DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

SPRING 2004

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 522 - MILTON

Prof. Scott Stevens

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

Registration Numbers: (A) 260286 (B) 336130

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

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

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 526 - ROMANTICISM

Prof. Mili Clark

Thursday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 262824 (B) 172994

Text Box:
Caspar David Friedrich
1774-1840
The Tree of Crows
c. 1822 According to contemporary criticism, nothing provoked romanticism like the standardization of taste imposed upon the populace by the mass production of goods and services in the capitalist economy. “In this respect, Romanticism represents the revolt of repressed, channeled, and deformed subjectivity and affectivity” (Robert Sayre). Yet, capitalism, as we know it, was in its infancy in the late eighteenth century, and the history of economic abuses against the working poor goes back to medieval times. So, we ought to take Romantic poets and artists at their word that they were rebelling against worn out aesthetics, social manners and mannerisms that disenfranchised women and the working poor, organized religion, despotic governments, the slave trade—whatever customs and practices had been prevalent for so long that their original reason for being and usefulness were long gone.

Although the Romantic Movement in England refers to a specific time period, from 1780 to1830, romanticism is a way of being and behaving that can occur anytime in a society that, for one reason or another, fails to satisfy the aesthetic and political desires of educated young (mostly) men (though women were stirring in the Romantic Period itself). Where do you turn for satisfaction if your society is starving your sensibilities and intellect (and even your stomach, if you can’t find employment)?

1a Nature, communing with

1b Nature, theorizing about

2a The idealized past, longing for

2b An idealized future, hoping for

3a Poetry/Arts, theories of

3b Poetry/Arts, practice of

4 Essays/Books, criticizing Everything

5a Foreign wars of rebellion, sympathizing with

5b Foreign wars of rebellion, joining up with

6a Drugs, fleeing from stultification of life

6b Drugs, fleeing toward an otherworldly sublime something

7 Individualism, all of the above

8 Imagination, all of the above

We’ll read the usual English Romantics with a smattering of 17^th- and 18^th-century romantic wannabes, selections from influential German philosophers and French poets, and Victorian and 20^th century follow throughs.

Requirements: Collaborative class presentations

Weekly response papers posted to UBLearns message board

Final essay

HEAD-DRESS. Small white silk hat, trimmed with yellow and pink-striped riband; a deep veil of clear white lawn, with an embroidered border in colours. The hair in light curls. Round gown of fine callico, with a narrow flounce of the same. Short full sleeves of plain muslin, made up into three different forms; the upper part loose, the middle in small plaits, and the end in ruffles. Over the shoulders pink and yellow taffeta, put into plaits, and crossing in the front. A narrow pink riband round the waist, tied on the left side. A string of white beads round the neck. Gold ear-rings. Yellow gloves and shoes.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 537 - HAWTHORNE

Prof. Robert Daly

Wednesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 335060 (B) 409014

Long ago, Americanists met to lament that we know bits and pieces of many writers but rarely know any one writer in detail and in context. This seminar aims to help you become an exception to that sad rule. Nathaniel Hawthorne is a cultural icon, considered “major” in both his time and our own. As the current flood of commentary on his work suggests, he remains an important writer of literature as ethical and aesthetic exploration. He read most of the American writers who preceded him and influenced many who followed. Even today, his writing continues to do important cultural work. For that reason, to become conversant with his writing is to learn a good deal of American literature and culture.

We shall read the best of Hawthorne's short tales and the four completed romances, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. There will be handouts on research essays, publication, annotated bibliographies, a chronology of Hawthorne's life and writing, a guide to the manuscript sources, and other handouts on how we read Hawthorne and why it matters.

We shall read the texts in roughly the order in which he wrote them, pay attention to their interactions with other texts and with the larger culture, ask why he so often altered the historical accounts, why he peopled his tales with poor readers who enact various epistemological reductions and suffer the elaborate consequences. We'll consider how one can use in literature a historical culture already literary in at least two senses, not only shaped by and in literary genres, but also lived and written by people aware and wary of the interpretive resonances of their every move. We shall attempt a double focus, viewing Hawthorne's writings as both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their times) and hermeneutic (enabling us to attend to our own interpretive repertoires and cultural strategies). We shall ask how and what they meant in his time and how and what they mean in ours.

Each student will be expected to participate in seminar discussion, to do a seminar introduction, and to write a research essay on a subject of his or her own choosing. Those taking the seminar extensively will be expected to do everything but the research essay.

Texts:

McIntosh, James, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales. New York: Norton, 1987.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 3rd ed. Ed. Seymour Gross, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988.

---. The House of the Seven Gables. Ed. Seymour Gross. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1967.

---. The Blithedale Romance. Ed. William E. Cain. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996.

---. The Marble Faun. Ed. Richard Brodhead. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Though you may, of course, acquire them anywhere you please, these books will be available at Talking Leaves Bookstore on Main Street.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 545 - THE 20^th CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL:

CLASS AND MODERN CHANGE

Prof. Nathan Grant

Thursday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 286822 (B) 097356

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, of taken away, nothing else in all the world's

boundless storehouses could make up to us, or ever again return.

This variegated selfhood of the American consciousness would be articulated anew--and perhaps more definitely--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 will 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 20^th century.

Authors and titles may include Henry James, In the Cage; 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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 548 - PERFORMATIVE FICTION AND THE LANGUAGE OF ACTION:

A fiction workshop

Prof. Christina Milletti

Wednesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436

Registration Number: 255961

Lautreamont writes in Maldoror: "I shall establish in a few lines how Maldoror was good during his early years, when he lived happily. There that's done." More recently, Kathy Acker writes in Don Quixote, ""All stories or narratives," the dog barked, "being stories of revolt, are revolt."" This workshop seminar will investigate intersections of performative language (speech act theory) and fictional language by pursuing two interrelated objectives. First, we will examine how and under what circumstances fictional narratives assume a variety of performative poses: through what means, in other words, fiction can amplify, intensify, or multiply the relationship of "fictional" language to "ordinary" language in order to create specific, directed effects beyond the discursive realm of the text. Second, students will be asked to design their own performative fictions which consider, deploy, react to, and/or challenge theories examined during the semester and submit their works in progress to the workshop for review.

This is a hybrid course: though each student will be asked to give one critical presentation, response pieces must be creative in scope, and culminate in a final fictional project. Course readings will include selections from J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, John Barth, Kathy Acker, Gertrude Stein, and Christine Brook-Rose among others. We will also examine fictions in alternate media--such as hyperfiction and sound-based narratives.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 550 - CREATIVE WRITING POETRY

Prof. Irving Feldman

Tuesday, 7:00-9:40 p.m., Clemens 436

Registration Number: 126705

A workshop course in which students' original work will be discussed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 561 - STUDIES IN THE NOVEL

Prof. Arthur Efron

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

Registration Numbers: (A) 409649 (B) 111593

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

"The novel is the highest complex of subtle inter-relatedness that

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

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

The five novels will come from very different eras and cultures, but each will have value in itself and as a searching experiment in the development of the novel. The first is the work that started the "modern" novel on its way, Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. We will read Part One, the first half of the novel, published in 1605. Then, we leap to the 19^th century, and read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronté. From there, we go to Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garciá Márquez; and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

The New Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002) by H. Porter Abbott is a playful-serious guide that will be the only theory-book required. Incredibly, it lacks any specific discussion of the genre of the novel. But in excerpts that I will make available to you, we will read challenging statements on fiction and the literary field called "the novel," including Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"; Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction"; D.H. Lawrence, "Why the Novel Matters" and "Morality and the Novel"; E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel; Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination; John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment"; David Lodge, "Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction," Margaret Ann Doody, The True Story of the Novel; Brian Richardson, "Linearity and its Discontents"; Linda Hutcheon, "Historiographical Metafiction"; Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction; and Charles Baxter, "Talking Forks: Fiction and the Inner Life of Objects."

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

We need Dewey in order to develop a groundmap of where we are going in this complex field. We also need an understanding of why we are reading novels at all. I want to present an approach that defends the integrity of the novel (and of literature itself), rather than a neutral description. As the course unfolds, I will resist (but not dismiss) the notions that there is no such genre as the novel, that the novel is dead, that it is about to be buried by the Web, or that it can be reduced to "writing," "power," "the market," "bourgeois culture," "language," "the body," "fictionality," or "narrativity." We will try to understand why it is that the modern novel, developed largely in the Western world, is having so many rebirths in the rest of the world today. I will defend the concept of character, with all of its imaginary intimate knowledge of the human being in society. Character, as E.M. Forster knew, has been hard-won through the creative struggles of the great novelists. There can be no worthy sense of fictional character without relying on two other cultural concepts that now seem to be in disrepute: the self and individuality. Very well, we will take a few steps to re-repute them.

Requirements: papers of 3 to 6 pages, one on each of the novels. The topics for these will be assigned, but will allow for your own decisions and choices. They will be due immediately as we read our way into the novels; no missed or long-delayed papers. On the last day, I will ask for that short (2 pages, or longer, if you wish) "comment" on "My Theory of the Novel."

You will also be asked to lead the seminar discussion with your own short presentation on what we are then reading or on any topic in the field of the novel that interests you.

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

I will ask that you take notes and hand them in at some point during the course. The idea is to enable you to make use of what is being said (including what is said by other members of the seminar), rather than let it pass into possibly irretrievable memory.

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

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

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 583 - POETICS OF DIFFICULTY

Prof. Tim Dean

Thursday, 7:00-9:40 p.m., Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 151773 (B) 341353

This course investigates different forms of poetic "difficulty," understood broadly as the workings of language at the outer reaches of intelligibility. With "difficulty" as our rubric, we will consider the poetry and poetics of Emily Dickinson and Hart Crane, asking questions such as the following:

What is the place and function of "difficulty" in modernist aesthetics?

How has "difficulty" come to be aligned with the avant garde?

How should we understand tensions between "difficulty" and democratic access?

How does the question of poetic "difficulty" map onto public/private distinctions?

How does "difficulty" challenge conventional forms of publication?

How might categories of gender and sexuality inflect our understanding of "difficulty"?

What is the relation between "difficulty" and queerness?

What is the relation between "difficulty" and mental illness?

How might poetic "difficulty" be understood as a dialect of the linguistic unconscious?

How might we develop an ethical as well as a hermeneutical relation to "difficult" poetry?

In coming to grips with different kinds of poetic "difficulty," we will read a number of philosophical as well as poetic texts, asking both how "difficult" theory might connect with "difficult" poetry, and how certain poetries might be understood as forms of theory in their own right--how, that is, "difficult" poetry manifests heuristic and speculative values that illuminate theoretical problems (as well as the reverse). In other words, we will be reading a lot of theory as well as a lot of poetry.

Dickinson and Crane will offer us test cases, and we will attempt to become familiar with their canons, their careers, and the critical industries produced around their work. However, students enrolled in the course may write final papers on "difficult" poets other than Dickinson and Crane.

Visits from poets Lucie Brock-Broido (The Master Letters) and Allen Grossman will be integrated into the course.

Course Requirements

Participation in class discussion, oral presentation, and final research paper (25 pages)

Note

In the interests of keeping this class at a size conducive to serious seminar discussion, no auditors without instructor permission, please.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 584 - CORE POETICS
Prof. Myung Mi Kim

Wednesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 438

Registration Numbers: (A) 133544 (B) 254380

I envision this course as one among many possible seminars in "core poetics" devoted to exploring the history of poetics not only as an accounting for, but as a means of addressing: "what is poetics?" The Spring 2004 version of "core poetics" will track notions and demonstrations of poetics that emerge in 20^th century America (broadly speaking). Our guiding question: what has yet to be written about poetics as the conjunction of poesis, acts of critical reading, and the practice of contemplating literary/ intellectual productions in globally historicized contexts. If, as Valery suggests, poetics is "a name for everything that bears on the creation or composition of works having language at once as their substance and as their instrument," what has been its particular contribution to tests of the heterogeneous? Of translingual, transcultural, and transtemporal materials?

Possible readings: William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge, Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions, H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, Robert Duncan, Fictive Certainties, Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights: Writings, 1954-1989, Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics. Further: the question before us, what has yet to be written in relation to poetics, demands that we attend to the multiple registers (occasions, forms, contexts) in which a thinking through of/with poetics takes place. In this respect, we might consider talks, lectures, speeches: e.g., Jack Spicer's "Vancouver lectures," excerpts from Charles Bernstein's My Way: Speeches and Poems, Erica Hunt's "Notes Toward an Oppositional Poetics," Kamau Brathwaite's ConVERsation (based on transcriptions of a series of conversations with Nathaniel Mackey). Correlation: anthologies to be read together as a group; for example, Warren Tallman and Donald Allen's Poetics of the New American Poetry (as well as the poetics section of New American Poetry), Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach, the section on poetics from Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing By Women, edited by Margy Sloan, Walter Lew's afterword to Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. Among other possible essays we may want to study: Laura Riding Jackson, "Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality," Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto," Robin Blaser, "The Poetics of the Outside." It may also prove useful to imagine correspondence as a site for working out and practicing poetics: for instance, the selected letters of George Oppen or Lorine Niedecker. Further correlation: I would propose that we look at paratextual materials such as introductions, prefaces, afterwords and so on as they become examples/manifestations of poetics. Companion readings: Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics, Aristotle, Poetics, Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora, Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies, Georgio Agamben, The End of the Poem, Paul Celan, Collected Prose (especially, "The Meridian Speech"), Coleridge, excerpts from Biographia literaria, Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, l855 edition, Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, Longinus, "On the Sublime." This list, then, is offered as indicative not definitive readings for the course. Weekly responses, a formal seminar presentation, as well as a final paper are the basic expectations. Again, given the question: what has yet to be written in relation to poetics, this seminar is an open invitation for poets and scholars to speculate on and theorize poetics in (for) the 2lst century.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 585 - FAULKNER

Prof. Bruce Jackson

Monday, 3:30-6:10 p.m., Clemens 610

Registration Numbers: (A) 396530 (B) 109099

During his great years--1929 through 1942--William Faulkner was the most experimental of American fiction writers: he developed or found a different narrative mode for each of his major novels. He is one of the few American novelists who was truly polyphonic: his characters' utterances scan so specifically you usually don't need "Sutpen said" or "Quentin said" to know who's talking (a good thing, since he often doesn't bother to write "Sutpen said" or "Quentin said."). We'll read and discuss Faulkner's major novels, several of his short stories, one of the biographies, and some criticism. Students will do one brief oral report on a critical or biographical work or on one of the novels we're not reading, and a term paper.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 586 - STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Prof. Neil Schmitz

Tuesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 251401 (B) 049789

Civil War Studies in American Literature. The first march in this seminar begins in 1863 and ends in 1963. It concerns the story sequence of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (which contains and revises Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence), Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition Speech (l895), and Martin Luther King's Lincoln Memorial Speech (1963), speech acts, speech events, that were epochal, paradigm shifters, turners of the screw in our national narrative. We read living sacred script, must feel the sensation of the post-Unionist/new nationalist sublime, even as we contemplate the spectacle of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., the enigma of its interpolation in the story sequence. The second march concerns a certain post-Confederate construction of this post-Civil War sublime, takes up Mark Twain in his Mississippi sequence (Tom Sawyer [1876], Huckleberry Finn [1885],) William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom [1936], engages the Uncle question in Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and Charles Chesnutt's Uncle Julius, has always in mind the merciless Flannery O'Connor and the vanquished Cormac McCarthy, and hopes to get there, to her Georgia and his Tennessee. Between the first and second march, there is a bivouac where we consider Herman Melville's 'Confederate' poetry, his Stonewall Jackson songs, his Robert E. Lee tribute.

Useful pre-seminar knowledge: the instance in Nat Turner's text where he accepts the axe and the instance in Uncle Tom's Cabin where Uncle Tom refuses Nat Turner's axe. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and Pym. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (text or film version). You should be able to write a solid paragraph describing John C. Calhoun. We will all read Blight's Race and Reunion, the most recent post-Unionist/new nationalist account of Lost Cause Narrative, the present caption of post-Civil War Anglo-American Southern writing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ENG 587 - SHAKESPEARE

Prof. David Willbern

Tuesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 176909 (B) 138798

That's Picasso's Shakespeare. What does it look like to you? Cubist, androgynous, theatrical, inscrutable, an oval on a field of diamonds? When you read Shakespeare, what do you see?

We will read about a dozen plays, along with critical essays from various periods and perspectives. Thus the course will focus on Shakespeare, the author, as well as on "Shakespeare," the field of discourse liberally sown and reaped over the centuries. Critical styles include character-oriented, text-oriented, mythical, historical, New Critical, Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, post-structural, "new historical," and (is it possible?) more. My own interpretive style leans toward psychoanalytic, but it's a bias, not a warp.

If you take this seminar, you can expect to complete it with a durable yet nuanced appreciation of several of Shakespeare's plays, plus a broad acquaintance with past and present styles of Shakespeare criticism. In the process you might hone your own style of reading (and writing), and begin to sketch your own "Shakespeare."

Depending on the size of the group, seminar members can select many of the plays we'll read. Some that I'd like to include are As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Othello, and The Tempest. I'll arrange the first few weeks of readings; the remainder can be decided by the group. Depending on cost and availability, we'll use well-annotated individual editions (such as Arden) and some recent Norton "critical editions." If you already have a Collected Works (of course you do), it will be useful. Some material may be digitally available on UB Library Reserve. My own undergraduate Web sites may be helpful: http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/classes/eng/willbern/Shakespeare/index.htm

I'll ask you to make one in-class presentation on a topic devised in mutual conversation, write one brief response to a play and some of its criticism, and produce one substantial final paper.

For the first class, please reread the First Act of Hamlet.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 593/493 - MULTICULTURAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Prof. Robert Newman

Tuesday, 4:00-6:40 p.m., Clemens 436

Registration Number: 309671

(Auto)Biography involves a paradox: individual lives need to be understood in terms of the cultural and historical forces that shaped them and yet also as unique and individual reactions to multiple and often conflicting forces. Nothing could exemplify this more pertinently than the first text we'll look at--the Iranian exile Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books, which deals not only with Nabokov in the Islamic Republic but also Fitzgerald (whose "Gatsby" is put on mock-trial by one of Nafisi's Islamic students, thereby revealing what precisely are the referents for such words as "American," "Western" and "decadence"), James and Austen.

The course will also explore the cultural-individual conflict in relation to some classic autobiographies--Augustine, Rousseau, Boswell's Life of Johnson (the model by the way, for Edmund Morris' Dutch), Frederick Douglass, Zitkala-Sa and (maybe) Yezierska--and to some contemporaries, chosen from among Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, Monette's Becoming a Man, Sherman Alexie's autobiographical "Smoke Signals," Charles McBride's marvelous Black-Jewish Color of Water, Carolyn See's Dreaming, Hard Luck and Good Times in America, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Debra Dickerson's account of African-American success in the Air Force, American Story and Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey.

We will also look at recent material dealing with conflicts over the very nature and significance of multiculturalism itself and of varied critical approaches to (Auto)Biography.

Requirements:

A critical essay, backed up by research; an autobiographical or biographical essay; class attendance and participation. As to the final paper, this may be the chance to do a version of the family biography you've always wanted to do (keeping in mind the paradox of the cultural-individual that I spoke of above)!

Graduate students (enrolled under ENG 593) will be expected to submit a reading list of additional primary and secondary texts for reporting on to the class as a whole.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 594/494 - ADVANCED NON-FICTION WRITING

Prof. Mark Shechner

Tuesday, 7:00-9:40 p.m., Clemens 538

Registration Number: 248633

This course, 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: being interested.

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 generic, 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'll spend a lot of time on resource building: where do words come from? Where do phrases 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'll 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 voice.

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'm 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, 7-15 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 lower of grade.

3. Two books: a thesaurus and a portable dictionary. They are indispensable tools, and I'll have a number ordered for the course through Talking Leaves Book Stores at 3l58 Main Street.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 595/495 - THE JEWISH WRITER IN AMERICA, Part 2

Prof. Mark Shechner

Thursday, 7:00-9:40 p.m., Clemens

Registration Number: 172416

This course picks up where the Fall course left off, with the explosion of Jewish fiction writing in the main stream of American fiction after the Second World War. Everyone is familiar with the names of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, but how many know the writing of Isaac Rosenfeld, Lionel Trilling (indeed he wrote a novel), Leslie Fiedler, Meyer Levin, Meyer Liben, etc. We might toward the end leap into the very contemporary with writing by, say, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Chabon (a great nephew of Abraham Cahan), Melvin Jules Bukiet, Steve Stern, or Nathan Englander. We will also look at social and intellectual developments along the way, in journals such as Partisan Review and Commentary and various offshoots and antecedents. It will also be, as was the Fall semester, a course in social history, the life and pressures and values that the literature arose out of.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 607- STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE

LITERARY THEORY IN EARLY-MODERN STUDIES

Prof. Andrew Stott

Wednesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 236980 (B) 030404

Since the 1970s, early-modern studies has earned a reputation for quickly adopting literary and critical theory into its methodology. This is partly due to the presence of Shakespeare in the field, and his status as a cultural and canonical totem has encouraged scholars to approach his works from new perspectives as a means of challenging critical orthodoxies and politicizing the academy. This course intends to look at the application of literary and critical theory in early-modern studies, with an eye to familiarizing students with theoretical trends, their position in Literature departments, the controversies that surround them, and their suitability to historical materials. We will read a number of the primary theoretical texts that have inspired new movements (Marx, Freud, Foucault, Geertz), as well as examples of criticism that use Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and queer theories as a basis for their readings of early-modern literature. We will also take some time to consider the impact, efficacy and constraints of New Historicism, undoubtedly the dominant methodological practice in early-modern studies in the last twenty years. It would be helpful for students to have some working knowledge of Shakespeare, as we will use his plays as a means of focusing discussion.

Students will be asked to present at least one fully-researched 20 minute presentation on some aspect of the course material, and to produce a full-length paper at the end of the semester.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 613 - STUDIES IN 18^TH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL

Prof. Ruth Mack

Monday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 193400 (B) 237254

Introducing Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding claims that his new genre, the "comic epic-poem in prose," will bypass "precepts" for "examples." In this course we (predictably) will read texts, Fielding's among them, that constitute examples of the "novel" genre as it emerged in Britain during the eighteenth century. We will also read theories of the novel, ranging from eighteenth-century literary criticism by Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, to more modern critical histories of the novel by Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, and Georg Lukacs. But such a line between practice and theory is not one the novel respects. We thus will be concerned additionally with what Fielding's remark suggests: the novel's tendency to theorize itself and to recast the relationship between theory and practice.

What is a novel? On our way to answering this question, we will examine critical attempts to formally separate the novel from other prose texts, and we will consider the political states of such a separation, beginning with the novel's gendered eighteenth-century war with the romance. In these terms, we will be engaged in uncovering and reevaluating the dimensions of a very particular literary-historical moment. Yet from the outset our questions will necessarily reach beyond the eighteenth-century British context, because in staking its claims to newness the novel calls into question the definition of "genre." The consolidation of the novel's identity puts on the table the most fundamental questions about the relationships between genre and culture, between history and theory, and between texts and readers. With this in mind, we will discuss how the novel's beginnings might illuminate much later theories of subjectivity and fiction.

Literary texts will include Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho.

Critical texts will include material by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Claude Levi-Strauss, Nancy Armstrong, Dorrit Cohn, and Franco Moretti.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 645 - STUDIES IN THE NOVEL: POSTMODERN FICTION

THE POLITICS OF THE UNPRESENTABLE:

ACKER, DeLILLO, GADDIS

Prof. Joseph Conte

Tuesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 011412 (B) 212517

In one of the foundational documents of an “anti-foundationalist” postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard argues that the postmodern is an aesthetics of the unpresentable, a form of the sublime, in which new modes of presentation are constantly sought for that which is finally ineffable. Such is the case in the fiction of Kathy Acker, who seeks to arrive at a place, a society in Empire of the Senseless, that exists beyond taboo, that isn’t “constructed according to the phallus,” that is wholly outside of the patriarchy. The work of Don DeLillo describes the irony of our media ecology, in which the saturation of archived, broadcast, and electronic information miserably fails to explain the iridescent sheen of the Airborne Toxic Disaster in White Noise or the events in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 in Libra. William Gaddis satirizes our continued attachment to elaborate systems that have ceased to conform to empirical observation: the churning of a finance market that bears increasingly little relation to the demands of labor in J R; and the practice of law without recourse to justice in A Frolic of His Own.

Nevertheless, Fredric Jameson has proposed that there has been a “waning of affect,” or dedifferentiation, in the expressions of postmodernism, from the visual arts to literature. But the suggestion that postmodern fiction, particularly the brand that has tirelessly sought new modes of presentation, has lapsed into a degree zero of political critique is not borne out by the work we will read. Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School and Great Expectations wage a terrorist campaign across the political spectrum, excoriating “fascist” anti-pornographers, “empathetic” abortion-providers, and Plath’s “Daddy” in any disguise. DeLillo’s Underworld recognizes that waste management is the paradigmatic occupation in our disposable consumer economy and that the underclass—human disposability—is the most egregious form of waste.

To supplement the novels mentioned here (with possible additions or substitutions), we will read some excerpts from the statements on postmodern theory by Lyotard, Jameson, and Baudrillard, as well as a number of critical assessments of the fiction by Ellen Friedman, Tom LeClair, Paul Maltby, Frank Lentricchia, and others.

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

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 651 - VIOLENCE AND RHETORIC

Prof. Arabella Lyon

Wednesday, 7:00-9:40 p.m., Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 168716 (B) 210504

Many rhetoricians have noted that classical rhetoric and contemporary critical theory share concerns. In this course, we will examine a few of these concerns, most prominently (l) the relationships among discourse, power, and violence and (2) how one--especially when faced with power differentials--evaluates competing claims of knowledge or good. These concerns are at the core of pluralistic and democratic practices and, perhaps, define the limits of rhetoric. In the classical period, we will be reading Sophocles, Euripides, a sophist or two, Plato, and Aristotle; in contemporary theory, we may examine Hannah Arendt, Kenneth Burke, J. L. Austin, Elaine Scarry, and Michel Foucault.

The purpose of this course will be to develop greater understanding of how violence constructs, confronts, and/or allies with public discourse at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To that end, we will look at debates on hate speech and pornography as sites where rhetoric, power and violence are evident. Students should pursue a research project which analyzes the relationship between discourse, power, and violence in literature or the discourse around an event such as 9/ll, the Montreal massacre, or the Oklahoma City bombing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 681 - CELEBRITY CULTURE

Prof. David Schmid

Thursday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 192045 (B) 411029

Fame, makes a man take things over

Fame, lets him loose, hard to swallow

Fame, puts you there where things are hollow

Fame

Fame, it's not your brain, it's just the flame

That burns your change to keep you insane

Fame

- David Bowie Fame (l978)

Despite David Bowie's warning about its deleterious consequences, American culture is today more obsessed than ever by fame. Whether in the form of desire for the lifestyles of the famous (MTV's Cribs, VH1's The Fabulous Life, the E! network), our enjoyment of their self-destructive tendencies (E!'s Celebrities Uncensored, the National Enquirer, celebrity trials), or the possibility of actually becoming famous (American Idol, Making the Band) the contemporary engagement with fame seems total, undifferentiated, and to have always been with us.

The aim of this class is to anatomize the role fame plays in American culture by providing a history of the concept, clarifying the terminological complexities that surround fame, and examining the ways in which popular culture itself has not only propagated and reflected our obsession with fame, but has also frequently provided insightful and self-conscious analysis of that obsession. What are the origins of the concept of fame? What's the difference between fame and celebrity? Between fame and notoriety? Why are we so interested in fame? Should we be doing something more valuable with our time instead?! These are some of the questions that we will discuss in this class.

The following texts and films will help guide our discussions:

Nathanael West The Day of the Locust (1939)

Jerzy N. Kosinski Being There (1971)

Kenneth Anger Hollywood Babylon (1983)

Jackie Stacey Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (1994)

P. David Marshall Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (1997)

Richard Dyer Stars (revised ed., 1998)

Ben Elton Popcorn (1998)

Gary Indiana Three Month Fever (1999)

All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Superstar: the Life and

Times of Any Warhol (Chuck Workman, 1991)

15 Minutes (John Herzfeld, 2001)

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

We will also be reading a wide range of secondary material by scholars such as Leo Lowenthall, C. Wright Mills, Leo Braudy, Warren Susman, and Richard Schickel.

Requirements:

Apart from the usual requirements, a minimally guilt-ridden obsession with the sweaty, trashy, abject dregs of our popular culture would be helpful, but is not essential!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 683 - THE FILMS OF ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

Prof. Joan Copjec

Wednesday, 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 252548 (B) 364361

This seminar is an introduction to the films of the contemporary Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami. In recent years his highly-laurelled films, exhibited at major international film festivals, have brought Iranian cinema to the attention of the world. My intention is to retain some attention for this national cinema while focusing on Kiarostami's work, which remains unique despite having developed out of similar conditions and sharing many features and concerns.

Among the notable features of Kiarostami's films are their exquisitely beautiful images of the Iranian landscape; their pared-dowm action and radical elimination of all mythological elements of traditional Iranian literature and ideology; and their often documentary format. These features have led many critics to compare Kiarostami to the Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, yet the conditions of Koarostami's cinema are quite different. We will examine the critical comparison and the background of Iranian culture and politics that throw it into question.

Students signing up for the seminar will be required to attend the film screenings scheduled for the undergraduate course, "Iranian Cinema," which meets Thursdays at 3:30 pm. (N.B.: you may not take this seminar if you are unavailable for Thursday's meeting.) Wednesday's seminar meeting will be devoted to screenings of other Kiarostami films not shown in the undergraduate class; to individual presentations by students; and to discussions of related theoretical materials. These meetings will often be shortened to compensate for the extra hours of classroom time required.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ENG 707 - MYTHOLOGY

Prof. Diane Christian

Wednesday, 3:30-6:10, Clemens 610

Registration Numbers: (A) 405281 (B) 337960

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

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

CROSS LISTED COURSES

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ITA 520 - THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN NOVEL

TIME: MONDAY 1:00-3:40, Clemens 218

SPRING 2004

PROFESSOR M. E. GUTIERREZ

Registration Number: 441194

Cross-registered with:

ENG 415:  Registration Number: 360969

ITAL 406: Registration Number: 228377

COL 570:  Registration Number: 004106

ITAL 520: Registration Number: 441194

HMN 505:  Registration Number: 412064

This course will focus on the Italian Novel of the 20^th Century, covering the half-century span from the

This course will focus on the Italian Novel of the 20th Century, covering the half-century span from the end of World War I to the eighties.  It will provide a

 general overview of the evolution of literary and philosophical movements, criticism, prose and poetry through the two World Wars, the rise and fall of the Fascist

 regime and the post-war reconstruction of a neo-capitalistic society. Readings will include quintessential novels representative of different moments of this

 evolution: the Unification of Italy (The Leopard), bourgeois life in the twenties (Zeno's Confessions) and the lives of peasants and intellectuals under Fascism

 (The Moon and the Bonfire).  In Family Sayings, the problems of the War of Liberation, the northern countryside, and the domestic world of the novel's

 protagonist, Natalia (who recounts her-story and Italy’s macro-history in the first person), are all intertwined in the best tradition of autobiographical narrative.

  We will also explore, through Women at War, issues of Italian national identity as they are focused in the definition of Italian female subjectivity.

N.B.: The  readings and the course will be in English.

Readings will include relevant literary works by the following writers:

1.  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa        The Leopard

2.  Italo Svevo                                       Zeno's Confessions

3.  Cesare Pavese                                  The Moon and the Bonfire

4.  Natalia Ginzburg                               Family Sayins

5.  Dacia Maraini                                   Women at War

6.  Anna Maria Ortese                           The Iguana

7.  Primo Levi                                        Survival in Auschwitz

8.  Italo Calvino                                     Under the Jaguar Sun

9.        "                                                 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

10.  Umberto Eco                                  The Name of the Rose

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Return to the English Department. This page is maintained by Sophia Canavos.