Course Descriptions
English Graduate Courses
Fall 2008 - Spring 2009
Fall 2008
501.001 (984700)
Materials and Methods of Research
Paul YoungquistM
3:35 PM – 6:35 PM; 7 Burrowes
English 501 is an introduction to the teaching of English as a profession, with special attention to the choices that face graduate students who are entering our program. We’ll read materials about the profession—about pedagogy, scholarship, and departmental citizenship. Graduate students have an uncomfortably nebulous status: they are students, to be sure, but many of them are simultaneously beginning as teachers, and they are all expected to act and think like professionals. We’ll discuss this “doubtful middle state.” We will have tutorials in library skills and archival research; we’ll also hear from members of the department about their scholarly work and their literary interests. Former students from our program who are “out there” in the profession will visit us and discuss their experiences. Each student in this seminar will produce an annotated bibliography, a conference proposal, and a conference-length paper for presentation.
501.002 (139432)
Materials and Methods of Research
Brian Lennon
W 3:35 PM – 6:35 PM; 7 Burrowes
English 501.1 is an introduction to the profession for students pursuing the MFA degree, with special attention to issues confronted by graduate students entering our program. For half the semester, we'll meet along with new MA students, to explore the academic side of the discipline of English studies - pedagogy, scholarship, and departmental citizenship. Graduate students are students, to be sure, but many are simultaneously beginning their work as teachers; at the same time, they are expected to act and think (and begin to publish) like professional writers. We will explore the relationship between creative writing and English studies, as well as the relationship of English studies to other fields in the humanities, and to the humanities as a disciplinary formation itself. Tutorials in library skills and archival research will prepare MFA students for literature seminars and scholarly work. We'll hear career anecdotes and advice from both current members of the creative writing faculty and graduates of the MFA program. Requirements will include the preparation of an annotated bibliography and a piece of writing for submission to an appropriate venue.
504 (140797)
Emancipatory Composition
Keith Gilyard
R 9:05 AM – 12:05 PM; 47 Burrowes
This course will explore a series of texts that are united by the authors' interest in relationships among critical pedagogy, rhetoric, and composition practices. Books will include Chris Gallagher's "Radical Departures: Composition and Progressive Pedagogy," Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald's "Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and the Teaching of Writing," Bradford Stull's "Amid the Fall, Dreaming of Eden: Du Bois, King, Malcolm X, and Emancipatory Composition," bell hooks' "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom," Keith Gilyard's "Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy," and Andrea Greenbaum's "Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility."
.512 (984706)
Graduate Fiction Workshop
Josip Novakovich
R 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM; 215 Bouke
A graduate seminar relying on the standard fiction workshop format: you will write 2-3 short stories or novel chapters (amounting to about 50 pp), and we will critique them in a constructive manner, in class, offering editorial advice, and giving you marginal comments and end-notes. You will read one story collection or novel of your choice and write a pertinent craft analysis to present in class so we can all learn some nice moves to apply in our own fiction writing, possibly. For craft discussion, we will also read a bunch of classic stories (most available online—I will send the links), such as Father Sergius, The Devil, and Death of Ivan Illych by Tolstoy, Ball of Fat, and Mademoiselle Fifi by Maupassant, a few stories by Angela Carter, and a couple of novels TBA.
513(984709) Robin Becker
T 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM; 47 Burrowes
In this graduate seminar, we will read and discuss published poetry as well as critical essays that inform and provide models for student poems. Weekly workshops provide a forum for discussion of diction, imagery, line turn, stanza shape and syntax in student work. Writing assignments will offer opportunities to experiment with new modes. Students revise weekly and prepare portfolio of poems for evaluation at mid-term and close of semester.
515 (984712)
Memory Babe: The Art of the Memoir
Toby Thompson
T 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM; 47 Burrowes
This nonfiction seminar will concentrate on memoir writing and how we, as authors, remember. Techniques for jogging memory, as well as creating memorable stories will taught. Rites of passage, such as love affairs, family deaths, interesting jobs, great trips, various disorders and assets are possible topics. The line between nonfiction and fiction in memoir writing will be discussed. Several contemporary or near-contemporary texts will be read. One six-thousand word piece, due at the middle of the semester, and revised by the end, will be required. Or the student may choose to write a completely new piece for the second due date. Attendance at all classes is required,
530 (139699)
Literature of Biography & Autobiography
James L. West III
W 9:05AM – 12:05 PM; 47 Burrowes
This will be a seminar in twentieth-century American literary autobiography. We'll study texts by such authors as Mencken, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wright, McCarthy, Styron, Mary Karr, and several others. The seminar should be useful to both literature students and to MFA candidates. Each student will write one interpretive paper and one personal memoir and give an oral report. We'll talk along the way about the differences between biography and autobiography as genres, and we’ll discuss publication possibilities in the field.
540 (984718)
Elizabethan Prose and Poetry
Marcy North
T 9:05 AM – 12:05 PM; 47 Burrowes
This course is subtitled Poetry, Prose, and early Modern Literary Fashion. Course participants will investigate how and why certain works of literature became fashionable or popular with Elizabethan readers. What material and cultural forces drove the tastes of readers and the markets for print and manuscript? We’ll be thinking a lot about literacy, reception, print and manuscript circulation, the popular press, gendered media and genres, censorship, the importance of song and other forms of oral transmission, the currency of illegal and salacious literature, self-promotion and patronage, the Stationers’ company and the material production of literature, smuggled literature and official literature, and the influence of Continental literary trends. Authors/works may include Tottel’s Miscellany (where Elizabethans found Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey), William Tyndale’s scriptural translations and prefaces, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, Satirists such as Thomas Nashe and “Martin Marprelate,” balladeers and craftsmen authors such as Thomas Deloney, sought-after courtly authors such as Sir Edward Dier and Sir Walter Ralegh, royal authors such as Elizabeth I and "Mary Stuart," and Catholic authors such as Robert Southwell and Robert Parsons. Students will learn many valuable archival research skills, read some great poetry and some provocative prose, and come away from the class with a sense of how literary fashions are intertwined with political and religious crises, social stratification and mobility, educational reforms, and technological innovations.
545 (140803) Chaucer
Robert Edwards
M 9:05 AM – 12:05 PM; 47 Burrowes
This seminar will focus on major narrative works from the second half of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetic career. We’ll read key texts from the Canterbury Tales and Legend of Good Women as well as Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s fifteenth-century disciplines and his Renaissance readers fashioned him as the originary author of their literary tradition—the father of English poetry as well as the ancient and learned poet. Chaucer’s place at the head of this genealogy belies, of course, his continual practice of borrowing from other writers, some of them acknowledged but others obscured (famously, Boccaccio). We’ll read Chaucer’s poems against their sources and intertexts as a way of identifying what Chaucer does as a poet, particularly as a medieval poet negotiating between classical and vernacular traditions. We’ll also trouble the idea of literary sources by looking at some of the historical and theoretical issues involved in trying to understand what a poet does as a fundamentally revisionary artist. To add further resonance to the inquiry, we’ll consider some of Chaucer’s work in relation to his contemporaries (Gower, Langland) and to the reception of his works and his sources in sixteenth-century translations and adaptations. The seminar will require active participation, short responses papers, several research exercises, and an article-length research paper. No previous knowledge of Middle English is assumed; for sources and intertexts, students will have a choice of using modern translations or the originals.
546 (137686)
Milton and Popular Culture
Laura Knoppers
M 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM; 47 Burrowes
This course looks at John Milton and his legacy from the Romantics through 20th and 21st century fantasy literature, television, film, newspapers, comic books, children’s books, and music. We will begin with careful reading of Milton’s Comus, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained in the light of “Satanist” and “Anti-Satanist” criticism. Adaptations of Milton then to be explored include William Blake’s watercolor illustrations, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; 1831), James Whale’s 1935 film, Bride of Frankenstein, C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1944), Steven Brust, To Reign in Hell (1984), Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Bladerunner; and excerpts from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000). REQUIREMENTS: Faithful attendance and reading, spirited participation, oral presentation on research project, and a final research paper on Milton or an adaptation of his work.
554 (984724)
Studies in Early American Literature
Carla Mulford
W 9:05 – 12:05 PM; 7 Burrowes
The Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century
Students in this course will examine primary and secondary materials related to the study of British North America in the eighteenth century, looking into the range of critical conversations that are taking place regarding the circum-Atlantic world, which, for our purposes will be designated as North America, Britain and Europe, Africa, and Asia. Using primary readings (probably one major reading per week drawn primarily from Britain and British North America, but perhaps also from France), we’ll consider the several different conversations being had about Atlantic empires; cosmopolitanism and polite letters (including the so-called Republic of Letters); enlightenment’s iteration of the “new science”; developing categories of aesthetics, gender, and “the natural”; speculative questions about humans’ moral capacities (e.g., the construction of “virtue”); and other things. Each student (or team of students) will be responsible for an illuminating discussion with us about the "conversations" taking place in/around their topic over the past 2-3 decades. Coursework will include spirited discussion each week about the common readings, individual or teamwork projects on secondary resources related to a topic of the student or students’ choice(s), and a seminar paper (turned in as a draft and then a completed paper).
558 (984727)
Victorian Fiction: The Classics. Voices and Visions in the
Bob Lougy
T 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM;
19th Century British Novel
7 Burrowes
This course will be devoted to some of the major novels to come out of Victorian England, and will be interested not only in exploring the visions and the voices that we find in this fiction, but also in examining the ways in which these writers expanded and even transformed the possibilities of fiction. We will begin mid-century with Emily Brontë and end with Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, published in 1895. We will be reading most if not all of the following novels: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers; Charles Dickens, Bleak House; George Eliot, Middlemarch, and Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure.
The course will consist of close and careful reading of these texts and an exploration of those central issues—cultural, historical, aesthetic, etc.—raised by them. Class presentations will be required of all members of the seminar. Similarly, members of the seminar will be asked to respond frequently to specific questions or concerns raised by the novels under consideration and to share these responses with other members of the seminar. One final paper, to be worked out in advance in consultations between the student and instructor, will be due at the end of the semester.
561(984730)
Black Romanticism
Paul Youngquist
R 3:35 PM – 6:35 PM; 328 HHD
How black is Romanticism? This question will be the central concern of our course, which will investigate the roots of British and American culture in the routes of trans-Atlantic economic trade of the late eighteenth century. We will contest the implied racial and national purity of British culture by examining its production at the hands of racial and ethnic others. If the economic vitality of late eighteenth-century England derives from the traffic in black slaves and the labor of black sailors, something similar can be said of its cultural production. From this perspective, Romanticism turns multi-ethnic, a motley chorus inconceivable without the contribution of formerly mute minority voices. This course will sully the purity of British culture by testing local and national practices against global exchanges and mobilities. The result: a new understanding of Romanticism as a mixed cultural heritage. We will end the course by examining the persistence of that heritage in the music of reggae and hip-hop. Readings will include selections from Gilroy, Linebaugh and Rediker, C.L.R. James, and Brathwaite, as well as Equiano, Cugoano, Blake, More and the abolitionists, Hunt, and Wederburn. We will also look at the political cartoons of the period.
Requirements: presentation, paper.
564 (984733)
19th Century Queer
Christopher Castiglia
R 3:35 PM – 6:35 PM; 7 Burrowes
This seminar will explore 19th-century U.S. literature in the context of contemporary queer theory and several of its most persistent concerns: temporality and the persistence of trauma; pleasure, fantasy, and alternative inscriptions of “the real”; performativity and the “sexed” body; the death drive and queer sociality; formations of queer counter-publics; transgendering, hermaphrodism, and the queer “crip”; queer aesthetics. We will read theorists such as Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Lee Edelman, Tim Dean, Heather Love, Robert Caserio, David Halperin, and Robert McGruer alongside nineteenth-century authors including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Warren Stoddard, Elizabeth Stoddard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Winthrop, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James.
566 (984736
African American Playwrights
Iyun Osagie
W 12:20PM – 3:20 PM; 47 Burrowes
Contemporary African American Drama
This course explores the expressive and performative articulation of history on stage. Although most African American TV plays have generally lined up with the American status quo, the African American stage has particularly been marked by its counter-hegemonic status in American society. By focusing on the cultural practice of drama on the black stage, we will examine themes of conquest and resistance and how the politics of space and location accentuate the dramatic techniques and the cultural forms employed by black playwrights. According to W.E.B. DuBois, black theater should define, inscribe, and authenticate the enduring presence of a culturally black subjectivity. To what extent, then, does the intertextual nature of theater affect the production of a culturally-specific black identity? With both a historical overview and a selection of primary readings, we will examine playwrights such as Angelina Grimke, Owen Dodson, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Paul Carter Harrison. How does Black theater today (off and on Broadway) contextualize political and social representations of African Americans? We would hope to answer these questions not just through our class readings but also through engagement with live theater (Penn State theater? Broadway?).
Requirement: A five-page draft (Mid term) and a fifteen-page final paper.
567(139402)
Black Cosmopolitanism: Ellison and Johnson Linda Selzer
R 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM; 47 Burrowes
This course investigates the controversial status of cosmopolitan thought by examining several recent approaches to black cosmopolitanism in relation to the work of two writers, Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson. Much critical debate on cosmopolitanism centers upon its complex relationships to nationalism, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity. Does cosmopolitanism’s revitalized appeal to universal human rights provide a basis for progressive social reform, or does it promote abstract loyalties at the expense of actually existing ethnic, geographical, and national communities? Does the new cosmopolitanism’s rearticulation of world citizenship provide a position from which to criticize overzealous nationalism, or does it constitute, as Tim Brennan fears, an extension of western nationalism (and capital) on a global scale? Over the course of the semester we will consider such questions as we explore the conceptual boundaries of black cosmopolitanism by investigating several recent attempts to describe a situated, critical, or vernacular cosmopolitanism in relation to the work of Ellison and Johnson. Readings will include critical articles on cosmopolitanism; selections from the Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Trading Twelves: The Collected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, and Flying Home: and Other Stories; Invisible Man; and selected short stories and three novels by Charles Johnson (Dreamer, Middle Passage, and Oxherding Tale). Class requirements will include spirited participation (which will include leading a discussion of an article on cosmopolitanism), and a paper of publishable length. (Charles Johnson has agreed to respond to inquiries from seminar participants writing papers on his work.)
573 (984739
The Bloomsbury Group
Christopher Reed
M 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM; 7 Burrowes
This course examines the Bloomsbury Group with emphasis on the connections among its members and its influence on twentieth-century literature -- and popular ideas about literature – in Britain and the United States. We will study the novels and short fiction by E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf in the context of the art and aesthetic theory produced by their Bloomsbury colleagues. We will also consider recent reworkings of Bloomsbury novels in films and in novels, such as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. The number and variety of these recent Bloomsbury-derived texts suggests how relevant Bloomsbury remains today, although – or because -- the implications of that relevance are contested. This course will foreground the issues that keep Bloomsbury on our minds: the interplay among the arts within the group as well as its members’ pioneering engagement with modern(ist?) ideas about the nature and responsibility of the artist relation to other identities based on sexuality, gender, and political commitments.
Students will be responsible for all assigned readings, for leading portions of seminar discussion (in pairs), and for producing an original, researched essay on a topic of their choosing. This course is interdisciplinary and may be appropriate for graduate students in disciplines outside English, including Art History and Women’s Studies.
574 (137620)
The Other Henry Jameses
Michael Anesko
R 9:05 PM – 12:05 PM; 104 Pond
Recent criticism has reinvented Henry James so many times that it has been difficult to keep pace with his many reincarnations: champions of Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism have all claimed him (with varying degrees of legitimacy); and literary theorists of very different persuasions have recognized a need to square themselves with his practice. Recently, novelists such as David Lodge (Author, Author!) and Colm Tóibín (The Master) have made him into a “fictional” protagonist—another testament to James’s remarkably elastic and enduring fame.
This seminar will try to map out many of these new developments in James studies, pairing a good selection of primary texts with the diverse array of critical approaches that scholars have employed to address them. Thorough grounding in these modes of discourse may encourage some students in the seminar to become involved (at a later stage of their graduate work) in an important publishing venture soon to be announced by Cambridge University Press: a new complete scholarly edition of Henry James’s fiction, for which Mr. Anesko will serve as American editor.
575 (139408)
Exp/Mod 20th Century Fiction - Joyce
Mark Morrisson
T 12:20 PM – 3:30 PM; 215 Bouke
We will read most of Joyce’s major work, including Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and portions of Finnegans Wake, and some of his minor work (potentially his play, Exiles, some of his poetry, and other writings) as time permits. We will explore Irish historical contexts of Joyce’s writings, and we will also discuss the production and publication of Joyce’s later work in the context of Parisian modernism. We will examine modernist debates about the nature and possibilities of language that swirled around Finnegans Wake during the 1920s and 1930s. Joyce has been a central focus of literary criticism and research since the 1930s, and we will map out the theoretical and critical terrain explored by scholars in the past and present.
577 (984742)
Contemporary Fiction
Kit Hume
W 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM; 320 Sackett
This is a course in fiction written during the last twenty years. The books are drawn from American (including Native American, African American, Asian American, and Anglophone literature from various Spanish- and Caribbean-influenced cultures), British, Subcontinental Indian, Anglophone African, Canadian, Antipodean-anything written in English. Where possible, novels exhibit various sexual orientations, religious concerns, and avant-garde as well as traditional literary techniques, and a spectrum of political orientations. Each week, a seminar participant is responsible for presenting the text of the week by offering a brief biography of the author and a selective bibliography emphasizing the work being read. Discussion will focus on ways of working with such a text and how one could usefully write an article on it. Everyone will write a minimum of two drafts of an article on one of these texts or on some other text that interests you. The last few meetings are devoted to workshopping your article. Throughout, my focus is on professionalism, on how to publish, and on how to succeed in building your academic career.
M. G. Vassanji THE BOOK OF SECRETS (Kenya-Tanzania/Canadian)
William T. Vollmann, EUROPE CENTRAL (Am)
Richard Powers, GAIN (Am)
Cormac McCarthy, THE ROAD (Am)
Marina Lewycka, A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRANIAN (Ukrainian/English)
Peter Ackroyd, ENGLISH MUSIC (Brit)
Ruth Ozeki, ALL OVER CREATION (Asian-Am)
Chris Abani, VIRGIN OF FLAMES (Nigerian)
Susan Power, ROOF WALKER (Native Am)
Adrian Tomine, SHORTCOMINGS (graphic novel)
E. Lynn Harris, IF THIS WORLD WERE MINE (African-Am)
583 (139405)
Theory After Heidegger:
Claire Colebrook
R 9:05 AM – 12:05 PM; 7 Burrowes
This course will examine three key short texts by Martin Heidegger -- Letter on Humanism, Origin of the Work of Art, and The Question Concerning Technology -- and will then look at late twentieth-century and contemporary responses to the topics raised by Heidegger's critiques of humanism, aesthetics and historicism. Writers discussed may include Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Nancy. The course will focus less on the influence of Heidegger and more on the problems contemporary theory has inherited from his philosophy: the status of the human, the nature of literature, the limits of technological modernity and the problems of thinking.
584 (984748)
Rhetoric, Writing, and Identity
Cheryl Glenn
W 12:20 PM – 3:30 PM; 102 Pond
Rhetoric does not take place in a vacuum; the shape and content of any un/spoken, written, or signed rhetoric is inevitably influenced by the rhetor herself (who she is and where she comes from) and by the social, political, and cultural situation she enters. Although issues of identity (understood as a complex, shifting intersection of various subject positions such as race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, dis/ability, region, etc.) are now familiar to us all, they require renewed inspection and innovative inquiry. In this course, we will consider identities as they are presented, interpreted and re-presented, and constructed through reading, writing, speaking, listening, and silence. After all, within these re/presentations lie endless possibilities for understanding and misunderstanding, connections and disconnections.
By exploring the ways in which identity influences, constrains, and enables the rhetorical choices of individuals, we will address the following questions: (1) What specific discursive features contribute to re/presentations of identities—with what consequences? (2) How can re/presentations of identity help us re/write history, the future, others, and ourselves more ethically and accurately? (3) What does an academic identity mean for students, teachers, curricula? (4) How do issues of identity affect students, teachers, and citizens from widely varying cultural and language backgrounds, especially those that value listening and silence?
Texts might include: Linda Martin Alcoff, et al., Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave); Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (Plume-Penguin); Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima (Grand Central); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Ana Castillo, So Far From God (Plume); Diane Freedman, The Teacher's Body (SUNY); Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken (Southern Illinois); bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (Routledge); Moya Lloyd, Beyond Identity Politics (SAGE); N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words (St. Martin's); Nora Naranjo-Morse, Mud Woman: Poems from Clay (Arizona); Simon Ortiz, Speaking for the Generations (Arizona) and Out There Somewhere (Arizona); Jacqueline Jones Royster, Calling Cards (SUNY); Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (Arcade) and Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit (Simon & Shuster).
590 (984751) Colloquim
Charlotte Holmes
W 1:25 PM – 2:15 PM; 103 Pond
This class is designed to support those teaching English 50 for the first time. It should be taken concurrently with one’s first English 50 teaching assignment or the semester prior to it. All second-year M.F.A. students on assistantship must schedule this class.
Our first meeting will take place prior to the beginning of the fall semester. At that time, we’ll review and discuss syllabi and reading lists. In subsequent weekly meetings, the course will provide you with a forum for discussing how to develop successful writing exercises and assignments, how to set reasonable classroom goals and expectations, how to evaluate creative work for a grade, and how to balance teaching and your own writing.
There may be occasional reading assignments, but no required texts. As an ongoing semester project, you will assemble, as a group, a workbook of writing exercises, reading lists, and helpful resources to carry forward into the next creative writing class you teach.
597A.001
Some Rudiments of Method for Literary Study
Rob Hume
T 6:35 PM – 9:35 PM
This seminar will investigate a two-pronged problem: (1) What kind of criticism or scholarship do you want to spend the rest of your life writing? (2) What sorts of criticism and scholarship can be effectively and usefully taught to undergraduate English majors? We will ask some very basic questions. What “methods” of criticism and scholarship are trendy these days? What methods have ceased to be trendy and why? (New Historicism? Semiotics? Reader-Response Criticism? Foucault?) What promises to be viable for serious criticism and research when you (now aged 22 or 25) are 40? 50? When you are sixty, will you be proud of what you published when you were thirty? And will it still be cited or will it be universally ignored?
We will investigate various scholarly critical realms—textual, contextual, historical, and ideological. What does feminist scholarship look like in seventeenth-century realms? What does Marxist scholarship look like in nineteenth-century American territories? Access to texts (ancient and modern) has changed radically in the last five years. How should we be employing technology in our research and teaching? What use can we make of such resources as ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), the brand-new (December 2007) Burney Newspaper collection and the British Library’s Nineteenth-Century Newspaper collection, for instance? How do we use such resources to change our teaching?
Readings for the seminar will be a variety of mostly brief texts drawn from a broad range of British and American literature taken in conjunction with a multiplicity of critical approaches to them. Seminar members will be asked for short weekly reading responses; a draft syllabus of an intro-to-lit course of your own design; and two serious drafts of a term paper which might be any of several kinds of criticism. E.g., A critical or historical analysis of a work in any period of British or American literature; or a demonstration of contrasting approaches to such a work; or a theoretical analysis and practical justification of any of the methods discussed during the semester. Assuming that seminar members possess enough collective transportation, meetings after the first week will be at my house (2496 Bernel Road, near the airport). If you have questions about this decidedly unusual seminar, please contact me by e-mail (Rob-Hume@psu.edu).
597B.001
Goth Gothic
Sanford Schwartz
W 6:35 PM – 9:35 PM
In this seminar we’ll explore the Gothic tradition since its inception in the second half eighteenth century and continuing into our own time. We'll look at some British and American texts of the foundational period (c. 1760-1820); a few mid-nineteenth century works; the Gothic resurgence at the end of the 19th centuryBram Stoker, Stevenson, James among others; and the Goth(ic) revival of recent years, including some of the vast body of theoretical, critical, and historical studies that have appeared in the last two decades. At all points we’ll be probing the social and cultural conditions that have given rise to the Gothic in its various forms and account for its perpetuation over the course of several centuries. We’ll also pay some attention to the development of the Gothic into modern popular genres such as , science fiction, mystery, romance, fantasy, and horror, and to its seemingly inexhaustible capacity to haunt the silver screen.
602
Teaching Literature Outside
Robert Burkholder
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the growing professional focus on experientially grounded teaching. Much of the course will be devoted to each student’s development of a syllabus for their own outdoor literature courses, and also planning a multidimensional group outing for the class that will introduce those involved to issues of logistics and planning that are key to responsibly offering outdoor experiences that inform and enhance the reading and discussion of written texts. We will devote time to real world concerns related to the institutional and personal liability of those offering such courses, Leave-No-Trace principles, first aid training, and emergency preparedness. Reading intended to spur discussion and suggest a theoretical basis for experiential pedagogy will be drawn largely from the texts listed below:
Hal Crimmel, editor, Teaching in the Field: Working with Students in the Outdoor Classroom (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003.
David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994).
John Tallmadge, Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher’s Path (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997).
Mitchell Thomashow, Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1995).
Christopher Uhl, Developing Ecological Consciousness: Path to a Sustainable World (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
Spring 2009
502
Theory and Teaching of Composition
Jack Selzer
M 6:30-9:30, 21 Burrowes
English 502 (a proseminar) is designed to acquaint graduate students with some of the key texts most important current work in the field of rhetoric and composition. As an introductory survey, the seminar is necessarily selective; emphasized this term will be the impact of classical texts on current theory and practice (and so students will read from the Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, as well as from Burke, Berlin, Biesecker, Mailloux, et al). But there will also be an opportunity to sample some of the most interesting current work being done--on the history of composition in America; on issues related to technology, race, and gender; on material rhetoric of one kind or another (i.e., the rhetoric of the body; disability studies; visual rhetoric); and on social movements, including the rhetoric of the civil rights movement. As a proseminar, English 502 is primarily a reading course; it is intended introduce the field to people who might like to take additional coursework in rhetoric, or to fulfill the "rhetoric or theory" requirement for students in other areas of English students. Participants will learn about local resources for the study of rhetoric and composition: e.g., library archives, the Center for Democratic Deliberation, and faculty members in English and Communication Arts and Sciences. And since one continuing focus of the course is pedagogy, it is likely to have a substantial impact on participants' teaching practices as well.
512
Writing Fiction
Charlotte Holmes
In this seminar designed for students pursuing an MFA degree in fiction writing, we will concentrate on the art and craft of short fiction. To that end, you will read four books of contemporary short stories, which we will carefully dissect in class prior to our workshop discussions of your own stories. I've not yet chosen the reading list, but books I've assigned in previous semesters include Jhumpa Lahiri's INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, Edward P. Jones' LOST IN THE CITY, Peter Hoeg's THE HISTORY OF DANISH DREAMS, Richard Pevear's new translation of Chekhov's stories, Ann Beattie's FOLLIES, W.G. Sebald's AUSTERLITZ, Shirley Hazzard's THE GREAT FIRE, Jamaica Kincaid's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER and HISTORY OF A SMALL PLACE, J.M. Coetzee's ELIZABETH COSTELLO...and so on.
If you are working on a novel and wish to discuss chapters in class, this is completely acceptable, although you will have to endure comments about how you could disguise a chapter as a short story and send it out for publication. If you are in the MFA program in poetry or nonfiction, have some experience writing fiction and a burning desire to write more of it, you will be in good company so long as you regard the work with the same seriousness of purpose and intensity that you have about poetry or nonfiction.
513
Writing Poetry
Julia Kasdorf
In this workshop we will read books produced early in the careers of various contemporary and Modern poets with an interest in discovering the ways that poets have gone about assembling collections of poetry, and with a concern for the decisions that an emerging author must make prior to the publication of the first manuscript. How does the title, order, arrangement into sections-or not-influence the movement and meaning of a book of poems? At what point do we begin to think beyond the individual poem and begin writing toward a greater whole? We'll consider journal publication as an initial move toward the first book. Students will also write a new poem every week for workshop, perform several memorized poems, and produce a final portfolio of revised work.
541 Caroline Eckhardt
543
Inscribing the Court:
Michael Kiernan
Donne, Jonson, Bacon, and King James
We will explore the works and days of three major writers at once attracted and conflicted by the self-styled British Solomon, King James I, and the complicated culture of his court. Readings include Donne's verse, letters, and sermons; Jonson's verse, notebooks, court masques and plays (Bartholomew Fair, Sejanus); Bacon's Essayes or Counsells, Civill and Morall, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis, letters, and Apophthegmes new and old.
Oral reports on major contemporaries will enrich the context of our discussions. Each seminarian will also write a review of a recent scholarly monograph on a topic relevant to our focus, vett a scholarly article, and research and present a final paper to the seminar.
548 Shakespeare
Garrett Sullivan
This course will focus on Shakespeare’s plays and poems in relation to five broadly defined topic areas that have been important for recent scholarship: text and author; body and world; race, ethnicity and religion; sexuality, gender and genre; and performance and appropriation. We might consider the significance of debates about whether Judaism is an early modern racial category for The Merchant of Venice; or examine the links between Galenic physiology, gender, and epic heroism in 1 Henry IV; or focus on the spectral afterlife of Hamlet in Nolan’s Memento or Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well; or take up a variety of approaches (ecocritical, cartographic, geographic) to the “green world” of comedies such as As You Like It. The ambition of this course is not merely to situate Shakespeare’s works in relation to a range of important critical questions or topics, but also to foster the generation of connections between seemingly disparate areas of scholarly inquiry.
Students will each be required to write response papers, make a presentation and write a final essay, as well as participate regularly.
550
Eighteenth-Century Proseminar, 1660-1800:
Clement Hawes
Literature in the Age of Enlightenment
This course will seek to orient students to the field of British Eighteenth-Century Studies. Our readings are organized around the works of well-known and influential authors, to be drawn from the following list of greatest hits: Addison, Behn, Boswell, Burke, Burney, Congreve, Defoe, Dryden, Edgeworth, Etherege, Farquhar, Fielding, Gay, Goldsmith, Gray, Hume, Johnson, Lewis, Locke, Mandeville, Pope, Radcliffe. Richardson, Rochester, Sheridan, Smart, Southerne, Steele, Sterne, Swift, Vanbrugh, Walpole, Wycherly.
We will discuss a wide range of criticism and scholarship, including the following: formalist, “old” historicist, marxist, feminist, deconstructive, “new” historicist, postcolonial, queer, and trans-national/global. Class lectures and discussions have the larger goal of helping you digest and assimilate your wide and deep readings. Our group discussions will be largely devoted to describing the state of play as regards criticism and scholarship in each area we cover and to identifying potential future areas for criticism and research. The critical history of any given text inevitably entails a dialectics between, to coin a phrase, blindness and insight. To understand that is to be in a position to take advantage of “openings”: holes and gaps in the criticism through which a nimble critic might run, like a broken-field runner seeking daylight. Our ultimate goal is to identify viable critical projects as yet to be done.
No prior acquaintance with the primary authors will be assumed. I will of course be providing you with a list both of their major works and the standard editions thereof. Week to week, there will be few assigned readings, in the usual sense, of our primary authors. Nevertheless, one thing you can expect from this course is a lot of reading. This is your chance to read until you are saturated at the cellular level. You may read what you want, and need, to read. Our seminar time will be dedicated to looking at unfolding critical approaches in relation to each author. This entails noting the cruxes in a given author or text – the famous topoi that have invited certain approaches -- as well as the various blind spots inherent in any given methodology. We will be reading criticism with an eye to critique.
We will of course discuss key books and decisive articles, some of which will be part of the assigned reading. In the same vein, we will give some attention in class as well to electronic databases such as ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), whose research potential has barely been tapped.
Your main assignment for the class will be to produce a mock thesis proposal (7-10 pages), complete with an annotated bibliography. This proposal must make clear, very concisely, how you situate your project in the field of previous work. You will have to show what has not been done and why it needs to be done.
There will be some smaller written and/or oral assignments as well, This will include an article critique.
561
Studies in the Romantic Movement
Nick Joukovsky
Poetry and Politics: Wordsworth and the Younger Romantics
This seminar will explore the intersection of poetry and politics in the Romantic period by examining the ways in which the younger generation of English Romantic writers--Byron, Shelley, Keats, Peacock, Hunt, and Reynolds--responded to the work and career of their older contemporary William Wordsworth. For the first few weeks, we will trace the various stages of Wordsworth's public career to about 1820, with emphasis on the reception of Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800), Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), and The Excursion (1814). The aim will be to place Wordsworth in context by seeing him as his younger contemporaries saw him. To this end, we will read some of his overtly political poetry, which is rarely if ever anthologized, along with the early critical attacks of Jeffrey and Hazlitt, as well as later satires such as Peacock’s Melincourt (1817) and Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third (1819), which respond directly to the changing politics of Wordsworth and his fellow “Lakers” Coleridge and Southey. Then, for the rest of the semester, we will explore some of the ways in which Wordsworth’s presence helped shape the literary careers of Byron and Hunt, Shelley and Peacock, Keats and Reynolds, despite their frequent disagreement with his poetic and political principles. Since all of these younger writers were politically liberal or radical, and since most of them knew each other, in some cases intimately, we will naturally want to investigate questions of intertextuality and influence in their work, as well as to consider whether they may be said to belong to a single movement or “school” that defined itself, at least in part, through its opposition to Wordsworth. There will also be opportunities to investigate the still largely ignored impact of Wordsworth on Romantic women poets, most obviously Felicia Hemans. While the course will survey a wide range of historical and cultural approaches to Romantic literature, it will provide a particularly good opportunity to study questions of literary politics, poetic influence, and intergenerational conflict.
Seminar papers will provide practice in several genres of scholarly writing. Each student will be expected to produce a short oral report accompanied by an annotated bibliography, a brief scholarly or critical note, a full-length article, and an oral conference paper based on that article.
562
The Nineteenth-Century "Poetess"
Emily Harrington
Recently "recuperated" from literary obscurity, the figure of the nineteenth-century "poetess" enjoyed tremendous contemporary popularity and even influence. This course will investigate how nineteenth-century critics and recent critics have both constructed the woman poet. Central to the course will be questions about how Women's struggles to define themselves as poets, to find audiences, and publish their work affected their artistic production. At the same time, we will consider how these poets both help to define and cut across conventional periodizations of "Romantic" and "Victorian," and how ideas about women poets developed over the course of the century. We will study Felicia Hemans, L.E.L. Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Christina Rossetti Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Michael Field, and Alice Meynell, among others. In addition to close attention to their works, we will conside
564
Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature:
Hester Blum
Personal Narratives
This course centers on the genre of the personal narrative in nineteenth-century American literature. We will read the first-person accounts of captives, paupers, sailors, slaves, travelers, and soldiers. In doing so, we will consider what compelled certain Americans to record and publish the history of their own lives; who read such stories; what made someone a worthy subject of literary attention; and what their individual narratives might reveal about collective American experience. We will also take up questions of narrative form, authenticity, and the professionalization of authorship in America. In addition to critical readings, primary texts may include Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast, Caroline Kirkland's A New Home; Who'll Follow?, James Riley’s Sufferings in Africa, Mary Jemison’s Narrative of Indian captivity, Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation; William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom; and Israel Potter's Life and Remarkable Adventures.
566
Satire and the New Black Aesthetic in the Contemporary African American Novel
Bernard Bell
The shifting cyclical pattern of residual, emerging, and dominant aesthetic movements in literature continues among some novelists and critics in the 21st-century as a New Black Aesthetic (NBA) that stresses a satirical vision of race, class, gender, and sexually transgressive hybridity and multiculturalism. The most recent movement for a NBA began in the late 1980s with a new generation that novelist Trey Ellis calls "cultural mulattoes," "blacks who grew up in white neighborhoods" but "now live in black neighborhoods," and "alienated (junior) intellectuals . . . educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures." In addition to Ellis, the NBA movement includes such novelists as Colson Whitehead, Percival Everett, Gayl Jones, Paul Beatty, Darius James, and Danzy Senna. Assuming that African American literature is fundamentally a socially symbolic linguistic construct, we will examine in this course the relationship of satire to the aesthetics in selected novels by Ishmael Reed, Trey Ellis, Colson Whitehead, Percival Everett, and Gayl Jones. We will focus primarily on how these novelists seek in different ways to move beyond African American social realism and vernacular tropes of core black personal and collective identity to African American middle-class satirical tropes that privilege individualism and indeterminate multiculturalism and sexuality.
570
The Writer as Critic:
Robin Becker
W 3:35-6:35, 59 Burrowes
Reviewing Contemporary Poetry, Fiction & Non-Fiction
573
Modernist Narrative and Modernist Lyric.
Robert Caserio
Professor Caserio. Notable modernists or proto-modernists were skilled or distinguished poets as well as novelists. Experiments in genre-bending were a result of such double achievement. The course will survey and analyze how conjunctions of narrative and lyric forms helped produce modernism and establish its character. The fact that novelists influenced poets--for example, Henry James' influence on Ezra Pound's Cantos--will be part of the consideration, as will distortions of literary history that leave out of account Hardy's major contribution to 20th century poetry. Hardy's case especially exemplifies critical myopia that results from dividing "the field" or "fields"--of Victorianism, of modernism--in ways that divorce experiments in prose fiction from innovations or achievements in verse. The novelist-poets to be studied: Kipling, Hardy, Ford Madox For! d, D. H. Lawrence, H. D. The influence of Robert Browning and James on Pound's The Cantos will be on the agenda; so will Kipling's influence on T. S. Eliot. Hart Crane's The Bridge and selections from Joyce's Finnegans Wake will be considered as specimens of epic's transformation into lyric. Social and political significances as well as aesthetic significances at stake, for modernism and for readers, in the narrative-lyric crossover (and of claims that "poetry must be as well written as prose") will be addressed throughout. The course will conclude with W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror, a text that, summing up the syllabus, expresses Auden's poetics of lyric in a voice mimicking Henry James' poetics of narrative. Requirements for the course: several short papers, a long paper (with an eye towards a publishable article about modernist fusions of lyric and narrative), a mid-term, and a final.
574
Modernist Duet: Ernest Hemingway and Kay Boyle
Sandra Spanier
For two writers occupying such different positions in the canon of 20th-century American literature and who never met, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) and Kay Boyle (1902-1992) have much in common. After the Great War, both fled Main Street America for France and joined the other literary expatriates in Paris in the 1920s. As zealous young modernists, they published their experimental early works in the same avant-garde “little magazines,” and both were recognized as especially promising talents of the so-called “lost generation” (a term they both disparaged). Whereas most of the “exiles” returned after the heyday of that legendary era, they continued to live abroad for most of their adult lives: Boyle in Europe, Hemingway in Cuba. Committed to opposing fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, after World War II both writers became suspect as “premature anti-fascists,” and the Cold War would make its impact on their lives and work. Both were active and astute participants in and observers of their times, bearing witness in their art.
Winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hemingway not only occupies a prominent place in the literary canon, but remains a globally recognized icon of popular culture. Boyle was well known for the scores of short stories that appeared in magazines ranging from This Quarter and transition to The New Yorker and Saturday Evening Post, and she published more than 40 books (only one a bestseller.) In terms of honors and awards, her "pedigree" as a distinguished writer is impeccable, but while she continued to write into the 1990s, she never achieved the widespread recognition that her contemporaries of the 1920s assumed would be her due.
Boyle and Hemingway are important and interesting for their distinctive contributions to modern American literature, and they provide a case study in the vagaries of literary reputation. We will examine their expatriate experiences and textual experiments of the 1920s; we will compare their narratives of "initiation" in Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and Boyle's female bildungsromane; we will examine their treatment of overtly political and social themes in light of modernism’s phobia of “sentimentality;” and we will explore the effects on the artist of celebrity and the lack of it. Throughout, we will balance a close examination of their texts with a consideration of the shifting contexts–personal, literary, social, political, economic–in which they were created.
584
Studies in Rhetoric: Postcritical Perspectives on Literacy Technologies
Stuart Selber
In the 1980s, rhetoric and writing studies concerned itself with the following question: Do computers make students better writers? One assumption in this period was that computers could be avoided if their disadvantages outweighed their advantages: After all, people could always fall back on the more tried-and true, and the more intellectually comfortable, technologies of print. Although print remains important, computers can no longer be understood as optional or alternative literacy environments. Indeed, for better or worse, computers have become primary spaces where much education happens. The Internet and other computer applications have succeeded in becoming an undeniable part of the academic landscape, leaving very few activities, structures, or processes unaffected. This seminar considers a series of questions that reflect this postcritical reality: How do literacy technologies mediate work, especially in academic settings? In what ways could they be considered to be socially and politically organized? What is at stake in the contexts in which literacy technologies are developed and used? What are the implications for rhetoric and writing studies? And for English studies more generally? What are productive uses to which literacy technologies can be put? We will investigate these questions (and others) through texts that situate technology historically, critically, and contextually. Students will produce an electronic project in addition to a more conventional academic essay. And they will participate in weekly online conferences.
597
“Theory is DeadLong Live Theory”:
Post Structuralist Rhetorical Practices
Jeffrey Nealon & Richard Doyle
...verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes...who is being hailed. Louis Althusser,
“Ideology and State Apparatuses”
"Hey, you there yea, you! You're interested in theory, cultural studies, all the big questions about the interrelations of culture, technology, biopower, information and language. But you're not sure what do do with that interest, now that the Chronicle of Higher Education sez (metaphorically speaking, of course) that "theory is dead?" One word, bub: rhetoric!" Philosophically and pedagogically, this course will examine the history and legacy of rhetoric the word, the practices, the history specifically within post structuralist theoretical discourse (most succinctly, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Guattari, Irrigary, Lyotard and Ronell), paying particular attention to the Greek roots of post structuralist rhetoric in the Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle as well as New and Old World shamanism and "sorcery". (Bataille, Artaud, Deleuze & Guattari, Taussig) Institutionally, the course hopes to build on a growing interest in theory within the field of rhetoric and composition that builds on the long interest of theory in rhetoric. specifically, this course will respond to questions and scholarship focused by the inaugural "Rhetorical/Theory" conference, organized by former PSU PhD students to be held in October 2008
597
On the PostColony - Readings from Africa and the Caribbean
Aldon Nielsen
“We are here because you were there.” So read a sign held by a protestor at a rally in England some years ago, making much the same point that is visible in the title of one prominent anthology of postcolonial studies, The Empire Writes Back. While there is very little argument about the historical fact of colonialism, there has been considerable debate over the nature, even the existence of, the postcolonial. Still more contentious has been the argument over the “blowback,” the effects within metropolitan literatures both of colonialism itself and of literatures emanating from the former colonies, perhaps no better exemplified than when the anti-immigrant British politician Margaret Thatcher found herself offering police protection to the embattled postcolonial novelist Salman Rushdie. In its broadest sense, postcolonial theory is based, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin propose, “in the historical fact of European colonialism and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise.” Theory, as these same authors point out, arises too, and perhaps arises first, in the creative literature authored by those artists who have been subjects of, and to, colonialism, citizens of an emergent world finding its own new orders. This seminar will offer a consideration of competing theories of the postcolonial in the context of readings from Africa and from the Caribbean. While all required readings will be in English, we will study texts from the Anglophone, Francophone and Spanish language communities. Writers studied may include Antonio Benitez-Rojo, C.L.R. James, Achille Mbembe, Wole Soyinka, George Lamming, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Jamaica Kincaid, Wilson Harris, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Edwige Danticat and/or others. Each student will be responsible for seminar presentations on the assigned readings. There will also be a seminar paper on a topic selected by the student and approved by the instructor.
Engl 597
Hemispheric American Studies
Sean X. Goudie
Writes José Martí in “Nuestra América” (1891), “The prideful villager thinks his hometown contains the whole world. . . . Whatever is left of that sleepy hometown in America must awaken. [. . .] From the Rio Bravo to the Strains of Magellan, the Great Semi, seated on a condor’s back, has scattered the seeds of the new America across the romantic nations of the continent and the suffering islands of the Sea!” In his late nineteenth century moment and our twenty-first century one, Martí suggests a reconsideration of the formation of the hemisphere’s cross-cultural imaginaries and identities away from bounded national estimations in favor of a “new America” framework. Such a cartography would take stock of the manifold and shifting relations between and across the nations and peoples comprising the hemisphere’s islands and continents. How do Martí and his inheritors challenge traditional, U. S.-centered models for defining the geographic and temporal borders of American cultural studies? What are the possibilities (and potential pitfalls) of imagining, ala Martí, a “new America” literary and cultural studies? This graduate course seeks to answer such questions by treating primary works and scholarship produced by figures traveling across the Americas from the 18th century onward. In order properly to locate them in their relevant comparative Americas frameworks, such figures and their texts invite, whether explicitly or implicitly, the reader to develop a range of new competencies—historic, political, economic, cultural, and linguistic among them. As we proceed, we will identify the topics and trends of, as well as propose possible future pathways for, scholarship being conducted according to the exciting, if decidedly unwieldy, field of hemispheric American studies. Course requirements include in-class presentations, regular response papers, and a final researched essay (approximately 25 pp in length).
