (B) 250659
ENG
584 - POETICS
..
Prof. Myung Mi Kim
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 304494 (B) 274841
ENG
593-493 - MULTICULTURAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Prof. Robert Newman
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Number:
461201
ENG
594-494 - ADVANCED JOURNALISM
..
Prof. Mark Shechner
Wednesday 7:00-9:40, 538 Clemens
Registration Number:
264951
ENG
595-495 - ADVANCED JOYCE
Prof. Mark Shechner
Monday 7:00-9:40, 538 Clemens
Registration Number:
025532
ENG
607 - EVE AND JAEL: WOMEN WRITERS IN EARLY MODERN
ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1545-1700
.
Prof.
James Holstun
Monday 12:30-3:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 040519 (B) 140327
ENG
633 - NEW AMERICAN POETRIES
..
Prof. Charles Bernstein
Thursday, 12:30-3:10, 438 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 116430 (B) 186525
ENG
648 - DELEUZE ON CINEMA
.
Prof. Joan Copjec
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 022697 (B) 046559
ENG
649 - HARLEM RENAISSANCE WRITING
.
Prof. Nathan Grant
Tuesday 12:30-3:l0, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 084997 (B) 123860
ENG
653 - FEMINIST PERFORMANCES
Prof. Arabella Lyon
Monday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 089925 (B) 358921
ENG
655 - LITERATURE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
Prof. James Bunn
Monday 3:30-6:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 220164 (B) 024291
ENG
679 - BASIC CONCEPTS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
.
Prof. Tim Dean
Thursday 7:00-9:40,
538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 300730 (B) 416397
ENG
680 - MULTICULTURAL BRITAIN
.
Prof. David Schmid
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 466864 (B) 417321
ENG
682 - LANGUAGE POETRY: HISTORY, THEORY, AND PRAXIS
Prof. Ming Qian Ma
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 259352 (B) 236253
ENG
683 - AMERICAN FILM HISTORY
..
Prof. Alan Spiegel
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 538 Clemens
Screening: Monday
5:00-6:50, l0 Capen
Registration Numbers:
(A) 157586 (B) 403085
ENG
684 - CONTESTED REPRESENTATIONS
...
Prof. Scott Stevens
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 238891 (B) 402915
ENG
697 - POETICS OF THE AMERICAS
.
Prof. Dennis Tedlock
Tuesday 12:30-3:10,
540 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 408353 (B) 281010
CROSS-LISTED
COURSES
ENG
701 - CARIBBEAN AESTHETICS
Prof. Jose F. Buscaglia
Wednesday 4:10
-6:50,
Registration
Number: l84396
ENG
706 - POETICS OF PROGRAMMABLE LITERATURE
Prof. Loss Glazier
Tuesday 12:30-3:10,
232 Center for the Arts
Registration
Number: 214235
Prof. Mili Clark
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 381088 (B) 409105
The lyf 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
whos just like the Wife of Bath).
I would never discourage undergraduates from believing this commonplace
if it is what keeps them reading Chaucer.
However, Chaucers workshis characters, his tropes, his sentimentscomprise
the strata of an archeology.
Compressed, sometimes neatly, sometimes
haphazardly, beneath the surface of his texts, are genres, themselves within
genres, which, the deeper you dig, the farther back in the particular site
of a text of you go, you unearth other authors, other texts, other centuries,
other cultures. The tale of Constance
in The Man of Laws 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, Im not sure their virtue matches that
of their predecessors, and if not, do they belong in this particular archeology?
On the whole, Chaucers 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 proem 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 the good grain from the field of literature
and left him glenyng 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 he is writing (Troilus and
Criseyde). However, at the end
of the latter work (is it the first novel in English?), 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. Well
read the dream visions, Troilus and
Criseyde, and the 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. Well have in-class presentations, short response papers, surveys
of the literature on particular texts.
ENG 518
- ELIZABETHAN/JACOBEAN DRAMA
Prof. Barbara Bono
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 098799 (B) 107702
Shakespeare's
plays were written in an age of theater that also produced a host of other
major playwrights--Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster,
etc.--and literally dozens of masterful plays.
Theater under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I was both elite and
popular. It was orthodox, confirming
religious and political pieties, exorcising social discontent, and it was
subversive, threatening traditional boundaries and articulating hitherto unspoken
fears. It was performed in the centers
of power--the courts, great houses, and banqueti8ng halls of the mighty--and
it was marginalized, censored, played out in the suburbs, amid the stews and
the bear-baiting. In 1642 the public
theater was suppressed, but in l649 it arguably performed its "last act"
in a process Franco Moretti has described as the "deconsecration of sovereignty,"
the literal execution of the King. "That thence the royal actor borne,/ The
tragic scaffold might adorn;/ While round the armed bands/ Did clap their
bloody hands" (Andrew Marvell, "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's
Return from Ireland").
In this course
we will study these distinctions among and contradictions within Elizabethan
and Jacobean drama through an historical survey reaching back to the native
origins of English drama and looking ahead to Charles's deposition. We will use paperback editions of Andrew Gurr's
The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 and A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John Cox and David Scott
Kastan as background resources; to them we will add a paperback edition of
critical essays, Staging the Renaissance:
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan
and Peter Stallybrass. I will also
make available additional critical work on the drama of this period--coordinated
with our weekly readings--by new historicism, sex and gender system, and cultural
materialist critics such as Catherine Belsey, Michael Bristol, Karen Coddin,
Walter Cohen, Frances Dolan, Jonathan Dollimore, Margaret W. Ferguson, Susan
Frye, Marjorie Garber, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson,
Jean Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Louis Adrian Montrose, Stephen Mullaney,
Gail Kern Paster, Phyllis Rackin, Valerie Traub, Frank Whigham, and others.
Our primary text will be the new Norton
Anthology of English Renaissance Drama (2002).
Our focus will
be on certain specific historical and symbolic moments in the history of the
early modern English theater as a way of establishing the central cultural
importance of the drama, frequently with an implied or explicit Shakespearean
comparison. Thus we will begin by
discussion the "place" of the early modern English drama through
studying how it negotiates its limits, "beating the bounds" of the
regional city or town in the medieval cycle plays, renegotiating those limits
in royal entry pageantry and a play such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1604), written shortly after James's entry into
London as King. We will read John
Lyly's court-centered Endymion (1588) as a heightened dramatic
example of the "cult" of Elizabeth, erected against a background
of royal pageantry, fetishizing her virginity against the Spanish threat,
and compare Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night' Dream as a self-conscious remembering and displacement of that
fantasy. We will study those early
blockbusters of the purpose-built public theater, Thoms Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1586) and Christopher
Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (c/ 1592).
As examples of the frustrate rising social energy of those two doomed roommates,
and analogize them to the early success of Shakespeare's charmingly evil and
monstrous Machiavel in Richard III
(c. l592-93), and the combined threat posed by the sexualized woman and the
envious subaltern in the anonymous
Arden of Feversham (1592). We will review the good Machiavellianism, the
positive historiography, of Shakespeare's
second tetralogy of history plays (Richard
II (1595), 1 Henry IV [1597],
2 Henry IV
[1597-98], Henry V [1599])
as a prelude to discussing ways in which it is complemented and supplemented
by a city-based model of production and reproduction in Thomas Dekker's The Shoemakers' Holiday (1599) and presages
turn-of-the century anxiety culminating in plays such as Julius Caesar (l599) and Hamlet (1600-1602),
and in the Essex rebellion (1601) and the death of the old Queen (1603).
James's tragicomic
accession at the end of l603 (that "Wonderfull Yeare," as Dekker
suggestively titles it in his pamphlet) will form the occasion for us to read
Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610)
as a self-conscious look backward at the dominating passions of the Elizabethan
age, their dramatic expression, and their commercial renegotiating in the
seven years "sin' the king came in" (1.2.165). It will also be the occasion for us to return strongly to the issues
of gender and sexual politics in transvestite comedies such as Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night (l599) and Thomas
Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness
(1603), Shakespeare's Othello (1603-04),
John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi
(c. 1613), and the first female-authored play in English, Lady Elizabeth
Cary's closet drama, The Tragedy of
Mariam (1613). Finally, it will
provide us with the occasion to speculate on the increasing difficulty of
government and surveillance (John Marston's The Malcontent [1604] and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure [1604]), of holding together a kingdom "unified"
from two formerly independent states and committed to a policy of irenic marital
diplomacy abroad (Shakespeare Scottish play, Macbeth [1605-1606] read against Ben Jonson's
Masque of Queens [1609], or tragicomedies
by Beaumont and Fletcher such as Philaster [1608-1610]), and of unifying an audience sensibility riven
by distinctions of belief systems and class (Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle [1607-1610])
Pace and format
will be contractually determined between the instructor and the individual
student, depending upon the student's background for the work, graduate program,
and section choice (A or B). One likely
"A" format is brief bi-weekly response papers, a critical review,
and either an extended seminar paper or a briefer mock-conference presentation.
If you have questions, come see me and we'll talk about how this course
fits into your plans.
ENG 524
- 18TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE
Prof. Ruth Mack
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, 535 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 394492 (B) 428108
Rather unflatteringly
distinguished as the period that preceded the Historical Age, the eighteenth
century has been depicted as a time when history-writing was pervasive and
prominent but without a theory of history. Both neoclassicism's addiction to the values
of the past over those of the present and the Enlightenment's commitment to
the progressive present over the superstitious past have been thought to confirm
this by generating the same unexamined past/present dichotomy. This course offers an introduction to some
of the major literary texts of eighteenth-century Britain through a consideration
of their theories of history: their arguments about how the past should be
thought in relation to the present. In
particular, we will examine how these texts make use of literary form to configure
the relationship between text and world, producing their own historicity by
manufacturing representations of what the present, historical world is.
Our reading will
include Alexander Pope's Dunciad,
Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Charlotte
Lennox's Female Quixote, and James
Macpherson's Ossian poems. In addition
to treating such texts in an eighteenth-century context, we will be concerned
with how they challenge twentieth-century notions of the relation between
"form" and "history."
Why have "form" and "history" come to be antithetical
terms? What definition of each term
functions in such an opposition, and how does that binary affect literary-critical
investigation in the current moment? We will consider philosophers', historians'
and literary historians' answers to these questions with readings from Aristotle,
Lord Bolingbroke, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Michel Foucault, Hayden White,
Frederic Jameson, and the New Historicists.
ENG 539
- 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof. Stacy Hubbard
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 535 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 132587 (B) 246959
In this seminar we will take an interdisciplinary look at American
culture from 1855 to 1930. Through
close readings of various texts and artifacts (including novels, poems, paintings,
photography, and architecture), we will explore how Americans made use of
art and literature to negotiate the social and political complexities of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. Of particular interest will be the period's
evolving notions of realism and "the real," authenticity and authority.
The early part of this period is often referred to as the "Gilded
Age," suggesting that Americans at this time were concerned with the
deceptiveness of appearances, with spectacle, wealth, and charlatanry.
At the opening of the twentieth century, American artists were
worrying the question of what it meant to be a "genuine" American,
what it meant to "really" live in some vital and immediate way,
and where cultural authority might lie. The
increasing authority of scientific and sociological discourses and advances
in photography and film suggested new ways of accessing, through vision, the
real and the true; thus, we find many painters and writers of the time adopting
"scientific" approaches to their material. At the same time, the rise of urbanism and consumer culture, along
with new practices of advertising and retailing and such large-scale spectacles
as the Chicago World's Fair, linked spectatorship to fantasy and desire, suggesting
that the work of culture is to invest the material with the aura of the Ideal.
Consequently, the role of spectatorship in the creation of "anticipatory
selves" (Fisher) is central to many fictions and visual artifacts of
the period, from the new department stores to The House of Mirth, to
the paintings of Sargent and Chase and the frontier fictions of Willa Cather. So we'll be looking at various ways of looking
(sociological, scientific, touristic, acquisitive, erotic, and aesthetic)
and at the variety of things which this period considered worth looking at.
And in the process we'll explore how such thorough-going specularity
impacts various practices of representation, from poems and novels to realist
paintings and domestic architecture.
Promary literary texts include Walt Whitman's poetry, Stephen Crane's
Red Badge of Courage, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives,
Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,
Marianne Moore's poetry, Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, Nella
Larsen's Quicksand, and selected writings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Visual texts include works by Thomas Eakins,
Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, James McNiel Whistler, William Merritt
Chase, Mary Cassatt, Louis Sullivan, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O'Sullivan,
Alfred Stiegltiz, Georgia O'Keefe, Frederick Remington, Ansel Adams, and Frank
Lloyd Wright. In addition, I will
assign various secondary readings on specularity, realism and naturalism,
and consumer culture.
Requirements for the course include regular
attendance; active and informed participation; one oral presentation; a five-page
mid-term paper; and a final 15-20 pp. Research paper. Students registered for extensive credit are
expected to fulfill all of these requirements with the exception of the final
paper.
ENG 541
- 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL
Prof. Robert Daly
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 168169 (B) 161195
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
land the cultural work of the novel, to the ways in which it works to challenge
and enlarge our epistemology and sense of options, whether we consider ourselves
modern, postmodern, or something completely different.
Postmodernism
was named and theorized ex ante by 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, but even this notion remains contested, so it won't hurt too
much to descend to specifics. We shall
explore this matter and others by actually reading some novels. We shall pay attention to the cultural conversations
and the cultural work of the novel in our time and place by considering the
distinctions, imbrications, binary oppositions, commonalities, reciprocities,
eddies, and swirls of these and other categories.
We shall read,
within the reciprocal economies of their cultural contexts, some modern and
some postmodern American novels, along with some in which the borders between
these categories seem quite permeable. We
shall explore questions of agency. We
shall consider these texts as both representative (participating in the cultural
conversations of their times) and hermeneutic (affording practice and skills
in the arts of interpretation); as enacting both a "hermeneutics of suspicion"
and a "hermeneutics of empathy"; as enabling "paranoid reading,"
"reparative reading," an "ethics of reading," and any
other modes of reading members of the seminar care to do.
And we shall attend to the various ways in which the texts thematize
interpretation, including, in Kathy Eden's words, "not only the traditional
analogy between reading and the journey home but also that between the literary
work read and a carefully woven tapestry." Finally we shall track out a few Deleuzean
connections and explore the ways in which writers both describe and perform
the transient syntheses of American culture.
Each student taking
the course intensively (for full credit) will be expected to participate in
seminar discussions, to give a seminar report on one of the texts, and to
write a research essay on a subject of her or his own choosing. Those taking the course extensively will be
expected to do everything but the research essay. Finally, a postmodern gesture, the unconvincing, self-justifying
rationalization: though you may think I know only the earlier writers (if
them), I have published on Cather, Fitzgerald, Gardner, postmodernism, and
at least one Pynchon.
Texts:
Wharton, Edith. Summer.
Harper Collins.
Cather, Willa. My Antonνa.
Houghton Mifflin.
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Norton Critical Edition.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The
Great Gatsby. Scribner's.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49: A Novel. Harper Collins.
Gardner, John. October Light. Vintage, Random House.
Morrison, Toni. Song
of Solomon. New American Library.
Powell, Padgett. Edisto: A Novel. Henry Holt & Co.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Ivy Books, Ballantine.
Morrison, Toni. Paradise. Penguin.
ENG 549
- CREATIVE WRITING POETRY
Prof. Irving Feldman
Tuesday 7:00-9:40 pm, 412 Clemens
Registration Number:
147459
A workshop course in which students' original work will be discussed.
ENG 568
- LITERATURE AND PSYCHOLOGY
WRITING AND THE BODY: DISCOURSE, PERFORMATIVES,
MEDIA
Prof.
Jim Swan
Monday 12:30-3:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 488713 (B) 250659
The seminar will explore questions about language and the body
from several disciplinary points of view: linguistics, philosophy, anthropology,
biology, computer science, and cognitive science. Also in play will be newly articulated critical
discourses concerned with disability, medical humanities, and digital media.
In the spring of 2003, a major focus will be speech acts
(or performatives)--as first described by J.L. Austin and later contested
by Jacques Derrida and John Searle. The
moment, in 1971, when Derrida and Searle argue over the significance of Austin's
work on speech acts is still felt today as the start of an ongoing, generative
debate about language and interpretation.
Another major focus will be language and disability. My recent essay, "Disabilities, Bodies,
Voices," has just appeared in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities
(New York: MLA, 2002).
You can get some idea of the seminar by looking at past syllabi
on my website, where you will also find a page describing my current work:
http://cas.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/swan/
Students will be encouraged to develop presentations for the 2003
conference of the Society for Literature and Science (SLS) in Austin, Texas.
You will find web sites for this year's conference (in Pasadena) at
http://sls-2002.caltech.edu/ and for the 2001 conference (in Buffalo)
at http://cas.buffalo.edu/events/sls2001/
Authors we are likely to read in the seminar:
J.L.Austin (speech acts)
Tim Lenoir (philosophy of science,
Karen Barad (anthropology of science) digital media)
Robert Brandom (philosophy of language) Emmanuel Levinas (ethics, discourse)
Jerome Bruner (language acquisition) Michael Lynch (ethnomethodology, science
Judith Butler (performatives & gender) studies)
Rodney Brooks (robotics)
Richard Powers (computers & fiction)
Stanley Cavell (philosophy of language) Albert Robillard(disability &autobiography)
Noam Chomsky (language)
Brian Rotman (mathematics & language)
Terrence Deacon (language & evolution) Harvey Sacks (conversation analysis)
Jacques Derrida (philosophy of language)
Oliver Sacks (neurology & narrative)
Kenny Fries (writing & disability) Silvan Tomkins (affect, embodiment)
Harold Garfinkel (ethnomethodology )
Alan Turning (machine intelligence,
Katherine Hayles (cyber-narrative, the "Turning test")
post-human) Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophy
of
Bruno Latour (philosophy of science) language)
ENG 584
- TRANS[L]ITIVE MEDIATIONS
Prof. Myung Mi Kim
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 304494 (B) 274841
"AMARE SINASM"
"A MERRY CAN ISM" "A
MER IN CAN ISM" "A MARR
CAN ISM"
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
"The Word (Le Mot)"
1975
9 color slides, 5 color photographs
This seminar concerns a poetics of attempt, approximation, contingency--poetic
practices that tend the conjunctural, chiasmatic, and transitive: we explore
the work of those poets who problematize and animate (reconfigure) the transnational,
transcultural, and translingual. We will read closely poets whose processural
acts mediate the ruptured and multiply attenuated ethno-national, person,
and linguistic displacements [conjunctions] that characterize "coming
into speech", given our current historical moment. Some foundational questions for the seminar include: What is the
interarticulation of nation, language, (nation-language), dialect, ideolect,
and vernacular? What are the terms
and conditions of recognizability? What are the possible radical tests of
translating, transliterating, transcribing?
How to decipher geopolitical, economic, and cultural practices that
constitute language formation and participation (that is, models and demands
of fluency and standardization)? What
is the work of silence? Of uncertainty? Trans[l]itive Mediation--a poetics
of rendering, of placing in relation the convergences, and elisions that sound
and mark an ethics of plurality.
Proposed: that a poetics
emerges from an entire body of practice.
One possible constellation--the work of Norma Cole, Canadian-born,
but living in the U.S., translator from the French and other languages, practicing/
inventing speculative prose, and further, extending poetic acts through active
engagement with editing and publishing. The
reading in this instance would include Cole's recent book of poems, Spinoza in her Youth, as well as a book
she edited on writing from France titled Cross
Cut Universe. In this constellation,
we will read Il Donc by Danielle
Collobert as well as her Notebooks
(to be read as a "statement" of poetics?), both translated by Cole.
Another such constellation might be located around the work of Rosmarie
Waldrop: her relationship to a first tongue, German, her book of poems "translating"
Wittgenstein, her work as a translator (from the French) of Edmond Jabes,
which would allow us to investigate the complicated ground of Jabes' relationship
to "the possibilities of utterance" as a Jew displaced from Egypt
to Paris writing in French (translated into English).
We will read Jabes' Book of Questions
as well as A Foreigner Carrying in the
Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, and From
the Desert to the Book. Nathaniel
Mackey's work in "cross-culturality" as posed in his book, Discrepant Engagement will be useful as
it prepares us to activate the space in which to "hear" not only
his own creative and critical work but as it is in conversation with the work
of Kamau Brathwaite. From Brathwaite,
we'll read The History of the Voice
and from a range of his poems, including Trench
Town Rock. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's
multimedia, installation, and film work and moreover, her "artists statements"
(how they read together as a poetics) will be instructive as they negotiate
questions of recognizability [affiliation], fragment, mutability, and contingency.
Other possible readings: Erin Moure's A
Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person--what she calls a "transelation"
or "transcreation"; work
by Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, who conducts research on Nu Shu, the secret women's
language of Hunan Province, China. Companion
texts/possible extensions: From An
Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, edited
by Alfred Arteaga: Tejaswini Niranjana's "Colonialism and the Politics
of Translation". Norma Alarcon's
"Conjugating Subjects: The Heteroglossia of Essence and Resistance",
Gayatri Spivak's "Bonding in Difference". Also from Arteaga, House with
the Blue Door and Chicano Poetics:
Heterotexts and Hybridities. Helene
Cixous, from Stigmata. Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator"
in Illuminations. Further considerations: readings in historical-comparative
linguistics; writing by women and postcoloniality, (e.g., Writing
Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies edited by Gillian
Rose).
ENG 593-494
- MULTICULTURAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Prof. Robert Newman
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, 412 Clemens
Registration Number:
461201
(Auto)Biography involves a paradox: individual
lives (especially those we write about ourselves) are understood in terms
of the cultural and historical forces that shaped them (us) and yet also as
unique and individual reactions to such forces. (What me, a type??) The
multicultural aspect introduces another problem: maybe if we put too much
stress on the 'multi' part, we will give up the unifying aspects of the 'cultural'.
Or vice-versa: if we put too much stress on the cultural, maybe we'll
ignore all the differences that make either for interest or real conflicts.
So there's work
to be done. We'll fist look at some
classic examples of autobiography--St. Augustine's life gives the pattern
to Western culture's concern with autobiography, Rousseau's claims to be the
first story that is totally, completely sincere, Boswell tells Johnson's story
but really tells his own story (Edmund Morris used Boswell's Life of Johnson as his model for the infamous Ronald Regan bio, Dutch), Frederick Douglass' Narrative explores the life story of a
slave who became "a man," and so on.
(Other accounts might include those of the Sioux writer Gertrude Bonin/Zikala-Sa,
the immigrant Jewish writer Mary Antin, the Dutch-American observer Jacob
Riis {How the Other Half Lives}
.)
Second (and not
necessarily second in time--I might start with these!) are such new classics
as Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway,
Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory,
Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, Malcolm
X's Autobiography, Sherman Alexie's
"Smoke Signals" (the movie), Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character, Ellis Cose's Rage of a Privileged Class, Charles McBride's Color of Water, Kingston's Woman
Warrior, Debra Dickerson's American
Story, Karen Brodkin Sacks' How
the Jews Became White Folks
.
And for the most
recent possibilities, most certainly Anzari's East of Kabul (he wrote a famous e-mail on 9/ll); this account records
his earlier adventures trying to find both his career as a journalist and
his status as an American, born of an Afghani father and an American mother,
wondering what the true Islam really is. I might possibly use again Leila Ahmed's interesting chronicle of
growing up in Egypt, now a named Chair of Feminist Studies at Harvard.
We will examine
recent essays dealing with multiculturalism and the theories of autobiography.
Requirements include a critical
essay, an optional autobiographical or biographical essay, class attendance
and participation. As to the final
paper, this may be the chance to write the family biography which you've always
wanted to do.
Graduate students
enrolled in English 593 will be asked to submit a reading list of additional
primary and secondary texts for a critical essay and for reports, weekly,
to the class as a whole.
ENG 594-494
- ADVANCED JOURNALISM
Prof. Mark Shechner
Wednesday 7:00-9:40, 538 Clemens
Registration Number:
264951
A draft of the course outline can be found at this URL:
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/ ~ shechner/journalism/english.487.htm
Advanced Writing/Journalism, which is dual-listed for students at both the senior level
and graduate MA-level, is designed to get students beyond the basic routines
of composition and the jargons and codes of "lit-crit" in their
writing. Thus it is ideal for students
who envision journalism as a career or as an active supplement to an academic
career. It takes "composition"
and your capacity for clarity and organization for granted and moves on to
the next step: learning how to be interesting.
The course will permit you to think about and work on matters of
voice and style. A writer of any kind
who wishes to make headway with his/her writing must have a voice, a distinctive
signature that is his or hers alone. You'll spend a lot of time learning how not to sound like a Brand
X clone of some other unfortunate Brand X clone. (Voice is defined in a novel by Philip Roth as something that "starts
from down behind your knees and ends up above your head."
True, but you still have to work at it.)
We will spend a lot of time on resource building: where do words come
from? Where do phrases come from? What
is a sentence rhythm and how can I develop it? How do arguments really work? How many drafts of an essay or review do I
have to write before it is any good? (I'd
say ten if it is not important, twenty if it really matters.)
I will ask every student to find and adopt a master stylist and
apprentice him/herself to that master. Apprenticeship
and a degree of mimicry are key to writing well. Your own voice begins in the shadow of another's.
That will mean finding in some weekly or monthly journal, and writer
or writers whose sentences, phrases, and voice you will get to know well and
apprentice yourself to. I will ask everyone to keep a journal of words,
phrases, and ideas and to share that journal on a regular basis.
Among the many requirements of good writing is to really know something,
know it down to its depths, and each student will work on a semester-long
project that would be potentially, maybe even actually, publishable at the
end of the semester.
Since the class will be writing and reading-intensive, I shall
limit it to 22 students, ideally balanced between eleven undergraduates and
eleven graduates, and a decision will be made at the end of the first week
of class on the basis of a sample of writing you submit on the first day. I am looking for students who already can write
and are serious about practicing and polishing that skill.
Requirements:
1. A sample of earlier writing to be submitted on the first day
of class. Ideal length, 7 - l5 pages.
2. Regular attendance:
Attendance is simply required, and I will take roll. To get anything out of a course that meets just once a week you
have to be in it, and students who are not in it should not expect to make
up for lost class time through exams or papers.
In a course that meets once a week, students who miss more than two
classes for any reason will suffer an automatic lowering of grade.
3. Two books: a thesaurus
and a portable dictionary. They are
indispensable tools, and while I don't have any ordered, you can find good
ones at either the University Bookstore or at Talking Leaves Bookstore at
3158 Main Street.
Prof. Mark Shechner
Monday 7:00-9:40 pm, 538 Clemens
Registration Number:
025532
The second semester
of James Joyce will be concerned with everything that the first semester had
to leave out, and will assume a familiarity with, and preferably a reading
knowledge of, A Portrait and Ulysses. It will go back to
the beginning and read Joyce's poems, including Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach;
the stories in Dubliners, the play
Exiles and the by-now-famous notes
for Exiles; the precursors to A Portrait; the essay "A Portrait
of the Artist" and the partial novel, Stephen
Hero, the Selected Letters and
Joyce's Critical Writing; the sketch
"Giacomo Joyce," and finally, for the last three or four weeks,
selections from Finnegans Wake. If there is time, we will go back and look
at his notebooks, his workbooks, etc. The
aim of the entire year-long course is to know Joyce and his work comprehensively,
and in historical and literary contexts. Joyce was the great writer in the English language
in the 20th century, and nothing he did is without interest.
ENG 607
- EVE AND JAEL: WOMEN WRITERS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1545-1700
Prof. James Holstun
Monday 12:30-3:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 040519 (B) 140327
The most important
development in early modern literary studies during the last two decades has
been the rediscovery, republican, and systematic study of writing by women.
At first, like the male-focused criticism it criticized, this work
tended to concentrate on ruling-class writers of poetry, drama, and prose
romance. But more recently, it has turned to representations
of women in popular culture, to the experience of working-class women, and
to their self-representation in the genres of radical Protestantism: the Foxean
captivity narrative, the spiritual autobiography, revolutionary political
and religious theory, and prophecies of various sorts.
This course will
survey early modern women's writing, with emphasis on seventeenth-century
England and America. We will consider
some backgrounds in the Book of Judges, "St. John" (the Book of
Revelation), St. Paul, and Reformation writings on women. We'll be looking at various narratives of captivity,
including Anne Askew's Henrician Examination,
diaries of abused wives, Anna Trapnel's account of Cromwellian captivity,
Evans and Rowlandson's Indian captivity during "King Philip's War."
We'll consider the "Controversy over Women" (works by Swetnam,
Sowernam, Speght, and the crossdressing pamphlets Haec
Vir and Hic Mulier), prophetesses (Anne Hutchinson,
Eleanor Davies, Trapnel, Margaret Fell, Evans and Chevers), preachers, petitioners,
political theorists, and social reformers (Margaret Fell, Katharine Chidley,
Mary Cary), royalist dramatists, poets and writers of fiction (Philips, Behn,
Cavendish). We will be reading a good
deal of poetry, including Amelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, selections from
Bradstreet's Tenth Muse, and Lucy
Hutchinson's republican lyrics and excerpts from her biblical epic, Order and Disorder. As we consider Katherine Philips (selected
lyrics) and Margaret Cavendish (Blazing
World, Convent of Pleasure), we will consider lesbianism and the royalist
coterie. And we'll consider the "heterosexual"
nature of women's writing by examining a few related works by seventeenth-century
male colloquists (Joseph Swetnam and misogynous satirists, James Stuart, Robert
Filmer, John Donne, John Rogers, Andrew Marvell, John Milton).
We'll also read
a good deal of feminist literary criticism, political theory, and social history
related to the field, including work by Margaret Ezell on women and literary
history, Wally Seccombe on the reproduction of labor power, Carole Pateman
on the fraternal contract, Amy Erickson on women and property, Alice Clark
on women's
work and the relation between the end of home industry and the
rise of capitalist patriarchy, Ann Hughes on Leveller women, Katharine Gillespie
on Chidley's radical domesticity, Catharine Gray on Katherine Philips and
the counter-public sphere, Catherine Gallagher on royalism and feminism, and
several writers discussion women, publicness, and "sphere" theory:
Jόrgen Habermas, Carole Pateman, Sharon Achinstein, and Amanda Vickery.
I don't assume
any previous experience of the field or of early modern literature at the
beginning of the semester, but you will have considerable by the end: this
will be a demanding course. Everyone
will write short, informal essays (one-half hour's work) on the week's reading. Those taking the course intensively will also
write a five-to-ten-page commentary on an unrepublished pamphlet or book (available
on microfilm or through our subscription to Early English Books Online) by
an early modern woman writer, and a fifteen-to-twenty-page seminar paper (which
might reasonably grow in part out of the commentary). Course texts at Talking Leaves, Queen City
Imagining, and through online reserve. Contact
me if you want to know more: jamesholstun@hotmail.com.
ENG 633
- NEW AMERICAN POETRIES
Prof. Charles Bernstein
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 438 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 116430 (B) 186525
The seminar will focus mostly
on North American poets born between 1910 and 1930. As such it constitutes an extension of two recent seminars: Modernisms
and Second Wave Modernism (see syllabi on the EPC).
A set of visitors
will define part of the domain: Marjorie Perloff, David Antin, Jackson Mac
Low, and Robert Creeley, plus Robert Grenier on Larry Eigner, Pierre Joris
on Paul Celan, Peter Gizzi on Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Willis on Pre-Raphaelitism
for our time; but attention will also be given to such poets as Guest, Ashbery,
Schulyer, O'Hara, Weiner, Baraka, Rich, Plath, Wieners (though born in '34),
Whalen, Olson, Rukeyser, and Ginsberg.
Prof. Joan Copjec
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 022697 (B) 046559
The primary focus of this seminar is the two-volume
contribution of Gilles Deleuze to the theory of cinema: The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. But we will also take a look at other theories
of film in order to understand what Deleuze is not saying or, more polemically, what he is opposing. Clearly, he wanted to steer the theory of film
in a different direction from the one Christian Metz and Screen staked out from the mid-1970s through
the end of the 1980s. The Metzian/Screen
position is so extensive, however, that we will do little more than sketch
it out through readings of a few isolated texts.
We will pay more attention to the work of Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell--to
What Is Cinema? and The World Viewed -- who offer distinctive views of cinema. Short films or film clips will be screened
from time to time in class. At other
times I will ask you to view videos or DVD's on your own, since we will need
to reserve class time for discussion of the theory.
ENG 649
- HARLEM RENAISSANCE WRITING
Prof. Nathan Grant
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 084997 (B) 123860
Despite his compelling
sixteenth chapter on the reasons for the day-to-day despair of black Philadelphians
in The Philadelphia Negro (1899),
W.E.B. DuBois seems to sidestep the fact that those very pressures also generate
anger, cynicism and a taste for dangerous entertainments. But this very bifurcation of thought represents
the ordinary (and myriad) ambiguities and ambivalences about black selfhood
that themselves become the curiously open-ended period known as the Harlem
Renaissance, the heart of which found perhaps its fullest expression in the
decade and a half beginning 1920. The
New Negro, the metaphor for black defiance and subjectivity between the wars,
has slippages that we encounter in its cultural transvaluations, many more
than are captured by Nathan Huggins' assertion in his Harlem Renaissance (1971) that "the very presence of a New Negro
determines a dissatisfaction with the Old."
Overall, the course
will seek to contest that the familiar themes of race, class and gender are
implicated in appreciations of the black body and of sexuality and culture,
are unbound from soon-to-be ossified Victorian conventions and compose the
vehicle on which elements of both the black masculine and feminine themselves
are insurgent in the debates on pluralism and modernist expression prevalent
during the period.
Primary texts include: Jean
Toomer, Cane; Claude McKay, Home
to Harlem; Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Carl Van Vechten, Nigger
Heaven; Jdessie Fauset, There Is
Confusion.
Secondary authors include: Lauren Berlant, Hortense Spillers, Hdenry
Louis Gates, Jr., Joy James, George Hutchinson, Ann Douglas.
ENG 653
- FEMINIST PERFORMANCES
Prof. Arabella Lyon
Monday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 089925 (B) 358921
Performance
and act: concepts long familiar to the philosopher and rhetorician, concerns
of Gorgias, Plato, and Aristotle. In
feminism, they are relatively recent concerns with implications both promising
and troubling. For example, recent
writings about gender as performance are a basis of the ruptures between feminists
and post-feminists, and speech act theory informs legal challenges against
pornography and first amendment rights. Hence, feminist theory faces a new set of questions. What is the relationship between discourse
and the embodied experiences of women? What
is gained and lost if gender is theorized as construct as performance?
Does the speech act create the act of violence, and if so, what does
that imply about freedom of speech? If
one argues for the textual and symbolic nature of human experience, then how
does one address material and historical conditions?
What is the relationship between the symbolic and the material?
In this seminar
we will examine theories of gender as performance through the lens of speech
act theory and rhetorical theory. To
do this, we will return to J.L.Austin, Kenneth Burke, maybe Stanley Cavell,
maybe Ludwig Wittgenstein and develop several approaches to speech act theory. With and against this rather apolitical start,
we will then read feminists and post-feminists--such as Judith Butler, Catherine
MacKinnon, Linda Kauffman, Teresa Ebert, and Drucilla Cornell--and articulate
our answers to the above questions. We
may also be helped in this if we take advantage of the campus production of
The Vagina Monologues and the world-wide
V-day campaign to understand art as political action.
ENG 655
- LITERATURE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
Prof. James Bunn
Monday 3:30-6:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 220164 (B) 024291
Some say that
ecocriticism is insufficiently theorized.
Given the pastiche of postmodernism, maybe that is a good thing. In this seminar I want to explore different
ways in which some writers of the environmental movement have described interactions
of living creatures within their locales. For the first half of the course we shall read
some works that are always listed as classics: Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Aldo Leopold's
Sand County Almanac, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. I also want to feature several more recent books, Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward
Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Barbara
Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. What principles of balance, sustenance,
flow and cycling contribute to their environmentalism?
In the second
half of the course I plan to read some theories of material culture in order
to review "things," and the question of "life-in-things." We'll review Marx on alienation, Lukacs on
reification and Terry Eagleton on the ideology of the aesthetic. We'll read Heidegger on technology. We'll read Martin Jay on aesthetic ideology,
all in an effort to comprehend some pitfalls of an environmental aesthetic.
Finally I want to review contemporary readings in evolution, environmental
feedback, chaos theory, and symmetry theory in order to study the infiltration
of language with nature.
ENG 679
- BASIC CONCEPTS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Prof. Tim Dean
Thursday 7:00-9:40, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 300730 (B) 416397
This course functions as an introduction
to psychoanalytic theory, specifically, Freud and the French rereadings of
Freud in Lacan and Laplanche. We will
focus particularly closely on Freud's writings on culture and aesthetics,
guided by the question of how psychoanalysis can be used non-reductively for
literary and cultural study. Thus we will consider psychoanalytic accounts of fantasy, sublimation,
transference, the drive, the uncanny (and theories of aesthetic affect), the
enigmatic signifier, and the cultural unconscious, asking not how psychoanalysis
can be applied to literature but rather how a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity
might revise our sense of how we--as readers, viewers, critics, collectors,
and teachers--relate to aesthetic and cultural forms.
Readings by Freud
include Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem
and Taboo, Papers on Technique, "The Uncanny," and "Negation";
readings by Lacan include The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI) and The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII);
readings by Laplanche include Life and
Death in Psychoanalysis, Essays on Otherness, and (with J.B. Pontalis)
"Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality." Secondary readings by Leo
Bersani, Peter Brooks, Helene Cixous, Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Teresa de
Lauretis, Shoshana Felman, Neil Hertz, Julia Kristeva, Jacques-Alain Miller,
Charles Shepherdson, and Slovoj Zizek, among others.
This course is
open to students with minimal previous experience with psychoanalytic theory,
as well as to more experienced graduate students.
ENG 680
- MULTICULTURAL BRITAIN
Prof. David Schmid
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 538 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) (B)
In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy criticizes the British
tradition of cultural studies for indulging in "what can only be called
a morbid celebration of England and Englishness." Gilroy's wonderfully acidic phrase calls to mind the steady diet
of Masterpiece Theatre, 1970s sitcoms and royal documentaries offered by PBS.
If this constitutes your only exposure to Modern Britain, you could
be forgiven for thinking that Britain is populated
Exclusively by people who are stupid, irritating, upper-class,
royalist and, above all, white. The
truth (at least with regard to race) is very different. Modern Britain has never been more multicultural
and the aim of this seminar is to examine how this fact has slowly and inexorably
altered what it means to be 'British.' Although the presence of people of color in
Britain goes back hundreds of years, this class will focus on post-World War
II Britain beginning, not coincidentally, with the arrival of the S.S. Windrush
from the West Indies in 1948. The
Windrush carried the first significant numbers of West Indian immigrants to
England, thus triggering a process of transformation in British identity that
is still unfinished and hotly contested.
We will study this transformation through novels, poetry, music, film,
and art. We will also read theoretical
and critical work by Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer,
C.L.R. James, and others.
The tentative reading list is as follows:
Prose and Poetry
Diran Adebayo
Some Kind of Black
Rhonda Cobham and
Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black
Merle Collins (eds)
Women in Britain (selections)
Fred D'Aguiar
British Subjects
Ferdinand Dennis (ed)
Voices of the Crossing (selections)
Kazuo Ishiguro
Remains of the Day
Hanif Kureishi
Buddha of Suburbia
George Lamming
The Emigrants
Colin MacInnes
Absolute Beginners
Courttia Newland
The Scholar
Zadie Smith
White Teeth
Meera Syal
Anita and Me
Onyekachi Wambu (ed) Hurricane
Hits England: An Anthology of Writing About
Black Britain (selections)
Film
Bhaji on the Beach
My Beautiful Laundrette
Young Soul Rebels
Visual Art
M. Franklin Sirmans
Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean
and Mora J. Beauchamp- Artists
in Britain, 1966-1996
Byrd (eds)
Music
Styles: Bhangra, Punk, Reggae, Two-Tone
Artists: Asian Dub Foundation, Bally Sagoo, Linton Kwesi Johnson,
Aswad, The Clash, The Specials, The Selecter, Madness.
Requirements:
Students taking the class extensively are required to write a series
of short reading responses and a 5-page mid-term paper. Students taking the class intensively are also
required to write a 20-page research paper.
ENG 682
- LANGUAGE POETRY: HISTORY, THEORY, AND PRAXIS
Prof.
Ming-Qian Ma
Thursday 3:30-6:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 259352 (B) 236253
As a historical
overview / rethinking of one of the most remarkable poetic phenomena in the
Twentieth Century, this seminar will focus on a two-fold objective:
First, it will
attempt to answer the question "what is Language poetry?" By closely and systematically examining poets'
poetics statements, manifesto writings, and theoretical exchanges in relation
to their concomitant textual praxes, the seminar will concentrate, chronologically,
on the critical / methodological issues central to avant-garde innovations.
Situated within the larger context of post-structuralism, it will sort
out the specifics, both in theory and in praxes, which have defined Language
poetry, since the 1970s, as a radical critique of language, society, and culture
at what Jerome McGann calls the "fundamental levels of the consciousness
industries."
Secondly, it will
attempt to critique Language poetry as an avant-garde movement, focusing,
diachronically, on its complex relationship with literary establishments,
institutions, and academics. Within
the larger context of historical avant-garde, this seminar will thus examine
the extent to which Language poetry has succeeded in revising, or failed to
revise, the thitherto theory and definition of avant-garde.
The tentative reading list for the seminar will include, but not
limited to, the following:
Theory of Avant-Garde:
Renato Poggioli, The Theory
odf the Avant-Garde
Peter Burger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde
Berete E. Strong, The Poetic
Avant-Garde
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist
Moment
Etc.
Poetics:
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book
Bruce Andrews, Paradise and
Method
Charles Bernstein, Content's
Dream, A Poetics, My Way
Ron Silliman, The New Sentence
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The
Pink Guitar
Lyn Hijinian, The Language
of Inquiry
Bob Perelman, The Marginalization
of Poetry
Etc.
Poetry:
Chronological selections of poetry by representative Language poets
ENG 683
- AMERICAN FILM HISTORY
Prof. Alan Spiegel
Wednesday 3:30-6:l0, 538 Clemens
Screening: Monday
5:00-6:50, 10 Capen
Registration Numbers:
(A) 157586 (B) 403085
For those who
wish to pursue a minor field in film history--a policy which this department
both allows and encourages--or simply learn how to look at movies, this course
may be considered a reasonable place to begin.
This semester we'll attempt a short history of the American Film--movements,
trends, artists, studios: the works--easily a year's material (or more) telescoped
into a semester. We'll start with
a month of film techniques, etc., drawing examples from the work of the silent
masters: Griffith's Broken Blossoms;
Stroheim's Greed; Keaton's Sherlock
Jr. And then the transition to sound: Chaplin's
Modern Times (resistance to the word);
Hawks' His Girl Friday (word triumphant);
Sternberg's Scarlet Express (image
triumphant); Welles' Citizen Kane
(integration of word and image). Next
a brief look at the Studio system (late '30s--early '50s): Wilder's Double Indemnity (the genre film); Tourneur's
The Cat People (the B-film); Kazan's
A Streetcar Named Desire (acting).
We'll end with an overview of major trends in serious contemporary
filmmaking: Altman's The Long Goodbye, Kubrick's 2001,
Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Lynch's
Blue Velvet, taped excerpts from other
films; the relevant chapters in David Cook's A History of the Narrative Film; handouts, etc.
(N.B: the above film list is tentative and subject to changes.)
My goals are simply
to l) help students think through their eyes; get a lot of practice in reading
movies seriously; that is closely; in translating images into words,
and 2) see each film as representative of various trends and problems in film
history, theory, and critical methodology. Perhaps not so simple after all, but I trust everyone will have
a good time.
A number of short
analytic papers and orals presentations will probably be required. Films will be shown on Monday at 5:00 p.m.
and discussed on Wednesday at 3:30. While
the Wednesday class is of course mandatory, the Monday screening is flexible;
the student may see the required film by any means available to her or him
(e.g., video rental) as long as the viewing takes place before the
Wednesday meeting. Media and MAH students
are urged to sign on; a background in film is not a prerequisite.
ENG 684
- CONTESTED REPRESENTATIONS
Prof. Scott Stevens
Thursday 12:30-3:10, 436 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 238891 (B) 402915
Cultural historians often regard the preceding years of the Stuart
dynasty (l603-l649) to be the culmination of the Renaissance in England and
the beginning of the transition to the early modern period. Therefore, understanding several of the key
issues that led to this epoch-making chapter in English history is of importance
across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. This course focuses on the literature and fine
arts of the first half of the seventeenth century. Special attention will be given to placing
the authors and artists studied within the contexts of the controversies surrounding
monarchial power and the Stuart court which mark this pivotal century in British
history. Major poets such as Donne,
Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, and Marvell will be read with regard to intersecting
debates on aesthetics, religion, and politics in early Stuart England.
We will also attend to the role of Oxford & Cambridge Universities
as important centers of intellectual and theological debate and dissent in
the period. This will allow us to better understand the
place of the university as a catalyst in social and cultural developments.
Aesthetic developments
and debates in the fine arts are likewise central to understanding Stuart
culture. Court patronage allowed England
contact with some of the major aesthetic movements of the seventeenth century
by recruiting artists with international reputations. Thus, van Dyck, Mytens, Hollar, and Rubens
contributed works that would have a lasting effect on English painting. Representation became a hotly contested subject
in the areas of religious iconography, royal portraiture, court masques, and
theater. We will spend a considerable
amount of time on visual materials to better understand the various debates
over mimesis, iconoclasm, and political propaganda in this period. The course will provide students with a means
of assessing the inter-connection of disparate artistic movements with the
English Revolution of the l640's.
Students will
be expected to give a l5 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 697
- POETICS OF THE AMERICAS
Prof. Dennis Tedlock
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, 540 Clemens
Registration Numbers:
(A) 408353 (B) 281010
This seminar will be guided, in part, by
a strategic (or provisional) essentialism.
We will look and listen for poetry--whether past, ongoing, or projected--that
is specific, in some radical sense, to the so-called Americas or New World
or Western Hemisphere, or to Turtle Island. In the case of poetries from the indigenous
languages of these worlds, we will try for modes of interpretation and translation
that neither locate them on the margins of Eurocentric poetics nor assign
them to a prehistory of poetics. In
the case of poetries that belong to the new languages of these worlds, which
is to say creoles and pidgins, we will again try to decenter Europe.
Texts dealing with the first contacts between
Europeans and the peoples who were new to them will be read for clues to poetic
differences, with special attention to native accounts of the invaders.
We will also consider the radically indigenous writings of the Americas,
including pictographs with special attention to newly deciphered Mayan texts. Mayan literature, written in what turns out to be a phonetic script,
begins 500 years earlier than English literature. Its re-emergence into readability, which comes
at the same time as a major cultural renewal among Mayan peoples, poses major problems for Eurocentric cultural
schemes (and for Olson's human universe.)
One-page response papers will be due at each
meeting, with a longer piece of work due at the end. Alternatives to term papers may be negotiated,
including translations, writerly works, performance pieces, etc.
Readings will include a wide range of texts,
translations, and interpretations by most of the following and others as well:
Humberto Ak'abal, Paula Gunn Allen, Mary Austin, Jorge Luis Borges, Edward
Kamau Brathwaite, Daniel G. Briton, Edouard Glissant, Dell Hymes, Ah Maxam,
Alonzo Gonzaloes Mσ, Charles Olson, Simon Ortiz, Andrew Peynetsa, Kenneth
Rexroth, Jerome Rothenberg, Marνa Sabina, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Snyder,
Luci Tapahonso, Nathaniel Tarn, Cecilia Vicuρa, Lady Xok, Ray Young Bear.
Listenings will cover a wide range of performances in various languages.
Assigned texts will include: Walter D. Mignolo,
Local Histories/Global Designs;
Charles Olson, Selected Writings;
Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds., The
Multilingual Anthology of American Literature; Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America; and Cecilia Vicuρa,
Unravelling Words and the Weaving of
Water.
CROSS-REGISTERED
COURSES
ENG 701
- CARIBBEAN AESTHETICS
Prof. Joseph F. Buscaglia
Wednesday 4:10-6:50
Registration Number:
184396
Description not yet available.
ENG 706
- POETICS OF PROGRAMMABLE LITERATURE
Prof. Loss Glazier
Tuesday 12:30-3:l0,
232 Center for the Arts
Registration Number:
214235
Programmable literature
can be defined as new media writing that uses programming and/or interactivity
to generate varying content for different readings. This emerging discipline is a truly dynamic
field of digital media poetics. This
is a graduate-level course about reading programmable literature and
about relevant literary/digital theory. It
will provide detailed examination of works by programmable medium artists
such as John Cayley, Philippe Bootz, Neil Hennessey, Judd Morrissey/Lori Talley,
Simon Biggs and/or others. The concept
of "literature" will extend to other implementations of programmability,
including diverse types of textual art machines. We will consider the grammar of programming
languages and will differentiate programming code from scripting languages
and simple mark-up. A survey of programming
languages, algorithmic thinking, and text manipulation programs will be included,
depending on student interest. We
will look at some Language Poetry practices as relating to programmability. We will consider the relation between programmed
variance and scholarly textual criticism. Theories of programmability will be central to the course and will
include a look at foundational writings, including Turing, Babbage, Kittler,
and others. Questions that will be
raised include how meaning is made when texts have multiple content, how such
multiple content can be tracked, how the scope of a work is determined, and
how you read between the variants to locate issues at the core of such works.
Course requirements: reading, oral presentation,
final project, digital or paper. If
idigital, final project may be a programming project, text manipulation project,
or variance analysis, digital or traditional; if paper, given the newness
of the field, it is hoped that paper can be publishable. No programming/technical experience is required.
Text: TBA