DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

We’ll read the usual English Romantics with a smattering of 17^th- and 18^th-century romantic precursors, selections from influential German philosophers on the sublime and the beautiful.

Requirements: Collaborative class presentations

Weekly response papers posted to UBLearns message board

Final essay

ENG 527 – VICTORIAN VIOLENCE

Prof. Rachel Ablow

Wednesday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 430022 (B) 396096

This course will examine the Victorian origins and development of the notion that changing someone’s mind constitutes an act of violence. What assumptions about personal identity does such a notion involve? What does it suggest about how the Victorians understood consciousness, belief, rationality, and the body? What does it suggest about how they imagined inter-subjectivity, reading, and persuasion? And how do these questions intersect with the shifting politics of (and violence involved in) citizenship, nation, and empire? Many of these questions remain very much alive today. Hence, in addition to examining Victorian literature, this course will address recent debates about identity, representation, and the politics of disagreement.

For this course we will read most or all of the following: eighteenth-century philosophy (Locke, Hume, Smith), nineteenth-century philosophy (Mill, Carlyle, Arnold), nineteenth-century novelists (Austen, Eliot, Brontë, Trollope, Wilde), nineteenth-century autobiographers (Mill, Newman, Ruskin), and contemporary theory (Althusser, Habermas, Michaels, Appiah, Butler).

ENG 545 – MODERN LITERATURE

Prof. Michael Sayeau

Monday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 429449 (B) 444879

MODERNISM AND THE AESTHETIC

This seminar will focus on the problematic relationship between the concept of the aesthetic—or even just the idea of beauty—and literary modernism, modernist and post-modern literary theory, and the culture of modernization. While this seminar might serve well as a survey of (international, but in particular British and Irish) modernist literature, we will read our novels, poems, and plays as episodes in the continual reconceptualization of the aesthetic during the modern period. Guided by, though not discipled to, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, we will not only attempt to understand the affiliation of the aesthetic with autonomy, but also attempt to discover other ways to speak and write about the aesthetic and beauty during this period.

In a sense, it all boils down to a crux that is simpler to state than it is to resolve: On the one hand, and in the wake of the emergence of modernist sensibilities and the theoretical work they inspired, it is difficult now to think about beauty without equating it with mystification. On the other hand, no one, no matter how convinced of the mystified perniciousness of beauty, would ever advocate cleansing the world of it once and for all. How do modernist texts and theorists position themselves in regard to this crux? Are there postures and positions still waiting for us to be discovered? Are there alternative beauties nestled in the undergrowth that a close and innovative attention to modernist form will bring to light?

It is my hope that this seminar will serve to suggest a path toward a significant reevaluation of many of the persistent critical predispositions concerning modernism and what has been taken to be its aesthetic—a reevaluation that, given the influence that modernism had upon the development of practices of critical analysis, might in turn illuminate paths not taken in the evolution of literary theory and criticism.

Some of the texts/figures we may read include: Aristotle, Wordsworth, Marx, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Ruskin, William Morris, Pater, Wilde, Conrad, Forster, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, Derrida, as well as artists from non-literary media, contemporary critics and theorists.

ENG 578 – HARLEM RENAISSANCE WRITINGS

Prof. Nathan Grant

Thursday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 086499 (B) 079398

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 the fullest expression in the decade land 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 Huggin’s 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 585 - LITERARY TEXTUAL EDITING: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Prof. Cristanne Miller

Tuesday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 412

Registration Numbers: (A) 498146 (B) 073723

The goal of this class is to increase our textual literacy by making us more skeptical about textual stability in any form and more knowledgeable about ways that editorial principles (and trends) shape textual production and texts themselves. This course will begin with an overview of textual editing theory and practice as it has changed during the course of the twentieth century, beginning with some classic texts on editing and intentionality (Fredson Bowers, Stephen Orgel, W.W. Greg, Thomas Tanselle) and moving on to various more contemporary approaches to thinking about editing (Hans Walter Gabler, Jerome McGann, Walter Greetham, George Bornstein). At least two editors will visit the seminar to talk about their experiences with different kinds of texts and different kinds of editorial challenges. While reading editorial theory, we will also look at a series of primary texts epitomizing various kinds of textual instability and ways that theories encourage different interpretive practices and produce different stabilized texts. For example, we will look at a 1970, a 2002, and a 2003 edition of Marianne Moore’s poems to think through the implications of various principles of editorial framing and the pragmatic and interpretive hurdles or opportunities created by each. We will look at bad editions and good ones, representative and eccentric texts.

Texts we will definitely study in thinking about editorial challenges include the new Alice Quinn edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006), Christopher Ricks’ edition of T.S. Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (1996), and various editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Additionally, we will discuss cutting edge work on digitization of texts and the new opportunities and restrictions presented by electronic editing.

Students will create an edition of a text or a group of texts for their seminar project, working with material that has not previously been “published” or edited. While the poetry collection is the obvious source of such material, other sources from any historical period may also be used, and the range of texts available for editing may range beyond that ordinarily considered “literature.” Each student edition must be prefaced by a significant introduction, in which the editor presents the problematics of text-constitution and the theories or principles that have shaped her or his decisions about how to edit the material under consideration. For this assignment, all editions must be in book/codex form.

ENG 586 – POST-WAR AMERICAN WOMEN POETS

Prof. Myung Mi Kim

Monday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 287787 (B) 059861

This is a seminar on writing by post-war American women poets working in the innovative tradition. (Re)frame: this is a course in feminist avant-garde poetry and poetics. It seeks to problematize “feminist”, “avant-garde”, in relation to practices of gender (gendering), to ideologies of form, to questions of agency. It asks: what is the cultural labor (implicit or vexed) proposed by women’s experimental writing?

We will pay particular attention to the “tests”—whether linguistic, visual, aural, formal, or generic—that accompany the poetry we’ll be reading, e.g., Barbara Guest, Seeking Air; Hannah Wiener, Clairvoyant Journal, Cecilia Vicuna (her performance pieces). Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, Erica Hunt, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha are troubled by and trouble the gendered dimensions of history. It may be useful to explore the innovation (intervention?) experimental women poets have undertaking in treatments of the “long poem” and “project-oriented work”, for example, Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day; Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette; Beverly Dahlen, A Reading.

Working at the interstices of theoretical and poetic discourses, experimental women poets have made distinct contributions to literary criticism, scholarship, and poetics. Our readings in this context may include Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson; Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry; Kathleen Fraser, Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity; Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager, Leslie Scalapino, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. We will read these texts in conjunction with a book of poems by each poet.

We may also read: Adrienne Rich, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Harriet Mullen, Johanna Drucker, Norma Cole and others.

Requirements include weekly response papers, one fifteen-minute presentation, and a seminar paper.

ENG 587 – IRISH INFORMATION:

What Passes for Information About Ireland

Prof. Damien Keane

Tuesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 368321 (B) 152207

A compelling argument can be made that Irish writing is thematically obsessed with information—with how information is transmitted, disseminated, and received; with the social and structural channels that enable its movement and manipulation; with the methods and instruments for storing, indexing, and cataloguing it; and with the motivation and designs that determine its propagation and suppression. Along with this thematic obsession, Irish writing can be said to manifest a stark formal critique of the political and aesthetic institutions and ideologies through which information is created, passed, and understood. This course will survey a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish texts, with the aim of comprehending these dynamics in historical, literary, and theoretical context. While the syllabus will follow a rough chronological outline, its primary readings will be arranged into several distinct units, which will be organized by similarity of concern, theme, or address. The primary reading load will be quite heavy (in terms of the brute number of pages) during the first half of the semester, with a tapering-off in the second half; yet all of the readings will be of a density requiring sharp critical attention.

Primary readings might include: Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent; stories by William Carleton; Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn and Arrah-na-Pogue; short plays by Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands; James Joyce, the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, articles by Roger Casement, and short fragments from Finnegans Wake; Samuel Beckett, Watt and Mercier and Camier; excerpts from Tomás Ó Criomhthainn, An tOileánach (The Islandman), Flann O’Brien, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), and readings about “mother-tongue fascism”; selected poems by Louis MacNeice and excerpts from Denis Johnston’s Nine Rivers from Jordan; Samuel Beckett, several late plays; Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti and Breaking the News. Secondary readings will be drawn from the works of: Antonio Gramsci and Gayatri Spivak (subaltern); Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other Frankfurt theorists (technology, administration, the aesthetic); V.N. Volosinov and Mikhail Bakhtin (“multi-accentuality” and quoted speech); Jacques Derrida (citation and the archive); Friedrich Kittler (discourse networks, inscription and storage technologies); and some recent textual scholarship.

Course requirements include one fifteen-minute presentation; one five-page bibliographic essay, and a final research essay (20 pages).

ENG 609 – STUDIES IN 19^TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL

Prof. Kenneth Dauber

Thursday 15:30-8:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 124292 (B) 236195

Theory of American Literature. This course is designed to give you a roadmap of the variety of ways 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 old (like Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel or D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature), some newer (Stanley Cavell on Thoreau and Emerson, Donald Pease on cultural critique), some from only yesterday, 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 meant 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 Hannah 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.

ENG 627 - STUDIES IN 20^th CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Prof. Neil Schmitz

Tuesday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 141771 (B) 319844

The Confederacy lost its war of independence, the war between the States, the Civil War. We will begin reading John Wilkes Booth’s assassination soliloquy: “I have ever held the South were right.” The South plural, of course. Booth is trying to do the great soliloquy of a Confederate tragic hero, trying to register its noble right reasoning. Here, in made speech, the Confederate argument. Booth’s “Letter to Posterity” is arguably the final text in Confederate discourse, the last written in its sovereignty, its self determination. Booth would not surrender. Then there is a quick study of Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” and Joel Chandler Harris’s “The Tar Baby” and “The Briar Patch,” post-Civil War texts, classic formations of Lost Cause Narrative. Be good if everyone is conversant in Gone With the Wind, novel or film. A certain self-identified Anglo Southern writing, post-Confederate, self critical, reaches different completions in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!, in Flannery O’Connor’s major fiction, in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Suttree. Is it the revenge of Anglo Southern writing, put into tutelage, disrespected, made comical, to produce the Shakespeare of modern American tragedies and comedies, to crush us with Faulkner, minority guy achieving the majority prize? Our national masterpiece is written in a foreign language. How do you pronounce “Beauchamp”? In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wonderfully state the situation we confront in the seminar. “That is the strength of authors deemed ‘minor,’ who are in fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one’s own language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use the minor language to send the major language racing. Minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue.”

1865, seismic shift for Anglo Southern writing, its first surrender. 1965, second seismic shift, second surrender. We refer to William Styron’s The Confessions f Nat Turner, another final text, like Booth’s Letter, Anglo Southern writing doing, in the first person, African American subjectivity, African American speech. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond challenged Styron’s performance of Nat Turner and that was it. There was a controversy, but effectively Anglo Southern writing lost its license to do African American subjectivity, African American speech. McCarthy’s Suttree somberly occupies a diminished ruined space. It is tres post-1965 Anglo Southern writing, shocked, apologetic, chastened. Magisterial performances, each text. What is this post-Confederate (1865-1965) thing? Is Suttree the end of it? Doesn’t O’Connor previously end it in the story, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,”? In this certain Anglo Southern writing, isn’t it always ending, always committi9ng suicide, dying, always losing its leg, crippled, castrated? What a powerhouse it is in modern American literature.

ENG 628 – STUDIES IN 20^TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore

Prof. Stacy Hubbard

Thursday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 354950 (B) 273805

This course will focus on the works of Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, two major American modernists who are often seen as belonging to separate traditions, but who have many principles, practices and lines of influence in common. The premise of this course is that reading them together may help to demolish some critical and historical shibboleths and invite us into a productive rethinking of the scene of modernism.

Moore and Stein both thought of themselves as “writers” rather than poets, essayists or novelists, and evolved complexly modern (some would say, postmodern) ways of thinking about literary authority and textual agency. They were both avid vernacularists, deeply rooted in American speech and writing (with debts to Emerson, Whitman, William and Henry James, among others) as well as omnivorously curious cosmopolites in close conversation with visual avant-gardes. They valued grammar as the foundation of literary composition, and had a good deal to say about it; they produced word “portraits” which brought to bear on poetry some of the principles of painting and photography; they practiced various forms of process-oriented writing and serial production; they developed styles alternating between paratactic expansion and aphoristic condensation; they viewed collecting as a significant creative practice, both inside and outside of texts; and they thought skeptically, and practiced iconoclastically, around issues of genre, tradition and indebtedness. (Of course, within and around these resemblances, we’ll also want to tease out the crucial differences between Moore and Stein, and there are many.) Thinking more contextually, Moore and Stein both began as experimentalists with little to no audience, and ended as celebrity icons, such that questions of audience and self-fashioning play a significant role in their careers; they both had life-long collaborative relationships with other women (Stein with Toklas, Moore with her mother), which cast light on the conditions of authorship; and they both have complicated publication histories which invite consideration of the role of archives and the complexities of editing practices. And, of course, both Stein and Moore were women writing in the company of hyper-masculine modernisms, which accounts in part for the way they were elided from historical accounts of modernism, and then, fairly recently, reconsidered and, if not quite recuperated, then reintroduced. The difference that those reintroductions have or should make to our definitions of modernism will be one topic for consideration.

We will read widely in the works of both Moore (poems, letters, essays, notebooks, reviews) and Stein (poems, autobiographies, biographies, lectures, novels, and other
hard-to-categorize genres) as well as in critical writings about the two, both old and new, and some more wide-ranging considerations of women’s modernism. We will also read selected works by Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, and Henry and William James as these resonate with works by Moore and Stein. If there is time, we may also briefly consider a few other modernist women, such as H.D. and Mina Loy, by way of context. On two occasions, we will join (to the extent that schedules allow) with Professor Miller’s textual editing class (Tuesday, 12:30) to look at the editorial history of Moore’s poems, and to hear Robin Schulze discuss her groundbreaking facsimile edition of Moore’s early poems, BECOMING MARIANNE MOORE.

Requirements for the course include two brief oral presentations, one annotated bibliography with a brief introductory essay, and one seminar paper 15-20 pages in length. Regular participation in discussions is expected, of course.

ENG 648 – PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM:

DERRIDA AND THE DEATH DRIVE

Prof. Steven Miller

Wednesday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 436

Registration Numbers: (A) 458897 (B) 329733

In this course, we will begin to examine Derrida’s engagement with psychoanalysis—not just psychoanalytic theory, not just the texts of Freud, Klein, and Lacan, but with the singularity of the history, traditions, and practices of psychoanalysis as such. We will take seriously Derrida’s own claim that he is an unswerving “friend” of psychoanalysis, and begin by verifying the observation that his work constitutes one of the most obsessive treatments of “the psychoanalytic.” Central to Derrida’s “return to Freud”—no less than to Lacan’s (and we will negotiate with this correspondence)—is an extended reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle that seeks to measure the destiny, readability, and scope of Freud’s structurally paradoxical hypothesis. Always attentive to the scene of Freud’s own encounter with the death drive, this reading examines how the drive works in and through the situation of analytic dialogue, and thereby solicits a mass of problems that remain essential both to psychoanalysis and to deconstruction: repression, archivization, tradition, repetition, fantasy, narcissism, and transference. We will discuss the weight that Derrida grants to each of these terms; but, further, we will be guided by the way in which, from the very beginning, Derrida’s concern with the ethical and political valences of Freud’s and Lacan’s determination of the death drive (a concern that will inform his later work on sovereignty). Our reading for the course will revolve primarily around Derrida’s The Post Card, but will also spend time on Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the “Mystic Writing-Pad”; Lacan’s “Seminar on the Purloined Letter;” and Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing” and The Politics of Friendship.

ENG 653 – QUEER THEORY

Prof. Tim Dean

Friday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 238880 (B) 277887

This course examines the founding texts and concepts of the heterogeneous field of study known as queer theory. We will begin by considering the premise that “queer” is more than a catchall term or synonym for “lesbian and gay,” and we will proceed by taking seriously the various critiques of identity that have emerged during the past half century. We will try to grasp the conceptual and political implications of “queer” as not a new identity but that which undermines identity. This is not a course in lesbian and gay studies, neither it is a course in cultural studies or popular representations of sexuality, though we will try to consider the full range of contemporary erotic practices.

In order to trace a genealogy of the concept of queerness, we will return to the beginning of the twentieth century and the basic texts of psychoanalysis, primarily Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. After reading Foucault’s introductory volume of The History of Sexuality as something other than a critique of psychoanalysis, we will assess how sexuality might be analyzed outside the framework of psychology, as well as beyond that of identity. We will pay attention to the imbrication of sexuality with race, class, and nationality; and in thinking about sexual embodiment we will consider the intersection of queer theory with disability theory.

In addition to Freud and Foucault, reading includes work by: Hilton Als, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Arnold I. Davidson, Tim Dean, Teresa de Lauretis, Samuel Delany, Lisa Duggan, Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Halberstam, David Halperin, Scott Herring, Guy Hocquenghem, Robert McRuer, Gayle Rubin, Eve Segwick, Michael Warner, Monique Wittig.

Please read Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal before the first day of class.

Enrollment limited to 15. Registration for this course is by permission of the instructor only. Students interested in the course should submit a brief paper (no more than 5 pages) rationalizing their interest in the course and how the subject matter is relevant to their current or future research.

ENG 679 – THE LANGUAGE OF GENDER IN 20^TH CENTURY WOMEN’S

INNOVATIVE NOVELS

Prof. Christina Milletti

Monday 19:00-21:40, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 061478 (B) 131622

Novelist Kathy Acker distinguishes between realist and experimental forms of fiction by singling out the former as an apparatus of control. As she argues, realist narratives function to manipulate readers’ perceptions, whereas experimental ones present a playful disorder that invites readers to consider how their perceptions are in fact formed. In short, it might be said that, for Acker, all narrative is political, inflected by questions of power. Using this as a founding tenet of this seminar, we will consider in what ways fictional language can present opportunities to critically examine the delivery of power in language—how novels, in short, might present the means for challenging political forces, both subtle and overt.

For the purposes of this seminar, we will constrain the scope of the political to the situation of gender, and by reflecting on the novels of selected 20^th century innovative women writers who have been associated with modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, we will consider precisely in what ways their work takes up questions of power (if at all). Last but not least, we will examine the stakes of creating a narrative “genealogy” based on gender: in what ways can texts arising from the diverse contexts of Peggy Guggenheim’s “Hangover Hall,” “Bloomsbury,” the Left Bank, Soho, the web, and beyond productively speak to one another across time and space?

Novelists likely to be considered: Djuna Barnes, Emily Holmes Coleman, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, Clarice Lispector, Christa Wolf, Christine Brooke-Rose, Kathy Acker, Ann Quin, Angela Carter, Mary Gaitskill, and Shelley Jackson. Critical texts by: Maurice Blanchot, Luce Irigaray, Susan Suleiman, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, J.L. Austin, and Raymond Federman (among others). Basic requirements: weekly response papers (which may be either critical or creative in scope), a short presentation, and a seminar paper.

ENG 681 – MYTHOGRAPHY

Prof. Dennis Tedlock

Tuesday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 540

Registration Numbers: (A) 493878 (B) 081687

Mythography is the process by which myths become graphed, or narratives become textualized. We will explore this process in its full range, from ancient writing systems to sound recording, comparing the works of such mythographers as playwrights, poets, novelists, and compilers of sacred books, on the one hand, and those of folklorists, linguists, and ethnographers on the other. Narrative, which can be highly lyrical, will be distinguished from story, whose movement is determined by plot. Our attention will be centered on narratives that are spoken rather than sung. In the folktale (and not in the epic) may be found the oral analog (and source) of the multivocal discourse of the novel, a fact which is missed by Bakhtin.

There will be exercises in the scripting of sound recordings. Term papers may be based either on sound recordings or on narratives that have already been textualized by means of writing. Writers and performers will be welcome to put mythography directly into practice. Readings will include David Antin, i never knew what time it was; M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Ed Dorn, Gunslinger; Robert Duncan, “The Truth and Life of Myth”; Brenda M. Farnell, Do You See What I Mean? Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action; Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”; Charles Olsen, “Causal Mythology”; Dennis Tedlock, Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya; and W.B. Yeats, Mythologies.

ENG 682 – FIELDWORK METHODOLOGIES

Prof. Bruce Jackson

Monday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 610

Registration Number: 350514

Most literary research is grounded in documents already in place: books on a shelf; manuscripts in an archive; letters collected, catalogued, and boxed. But warehoused documents are not the only sources for literary scholars, and they aren’t even the primary sources for scholars in ethnography, folklore, oral history, anthropology, sociology, and recent biography, history and public policy. For those scholars, the stuff to be analyzed and interpreted is found by going out and looking at the world and its inhabitants and from interviews with living people—from fieldwork.

Participants in this seminar will design and carry out a project of field research and will engage in extensive discussions of their work. Subject matter and medium are completely open: you can document a poet, a rock band, a crook, a cop, a cookie store, a process, a group, a place; you can do it with still camera, notebook, audio or video tape recorder or film. Whatever.

There is no syllabus. Our discussions will focus on research project definition and design, fieldwork ethics, collection and management of data, and the organization of data into a product—article, film, sound recording or program, thesis. I’ll ask you to read two books—one a superb study of urban street life that includes smart discussions of methodology, the observer’s and writer’s roles, and the ethical obligations of both; the other a collection of essays by several interesting people on how their fieldwork projects began to make sense to them, or how they learned that what they thought they were doing wasn’t what they in fact were doing. We will probably add some reading as we go

along—items that come out of our specific discussions.

Some participants may finish a product during the semester, but a finished product isn’t a requirement (though at least a rough draft of one is); our concern will be on designing and carrying out the field research, and with understanding the substantive, methodological, and ethical questions raised by one another’s work.

Past participants in this seminar have been graduate students in American Studies, English, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Media Study, Communications, Sociology and History.

ENG 697 – DEFINITIONS OF AMERICA: GREEN WORLD UTOPIAS

Prof. James Bunn

Friday 12:30-15:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 155506 (B) 245856

It is often said that Europeans who came to America brought their prejudgments with them: their political ideologies, their religious fervor, their greed. As an imagined place, as conjectural setting, America served as a kind of dream screen upon which Europeans projected these beliefs in various kinds of narratives. For instance, in Shakepeare’s Tempest, many of the characters project their fantasies about governance upon Caliban’s island, according to the characters peculiar to each. As early as Thomas More’s Utopia, America was projected in a similar way as a place for a rational community based upon equitable work. One of the basic questions one asks of utopias is, Who does the work? Once they arrived in America, colonists learned from Native Americans and from experienced guides the lay of the land. This celebration of a tutelary Place also became part of the enabling narrative. Then too, the actual experiences of wilderness in America became part of an unconscious propaganda about an ideal existence in a green world. Bartram’s Travels and Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer stirred the imaginations of Europeans; and, without intending to, helped prompt many more Europeans to emigrate. What is the relation between utopian narrative and theories of practical action? This fundamental question about the issue of right action in a utopian community occurs as early as Plato’s Republic.

Other texts to be considered, in addition to those already mentioned, will be Thoreau’s Walden, Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, Cather’s My Antonia, and Turner’s essays on frontier and region. We shall restudy traditional notions about communities in a green place in terms of more recent environmental ideas about the constraints of energies in a region: the lay of the land in terms of water flow, available soil, communication networks. Is the aim of a sustainable economy, dear to environmentalists, another version of ecotopia? In that regard, search online for the new “Ecotopia” exhibit at the International Center for Photography in NYC.

Finally, we shall explore the relations between propaganda, enabling narratives, and totalizing utopias in two texts that at first may seem to be outside the scope of this seminar: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and Frank Capra’s Why We Fight. These films will allow us to focus on wartime issues of standardization and total mobilization as utopian mainstays. A traditional juxtaposition has been the dystopian standardized city as opposed to the ideal pastoralized country, but we shall also explore Giorgio Agamben’s more recent assertion: “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” Is the camp at Guantanamo Bay a concentrated counter-environment to the enabling narrative before us? How do utopias predict a future time as well as imagine a concentrated space? What exactly is the bodily bio in a biopolitical paradigm?

ENG 715 – POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE & THEORY

Prof. Carine Mardorossian

Thursday 15:30-18:10, Clemens 538

Registration Numbers: (A) 468866 (B) 375l60

The diasporic experience has animated much recent postcolonial literature, criticism and theory. In fact, “diaspora” seems to have supplemented “nation” as one of the key concepts in contemporary postcolonial studies. In this course, we will look at the ways in which the diasporic consciousness has engendered new ways of thinking about literature’s relationship to history, community, as well as theory. We will also consider the different ways in which the concept of diaspora itself has been defined and redefined since the publication of influential texts such as Rushdie’s Imaginary Homeland and Cohen’s Global Diasporas in the 1990s. How has the critical response to diasporic cultural practices allowed us to rethink identity in terms of “routes” (Gilroy) rather than “roots”? What are the problems attendant on this kind of rethinking (Radhakrishnan, Avtar Brah, Pheng Cheah, Stuart Hall?) What is the relationship between diaspora, migrancy, exile, and cosmopolitanism?

This course engages with current formulations of the term “diaspora” from within a theoretical context of ethnic, cultural, and transatlantic studies. It will also examine how the term productively intersects with constructions of sexuality and gender (Gopinath’s “Impossible Desires”). Seminar participants will be expected to facilitate discussion through presentations, to generate and share their bi-weekly responses with one another, and to write a research paper that looks at the ramifications of our theoretical discussions for our readings of literature or other cultural artifacts.

Authors we will read include but are not limited to: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Avtar Brah, Pheng Cheah, Rey Chow, Michelle Cliff, Robin Cohen, Brent Edwards, David Eng, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Gopinath, Inderpal Grewal, Stuart Hall, David Kazanjian, Jamaica Kincaid, Lily Mendoza, Kobena Mercer, V.S. Naipaul, Aihwa Ong, Salman Rushdie, Gayatri Spivak, Michelle Wright.