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Faculty Directory

Brian Lennon
Assistant Professor of English

Lennon Photo

Contact:
216 BurrowesBuilding
University Park, PA 16802
(814) 865-6261
bul5@psu.edu

http://www.personal.psu.edu/bul5/

Office hours:

Tuesday 5-6:30 and Wednesday 3:30-5

Educational history:

Books:
City: An Essay (University of Georgia, 2002)

Articles:

Chapbook:
Dial Series One. Potes & Poets, 2000.

Other recent publications (selected):

Recent presentations:

Awards:
Associated Writing Programs Award Series for City: An Essay (2000)

Course descriptions
ENGL 200: Introduction to Critical Reading
We’ll have three goals here. The first is to develop an understanding of critical concepts essential to the study of literature. The second is to establish working definitions of key terms for literary studies and to trace their emergence from different critical approaches or “schools” of literary theory. The third is to learn to read for, and to reproduce, literary-theoretical argument. If one of the questions literary theory asks is “What is literature?,” the other, obviously, is “What is theory?” ― or, at a deeper level, “Why theory?” A working assumption here will be theory’s everydayness ― its presence everywhere in both public and private conversation. That means, for example, that we can identify ordinary and often simple problems (problems that are easy to understand, if not necessarily to solve) in the most abstruse theoretical arguments. Still, we’ll be reading primary sources in literary theory, which are often difficult, so we’ll need to develop that acumen. We’ll also read commentary placing different theoretical approaches in a wider context. In learning from theory tactics for reading literature critically ― reading form, reading for critical contrast, for argument, and for the tension between common sense and counterintuition ― we’ll also be learning to read theory itself.

ENGL 261 Exploring Literary Forms: Language Memoirs
This course will introduce you to a new genre of contemporary U.S. prose literature: the language memoir, or memoir of language acquisition. We’ll read memoirs by (1) U.S.-born, English-speaking authors who learned languages other than English while living abroad; (2) authors born in the United States who grew up in bilingual or multilingual families; (3) authors who emigrated to the United States and learned English as a second (or third, or fourth) language; (4) authors who settled in the United States after growing up multilingual in their home cultures. We’ll look at how the generic conventions of memoir both serve and disserve these authors’ stories, paying special attention to the experiences of spatial mobility (in travel, migration, and displacement) they record. We’ll also examine the social mobility acquired with a new language, as one “crosses the line” of economic class or (or and) ethnic/national identification. We’ll consider the relationship between linguistic and cultural translation, and what it means to be cosmopolitan and/or post-colonial, possessing knowledge of languages and cultures meaningfully distant from one’s own. And we’ll look at the politics and ethics of multilingualism, in controversies over language rights and language policy. Finally, we’ll consider just what is at stake in discovering – or creating –  a new genre of contemporary literature.

ENGL 304M Honors Seminar: Writing Across Genre
In this course we will read closely works of twentieth century U.S. and “world’’ literature that combine or cross fictional, nonfictional, and poetic genres, considering how generic boundaries are defined, as well as what it means to “write across’’ them. Among the questions we’ll ask –  and perhaps answer – are: How does the system of disciplines in the university (English studies, comparative literature, creative writing) reflect or produce distinct genres of writing? What is the proper relation of writing to knowledge? How does one properly narrate, or “essay,’’ or lyricize personal and collective trauma in war, or in the colonial encounter? Do writers write freely, or are genres structures that constrain or determine the practice of writing? Is “writing across genre’’ itself a genre? In structured experimental writing assignments, you will (a) respond critically (analytically) to these readings, and (b) create texts of your own (poetic, fictional, autobiographical or autoethnographic, and/or literary-critical) which cross genre.

ENGL 415 Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Broken Pieces
Most writing remains unfinished, “living on” in the form of notes, sketches, and drafts. This course examines writing’s “broken pieces,” with focus on short forms of nonfiction prose: aphorism, maxim, sketch, vignette, feuilleton, pensée, prose poem, fragment, and essay. Along the way, we will consider how larger units of writing, including books, are constructed (through collage, montage, mosaic, constellation, counterpoint or dialectic, and other methods of composition) from accumulations of smaller ones. Course format combines structured experimental writing with close reading and analysis.

ENGL 439 American Nonfiction Prose
Works of prose nonfiction dramatizing “the American scene”: the partly observed, partly imagined America of both native- and foreign-born citizens. We’ll read Americans who went abroad (Emerson, Baldwin, Settle, Kaplan), those who arrived from elsewhere (Hoffman, Dorfman, Aciman, Abinader) and those who traveled at home (Agee, Rodriguez, Heat-Moon, Anzaldúa).

ENGL 487W Senior Seminar: Genres of Migration and Displacement
oes the “content” or experience of migration and displacement place a certain pressure on the form of writing about it? Ought it to? In this seminar, we will explore the transcultural encounter in “globalization” as mediated in and by genres of writing. Examining literary figurations of Sephardic and Ottoman cosmopolitanism (Aciman and Pamuk), North American aboriginal migration (Momaday), Caribbean diasporic return (Césaire), European unification (Sebald), and the production of the American West (Ondaatje), we will consider how memoir both serves and disserves authors’ (and characters’) stories. We’ll consider the relationship between linguistic and cultural translation, and the literary implications of a cosmopolitanism experienced “from above” and “from below,” in the knowledge of languages and cultures meaningfully distant from one’s own. Finally, we’ll think about “life writing” as autobiographical writing that exceeds, resists or fails the existing generic conventions of published or publishable autobiography (and as writing that perhaps resists or fails publication itself).

ENGL 515 Writing Nonfiction: Defacement
Our theme for this semester will be defacement. Together we will reflect on the iconoclasm of writing and the ethics of publication. How do we violate objects, places, or persons by writing about them in genres that tell us they are “telling the truth”? Can this violation be avoided, or can we make restitution for it? How is the truth revealed, and how is it concealed, by the personal essay, by memoir, autobiography, and biography, and by journalistic writing? By travel writing and ethnography? By scholarship generally? By philosophical writing? You’ll be asked to reflect on these aspects of your own work in any genre of nonfiction prose, which you’ll present to us at length in at least one class session. We will emphasize both theory, in rigorous thinking, and practice, in daily reading and writing by quota toward the form of the book. Readings from Berger, Derrida, De Man, Djebar, Goytisolo, Howe, Lévi-Strauss, Giard, Sontag, Spivak, Stavans, Viscusi.

ENGL 515/ CMLIT 504 Writing Nonfiction/ Studies in Literary Genres: Essayism
This course has two goals: (1) To bring into contact three disciplines pitted against each other in the contemporary conflict of the faculties; (2) To examine a genre of nonfiction prose common to, and controversial for, each discipline. The three disciplines are literary studies, philosophy, and creative writing. (Genre produces controversy in history, anthropology, and other humanities and social science areas as well, however, and seminar members working in those areas are most welcome.) The genre is the essay. In practical tension with the scholarly article and research monograph, the treatise, and the nonfiction narrative, we could say, the essay form both articulates and tests the act of power – literally discipline – by which knowledge is divided and through which it disseminates. Accordingly, we’ll focus our work in two areas: the theory of genre and the practice of writing. Our method will be comparative: we’ll consider the essay as form, anti-form, and nostalgia for form; as genre, anti-genre, and law of genre; as constellation, piece work, defacement, life writing, art de faire, Bruchstück, “sur-vivre.” “Essayism” marks this concurrent, comparative emphasis on theory and practice, science and art, philosophy and poetry (... literature... creative writing). Our project here is to use the tension between those terms to develop an understanding of the real boundaries of our disciplines, and of real possibilities for cross-border relations. Think of this, then, as an attempt to lend substance to the often empty (yet exigent) rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, by restoring to it a perpetually missing link: writing practice. We’ll run the first half of each class session as a conventional seminar, working from a selection of scholarly and critical articles and book chapters; the second half will meet as a colloquium and workshop, discussing one seminar member’s work in progress in any mode of nonfiction prose (literary, critical, or scholarly). This format should be equally useful to M.F.A. candidates working in literary forms of nonfiction prose and to M.A./Ph.D candidates in literature or related humanities disciplines with interests in genre studies, rhetoric, poetics, literary and critical theory, or philosophy and literature.

ENGL 515 Writing Nonfiction
We will alternate between reading, reviewing and discussion of works in progress by members of the class and reading, reviewing, and discussion of recently published works of literary nonfiction, with an emphasis on work by authors born outside the United States (e.g., Aciman, Darwish, Djebar, Pamuk) and on work relevant to the current geopolitical situation.