DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

SPRING 2006

 

         

ENG 511 – Pre-Postcolonialism

         

          Prof. Randy P. Schiff

          Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412

          Registration Numbers: (A) 023085  (B) 332249

 

          In recent years, postcolonial theory has preoccupied a number of medievalists, with some of the most exciting critical work having been generated by the endorsement of—and resistance to—the “importation” into medieval studies of postcolonial perspectives on nationalism, imperialism, and ethnic identity.  Our course will have a dual focus, engaging postcolonial theory in general, even as we map such arguments on to relevant medieval texts.  We will explore some of the foundational works of postcolonial criticism, through a survey of some of the by-now-canonical theorists of the field (Said, Bhaba, Spivak, Viswanathan, Hardt and Negri, and others), with a special emphasis on the interplay of marginal identities and community-formation.  We will also examine some key medievalist interventions in postcolonial debate (Barrett, Cohen, Ingham, Warren, Davis, Holsinger, Heng), exploring the manner in which the ethnic hybridity and fluid borders of the European Middle Ages prove to be fertile ground for postcolonial criticism.   Our course will apply postcolonial perspectives to a range of primary texts from the medieval period.  We will engage medieval treatments of the vexed question of empire-building by looking at narratives of Arthurian expansionism (Geoffrey of Manmouth, The Awntyrs off Arthure, Malory).  We will also consider questions of ethnic identity and contact with “the East” in a number of texts (Chaucer’s Man of Law’s and Squire’s Tales, Crusading texts, and Alexander romances).  Medieval texts (with the exception of Chaucer) may be read either in translation or in the original language.  Students will be expected to produce one class presentation, as well as one seminar paper of 15-20 pages.

 

 

 

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ENG 522 – MILTON

         

          Prof. Mili Clark

          Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 128A

          Registration Numbers: (A) 155028  (B) 097232

 

 

 

The history of English poetics would not be as we know it today without John Milton.  Depending on which school of poets admired or despised him, the practice and theory of poetry shuttled between romanticism and neo-classicism, between lush lyricism and tough satire, between individualism and collectivism, between the uncompromising encounter with an Absolute and the ever-approaching, never-reaching comfort of mediation.  Such dichotomies existed in philosophy, theology, and poetry before Milton, of course, in Greek drama and Shakespeare, especially, but something about Milton provoked critics and poets to lay at his oeuvre swathes of literary history, until the mid-twentieth century when, it seems, his formidable influence expired.

 

Perhaps that something about Milton was that everything he wrote about and involved himself in meant so much to him, exercised his passions to the utmost.  How embarrassing!—at least by today’s laid-back standards of taste.  Whatever.  We’ll hunt for the something about Milton in our readings and discussions.  I’m particularly drawn to the violence in Milton’s works and his need to express his hopes and disappointments in violent tropes, on the one hand, and the implication, on the other, that true poetry . . . is not.  Is not expression.  What, then, is expression?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, there’s politics.  In his writings advocating the scrapping of the monarchy and setting up of a republic, Milton often sounds like a modern revolutionary (including advocating exporting the English revolution to the rest of Europe).  However, there is the Milton before and during the Commonwealth and there is the Milton during the Restoration.  Though critics like to construct their Miltons out of whole cloth, we should grant him the piecemeal and overwritten garments of intellectual revision as he grew older.  And, what have politics to do with poetics?  A lot, actually.

 

We’ll read some short poems, some political tractates, and the major poems (Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained)—a fair amount of reading in a Good Old Cause.

 

I like noisy seminars where everybody talks without fear of making a theoretical or ideological misstep. There will be group presentations and a final project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ENG 545 – MODERN LITERATURE

         

          Prof. Michael Sayeau

          Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412

          Registration Numbers:  (A) 282088  (B) 341455

 

 

In this course, we will examine the ways that the modern novel (and film) not only represents, but also adapts to or even challenges such modes of time as shock, routinization, boredom, memory, revolution, the epiphany, and the everyday.  To what extent are the formal innovations of the period’s texts the product of a changing experience of time?  How is the temporality of modern literature reformed in response to technological and scientific developments such as the photographic camera, long distance transportation, and the theory of relativity?  In addition to a weekly novel, we will examine the works of such theorists of modernity and its times as Freud, Simmel, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Blanchot, Foucault, Debord, Jameson, and Bhabha.

 

Recommended reading before the first class: Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918.

 

Possible texts include:

 

Flaubert, Madam Bovary

Wells, The Time Machine

Conrad, The Secret Agent

Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Woolf, To the Lighthouse

 

 

 

 

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ENG 576 – LITERATURE AND SOCIETY:  Representing Human Rights

          Prof. Arabella Lyon

          Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

          Registration Numbers: (A) 029365  (B) 267158

 

“Since the conception of human rights transcends local legislation and the citizenship of the individual, the support for human rights can come from anyone—whether or not she is a citizen of the same country as the individual whose rights are threatened.  A foreigner does not need the permission of a repressive government to try to help a person whose liberties are being violated.  Indeed, insofar as human rights are seen as rights that any person has as a human being (and not as a citizen of any particular country), the reach of the corresponding duties can also include any human being (irrespective of citizenship).”

            Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Asian Values,” The New Republic, 1997.

 

Human rights talk has emerged as a powerful discourse used in the construction of citizenships, histories, nation states, geopolitical boundaries, and human duty.  It is used to promote Western “universals,” to imagine new cultural formations, to force compromises among nations and between groups within nations, and, at its best, to protect and dignify human diversity.  Despite the appeals of human rights discourse, however, its representations are subject to sociopolitical and economic forces that limit its possibilities.

 

In this class we will explore a series of questions that will make us better readers of human rights advocacy: Who can speak and advocate for whom? How are human rights defined within its characterizations in law, literature, and film?  How are gender, race, nationality, class, age depicted within popular culture and legal/political documents?  How is the subject of human rights violation constructed, and for what purpose?  To answer these questions, the course will begin with some theoretical reading that structure the debates within human rights.  These will be followed by readings on representing suffering, the nature of pity and empathy, and the politics of representing human rights.  Throughout the course we will interpret the forces within documentary films, primary documents, journalistic pieces, web pages, fiction and poetry.

 

Given the breath of the topic, I will tend to focus on contemporary representations of women and Asian (remember Asia holds 60% of the world’s population); however, there will be room for analyzing issues elsewhere in time and space (especially the U.S.).  Please see me if you have special requests.  While the course will work primarily with copies of essays, you may wish to look at Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (editors, Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol) and A Map of Hope: Women’s Writings on Human Rights (editor, Marjorie Agosin); both are available in our library.  Here are some web pages to get you started thinking about the issue of representation:

www.amnesty.org

www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/services/eds/themes/humanrights.html#email

www.derechos.org

www.hrw.org

 

ENG 578 – ASIAN AMERICAN SEXUALITIES

         

          Prof. Susan Moynihan

          Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436

          Registration Numbers: (A) 403881   (B) 259114

This seminar will address the significant role sexuality and sexual politics have played in the formation of Asian American literature, theory, and criticism. The racial formation of Asian Americans has been shaped historically in tandem with sexual projections upon them. One can consider the early projections of deviance upon 19th century Chinese immigrant bachelor societies (formed in the wake of immigration exclusion laws) and the effects of the 1875 Page Law targeting Chinese immigrant women as prostitutes. More contemporary concerns merge these historical tensions around immigrant "pollutants" with the legacies from colonial structures, American wars and the continuing military presence in Asia, the rise of the acquiescent "model minority" image, various forms of sexism and homophobia both within and without Asian American communities, and even the models of masculinity and femininity that took hold with the rise of Asian American political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Asian American writers have incorporated these concerns on the level of topic, yes, but also in terms of character formation, style, and narrative structure. In our analyses of the literature, we will draw attention to the relationship between sexuality and history, the deployments of the body as nation, and sexual negotiations in response to the dynamics of globalization, exploitation, desire and consumption.
Literary texts most likely will include Frank Chin's Donald Duk, Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Ginu Kamani's Junglee Girl, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's, Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala, Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, and H.T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands.
Critical/theoretical texts may include Leslie Bow's Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature, David Eng's Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, and excerpts from David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom's edited collection Q&A: Queer in Asian America, Laura Hyun Yi Kang's Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women, Daniel Y. Kim's Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow
This seminar requires active participation in weekly discussions, one class presentation of a 7-8 page critical response to an assigned week's readings, and a 20 page seminar paper.
 

 

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ENG 581 – AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

         

          Prof. Hershini Young

          Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers: (A)  196038   (B) 345391

 

 

 

This class will introduce students to contemporary African American literature and literary theory.  Focusing on issues of gender and sexuality, we will examine recent literary works such as Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Danzy Senna’s Cacasia (1999) and Symptomatic (2004), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), Olympia Vernon’s Eden (2002) and Abudulrazak Gumah’s Muslim novel Desertion (2005).  Such a reading list will broaden our traditional understandings of African American literature, while stressing the influence of diaspora on contemporary formulations of blackness, gender and sexuality.  In addition, we will examine recent theoretical work on gender and sexuality such as Michelle Wright’s Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora and Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique not only in order to examine the current directions in black literary theory, but also to see what kinds of theory are needed politically and aesthetically.

 

 

 

 

 

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ENG 583 JAX – POETICS

 Oral Literature: Homer to Tupac

 

          Prof. Bruce Jackson

          Monday  3:30-6:10, Clemens 610

          Registration Number: 117282

 

The title of this seminar is an oxymoron: ‘literature’ comes from the Latin litteratura, which means ‘writing’, and we’re going to be talking about everything but; myths, legends, märchen, sermons, stump speeches, ballads, epics, toasts, rap, etc.  There is, however, no other term for what we’re going to be talking about and the stuff has been generically called ‘oral literature’ for so long now people who study it have given up looking for a more accurate name.

 

When most people refer to ‘oral literature’ they’re talking about structured speech acts that may find their way into print, but do not have their origin or working life there, such as The Odyssey, the Biblical Proverbs, The ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, the toast about Stackolee, the märchen about Aschenputtel/Cinderella, the African American folktale about John and the Alligator, the Salish myth about The Salmon-berry Boy.  We’ll read edited and/or translated versions of primary material, and listen to some performances.  We’ll talk about the differences between the world of print, where an item may exist in different physical forms but in substance be exactly the same (a novel in magazine serial, hard cover and paperback editions; a poem in various books or written out by hand) and the world of oral literature, where each performance of an item may be different from any other performance of it by the same or by other performers.  We’ll discuss various theories about performance, context, variation and representation, and how these performances and works relate to the world of print.

 

Members of the seminar will do an oral presentation based on a key oral literature work or collection, or on an analytical study from a list I’ll provide at the first meeting.  They’ll also do a term paper.

 

 

 

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ENG  584 

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND  POETICS: The Poetics and Philosophy of “Poetry”

 

          Prof. Steve McCaffery

          Wednesday 12:30-3:10,Clemens 438

          Registration Numbers: (A) 327628  (B) 235489

 

 

This course examines the 20th century interrelation of a western philosophic tradition with that of a parallel tradition in poetics; traditions that focus upon the mutating function and construction of “poetry” as a key concept, metaphors, and mythologeme in both discourses.  How does Heidegger’s notion of “poetry” differ from Charles Bernstein’s?  Why is “poetry” variously considered the supreme communicating vessel and a sovereign non-communication?  What links both philosophic and poetic desire to the notion of the sacrificial?  These and related questions are examined in a range of philosophic readings including Heidegger, Kristeva, Levinas, Bataille and Baudrillard.  Such philosophic positions are analysed and read against a parallel series of poetic theories  that similarly invest the notion of “poetry” in a variety of destinies and purposes.  Included are Robert Duncan, Charles Olson’s radical fusion of the body and language; Paul Celan and the fate of poetry after Auschwitz, Denise Levertov on organic form and theories by two contemporary poets: Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ENG 586 – READING AROUND JOYCE

 

          Prof. Damien Keane

          Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 412

          Registration Numbers: (A) 371906  (B) 028002

 

In 1956, Samuel Beckett described his artistic relationship to James Joyce in a famous comment made to the New York Times: “The more Joyce knew the more he could.  He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist.  I’m working with impotence, ignorance.  There seems to be a kind of esthetic axiom that expression is achievement—must be an achievement.  My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as unusable—as something by definition incompatible with art.”  If we can accept the formulation that knowledge is power, is it then the case that knowledge is a safeguard from power, manipulation, or coercion?  More specifically, are the kinds of reading practices and the kind of reader authorized in and by Joyce’s works germane, or even adequate, to the social, technological, and political forces brutally ushered in by the Second World War?  Does the Joycean reader survive the war and, if so, in what form?  To examine theses questions of expression, information, reception, and authority, this course will read Joyce’s later works (all of Ulysses and parts of Finnegans Wake) and selected works by Irish authors working through the lessons of Joyce’s fiction and the world that he himself did not live to see.  The first half of the semester will be devoted to Joyce’s works in the aesthetic, textual, institutional, and political contexts of their production and initial reception; the second half of the semester will then turn to works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Francis Stuart as a means of exploring the types of pressure exerted on these contexts by the war and its aftermath. Texts for the second half of the semester may include works from among: Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, The Lost Ones, and his short works for radio; Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and stories from The Demon Lover and Other Stories; O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman; and Stuart’s Black List, Section H and transcripts of his wartime broadcasts from Berlin.  There will also be selected theoretical and critical readings to augment our primary readings.  Students will be required to give one or two fifteen-minute class presentations; write a five-page bibliographic essay; and submit a final research essay (20 pages) at the end of the semester.

 

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ENG 587 – HARLEM RENAISSANCE WRITING

 

          Prof. Nathan Grant

          Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 412

          Registration Numbers: (A)  203867   (B) 204164

 

 

          Despite his compelling sixteenth chapter on the reasons for the day-to-day despair of black Philadelphians in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), W.E.B. DuBois seems to sidestep the fact that those very pressures also generate anger, cynicism and a taste for dangerous entertainments.  But this very bifurcation of thought represents the ordinary (and myriad) ambiguities and ambivalences about black selfhood that themselves become the curiously open-ended period known as the Harlem Renaissance, the heart of which found perhaps its fullest expression in the decade and a half beginning 1920.  The New Negro, the metaphor for black defiance and subjectivity between the wars, has slippages that we encounter in its cultural transvaluations, many more than are captured by Nathan Huggins’ assertion in his Harlem Renaissance (1971) that “the very presence of a New Negro determines a dissatisfaction with the Old.”

 

          Overall, the course will seek to contest that the familiar themes of race, class and gender are implicated in appreciations of the black body and of sexuality and culture, are unbound from soon-to-be ossified Victorian conventions and compose the vehicle on which elements of both the black masculine and feminine themselves are insurgent in the debates on pluralism and modernist expression prevalent during the period.

 

Primary texts include: Jean Toomer, Cane; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven; Jessie Fauset, There Is Confusion.

 

Secondary authors include: Lauren Berlant, Hortense Spillers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Joy James, George Hutchinson, Ann Douglas.

 

 

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ENG 595 – NONFICTION WRITING

 

          Prof. Mark Shechner

          Thursday 7:00-9:40 pm, Clemens 436

          Registration Number:  156869

 

          This course, which is dual-listed for students at both the senior level and graduate Masters-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 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 3158 Main Street.

 

 

 

 

ENG 609 – 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

         

          Prof. Kenneth Dauber

          Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436

          Registration Numbers: (A) 178843  (B) 413612

 

 

          Theory of American Literature.  This course is designed to give you a roadmap of the variety of way of talking about classic American literature through readings in the literature of the period and, especially, through a thorough immersion in a wide range of theories about how that literature is to be approached.   Reading will be heavy, about two books a week—one a primary text and one a secondary text on the nature of American writing in which that primary text plays a central role.  We will read deconstructions, works of cultural criticism, ordinary language criticism, feminism, new historicism—some oldies (like Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel or D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature), some newies (Stanley Cavell on Thoreau and Emerson, Donald Pease on cultural critique), some in between, some as yet to be determined.  The list will be chosen on the basis of what seems current, what seems enduring, and what I haven’t read yet but mean to because it seems promising.  Primary texts will include Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, some novels of Hawthorne (especially the House of the Seven Gables), some by Melville (especially Pierre), a chunk of Emerson’s best, a few of the earliest American novels (Brockden Brown, maybe Hanna Foster), and others (Poe? Thoreau?).  By the end of the course, if you are faithful, you will have an extraordinary sense of how the founding period in American literature lays itself out, what the debates about it are, what works and what doesn’t.  I tend to be very opinionated about such matters.  The course is designed to enable you to form your own (hopefully different) opinions, as well.

 

 

 

 

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ENG 626 – EMERSON: EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIMENT

 

          Prof. Stacy Hubbard

          Wednesday 12:30-6:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers: (A) 452528  (B) 359648

 

                                                “I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back.”

                                                                                    Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

 

In this course we will be reading the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson with an eye to his impact on American writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Despite his admonition that w should not set the least value on what he says, Emerson’s impact on American thought and American literary style has been diverse and profound.  Through his vision-centered epistemology, his advocacy of radical presentness, his conception of language as “furtive” and “fluxional,” his emphasis on the primacy of experience and the authority (although, paradoxically, also the indefinability) of the self, Emerson sets in motion many of the crucial strategies and debates of American political, psychological and literary discourse.

 

We will be examining the tensions in Emerson’s work between transcendence and immanence; self-reliance and “abandonment”; fluency and stuttering or silence; transparency and blindness; systematicity and spontaneity; ideal truths and “sliding surfaces.”  Emerson the revolutionary; the reformer; the conservative; the masculinist; the feminist; the religious thinker; the scientific thinker; the classicist; the vernacularist—there are as many Emersons as there are readers of Emerson.  Over the course of the semester, we’ll be looking at some of his most incisive, influential, faithful and resisting readers, both critics and writers.  A major writer in a minor form, Emerson in his essays creates a quintessentially American style: improvisational, anecdotal, aphoristic, oracular, associational, circular and allusive—“each sentence an infinitely repellant article,” as he says.  It is this experiential—and experimental—style which is arguably Emerson’s most important legacy.

 

We will read substantial selections from Emerson’s writings as well as critical works by Berkovitch, Brown, Buell, Cadava, Cameron, Cavell, Ellison, Levin, Lopez, Packer, Poirier, Zwarg and others.  In addition, as time allows we will read selections from some of Emerson’s contemporaries and inheritors: Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, William James, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore.

 

Students registered for intensive credit will give one oral presentation, write one mid-term paper (8-10 pp.) which analyzes closely a single Emerson essay and one final (15 pp.) research/analytical paper which takes on a larger topic in Emerson studies or brings Emerson’s work into dialog with that of another writer.  This longer paper may build upon something begun in the short paper.  Students registered for extensive credit will be required to complete only the short paper, without the longer seminar paper or the oral presentation.  Regular reading of assigned materials, attendance and full participation are expected of both intensive and extensive students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ENG 628 – STUDIES IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

 

          Prof. Neil Schmitz

          Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers: (A)  376332   (B) 187491

 

 

 

     The texts are Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises;  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.  These are, arguably, the great teaching texts of modernist American prose writing in the first half of the 20th century.  What to drink, what to eat, where to go, what to wear, how to be, what is great, what is interesting, how to write, what is revenge, we will sit before these masters.  Second sequence:  Flannery O’Connor, selected stories; Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint; Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada; Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar, postmodern standup comedy from the major minorities.  Presentations, a final paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ENG 647 – POETICS OF THE AMERICAS

          Prof. Dennis Tedlock

          Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 647

          Registration Numbers:  (A)  041305    (B) 187402

 

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 natural or cultural or linguistic sense, to the so-called Americas or New World or Western Hemisphere, or to Turtle Island.  In the case of poetries from the indigenous languages of these worlds, we will try for modes of interpretation and translation that neither locate them on the margins of Eurocentric poetics nor assign them to a prehistory of poetics.

 

Text dealing with the first contacts between Europeans and the peoples who were new to them will be read for clues to poetic differences, with special attention to native accounts of the invaders.  We will also consider the radically indigenous writings of the Americas, with special attention to newly deciphered Mayan texts.  Ancient Mayan literature, written in what turns out to be a largely phonetic script, begins earlier than English literature by about 900 years.  Its re-emergence into readability, which comes at the same time as a major cultural renewal among contemporary Mayan peoples, poses major problems for Eurocentric cultural schemes and suggests a reconsideration of Charles Olson’s human universe.

 

One-page response papers will be due at each meeting, with a longer piece of work due at the end.  Alternatives to term papers may be negotiated, including translations, writerly works, and performance pieces.

 

Readings, in addition to handouts, will be as follows:  Michael Coe, Breaking the Mayan Code, Berbak Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain; Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, The Sun Unwound: Original Texts from Occupied America; Miguel León Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Questions of the Other; Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice; Cecilia Vicuña, Instan.  Books are available at Talking Leaves Bookstore, 3158 Main Street.

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ENG 648 – PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

                             Henry Corbin and Islamic Philosophy

 

          Prof. Joan Copjec

          Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436

          Registration Numbers:  (A) 163493   (B) 431738

 

 

This seminar will give you a basic introduction to the work of the famous scholar of Islamic philosophy, Henry Corbin.  Friend of Lacan and the first translator of Heidegger into French, Corbin brokered a spectacular philosophical encounter of Heidegger avec Souhravzardi as initially improbable and more compelling even than that of Kant avec Sade.

 

          Following a general survey of Corbin’s work and its major concepts, we will focus a little more closely on those parts of it that seem most relevant to theoretical debates taking place at the moment:  Corbin’s indefatigable critique of historicism, sustained over his lifetime; his concept of the “imaginal,” which is clearly related to Lacan’s concept of the “imaginary”; the meaning of prophecy and the role of the prophet; the place of religion I politics and philosophy; the traces that remain in the films of Abbas Kiarostami of an “angelology” and of “ta’wil.”

 

 

 

 

 

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ENG 679 – THE CRITICAL AND THE CLINICAL

 

          Prof. Steven Miller

          Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 436

          Registration Numbers:  (A)  095525  (B) 076044

 

PSYCHOSIS, SEMIOLOGY, AND RHETORIC.

 

This course will revolve around a close reading of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar III (1955-56): The Psychoses.  This seminar is important because it orients Lacan’s rereading of Freud around the questions raised by psychosis (the signifier, the symbolic Father, the fragmented body, jouissance, femininity).  But it is also in relation to his reading of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and of Freud’s text on Schreber that Lacan begins to formalize his understanding of the function of speech and language in terms of the major categories of structural linguistics and rhetoric (i.e. the signifier, metaphor, and metonymy).  Our reading of this seminar, therefore, will serve as an introduction to Lacan and “structuralism” that does not remain captive to the history of criticism.  (Nonetheless, approaching linguistics in this context also makes it possible to understand why, in a work such as Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, psychosis becomes the opening toward a “post-structural” semiology).  In addition to Lacan’s seminar, we will read Schreber’s Memoirs, Freud’s “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (The Wolf Man), “Psychoanalytic Notes upon a Case of Paranoia” (The Schreber Case) and related papers on neurosis and psychosis, Lacan’s “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics, and Jakobson’s “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance.”

 

 

 

 

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ENG 680 – ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE:

                             The Science Fiction of Living Machines

 

          Prof. James Bunn

          Friday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers:  (A) 414044   (B) 187628

 

 

          As the Industrial Revolution accelerated, its mobilization of speed and power set off a baffling rate of technological exchange that left some people feeling left behind, even as they hitched a ride on a vehicle whose inner workings they did not understand.  Fueling this new mobility was the finding that nature itself was vehicular energy.  Nature was not just some green place as yet untouched by the side of effects of industrial squalor.  Nature impelled and thrust all things inscrutably.  At the same time, mobile bodies were mobilized into huge new social phalanxes such as the work force and a nationalized war front.  It was not yet clear just what was the relation between organic life and machine power.  This question was the point of Leo Marx’s classic work The Machine in the Garden.  Was technology an aberrant form of invention that separated humans from a traditional closeness to nature?  Most nature romantics thought so.  That insistence was part of Karl Marx’s assertion about the factory system, the business machine, and the alienation of workers.  Wordsworth and Coleridge insisted that energy was not an impersonal thrusting force but a moving spirit that runs through all things.  The idea of a vital force, the élan vital of Bergson and others such as Deleuze, will be part of ongoing discussions about the ecological fit between organic forms and technological designs.

 

          The main reason that these issues need to be reexamined is that some theoretical biologists now assert that technology, indeed all of human culture, should be seen as a subset of environmental evolution.  The biosphere is seen as the environment for technological evolution.  To test this idea, we’ll read some of the new biology as secondary material.  Others turn the idea upside down.  For instance, Stephen Hawking remarked wryly that most forms of life are parasites that feed on other life:  “I think computer viruses should count as life.”  He said further, “Some people would use the term evolution only for internally transmitted genetic material and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally.  I think it is legitimate to take a broader view and include externally transmitted information as well as DNA in the evolution of the human race.”  In this context we’ll read definitions of human bodies as cyborgs and replicants whose evolutionary implications some have dubbed the Posthuman.  What are the larger ethical implications of machine life, as seen by some of today’s influential thinkers?  For instance, Richard Dawkins has said, “The individual organism is a survival machine for its genes.”  In a chapter called “Smart Machines” Marvin Minsky has said, “The brain…

is a great mess of assorted mechanisms that barely manage to get the job done.”  Daniel Dennett has said, “The idea of consciousness [as “software”] as a virtual machine is a nice intuition pump.”  How should one respond?

 

          We’ll begin to answer with some classics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thoreau’s Walden, Henry Adams’s “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.  We’ll watch some classic sci-fi films: Kubrick’s 2001 and Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner.  As current examples, we’ll read Nicola Griffith’s Slow River and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.  How do theories of narrative and other technologies of filmic illusion fit into the concept of mechanical mobility?  In addition to names already mentioned, we’ll read some Heidegger on technology and nature, Virilio on the motor, Martin Jay on force fields, Gary Snyder on wild grammar and caterpillar treads.

 

          Nota bene:  The study of literature and the environment is probably the fastest growing discipline within literary and cultural studies.  One indicator is that major university presses now feature books and series about environmental studies.

 

 

 

 

 

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ENG 681 – NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

 

          Prof. Robert Daly

          Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Numbers: (A) 078977   (B) 336118

 

          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 Hawthorn 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.  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 684 – TRANSLATIONS

 

          Prof. Steven Miller

          Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538

          Registration Number:  437325

 

Translation is a major event in the afterlife of literary and philosophical works, a poetic and political practice, and a decision that opens toward the essence of language.  In both theory and weekly practice, this class will explore the precise ways in which these aspects of translation (and others) present themselves to the translator.  We will discuss various key texts on the theory of translation (Jerome, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Derrida, de Man) and examine the translation practices of philosophers and writers (Heidegger, Derrida, Pound, Beckett).  But we will also work together on the translation of several short texts of different genres (philosophy, narrative, poetry), pausing at every turn to discuss the range of miniscule tasks that confront the translator.

 

Students will give a class presentation on problems relating to the translation of a passage from the texts that the class is working on together.  In addition, they must complete an original translation with a brief “Translator’s Introduction” and a critical review of an existing translation.  These last two assignments, however, will not be of equal length.  It is up to the student to decide which one will constitute his primary work (15+ pp.) for the class.

 

The class will be conducted in English.  But the texts that we translate together will be in French. In order to prepare the class presentation and to participate in class discussions, therefore, students must at least have a “working knowledge” of French.  Otherwise, I welcome students who would like to work on translations from other languages (especially Spanish and German) to use the other assignments to pursue this work.

 

 

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