Past Graduate Seminars and Workshops

 

Fall 2012

ENGL 303   Graduate Fiction Workshop
Topic: Fiction Writing and the Novella
Lorraine Lopez
(Monday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

In this workshop, we will focus on the construction of effective works of fiction by encouraging writers to explore possibilities through reading published and peer narratives.  Members will produce creative and critical writing and present original fiction for workshop critique.  Over the course of the semester, participants are expected to draft a minimum of two short stories or chapters for presentation to the workshop for critique.  This workshop undertakes complex and advanced analysis of elements of craft such as structure, symbol, metaphor, and style, and presumes members are already familiar with rudimentary techniques related to the development of characters, the balance of scene and summary, and construction of the narrative arc.  Beyond elements of fiction, we will investigate tension produced by symbol, imagery, metaphor, and underlying thematic strands in published and peer-produced literature.  Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext and selected essays will guide workshop discussion along these lines.  As contemplation of craft and teaching/mentoring are critical components of the professional writer’s career, workshop members will lead presentations on elements of craft in conjunction with works of assigned reading and assign and direct in-workshop writing exercises.  Finally, becoming a writer means being a responsible member of the literary community and publishing written work.  As such, each workshop member will draft and publish a book review during the semester. 

 

ENGL 304   Graduate Poetry Writing Workshop
Rick Hilles
(Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

The primary focus of this intensive graduate workshop in poetry writing will be your poems in progress; we will also read and discuss various volumes of contemporary poetry, many in conjunction with the Visiting Writers series. All workshop members will be expected to: participate intensely in class discussions, prepare in advance substantive and substantial written comments on peers’ work-in-progress, attend regular conferences with the workshop leader, and, by the end of the semester, produce of a significant body of new poems.

 

ENGL 307-01   Graduate Fiction Workshop
Topic: Pastiche:  Collage, Montage, Documentary, and Literary Fiction
Nancy Reisman
(Wednesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

In this course, we’ll consider ways in which both visual and literary artists draw on methods of assemblage, ongoing conversations between the visual and the literary, fiction and non-fiction, and the ways several literary writers have used pastiche forms.  What do collage or documentary forms offer a writer that other forms may not? How might collage forms shift the reader’s/viewer’s experience?  We’ll read work by Michael Ondaatje, Tim O’Brien, Manuel Puig, among others; consider visual works by Joseph Cornell, Betye Saar,  and other artists; and also consider the ways in which film technique and individual works suggest possibilities for literary fiction. The assigned course projects will include options for original fiction and hybrid creative projects as well as more traditional analytical discussions; course assignments will include brief weekly responses.

 

ENGL 307-02   Graduate Poetry Workshop
Topic: Forms of Poetry:  Reading Modern European Poetry in Translation
Kate Daniels
(Monday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

In this MFA seminar, we will read selected works of some of the major European poets of the Modernist and post war eras, exploring this oeuvre in individual language clusters.  We’ll begin with (pre-modern) Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and continue with Mallarme, Apollinaire, Ponge, Celan, Breton.  Then:  Trakl, Rilke, Sachs, Brecht.  Neruda, Lorca, Machado, Pessoa.  Pasternak, Mandelstam, Ahkmatova, Brodsky.  Pavese, Montale, Calvino.  Cavafy, Ritsos, Seferis.  Hikmet.  Radnoti.  Rozewciz, Milosz, Szymborska.  We’ll end with Transtromer (current Nobel Laureate), Ekelof, and Martinson. 

Along the way, we’ll focus on selected aspects of literary translation (and will have several guest presenters); the prose poem; the advent of free verse; continental Dadaism and Surrealism; literary influences among these poets and certain English language poets of the era (Baudelaire & E.A. Poe; James Wright & Trakl; Brodsky & Auden, etc.); individual literary movements and affiliations (i.e. French Symbolism, Russian Futurism); the crucial role of Robert Bly’s The Fifties and The Sixties press in making many of these poets first available in English, and in disseminating their work; and other topics as they arise from our reading and response.

Books: 

Definitely buy these on Amazon over the summer.
Paris Spleen, Charles Baudelaire (tr. Louise Varese) New Directions.
Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, (tr. Wallace Fowlie)  original 1966 edition or revised 2005
The Selected Poetry of Rainier Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell, intro by Robert Hass)
The Essential Neruda (tr Reid, Hass, et al) New Directions 2004
Friends, You Drank Some Darkness (Ekelof, Martinson, Transtromer) (tr. Robert Bly)
Things I Didn’t Know I Loved, Nazim Hikmet

The rest of the reading (which includes several essays by American poets that relate to the poets or poetry we’ll be reading in translation) will be prepared for you in class packs, purchasable at beginning of semester.  Obviously, we’ll be doing an enormous amount of reading and processing.  Expect your writing to be strongly influenced – and your eyes to be tired, but your soul uplifted and your writing mightily improved… 

Requirements:

Each student will be responsible for at least two lecture/presentations throughout the semester, and a final writing project at semester’s end. 
 

 

ENGL 310   Seminar in Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare and Theory
Lynn Enterline
(Monday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Whether as author or cultural object, “Shakespeare” attracts vigorous theoretical speculation and debate.  Part of the aim of this seminar will be to investigate the terms, insights, and omissions attending the numerous kinds of theoretically informed critique instigated by the linguistic turn of structuralist and post-structuralist theory.  Bookended by Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 1986) and Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Jonathan Gil Harris, 2011), this quarter century saw the rise of numerous critical/theoretical schools – psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, Marxist, materialist, post-colonial – that have become part of the DNA of our profession.  But the seminar’s primary goal will not be to survey schools of theory as such.  Rather, we begin from the observation that Shakespeare’s texts already inhabit the theories brought to bear on them: major writers in all of the “contemporary” theories listed above have turned to Shakespeare’s texts as part of their investigation.  We will therefore endeavor to read early- and post-modern texts side by side – in dialogue, a mode deeply familiar to sixteenth century authors – while questioning the validity of these period distinctions and the meliorist historical narratives derived from them.   Our readings will be organized around some of the most important issues shared by Shakespeare and the numerous theorists who engage with his texts.  And the underlying question behind these dialogic inquiries will be as follows: what specific critical purchase does the practice of reading literature offer those who would understand Walter Benjamin’s observation that all documents of culture are also documents of barbarism? Topics include: language, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, affect, bodies, race, authority, power, ideology

 

ENGL 355-01   Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic:  Idea of Black Culture
Hortense Spillers
(Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

The idea of black culture provides a reading of conceptualizations of the subject across a historical timeline that begins with W.E.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk (1903) and proceeds through successive periods of black cultural apprenticeship: The Pan-African idea, pursued as a practice after the end of World War I; the era of African decolonization and the mounting of the Civil and human rights campaigns in the United States, which both share the global context of the "Cold War" (from the Marshall Plan to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 1989, and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, 1991), the "birth" of Black Studies and the development of the new epistemologies of the post-sixties and beyond, and  the emergence of Diaspora and the post-race/post-colonial subject of the latter twentieth century—the implications of the Obama Presidency. Each of these eras of human and social engagement has engendered its own distinctive work on the meaning(s) of black culture. This seminar will examine such readings in a selective manner by analyzing texts by, among others, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, as well as contemporary scholars, including Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler, Ken Warren, and Brent Edwards. (a comprehensive list to follow)

 

ENGL 355-02   Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic: Was Cinema Modern?
Paul D. Young
(Wednesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Few filmgoers during the medium’s first decades (1895-1925) would have thought twice about the question: the cinema simply was the most revolutionary medium of representation ever devised. Yet its photographic and mechanical technologies emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, and its public, collective exhibition practices seem thoroughly antiquated in the age of video and digital media. We will address the seminar’s titular question from both ends of the twentieth century by delving into theory, history, and criticism of the modernity of cinema, its possibilities for modernist art and literary practice, and its relationships to digital audiovisual media. Readings will range from turn-of-the-century philosophy, sociology, and journalism (Simmel, Bergson, Kraucaer) and Frankfurt School critical theory (Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno) to the uses of cinema for Dadaism, surrealism, and avant-garde movements in art and literature. Films screened (weekly) will range from the earliest films ever shown and silent commercial films by D. W. Griffith, Fritz Lang and others, to the avant-garde experiments of the twenties (possible directors include Ray, Dulac, Duchamp, Clair, Léger, Buñuel, and Eisenstein), structural films of the 1960s and 70s (Frampton, Snow), and even a little Hitchcock (via Zizek). Readings begin with We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour’s post-humanist history of the empirical sciences (1993), and end with David Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film (2007). Please purchase and read the Latour before the first seminar meeting.

 

ENGL 355-03:   Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic:Proseminar:  Literary Study and the Transnational Turn
Mark Wollaeger
(Thursday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This course is designed as an introduction to graduate study focused on the transnational/global turn in literary studies. Although this turn has been underway, depending on the period and field, for about a decade, in recent years it has begun to grow more prominent. Given that my own expertise lies in modernism, much of the common reading of primary texts will be drawn from the long twentieth century; but individual projects grounded in a period/field of your choice will also be assigned, and the study of modernism will emphasize its links to other periods, fields, and national traditions. Theoretical readings by their very nature will also speak across disciplinary distinctions organized according to temporal, spatial, or linguistic coordinates. I could make up a list of assigned texts, but I honestly don’t know yet. I do know, however, that even though gesture is sometimes considered a universal language, the list of possible assignments will not include interpretive dance

 

WGS 301   Gender and Sexuality                                 This course is dual listed with English
Topic:  Feminist Approaches
Kathryn Schwarz
(Tuesday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Interdisciplinary introduction to the major debates, theoretical terms, and research methods in feminist, gender, sexuality, and queer studies.

In this seminar, we will build an archive that gives us tools for thinking about gender and sexuality from a range of disciplinary perspectives.  We will consider theories of social subjectivity, which posit various relationships between systems of power and individual identities and desires; our discussions will engage such cultural theorists as Louis Althusser, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Judith Halberstam, Gayle Rubin, Elaine Scarry, Joan W. Scott, Patricia Williams, and Slavoj Zizek.  We will invite scholars from a range of fields to join us for conversations about their scholarship and the methodologies that inform it.  As we move through the semester, students will have opportunities to assign texts—historical, critical, archival, and/or theoretical—that represent the disciplines and approaches with which they are most concerned.

 

Spring 2012

ENGL 303 Graduate Fiction Workshop
Topic: TBA
Nancy Reisman
(Tuesday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Description forthcoming

ENGL 304 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Topic: TBA
Kate Daniels
(Monday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Description forthcoming

ENGL 305 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop
Topic: Creative Nonfiction Writing
Peter Guralnick
(Tuesday 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with a particular emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, and Alice Munro. Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should lead to discussion that is as wide-ranging as it is lively and engaging,

ENGL 307 Literature and the Craft of Writing
Topic: TBA
Tony Earley
(Wedensday,12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Description forthcoming

ENGL 307 Literature and the Craft of Writing
Topic: TBA
Rick Hilles
(Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Description forthcoming

ENGL 318 Seminar in Victorian Literature
Topic: Visuality, Visual Culture, and the Victorian Imagination
Rachel Teukolsky
(Thursday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This course will approach Victorian literary and cultural history from the angle of visuality. We will study some of the famous Victorian high-art interactions between verbal and visual arts, such as D. G. Rossetti's poetry and paintings, Robert Browning's "painter poems," and art writing by John Ruskin and Walter Pater. We will also consider literary works remarkable for their visual play, such as Dickens's Bleak House, Brontë's Villette, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, among others. And we will explore some key objects of Victorian visual culture, including illustrated books, advertising posters, and representations of the Great Exhibition of 1851, usually considered the first World's Fair. Histories and theories of nineteenth-century visuality will potentially include Nancy Armstrong on photography; Sharon Marcus on fashion plates; Vanessa Schwarz on the idea of visual culture; W. J. T. Mitchell on ekphrasis; Walter Benjamin on art and machines; Michel Foucault on panopticons; Jonathan Crary on optical experiments; Martin Jay on "Scopic Regimes of Modernity"; and Friedrich Kittler on early film, among others. The course, aimed at both specialists and non-specialists, will consider some basic questions: How to analyze an image? What is visual culture, and how has the idea become significant to nineteenth-century studies? How do the shifting historical relations of high art to mass culture inflect our understanding of words and images in the nineteenth century?

ENGL 337 Seminar in Critical Theory
Topic: "Theory and Life"
Scott Juengel
(Tuesday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

One could responsibly argue that no critical question occupied literary, political and cultural theory of the last decade more than the question of life. Indeed, it might seem hard to argue otherwise. As a concept, life heralds something both essential and elusive, and as such its fate concenters a range of theoretical investigations that extend across the arts, sciences and the political world. For instance, recent commitments to biological time have aligned Darwin with figures like Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze in order to think again the persistence of a livable future. And such a future, imaged so often these days as posthuman and virtually administrated, has not only put the matter of the human to heretofore unseen theoretical trials, but has triggered a return to the question of thingliness and the increasingly porous boundaries between the animate and inanimate, between life and the lifelike. Similarly, eulogies for the demise of the nation-state and a post-9/11 strategic bargain with humanism have produced a motley of concerns about the nature of sovereignty, politico-theological legitimacy, and the biopolitical (life in its "bare," "creaturely," "precarious" and "everyday" forms). In other words, this evanescent thing called life has reorganized multiple fields of inquiry in recent years; or rather, it has revealed itself again with ever-urgent force as a linchpin of late modern ethical thought.

While there will be a conceptual focus to the semester, this seminar is designed to introduce graduate students to a range of theoretical approaches, and as such our conversations each week will remain sensitive to method and argument. In this spirit, the course title is also a call to consider the role of "theory" in professional life both in and outside the academy. For example, in addition to charting the saliency of "life" in contemporary cultural theory, we will periodically explore the juncture where forms of historically situated life-writing and conceptual investigation intersect—i.e. Adorno's Minima Moralia; Derrida's "autobiographical animal" lectures; Benjamin's One-Way Street or "Hashish writings"; Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks; Butler on responsibly accounting for oneself after 9/11, etc.—in order to reflect on the history and experience of critical theorizing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic: Biocultures: Twenty-First Century Models of Science, Medicine, and Literature
Jay Clayton
(Monday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Since the heyday of the science wars in the 1990s when radical critiques of science provoked a backlash in the scientific community, a shift has occurred in the relationship between science, medicine, and the humanities. New models range from cognitive studies and evolutionary psychology, which tend to emphasize what science can contribute to the humanities, to models that emphasize the way literary studies can affect scientific and medical practice by influencing public policy. In the latter case, focusing on the social, ethical, and cultural implications of science gives literary scholars an opportunity to intervene in established interdisciplinary conversations that have real consequences beyond the academy.

In this seminar we will concentrate on dystopian fictions and films such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931), Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazua Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005), and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story (2010), as well as other recent novels such as Ian McEwan;s Saturday (2005) and Richard Powers's Generosity (2009); science fiction stories about the posthuman by Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, Charles Stross, and Greg Egan; and theoretical texts in science studies by Lorraine Daston, Lennard Davis, Peter Galison, Sander Gilman, John Guillory, Evelyn Fox Keller, David Morris, Nikolas Rose, Steven Shapin, Mark Turner, and Priscilla Wald.

To provide hands-on experience in interdisciplinary research methods, interested students will join research teams in a medical school laboratory with the goal of identifying a literary work that explores the social or cultural implications of the lab's investigations in areas such as breast feeding, cancer research, contagious diseases, vaccine safety, genetic screening, cloning, organ transplants, pain, and sexuality research. Students will learn how grants are developed in the sciences; how multi-disciplinary teamwork occurs in the medical world; and how to generate papers on social, ethical, and cultural issues raised by science and medicine.

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic: Herman Melville
Colin Dayan
(Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This seminar is an intensive reading in the prose and poetry of Herman Melville, especially Moby Dick (1851); Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852); Israel Potter (1855); The Piazza Tales (1856); The Confidence Man (1857); Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866); Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage (1876); Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). Only in the conclusion of the course will we turn to a discussion of literary critical approaches to these works. The burden of this class will lie in our close readings and contextualization of Melville's writings, which will demand some familiarity with authors and issues crucial to his accounts of the Old World and New, his obsession with taxonomies of the human, the facts of bondage, and the nature of belief--whether in law, God, or nation. These collateral readings include works by John Locke, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Orville Dewey, James Kent, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the legal opinions of Lemuel Shaw and Joseph Story, as well as selected natural histories of the Caribbean.

Requirements: an oral presentation and a final essay.

ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic: Beneath the Mask: Subjectivity and Suppression in African American and Caribbean Autobiography
Ifeoma Nwnankwo
(Wedensday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course will delve into the approaches to self-crafting and self-representation in autobiographical narratives African-descended individuals from the U.S. and the (English and Spanish-speaking) Caribbean. During the first unit of the class students will gain a firm grounding in autobiography theory and criticism, particularly that focused on the earliest narratives produced by people of African descent in the Americas. In the second (and most expansive) unit, we will explore more contemporary public articulations of self, including those posited in more contemporary literary texts, popular music (hip hop and dancehall reggae in particular), and oral narratives generated via interviews. The third unit will center on the crafting of a final project. Students will choose from multiple format options—a critical essay, a theoretical essay, an autobiographical narrative (about you or about someone else), a set of life history or oral history interviews (historically and theoretically contextualized), a series of poems, a short story, or a set of lesson plans for K-12 teachers. Substantive and intensive readings and discussions about the mechanics, implications, and histories of each format/methodology, particularly as it relates to African American and Caribbean people, will figure prominently in this unit, as will one-on-one conferences about each student's project.

 

Fall 2011

ENGL 303 Graduate Fiction Workshop
Topic: Narrative Craft and Linked-Story Collections
Lorraine Lopez
(Monday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate workshop in fiction writing with an emphasis on narrative craft. As such, the workshop undertakes more complex and advanced consideration of elements of fiction and presumes members are already familiar with basic techniques of characterization, scene and narrative structure, and development of story. The function of this workshop is to help writers develop fiction they are actively engaged in creating, new work—published work, writing samples submitted for admission to the program, and work that has been turned in for other workshops may not be submitted for workshop—that will likely become part of the final thesis. This particular workshop will focus on the linked-story collection, and as such, participants will read, present, discuss, and critique published linked-story collections by various authors, including Alice Munro, Anthony Doerr, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Daniel Bezmozgis, Barbara Johnson, and Daniel Mueenuddin. Additionally, workshop members will read articles on craft in Curious Attractions by Debra Spark , as well as attend literary events and participate in question-answer sessions with visiting fiction writers. Finally, being a responsible member of the writing community means promoting contemporary literature. Thus, workshop members will also compose a review of a newly released work of fiction for publication in an online or print venue during the semester.

ENGL 304 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Topic: TBD
Mark Jarman
(Tuesday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Description Forthcoming

ENGL 307-02 Graduate Seminar
Topic: Ma & Pa Poetry: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman
Kate Daniels
(Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

In this MFA seminar, we will read the complete poetry of Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman, along with several biographies and critical articles, addressing various aspects of each poet's work. Our goal will be to understand something about the startling emergence of the first original voices in American poetry, to trace the critical reception to both poets over time, to explore their influence on twentieth century poets, and to read them as writers, ourselves, examining closely selected technical aspects of their verse. We will begin with Dickinson. Over the summer, please read The Complete Poems of E.D., and the Sewall biography, so that we can get right to work. During the second week of September, former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins will give a guest lecture on Dickinson and her poetry.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Johnson, editor

The Life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall

My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe

Leaves of Grass, and Other Writings: A Norton Critical Edition, Michael Moon, editor

Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, by David S. Reynolds

On Whitman: Writers on Writing, by C.K. Williams

+ critical articles to be assigned

ENGL 307-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop
Topic: Where the Girls Are: (Some) Contemporary Women Short Story Writers and their Influences
Nancy Reisman
(Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

In this course, we'll explore the work of several late 20th and 21st century women short story writers, and delve into their various aesthetics, influences, formal and thematic concerns. We'll consider generational and cultural moments (with an eye on the intergenerational links and divergences); the sense of relationship, desire, and place within writers' works; their visions of the short story form and uses of language; their representations of power and the power dynamics within forms; and their non-literary as well as their literary influences. Among the writers we'll read and discuss: Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Angela Carter, Lorrie Moore, Deborah Eisenberg, Lydia Davis, Clarice Lispector, Aimee Bender, Jhumpa Lahiri, and several newly emerging story writers. Course projects will include engagement with art-making process and oral and written discussion of formal and cultural concerns.

ENGL 355-04 Graduate Seminar in British Romanticism
Topic: Re-Orienting British Romanticism
Humberto Garcia
(Tuesday, 3:30-6:00p.m.)

This graduate seminar explores the complex ways in which Romantic poetry and fiction were enabled, in major part, by cross-cultural, political, and economic engagements with the Orient, defined (for the purpose of this course) as Muslim Afro-Eurasia with a particular focus on late eighteenth-century British India. In order to historically situate the Romantic fascination with the Orient, the first half of this seminar examines two formative periods: (i) George Sale's English translation of the Koran (1734, rpt. in 1795) and the various "Lives of Mahomet" that portrayed Islam sympathetically. (ii) Sir William Jones' groundbreaking linguistic work on Sanskrit and Persian literature and the influential role of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta (established in 1784) for the discovery/construction of Hindu and Buddhist Enlightenments. The second half of the course examines the orientalist works of Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Hamilton, Sake Dean Mahomet, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and others. The primary goal is to rethink British Romantic literature in a global and transnational context, understanding the codes, rhetoric, and genres of Romantic Orientalism in relation to literary experimentation, revolutionary politics, British nationalism, and the colonial enterprise at home and abroad. Various theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches (in history, economics, religious studies, etc.) will be paramount, but revisionist scholarship in postcolonial studies will receive the most sustained attention. Hence, the first two weeks of class are dedicated to a reappraisal and reexamination of a much-disputed but seminal theoretical text: Edward Said's Orientalism (1978).

Because this seminar is designed for specialists and non-specialists alike, the required 20-30 page seminar paper (50% of your total grade) could reflect related literary and theoretical issues in other fields and periods of interest. Class participation (10%), a formal presentation on assigned secondary readings (10%), and a seminar paper abstract (10%) are also required. The semester culminates in a conference-style oral presentation based on your revised abstract (20%).

ENGL 320 Studies in American Literature
Topic: U.S. Antebellum Print Culture
Teresa Goddu
(Monday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course will focus on the emergence of a national literary marketplace in the U.S. antebellum period by examining how the market revolution structured the trade in print.

In examining print as both a cultural form and a marketable commodity, it will situate texts within a variety of distributional, technological, consumerist, and discursive networks. It will historicize and theorize modes of antebellum authorship, circulation, and readership as well as attend to particular genres and forms. Our specific case studies will be drawn from early African American print culture. Indeed, we will use African American literature as our lens through which to understand the antebellum period.

The course will introduce students to archival research methods as well as to the interdisciplinary methodology of print culture studies which maps the relationships between the materiality of the text (its publication history or status as a commercial commodity) and its meaning. While the course will be focused on the US antebellum period for its historical frame and African American literature for its case studies, its methodology is transferable to all literary fields. All students with an interest in print culture studies are encouraged to take the class.

The class will consist of weekly archival exercises and several mid-size papers that synthesize the class's methodologies.

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic: Poetry
Vereen Bell
(Wednesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Up to a point this seminar will be experimental in that the texts we use and approaches we take will be determined by the needs of the students enrolled. The long range plan is to create a model for future seminars like it that other instructors can teach. The seminar will have two objectives. The first objective is to refresh and calibrate our close-reading skills (which apply, of course, to other texts as well as to poetry) and to form an understanding of the formal strategies by means of which poetry addresses its audience, both in the present and in its original historical moment. The second objective is to examine representative longer poems as they are contextualized and interpreted by the different critical approaches which currently prevail in our profession. The first three weeks of the seminar will be devoted to poetry-reading boot camp, involving reading and discussing a variety of poems, both canonical and contemporary, selected to represent the range of possibilities of poetic expression. After that stage—for the next twelve weeks—we will examine at two or three week intervals major poems or clusters of poems selected (by the class, more or less) from a group which will include Shakespeare's Sonnets; Keats's Odes; Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; Tennyson's In Memoriam; Yeats's "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"; Eliot's The Waste Land; Frost's North of Boston; Sylvia Plath's Ariel; Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems; Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau. The procedure with the longer poems will be first to discuss the poems themselves (without outside help, so to speak) and then to discuss and evaluate critical and scholarly writings about those poems. Where it is possible expert visitors will be invited in to guide our discussions at relevant points and walk us through the hard parts, giving us the benefits of their training and special interests.

At the end of the boot camp phase students will be required to submit at least one close-reading analysis of a specific poem. At the end of the second, students will submit a longer paper on a more substantial single poem or cluster of poems, by a poet of the student's choosing, that replicates the methodologies and the research-based analysis we will have used in the second phase.

Meanwhile:

Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk... if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior high school playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

(Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems)

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic: Maladies of Attention: The Distracted Subject of Cinema
Jennifer Fay
(Monday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) Please note meeting time correction (was previously listed as 12:30-3:00)

As Jonathan Crary argues, the norms of attention have arisen in relation to the reciprocal and inseparable phenomena of modern distraction. Paradoxically, distraction may be a tool of attention, and thus attention, as a discrete category of perception, poses several challenges to theorization. Beginning in the 19th century and working towards more contemporary cinematic practices, this course queries the tension between various modes of distraction that are intricated in absorbed perception, specifically cinematic perception. It proposes to re-assess some of the canonical films and texts of film theory (realist, surrealist, feminist, Marxist...) that are predicated on distinctions between spectacle and narrative, shock and absorption, fragmentation and totality, and masculine and feminine feeling. The course will also engage films and readings that are not typically theorized together. By pairing theory/criticism and primary texts across a range of media, we will probe the thresholds of modern perceptual, affective, and political states of mind.

To give but two examples: We will read Gustav Flaubert's 1857 Madame Bovary with Chantal Akerman's 1975 experimental film Jeanne Dielman while reading excerpts from Lars Svendsen's A Philosophy of Boredom (2005) and Elizabeth S. Goodstein's Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (2005) in order to understand histories and forms of feminine and feminist boredom. Similarly, at the interstices of attention and commitment, we will ponder the emaciated body as a spectacle of suffering, a narrative of virtuosic self-mastery, an index of oppression, as well as a sign of political withdrawal (in both senses of that word). We will pair such texts as Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), Franz Kafka's 1922 "Hunger Artist" and the writings and films of Brazilian Cinema Nova's most outspoken theorist, Glauber Rocha ("An Esthetic of Hunger", 1965) for whom the depleted body finds its revolutionary representation in the "sad, ugly...screaming, desperate" films of underdevelopment. This class takes seriously such attentive diversions as forgetfulness, indifference, boredom, repetition, disgust, and obsession, and it will attempt to connect them to a range of modern political conditions and affectations.

There will be a mandatory screening outside of class every week at a time and place to be determined.

ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English and American Literature
Topic: Proseminar: Bodies and Subjects: The Violence of Social Contract
Kathryn Schwarz
(Thursday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

In this course, we will think about the costs and rewards of social subjectivity. The costs are familiar elements of our analytical vocabulary, from interpellation and false consciousness to abjection and ideological jouissance. For that very reason, it is worth looking closely at the privileges conferred on the social subject. However illusory those privileges may be, they defend against the immanent capacities of the body: to nurture disease, to succumb to desire, to be in peril or out of place, to die. Those capacities exceed the reach of agency or intention, and locate the body in a transactional, mutable, and dangerous intimacy with the world.

Of course we know this; here we will concentrate on the stories told to manage that knowledge. One of those stories involves a notion of contract that upholds social integrity regardless of individual costs. If such contracts produce the hierarchies and exclusions that motivate ideological critique, they also rewrite the meaning of transience: temporary bodies sustain social permanence, and self-loss is always someone else's problem. Collective priorities thus have a peculiarly protective effect, even in their most oppressive forms. This perhaps sheds some light on the difficulty of radical change, even when we possess an articulate awareness of the coercions and seductions that shape social life.

We will build an archive that gives us tools for thinking about ideology in its various guises—language, labor, and history, consent, desire, discipline, and law—drawing on such theorists as Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Carla Freccero, Jacques Lacan, Elaine Scarry, and Slavoj Žižek. We will spend a few weeks with Renaissance texts, to consider the significance of assigning a "birth" to the modern subject: what happens, for example, if we set the "subject" of Foucault's discipline beside the "subject" of Jacob Burkhardt's individualism, and look at a play by Marlowe or Shakespeare through both lenses at once? As we move through the semester, students will have opportunities to assign texts—literary, historical, critical, and theoretical—that represent the periods, forms, and methodologies with which they are most concerned.

Other Courses of Interest

This course is dual listed with English and the description updated May 9, 2011

HIST 343 Studies in Early Modern English History
Topic: Studies in Early Modern English History: Religious politics and confessional conflict in early Stuart England
Peter Lake
(Wednesday, 6:10-9:00 p.m.)

This is a wholly different from the course I taught last fall (2010), which I changed to suit the interests of the students taking it. This is about the early Start and civil war periods and is more heavily contrasted on religious disputes and polemics between puritans and various sorts of conformists in England and between catholic and protestants and then between all sorts of people during the religious cacophony of the civil wars. Central will church state relations and questions about the nature and authority of the clerical calling and the clerical estate. Central for the earlier period will be the confrontation between Laudianism and its various others and critics and later between main stream puritans the more radical sects and Quakers. Obviously the relation between religion and politics will feature but this is not a course about political history.

Spring 2011 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 303-1 Graduate Fiction Workshop

Tony Earley

(Thursdays, 2:30-5:00 p.m.)

Description Forthcoming

ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop

Kate Daniels

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This is an intensive workshop in poetry writing. Students are expected to complete 10-12 new poems (or the equivalent) over the course of the semester, or to engage in extensive revision of the poems in the thesis. Reading list: Individual volumes of poetry by the poets who will visit campus as part of the Visiting Writers Series, including Frank Bidart, Jericho Brown, Ciaran Carson, Mark Jarman, and Bobby Rogers. Several of these writers will visit class. In addition, we will read several essays on relevant issues in contemporary poetry and poetics, as they arise from the work under examination in the workshop. Extensive revision and regular conferencing with the instructor are expected.

For National Poetry Month in April, students (working individually or together) will devise projects that are campus- or community-based. Documentation of these projects will be part of the portfolio due at semester’s end. Finally, collaborating with the Art Department, MFA poets will be asked to create brief texts for an on-campus art installation, that will be directed by Professor Mel Ziegler (see: www.vanderbilt.edu/myvu/news/2007/09/21/community-art-is-passion-of-new-studio-arts-chair-mel-ziegler.47322 )

 

ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop

Peter Guralnick

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same proviso. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic, to be turned in before the December break.

This is a workshop on Creative Nonfiction, which revolves around the writing of the participants, with additional readings in work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Jack Kerouac, Wil Haygood, Rosanne Cash, and Alice Munro.

It will focus on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception, with special emphasis on the profile – in other words, how to make a real-life story come alive in the same way that fictional narrative can.

This is a workshop in which we are all interdependent on each other's efforts.

Three major pieces of 2500-3000 words will be required, along with the possibility of some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the other students' papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. Class participation is the second most important element of the class (after the writing itself), so attendance is of the highest importance. Most of all, the workshop is a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing (irrespective of the level of achievement) should make it engaging – and fun – for all. The only prerequisite is a commitment to effort and honest self-expression.

 

ENGL 307-01 Graduate Seminar

Topic: Why Write: Perspectives on Literary Creativity

Kate Daniels

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

In this seminar designed for graduate students in creative writing, we will consider why people write poems, novels, plays, and short stories. What is the ancient and cross-cultural urge to express oneself creatively in written language all about? What is the function of the literary imagination in individual lives, as well as in larger social and cultural contexts? Finally, because this is a seminar for creative writers, we will ruminate on this question posed by Australian novelist Sue Woolfe: “What are people who sit in rooms making up stories doing with their minds?” We will essay responses by exploring three current approaches to understanding literary creativity: psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and (for lack of a better term at present) aesthetics. Reading for this part of the semester will include: Freud’s “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” and “On the Mystic Writing Pad,” Jung’s “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” Edmund Bergler’s “Unconscious Mechanisms in Writer’s Block,” The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice Flaherty, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience, by Sue Woolfe, and several other essays and book excerpts..

During the second half of the semester, we will hear from writers themselves – George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, William Styron, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker et al – about why they (think they) write, and how they imagine the relationship of their “selves” to the texts they create. Of particular interest may be our inquiries into ideas about mental and physical illness and writing; addiction and writing; gender and writing; and confinement and writing. We will end the semester by critiquing two films that feature writers as main characters as a way of talking about some of the common ideas and stereotypes of writers and artists perpetuated by mass media.

 

ENGL 314-01 Seminar: 1600-1800

Topic: Theatre and Empire

Bridget Orr

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course is focused on the role of theater in the development (and contestation) of English/British ideologies of nation and empire in the long eighteenth century. We will be reading major dramatic works from Dryden to Inchbald, tracking the emergence and revision of late Stuart, Tory, Whig, Patriot, Walpolean, radical and Pittite defences and critiques of colonialism. But rather than reading the texts solely as vehicles for particular Court/factional or party positions, we shall consider generic changes, including the rise and fall of heroic, pathetic and sentimental modes; the emergence of pantomime, ballad-opera and musical comedy; and what Michael Ragussis calls multi-ethnic spectacles, in the theatrical construction of national and imperial spectators. Our inquiries will be informed by the ancient question as to why Georgian dramaturgy seems to fall away so sharply from the achievements of Restoration playwrights despite the cultural centrality of theatre throughout this period.

 

ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature

Dana Nelson

Topic: Democratic Frontiers

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Where does democratic power originate? Where does it abide? What contains and guards it?   Who exercises it and by what right? Is its exercise inevitably through sovereignty, singular and unified through symbol, formal government or representative actor? Or can it be generated—not just effectively but maybe ethically—in plurality, collaboratively, as a commons? These are not just theoretical questions, addressed by theorists of democracy from Schmitt and Agamben to Derrida, Hardt and Negri; they are historical too. In this course, after touring through some recent interdisciplinary work that rethinks the history of sovereignty in the early years of nation, we’ll investigate how early US literature can help us animate historical questions about US democracy, and suggest how it fleshes out some recent theorizing about constituent power, or the power of the multitude, while challenging us to think beyond familiar categories. We’ll pay especial attention to frontier literature, for what it has to tell us both about how more equalitarian practices were being represented as “pre-political” and “savage” in the early nation, and for how those practices continued showing up well into the nineteenth-century. And we’ll think about theories, histories and practices of communing and their relation to alternative democratic practices.

Fictional texts we’ll read probably include: Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, Cooper, Pioneers, Bird, Nick of the Woods, Kirkland A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, Ridge, Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, Delany Blake, or the Huts of America, and Davis,Waiting for the Verdict.

We’ll read history by Woody Holton, Terry Bouton, Christian Fritz, Reeve Huston, Laura Edwards and Ron Formisano; political theory by some of the above and Melissa Orlie, Suzette Hemberger and Sheldon Wolin, and assorted literary critics like Jennifer Greiman and Mark Rifkin.

 

ENGL 337B-01 Introduction to Literary Theory

Robert Barsky

Topic: Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This course will survey central postcolonial theories as a way of thinking about some crucial issues relating to the postcolonial and multicultural experiences, and the issues raised by the integration of people into a host country subsequent to significant upheaval in their country of origin. Along the way, we will examine the implications of colonial encounter, and formation of idea "post-colonial" culture, particularly in a multicultural urban setting. Subjects include language, freedom and agency, gender roles, representation of space, relation between power and narrative. By comparing details of the legal procedure leading to immigrant or refugee status to the experiences recounted in the fictional texts, we will also have occasion to discuss the conflicting images that the society projects onto its ethnic groups, and the effects they have upon individuals attempting to find their way “home” in fiction and in life.

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature

Topic: Cinema and the Thics of Desire: Love, the Other , and the Body in the Film Image

Sam Girgus

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Cinema and the Ethics of Desire: Love, the Other, and the Body in the Film Image

The relationship of ethics to love, sexuality, and the body in American and international cinema as seen through the writings and thought of leading modern thinkers including Freud, Kristeva, Irigaray, Ricoeur, and Levinas.* The course will consider the body on film as the condition of the ethical relationship to the other. The course will propose a systematic methodology based on psychoanalysis and modern ethics for studying film as a heterogeneous “cinetext,” meaning a complex art form of vision and sound. We will examine such interconnected themes as time and the feminine; the maternal body and the ideology of love; sex and redemption; subjectivity, the law, and the other; paternal power and the missing male. We will concentrate on studying the relationship between the art of the film image (cinematography, editing, sound etc.) and the themes of the body and ethics, often in the contexts of national social and cultural ideologies. The course will be geared for both beginning and advanced students. We will choose a workable number of films for study from a wide range of diverse films from different national cinemas and periods, potentially including for example, selections from the modernist works of Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Chereau, and Bunuel; classics by such American directors as Ford, Capra, Hawks, Scorsese, Allen, Lee, Lynch, and Eastwood; the innovative cinema of Almodovar, Oshima, Del Toro, Inarritu, among others; historic and current women directors such as Ida Lupino, Julia Dash, Agnes Varda, Debra Granik, and Lisa Cholodenko; and various adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. We also will consider studying films that test the increasingly porous line between the sexualized screen body and the soft pornography of American popular culture today.

*Suggested critical and theoretical readings will include writings by Kelly Oliver, Tina Chanter, Ewa Ziarek, and Richard Kearney, among others.

 

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English and American Literature

Hortense Spillers

Topic: Black Male Writers: The Troika Plus One

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

“Black Male Writers: The Troika Plus One”: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin might arguably be thought of as the major African-American writers of the post-World War II period and as a result, the chief voices of a black post-modernism; the youngest member of this literary combination, David Bradley, writing in the wake of his “elders,” shows traces of that past, as well as strides toward new ground. This course is devoted to a study of these figures and the “anxieties of influence” that make it possible for us to read them as a kind of “visionary company.”

 

 

Fall 2010 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 303 Graduate Fiction Workshop

Topic: TBD

Nancy Reisman

(Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

The central goal of this graduate fiction workshop is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. This is primarily a studio course: the participants’ work-in-progress will serve as key course texts. We’ll also read and discuss published works of fiction (novels as well as short stories) and craft essays. As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll consider artistic vision in relation to questions of form and structure, and the possibilities for invention and for reinvigorating tradition. We’ll explore the questions of perception, narrative stance, varieties of tension, dramatic and non-dramatic progression, voice, language, and other aspects of craft. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? Conceptualize character? How might we consider conflicting and/or echoing movements within a given piece? Which ‘rules’ might be most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? At the beginning of the semester, we’ll set up a schedule for presentation of fiction-in-progress, and throughout the term writers will also offer their written and oral responses to published works, and will meet with visiting writers.

 

ENGL 304 Graduate Poetry Workshop

Topic: TBD

Rick Hilles

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Description Forthcoming

 

ENGL 306-01 Seminar in 16th Century Literature

Topic: Early Modern Masculinity

Lynn Enterline

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Designed as a proseminar to introduce first year students to an academic career of research and writing, the seminar will focus on the ideological, literary, rhetorical, affective, sexual, and institutional parameters of early modern masculinity.   Moving between sixteenth century, critical, and theoretical texts, we will consider throughout what a specifically literary perspective adds to the field of gender studies. Texts and authors may include: Ovid, Shakespeare, John Webster, Andrew Marvell; Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu; and a range of contemporary investigations into the history of emotion and sexuality in the early modern period.

 

 

ENGL 307 Literature and the Craft of Writing

Topic: Traditional Poetic Form and Modern Practice

Mark Jarman

(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

We will study the prosody of a wide range of Modern and Contemporary poets, including Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, Maxine Kumin, and Sylvia Plath. Required work will include writing in the verse forms of these poets, plus extended analysis of their techniques. Texts will be Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms, and Derek Attridge’s Poetic Rhythm, an Introduction.

 

 

ENGL 318-01 Seminar in Victorian Literature

Topic: Sensation and Sexuality in Victorian Britain

Carolyn Dever

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Please note that reading assignments for this seminar are available on OAK with the first assignment to be completed by the first session.

This course will address questions of embodiment, eroticism, and representation in Victorian “sensation fiction,” including novels that sample the tropes—thrills, chills, and mysteries—of sensationalism in the more conventional framework of mid-century realism. Setting the stage for the semester’s inquiry is a pair of texts—Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and W.T. Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon—that establish sexual mystery as a form of narrative epistemology and also as a vexed material practice. Additional primary readings for the course will include Emily Brontë’s WutheringHeights, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Trollope’s The Small House at Allington. The semester’s conclusion will include Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Stoker’s Dracula, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, read in tandem with their near contemporary, Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. I will assign additional historical, critical, and theoretical readings in order to underscore both the materiality of Victorian sexuality, and the elliptical narrative epistemologies that Victorian culture employs both to mark the body and to conceal it.

 

ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature

Topic: Three African American Modernists: James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes

Vera M. Kutzinski

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

For most of the twentieth century, the ideology of modernism has defined African American writing as auto-ethnography and separated it from so-called high (white) modernism in the U.S. In this seminar, we will explore the lives and works of three prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance to analyze how exactly the term “African American” relates to “modernism,” that is, how each term is transformed when brought into contact with the other. We will read comprehensively: poetry, fiction, autobiographies, letters, and translations (in Hughes’s case). Our goal will be to discern how each of the three authors figured his own self (or selves) in relation both to the literary/cultural establishment(s) and to the larger society. The main question for this seminar is how aesthetics and politics intersect in the imaginative work of literary representation and in critical and theoretical inquiry. Readings: Hughes, The Big Sea; I Wonder as I Wander; Collected Poems;Remember Me to Harlem (Letters); Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Collected Poems; God’s Trombones; Black Manhattan; Along this Way; Toomer, Cane; The Wayward and the Seeking; Complete Poems. Requirements: Weekly 500-word response papers; one oral presentation on relevant scholarship; one final paper (15-20 pages). Note: The first meeting is on August 26. I will email a syllabus to anyone who is pre-registered for the course a week prior to that date.

 

ENGL 321-01 Studies in Southern Literature

Topic: “The New Southern Studies”

Michael Kreyling

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

First, it isn’t called “southern literature” any longer. It’s “The New Southern Studies.” Whether the name change signifies a real difference, a “turn” in the field, of not is the central question of the seminar. We have Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury to heed; she didn’t think changing the name Maury Compson to Benjamin would help: “Name aint going to help him. Hurt him, neither. Folks dont have no luck, changing names.”

What I plan to do is this: arrange a group of texts representing the canon in southern literature/NSS, and approach them in each meeting of the seminar from the ancient and the modern points of view. Some of these entries will take more than one meeting.

The seminar schedule will probably look something like this list:

William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee (or another of his antebellum historical romances). Discussion will circulate through basic theories of the historical novel (Lukacs) and nationalism (Benedict Anderson).

Thomas Dixon, The Clansman. The romance of Reconstruction. A primer in post-bellum politicized narrative. David Blight, Race and Reunion. Early theories in the “new” science of sociology (William Graham Sumner). Plessy v. Ferguson.

Booker T. Washington (Up From Slavery) and W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk). Uplift, activism, African American masculinity. Approaches by Houston Baker and Riché Richardson.

Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand. Regionalism.

William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses. The major figure as political piñata: Was Faulkner part of the Civil Rights movement?

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! The greatest novel written by an American -- in the same year with Gone With the Wind – the most popular novel written by an American.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel and its 50th anniversary. And Katherine Stockett, The Help: the knock-off South. Memory, memorialization.

Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising. The global south.

The south on film: D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation; David Selznick, GWTW; Lars Von Trier, Manderlay; Kevin Wilmott, C.S.A.; and others.

Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina. Shelby Lee Adams, The True Meaning of Pictures. Trash, class, exploitation.

I suggest that, over the summer, anyone interested read some of the titles in the early weeks of the semester (The Yemassee, The Clansman, I’ll Take My Stand) and some of the titles I see as important but in the supporting cast: The Help, GWTW. The films too would make a good summer series.

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature

Topic: Early Cinema 1893-1920

Paul Young

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Please contact Prof. Young directly about screenings and readings prior to first seminar session

This seminar treats the period between the first projected film screenings in the United States (1895-1896) and the regularization of production, distribution, and exhibition in place in the US (as well as Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and India) by 1920. Our focus will oscillate between the medium itself during these formative years and the cultural concerns to which cinematic discourse spoke: mechanization, industry, and urban experience; the growing public presence of women; and the racial, ethnic, and regional differences that problematized "American identity" even as the cinema identified (nearly) all Americans as potential spectators. No prior knowledge of film is required, but participants should be prepared to read and view widely outside of class in order to gain proficiency in reading film styles and techniques more rapidly. Requirements will include weekly screenings and readings, student presentations, a midterm analysis exercise, and a final seminar paper.

 

HIST 344 A (Dual List with ENGL) Studies in Modern England

Topic: British Identities at Home and Away in the long 19th Century

James Epstein

(Thursdays, 12:10-3:00 p.m.) Note Change of Meeting Day

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to recent works of British social, political, cultural, and literary history, focussing on constructions of identities (national, imperial, gender, class, urban, rural, etc.) during the long 19th century. Particular emphasis is placed on how collective identities were shaped through interchange between metropolitan and colonial sites. The course also seeks to link secondary works to the reading and interpreting of contemporary works. Readings include key works by historians such as Linda Colley, Catherine Hall, and Judith Walkowitz, by literary and cutltural critics such as Simon Gikandi and Raymond Williams, and works by writers such as Jane Austen, William Cobbett, Mary Seacole, and Thomas Carlyle.

 

HIST 343 (Dual List with ENGL) Studies in Early Modern English History

Topic: Religion, culture and politics in post reformation England

Peter Lake

(Wednesday, 6:10-9:00 pm)

The course will examine the interaction between religious change and politics in the period after the reformation. The focus will be on the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Emphasis will be given to questions of ‘political culture’; the ways in which the peculiar exigencies of the Elizabethan regime, in Collinson’s phrase ‘the Elizabethan exclusion crisis’, led to various experiments in the ways in which politics was conducted. Central here will be the notion of the monarchical republic of Elizabeth 1 and the politics of popularity and the various monarchical reactions thereby provoked. The doings of both Catholics and Puritans will be examined and a wide range of primary sources will be consulted. Various literary texts will also be used.

 

 

Spring 2010 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop

Tony Earley

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Description Forthcoming

 

ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop

Kate Daniels

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

*This is an intensive workshop in poetry writing. Students are expected to complete 10-12 new poems (or the equivalent) over the course of the semester. We will use the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition, as a base text for the class. In addition, we’ll read individual volumes of poetry by the poets who will visit campus as part of the Visiting Writers Series. Extensive revision and regular conferencing with the instructor are expected.

 

ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop

Peter Guralnick

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with a particular emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, W.C. Heinz, Louis Menand, and Alice Munro. Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should lead to discussion that is as wide-ranging as it is lively and engaging.

 

ENGL 307-01 Literature and Craft of Writing

Topic: Frost and Stevens, Their Craft and Influence

Mark Jarman

(Thursdays, 2:10-5:00 p.m.)

Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens are two of America’s greatest and most original poets and tower over their contemporaries in the twentieth century. As individuals and artists they could not appear more different. Frost presented himself to the world as a New England farmer, while Stevens was an executive with a major insurance agency in Hartford, Connecticut. Frost held various posts in universities and gave frequent readings of his work, barding around, as he called it. Stevens’ interaction with the American public was mainly as an insurance adjustor, one of his era’s best investigators of claims. Their poetry differed markedly as well. Frost’s poems reflect his persona as a Yankee agrarian, recording the voices and lives of country people in New Hampshire and Vermont. In his poetry, Stevens departed entirely from the drab world of business to celebrate the wildly imaginative and exotic in his unique verses, often about fantastic characters. Not only do they provide a contrast in their poetry, but in their professional careers. Yet both poets had much more in common than is apparent. Both encountered the thought of William James and George Santayana at HarvardUniversity in the 1890's. Both spent a long apprenticeship as poets before publishing their first books. Both were masters of traditional English verse, especially the blank verse line, but Stevens was one of the great innovators in American free verse, a course Frost never followed. Both were engaged by the modern dilemma of alienation.   Both saw poetry as an answer to the modern problem of religious belief.

Our course will examine the work of these two poets side by side, with a special emphasis on their craft and innovations by both poets. We will also consider poets who benefited from the example of one or the other. In the case of Robert Frost, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney. And Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, in the case of Wallace Stevens. You will be required to give a presentation to the class and to write a paper. Our texts will be the Library of America Editions of Robert Frost’s Poetry and Prose and Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose. There will also be supplemental readings of more contemporary poets.

 

ENGL 307-02 Literature and Craft of Writing

Topic: Where the Girls Are: (Some) Contemporary Women Short Story Writers and their Influences

Nancy Reisman

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course will explore of the work of a range of late 20th and 21st century women story writers, their aesthetics, voices, and literary techniques; their generational and cultural moments; the sense of relationship, desire, and place within their work; their visions of the short story form; and their literary and non-literary influences. We’ll read work by Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Edna O’Brien, Angela Carter, Lorrie Moore, Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. Course projects will offer opportunities to engage with the art-making process are well as with various analytical considerations of these writers’ works.

 

ENGL 314-01 Seminar, 1660-1800

Topic: Ideas of Fiction

Jonathan Lamb

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Background:

There has been a further spate of theories of the novel in the last few years, with new books or essays by Catherine Gallagher, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Alex Woloch and Candace Vogler, to name a few. One of the most interesting contributions was not directly concerned with the novel but with the nature of contract, specifically the original contract which, in the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (for example) forms the basis of civil society. In her book, Wayward Contracts, Vicky Kahn explored the English Revolution as a collision between two radically different kinds of narrative: the story of feudal obligation and the story of foundational consent.   When the latter supervened and became the basis of English history in the eighteenth century, a very close liaison was produced between politics and poetics, Kahn argues, because a fiction had managed to transfigure not only the nature of politics but also the nature of experience. She is not the first person to suggest that the novel comes about not as an attempt to reflect the empirical actuality of life, but as an exercise in fictionality itself. Gallagher and Lynch both argue that fiction is concerned with fiction, not with the real, and that it is its quality of being made up, not of being empirically accurate, which appeals to the reader. But what if this were true not just of the novel, but of all the business of civil society? Often in Robinson Crusoe we find the hero saying things such as, `As I imagined it, so it was,’ or dreaming the next phase of his life on the island before it actually happens. Is it the law of imagination we ought to be invoking, and not the standard of empirical actuality? Have we been reading novels the wrong way round?

Aims:

Well if we have, how might we begin to reread novels? The course will be divided in two parts. The first will negotiate theories of fiction, from Samuel Johnson to Candace Vogler, with Kahn’s provisos in mind, to see if we can form an idea of the preposterous kind of novel, and what that would entail for the characters within it, as well as the readers of it. This will require making some basic distinctions between fiction, history and romance; also between characters, persons and authors. In the second half, I want each student to propose a novel that exhibits some of these preposterous characteristics, ranging for their examples between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries.

 

ENGL 325-01 Seminar in Modern British and American Literature

Topic: Comparative Modernisms

Mark Wollaeger

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

The course aims to provide an introduction to modernism attentive to the recent global/transnational turn in modernist studies. As currently conceived, it should be titled Modernisms: Genealogical and Comparative. The genealogical axis will begin in two “origins”: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857), often described as the progenitors of modern fiction and modern poetry respectively. From these beginnings we will move forward through some major English-language works by Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot (The Good Soldier,Ulysses, early Eliot up through The Waste Land). Once into twentieth-century British modernism, we will push further out along the comparative axis (opened already by the movement from England to Ireland) by reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway alongside Ahmet Tanipar’s The Time Regulation Institute, a Turkish comic novel. We will also loop back to Ulysses via some Japanese experimental fiction, including Ito Sei’s “Streets of Fiendish Ghosts,” and possibly by some Indian Anglophone literature. We will also read significant theoretical work underpinning the global turn, from Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire (e.g., “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”) to more recent work by theorists of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and comparativity (e.g., Anthony Appiah, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Fredric Jameson, Jonathan Culler, Franco Moretti). Rather than require a long seminar paper at the end, this course will culminate in two shorter pieces (ten and five pages) designed as talks and seminar position papers for submission to the Modernist Studies Association Convention, which meets every fall, and will also require a variety of short papers and presentations during the semester

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature

Topic: The Other Latino: Contemporary Latino Literature

Lorraine Lopez

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Latino literature consists of poetry and prose written by American authors of Hispanic heritage who have been inculcated by the U.S. experience, who write in English, and who self-identify as Latinos. While seeking to honor the diversity within this diversity, this seminar focuses on the vibrant new writings by U.S. Latinos--Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican-Americans, whose work is an important component of mainstream American culture. Authors whose work we will investigate include Junot Diaz, Helena Maria Viramontes, Stephanie Elizondo-Griest, Daniel Chacon, Sergio Troncoso, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, and topics we will cover are cultural hybridity, post-Movement identity, borderlands theory, gender dynamics, and popular religiosity.

 

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English and American Literature

Topic: Print Culture and Literary Production

Dahlia Porter

(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

In the opening section of The Dunciad, Alexander Pope descries the endless stream of “Journals, Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines” issuing from Grub Street, home to publishers, booksellers, aspiring poets, and impoverished hack writers. Pope’s concern, like many of his generation, stemmed from the rapid expansion of the universe of print—an ever-expanding world in which authors and readers acquired new roles, literature became a business, and the locus of literary authority was continually up for grabs. If Pope responded to these new formations with satire (and a lawsuit again Curll for publishing his letters), by 1815 Wordsworth had come upon a different solution: every original author, he argued, “had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” The world of print might be used to an author’s advantage; the only trick was figuring out how. This course will examine the central questions raised by a new awareness (in authors, readers, editors, and publishers) of the power and potential of print in the 18th and 19th centuries. We will begin with a survey of recent criticism to establish the scholarly conversation and pinpoint some useful methodological approaches (book history, word and image studies, material culture, new historicism). We’ll then devote several weeks to a trio of significant eighteenth-century publishing projects: Pope’s Dunciad, Richardson’s Pamela, and Johnson’s Dictionary. After working through a matrix of conceptual and technical issues with these case studies, we’ll shift our attention to the formal and generic innovations of Romantic era. Coupling theory, criticism, and primary texts, we’ll consider topics ranging from ekphrasis (Blake as engraver and poet); paratexts (prefaces, illustrations, and interludes in Darwin and Smith); annotation (footnotes in Owenson’s novel The Wild Irish Girl and Southey’s oriental tale Thalaba the Destroyer); collection (museums, miscellanies, and Lyrical Ballads); celebrity (the wildly popular Lord Byron); periodicals and reviews (James Hogg and Blackwood’s magazine); and the death of the author (quite literally, in Shelley’s Adonais).

 

ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English and American Literature

Topic: Cosmopolitanism Otherwise: African American and Caribbean Women's Border Crossings

Ifeoma Nwankwo

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course will center on the ways Black women word artists have narrated, represented, and theorized transnational border crossing during three key eras in African Diaspora history: Pre-Emancipation; New Negro Renaissance; the Contemporary Period (1980-present). What do they identify as the drivers behind and the key positive or negative outcomes of these journeys? What language or terminology do these women use to talk about such movements? Do/Can we see recurring paradigms for enacting or discussing cross-national engagement? How do these conventions converge with or diverge from those foregrounded in contemporary scholarly discourse?

Through in-depth examinations of the treatment of the international in autobiography, fiction, poetry, scholarly writing, and music lyrics by African American, Caribbean and Afro-Latin American women, we will consider the benefits and the drawbacks of employing cosmopolitanism as a way of reading and discussing Black women’s cross-border movements. We will explore questions such as: What is the history of cosmopolitanism as a concept? Who has used it and to what end? Why should we or should not use it to discuss/interpret Black women’s border crossings? What alternatives are there, and what are the benefits and limitations of these alternatives, especially as employed by scholars? Are there analytical maneuvers that the concepts of Diaspora, The Black Atlantic, Pan-Africanism, and Third World Feminism allow us to make that cosmopolitanism does not, or vice versa?

The syllabus is divided into units. Each unit represents a particular category of transnational movement (e.g. migration) or destination (e.g. “Africa”). Each unit’s reading list includes at least one text from each of the following categories: literature, history, literary criticism, and literary theory. The course requirements, plainly stated, are: class participation, position papers, discussion leading, and final paper. All students are expected to come to each class with a brief (3-4 page) position paper on the day’s readings and be ready to use it as a basis for engaging in dialogue with classmates. In addition, for each class session, one student will be responsible for not just leading discussion, but rather for inspiring a vibrant discussion of the readings.

Reading list includes:

K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism

Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Nancy Prince, The West Indies

Nella Larsen, Quicksand

Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow

Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

 

Other Courses of Interest

 

FRENCH 395

Topic: “Crime, Punishment and Confession”

Robert Barsky

(Thursdays 3:10-5:30 p.m.)

This course, to be taught in English, combines primary works of literature written in the 19th and 20th centuries with secondary critical works which address concerns of the law and literature movement from various perspectives. First, we will survey the field by examining some of the foundational texts used in the “field” of literature and law. We will then look to issues relating to the community that adjudicates in both literature and law, raising issues of interpretation, reader response, and pre-conceived notions about fields and disciplines. With some theoretical and literary material in hand, we will then look to issues raised in feminism as they relate to both the legal and the literary fields.

Finally, we shall discuss the problem of ‘constructing a productive other’

as it applies to both author-hero relations in fiction, and individual-claimant relations in law.

There will be some secondary themes developed throughout this course. First, we will discuss the process of narrative construction in literature and law, which essentially refers to the transformation of inner experience into narrative through relations with the other. Second, we will evaluate narrative strategies in literature and law with an aim to understanding the production and reproduction of legitimate language and the economy of linguistic exchange. Third, we will survey various approaches to 'outsider law' and its contemporary application. Fourth, we will have recourse to categories such as 'situatedness,' 'answerability,' and 'author-hero' relations as a means of discussing literatures of confession. Finally, we will discuss the implications of social discourse theory for the study of literature and law as a means of finding themes and concerns which are common to both domains

1. Theory texts:

M. Angenot, «What Can Literature Do?” in Marc Angenot and the Scandal of History M.M. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination and Art and Answerability P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power J.-F. Lyotard, The différend Meyer, Michel Philosophy and the Passions Richard Posner, Literature and Law

2. Literary texts:

Honoré de Balzac, selections from different novels and short stories Marquis de Sade, Dialogue between a Priest and a moribond Victor Hugo, The Last day of a Condemned Man Emile Zola, « J’accuse » and selections from novels from the Rougon-Macquart series Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea Albert Camus, The Stranger

 

 

Fall 2009 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop

Nancy Reisman

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The central goal of this graduate fiction workshop is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. This is primarily a studio course; participants will also consider published works of fiction and discussions of craft. As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll discuss artistic vision in relation to questions of form and structure, and the possibilities for invention and for reinvigorating tradition. Throughout the semester, we’ll discuss both short and longer forms of fiction, and we’ll consider varieties of perception, narrative stance, tension, dramatic and non-dramatic progression, voice, language, and other aspects of craft. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? Conceptualize character? How might we consider conflicting and/or echoing movements within a given piece? Which ‘rules’ might be most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between fiction writing and other arts? Between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? Throughout the semester, graduate writers will be required to produce and present new original fiction, and to read and respond to published writing in class discussion and written discussions.

 

ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop

Mark Jarman

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants. Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course. Each class member will also choose a poet, in consultation with the workshop leader, for extensive study, resulting in a presentation to the class at the end of the semester. There will also be weekly discussion of reading assignments from our texts: Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, & Meg Schoerke and Twentieth Century American Poetics, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, & Meg Schoerke.

 

ENGL 307-01 Literature and the Craft of Writing

Topic: Reading/"Reading" Vanderbilt Writers

Kate Daniels

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Creative Writing has been a vital part of Vanderbilt University’s English Department for nearly a century. Much of the discourse around the history of writers and writing at Vanderbilt has been dominated by the controversial text known as I’ll Take My Stand:Twelve Southerners on the South and the Agrarian Tradition – an anthology of manifesto-like essays published in 1929. We will begin this MFA seminar by reading this small book that has evoked so much interest and that has come to be so prominently identified with the institution. Then we’ll try to read with fresh eyes selected works by many of the writers who studied and wrote at Vanderbilt under the influence of this text as undergraduate and graduate students, and as faculty members. We will consider the idea of a Vanderbilt “tradition” of creative writing, and whether that term is still relevant in any meaningful way. We will also look at Vanderbilt writers as teachers of writing – an old and important practice at Vanderbilt that began with Ransom’s famous class which he called “a practical course in writing various types of prose, including the short story.”

Ransom’s most notable students included Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Peter Taylor. Other important writers who have studied at Vanderbilt include Roy Blount, Jr., James Dickey, Jesse Hill Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Caroline Gordon, Madison Jones, Jim Wayne Miller, James Patterson, Elizabeth Spencer, Max Steele, and Jesse Stuart. Younger writers who were once students at Vanderbilt include Diann Blakely, Elaine Fowler Palencia, Kevin Wilson, and Greg Williamson. Our semester will end with a panel discussion with members of the current MFA faculty.

Please purchase (used) copies of books on Amazon. Selected poems means that I will make a selection of poems for you to read.

Texts:

I’ll Take My Stand:Twelve Southerners on the South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930)

Blount, Jr., Roy. Alphabet Juice (2008)

Dickey, James. Buckdancer’s Choice, Deliverance, selections from journals

Gilchrist, Ellen. Victory Over Japan (stories), selections from The Writing Life (essays)

Gordon, Caroline. The Women on the Porch

Jarrell, Randall. The Poet and the Age, and selected poems.

Patterson, James. Choose one…

Ransom, The World’s Body and selected poems.

Elizabeth Spencer. The Stories of ES (1981)

Tate, Allen. Selection of poems.

Taylor, Peter. A Long Fourth & Other Stories (1948), A Summons to Memphis (1985)

Warren: All the King’s Men, Audubon: A Vision, Brother to Dragons, Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren & Cleanth Brooks: Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction

Younger contemporaries: Kevin Wilson & Leah Stewart

Older contemporaries: MFA faculty

 

ENGL 312-01 Seminar in Seventeenth -Century Literature

Topic: Milton

Leah Marcus

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

John Milton was a well-known political radical, one of the English revolutionaries who signed the death warrant of King Charles I. As an artist, however, he was interestingly conservative in that he practiced literary forms that in their own era looked like throwbacks to a fairly distant past. This course offers students the opportunity to read (or reread) all of Milton’s major writings, with an emphasis on their cultural context at the time they were written and published, beginning in the Caroline period, spanning the tumult of the Civil War and Interregnum, and extending well into the Restoration. We will also survey recent Milton criticism, taking note of its strengths and attempting to interpret its blind spots, particularly its tendency to run twenty years behind the rest of the field of Early Modern studies.

 

ENGL 318-01 Seminar in Victorian Prose and Poetry

Topic: Victorian Temporalities: Past, Present, Future

Rachel Teukolsky

(Thursdays,12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Victorian writers are known for their powerful and often anguished sense of history. Some used nostalgia to adjust to the startling modernity of their own industrial age; others observed the falls of previous empires and arrived at a new relativistic understanding of their own place in the world timeline. This course will introduce Victorian literature using the rubric of temporality. Our readings will be divided into three loose groupings: past, present, and future. In the course’s first section, “Past,” topics will include Victorian medievalism, the historical novel, neo-Catholicism, Pre-Raphaelitism, the trope of contrast, and philosophies of history and history-writing. We will also begin to explore the role of historicism in the field of Victorian studies more broadly. Part two, “Present,” will look at some of the more synchronic and spatial modes that Victorian writers used to limn their new modernity, or “the spirit of the age.” Topics will include defining the modern, reality and realism, things, the Great Exhibition, London and the geographies of modernity, and modes of everyday life. An interlude will focus on Darwinian narratives of development. The final part of the course, “Future,” will examine late-Victorian visions of the world to come. We will consider aesthetic utopianism, dystopia and science fiction, decadence, and cultures of new media. The course will ideally conclude with a segment on steampunk, the modern-day romance with Victorian futurism. Authors will likely include: W. Thackeray, J. Ruskin, T. Carlyle, R. Browning, G. Eliot, C. Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, C. Dickens, E. B. Browning, K. Marx, C. Darwin, W. Morris, B. Stoker, and H.G. Wells, along with a selection of relevant contemporary theorists and critics.

 

ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature

Topic: Poe's Gothic: The Antebellum Context

Colin Dayan

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

In In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams debunks the idea of Poe as a morbid romantic transplanted onto American soil. “Poe was not ‘a fault of nature,’ ‘a find for French eyes’ but a genius intimately shaped by his locality and time. It is to save our faces that we’ve given him a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classic accuracies we have not known how else to escape.”

In this seminar, we will place Poe in his varying locales, dealing closely with his poetry, fiction, and criticism. This attempt to make Poe local will depend on providing contexts for the study of his work: Newtonian mechanics, Calvinist predetermination, empirical philosophy, medical jurisprudence, and, most important, legal and natural histories of slavery. Whether he writes from Virginia, New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, Poe addresses questions of property, slavery, superstition, and status—questions that put him in dialogue with the romance of the South and the realities of race.

Some questions to be considered:

1) How was ghostliness reinvented through the language of property and persons that questioned the mental prerequisites of legal responsibility?

2) What are the grounds for a transnational gothic into which are seeded legal fictions, spiritual beliefs, and historical fragments?

Primary readings include: selected legal cases and sermons; the Bible (Leviticus, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Romans); Poe’s poetry, tales, essays, and reviews (including Eureka, his “Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe”); Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, George Balcombe; Lydia Maria Child, A Romance of the Republic; Robert Bird, Shepherd Lee; Richard Hildreth, Archy Moore, the White Slave; or Memoirs of a Fugitive.

 

ENGL 337A-01 Introduction to Literary Theory

Topic: Pro-seminar: Practical Theory

Mark Schoenfield

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

How do our theoretical paradigms intersect with our current research methods? Using this general question as a guide, we will explore the practical implications of theoretical perspectives and consider how to deploy current (and older) technologies to establish research questions and solutions.   As the conduit between epistemology and literary production, literary theory explores questions of what is a text, a book, what are an author, what's up with grammar anyway? In this course, we will consider certain paradigms—structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, among them—in the context of three concrete literary situations. We will use 19th-century periodicals to explore questions of authorship, textuality, and narrative. We will consider the pressures of consumption and economics on the formation of literary culture, roles, and identities. Finally, we will look at interdisciplinary research by considering the field of Law and Literature. Students will do projects, presentations, and papers, with an emphasis on collaboration.

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: The Black Atlantic: Literature, Cultures, and Histories of 'Crossing'

Houston Baker

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

A caveat: this is not a course for the faint of heart or the un-theoretically grounded, or, for those unwilling to read ‘til their eyes have grown weary with the grace of theoretical knowledge. This is not an introductory, or, a lecture course. This is not a course in any way lax in its requirements for the following: one-hundred percent class attendance, enlightened contributions to class discussion, originality of thought, and demonstrated ability to synthesize ranging concerns of expressive cultural, socio-historical, post-colonial, post-modernist, post-colonial feminist critique currently informing Diaspora Studies into a rich mixture of scholarly results. But … this course is also formally intended as a space of discussion, a site of learning, and a forum for a rich array of criticism and theorizing of Black Diaspora texts -- written, video, autobiographical, documentary, theoretical, fictional, poetic, historical, and sociological. Commencing with multiple contours of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, this course will endeavor rigorously to provide a sighting and intellectual grasp of Black Diaspora critical, narratological, and theoretical models in combination with fiercely compelling and enjoyable readings of Diaspora expressive cultural texts (e.g., Earl Lovelace’s Salt). Anchoring the course are: Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, and Heather Russell’s Legba’s Crossing (Due from University of Georgia Press, November 2009). Theoretical necessities include some knowledge (Cf. GOOGLE) of Foucault, C.L.R. James, Simmel, De Certeau, Parks, Du Bois, and others. Additional de rigueur texts on our syllabus include: Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey, Edward Glissant and George Lamming, Richard Wright and Colson Whitehead, Kamau Brathwaite, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and others. Compiling a bibliography of the Diaspora, as well as local fieldwork, are included in course requirements. The “returns” of the course (the course well and successfully pursued, that is) include being adequately prepared for a future job interview at MLA.

 

 

Spring 2009 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 303-01. Graduate Fiction Workshop

Lorraine Lopez

(Mondays 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This workshop/studio course focuses on the development of fictive works-in-progress in connection to investigation and discussion of elements of craft. Graduate writers will be required to present a minimum of three pieces of new and original fiction composed during the semester, to provide substantive reviews of work by peers on a regular basis, to compose a publishable book review, and to lead a workshop discussion on craft in conjunction with a selected short story that will be appropriate for presenting in an undergraduate workshop. Finally, this workshop will investigate the novella form and how it works in relationship to the short story and the novel. Toward this end, workshop.

 

ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop

Rick Hilles

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The primary focus of this graduate poetry workshop will be a discussion of your work-in-progress. Since all of you are in the process of compiling your own collections, we will supplement our reading with a selection of notable contemporary poetry books—some first and second books, others by poets well into careers—including:

Larry Levis, Elegy

Brian Turner, Here, Bullet

Tracy K. Smith, Duende

Andrew Feld, Citizen

Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors

Afaa Michael Weaver, The Plum Flower Dance

A Van Jordan, Macnolia

Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome

In addition to writing your own work and providing commentary on the work of your peers, you will also be asked to give one presentation (on one additional poetry collection, of our choosing).

 

ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop

Peter Guralnick

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with a particular emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, and Louis Menand . Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should lead to discussion that is as wide-ranging as it is lively and engaging.

 

 

ENGL 321-01 Studies in Southern Literature

Michael Kreyling

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This seminar is organized on the belief that all you have to know about Southern Lit is embedded in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Each chapter contains the trace, or an even stronger mark, of another genre or topic or theme crucial to understanding the field. In the first chapter, for example, Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin Compson (poor Quentin) that he might aspire to be a writer and she has the material appropriate for the Southern Writer: Old South fustian such as Thomas Nelson Page produced by the bale. Sutpen’s adventures in the West Indies – another example -- connect with the current attention to the Caribbean South, an aspect of the “new southern studies.” The seminar will proceed accordingly, chapter-by-chapter through Absalom with excursions suggested by each.

A sample of accompanying reading:

Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls Rising.

Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road.

Lars Von Trier, Manderlay (DVD).

Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding and The Bride of the Innisfallen.

Octavia Butler, Kindred.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: "Histories of Narrative Cinema"

Paul Young

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course begins with the contention that the history of narrative cinema, already the target of revisionist historians in recent years, is in dire need of further revisionist research and theorization. Where once critics characterized the first films (especially before 1907) as slipshod affairs in search of the narrative sophistication that characterizes later Hollywood productions, the excavation of pre-1915 American cinema that began in the late 1970s helped catalyze the claim that the early cinema had a full-blown aesthetic of its own, which André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning dubbed ³the cinema of attractions.² Recent scholarly work on the ³transitional era² between the cinema of attractions and "classical" Hollywood narrative, however, seems to have edged the field back toward its previous teleological bent, as if all roads of narrative experimentation necessarily led to the seamless illusionism of classical narrative technique. To prepare us to make our own discoveries about narrative cinema's diversity of form, style, and technique, we will read key theorists of narrative in general (the Russian formalists, Genette, Barthes, Jameson, Brooks) and cinematic narrative in particular (Bordwell, Thompson, Branigan, Chatman, the "political modernists" of the 1960s and 70s, Gunning) and view a wide range of film genres that range from the 1890s to the 1930s. Presentations and seminar papers will focus on trends, experiments, dead ends, and "forgotten futures"

of the fiction film, pursued via research into (for example) individual films, genres, production companies, directors, screenwriters, histories of distribution and/or exhibition practices, and trade and fan publications (including contemporary screenwriting manuals).

 

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: Biotechnology and Culture: Victorian Eugenics to Contemporary Genomics

Jay Clayton

(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 P.M.)

In the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory was as much a cultural as a scientific concern. Questions about evolution’s impact on religion, social theory, racial science, degeneration, and eugenics were debated among scientists, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, poets, and novelists. Today, the revolution in genomics has had an equal impact on contemporary culture. Novels, films, visual arts, and popular culture explore topics such as cloning and stem-cell research; genes for violence, homosexuality, and long life; ecological protests against manipulating the genetic code; religious objections to evolution; genetic privacy; the patenting of genes; DNA evidence in criminal cases; and bioterrorism

This course will look at new models of interdisciplinary work in the humanities by focusing on the changing relationship of biotechnology and culture from the mid-nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. We will discuss texts from a number of different genres, including science writing, Victorian fiction, postmodern fiction, science fiction novels and films, autobiography, and critical essays on science theory and biotechnology.

Readings will be evenly divided between the nineteenth and the twentieth/twenty-first centuries, and will include many of the following texts: Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Origin of the Species (1859), Francis Galton’s “Hereditary Talent and Character” (1865), Thomas H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” (1893), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain (1889), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), J.B.S. Haldane “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future” (1923), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), James Watson’s The Double Helix (1968), Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1992), Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever (1996), Zadi Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2003), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). Films will include Island of Lost Souls (1932), Blade Runner (1982), and Gattaca (1997).

 

ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: "Poetry & Place: The Epic of the Americas"

Vera Kutzinski

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Is there such a thing as an epic of the Americas? One might argue that there are many examples of the epic that take the shape of the novel, but what about poetry? How has this particular actual and symbolic geography inflected poetry? What has happened to the traditional project of epic poetry in the twentieth-century Americas? In this course, we will focus on examples of the long poem, all of which concern themselves with different places (“residences,” as Neruda might have it) in the Americas. With one important exception, our readings are from across the twentieth century. Readings: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Pablo Neruda, Canto General (trans. Jack Schmitt), Jay Wright, Dimensions of History, Fred D’Aguiar, Bill of Rights, Frederick Turner, The New World, Hart Crane, The Bridge, Derek Walcott, Omeros, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants, Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama (1961); Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C.”

 

ENGL 355-04 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: "The Ends of Empire"

Lynn Enterline

Cecelia Tichi

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This team-taught seminar follows the literature of empire from Rome to London to the United States. We hope, at the same time, to explore the many possible intersections between the literary, methodological, and theoretical pursuits of European and American studies. Beginning with

the generic and rhetorical experiments of the classical epic and the “translations of empire,” we will conclude with American novels and Julie Taymor’s Shakespearean critique of the Hollywood Rome movie. Topics will include: the formal and political aspects of epic and narrative teleology; "the tears of things": aesthetics and violence in the ekphrastic tradition; empire and the discourse of masculinity; epic sexualities; patronage, prophetic visions, and critique; memory and traumatic repetition; translations of empire in the institutions of education.

Possible texts include: Negri and Hardt, Empire; selections from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; John Heywood, Oenone and Paris; Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; John Barlow, The Columbiad; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Henry James, The American ; Julie Taymor, Titus.

 

 

Fall 2008 Seminars and Workshops

ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop

Nancy Reisman

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The central goal of this graduate fiction workshop is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. This is primarily a studio course; participants will also consider published works of fiction and discussions of craft. As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll discuss artistic vision in relation to questions of form and structure, and the possibilities for invention and for reinvigorating tradition. We’ll consider the questions of perception, narrative stance, varieties of tension, dramatic and non-dramatic progression, voice, language, and other aspects of craft. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? Conceptualize character? To what extent is secular epiphany central, marginal, false? How might we consider conflicting and/or echoing movements within a given piece? Which ‘rules’ might be most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between fiction writing and other arts? Between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? Throughout the semester, graduate writers will be required to produce and present new original fiction, to read and respond to published writing in class discussion and written discussions.

 

ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop

Kate Daniels

(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This an intensive graduate workshop in writing poetry. We will read various volumes of contemporary poetry in conjunction with the Visiting Writers series. Students will be expected to produce a significant portfolio of poems by semester's end; attend regular conferences with the instructor; and participate intensely in class by preparing advance written responses to the week's offerings.

 

ENGL 307-01 Literature and Craft of Writing

Topic: Reading Emily Dickinson

Kate Daniels

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate seminar designed for MFA students. Our focus will be on the syntax, grammar, parts of speech, diction, and punctuation preferred by Dickinson in both her poems and her prose. Our goal will be to develop some ideas about how those choices accounted for her startlingly unconventional, pre-Modern, pre-psychoanalytic literary voice. We will examine Dickinson’s language through close readings of many poems and letters. There will be some comparison of her unique utterances with more conventional examples from the period (Longfellow, for example), but for the most part, we will spend our time getting our hands dirty in the guts of the poems to discover how they work. Over the summer, please read The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Thomas Johnson, ed.) and one of the biographies. You will also need to familiarize yourself with Dickinson’s preferred metrical form, common (or hymn) meter. Additional readings during the semester will include letters and manuscript versions of many poems. In a final writing project, students will address aspects of Dickinson’s praxis within the context of the aesthetics and formal practices of their own creative work. Grading: 1/3 each for class participation; seminar presentation; writing project.

 

ENGL 310-01 Seminar in Shakespeare

Topic: Shakespeare and Sexual Ideologies

Kathryn Schwarz

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The works of Shakespeare have often provided a symptomatic focus for theories of gender and sexuality. From the rise of academic feminism, through the debates between feminists and new historicists, to the evolution of psychoanalytic, queer and performativity theories, Shakespearean criticism both reflects and contributes to the emergence of new methodologies in literary critical discourse. Assumptions concerning the canonicity of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean work as a kind of Trojan horse, authorizing approaches that might, at least initially, be resisted as marginal, “too political,” or otherwise threatening to disciplinary conventions. At the same time, those approaches put in question the processes through which orthodoxies—of literary works, and of literary critical practices—takes shape. The particular ways in which this happens raise a number of provocative questions. How do the “transgressions” of feminine characters, ranging from transvestism to illicit sexuality to inappropriate authority to acts of political and domestic violence, authorize feminist readings that challenge misogyny on its own grounds? How do the history plays, traditionally regarded as articulations of exclusively masculine preoccupations, enable the development of feminist historicism? In what ways do responses to the Sonnets reveal both intersections and conflicts between gay studies and queer theory? Why is Shakespeare so central to the current tensions between historicist and presentist approaches to sexual and gendered identity?

In this course we will look at a range of Shakespeare’s works in relation to the ideological discourses surrounding gender and sexuality. We will read these works in the context of significant critical interventions, and the theoretical methodologies on which those interventions draw. Our goal is not only to consider the sexual politics of the Shakespearean, but to use that issue as a focal point for questions about the larger implications of critical practice.

 

ENGL 320-02 Studies in American Literature

Topic: Antebellum U.S. Print Culture

Teresa Goddu

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This course will focus on the emergence of a national literary marketplace in the U.S. antebellum period by examining how the market revolution structured the trade in print.

By examining print as a cultural as well as marketable commodity, the course will situate texts within a variety of distributional, technological, consumerist as well as discursive networks of meaning. It will examine a range of popular print forms—from almanacs and gift books to periodicals and pamphlets—in conjunction with the canonical literature of the period. For instance, we will read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in relationship to the gift book, The Pearl, in order to understand how Hawthorne deployed popular print forms to write a bestseller. The course will introduce students to archival research as well as to the interdisciplinary methodology of the history of the book which maps the relationships between the materiality of the text (its publication history or status as a commercial commodity) and its meaning. The course will draw on a number of fields—including material and literary culture, economic and social history, and technology—in order to map the intersections between cultural and commercial history. Several short papers and a final 20-25 pp. paper.

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: "Literary Geographies"

Allison Schachter

(Thursdays 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This seminar will investigate the relationship between literature and geography: how literature, particularly the novel, both imagines and represents political territory, and how literary historians and critics narrate this relationship. We will focus on the circulation of literature, literary communities, and languages beyond national borders, interrogating such terms as "international," "transnational," "global," and "diasporic." The class will be divided into two sections. The first section will explore key theoretical models of literary geography, Weltliteratur, “Third-World Literature,” and imagined communities. The second section of the class will examine two geographically motivated models of literary history: The Black Atlantic and the Jewish Diaspora. Both these models harness the power of regional and diasporic geographies to challenge national literary narratives and to make visible obscured cultural formations. Students in the class will be given an opportunity to develop and explore their own alternative literary geographies. Readings include literary works by Junot Diaz, José Rizal, Derek Walcott, Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, and Jacqueline Kahanoff. Critical works include texts by Aijaz Ahmand, Benedict Anderson, Rey Chow, Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford, and Daniel Boyarin.

 

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: "The Idea of Black Culture"

Hortense Spillers

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course will attempt to lay out a theory of black culture in its local and diasporic instances by looking at some of the work of W.E.B.DuBois over and against some of the writings of the Frankfurt School, notably Herbert Marcuse.

 

ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English/American Literature

Topic: 'Out of Ireland we have come:' Big House Fiction and Anglo-Irish Identity

Michael Neill

(Wednesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen, wrote of her family home: 'It is the negation of mystical Ireland: its bald walls rebut the surrounding, disturbing light. Imposed on seized land, built in the rulers' ruling tradition, the house is, all the same, of the local rock, and sheds the same grey gleam you see over the countryside.' This course will use a range of fictions centred on the so-called 'big houses' of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy as a means of exploring the fertile, but ultimately self-destructive contradictions of a hybrid settler culture.

Maria Edgeworth,

   Castle Rackrent

   The Absentee

Anthony Trollope,

   The Kellys and the O'Kellys

   The Landleaguers

Somerville and Ross,

   The Real Charlotte

   The Big House at Inver

Elizabeth Bowen,

   The Last September

   Bowen's Court

Molly Keane,

   Two Days in Aragon

   Good Behaviour

William Trevor,

   Fools of Fortune

   The Story of Lucy Gault

J.G. Farrell,

   Troubles

Brian Friel,

   Aristocrats

   The Home Place

W.B. Yeats

   Collected Poems

 

 

 

Spring 2008 Seminars and Workshops  

 

ENGL 303. Graduate Fiction Workshop

Tony Earley

Description Forthcoming

ENGL 304. Graduate Poetry Workshop

Kate Daniels

Description Forthcoming

 

ENGL 310. Seminar in Shakespeare

Topic: Shakespeare and Sexual Ideologies

Kathryn Schwarz

(Thursdays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

The works of Shakespeare have often provided a symptomatic focus for theories of gender and sexuality. From the rise of academic feminism, through the debates between feminists and new historicists, to the evolution of psychoanalytic, queer and performativity theories, Shakespearean criticism both reflects and contributes to the emergence of new methodologies in literary critical discourse. Assumptions concerning the canonicity of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean work as a kind of Trojan horse, authorizing approaches that might, at least initially, be resisted as marginal, “too political,” or otherwise threatening to disciplinary conventions. At the same time, those approaches put in question the processes through which orthodoxies—of literary works, and of literary critical practices—takes shape. The particular ways in which this happens raise a number of provocative questions. How do the “transgressions” of feminine characters, ranging from transvestism to illicit sexuality to inappropriate authority to acts of political and domestic violence, authorize feminist readings that challenge misogyny on its own grounds? How do the history plays, traditionally regarded as articulations of exclusively masculine preoccupations, enable the development of feminist historicism? In what ways do responses to the Sonnets reveal both intersections and conflicts between gay studies and queer theory? Why is Shakespeare so central to the current tensions between historicist and presentist approaches to sexual and gendered identity?  

In this course we will look at a range of Shakespeare’s works in relation to the ideological discourses surrounding gender and sexuality. We will read these works in the context of significant critical interventions, and the theoretical methodologies on which those interventions draw. Our goal is not only to consider the sexual politics of the Shakespearean, but to use that issue as a focal point for questions about the larger implications of critical practice.

 

ENGL 314. Seminar, 1660-1800

Topic: The Long Eighteenth Century

Bridget Orr

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course tracks the relations of literary and theatrical culture in England to the emergence and partial dissolution of England's (later Britain's) first empire. Thus we shall focus on the discursive and institutional contexts in which a newly self-conscious national literature was being created in competition with antecedent and rival imperial powers; and examine claims that the period's emergent and successful genres and modes (the novel, sentimentality, georgic, the sublime) owed their success to their facility in representing colonial processes. Readings will include primary texts by Dryden, Behn, Addison and Steele, Defoe, Wortley Montagu, Pope, Swift, Lillo, Foote, Sheridan, Johnson, MacKenzie, Gray, Cumberland, Burke, Egdeworth and Seward.

 

ENGL 325. Seminar in Modern British & American Literature

Topic: Fictions of the "Modernist"

Mark Wollaeger

(Tuesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

Designed to follow from but not depend on Professor Carolyn Dever’s Fall 2007 course, Fictions of the Victorian, Fiction of the Modernist will investigate how self-consciously “modern” writers (“modernist” not becoming a common term before the end of the period now known as modernism) tried to persuade themselves and others that everything done by the Victorians was wrong, inadequate, or antiquated. Part of our concern will be with the relative success of this propaganda campaign, which is to say that by examining continuities that modernists preferred to ignore we will also aim to bring into focus genuine discontinuities. Using Aestheticism as our hinge into modernism, likely we will focus on authors whose work and reception enter into productive dialogue with their Victorian predecessors around issues (picking up from Professor Dever’s course) of identity and the cultural status of literature. We will devote some attention to methodology, with particular emphasis on historicist approaches to modernism. Readings will include Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; E. M. Forster, Howards End; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets; a novel by Storm Jameson (not one of your usual suspects) yet to be determined; Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier. We will also be reading from contemporary modern journals, such as the New Age, that are now available online. Assignments will include one relatively short essay focusing on allusion to Victorian texts; a longer culminating assignment, a version of which will be due before the end of the semester and then revised; and an oral presentation or discussion-leading. Ideally, class members will produce work that will allow them to participate in the Fall 2008 Modernist Studies Association Convention, to be held here at Vanderbilt next November.

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: From the Plantation to the Penitentiary: Interpretation, Literature, and the Law

Colin Dayan

(Tuesdays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

This seminar explores the redefinition of civil life in nineteenth-century America by concentrating on how punishment, prisons, and incapacitation not only became critical to the ideology of democracy and freedom, but also shaped a genealogy of property and possession essential to what Thomas L. Dumm in Democracy and Punishment has called "the American project." We will be expanding our understanding of what constitutes this exclusive locale throughout the semester.

Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been announced in December 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude "except as punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The legal exception became the means for terminological slippage: those who were once slaves were no criminals. Such an amendment literally amounted to nothing less than an escape clause, a corrective that left the vestige of enslavement intact. Some of the questions crucial to our investigation of the continuity between slavery and incarceration follow: How do narratives of the past get told by law? How does the mobilization of history trump arguments about justice? What are the legitimate rights of the state over the liberty interests of the incarcerated? What is the relation between the status of criminal as "slave of the state" and slave as property or thing? What are the conditions sufficient for attaining the status of "citizen"?

Through an examination of legal, philosophical and historical texts, as well as fictional and film re-enactments of incarceration and criminality, the seminar will examine the varying controversies about personal identity, servitude, and finally, the legacy of such legal fictions as "civil death" or being "dead in law." Using primary and secondary historical materials, the course will attempt to make sense of the diverse and contradictory images of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment and exclusion: chain gangs, special management, treatment, or control units, and capital punishment.

 

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English & American Literature

Topic: " The Odysseys": (Homer, Kazantzakis, Joyce, Wolcott)

Hortense Spillers

(Wednesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

This course is devoted to a reading of selective literary works that take their inspiration, one way or another, from The Odyssey; starting with Homer's classical work, we will proceed to examine modern and modernist instances of odyssean transformations, revisions and corrections, in James Joyce's Ulysses, Nikos Kazantzakis' Modern Sequel, and Derek Walcott's Omeros; these three radically disparate instances of genre, history, time, space, and biography as embodied in these writers, take us from Homer and the ancient world, to modern Europe, and finally, the African Diaspora of the new world. We hope to examine such an outcome by a careful reading of the literary instances before us.

 

American Studies

AMST 300-1 Graduate Workshop in American Studies

Topic: Democracy in Action

Dana D. Nelson

(Thursdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

This course is designed for graduate students who are committed to using what they learn about democracy to make a difference in their communities, both in their role as experts and as citizens. This course will introduce you to an interdisciplinary approach to democracy theory, policy and practice, and to the cultural knowledge and strategies you need to make an impact in our increasingly diverse communities and workplaces—and to be open to their productive impacts on you and your own work. We will study and theorize democracy, activism, volunteerism and the policy process, think about participatory research models, consider community perspectives on building partnerships between universities and communities, and consult with numerous organizers and activists in the Nashville and Middle-Tennessee community.

Course readings focus on:

   democracy and citizenship theory

   empirical studies of political and civic attitudes and participation

   productive models for intellectuals and experts to engage the general public, local democratic processes and policy communities

   participatory research versus service learning local/global versus city, state and national political engagement

Please contact Professor for more information.

 

 

Fall 2007 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 303. Graduate Fiction Workshop

Lorraine Lopez

(Tuesdays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

This workshop/studio course focuses on the development of fictive works-in-progress in connection to investigation and discussion of elements of craft. Graduate writers will be required to present a minimum of three pieces of new and original fiction composed during the semester, to provide substantive reviews of work by peers on a regular basis, to compose a nonfiction essay on an element of craft, and to lead a workshop discussion on craft in conjunction with a selected short story that will be appropriate for presenting in an undergraduate workshop. Toward this end, workshop participants will read and discuss Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway; Best American Short Stories 2006, edited by Ann Patchett; and Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose.

 

ENGL 304. Graduate Poetry Workshop

Mark Jarman

(Mondays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants. Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course. Each class member will also write a statement of poetics, due at the end of the semester, modeled on any one of those we read and discuss in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.   Our texts will be Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics.

 

ENGL 307. Literature and the Craft of Writing

Topic: Romantic Novels, Novel Romance

Mark Schoenfield

(Tuesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants. Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course. Each class member will also write a statement of poetics, due at the end of the semester, modeled on any one of those we read and discuss in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.   Our texts will be Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics.

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants. Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course. Each class member will also write a statement of poetics, due at the end of the semester, modeled on any one of those we read and discuss in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.   Our texts will be Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics.

Designed primarily for Creative Writers with an interest in narrative structures, this course will center around novels of the Romantic Period, ranging from those paranoid Jacobin works such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams that emerge in the midst of the British reaction to the French Revolution to those novels of manners produced on the thinnest, most delicate of plots by Jane Austen. We will consider how aesthetic issues, characterization, setting, and other literary concerns are shaped within the genres of the period, but also how novels expand and transform those genres. We will also explore some narratives that appear outside the usual domain of the novel, such as Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English-Opium Eater and some of the narrative poems and periodical pieces of the period. Writing assignments will be individually tailored.

 

ENGL 318. Seminar in Victorian Prose & Poetry

Topic: Fictions of the "Victorian"

Carolyn Dever

(Wednesdays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

Taking as a case-study work of the late-Victorian poet Michael Field, this seminar will investigate three contexts in which nineteenth-century British literary writers conceived of themselves, for better or for worse, as "Victorians": through their shifting investments in the novel as a marker of cultural status in the aesthetic marketplace; through the volatile politics of gender and sexual identity that both drove and reflected the evolution of literary forms; and through the emergence of Aestheticism late in the century as an ambivalent address to modernity. In addition to the journals and poetry of Michael Field, primary reading assignments will include fiction, poetry, and prose from Robert Browning, Conrad, Dickens, George Eliot, Gilbert and Sullivan, James, Meredith, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson, Wilde, and other authors. Course requirements will include several papers and at least one research presentation.

Fictions of the "Victorian" will serve as the English Department Proseminar for first-year graduate students. This seminar is offered in conjunction with Professor Mark Wollaeger's Spring 2008 course, Fictions of the "Modernist," which is designed to follow from this course without depending on it.

 

ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature

Topic: Black Writers and Their Work in the New World

Houston Baker

(Mondays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

This seminar will analyze expressive cultural, economic, psychological, geographical, demographic, transnational, and geopolitical outcomes and consequences of that “rupture of modernity” constituted by the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through reading, interpretation, and discussion of poetry, film, novels, and other expressive modes from Black America, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the course will trace diasporic commonalities and differences in conceptual fields marked by such terms as: “liberation,” “freedom,” “citizenship,” “nation,” “race,” “class,” “violence,” “incarceration,” and “revolution.” The greatest concentration of our reading will derive from Black America and the Caribbean as we work to speculate upon and build interpretive “models.” We shall, however, see these models both qualified and expanded by attention to Latin American expressive cultural traditions.

During the semester, we shall benefit from the wisdom of guest lecturers and from viewing films and videos devoted to categories of understanding we seek to elaborate, such as, “independence” and “globalization.” There will be two to three brief papers (2-3 pages) assigned. In addition, there will be a short paper (6-8 pages) due shortly after mid-term. A long paper (15-20 pages) will be due on the final day of class.  

 

ENGL 330. Seminar in the Enlightenment and Its Literary Connections

Jonathan Lamb

Topic: Sympathy and the Passions

(Wednesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

This course will attempt a history of sympathy, starting with epic and briefly glancing at romance, then concentrating on the eighteenth century and beyond (Shaftesbuy, Hutcheson, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Darwin). Is it within our grasp to feel what someone else is feeling? What are the implications for personal identity? Does sympathy extend beyond humans to animals, and can we know what it is like to be a bat? Whatever happened to charity? The passions will be a major ancillary concern, raising the question of their relation to reason (Locke and Hume) together with the urgent question of these days, whether there is a possibility of affective knowledge. We shall study in detail Tristram Shandy and Sense and Sensibility. We shall study some of the recent scholarly works on these topics, such as Susan James, Passion and Action and Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion.

 

ENGL 337B Special Topics in Literary Theory

Topic: Postcolonial Theory

Jaya Kasibhatla

(Mondays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

The course is divided into four thematic sections. The first section, Subjectivity and Power, focuses on the particular contributions that postcolonial theorists have made in debates about subjectivity as a category of analysis through figures such as the native informant, and the subaltern. The second section, entitled Race, Language and Psychoanalysis, explores how critics have employed psychoanalytic approaches to theorize the construction of race and to consider how race complicates the Lacanian account of the subject's accession to language. In the third section of the course, Community and Solidarity, we will study the interactions between postcolonial theory and related knowledge projects such as Black British cultural studies. We will historicize these encounters and consider how contemporary U.S./Black British theories of race and politics converge with or diverge from ideas of hybridity and solidarity advanced by postcolonial theorists. The fourth and final section deals explicitly with the status of ethics in postcolonial studies, tracing the influence of such figures as Immanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben on postcolonial scholarship and questioning the demand that the work of minority critics be legibly ethical.

 

 

Spring 2007 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 302. Seminar in Chaucer

John Plummer

Topic: Violence and Desire in Chaucer's Work

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

     We will focus on Chaucerian romances and fabliaux, both of which—as genres—offer desire in conjunction with violence.   Speaking in generalities, one might say that in the romance, violence is stylized, instrumental, and programatic, essential to the (attempted) fulfillment of desire, whereas in the fabliau it is accidental and incidental, connected to desire by generic expectations, but not by narrative necessity.   But such generalities cry out for interrogation and revision, which this seminar will seek to provide.   Our texts will include but will not necessarily be confined to Troilus and Criseyde, and the Knight’s, Miller’s, Reeve’s, Friar’s, Summoner’s, Merchant’s, and Shipman’s Tales. We will also read a selection of French fabliaux in order to establish the expectations and promises of the form.

 

ENGL 303. Graduate Fiction Workshop

Nancy Reisman

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

   The graduate fiction workshop is a studio course, the central goal of which is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. As workshop members present fiction-in-progress, we'll discuss issues of form -- the slippery and changing shapes of fiction, what is formally possible in a given work - and the linked questions of narrative stance, point of view, language, voice, etc. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? To what extent is secular epiphany central, marginal, false? In what ways can we talk about conflicting and/or rhyming currents within a given piece? Conceptualize character? Which "rules" are most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between fiction writing and the other arts? Between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? Throughout the semester, graduate writers will be required to produce and present new original fiction, to read and respond to published writing in class discussion, in brief written discussions, and in individually-designed "short short" works.

 

 

ENGL 304. Graduate Poetry Workshop

Kate Daniels

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

   This workshop will focus on the critical discussion of poetry written by participants. In addition, each student will undertake a selected, retrospective reading of 20th-century poetry in English, emanating from the American or the British practice/manifestation/tradition/history. A bibliography of the semester's reading will be prepared in consultation with the instructor at the beginning of the semester. A substantial portfolio of poems, a literary essay focusing on the individual reading project, the facilitation of one or more of the weekly workshop sessions, participation in the Visiting Writers series and the Spring Literary Symposium, attendance at frequent conferences with the instructor, and the preparation of a "pedagogy of creative writing" project (to be determined in consultation with the instructor and integrated with each student's workshop session facilitation), along with assigned reading, will constitute the core of the semester's required work.

Participants will be strongly encouraged to attend the Annual Conference of the Association of Writers & Writers Programs that will take place in Atlanta from February 28 to March 3, 2007.

 

ENGL 305.   Graduate Non-Fiction Workshop

Peter Guralnick

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with an emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with the possibility of some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Stanley Booth, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Louis Menand, and Jill Lepore. Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should make it engaging (and in the words of Sam Phillips describing the aim of every one of his recording sessions) big fun for all.

 

ENGL 307. Literature and the Craft of Writing

Mark Jarman

Topic: Traditional Poetic Form in Modern Practice

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

     We will study the prosody of a wide range of Modern and Contemporary poets, including Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, Maxine Kumin, and Sylvia Plath. Required work will include writing in the verse forms of these poets, plus extended analysis of their techniques.

 

ENGL 314.   Seminar, 1660-1800

Bridget Orr

Topic: The Culture of Performance

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

   Eighteenth-century drama has generally been perceived as a failing genre, supplanted in literary historical estimates by the emergent novel. In this course, we shall re-examine this consensus, recently challenged by cultural historians interested in the cultural centrality of theatre throughout this period. Such reassessments of the importance of Georgian and Regency drama and theatre are connected to broader reconceptualizations of performativity in many domains of eighteenth-century culture. In addition to some reading in pertinent literary theoretical and anthropological texts, our readings of plays, novels and verse will be organized by a conspectus of recent arguments focused on topics such as masquerade; pantomine; publicity; celebrity; military and naval spectacle; colonial governmentality; riotous resistance and theatrical character vs. novelistic subject.

 

ENGL 316.   Seminar in Romantic Prose and Poetry

Mark Schoenfield

Topic: Romantic Literature: Prosody, Production, Publication

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Characterized by both a return to earlier forms, especially the Spenserian stanza, and explorations of new forms of both prose and poetry, Romantic literature responded to the changing political and social terrains by solidifying the concept of the professional writer. In this course, we will explore those volumes of poetry that engage these aesthetic and social issues both within their poetics, through the actual production of the volume, and through the reviews that responded to them. Among the volumes we will read are Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Students will develop their own projects based on other texts, and will produce an essay crafted for publication.

 

ENGL 318. Seminar in Victorian Prose and Poetry

Gordon Bigelow

Topic: Victorian Literature and Economics

(Wednesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

In significant ways during the 19th century, literature defined itself against economics. If political economy since Adam Smith offered a theory of market values and market behavior, then literature often claimed access to another, higher sphere, a sphere of moral and aesthetic values. This view of things did a great deal to shape the study of literature in the modern period, and it is this view we will trace, and interrogate, in this seminar.

The course will have three areas of focus:

First, we will read literary texts that take up economic questions in direct or indirect ways. Emphasis will be on fiction (Disraeli, Gaskell, Eliot, Gissing), with some reading in non-fiction prose (Carlyle, Ruskin) and poetry (C. Rossetti, Arnold). Second, the course will provide students with an accessible overview of British economic thought, from Smith and the rise of political economy, to the birth of neo-classical economics at the turn of the 20th century. (Political economy in Ireland develops in quite different ways, and we will look briefly at this tradition and at the literary culture that accompanied it.)

Third, the course will look at several strands of literary theory that offer way of studying literature and economics, and it will consider the work of literary critics writing in this area. (Theoretical readings by Marx, Williams, Derrida, Spivak; criticism by Gagnier, Gallagher, Guillory, Price).

Thus, while the course will focus on Victorian Britain, it is designed to introduce students in all fields to recent studies in literature and economics (sometimes called The New Economic Criticism). Students in other fields may develop research projects that apply methods studied in the seminar to their own area, or may pursue a question or problem within this body of theory.

 

ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature

William Luis

Topic: The Politics of Identity in Latino/US Literature

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Latinos, people of Hispanic descent born or raised in the United States, are the fastest growing population in the United States. However, the Latino presence can be traced to the first part of the nineteenth century, and they are indeed an integral part of U.S. history and culture. Latino literature is at the vanguard of a new discipline, one that erases differences between borders, cultures, genders, races, and languages. In this graduate seminar we will focus on the writings of Latinas/Latinos from the four largest groups: Chicanos, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Rican-Americans, and Dominican- Americans. We will look at the works of writers such as Cristina Garcia and Oscar Hijuelos (of Cuban descent), Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz (of Dominican descent), Gloria Anzaldua and Corky Gonzalez (Chicanos), and Judith Ortiz Cofer and Piri Thomas (of Puerto Rican descent), and explore how they read simultaneously the history and culture of their parents' country of origin and that of their adopted homeland, and produce a synthesis of the two.

 

ENGL 320-02 Studies in American Literature

Dana Nelson

Topic: Representative Democracy

(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

What counts as democratic representation?   What constitutes the subject of democratic representation? These are questions that have seemingly been solved by or represented as US political institutions. But the answer was not simply reducible to elected officials in the early nation. Many, excited by the notion of self-governance, speculated widely about representational as well as democratic possibilities. For instance, Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry provides answers to this question that seem a little like one of those miracle sponges: add water and it grows big. In the world of Brackenridge’s novel, representation can be collective and individual, and informed by a variety of motives. It can be selfish, too hasty, poorly informed. It is composed by a variety of competing views, deliberated and reconsidered. Indeed, representation is not just the result of democratic decision making (in the form of elections delegating political power to proxies, or in the form of legal decisions). It is also the basis for democratic decision-making, the material from which people form the opinions that shape their decisions about how to represent their political will. Representation, among other things, can be more and less accurate information contributing to democratic action, more and less carefully mulled political deliberation, more and less hastily formed public opinion, more and less effective legal decision, more and less political interpersonal story telling and indeed, more and less compelling a novel.

         This class will take seriously Brackenridge’s political theorizing about the ways that social, aesthetic and political forms of representation are mutually constitutive as well as in conflict. This class will utilize an interdisciplinary approach to these questions: We’ll study political theory, political philosophy, social and political history, and literary work as part of our broad inquiry into questions of how representation did work, could work, and was imagined in the early United States, through the Civil War. We’ll think about literary, aesthetic and philosophical projects that support dominant modes of political representation as well as those that offer challenges.

 

ENGL 321. Studies in Southern Literature

Vera Kutzinski

Topic: Re-Reading Faulkner

(Fridays, 12:30-3:30 p.m.)

       This seminar explores the potential and the limitations of both traditional and revisionary readings of some of the novels on which Faulkner’s reputation has come to rest; it is not a survey course. In addition to engaging in close textual work with Faulkner’s and others’ fictions as a basis for broader theoretical statements concerning canon formation and literary history, we will also analyze book reviews and scholarly essays to develop a strong sense of just how differently critics have assessed Faulkner’s literary achievement during the course of the twentieth century. We will begin with early critical arguments about The Sound and the Fury and then proceed to look at how, in the 1940s, the groundwork was laid for Faulkner to become a Nobel laureate and one of the centerpieces of the American literary canon in the post-WWII American academy. To early commentators such as Malcolm Bradbury, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, Faulkner represented the aesthetic, cultural, and political values associated initially with American regionalism and then (after the Nobel Prize) both with U.S. nationalism and with an international humanism. By contrast, the political and cultural values Faulkner represents to later intellectuals tend to be rather different. For some, including African American novelist Toni Morrison, he is a troubling writer who rarely, if ever, reaches beyond racial stereotypes. For Caribbean and Latin America writers, in turn, Faulkner is a writer with the deep transnational sensibilities that characterize a New World hemispheric regionalism. Readings include The Sound and The Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust (1948), Selected Letters; Malcolm Cowley, ed., The Portable Faulkner; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo; Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960); and Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi. Writing requirements: (1) a weekly 500-word response paper to be submitted via email attachment each Thursday. Discussion handouts will be prepared on the basis of these responses. (2) A final paper of 20-25 pages, to be preceded by a 2-page prospectus and a working bibliography.

      

ENGL 355. Special Topic in English and American Literature

Mark Wollaeger

Topic: Modernist Doctrine/Theories of Modernism

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

     This course will study (1) modernist doctrine, in the form of manifestos, essays, and reviews; (2) current theorizations of modernism; and (3) key examples of modernist poetry and fiction.

     Particular emphasis will fall on the historical-cultural and interdisciplinary turn taken in modernist studies in recent years, and on the place of formal analysis within such studies.

Probable authors include many of the usual suspects -- Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound -- as well as wildcards to be named later.

 

 

 

Fall 2006 Seminars and Workshops

 

ENGL 303. Graduate Fiction Workshop

Lorraine Lopez

(Mondays, 3:10-6:00 p.m)

   This is a graduate workshop in fiction writing with an emphasis on the short story and an aim toward the production of pieces for a collection, a short story cycle, or a "novel-in-stories," a series of independent yet related stories that together tell a larger story. Toward this end, participants will read, review, and discuss collected work by Heather Sellers, Richard McCann, Kate Walbert, Charles Baxter, and Joan Silber, among others.

   The workshop focuses on elements of craft such as point of view, plot structure, and style, and presumes the student is already familiar with basic techniques of characterization, scene and narrative structure, and development of story. Participants are expected to draft a minimum of three short stoires, present them to the workshop for critique and discussion, revise them, and resubmit them to the instructor at the end of the semester, along with brief, but substantive reviews of peer work.

 

ENGL 304. Graduate Poetry Workshop

Mark Jarman

(Tuesdays, 2:10-5:00 p.m.)

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants. Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course. Each class member will also choose a poet, in consultation with the workshop leader, for extensive study, resulting in a presentation to the class at the end of the semester. Our texts will be Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics.

 

ENGL 312. Seminar in 17th-Century Literature

Leah Marcus

Topic: Texts and Consequences:

An Introduction to Textual Studies

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This course will introduce graduate students to the field of textual studies, which has generated considerable excitement and scholarly attention in recent years. We will be studying the rhetoric of the edition: how are literary texts subtly (or not so subtly) shaped by the ways editors prepare them for readers? We will also consider different theories of the literary text, and how they help to determine the form in which literary texts reach readers, both in print and online. Finally, we will consider several prominent recent controversies over specific editions: the Oxford Shakespeare and its two-text King Lear, Gabler’s edition of Ulysses, and others of particular interest to students.

       Although a little more than half of the course will treat 17th-century literature, there will be ample space for students to explore other areas of interest. Major emphasis will be placed on gender assumptions and colonialism as forces that help to shape editions. In addition to those already mentioned above, topics of individual sessions will include the postmodern bible (Genesis and the story of David and Saul), gender and the shaping of texts (Taming of the Shrew and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), race, postcolonialism, and textual studies (Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Merchant of Venice).

 

ENGL 320. Studies in American Literature

Teresa Goddu

Topic: Slavery and the American Renaissance (Proseminar)

(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Focusing on the antebellum period, 1830-1860, this course will reread the literature of the “American Renaissance” in relation to its cultural context—slavery. We will be concerned with how the debate over slavery and its abolition informed the literature of this period and the professional identities of its authors as well as with how slavery itself became a saleable commodity in the emerging literary marketplace. We will read an array of texts (e.g., tracts, fiction, periodicals, slave narratives) as well as authors (e.g., Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Douglass, Stowe). In situating literature within the specific contexts of its production and reception, this course will also provide participants the skills necessary to conduct archival research in the period.

         This course is also the proseminar. As such, part of each class will be devoted to professional development. Students will learn research and writing skills through weekly exercises (e.g., how to write a book review or an abstract, how to apply for short-term grants). All first years are required to take the course. Second and Third years are welcome to join the course as long as they are willing to participate in the professional “skills” component of the course.

 

ENGL 325. Seminar in Modern British & American Literature

Roy Gottfried          

Topic: Ageless Joyce

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Considered the pre-eminent modernist, Joyce in his oeuvre actually challenges all notions of periodicity. With the 19th-century Bildungsroman nature of Portrait and the naturalism of "The Dubliners," Joyce reaches back to earlier forms. Although Ulysses is considered the modernist text, Finnegans Wake begins to push the limits of modernism into post-structuralism and -modernism avant la lettre.

We will consider several of Joyce's works as challenges to notions of contexts, reading selected stories from Dubliners, Ulysses (in its entirety), and various significant portions of the Wake. By following the order of composition, we will paradoxically question assumptions of development, genre, and period.

 

ENGL 337A Introduction to Literary Theory

Lynn Enterline

Topic: Theory, Feminism, Gender Studies

(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This seminar will be less a survey of the ever growing (and shifting) body of “theory” than an investigation of the way major trends in contemporary thought inflect feminist and queer literary studies. We begin with readings in the modern thinkers most influential for contemporary theory -- Freud, Marx, Derrida, de Saussure ­- in order to ground an investigation of current work on the connections among literature, gender, and sexuality. Topics include:language and materialism; subjectivity and the unconscious; the symbolic, the semiotic, and the family romance; the “scandal” of the speaking body; sexuality and “the field of vision”; identities and identifications; fetishism (commodity or otherwise); taboo, trauma, and representation; institutions, authority, ideology, and resistance; sexuality and value; gender and the politics of emotion. Authors include: Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean Laplanche, Jean Josef Goux, Mikkel Borch Jacobsen, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Butler, Shoshana Felman, Samuel

Weber, Louis Althusser, Gayle Rubin, Teresa de Lauretis, Jonathan Dollimore, Eve Sokofsky Sedgwick, Slavoj Zizek and others.

 

ENGL 337B Introduction to Literary Theory

Jonathan Lamb

Topic: Literature, Re-enactment and the Recovery of Memory

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

A seminar aimed at various aspects of historical re-enactment, as a literary genre, a documentary mode and an art-form. What are the aesthetic and historiographical implications of this method of rendering the past? Is it a new form of realism, or is it a sentimentalisation of history; is it technologically driven, or has it always been a resource of historians and artists? Since re-enactments are directed as much at the feelings as at the rational minds of its audience, might it be possible to argue for something like an epistemology of emotion in this sphere of representation? And what might that have in common with recent uses of re-enactment in art (such as Turner Prize artists Deller and Shonabare)?

Sample material: recent documentaries (The Ship, 1900s House, Frontier House, Fighter Pilot, The Trench); Don Quixote; Northanger Abbey, some Shakespearean Histories; Diderot and the supplement as re-enactment; Tristram Shandy and the re-enactment of siege warfare; J.M. Coetzee and Daniel Defoe; W.G. Sebald and the second world war; Turner Prize art pieces.

 

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature

Colin Dayan

Topic: Idioms of Servility:

Slavery, Prisons, and Torture

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

That one can create a servile soul is not only the most painful experience of modern man, but perhaps the very refutation of human freedom.

                                                                         -- Levinas, "Freedom and Command"

           Can we take law for the purpose of strictly philosophical inquiry? How might we approach the history of legal systems? How have legal institutions embraced and constructed, as well as silenced and stigmatized various national and personal identities?

           This seminar seeks to study the philosophical, moral, and ethical (normative) backgrounds to the debates on legality and legitimacy. Few of the topics under consideration are peculiarly Anglo-American; indeed most of them (slavery, civil death, penance, and torture) form part of the general history of the Western world. But our readings and discussion will be strictly limited to the British West Indies and the United States. Through an examination of legal, philosophical and historical texts, as well as fictional re-enactments of incarceration and criminality, the seminar will examine varying controversies about personal identity, servitude, and the legacy of such legal fictions as “civil death” or being “dead in law.” Using primary and secondary historical materials, the course will attempt to make sense of the diverse and contradictory images of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment and exclusion: special management, treatment, or control units; capital punishment; strategies of disenfranchisement; and the limits of due process and Eighth Amendment claims.

           Legitimacy, reasonableness, and necessity. These words recur in the Code Noir of the French Islands; the West Indian slave laws of the eighteenth century; the black codes of the American South; contemporary legal decisions promoting prisoner incapacitation; and, now, the detention of suspected terrorists and “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo, Bagram Air Base, or in numerous “secret sites” (the so-called legal “black holes”) in Eastern Europe and other foreign countries. The ongoing disintegration of formal law and the increasing subordination of the judiciary to the Washington central authorities continue to threaten the weak, the socially, oppressed, and the racially suspect. Thus, the stakes of the seminar are high. In attempting to speak about the multiple forms of disabling we confront today, we will, in conclusion, turn to the traditional concerns of liberal legal and political theory, focusing on Otto Kirchheimer’s “Legality and Legitimacy” (1932) and his “Remarks on Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) and The Concept of the Political (1932).  

 

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English and American LiteraturePaul Young

Topic: Classical Hollywood Narrative and Its Discontents

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

"Classical Hollywood Cinema": Since Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson's monumental study of the development of Hollywood storytelling and filmmaking practices, the term has become synonymous in Film Studies with all that is both pleasurable and rote about mass-market movies: psychologically-motivated characters, goal-driven plots, causal development, unified endings, narrative economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this list of characteristics also describes many things that avant-garde, experimental, and other "non-commercial" film genres are not. But are classical film and other forms really so distinct? How much do classical qualities depend upon characteristics of film as a medium (its "realist" capturing of space and time, its editability, its framing properties), and how much upon cultural, economic, and social determinants?

           This course will track that conceptual monolith, "classical cinema," from its emergence and rise to dominance (1908-1920) through the myriad challenges to its dominance after 1920, in order to discover the utility of this film-historical concept as well as to consider its descriptive and theoretical limitations. Beginning with literary theories of "classical" realist narration (Jakobson, Barthes, Lukács), we will read deeply in classical narrative cinema theory/history and investigate, through both film screenings and counter-theories, the forces that challenge classical cinema's integrity and stability from without (avant-garde, experimental, and "art" film, art-house cinema, alternative screening practices) and from within (genres, spectacle, the star system, self-reflexivity). The screening schedule will consist of a liberal mix of classical Hollywood films (both past and present), avant-garde works, postwar European films, and independently produced narrative films.

 

Dual Listing:

HIST 320A. Studies in European History 1815-1914

James Epstein

Topic: Modern British Identities: Home and Away

(Wednesdays, 2:10-5:00 p.m.)

This seminar is designed to introduce graduate students to recent works of British political, social, cultural, and literary history, focusing on constructions of identities (national, imperial, gender, class, urban, rural, etc) during the long 19th century. Particular emphasis is placed on how collective identities were shaped through interchange between metropolitan and colonial sites.

 

 

Spring 2006 Seminars

 

ENGL 306. Seminar in 16th-Century Literature

(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Lynn Enterline

Topic: Ovid & the Renaissance

The seminar will examine Ovid’s enormous influence on early modern representations of subjectivity, sexuality, and the body. We will explore the host of Ovidian characters – Medusa, Actaeon, Orpheus, Pygmalion, the Bacchae, Prosperina, Apollo, Daphne, Philomela, Hecuba – who continually surface in the period as figures for the complex affective textures of embodied experience. Topics include: autobiography and the history of rhetoric; the Latin grammar school, transvestism, discipline, and masculinity; rape and representation; Ovid and pornography; love elegy and the idea of a literary career; the poetic history of transgendered cross-voicing; classicism and the emergence of secular aesthetics. Texts include: The Metamorphoses, Heroides, and Amores; Petrarch’s Rime sparse; erotic epyllia from the 1590’s (e.g., Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, Paris and Oenone, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image); The Rape of Lucrece; selected sonnets from Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser; Donne’s “lesbian poem;” Lyly’s Galathea; Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Athens; Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest.

 

ENGL 310. Seminar in Shakespeare

(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Kathryn Schwarz

Topic: Textual Effects and Cultural Imaginations

This course will consider a selection of Shakespeare’s works in relation to the sources on which they draw and the traces they have left behind. These works illuminate their own cultural context, reflecting preoccupations with both classical traditions and emerging forms; their gestures toward such genres as prose romance, revenge tragedy, and sonnet sequence at once synthesize a range of familiar materials and play with the desire for novelty. Still more suggestive, perhaps, is the trail of adaptation, revision, imitation, interpretation, parody, critique, disavowal, and theft that follows these plays from their period to our own. From early modern conduct manuals to postmodern films, Shakespearean invocations have a peculiarly stubborn and symptomatic shelf life. Each of the texts we examine is surrounded by proliferations of anticipation and response; our task for the semester will be the recovery and juxtaposition of those contexts. We will, in short, build archives. That project brings together historical, critical, and theoretical modes of inquiry; Macbeth, for example, leads simultaneously to Holinshed’s chronicle, Lacan’s phallus, and Polanski’s film. Our concern throughout will be an inquiry not only into the workings of these plays and poems, but into the methodologies through which we, as inquisitive and implicated audience, make sense.

 

ENGL 318. Seminar in Victorian Prose and Poetry

(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Jay Clayton

Topic: Literature, Science and the Professions

     This course explores a time when neither the professional nor the disciplinary boundaries separating literature, science, medicine, and technology had solidified into their modern form. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, science and technology were very much a part of culture, an aspect of the larger intellectual life of the upper classes, not a separate sphere reserved for specialists. Quarterlies carried scientific papers side by side with political articles, poetry, and criticism, while novelists, politicians, and natural philosophers mingled together at the same clubs, attended the same lectures, and read the same books. Although disciplinary distinctions began to emerge during the second half of the century, the split between what C. P. Snow called the "two cultures" did not become an unbridgeable gulf until well into the twentieth century.

     In this seminar we shall use the methods of cultural studies and cultural history to analyze the complex relations between novels and natural philosophy in the Victorian era. Each week a literary text will be set in the context not only of scientific and medical developments but also of Victorian engineering triumphs (railroads, steams ships, bridges, tunnels), emerging communications networks (the postal system and telegraph), consumer architecture (the Crystal Palace, department stores, shopping arcades), and new media (the stereoscope, photography, and phonograph).

     Readings in the fiction of the period will be clustered around the first and middle thirds of the nineteenth century, two periods that strikingly illustrate the development of the professions and the growth of disciplinarity. Texts will include Jane Austen’s Persuasion; Charlotte Bronte's The Professor; Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; Dickens's "Mudfog Papers" and The Pickwick Papers; George Eliot's Middlemarch; Gaskell's "Cousin Phyllis" and Wives and Daughters; Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle; and Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Thorne. Students will also read excerpts from scientific texts by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, and William Whewell; study the engineering achievements of George Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Paxton; and give reports on literary criticism and history of science.

     Please order the texts online before the start of the semester at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/ans/english/clayton/318-S06.htm and read Persuasion for the first class.

 

ENGL 320-01   Studies in American Literature

(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Shawn Salvant

Topic: American Literature and Racial Science

This is a course on projects of "reading race" as illuminated through a comparative study of racialization in scientific and literary discourse. Analyzing such projects, we will try to delineate some of the shared premises and divergent methods of the literary and the scientific. Working within and around methodological problems in the field of literature and science, we will explore the "influence" of racial science on literary representations of race in selected works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature as well as the literary problems within the discourse of racial science.

Course material will include literary and scientific texts that perform, represent, or analyze racialization in various fields and practices (legal, social, psychological, phenomenological, taxonomic). We will read the material with special attention to how racialized bodies appear and disappear, get dissected and reassembled, move and behave, become felt or abject. Readings from Douglass, Schuyler, Faulkner, Hopkins, Wright, Twain, Baldwin, Howells, Galton, Gould, Haraway, Fanon, DuBois, Chase-Riboud, Benn Michaels, Omi and Winant, Appiah.

 

ENGL 320-02 Studies in American Literature

(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Dana Nelson

Topic: Representative/Democracy

People are not born knowing how to be representative any more than they are born knowing how to be democratic. It is worth insisting that representivity does not come naturally--for individuals or nations--and then thinking about what political and cultural practices of representation mean for practices of democracy. This is a course that asks a complex of interlocking and countervailing questions: how do people ("The People") learn to be represented, and representive? How can we represent democracy? When is representation democratic? How do different practices of representation impact the democratic imaginary? What would a democratic (as opposed to a representative) aesthetic look like? Where have democratic practices registered outside of the discipline or aesthetic of representivity?

Representative/Democracy will glance back to the early British colonies, and then concentrate on the eighteenth century for the bulk of the course (with some reading in the early nineteenth century at the very end). We will be reading primary and secondary literary materials, as well as political and cultural theory, and American/United States history. At the end, you should know a good deal more about eighteenth-century American and early literature, from belles-lettres, to political treatises to early novels. You will know more about political and social history, and you will become familiar with important topics in literary, political, economic and cultural theory debates over the public sphere and democracy.

Research skills, analytic comprehension and argument comparison and formulation will be the skills we look to develop in this class. You will participate in study cohorts as well as writing groups, will participate in a group project and will write an article-length paper as your final requirement.

 

ENGL 355-01   Special Topics in English and American Literature

(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

Sam Girgus

Topic: Modernism and the Documentary: Ethics and Reality

Documentary and film provide a history and record of modernism, while at the same time helping to forge modern consciousness. Every film to some degree becomes a documentary in which image, sound, and action record reality and experience. Such documentary sensibility has been part of the modernism of cinema and the modern experience. Documentary, therefore, as practice, art, and production raises questions about documentary’s influence upon history, culture, and reality. The philosophy of documentary also explores the relationship of film as art form and cultural product to ethics, knowledge, and being. Accordingly, the course will use documentary to develop a critique of both modernism and film.

As a complex art of visual and sound signs, documentary incorporates all the elements of classic film form—mise-en-scene, montage, editing, narration. However, as a record of human history and culture, documentary raises special issues concerning reality, ethics, and responsibility. Documentary’s search for information, knowledge, and truth grows more complicated as it engages questions of change, reform, and the good.

In addition to these broad themes and issues of culture, history, and philosophy, students will examine the specific history, elements, and art that comprise documentary.   In the course, we will view and study a variety of historical and contemporary documentaries in the light of interdisciplinary readings on film, culture, history, and philosophy. Before engaging broader issues, students will learn about the history and nature of documentary as a film form and social record. Final papers and film projects will involve in-depth studies of particular aspects of documentary studies, such as specific films, subjects, forms, directors or examinations of foundational issues in documentary of knowledge, meaning, significance, ontology, and ethics.

 

FALL 2005

 

ENGL 318 - Seminar in Victorian Prose and Poetry

Topic: Race, Affect, and Sexual Selection in Victorian Fiction

Carolyn Dever - W, 3:30-6:00 p.m.

This seminar takes as its centerpiece two texts by Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). While in the Origin Darwin accounts for the evolution of species through such mechanisms as natural selection, in the Descent he addresses human evolution through case-studies in sexual selection.

Victorian novels are themselves case-studies in sexual selection, representing social progress (or regress) through choices motivated by all sorts of affective attachments, including economic expediency and erotic desire. Working from templates Darwin provides, we will consider Victorian novelists’ employment of natural and sexual selection--and thus the production of categories such as race--as problems of human emotion.

Primary texts will include Brontë, Jane Eyre; Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Collins, The Moonstone; Haggard, She; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Stoker, Dracula, as well as secondary and contextualizing material to be assigned on the syllabus.     

 

ENGL 320-01 - Studies in American Literature

Topic: New Century, New Critical Realism

Cecelia Tichi - T, 3:30-6:00 p.m.

The seminar will engage U. S. fictional and nonfiction narrative at this moment when the insights of a quarter-century of "theory" have been assimilated and sociopolitical narrative and critique are on the ascendance in a context of changed material conditions, social crisis, and ideological conflict in the U. S. and abroad. We will examine the terms of critique offered by such narrativists as Barbara Kingsolver, Barry Lopez, Eric Schlosser, Ann Patchett, and Andre Dubus III and do so through the critics whose work helps us develop a "new critical realism" in the opening years of this century: Michael Denning, Noam Chomsky, Peter Brooks. We will, in addition, work toward a practical criticism that is functional in the reinterpretation of the traditional U. S. canons over two centuries.

           

ENGL 320-03 - Studies in American Literature

Topic: Postmodern Novel in America

Deak Nabers - R, 12:30-3:00 p.m.

This course will examine the emergence and flowering of the postmodern novel in America from the early 1950s through the 1970s. We will situate our readings of prominent novels in the context of a variety of theories of the postmodern (Jameson, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Fried, Venturi, Greenberg, Appiah) and a series of fundamental post-war intellectual milestones (Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mills's The Power Elite, Drucker's The Practice of Management, Bell's The End of Ideology, Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, Schlessinger's The Vital Center, Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, The Moynihan Report, Wills's Nixon Agonistes, and Sontag's Against Interpretation). Novelists to be considered include Bellow, Ellison, Baldwin, Doctorow, Mailer, Morrison, Dick, Didion, Le Guin, Delillo, and Roth. Requirements will include two presentations, two brief presentation papers, and one longer term paper.

 

ENGL 325 - Seminar in Modern British and American Literature

Topic: Professional Discourse and the Ways of Reading: The Example of Yeats

Vereen Bell - W, 12:30-3:00 p.m.

The point of this seminar, with Yeats as the main text, will be to acquaint graduate students with the nature of professional discourse and with how readings of Yeats are affected by the exchanges among scholars who would assume that they are addressing professional readers like themselves. In this respect the course will be as much an introduction to the process of professionalization as to Yeats's work itself.

My plan is to begin with perhaps three weeks' worth of introduction to the Yeats aspect of the subject matter in order to get everyone on more or less the same page and in order to refresh and practice our poetry reading skills. This segment would also include consideration of how Yeats fits in among the various modernist ideologies.

From there we will move to the ways in which the political environment in Ireland, both then and now, affect the criticism of Yeats's work and with the ways in which ideological differences come into play. Overlapping with this segment or immediately following it will be a segment on how postcolonial discourses have been applied to Yeats. These two segments will entail readings in modern Irish history and in the logic of postcolonial theory.

There will then be a segment on how detailed biographical history, most of which for Yeats has only recently come to light, has begun to affect the interpretation of Yeats's work. True biographical criticism is a relatively new field in Yeats studies. A short part of this segment will be devoted to the ways in which Yeats's mystical writings have been appropriated (and misappropriated) for the reading of his poems.

The last segment will be an introduction to the intriguing ways in which recent editorial and textual theory (including material history of the book) has expanded the ways of understanding Yeats's projects.

Along the way, over the course of the term, we will examine and evaluate different theoretical approaches to Yeats's poems in a more conventional sense--deconstructionist, Marxist, feminist, etc., and by that means achieve a slightly different form of the introduction to literary theory. For the seminar paper, students will have the option of applying one of the relevant methodologies to a modern writer of their own choosing or of continuing with the study of Yeats's work applying a specific methodology. At the end, students will present to each other a conference-sized paper which will be a condensed version of the larger-essay project. For these conference-style papers, we will want to be stressing logical argumentation, professional command of the subject matter, and clarity of presentation.      

 

ENGL 330/CLT 330 - The European Enlightenment and Its Legacies

John McCarthy - T, 12:30-3:00 p.m.

The European Enlightenment was a watershed event of reform and renewal in the long eighteenth-century (1680-1815) that permeated all facets of religious, intellectual, cultural, and literary life. This fact is best represented in the monumental project of the Encyclopédie. Philosophically the rethinking of the past and present begins with René Descartes and John Locke and ranges through Shaftesbury and Rousseau to Immanuel Kant. The philosophical innovation had distinct repercussions for the reconsideration of aesthetics and of literary practice itself. New forms such as the novel and the bourgeois drame emerged in the course of the century. Thus, this course will be organized around three main foci: the philosophical, the aesthetic, and literary practice. Using Norman Hampson, Peter Gay, Elizabeth Hull, Werner Schneiders and others, we will first sketch the broad contours of the epoch before examining certain aspects of the intellectual underpinnings of the movement (Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant) and sampling seminal renderings of the new thinking. Given the breadth and depth of the European Enlightenment, it will not be possible to render its multiple thrusts in an encompassing fashion. Rather, a selective approach will be pursued in individual and group projects on such topics as tolerance, cultural diversity, nature as process, benevolence, the public sphere, the role of women, and the ideal of individual autonomy. For example, we will read selections from Locke’s On Human Understanding, Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, and Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” Yet, the bulk of our attention will be devoted to analyzing the Enlightenment element in such works as Swift’s Gullivers Travels, Richardson’s Pamela, Voltaire’s Candide, de Laclos’s Les Liaison Dangereuses, Goethe’s Werther, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Diderot’s le Père de famille, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Differences in tenor of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany will be noted. The reading list will be drawn selectively from the above. All readings and discussions will be conducted in English. However, students are encouraged to read works in the original when possible.

A point of departure is the legacy of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century (Adorno, Horkheimer, Amery, Foucault, Habermas). Emphasis will be placed on the philosophical/anthropological reconceptualization of what it means to be human (Locke, Hume, Shaftsbury, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Thomasius, Kant). Of importance is the origin of contemporary reception aesthetics and its realization in literary works of the era. The seminal roles of Swift, Diderot, Richardson, Voltaire, and Lessing will be included. The actual problem of dealing with the European Enlightenment is the vastness of the project itself: it is simply not possible to deal with the epoch in as much detail as is deserving. For this reason, I have elected to focus attention on sensibility, a dimension of the Enlightenment which had long been relegated to a minor role because of a traditional focus on rationalism and reason as the dominant forces within the Age of Enlightenment. Consequently, we will have ample opportunity to contextualize reason and emotion (ratio et emotio) in our deliberations. My hope is to demonstrate how closely related both sense and sensibility were (are) related within the overall project of Enlightenment. The selection of primary works for analysis and discussion can be adjusted to accommodate the class participants.

The course will be a combination of lecture and discussion. Each participant will be responsible for reviewing two works of secondary literature for presentation to the entire group. The presentation should not exceed ca. 15 minutes, and should be accompanied by a one-page handout (a copy for each participant). Additionally, each student will offer an analysis of an aspect of one of the literary or philosophical works. This talk should last no longer than 20-25 minutes (an eight-page paper; i.e., the length of an MLA talk) to allow for ample discussion. Finally, each student will write a term paper of ca.15 pages on a substantial aspect of the course; it should deal with both the philosophical/aesthetic and literary dimensions of our deliberations.       

 

ENGL 337A - Introduction to Literary Theory

Robert Barsky - R, 4:00-6:30 p.m.

This course will offer a wide-ranging survey of literary and language theories, with special emphasis upon the period post-Saussure. We will examine the principle theoretical approaches--formalism, dialogism, structuralism, narratology, semiotics, deconstruction, Freudianism, reception theory, Marxism, feminisms, postcolonial language theory--but we will also look into some of the exciting language research which have been undertaken outside of the literary realm as a way of situating the project of literary theory within a properly historical and political framework. To ensure that the “literary” is not separated from the “theory,” there will be ample discussion of literary examples, if only to demonstrate that the theory often grows out of questions posed in the literature we so enjoy reading.      

 

ENGL 355-01 - Special Topic in English and American Literature

Topic: Fame: Romantic and Otherwise (Proseminar)

Mark Schoenfield - M, 12:30-3:00 p.m.

The configuration of literary identity is both historically specific (dependant on available technologies, on cultural and political conditions, and on biographical accidents) as well as accretive, with each new generation of writers inventing forms of fame that emerge from prior ones. In this course, we will investigate the phenomenon or fame at a variety of levels--including its connections to gender, class, and print culture. The first part of the course will focus on notions of celebrity during the romantic period, and our reading will include Lord Byron, who claims one morning to have awoke and found himself famous; Hazlitt, De Quincey, and other essayistic theorists of fame; and various pop-cultural formations by which fame was promulgated. Our reading will include, in addition to primary texts, critics and theorists who engage the concept of fame. In the second part of the course, students will investigate an aspect of fame relevant to their own periods of interests. They will design a class, including assigning reading, and produce a final paper that draws on both primary and secondary materials.

 

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