DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
SPRING 2005
ENG 509 – CHAUCER
Prof.
Mili Clark
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A) 402266
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 who’s just like the Wife of Bath”). I would never discourage undergraduates from
believing this commonplace if it is what keeps them reading Chaucer. However, Chaucer’s works—his characters, his
tropes, his sentiments—comprise the strata of an archeology.
Compressed,
sometimes neatly, sometimes haphazardly, beneath the surface 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 Law’s Tale, for instance,
takes you down through saints’ lives to the Greek Romances; the imperiled
virtuous heroine does not stop with Chaucer but continues up through Renaissance
drama and the Victorian novel to the serials of the silent film; though the
20th century is full of imperiled heroines, I’m not sure their
virtue matches that of their predecessors, and if not, do they belong in this
particular archeology?
On
the whole, Chaucer’s attitude toward the archeology of texts was positive. Textual layering provides richness and authenticity,
and, very important for the medieval writer, keeps the past alive in the present.
If old books were gone, the key of remembrance would be lost, says
Chaucer in the 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? or a proto-18C closet drama?), he seems to say
that those who lived before Christianity were essentially different from those
who came after.
Well, this course description is a long prologue to
a tale in itself. We’ll read the dream
visions, Troilus and Criseyde, and most Canterbury Tales, along
with some key Chaucerian sources. Because
I want graduate students to read Chaucer for their own pleasure and enlightenment,
and because we will be reading in Middle English, I am not requiring a major
paper at the end of the course. We’ll have collaborative
in-class presentations, weekly response posting to
Blackboard, surveys of the literature on particular texts (annotated bibliographies).
NOTE: There is only an “A” section. You can count ENG 509 as one of your 10 seminars
or as an extra seminar (which won’t affect your seminar requirement).
ENG 516 – TEACHING SHAKESPEARE
Prof.
Barbara Bono
Tuesday 4:10-6:50, Talbert 103
Registration Number: 153253
This
is a course in teaching Shakespeare. It is designed explicitly for students who imagine
that they will be presented with the challenge and the pleasure of teaching
our most prominent canonical author in junior high, high school, or college
settings.
Shakespeare’s
texts—in their linguistic density, their dramatic intensity, their cultural
awareness, their communal impact—did important and controversial cultural
work in their own day, and they can continue to do so now.
In this course we will use some of the methods of the Folger
Shakespeare Library’s long-standing NEH-sponsored “Teaching Shakespeare Institute”—journal writing, wordplay,
soliloquy analysis, adaptative and improvised scenarios,
scene work, comparison of videos—
Coupled
with the instructor’s historical focus on the confluence of political and
sex-gender issues, to remake and reinvigorate Shakespeare’s texts for today’s
students.
Class
will focus on three of the most commonly taught Shakspeare
plays from his four major genres—from the romantic comedies, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream; from the history plays, 1 Henry IV; from the tragedies,
Hamlet;--coupled with Russ McDonald’s excellent Bedford Companion
to Shakespeare as background and source book.
In addition, we may take illustrative examples from other plays commonly
taught in the lower-grade curriculum: from the romantic comedies, Twelfth
Night/ from the histories, Richard III and Henry V; from
the tragedies Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Othello,
Macbeth, and Lear; from the romances The Tempest.
The instructor, herself a member of the summer 1996 “Teaching Shakespeare
Institute” and the recipient of both the Chancellor’s Award and the Milton
Plesur Award for excellence in teaching, looks forward to
sharing the intellectual and community-building force of these plays with
her students so that they can share them with theirs. Format will be highly participatory; evaluation
will be largely conducted around the actual production of materials—journals,
exercises, lesson plans, scenarios, research project—to be used in future
classrooms.
ENG 542 – 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
Prof.
Myung Mi Kim
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A) 367013
(B) 267307
This seminar will be devoted to close readings of twentieth century American exploratory long poems in an attempt to consider how the conditions of writing/making problematize and negotiate with the politics of time. How do experiments in the long poem participate in tests of radical materiality, process, and the architectonics of multivalent forms to transcribe and render historical consciousness? It will be our task throughout the semester to track how the practice of the exploratory long poem refunctions the spatiotemporal mark (of perception, of configurations of meaningmaking). How does the poem tend the valence of duration, lived time, memory, domesticated time, commodified time? We will track the long poem as it notates interval, disruption, series, seriality, sequence, recurrence, periodicity, citation, interruption, accretion: in relation daily and social practices, the meaning of rehearsing the Imaginary and its radicalizing potential possibilities for human agency and collective action.
Proposed readings: we will proceed with a constellation of readings whenever possible. Thus, in a consideration of series/seriality we might read together Robin Blaser's "ImageNation" poems, Robert Duncan's "Passages" poems, and Nathaniel Mackey's "Song of the Andoumboulou". In considering sequence, we will read in conjunction, Gertrude Stein's Stanza in Meditation and Lyn Hejinian's Oxota. William Carlos Williams' Paterson and Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems suggest another productive paired reading. Another useful paired reading might be the work of George Oppen (with emphasis on "Of Being Numerous") and Lorine Niedecker. In thinking about "accretion" or "life works", we will read from Zukofsky's A and from across Larry Eigner's body of work. Muriel Rukeyser's U.S. 1 and Charles Reznikoff's Testimony (along with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, possibly) will allow us to explore citational practice in twentieth century exploratory long poems. Other possible poets/texts: Susan Howe, Pythagorean Silence, Joan Retallack, Beverly Dahlen, A Reading. In correlation and extension: Georgio Agamben, from Infancy and History, Henri Bergson's work on "duration", Johannes Fabian, from Time and the Other, Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Trinh Min ha, from When the Moon Waxes Red, among others, and certainly, examples of critical writing, essays on poetics, and so on, from the poets under study as well as secondary criticism on their work. This list is not meant to be definitive, but rather, indicative of the concerns of the seminar.
Basic requirements: weekly responses, one seminar
presentation (15 20 minutes), and a final seminar project.
ENG 552 – BIBLE AS LITERATURE
Prof.
Diane Christian
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A)
195946 (B) 034259
Isaac Bashevis Singer remarked that
to consider the Bible as literature is to profane the text and he reflects
the sincere religious position of many. Robert
Graves said succinctly that “mythology is somebody else’s religion.”
This course considers the Bible under the rubric of mythology and literature
to avoid the obvious interesting battle by occupying a space of fictional
freedom. But a central issue will be the idea of the
Bible—a normative specific text on which we swear in court, a contentious
complex history, and a sword. We’ll
read almost all the books of the Hebrew and Christian Testaments, with special
attention to Genesis and Darwin, Exodus and Freud, the prophets and the Gospels
and sacrifice theory, the Apocalypse and time.
We’ll survey some of the exegetical history that structures language
theory, and some major interpretive strategies—religion, anthropology, psychoanalysis,
feminism.
While the primary goal will be to read the Biblical texts,
a secondary one will be to explore some of the great dialogues with those
texts—from the rabbis and church fathers to Voltaire and the poets and scientists.
ENG 578 –
Prof.
James J. Bono
Wednesday l:00-3:40, Park 532
Registration Number: 228582
This seminar will provide an intensive introduction to major
historiographical issues and approaches in recent
scholarly work on the history of science and medicine and in recent attempts
to write cultural histories of specific facets of science and medicine.
The course is intended to serve the needs of a broad range of students
from history and from disciplines such as anthropology and literature, who
have an interest in science, medicine, technical knowledge and practices,
the body, sexuality, or related topics and their relationship to culture and
society. Through specific assignments,
reports, and a term paper attempts will be made to shape the course to the
needs of individual students, both those specializing in the history of science
or medicine and those whose major interests are in other aspects of history
or in other disciplines. Intensive
and extensive readings on a variety of periods and places (chiefly, but not
exclusively, focused upon
This semester (Spring 2005) we shall focus chiefly
upon the cultural history of medicine, with special attention given to the
history of the body and sexuality from antiquity to postmodern cyberculture. We’ll
address such topics as the body in ancient Greek and Chinese medical traditions;
medicine, natural philosophy, and notions of sexual difference in ancient,
medieval, and Renaissance Europe; the female body, the saintly body, and the
criminal body in late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe; monsters,
marvels, and monstrous bodies from the 13th through the 18th
centuries; the new cultural history of Renaissance anatomy; women, gender,
the birth of modern political economy, and 17th and 18th
century science and medicine; race, gender, and racialized
bodies in European and American scientific and medical discourses; hermaphrodites
and the scientific study of sexuality from the late Renaissance to the 20th
century in Europe and America; Foucault’s History of Sexuality; and virtual surgery,
technoscientifically altered human bodies, informatics,
and the “posthuman” body.
ENG 584 – THE POETICS OF THE PARALITERARY
Prof.
Stephen McCaffery
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A)
483730 (B) 277912
Poetry,
subsumed within the literary in general, involves a tolerable deviance from
linguistic norms, yet where does tolerance end and why are its parameters
circumscribed? The seminar explores this question and moves
to formulate a zone that might be called the paraliterary,
a zone whose textual inhabitants partake of literariness but are excluded
from literary and poetic canons. A
poetics of the paraliterary will be seen to emerge
out of, and alongside, a tradition of linquistic
conjecture that Gregory Ulmer calls a “linguistic” of the singular and the
heterological;” a tradition that sees the materiality,
corporeality and intransitivity of language as the prime stuff that poetry
is made of. As such the course presents material that collectively
argues against those content-oriented literary studies whose focus is ideological,
representational, and political, and investigates instead trans-historical
treatments of language as excess, alien, obsessive and remainder.
In so doing the course opens up numerous encounters with poetry from
the “other side” of language including alien writing systems, fake languages,
alphabetical conjectures, universal language schemes, sound, word creation,
orthography, orality, gesture and mania.
The material covered includes an extensive ethnic and trans-historic
breadth: from Plato’s Cratyllus, Arabic Mystical alphabets, Cherokee alphabets,
Easter Island Scripts and Harlem Jive, to the modernist provocations of Mallarmé,
Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp. A special
part of this course will examine the historical and cultural attitudes to
the deaf, the related field of prosthetic, non-vocal systems of language,
and provocations toward a gestural poetics.
ENG 585 – ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Prof.
Susan Moynihan
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A)
135579 (B) 481727
In the opening chapter of Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women, Laura Hyun Yi Kang focuses on the various deployments of Maxine Hong Kingston’s text The Woman Warrior to illustrate how the name “Maxine Hong Kingston” marks a point of autobiographical fixation and therefore becomes the object of various desires for knowledge. She traces the positioning of The Woman Warrior in relation to American autobiography, women’s autobiography, and ethnic autobiography as ethnography, and finds that the proper name, “Maxine Hong Kingston,” is deployed to unfix or trouble some categorical markers (such as genre, gender, race, or culture) even while other categorical markers remain unquestionably fixed. Kang concludes, “I would venture that the ‘debate’ over The Woman Warrior is symptomatic of the problem of delineating what counts as ‘Asian American literature,’ how ‘Asian American literature’ always fails to stand for ‘Asian Americans’” (67).
This course addresses Asian American women’s subjectivities as constructed through autobiographical texts in order to explore the paradoxes of identity and reference due to racialized and gendered constructions, particularly how such paradoxes affect the status of historical knowledge in the texts. We will ask, what are the historical effects produced through autobiographical texts if the site is subjective, identity is unstable, and reference is problematized? How are desires for knowledge shaped by power and the politics of difference? Central to our discussions will be the politics of silence, betrayal, and diasporic affiliations for Asian American women; the racist constructions of Asians and Asian Americans as inscrutable surfaces; the feminization of the Orient; the politics of trauma and the contradictions of resistance and complicity; and the penetrating gaze of the consumer of autobiography.
Primary texts most likely will include the following: Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s, Dictee, Winnifred Eaton’s Me: A Book of Remembrance, Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian,” Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Mary Paik Lee’s Quiet Odyssey, Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces, Anchee Min’s Red Azalea, and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar.
Course requirements include active participation in weekly discussions, one class presentation of a 7-8 page critical response to an assigned week’s readings, and a 15-20 page seminar paper.
ENG 587 – THE COMIC AESTHETIC
Prof.
Andrew Stott
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 012526 (B) 228593
In the modern academy, the invitation to embark upon an extended
discussion of comedy and comic narratives has been largely ignored, with the
implication that a study of the merely humorous is beneath the gravity of
scholarship. There are exceptions of
course: the work of comic writers such as Aristophanes and Shakespeare receives
enormous critical attention, yet, on reflection, it is apparent that much
of it aims to demonstrate how in the final analysis their comedy is ‘really’
very serious indeed. On this course
we will avoid trying to make comedy always an allegory for something sober,
trying instead to keep the ludic, the risible, the
ridiculous, and the inverted at the very heart of our thought.
The course will have three distinct strands. First, it will introduce students to the history,
theory, and terminology of Western comedy by means of a necessarily reductive
survey of film and literature that begins in ancient
Seminar participants will be required
to engage in discussions and full and frank debate, deliver at least two or
three presentations during the course of the semester and submit a full-length
research paper on a topic agreed with me. GSOH essential.
ENG 593 – STUDIES IN GENRE:
MULTICULTURAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Prof.
Robert Newman
Thursday
Registration Number: 414931
Multicultural autobiography has both a theoretical aim--to examine the costs and benefits of a pluralistic or multicultural approach to autobiography--and a practical aim, to encourage the writing of family history from a wide variety of personal and intellectual viewpoints.
Aside from Classic American Autobiographies, which includes Franklin (the still-essential American according to Gordon Wood). Douglass, Twain, and Zitkala-Sa, I’ll choose from among the following full-length autobiographical texts:
Torgovnick’s Crossing Ocean Parkway (the signature essay is “On Being White, Female and Born in Bensonhurst), Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (teaching Nabokov, Fitzgerald and James under the eyes of the Iranian mullahs), Manji’s What’s Wrong with Islam (an intellectual autobiography beginning with her rebellious childhood experiences in a madressa in Vancouver), Ahmed’s A Border Passage (Egyptian-born but an eventual feminist scholar who blooms in America, now a chaired professor at Harvard Divinity School), Ansary’s West of Kabul, East of New York (discovering a journalistic career in the land of the pre-Taliban, with a post-Taliban anti-invasion plea), Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (gay, Catholic, anti-bilingual , accused of slighting his middle class-dom), McBride’s Color of Water (two alternating stories—his Jewish mother’s and black father’s in italics, his own story in roman font--a search for the truth of his mother’s racial and religious identity), Sacks’ How the Jews Became White Folks (personal stories plus astute history and sociology), Monette’s gay autobiography Becoming a Man, Alexie’s “Smoke Signals” (a sweet-tough movie about reservation life), Kingston’s Ghost Warriors (Chinese-American and she says she would have written it a bit differently nowadays), Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary (growing up poor, white, Italian and cast as an developmental idiot, Rose is befriended by teachers who show him how to read Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science –Rose eventually ends up teaching developmental English at UCLA), Grealy’s Story of a Face (disability autobiography, now complemented—perhaps— by Grealy’s friend Patchett in her own near-critique autobio)….
These are some of the books I’ve used in the past and will use again. As a group these texts certainly exhibit a multicultural aim but in some cases they also reflect
dissatisfaction with crucial aspects of the multicultural idea, notably that as identity itself is in question, all groups and societies are absolutely equal and hence beyond criticism. I will also assemble a number of theoretical essays on the development of American pluralism, multiculturalism and ethnicity (e.g. Anthony Appiah (here for lectures this fall 05) on “the multicultural mistake.”
Requirements include spot researches on particular issues and critical essays and either a critical, researched essay on family or group background or an autobiographical essay on your own family history.
ENG 594 – JEWISH WRITERS IN
Prof.
Mark Shechner
Tuesday
Registration Number: 034566
This course picks up where the Fall
2003 course left off, with the explosion of Jewish fictions 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 2003 semester,
a course in social history, the life and pressures and values that the literature
arose out of.
ENG 595 – ADVANCED NON-FICTION PROSE
Prof.
Mark Shechner
Tuesday
Registration Number: 352709
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? 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 Store at
ENG 607 – STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE: Drana/Media/Culture
Prof.
Jim Swan
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A)
300014 (B) 436879
An inquiry into the relation between English Renaissance stage practice and modern (20th/21st century) media, political & cultural theory. In what ways have film and TV shaped our perception of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? What is the effect of translating their intensely verbal stage medium into today’s visual media? For instance, look at Julie Taymor’s fascinating adaptation of Titus Andronicus (Titus, 1999): the moment in Act 2, Scene 3, lines 192-245 when Martius falls into the pit and finds Bassianus’s body. Film directors inevitably cut lines, and Taymor cuts more than half of the passage, translating it into visual terms. The first meeting of the seminar will consider this scene, with Taymor’s film version, in order to develop questions about Renaissance drama in relation to our 21st century experience of textual, theatrical, and cinematic media. During the semester we will be reading from recent studies of Shakespeare, theater and film.
Another series of questions will be concerned with the Renaissance representation of a public, political culture, chiefly on the stage, and how that relates to the American, TV-saturated representation of today’s public sphere and political process. Consider, for instance, George W. Bush’s projection of personal sincerity and conviction, the oft televised phrase, “In my heart I believe . . .” accompanied by a hand on his chest. In what way does this have public or political meaning? To what extent do our media substitute the private and “personal” for the public and political? To get a handle on such questions, we will read selections from Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, and from recent criticism of their work, linking their analysis of private and public spheres to our reading of Renaissance plays.
Likely dramatic texts include: Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, 1 Henry IV, Much Ado, Hamlet, Macbeth; Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday; Jonson, Bartholomew Fair; Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle.
ENG 609 – 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
& LITERARY THEROY
Prof.
Kenneth Dauber
Wed. 12:30, Clemens 412
Registration Numbers: (A) 041247 (B) 436744
Our purpose will be to provide a map of the terrain of classic
American literature and the various contested approaches to it. Each week we will read two books, a modern work
of literary criticism and an underlying text from the nineteenth century that
is especially important for that criticism. So, for example, one week we may read some of
the major slave narratives (Douglas, Jacobs) side by side with Louis Henry
Gates’s construction of African-American literature in The Signifying Monkey. Another week we will read, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin along with Jane Tompkins’s
Sensational Designs, on women’s
literature in general. And so on: D.H.
Lawrence and Benjamin Franklin, Stanley Cavell and
Emerson, Gillian Brown and Melville, or etc. The secondary works will be a mix of enduring
conceptions, fugitive fashion, and personal preference, some older and some
newer, but all of which, in their variety, offer pathways through the field.
We will take up feminism, cultural studies, ordinary language criticism,
deconstruction, new historicism, and on. By
the end of the course you should have a very good idea of the uses—helpful,
problematical, wonderful, absurd—to which some of the major contemporary critical isms
have been put in serious practice so that you can begin to formulate where
and how you stand or maybe, even, challenge where you may be standing already.
ENG 628 – 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Prof.
Neil Schmitz
Tuesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 232953 (B) 194627
We will read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. We will start
with Donald Barthelme’s “at the
ENG 647 – POETICS OF THE
Prof.
Dennis Tedlock
Tuesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 027578 (B) 138710
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
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
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.
ENG 648 – THE CRITICAL AND THE CLINICAL
Prof.
Steven Miller
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 309626 (B) 448191
This seminar borrows its title from a book by Gilles Deleuze (Critique et clinique) in order to pose
anew questions about the relation between psychoanalysis and critical theory.
For political reasons relating to the hegemony of brain science over
the field of psychological research, Freudian psychoanalysis has in recent
times been studied primarily in those departments of the university where
the critical project—the project upon which the institution of the modern
university itself was founded—remains an urgent task.
However, the work done in such quarters has primarily upheld psychoanalysis
as the analysis of culture, rather than as technique, or clinic.
Although a series of recent publications, such as Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis,
or Joël Dor’s The
Clinical Lacan, represent laudable attempts
to remedy this historical oversight, one begins to sense that the question
of “theory and technique” has been ill posed. The seminar will therefore seek to elucidate
the question of the relation between the critical and the clinical, starting
from the assumption that
the clinic is not simply the special domain of “clinicians,”
but is somehow essential to grasping the specific critical project of psychoanalysis.
Lacan suggested as much when he insisted,
not only that the unconscious is structured like a language, but also that
this language is an encrypted address to the analyst, and then formalized
the link between structure and address in the “discourse of the analyst.”
We will explore two main approaches to the question.
First, we will try to discover whether psychoanalytic technique itself
implies a critical project. To this
end we will read selections from Freud’s Studies
on Hysteria, Papers on technique, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
The Interpretation of Dreams, Lacan’s
first seminar, and his écrits on “treatment,” in addition to some works
of Sándor Ferenczi, such
as his “clinical diary.” Then we will
examine Lacan’s engagement with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Secondly, in addition to reading Foucault’s
Birth of the Clinic, we will discuss
the work of several philosophers (Nietzsche, Rosenzweig,
Deleuze, Derrida) whose
engagement with the philosophical tradition turns upon a thinking of the clinic.
ENG 680 – 19TH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS
Prof.
Nathan Grant
Thursday
Registration Numbers: (A)
366409 (B) 345084
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. Du Bois 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; Jessie Fauset, There Is Confusion.
Secondary authors include: Lauren Berlant, Hortense Spillers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Joy James, George Hutchinson, Ann Douglas.
ENG 681 – WOMEN’S EXPERIMENTAL FICTION
Prof.
Christina Milletti
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A) 255201 (B) 260184
It might be said that criticism of women’s experimental fiction
arises from two distinct positions—one the one hand, it sets itself against the belief that women’s writing
is fundamentally realist and experiential (that women’s interests are focused
on representation not innovation), and, on the other hand, it moves towards an understanding of narrative experimentation
by women as inherently feminist gesture. As Ellen Friedman notes, “By exploding dominant
forms, women experimental writers not only assail the social structure, but
also produce an alternate fictional space, a space in which the feminine,
marginalized in traditional fiction and patriarchal culture, can be expressed.”
This course will challenge both these positions by asking what makes
innovative fictions by women in particular, distinctive within the field of
experimental fiction in general. Virginia
Woolf reminds us that experimental narratives by
women “[break] the sentence…[break] the sequence”—that they rupture conventional expectations
of women’s writing. Over the course
of this semester, then, we will consider the various techniques that women
innovative writers use to critique the constraints that limit both gender
and conventional forms of fiction alike. We
will evaluate what kind of “scene” these innovative women represent when put
into critical proximity. Above all,
we will investigate the techniques that writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein,
Djuina Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Kathy Acker,
and Shelley Jackson (among several others) use to
examine the relationship of language to power in order to
elaborate an understanding of gender.
This seminar is designed as a hybrid course:
students will be required to write critical as
well as creative projects.
ENG 690 – LATINA/O CULTURAL THEORY
Prof.
Carrie Tirado Bramen
Monday
Registration Numbers: (A)
268717 (B) 430088
The
objective of this course is to explore the cultural theories and debates in
the field of Latina/o studies beginning with Jose Martí’s
“Nuestra
This
is a partial list of the readings:
Coco
Fusco, English is Broken Here
Roberto
Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays
Carlos
Monsivais, Mexican
Postcards
Gloria
Anzaldúa, La
Frontera/The Borderlands
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
Sandra
Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
Alma
García, ed. Chicana Feminist Thought:
The Basic Historical Writings
One-page
reading notes (10), and a seminar paper.
ENG 693 – CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN POETRY & POETICS
Prof.
Scott Manning Stevens
Tuesday
Registration Numbers: (A) 085067
(B) 354858
This
seminar will focus on developments in Native American poetry since the late
1960s.
The
seminar will examine themes and issues specific to Native Americans writing
in English and in their respective native languages.
Since all North American Native Peoples descend from non-literate oral
societies, we will focus on the issues of traditional orality as well as the
influence of Modernist Euro-American poetics.
This
will mean that we will have to attend to culturally specific issues based
on tribal affiliation, history, and region as well as, the issue of direct
poetic and literary influences. Carter
Revard, an Osage poet, for instance, is a university
professor specializing in Medieval English literature, while Maurice Kenny,
a Mohawk poet, traces the primary influence on his writing to the poetry of
Louise Bogan. For each poet read in this seminar we will address
issues of ethnic identity, acculturation, and poetic affiliation.
We
will begin by examining some background materials, including recordings of
oral poetics and traditional song. After
some consideration of critical works on ethno-poetics we will look at two
late nineteenth-century Native American poets: E. Pauline Johnson and Alexander
Lawrence Posey. From within this context we will jump to the
poetry of Leslie Marmon Silko
and M. Scott Momaday in the late 1960s and move
on to such contemporary poets as Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Carter Revard,
Joy Harjo, Maurice Kenny, Roberta Hill, Sherman
Alexie, Laura Tohe, James Stevens
and others.
Cross-listed
with Indigenous Studies
ENG 697 – DEFINITIONS OF
Prof.
Robert Daly
Wednesday
Registration Numbers: (A)
015745 (B)
062059
We shall read, within
their reciprocal cultural contexts, several writings that help to define,
create, or revise our national cultures, both the discourse of nationalism
and what Julia Kristeva calls the discourses of
"nations without nationalism." We shall attend to their interactions with other
cultures, with conversations among them, and with the ways in which they are
both representative (participating in the cultural conversations of their
times and ours) and hermeneutic (affording practice and instruction in the
arts of interpretation). Ecocriticism,
feminism, ecofeminism, trauma theory, rhetorical
hermeneutics, literary anthropology, cultural criticism, post-analytic philosophy,
virtue ethics, cultural theory, and any other theories we find useful will
be welcome in our discussions of these texts but will not replace them.
Each student will do one seminar report (15-20 minutes),
and each student taking the seminar intensively (for full credit) will also
do one research essay on a topic of his or her own choosing.
Texts:
William Andrews,
ed., Classic American Autobiographies (
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Signet)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Bedford)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 2d ed., ed. William Rossi (Norton
Critical Edition)
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Bedford)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
and Other Short Novels (Signet)
Though you may,
of course, acquire them anywhere you please, these texts will be available
at Talking Leaves Bookstore.
ENG 697 - DEFINITIONS OF AMERICA
Prof. Bruce Jackson
Monday 3:30-6:10, 610 Clemens
Registration Number: 277592
The Great Depression was the third in a sequence of extended conditions in
the first third of the 20th century, one of them brief, the other two lasting
not much more than a decade each that radically altered the character of life
in America. The first was our avoidance of and then involvement in the so-called
Great War, which made us a global power. The second was Prohibition, in which
for the first time ordinary American citizens sought continuing relationships
with professional criminals. Third was the Great Depression and the awareness
that the Dream and the Reality were not the same thing at all.
This was the decade in which the Archive of American Folklore was established, the first agency in Federal government to seek words and music of ordinary people, rather than documents generated by the rich and powerful or anthropological reports about curious Others. It was the decade in which the government intervened in the landscape as never before: Boulder Dam, Shasta Dam, Bonneville Dam on Oregon's Columbia River, the Lincoln Tunnel, the TVA, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was a time when popular and folk heroes were John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Al Capone, Mickey Mouse, Superman, Dick Tracy, Felix the Cat and the Lone Ranger. It was movies like Little Caesar, Scarface, Public Enemy, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the Petrified Forest, the Plow that Broke the Plains, Barbary Coast, It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 42nd Street, Stagecoach, and Grapes of Wrath. It was the Scottsboro Boys, the Bonus Marchers, Woody Guthrie, Life and Time, Busby Berkeley, Clifford Odets, Social Security, and FDR's mantra: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." It was a decade in which notions of gender roles, class and race that had previously seemed natural and obvious seemed ever more conditional and contrived.
In this seminar, we'll discuss some of those books, events, films, heroes, events, and institutions, and songs. We'll look at the government's attempt to redefine America, particularly in the four component parts of the WPA's Federal One: The Federal Theater, Writers', Arts, and Music Projects. (What did the government want from those projects and what did it get from people like Jack Conroy, Conrad Aiken, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Saul Bellow, Jackson Pollock, William De Kooning, Orson Welles, Arthur Miller, and John Huston?) And we'll work our way to what I think is the book masterpiece of the period: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the astonishing collaboration between writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans, the significance of which would not become apparent for another twenty years.
Some of the readings (tentative, I will probably
alter this):
Jerre Mangione. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943
Robert S. McElvaine. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1943
Andrew Bergman. We're in the Money: Depression American and its Films
Michael Denning. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century
Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Writing Red: An Anthology of American
Women Writers, 1920-1940
Zora Neale Hurston. Mules and Men
Jack Conroy. The Disinherited
Henry Roth. Call It Sleep
John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath
Richard Wright. Native Son
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~