Fall 2009 Graduate Course Descriptions
M-Monday, T-Tuesday, W-Wednesday, R-Thursday, F-Friday
ENG 572A: History of Literary and Rhetorical Theory
David Bartine
T/R 1:15-2:40pm
An examination of some issues and debates in the history of literary and rhetorical theory. Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, and others. We will also discuss ways in which some of these issues and debates bear on current political situations.
ENG 589B: Philosophy of Teaching
Joseph Church
T/R 2:50-4:15pm
Philosophical in outlook, this course might just as well be titled “The Phenomenology of Teaching,” for in an era proclaiming the “end of metaphysics” we want to know what exactly does it mean “to teach”? teach what? what for? what is a teacher? what is a student? These and related questions will involve us in thinking ontologically about human nature, personal and social responsibilities, and knowledge and its conveyance. And they will involve us in practical concerns about materials, conduct, and evaluation in the classroom. Reading: T. Z. Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest and work by Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche, Darwin, Buber, Freud, Derrida, and others. Work: some daily writing (on topics); a term paper on teaching; and, with employment in mind, a five-page statement of your “Philosophy of Teaching.”
ENG 641: Fiction Workshop
Jaimee Wriston-Colbert
R 6:00-9:00pm
Gives graduate students an intensive study and practice in the writing of fiction. We will concentrate on short stories, but students working on novels may submit novel chapters. Focus is on student work, sharing and discussing in the workshop format; however, we will also read novels and short story collections, reviewing the elements of craft. Prompts and exercises are given to practice various techniques; these are designed to help students push their work forward, and stimulate new stories. Three complete stories or novel chapters are expected from each student, along with ongoing revisions. Graduate students who have been admitted into the MA or PhD Program in Creative Writing are welcome. Other graduate students may enroll if there is room, but only with the instructor's approval, based upon a writing sample of two to three stories/chapters brought to or submitted before the first class.
ENG 514: Restoration and NeoClassical Literature
Michael Conlon
T/R 2:50-4:15pm
This course challenges the view of the Restoration and early eighteenth century in England as a period devoted almost exclusively to the recovery of classical values and forms and the formation of those values into a literary code called "neoclassicism," in short, an age of order, stability, continuity, and reason. Emphasis will fall, instead, on the instabilities of the period reflected in the remarkable amount of artistic experimentation: the mixing of styles in poetry, the innovative uses of parodic and mock forms, the invention of modern comedy on the Restoration stage, and the emergence of the novel as a genre suited to an age in crisis. We will read the poetry of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift, the plays of William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, and John Gay, the novels of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. We will also read selections from several recent critical studies of the period, including Margaret Anne Doody, THE DARING MUSE: AUGUSTAN POETRY RECONSIDERED; Frederick V. Bogel, THE DIFFERENCE SATIRE MAKES; and Michael Mckeon, THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1600-1740.
The course will function as a seminar in which students present written questions each week on the assigned readings. The questions will direct and drive discussion and provide the subjects for two outside critical papers (8-10 pages in length). There will also be a final essay examination on both the primary and secondary readings
ENG 640: Poetry Workshop
Maria Gillan
Following WEEKENDS: September 12 & 13; October 10 & 11; November 14 & 15
In this intensive weekend workshop, we will concentrate on the poetics of memory and place. We will begin with the assumption that physical, geographic and spiritual locations are rich with stories that students can learn to access and convey through poetry. We will work on drafting poems within the workshop and not on polishing previously written work. We will concentrate on writing about our own ancestries, locations and personal histories.
Format: Meets on three weekends during the fall semester.
ENG 565Z: Banned Books and Stories Not Told
Henkel
W 6:00-9:00pm
In “An Open Letter to the Judson [Texas] Independent School District,” Margaret Atwood writes, “I would like to thank those who have dedicated themselves so energetically to banning my novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s encouraging to know the written word is still taken so seriously.” In 1885, the Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts banned Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because they thought that the book was “more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” Twain responded in a letter to his publisher, Charles L. Webster, by saying that the Committee members have “given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library. That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.” Whether because they discuss difficult questions of race, class, gender, or sexuality, or because they confront taboos that some would rather be kept quiet, literary texts have faced a long and complex history of censorship. We will examine why these texts have presented challenges to their readers, and aim to discover what they might teach us about free speech and censorship. Additional texts may include Anthony Comstock’s Traps for the Young, Theodore Schroeder’s Free Speech for Radicals, Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech, Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech, John Milton’s Areopagitica, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
ENG 450S/ 593: New Humanities: Evolution and Culture
Leslie Heywood
W 3:30-6:30pm
Evolutionary theory--which, conceived broadly, draws on work in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neurology, and science studies--provides an innovative frame of reference through which we might approach various aspects of human cultures, including artistic productions of all kinds. The course will provide an introduction to the cornerstones of contemporary evolutionary biology, with particular attention given to the framework of cultural evolution. In doing so, we will be developing an interactive theory that bridges the sciences and the humanities, and contributes to the bio-cultural model of interpretation that is facilitated by this bridge. Readings may include: Boyer and Richerson, Not by Genes Alone; Buller, Adapting Minds; Easterlin, What is Literature For; Boyd, On the Origin of Stories; Levine, Darwin Loves You; various essays; and cultural productions from novels and movies to medical technologies and artificial intelligence.
ENG 643B: Creative Non-Fiction Workshop
Leslie Heywood
M 3:30-6:30pm
This course focuses on creative non-fiction as a literary form that uses one’s life and research as material for transformation into creative writing that is as much a work of art as is fiction or poetry. How does one render the world with both truth and beauty, content and technique? Creative non-fiction comes out of the long literary tradition dedicated to verisimilitude in writing, but a primacy is placed on beauty of form and language as well. This is a writing course in which we will read other works of creative non-fiction in order to learn the genre. We will focus on the development of writing voice, use of perspective and point of view, how to do research for creative writing, and how to use the techniques of poetry and fiction to tell your own story or the story of a particular subject in a crafted, artistic way. The first part of the semester will be devoted to reading and discussion, including how to prepare a creative non-fiction book proposal, plus some writing exercises, and the second part will be devoted to workshopping your own writing. Readings may include: Doty, Dog Years: A Memoir; Huston, Cowboys Are My Weakness; Ackerman, The Alchemy of Mind; Gessner, Sick of Nature; Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia; The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008; Eggers, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
ENG 561J: Cultures of the Cold War
Joseph Keith
T/R 10:05-11:30am
Course focuses on U.S. literature and culture after WWII, especially from the period of 1945-1960. The course situates the various works within the domestic and global political context of the period: the early Cold War. We address an array of theoretical, formal and historical themes: Race and the emerging civil rights movement; containment; McCarthyism; crises in masculinity and femininity; youth culture. We also situate U.S. culture in an international frame, emphasizing the relationship between the various literary and cultural expressions to the nation’s ascension as a global power and to U.S. imperialism in the era of decolonization in the “Third World.” A subtheme will be to consider the dreams of a different world that appear in texts written by various ‘outsiders’ excluded from normative national life during the Cold War, and the challenges these offer to “America” as a culture and global power. In addition to engaging with a variety of cultural forms, such as novels, poetry, essays and films, the course will be supplemented by theoretical and historical texts. Writers may include among the following: Richard Wright, William Burroughs, Ann Petry, Amira Baraka, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, W.E.B. DuBois.
ENG 589A: Rhetoric and Comp Theory and Practice
Kelly Kinney
T/R 10:05-11:30am
English 589 prepares graduate instructors to teach general education composition courses at Binghamton University. It provides an overview of contemporary scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies, giving new instructors a theoretical scaffolding to reflect on their teaching, and a pedagogical base they may integrate into any course in English studies. In addition to engaging in readings on composition theory and pedagogy, graduate students complete a series of assignments, including a seminar paper based on a mock comprehensive exam question, a preliminary course schedule for WRIT 111, and a week-long lesson plan for WRIT 111. Graduate Students will also take responsibility for leading seminar discussions, and give oral reports on observations of instructors currently teaching WRIT 111.
ENG 515B: Milton and Contemporaries
Peter Mileur
T 6:00-8:50pm
It has been said that Milton is the wall separating everything that comes before from everything that comes after. During the Eighteenth Century, only the Bible was more widely read in England and no poet had a more profound influence on the Romantics. This course will be focused on the prose and poetry of Milton but will also pay considerable attention the religious, political, and social issues that shaped his work. We will also read some of the Metaphysical, Cavalier, Devotional, and Restoration poets that precede and coexist with him. A Midterm paper and a final paper.
ENG 572Y: Foucault, Said, and Arendt
Bill Spanos
T/R 1:15-2:40pm
This course will consider selected text of three of the most important and controversial thinkers of the post-Enlightenment global era with the view to 1) determine what they have in common, 2) what distinguishes them from each other; 3) what they contribute to our understanding of the various aspects of the immediately present world situation. By this I mean its postmodern, postcolonial, global aspects. More specifically the course will consider 1) the contested relationship between Foucault and Said as it pertain to the question of humanism; and 2) the relationship, all too often avoided, between Said’s and Arendt’s particular interest in the now globally central issue of the middle East, not least the highly fraught question of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people. Texts will include Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Memory, Counter-Memory, and Practice; Said’s Orientalism, The Question of Palestine; Culture and Imperialism; and Humanism and Democratic Criticism; and Arnedt’s The Portable Hannah Arendt and Origins of Totalitarianism, and Eichmann in Jersualem
ENG 593G: Intro to Sound Studies (emphasis on “noise”)
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman
M 3:30-6:30pm
“Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore"—R. Murray Schafer
"Bring the Noise"—Public Enemy
In this class, students will investigate the socially constructed concept of "noise" as a site of contestation and a keyword in the production of racial and social difference in the United States. We will address "noise" as a keyword in the vein of Raymond Williams, examining the function of its traditional definition as "unwanted sound" and tracing the shifting border drawn to distinguish "sound" from "noise" — and quite often "us" from "them"—in Western culture. Color lines are not just visual and spatial, but they are profoundly sonic. "Black Noise" will address key questions like: What distinguishes sound from noise? How and why has "blackness" historically been linked to "noise" in American racial formation? What is the connection between "noise" and power: socially, politically and legally? What is "white noise"? Why have particular black musical forms like jazz, rock and roll, and hip hop, been labeled "noise" by the dominant culture? Conversely, how has "noise" been used as resistance within black culture? In the first half of the course, we will read diverse perspectives on "noise" from such writers as Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Seneca, Jacques Attali, Ralph Ellison, Roland Barthes, Fred Moten, Susan McClary, Tricia Rose, Douglas Kahn, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Emily Thompson, R. Murray Schafer, and Josh Kun. We will study "noise" from a variety of vantage points: philosophical, scientific, historical, sociological, linguistic, and literary. In the second half of "Introduction to Noise," we will apply our theoretical framework to a variety of historically grounded, paired case studies: from the resonant biblical imagery of "The Tower of Babel" to W.E.B. Du Bois's depiction of the veil as a suffocating echo chamber in Dusk of Dawn; from 19th century debates over the sound of the Jubilee Singers to 20th century debates over the sound of Public Enemy, from noise abatement efforts in turn of the century New York City directed at recently immigrated vendors at Coney Island to contemporary phenomena, like the "Rochester Soundscape Society," a community activist group in Rochester, NY, that aims to rid the city of the "boom cars" of its youth of color.
ENG 565Q: Race and Empire in British/American Lit
Al Tricomi
T/R 1:15-2:40pm
This is a cultural studies course that seeks the long historical perspective. It aims to make visible Anglo-American attitudes toward race and religion in the building of empire from the early Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth. It treats canonical texts not often examined together, beginning with Shakespeare’s Tempest, with its depiction of profit-seeking Europeans in the New World, and Mary Rowlandson’s captivity diary, which reveals the original Puritan concept of a “chosen people.” Aphra Behn’s Oroonoco, Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and Melville’s Typee demonstrate resistant eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century responses to spreading British and American imperial practices among dependent or subject states. As a away of bringing together critical British and American responses to empire, we will treat both Conrad’s Heart of Darkness along with the American film based upon it, “Apocalypse Now.” The course will conclude with one text/film, still to be determined (such as "Gandhi" or Forster's Passage to India), showing the emergence of a former colonized state.
ENG 567A: Folklore and American Literature
LibbyTucker
W 3:30-6:30pm
This course explores multicultural folk traditions expressed in American literature. Monsters, ghosts, and other frightening figures populate a mythic landscape that calls for both folkloristic and literary analysis. Texts will include deCaro, The Folklore Muse; Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Erdrich, Tracks; Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses; Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways; and Groff, The Monsters of Templeton. Each student will write two short papers and one longer one and will participate in a group presentation.
ENG 593B: Literature and Medicine
Gayle Whittier
M 3:30-6:30pm
Literature and Medicine’s focus is on the cultural, ritual and metaphorical nature of American medicine in its various representations in poetry, fiction and non-fiction, most of the texts contemporary. Possible selections include Fadiman, Foucault, Payer, Hemingway, Gawande, Tolstoy, Pasten and Campo.
