Fall 2010 Graduate Courses
ENG 572D: Political and Musical ElaborationsENG 565: Medieval Texts/ Postmodern Contexts
Marilynn Desmond
Mondays 6-8:50
In this course we will explore the theoretical implications of the “radical familiarity” of medieval texts in post-modern contexts. We will consider especially the significance of medieval cultures and medieval literary theories for cultural studies, with a special emphasis on film theory and queer theory; we will address as well the extent to which critical theories challenge the historicist assumptions of medieval studies. Texts: The Romance of the Rose, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, York Mystery Plays, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, Boswell, John Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, Brooten, B. Women Loving Women, Dinshaw, C. Getting Medieval, Beckwith, S. Christ’s Body.
ENG 572R: Postcolonial Literatures of Race & Desire
Donette Francis
Tuesday/ Thursday 2:50-4:15
This course studies twentieth-century postcolonial literature and theory with an emphasis on the regional Caribbean and its diasporas. Our readings think about the multiple arenas through which race is made: the economy, culture, religion, law, psychology, sexuality and desire. Additionally, we will study how race intersects with gender and sexuality to produce national and global inequities from the colonial period to the present. Reading contemporary writers and scholars preoccupied with historical and archival authority, we will spend the semester examining the makings and meanings of race, gender and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
ENG 640: Poetry Workshop
Maria Gillan
3 Weekends TBD
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; email mariagillan@optonline.net for specific dates.
ENG 641: Graduate Fiction Workshop
Thomas Glave
Tuesday/ Thursday 6-8:50
This workshop will examine the traditional and non-traditional possibilities of creafting what is commonly and casually termed “fiction.” The class will consider “traditional,” “non-traditional,” and “experimental” forms, as well as the blurring of genres between “fiction,” “poetry,” and “drama,” in light of cultural differences which inform modes and “traditions” of storytelling, as well as received, entrenched notions regarding what “fiction” ought to be. Close readings of all texts, including those of workshop participants, required. A few workshop writing exercises may also be assigned.
ENG 572A: Animal Studies
Leslie Heywood
Mondays 3:30-6:30
What happens to humanism when the question of animals is introduced? This interdisciplinary course considers the human/ animal relationship from the perspective of the biological sciences (co-evolution), philosophy, literature, environmental studies and anthropology. Especially building on work in environmental philosophy, we will look at animals as morally considerable species that exist on a relational continuum with humans and the natural world, and the questions this continuum raises. Readings may include Donna Haraway, When Species Meet; Mark Beckoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals; Meg Daley Olmert, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond; Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human; Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men; novels like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle , and The Call of the Wild, creative non-fiction such as Dog Years and The Philosopher and the Wolf, and movies /documentaries such as Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.
ENG 565A: The Eighteenth Century Novel
Nicholas Nace
Tuesday/ Thursday 2:50-4:15
This seminar will view the eighteenth-century novel in a series of perspectival leaps. In the first half of the class, we will establish a chronological narrative of the so-called “rise of the novel,” first by studying exemplary canonical British novels up close, then stepping back in order to situate those novels within an increasingly expansive series of grand récits put forth by Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, and Margaret Anne Doody. From there we will move yet further away—to a distant, global vantage point—in order to abstract our test-case novels as blips and data points that can reveal, through their arrangement in various visual schema, the novel’s generic morphologies as well the socio-historical forces acting to shape the novel in this period. After surveying novelistic form at both a micro- and macroscopic level, we will in the second half of the class give ourselves over entirely to synchrony, zooming in on one single, anomalous notch in the traditional timeline: the year 1748. We will study this narrow one-year period of unsurpassed achievement in novel writing that produced a variety of influential novels, including two of the century’s greatest masterpieces: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. While we will spend a considerable amount of time on these two lengthy (though mercifully abridged) works by figures whose reputations were already established by 1748, we will also examine the first novels of such rising stars as Tobias Smollett and John Cleland. This process of segmenting the novel’s history and isolating a portion of it will allow us to work against the older, linear-tending grand narratives by witnessing several concurrent examples of creative fiction as they vie for a place in the same market. It will also afford us a glimpse of the emergence of certain novelistic sub-genres (such as the first-ever children’s novel, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess and the first explicitly erotic novel in English, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure), as well as provide us the opportunity to assess a strikingly contemporaneous spike in the production of Continental erotic novels.
ENG 565B: American Lit & the Frontier I: From the Puritans to the 20th Century
William Spanos
Tuesday/ Thursday 11:40-1:05
This course (Part 1, fall 2010 semester) will explore the indissoluble relationship between the myth of American exceptionalismsim, the American jeremiad, and the American frontier as this relationship has played itself out in American cultural and political history from the Puritans' "errand in the wilderness" of the "New World" to the "closing of the frontier" (Frederick Jackson Turner) at the end of the 19th century. Part 2 (to be held in next semester- spring 2011) will continue this genealogy through the Vietnam War to the George W. Bush administration's global "War on Terror after 9/11.01. In addressing these issues of representation and practice, the course will take its Interpretive directives from post-structuralist theory (above on, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Edward Said, Gioregio Agamben, and Alain Badiou) and, more particularly, from the critical discourse of the "New Americanists" (Sacvanb Bercovitch, Richard Slotkin, Edgar Dryden,Donald Pease, Amy Kaplan, John Carlos Row, among others. The course, in other words, will read the cultural and political history of American exceptionalism "against he grain (Walter Benjamin) -- or contrapuntally (Edward Said). Texts for the first Fall semester are likely to include the selected writings of the Puritans (edited by Perry Miller, Mary Rolandson's captivity narrative, James Fenimore Cooper's *The Pioneers*, the orations of Daniel Webster, Herman Melville's *Israel Potter,* *The Confidence-Man* and *Billy Budd,* Mark Twain's *Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.*
ENG 566A: Race, Realism, and the City
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman
Tuesdays 3:30-6:30
Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) was the first novel by an African American author chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) sold 1.5 million copies in its first release. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first play written by an African American to open on Broadway. Despite being some of the most popular and influential literature written in the US, African American cultural production from the 1940s and 1950s has languished in critical neglect, so much so that writers like Wright, Petry, Hansberry, Ellison, Baldwin, Chester Himes, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorothy West, and Willard Motley have been termed a “lost generation.” Rather than treating this extraordinary group of writers as “too late” for the Harlem Renaissance or “too early” for the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements, this course will explore the literary project of this period—increasingly called “the Chicago Renaissance”—as “right on time” in its own aesthetic, literary, political, cultural and social milieu. To trace the relationship this group of writers staked out between “race, realism, and the city,” we will attempt to reconstruct the world of artistic choices they faced at the mid-twentieth century, especially the fiercely debated divide between “Propanganda—or Poetry?” as Alain Locke described it in 1936. Toward that end, we will consider works from these writers alongside other social realist forms of the period (music, photography, film, and sound recording), and in dialogue with a long tradition of realism in American writing and embedded in various historical contexts: segregation (Southern AND Northern), the heyday of the Communist Party in the US, the second African American “Great Migration” to Northern urban centers, shifting gender roles, the rise of anti-colonial movements in Africa, the surveillance of the Cold War era, and the rise of post-war suburbs.
ENG 566B: Australian & Canadian Fiction
Susan Strehle
Tuesday/ Thursday 4:25-5:50
This course explores contemporary postcolonial fiction written in two former “settler colonies” of the British empire. The course introduces postcolonial theory and considers its shaping influence on the fiction produced in two English-speaking nations with different histories and cultures. The fiction in the course probes the relation between former colony and imperial center; colonizers and indigenous peoples; nature, culture and pollution; gender, race, class, sexuality, ability and immigration; and other issues of contemporary importance. Writers studied will include Margaret Atwood; Michael Ondaatje; Alice Munro; Peter Carey; Gail Jones; Andrew McGahan; Brenda Walker; and others. Students will write a short paper and a longer research paper and participate in a group presentation.
ENG 565C: Shakespeare & Contemporaries
Al Tricomi
Tuesday/ Thursday 1:15-2:40
This course pursues the challenging idea that English Renaissance drama comprises a greater achievement in total than that accomplished by Shakespeare alone. Shakespeare, it contends, can best be understood in the context of his contemporaries. Accordingly, I have organized much of the course around a series of pairings--one Shakespeare play and one by a well-known contemporary. The course treats two plays by Christopher Marlowe, the medieval-seeming DR. FAUSTUS and then THE JEW OF MALTA, which is paired with Shakespeare’s MERCHANT OF VENICE. Shakespeare’s RICHARD II introduces a pervasive theme of “the tragedy of state.” The place of women in society is also a special theme of focus. Marriage and the nature of patriarchy will be examined in Shakespeare's MEASURE FOR MEASURE and John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, and the problem of adultery in OTHELLO and Thomas Heywood's A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS. FORMAT: This Composition-Oral Speaking course features Team-Led Events (TLE) and a team project. It particularly emphasizes the creation of a community of learners, learning as a process, and the development of critical thinking skills. Students work in teams of 4 (or sometimes 3) to frame critical questions/issues, to which the class as a whole responds. Students come prepared for every play; each is responsible to her/his team and to the entire classroom community.
