Previous Courses
WINTER 2013 |FALL 2012 | SPRING/SUMMER 2012 | WINTER 2012 | FALL 2011 | SPRING/SUMMER 2011 | WINTER 2011| FALL 2010 | SPRING/SUMMER 2010 | WINTER 2010 | FALL 2009 | SPRING/SUMMER 2009 | WINTER 2009 | FALL 2008 | SPRING/SUMMER 2008 | WINTER 2008 | FALL 2007 | SPRING/SUMMER 2007 | WINTER 2007 | FALL 2006 | SPRING/SUMMER 2006 | WINTER 2006 | FALL 2005 | SPRING/SUMMER 2005 | WINTER 2005
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Jews have been part of American history since the mid-seventeenth century. Yet only with the massive emigration from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, when between 1880 and 1920 the Jewish population in the United States grew from 250,000 to nearly four million, did Jewish writers emerge as a significant force within our literary history. Beginning with Emma Lazarus’s often-quoted 1883 verses for the Statue of Liberaty—“Give me your tired, your poor, the huddled masses yearning to breath free”—we will trace the origins and development of Jewish American literature, in all of its genres, over the last 130 years. Besides reading a host of fascinating writers—from Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska to Philip Roth and Allegra Goodman, from Emma Lazarus to Allen Ginsberg, from Clifford Odets to David Mamet—we will consider some of the larger cultural issues which they engaged: immigration, assimilation, urbanization, devastation, suburbanization, and secularization.
ENG 614: Traditional and Contemporary Slave Narratives
The slave narrative is recognized as one of the founding genres in the African-American literary tradition. It is a genre that was principally meant to speak to the horrors of slavery in the US, and thus aid in the abolition movement. Still, in the 20thand 21st centuries, even in the absence of American chattel slavery, the genre persists. This course will look at foundational slave narratives, as well as the signifi cations made upon the slave narrative in contemporary literature from the US and Canada. It is designed for students to begin investigating the following question: what function(s) does the neo-slave narrative serve at our contemporary moment in history?
Required texts*:
Kindred by Octavia Butler.
The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke.
Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.
Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
Property by Valerie Martin.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams.
* All these, along with secondary readings
ENG 651: Caribbean Literature
This graduate seminar will focus on reading and analyzing works of Caribbean literature in English or English translation. Topics will include women's writing, colonial and postcolonial discourse, travel narratives, exile and performances of identity. A central consideration of the course will be the critical analysis of how the Caribbean identity has been constructed and continually reconstructed through migration, exile, and political nation development as well as through economics, tourism, and cross-cultural influences. Our readings will focus on writers from the Windrush Generation (post WWII) through to modern day. We will also incorporate elements of music (Calypso and Reggae), in order to investigate the dynamic relationship between music and literature. By the end of the course, students should have a greater appreciation for how literature constructs regional and national identities and how writers engage in issues of political, aesthetic and social discourse. Authors may include Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Kwame Dawes, Samuel Selvon, Maryse Conde, Kamau Brathwaite and more.
ENG 661: Chaucer
This semester, our primary focus will be on Chaucer’s best known text, The Canterbury Tales. We will begin by acquainting ourselves with Chaucer’s life, times, work, and language (Middle English); then we will move to analysis of the tales. Although we will concentrate on the ways in which Chaucer’s masterpiece reflects its historical context, we will also consider how the stories can be (and have been) read through a variety of critical lenses.
ENG 655: History of Literary Criticism and Theory
In this course we will examine changing ideas about literature—what it is, what it means and how to read it—from ancient times to the present, and in the recursive and reactive cycles in between. The course supports the M.A. program’s commitment to deepen your knowledge, sharpen your critical skills and strengthen your writing. It aims to equip the reader and especially the teacher of English with a variety of approaches to opening up and exploring literary texts, so it seeks to locate various modes of thinking about literature in the history of human thought. While in the course of just one semester, we can’t hope even to sample every useful critical point of view, it’s an aspiration of our course, in the comparison and collision of literary ideas, to equip each of us more fully to encounter and engage further critical perspectives.
RequiredTexts:
The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, David Richter, editor, third edition (other editions are fine, but the pagination in the assignments below may not be accurate).
Caitlin Horrocks, This is Not Your City
ENG 661: Author Seminar on A. Byatt and John Fowles
A. S. Byatt and John Fowles are two of the most influential and widely read novelists of the last few decades. Their works reflect critical modes that have shaped the direction of contemporary novel; and these same works have been formative of the style and direction contemporary literature has taken in recent years. This class will look at the signature texts of these authors—A. S. Byatt’s highly intertextual and fabulist work, Possession; and John Folwes’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the first postmodern novel written in English. It will examine other texts by and explore their techniques of parody, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction, pastiche, fabulism, and other features related to novel and theory—strategies Byatt and Fowles explored and popularized with their best-selling works of fiction and the highly successful film versions of the written works.
RequiredTexts:
ENG 663: Shakespeare
Ben Lockerd
Students in this seminar will read several plays in order to consider the range of Shakespeare’s genius. The focus will be on the romantic comedies and the romances (or tragic-comedies), which Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. The course will also include two tragedies as well, and the Shakespeare Festival play. Tentative list of plays:
Text: The Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel
The Comedy of Errors
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard III
Much Ado about Nothing
All’s Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
Hamlet
King Lear
Pericles
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
Spring/Summer 2012 l Top l
English 624: The Graphic Novel in Contemporary Culture
Robert Rozema
1st 6 Weeks of Summer
Whether you are new to graphic novels or have been collecting them for years, this graduate seminar promises to give you more ways of thinking about this emerging medium.
In its relatively short lifespan, the graphic novel has earned both critical and popular acclaim, addressed a range of serious subjects in a variety of genres, and developed its own visual grammar and narrative practices.
You’ll read both iconic and lesser-known graphic novels, learning to recognize the formal, visual components of graphic novels, explore the possibilities and limitations of this new narrative medium, critique the representation of race, class, and gender within graphic novels, and write critical responses to graphic novels in both print and visual media.
English 661: Author Seminar on Thomas Hardy
James Persoon
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had three careers in his 88 years, each spanning roughly a third of his life: until his mid-thirties he was an up-and-coming architect and aspiring but unsuccessful poet; in his middle years he became a successful, even eminent, Victorian novelist; and then in the last thirty years of his life he made himself into a major 20th century poet.
From the first period of his life we will look at his rejected poetry, read selections of Claire Tomlin’s biography of Hardy, and watch a film of his second published novel, the delightful Under the Greenwood Tree, published by him anonymously and mistaken by reviewers for the work of George Eliot, high praise indeed for a beginning writer. From the middle period we will read two of his most powerful novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd. Finally we will look at a modern “translation” of Hardy in the graphic novel Tamara Drewe, by British cartoonist for The Guardian, as well as plunge into as many of the 1000 poems in The Complete Poems as we can manage. If we don’t read all 1000, never fear, as Philip Larkin remarked, “there’s a lifetime ahead to keep Hardy by your bed,” and dipping in at random one will always find something new and interesting.
English 651: Literary Period Seminar: The Age of Decolonization
David Alvarez
2nd 6 Weeks of Summer
This course explores an array of literary texts that emerge from the matrix of one of the most consequential historical experiences of the 20th century: de-colonization, or the attainment of political independence in all continents by peoples who had hitherto been ruled by European colonial powers. This transformation of numerous polities around the world had a significant literary dimension, as it was often writers who articulated the hopes and aspirations of millions of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who sought to chart a path for their nations in the aftermath of colonial rule. These writers—such as Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe or Martinique’s Aimé Césaire or Indonesia’s Pramoedya Ananta Toer –also produced texts that articulated the manifold disappointments of the period after independence, when in many instances external neo-colonization interference and homegrown post-colonial autocracy and corruption became the order of the day. In addition to examining a representative cluster of literary writings by such authors, this course will provide you with an overall understanding of the character and significance of decolonization. Furthermore, in addition to treating decolonization as a periodizing label (one that refers to the attainment of independence between the late 1940’s and the late 1980’s), we will regard it as a term that can embrace a wider range of meanings, as for example it does when the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo notes that formerly colonized peoples must “de-colonize” their minds.
What can you expect to encounter and acquire in taking this course?
- An exciting array of literary texts from around the world that come to us from contexts in which literary expression has mattered not just to individuals but to whole peoples.
- A coherent historical framework in which to situate such texts
- Music and film from the countries whose texts we shall read
- Exposure to notable currents of post-colonial literature
- Critical writing on such literature
- Much else besides!
Here are some of the texts that we may be delving into together:
- Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest
- Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman
- Djebar, Assia. Children of the New World
- Cardenal, Ernesto. Flights of Victory
- Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place
- Amiry, Suad. Sharon and My Mother-in-Law
English 661: Flannery O’Connor Immerson Studies
Avis Hewitt
2nd 6 Weeks of Summer
This course will serve as an in-depth study of the works and environs of Flannery O’Connor, both the bookish and, if you choose, an experiential immersion. For five weeks we will study not only O’Connor’s fiction in Collected Works (1988), but also several signature essays in the vast critical context that surrounds her legacy, especially criticism authored by scholars whom we will then meet in Milledgeville, Georgia during the 6th weeks of our course. Students interested in focused study of O’Connor are, of course, not obliged to make the trip. We will meet during exam week to make up the hours that class does not meet in Michigan during week six. For those who do choose to make the trip, the following opportunities will be in play:
- Multiple work sessions in the Georgia College O’Connor archives with an introductory talk by Stephen Driggers, the author of The Manuscripts of Flannery O’Connor at Georgia College (1989).
- A trolley tour of lovely, historic Milledgeville that includes O’Connor’s home in town, her church, and Memory Hill where she is buried.
- A visit to Andalusia and tlaks by Craig Amason, executive director, and Mark Jorgensen of the farm outside of Milledgeville where O’Connor spent most of her writing life and where many of her stories are set.
- Seminar lunches with several major figures in O’Connor studies whose work on O’Connor we will have read during the five weeks of our course.
We will aim for accommodating both beginning and advanced entry points to O’Connor’s work and contexts.
English 624: Genre Seminar: Tolkien, Lewis, et. al.
Time: Tuesdays 6:00 – 8:50 p.m. (College of Health Sciences Bldg., Room 113)
In this seminar, we will study various Christian writers of the 20th Century. The course includes the following required works:
All Hallows Eve, Charles Williams; All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy; Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh; Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot; Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers; That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis; The Bachelors, Muriel Spark; Father Brown: The Essential Tales, G .K. Chesterton; The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene; The Return of the King, J. R .R. Tolkien, The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy; Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor.
ENG 651: Donne & the Metaphysicals
ENGLISH 661: Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
During a literary career that spanned five decades Ralph Ellison published only two collections of essays and a single novel—but what a novel. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Invisible Man’s publication, we will study this magnificent work and its many literary/cultural contexts. Besides considering Ellison’s literary forebears (Melville , Faulkner, Wright) , peers (Baldwin, Bellow), and descendants (Morrison, Wideman), we will examine the artistic and social contexts from which Invisible Man emerged and which it addressed: Southern folk culture, the Jim Crow South, jazz, literary modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Communist Party. We will also read a biography of Ellison, some of his uncollected stories and perhaps Juneteenth, the posthumous “novel” pieced together by his literary executor.
Texts
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
___________, Shadow and Act (1964)
___________, Going to the Territory (1986)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (2007)
Eric Sundquist, Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1995)
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All courses are subject to change.
Please contact us if you have any questions about the schedule.
Fall 2011 |TOP|
English 600: Graduate Literary Studies Seminar
This course is an introduction to graduate literary studies. We will explore some of the most important issues, statements, and debates in contemporary critical theory, noting the ways in which the discipline of English Studies has changed over time. Students will produce a seminar paper, most likely dealing with a text of their own choosing, with the overt goal of sharpening their critical, methodological, research, and writing skills in preparation for future literary study at the graduate level.
This course will examine in depth the work of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), and Eudora Welty (1909-2001)—three major 20th-century forces on the U. S. literary scene in the decades surrounding WWII. The state and fate of women at that time has frequently been judged regressive because they gave up the economic independence the war years had offered out of “Rosie the Riveter” necessity, yielding their places in the work force to the returning veterans and seeking meaning in marriage to their homes (“housewives”). Preeminent Princeton critic Elaine Showalter has likened them to the schizophrenic protagonist of the 1957 film classic, The Three Faces of Eve, in their intimidated attempts to create viable roles for themselves from the kinder, küche, kirche notion of the legitimate realm of women. Facing the unprecedented fright of a post-nuclear world where the now-defeated Axis powers had shockingly been succeeded by the threat of world-wide Communism, people, regardless of gender, found security in prescribed roles—whether “organization man” or “little woman.” Women’s voices were muted in the society, but not at the typewriter.
Eudora Welty, who educated herself at Mississippi State, University of Wisconsin, and Columbia, worked for the WPA as a photographer, capturing the world of the poor along the Mississippi Delta and publishing her first short story collection, A Curtain of Green, in 1941, one of nine collections and six novels and five works of nonfiction to her credit. Shirley Jackson of California, New York, and Vermont, burst dramatically onto the literary scene when The New Yorker published “The Lottery” on 26 June 1948, a success de scandale that occasioned a greater number of letters from its readership than any other story in the magazine’s history. Her relentless production of fiction of psychological suspense and horrific social commentary that “The Lottery” exemplifies resulted in six novels and over a hundred short stories before her death. The sophistication of Jackson’s literary art makes it a mystery as haunting as much of her best fiction that she has been noticeably neglected. Flannery O’Connor of Milledgeville, Georgia, published two story collections and two novels in her fourteen-year career. In 1969 and 1979, her literary executor, Sally Fitzgerald, published O’Connor’s essays and her letters, respectively. Their power, depth, humor, and clarity have garnered O’Connor an almost inviolable control over her reception in the decades since her death. The grotesque in her fiction witnesses to our blind pride as it creates distortions of the whole person that, created in the image of God, we were meant to be.
Our work will entail reading extensively each of these three authors and making use of Elaine Tyler May’s 2008 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War to discover commonalities while critiquing the perhaps facile categorizing of Jackson’s gothic, O’Connor’s grotesque, and Welty’s mythic ways into the imagined worlds their genius provides us. PRESENTATIONS, SEMINAR PAPER, FINAL EXAM.
ENG 651: American Renaissance Course Description
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Spring/Summer 2011 |TOP|
English 651: Beowulf
Everyone's read it - but this will be your opportunity to really delve into this iconic Anglo-Saxon poem. Over six weeks this summer we'll read the poem carefully, explore it in multiple contexts (including historical, social, political and manuscript, to name just a few...), and assess its place in the English canon. We'll pay specific attention to the critical response Beowulf has generated from J.R.R. Tolkien's influential "The Monsters and the Critics" through to the poem's modern representations and recreations in literature, film, and video games.
For students with some Old English language background, a translation component will be optionally available. However, no prior knowledge of Old English is necessary, and all texts will be available in Modern English.
English 651: Pre-colonial Roots, Colonial Routes, and Post-colonial Rewritings: The Tempest and its Travels
In this course we will first grapple with how the rich particulars of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, speak to the historical relationship between the global North and the global South, a theme that recurs in much of the text’s recent critical reception, some of which we also delve into. We will then read two literary engagements with Shakespeare’s drama from the French- and English-speaking Caribbean respectively, namely, A Tempest, by the Martinican poet and playwright Aime Césaire, and Middle Passages, by the Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite. The Tempest was written during the early stages of the five hundred year period known to historians as The Age of European Expansion. In contrast, the responses to it by Césaire and Brathwaite hail from the second half of the 20th century when colonized peoples contested the prerogatives of the colonial powers and struggled to achieve freedom from colonialism. In their different ways Césaire and Brathwaite both played crucial roles in the cultural movement for decolonization and in examining their work we will consider why The Tempest exerted such a profound influence on their outlook and on that of many of their peers. Unlike Césaire and Brathwaite, the last author whose work we will read, Ingrid de Kok, does not address The Tempest directly in her writings. Nonetheless, in her poetic reflections on home and exile, on identity and otherness, and on the relationship between colonial trauma and post-colonial reconciliation, she takes up themes that resonate with post-colonial readings of the play. Moreover, in geographical terms her poems will in a sense bring us full circle since after having begun the course with Shakespeare’s imaginative evocation of Renaissance Italians in colonial settings we will conclude with de Kok’s ruminations on settler colonialism in her native (South) Africa and on her relationship both with her ancestral Northern Europe and with Italy, the country in which she has written much of her recent work.
This course will be of especial interest to students who are keen to explore the cross-cultural dialogue between texts from the canon of British literature and texts from the literatures of formerly colonial countries. It will also be of particular interest to students who wish to learn more about some of the core thematic and formal concerns of post-colonial literary studies. More generally, but no less valuably, it will be of distinct interest to students who want to probe the interpenetration between historical experience and literary form.
Here are the main readings for the course:
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Shakespeare. The Tempest. (Norton Critical Edition, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman.)
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Aimé Césaire, A Tempest. (Translation of Une tempête)
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Kamau Brathwaite. Middle Passages.
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Ingrid de Kok, Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems.
English 661: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, A Literary Marriage
A study of two major voices in 20th-century literature (especially poetry) who happened to be married to each other, the English Ted Hughes and the American Sylvia Plath. We will examine their work through the creative interaction of their mutual lives, using Diana Middlebrook's wonderful biography of the marriage, Her Husband.
English 661: T. S. Eliot
Time: Tuesdays 6:00 – 9:20, 12-week period
This seminar will study Eliot’s poetry, plays, and also his prose writing (especially literary criticism and cultural essays).
Texts:
--T. S. Eliot. The Complete Poems and Plays (1909 – 1950). Harcourt.
--T. S. Eliot. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. Harcourt.
--T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land. Ed. Michael North. Norton, 2001.
--Eliot. The Confidential Clerk.
--Eliot. The Elder Statesman.
--Russell Kirk. Eliot and His Age. 2nd ed. ISI Books, 2008.
Please note: Prof. Lockerd will be traveling to Paris for the Eliot Society meeting there the week of July 18-22, so there will be no class meeting that week. We will schedule an extra meeting the week after that, probably on Friday evening.
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Winter 2011 |TOP|
ENG 616: World Literatures
This class will negotiate the term "world literature" through the framework of postcolonial studies. The term "postcolonial" has been assigned to a group of literatures that have in common a history of European colonization. The theoretical approach examines the impact colonization and decolonization has had on identity (cultural, national, linguistic), migration, issues of exile, diaspora, and contemporary sociopolitical and geopolitical constructions of nation. We will read a variety of novels, poetry, and critical essays from Africa, the West Indies, Europe, and India.
ENG 614: Literature of American Minorities
Slave Narratives to Neo-Slave Narratives
The slave narrative is recognized as one of the founding genres in the African-American literary tradition. Principally a genre meant to speak to the horrors of slavery in the US, and thus aid in the abolition movement. Still, in the 20th and 21st centuries, even in the absence of American chattel slavery, the genre persists. This course will look at foundational slave narratives, as well as the significations made upon the slave narrative in contemporary literature from the US and Canada. It is designed for students to begin investigating the following question: what function(s) does the neo-slave narrative serve at our contemporary moment in history?
Required texts*:
*All these, along with secondary readings.
ENG 624: Romance
The long medieval narratives of chivalric adventure came to be called “romances” because the most famous of them were written in romance languages, and that term has since been used to identify a rather loosely defined genre, one which actually began long before the Middle Ages. Some of the characteristics or motifs of the genre are as follows:
Some closely-related genres:
ENG 624: Poetry
This course will focus on the pleasures and intellectual challenges of reading modernist poetry. Specifically, the course will explore the genealogy of some of the numerous ways of writing modernist poetry and of being a modern poet. Since modernist poetry involves re-making or making new a number of traditions that preceded it, the course will focus on the modernist dialogue between tradition and innovation. As we read, enjoy, and interpret these poems, we will explore modernist poets' attitudes towards formal and free verse, spoken and visual poetry, personality (feelings, the self) and impersonality (tradition), as well as the roles of poetry in the modern world (questions of audience, politics, and/or popularity). As readers, we will also grapple with the special qualities of poetry as a genre and the exciting challenges of reading modern poetry.
MAIN TEXT:
Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1
ISBN: 0-393-97791-9
ON RESERVE:
Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine
1908-1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Longenbach, James. “Modern Poetry” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed.
Michael Levenson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 199. 100-127.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Pound / Stevens: whose era?” New Literary History 13 (1982): 485-514.
Rpt. In The Dance of the Intellect. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 1-32.
---. “ ‘Pound / Stevens: Whose Era?’ Revisited.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 26.2 (Fall
2002): 135-142.
---. “ ‘Easter 1916’: Yeats’s First War Poem.” The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War
Poetry. Ed. Tim Kendall. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 227-241.
Scott, Bonnie Kime, ed. Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
ENG 661: American Literature and the Holocaust
For six decades American writers and filmmakers have faced a representational dilemma: how to depict an event whose significance continues to grow, even being termed a metaphor of our times, yet one which challenges the imagination’s very limits? How to confront the Holocaust?
This course will explore the history of American literary and cinematic engagement with Auschwitz, what has been called the Americanization of the Holocaust. We will study the entire sweep of this response, from the immediate post-war years to the present, giving particular attention to the complex cultural dynamics which have impacted these works and their receptions.
TEXTS
John Hersey, The Wall (1950)
Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank (1955)
Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker (1961)
Norma Rosen, Touching Evil (1969)
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979)
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (1981-83)
Arthur Miller, Broken Glass (1994)
Goodrich and Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank (revised by Wendy Kesselman) (1995)
Thane Rosenbaum, Elijah Visible (1999)
Hilene Flanzbaum, The Americanization of the Holocaust (1999)
Michael Bernard-Donals, An Introduction to Holocaust Studies (2006)
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Fall 2010 | TOP |
ENG 605: American Literature
Avis Hewitt
“Deconstructing Dixie: Dust, Desire, and Divinity in Fiction of the American South.”
From grits, greens, sausage gravy, and the grotesque to julep, magnolias, chinaberry trees, and sharecropping, the South has served as a seductive site of opulence, sensuality, and savagery in the collage of our country’s cultural spaces. This course will unpack conventional perspectives: who has fostered them, who they serve, what supplies their power. Michael Kreyling’s provocative 1998 monograph, Inventing Southern Literature, argues for the construction of “a region that is not one,” seeing the post-bellum South as a creation of the Fugitive Agrarian forces at Vanderbilt in the 1920s and formalized in their essay collection, I’ll Take My Stand in 1930. Patricia Yaeger in her 2000 Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990, replaces the “official narrative of Southern literature” with an inclusive one that grows organically from Southern soil. Gary Ciuba uses René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to critique the South’s propensity for destruction in Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction (2007). To examine these and other conceptions of Southern literary dynamics, we will read six or so of these major works: William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom's Children (1936), the Miranda selections from Katherine Anne Porter’s Collected Stories (1965), Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (1979), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997). In addition we will read one short story per class session. These will be available on e-reserve and include texts such as the following: Faulkner’s “Dry September,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “Pantaloon in Black”: Richard Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star”; Eudora Welty’s “The Wide Net,” “Petrified Man,” ”No Place for You, My Love” and “Why I Live at the P.O.”; Carson McCullers’ “A Tree, A Rock, a Cloud”; Flannery O’Connor’s “A View of the Woods,” “The Displaced Person,” and “”Greenleaf”; Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time”; Ernest Gaines’ “The Sky Is Gray”; Alice Walker’s “To Hell with Dying,” “Sweet Jerome,” and “Strong Horse Tea”; Bobby Ann Mason’s “Shiloh”; Doris Betts’ “The Ugliest Pilgrim”; Lee Smith’s “The Bubba Stories”; Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory”; and Tim Gautreaux’s “Welding with Children.” The course requirements will consist in the main of multiple presentations with handouts (both summaries and researched analyses), a short paper on a short story, and a seminar paper on one of the major works of the course.
ENG 655: History of Literary Criticism
“Literature is equipment for living.” –Kenneth Burke
Course Description: This course examines changing ideas about literature—what it is, what it means and how to read it—from ancient times to the present. It supports the M.A. program’s commitment to deepen knowledge, sharpen critical skills and strengthen writing. It aims to equip the reader and especially the teacher of English with a variety of approaches to opening up and exploring literary texts. And it seeks to locate the various modes of thinking about literature in the history of human thought.
Texts:
The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, David Richter, editor, third edition.
Patricia Clark, She Walks into the Sea, Michigan State University Press [short story collection yet to be collected]
Course Requirements:
Midterm exam: short answer questions about defining literary-critical terms, dating eras, identifying passages, etc.); week of October 4
Paper #1: Analyze the ideas of one literary theorist; list five predominant works the theorist and his/her audience were reading, and explain how those ideas might help and/or hinder you in reading, understanding and/or teaching a work from …. 6 to 9 pages; you may wish to read more of the writings of the theorist under discussion. Week of October 25.
Paper #2: A paper comparing the ideas of two literary theorists from two different eras, explaining how their ideas might help and/or hinder you in reading, understanding and/or teaching a work from ……9 to 12 pages. MLA or Chicago Manual style. Week of November 15.
Class presentation: 10-15 minutes, exploring further writings by a critic or a school or criticism, or of secondary sources on that critic or school; essential to the presentation is explaining how the critic or school might apply to a Clark poem or a short story from the collection. An outline of your presentation and a one-page annotated bibliography is due to your classmates and me (electronic form is fine) at the prior class.
Take home Final: due by scheduled final exam period.
ENG 661: Milton
This semester, our focus will be on Paradise Lost, Milton's epic story of the Fall through which he attempts to “assert Eternal Providence/ And justify the ways of God to men.” In order to better understand the theological issues that arise in the poem, we will begin with a study of Milton's treatise, De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine). From there, we will devote approximately one week to each of the twelve books that make up Paradise Lost; in consequence, much of our time together will be spent in textual analysis based on close reading. At the end of the semester, students will either submit a scholarly essay of 10-12 pages (suitable for presentation at a conference) or take a comprehensive final examination.
Required Texts:
ParadiseLost, ed. G. Teskey (Norton Critical Edition)
De Doctrina Christiana (edition to be determined)
The Cambridge Companion to Milton
ENG 651: Old English Language/Literature
While Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf is an excellent way to initially experience that great poem, nothing compares to actually being able to read and work with the original Old English text. This course will offer both an introduction to the Old English language and the opportunity to examine the texts of the Anglo-Saxon period from a literary analysis perspective. Part of each class will be devoted to linguistic matters: namely, acquiring a basic understanding of Old English morphology and syntax, and forming a rudimentary lexicon for reading Old English poetry. The rest of each class will be devoted to reading a wide variety of Old English texts (some in the original, others in translation) in the context of current scholarly trends in the field. The major linguistic text will be Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English (Blackwell); the major critical text will be Reading Old English Texts, edited by Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe (Cambridge). Editions and/or translations of additional texts in Old English, including Beowulf, will also be used.
ENG 663: Shakespeare
Spring/Summer 2010 | TOP |
ENG 600: Introduction to Grad Studies
This course is designed to introduce students to graduate studies in English and to prepare them for work both in M. A. and Ph. D. programs. The course is divided into four sections: graduate studies, scholarship in literature and language, the teaching of literature, and the recent literary theory movement that has now evolved into what is called the post-theory period of literary criticism. For the first section, we will read Graduate Studies for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities by Gregory Semenza, which introduces such topics as developing a graduate career, engaging in graduate seminars, writing a seminar paper, publishing, and the academic job market. We will then read the MLA Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, which is arranged according to current perspectives in scholarship and writing. The course will also introduce the student to literary theory by examining Terry Eagleton’s work Literary Theory, which is an overview and critique of literary theoretical schools, incorporating his later views as published in his recent After Theory. We will discuss the uses and limitations of theories as well as the state of criticism today after the theoretical movement of the late twentieth century. Last, we will discuss the teaching of literature on the university level by examining Elaine Showalter’s excellent work, Teaching Literature.
Students will engage in various activities: seminar reports, discussions, examinations, and, most importantly, the writing of a seminar paper on a subject of their choice.
This course will be useful as an introduction to those who are currently students in GVSU’s graduate program in English, those planning to apply to Ph. D. programs, and those who see their careers as involving the teaching of and writing about literature.
ENG 651: British Poetry of the First World War, 1914-1918
There are a few canonical soldier-poets from these four years who've been looked at extensively--Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg, and about two dozen more who are significant, which is quite a rich achievement for so short a time (three of those major five didn't survive the war). But the influence of the Great War did not only involve front-line soldiers, nor just Brits, nor just men, nor did it all end in 1918. Major literary figures such as Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence, Hardy, Forster, Hemingway, Pound, Cummings, Joyce, Yeats--well, almost anyone alive in those years, whether male or female, war supporter or conscientious objector, intimately involved or peripheral--all were affected. Even seemingly other-worldly works from decades later, such as Felix Salton's Bambi or J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, are deep evocations of their writers' experiences in that war. Poetry was the favored form in popular literature of the time, from newspaper poems to popular song. The number of servicemen's and civilian newsletters was astounding, many letters were exchanged and diaries kept, and all of them seemed to copy out or create bits of verse. Probably the briefness and immediacy of poetry made it the favored form. The painter Isaac Rosenburg, for example, couldn't get canvas in the trenches, but he wrote poems on the backs of envelopes. The novels and memoirs came a decade later, at the end of the 1920s and into the 30s. We're are going to attempt to look at the sweep of the high and the low, the good and the bad in the poetry of the period, using the anthology Minds At War. We'll also study the best poet of the time in depth, using the complete poems of Owen. For a final project, students may examine any writer or topic of the period and venture into other genres if they wish, such as the wonderful memoirs of Vera Brittain, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden. Like most areas of study, it is enough for a lifetime but repays even a short look.
ENG 661: The Mediterranean in English Literature
The Mediterranean Sea (The Sea in the Middle of the Earth), whose very name indicates its centrality in the history and culture of the Western World, has been in its at least three thousand years recorded history the site of some of the greatest political, economic, scientific, and cultural developments in the world. Starting with the Middle East states and empires, the magnificent Egypt, the miracles of Greece and Rome, through the Medieval Christianity and Islam, all the way to its loss of primacy to the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds, the Mediterranean has been and continues to be the cradle of the cultural achievements of the West. In this context, together with the cultures of all the European, Near East and Middle East countries, English culture, in general, and its literature, in particular, have been strongly influenced by the events and "products" of that incredibly complex, diverse, and multicultural pert of the world.
This course will explore the incredibly rich echoes of the Mediterranean Sea and spirit in English literature, from Medieval hagiographies, through Chaucer's Italian and other Mediterranean literary "trips," the English Renaissance drama, obsessed with the images of the Mediterranean lands and characters, all the way to some of the big names of the 20th century, such as T. S. Eliot, Auden, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Durrell, and a host of others.
The course requires only eleven (11) books, all of them quite inexpensive, one of which is the textbook, but it will include numerous handouts, visual materials, and musical exhibits.
The teacher promises an exciting course and a memorable "trip" across and around the Mediterranean, with little or no seasickness!
ENG 624: The American Short Story
The American Short Story will serve as the focus for the ENG 624: Genre Studies course this summer session. We will begin with the first formal short stories, or tales, as they were referred to by writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, and progress to multicultural contemporary fiction by Sherman Alexie, Lan Samantha Chang, and Edwidge Danticat, among others. Along the way, we will consider the development of the short story genre along two lines: the shifting nature of and experimentation with narrative form and structure; and the attention to content that charts historical and cultural shifts in American society. Brief essays by writers and critics of the genre will supplement our reading of the stories themselves.
Winter 2010 l TOP l
ENG 603: British Literature
Arthur: A King for All Ages
This course will examine literature written in what we now call Great Britain from the early medieval period to the present. The focal point for this course will be the quasi-historical, mostly legendary figure of King Arthur. He has evolved from a Celtic warlord to a medieval king and his court at Camelot has proved a rich source of literary inspiration. His popularity has only grown in the past few decades as he has been played by Sean Connery and Clive Owen in film and turned into a high-school jock in a popular young-adult novel series. The major question this course will explore is: Why Arthur? What is so enduring about this particular figure that we’re still telling and retelling his story over a thousand years?
During the semester, we will survey British literature via Arthurian texts. Some texts may include the Welsh Culwyc ac Olwen, Wace’s Roman de Brut, Layamon’s Brut, the Stanzaic and Alliterative Morte Arthure, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, parts of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Dryden’s King Arthur or The British Worthy, Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.
ENG 624: The Genre of the Novel and the Idea of Realism
The novel, derived from the French nouvelle, meaning new, is a relatively new genre. It became the popular art form that it has remained until today because it gives to its readers a convincing portrait of the real world. Its relatively recent rise occurred during the Age of Reason and empiricism, in which knowledge was said to come from an interaction of the human mind and external reality. The scientific method, also, influenced realist methods. Because of its ability to represent (or re-present) reality, or the things of the world, through extensive descriptions, the novel has become the literary form most associated with realism, which derives from the Latin res, or thing. Realism is an artistic approach in which the purpose of the art form is to portray such an accurate picture of reality that its verisimilitude, or life-likeness, is so strong as to create the illusion of the real. We are all familiar with realistic paintings that create a photographically accurate portrayal of their subjects. However, unlike painting, which can create visually accurate imitations through the color and form produced by paint, the realistic novel has to use an abstract medium, language, to produce its illusion. This has created a dilemma for novelists, since throughout the ages the philosophic attitude toward the ways words and objects relate to each other has been a source of continued debate. Do words correspond directly to their objects or are they just arbitrarily connected by convention? Or, worse, is the connection of word and object a product of social forces whose motive is power and domination? The dilemma has also been exacerbated by changing notions of reality. The novels we will read present the way the philosophies of language of the particular period in which they were written influence the novelists' conception of how the language of his or her novel relates to reality, thus affecting their means of representation. We will also consider how conceptions of human reality have changed, also complicating the realist mission. We will examine four novels. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, the epitome of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, which signaled a shift from realism to impressionism, The Age of Innocence, which perfected the limited omniscient point of view, introducing a psychological reality, and, finally, the apotheosis of the novel form, Ulysses, whose multiple perspectives questioned the notion of a stable reality that can be objectively described.
ENG 651: Period: Medieval and Renaissance Visions of Heaven & Hell
This semester, we will read and discuss several medieval and Renaissance “visions” of heaven and hell. Our purpose will be threefold: to explore the intertextuality of these works; to determine—as best we can—how literary conceptions of the afterlife reflected and/or influenced popular attitudes toward piety, salvation, dogma; and to gain better understanding of why these works are still worth studying. Although our focus will be on texts composed from a Christian perspective, seminar members will be encouraged to consider depictions of heaven and hell that appear in other faith traditions. Tentative, and not all-inclusive reading list: The Voyage of St. Brendan, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, The Divine Comedy (Dante), Piers Plowman (Langland), Paradise Lost (Milton).
ENG 661: Author: E. E. Cummings
The poetry and prose of E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) is both a part of and apart from modernist and avant-garde trends in Anglo-American literature of the first half of the twentieth century. This course will explore how Cummings came to write his funny, lyrical, tender, satirical, idiosyncratic, genre-bending, and typographically-challenging works, placing them in the context of avant-garde and modernist experiments of the time. Close reading of Cummings’ prose and poetry will be supplemented with examples of analogous or influential avant-garde and modernist texts from authors like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore.
TEXTS:
Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Ed George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1994.
---. The Enormous Room: A typescript edition with drawings by the author. 1922. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1978.
---. Him. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Reprinted. New York: Liveright, 1955, 1970. [Available as a course packet]
---. EIMI. 1933. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 2007.
---. i: six nonlectures. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.
Friedman, Norman. (Re) Valuing Cummings: further essays on the poet, 1962-1993. Gainesville: University P of Florida, 1996. [Recommended only]
Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980.
Various articles from Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society [on reserve and on line at http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/Index.htm .]
Fall 2009 l TOP l
ENG 600: Introduction to Graduate Literary Studies
Dr. Emily Garcia
(Required for all students in the English MA program, recommended early in the program)
ENG 612: Women Writers
Women Writers in America: Life, Liberty, and Pursuits
In Toni Morrison's recent novel, A Mercy, set in America's colonial seventeenth century, a young female who thinks to give herself away for love, is told by a candid companion, "Own yourself, woman." But owning and asserting one's self was no easy accomplishment for women anywhere in the colonies (think of Anne Hutchinson) and certainly not in the world of literary production. Indeed, Anne Bradstreet, author of the first published book of poems by an American colonial, felt this keenly when it took the initiative, connections, and validating preface of a brother-in-law to bring her work to press in London. And when Mary Rowlandson, writer of a best-selling colonial Indian captivity narrative, first saw her own work in print, it was sandwiched between a sober preface by one minister and a sermon by another. Not until the late eighteenth century would women writing in America begin to test and vigorously claim fiction as a vehicle for imagined lives, longed-for liberties, and fascinating pursuits.
To observe the progress and development of American women as novelists and short story writers, we will examine the genres that women authors explored and developed in distinctive directions; the difficulties they overcame in publishing climates that privileged male authors; the affiliations women formed to support each other as serious writers; and the recovery by 20th-century feminists of women's texts previously by-passed or marginalized by male literary establishments. Accordingly, we will engage a range of American women fiction writers, enjoy the depth and complexity of their achievements, and examine the various cultural contexts in which their works were inspired, created, and published. Moving across some two hundred years, this course will address works (some novels and a number of short stories) by Susanna Haswell Rowson, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich.
ENG 651: Period: Irish Literature since the Gaelic Revival
ENG 651: Period: Romantic Period
ENG 661: Author: African-American Writers
African American Writers: Forging, Framing and Claiming Kindred
In ENGLISH 661, African American Writers, we will consider how African American writers from the 17th century forward address the following questions: what iterations of sentiment, memory and imagination enabled networks of African American kinship to persist when extreme regimens of displacement and dispersal were imposed on Africans and African Americans by hegemonic culture? What literary constructs, metaphors and myths have African American writers invented to narratize the kinship and kindred formations that African Americans forged in efforts to nullify the effects of enforced kinlessness and involuntary separation? What distinct literary strategies, i.e. themes, motifs, personae, etc. constructed to represent African American kinship and kindred formations are still inscribed in 21st century African American literature?
Tentative list of fiction writers: Frances E.W. Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Pearl Cleague, Samuel Delany, Mat Johnson, ZZ Parker, Tananarive Due and poets: Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, Marilyn Nelson, Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Alexander, Alice Walker, Cornelius Eady, Ethelbert Miller…
Spring/Summer 2009 l TOP l
ENG 651: Period: Victorian Literature
Victoria's reign was a long one and crowded with famous names. In the essay, Mill, Macaulay, Bentham, Huxley, Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater. In poetry, Arnold, Tennyson, the Brownings, Rosetti, Swinburne, and early Yeats. In drama, fewer canonical figures, Shaw, Wilde, and perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan. In the novel, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, Gaskell, Hardy, Conrad, James, to name just some of the most prolific. The period saw the explosion of new genres for a newly educated reading public: Collins and Conan Doyle with the detective story; MacDonald and Morris with fantasy fiction; Stevenson and Haggard with the boy’s adventure tale; Wells and Butler with science fiction, Potter and Greenaway with children’s literature. There was also a technological explosion, including such inventions as the locomotive and the camera, and worldshaking new ideas such as evolutionary theory and Marxism.
Since the Victorian novel is also being offered this semester, we will survey the many other genres of this richly creative period, organizing the course by topics such as religion and science; industrialization’s effect on the social and physical landscape; the roles of women and men; the invention of childhood; and travel and empire writing. In conjunction with the Victorian novel course, our final oral presentations (based on our long papers) will be presented to a joint audience of both classes.
ENG 661: Author: Charles Dickens
We will focus on later Dickens, emphasizing the personal and the political in his novels:
David Copperfield
Great Expectations (film)
Tale of Two Cities
Our Mutual Friend
Bleak House
Hard Times
Little Dorritt (film?)
At least one of these will be a film production we will watch as a class.
ENG 661: Author: Edmund Spenser
This seminar will study the works of Edmund Spenser, "the poets' poet." Seminar participants will read Spenser's monumental romance-epic, The Faerie Queene, as well as some of his lesser works.
Texts:
--Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Longman Annotated Edition, ed. A. C. Hamilton
--Spenser, The Shorter Poems, eds. William Oram et al.
--Heale, Elizabeth. The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide
ENG 661: Author: Flannery O'Connor
This course will survey O’Connor’s work. We will begin with her signature piece/signature collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955). From there we will retrace her steps to deal with her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), see the John Huston film version of that book (1979), and move to her more philosophical and less Cold-War second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960). We will finish with her posthumously published short story cycle, Everything That Rise Must Converge (1965). (All of these texts are contained within the Collected Works.) During the course of our study, we will inform our explorations of O’Connor’s fiction by juxtaposing contemporary theoretical approaches with a steady consideration of her own dramatically successful attempts to control the reception of her fiction. That will mean reading chronologically her letters and her essays. We will take up the letters from The Habit of BeingFlannery O’Connor: Collected Works. We will also read the good sampling of her essays contained within Collected Works that figure even more prominently in her control of reader reception (originally published separately as Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose [1969]). Our other text for the course, in addition to Collected Works, will be the new (February 25, 2009) Brad Gooch biography: Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown). Requirements for the course will likely be two presentations, a theoretically informed and extensively researched seminar paper, and lively class participation. (1979)—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Special Award—that Sally Fitzgerald, O’Connor’s literary executor, chose to make a part of (Library of America, 1988)
Winter 2009 l TOP l
ENG 614: Literature of American Ethnic Minorities
Eng 614 will focus on the voices and viewpoints of Black North American Women from their earliest known expression in frontier New France through the colonial and antebellum periods to the end of the nineteenth century. The course will be framed as an examination of the expression and identities of Black North American Women as Icons and Iconoclasts.
ENG 616: World Literature In English: Nations and Migrations
Dr. Bertrand Bickersteth
This course aims to provide students with an introduction to postcolonial literature by focusing on the idea of nation and the phenomenon of migration. We will use Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s text, The Empire Writes Back, as our main theoretical guide as we explore select literatures from India, Nigeria, Palestine, Trinidad, Europe and North America. In the process, we shall learn to question the intriguing intersections between nation and migration that those literatures reveal. Course texts may include works by VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amos Tutuola, Sahar Khalifeh, Tayeb Salih, Suzette Mayr, and others.
ENG 624: Genre: American Non-Fiction
Browse through the “New Books” at any Barnes and Noble and you will find evidence of an American publishing trend that shows no sign of slowing—the growing prominence of literary nonfiction. This course will focus on the rise since 1945 of what some have termed the “fourth genre” or “creative nonfiction,” a type of writing perhaps better described as the “literature of fact,” including such forms as memoir, autobiography, reportage, popular history, and literary journalism.
Besides reading classic examples of American nonfiction from the past sixty years and engaging the larger generic questions they provoke, we will pay particular attention to the cultural moments which produced them. Because nearly all prominent works of nonfiction since 1945 have been first published in magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly, one goal of the course will be to situate works by John Hersey, Rachel Carson, Truman Capote, Joan Didion and others within their original contexts. Students will also be expected to sample work by current practitioners, offering guidance to the rest of the class on the current state of the art of literary nonfiction.
Books
John Hersey,
ENG 661-01: Odysseus's Journey
This course focuses on 20th century versions of two Ancient Greek texts, Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" and Sophocles' play "Philoctetes." We will start the course by reading Stanley Lombardo's recent translation of "The Odyssey." We will then proceed to read the 20th century's first version of Homer's epic, James Joyce's "Ulysses," and consider the ways in which the latter text reworks "The Odyssey" by recasting it in modernist form and by situating its action in early 20th century Ireland. We will then turn to a late 20th century version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Philoctetes, a hero of the war that constitutes the backdrop to the storyline of Homer's poem, is also the name of a character in a major 20th century revision of "The Odyssey" by the St. Lucian poet and dramatist, Derek Walcott. Heaney's version of Sophocles's play will therefore serve as a transitional text between Joyce's Irish version of "The Odyssey" and Walcott's two Caribbean versions of the latter. Walcott's epic poem "Omeros" and his play "The Odyssey: A Stage Version" will occupy us for the remainder of the semester.
Assigned texts:
The Odyssey by Homer
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney.
Omeros by Derek Walcott
The Odyssey: A Stage Version by Derek Walcott
ENG 661-02: Author: African Writers
This course is a broad survey of contemporary African Literature and an investigation into the plurality of this literature through such expressions as “African Canon,” “Regional Literature” and “Other Africas.” Students in this class will explore literary aesthetics, economic issues, and political development, as well as common themes such as power, culture and identity as they are expressed through various genres. While an emphasis will be placed on the reading of primary texts, supplemental articles will help locate the conversation and support discussion and analysis. Authors include but are not limited to: Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Zakes Mda, and Bessie Head.
Fall 2008 | TOP |
ENG 600: Graduate Literary Studies Seminar
ENG 605: Seminar in American Literature
This seminar will focus on authors and texts that reflect America's search for literary, cultural, racial, and national identity. In so doing, this course will explore a central literary theme that spans four centuries (1608 to 2008) and appears pointedly in the now-classic 18th-century question framed by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur: "What is an American?" Initially imagining an energetic, prosperous people virtually "melted into a new race, " Crevecoeur became increasingly disenchanted with his own answer. Walt Whitman, however, by mid-19th century again grandly asserted that America entirely "encloses old and new" and Americans are above all "the race of races." As Americans have continued to ask who or what is an American, writers have vigorously and creatively engaged these questions. Their works and voices, in forming our nation's literature and vision of itself, have been critical, enthusiastic, cynical, celebrative, probing, ironic, hyperbolic, humorous, pensive, dramatic, and passionate. Accordingly this course will examine captivity narratives, essays, short stories, novels, political cartoons, and autobiographies to understand how American images, myths, and narratives have evolved into increasingly complex, multi-cultural challenges to and assertions of American constructions of identity and American selfhood. What it means to be an American has always been important to mainstream writers, but this question has also had profound implications for slaves, immigrants, women, indigenous peoples, and th ose on the margins of American society. The course will examine (with attention to genre, ideology, class, gender, race) a range of authors across the centuries, such as John Smith, John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Jemison, Samson Occom, Mark Twain, Charles A. Eastman, Henry James, Pearl Buck, Oliver La Farge, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and James McBride.
ENG 624: Genre: Life Writing: Saints and Sinners
This course will explore the genre of biography from some of its earliest incarnations in Western literature to the present day. We will focus on the sub-genres of literary biography, including Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare biography Will in the World and Janet Malcolm’s examination of Sylvia Plath biographies; hagiography, including medieval saints’ lives and an investigation of more modern hagiographic impulses in biography; and political biography, including Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, Thomas More’s Richard III, and present-day (and election year) biography. We will conclude the course by looking at some fictional texts that both exploit and reexamine biographical conventions, such as Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale.
ENG 651: Period: Modernism
ENG 655: History of Literary Criticism and Theory
Our purpose in this course will be to trace historically the philosophies, ideologies, attitudes and doctrines that have led us to perceive literature as we do today. This foundation of interconnected ideas will span 2,500 years, beginning with the diametric opposition of Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s humanist constructs; throughout, we will discern how allegiances to and reactions against the ideas of these two men, and of those who followed, have led to our own approaches to narrative criticism. As a general foundation for the understanding of literary thought and insight, our course will serve admirably to illuminate the ideas of those who have influenced writing and criticism and the socio-cultural contexts that, in turn, influenced them. We will rely upon a compilation such as The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism for primary texts by, among others, Plotinus, Sidney, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Fielding, Wordsworth, Poe, Arnold, Pater, Eliot, and Richards.
ENG 661: Author:
This semester, our primary focus will be on Chaucer’s best-known text, The Canterbury Tales. We will begin by acquainting ourselves with Chaucer’s life, times, work, and language (Middle English); then we will move to analysis of the tales. Although we will concentrate on the ways in which Chaucer’s masterpiece reflects its historical context, we will also consider how the stories can be (and have been) read through a variety of critical lenses.
Spring/Summer 2008 | TOP |
ENG 624: Genre: Contemporary Poetry
A study of contemporary poetry written in English (American, British, and World), including anthologies and complete collections by some of our best-known poets, as well as lesser-known but brilliant contemporaries.
TEXTS:
Contemporary American Poetry, R.S. Gwynn, ed.; The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt, eds.; The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, eds.; Cape Coast Castle: Poems, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang; Native Guard, Natasha Tretheway; Babel’s Stair, Rhoda Janzen; Seasonal Fires, Ingrid de Kok
(The total price for these seven texts is estimated to be around $100.00.)
ENG 651: Period: American Renaissance
Emily Garcia
"The American Scholar" (1837), in which he states: "Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?" The nineteenth-century American writers we will read in this course each held a commitment to breathing "new life" into American democracy and letters, but not all were always considered part of the period and movement. In this course, we will pursue two goals: to examine the literature for what it adds to the literary tradition and to consider the ends served by the concept through literary criticism. We will consider aesthetic innovations both purported and practiced, cultural issues engaged and omitted, and historical contexts reflected and refracted.
Readings will likely include:The Blithedale Romance (1852), Melville’s Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President (1853), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Daughter’s Uncle Tom (1852), poetry by Walt Whitman, and prose by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Assignments will include response papers and a critical essay.
ENG 661: Author:
“A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.”
American poet Wallace Stevens said that we have nothing better than Willa Cather’s writing. Her life and writing were at the heart of American Modernism, yet without being fancy, word cluttered Modernism. Originally from
Students will give a report on one of these novels in its critical settings, write one extended paper on this novel (or another novel of their choice); write a weekly on-line response journal and a final exam.
Class sessions will be conducted seminar style—there will be films shown on Cather’s life and on reactions to her. Office hours will be times when we can talk and design papers and concepts. I will post for student perusal a lot of supplementary material to abet understanding.
Cather’s approach and writing are direct and clear, inviting readers to know her better. She is a wonderful deep example of American Modernism at its finest.
“I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.”
“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”
Willa Cather
ENG 663: Shakespeare
Shakespearean Romance. Our focus will be on the romance genre. We will read romantic comedies and the romances (or tragic-comedies) Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. The course will also include two tragedies which might be described as romantic tragedies.
Tentative list of plays:
The Menaechmi, by Plautus; Comedy of Errors; The Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Much Ado about Nothing; As You Like It; Romeo and Juliet; King Lear; Cymbeline; The Winter's Tale; The Tempest
Winter 2008 | TOP |
ENG 603: Seminar in British Literature
Forging the Nation
The title of this course borrows from Linda Colley's seminal discussion of the formation of a definably British national character in 18th and 19th century literature. This course, however, will cast its focus both backward and forward from that point to undertake a discussion of the formation of both a distinct English national identity as well as responses to and revisions of that identity from what we might call England's "peripheries": Ireland, and East Asia, as well as more contested identities such as gender and sexuality. Beginning with the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, we will consider the formation of the very concept of nation in the medieval period; we'll also look at contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney's translation/rewriting of Beowulf as a reaction to the deep divisions between England and Ireland. We'll review the role of King Arthur is creating a national mythos of a heroic British national character, and examine the national status of Shakespeare's Henry V. Turning to the 18th and 19th centuries, we will debate the insider/outsider status of non-English members of the United Kingdom in Edgeworth's The Absentee and Scott's Heart of Midlothian, and finally, we'll consider two 20th century narratives of British national character, Stephen Frears's film My Beautiful Laundrette and Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty.
ENG 661-01: Author: Berger
Few writers alive today have produced a body of work as formally and thematically wide-ranging, original, and influential as John Berger. Best known around the world as the author of such pioneering studies of painting and photography as Ways of Seeing and Another Way of Telling, Berger is also a major fiction writer of our time. He published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, in 1958, when he was 33. During the 1960s, Berger published several more creative works, as well as a series of art-historical monographs, including an important appraisal of the career of Pablo Picasso, then the world's most feted artist. In 1972, Berger published G, which won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. In that year, he also presented Ways of Seeing for BBC television. A revisionist study of the heritage of Western art, both the television series and its accompanying text have influenced and challenged an entire generation of art-history students and professors. From the early 1970s to the present, Berger has penned a steady stream of fiction and art-criticism. Moreover, he has published plays, screenplays, and translations. Always formally innovative, Berger has also written a variety of unclassifiable texts that embrace cultural commentary, personal reflection, Art-criticism, scientific fact, philosophical speculation, and poetry. In this course, we will focus on Berger's fiction writing, but we will also have occasion to read some of his essays on art as well as at least one of his category-defying books. I hope that by the end of the semester, you will agree with the view advanced by The Daily Telegraph's reviewer of Berger's most recent work of fiction, Here Is Where We Meet (2005), to wit:
He has created a body of work unrivaled in the breadth of forms and genres it spans, its sensuous intelligence.
ENG 661-02: Author: Joyce
Dr. Susan Swartzlander
Bold, brassy, and bawdy text by Irish genius James Joyce seeks equally bold readers up for the ultimate literary challenge. Join us when we drop into "dear, dirty Dublin" on June 16, 1904 with this graduate seminar on James Joyce's Ulysses. Find out what happened on this Dublin day and why people all over the world still celebrate Bloomsday every June 16th. Discover why Ulysses was banned until a Supreme Court decision ended the need to smuggle the novel into the U.S.. Learn why Ulysses always tops the charts whenever people list the most important texts of all time. Learn about Irish songs, toasts, and folk traditions. Enjoy puzzles, puns, and parodies. Find out what James Joyce, Blazes Boylan, Molly Bloom, and Rodney Dangerfield have in common. We will look at the novel in the context of Irish history, as well as through a close explication of the text.
ENG 651-01: Period: Early Modern Drama
In the wildly popular
ENG 651-02 Period: Early American Literature
Dr. Emily Garcia
"What is an American?": Revolutionary Voices in Early American Literature
This course reconsiders Farmer James's now famous question from Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and asks whether, in the early period at least, "American" denotes not so much an identity as a subject position, one that gives voice to early Americans' frustrations, grievances, and desires for change. We'll begin in the colonial period, when individuals such as the Puritan wife and mother Anne Hutchinson in Massachusetts and the Spanish Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas in Mexico challenged the assumptions that informed European missions in the New World. Next we will consider revolutionary "declarations" of various forms, such as the
The second part of the course will more carefully consider how "literature" in the usual sense (poetry, drama, fiction) addresses revolutionary matters, particularly as print culture becomes more prominent in the early republic.
In addition to expanding our definition of revolutionary American literature to include voices of women's rights, abolition, and Native American resistance, we'll consider how early American writing challenges the terms on which the distinctions between "margin" and "center" are based.
Students will write a series of short (one- to two-page) reflection papers and one research paper. They will develop their ideas for the research paper in part via a class presentation.
Fall 2007 | TOP |
ENG 600: Graduate Literary Studies Seminar
Dr. James Persoon
ENG 624: Genre: American Fiction
Dr. Helen Westra
This course on "The Roots and Branches of American Fiction" will explore American literature in its beginning and formative stages and observe how at its roots American literature is about borderlands and boundaries--geographic, political, ideological, racial, gender, and literary--about asserting, crossing, protecting, testing, and resisting boundaries. In examining narratives and fiction that emerge in the often contested soil of America's cultural landscape, we will address a variety of American eighteenth and nineteenth century works and their links to domestic, gothic, sentimental, romantic, and historical fiction, and our texts will range from seventeenth and eighteenth century writers such as Cotton Mather, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown, to nineteenth century authors such as James Fennimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa Mae Alcott. Throughout the semester we will consider themes such as land, citizenship, women, home, Native Americans, slavery, individualism, and westward movement as America's fiction increasingly becomes both cultural marker and instrumentality in the newly formed and expanding republic.
ENG 655: History of Literary Criticism and Theory
Dr. Benjamin Lockerd
Literary theory is practically as old as literature itself. This course will examine changing ideas about literature from ancient times to the present. Some of the thinkers who will come under consideration are: Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Sidney, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Nietzsche, Eliot, Marx, Lukacs, Freud, Jung, Frye, Lacan, Bakhtin, Brooks, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Booth, Fish, and Armstrong.
ENG 661-01: Author: Faulkner
Spring/Summer 2007 | TOP |
ENG 612: Women Writers
When asked in Persuasion if she had noticed who had opened the door for her the previous day, Jane Austen's Anne Elliot replies, "No. Was it not Mrs. Speed, as usual, or the maid? I observed no one in particular." Critic Julia Nash has noted, "`No one in particular' may be what the masters and mistresses of history and literature wished their servants to be, but literary depictions of servants from medieval times to the twentieth century expose a high level of anxiety that in fact servants just might be people to be reckoned with." In this course we will study a number of works, beginning with Persuasion (1818), that allow us to tease out the implications of servitude. As we do, we will also take up the changing status of various women's texts "with regard to the canon," as the catalog course description states.
Using Austen as arguably the most universally esteemed female fiction writer in English, we will gauge by her aesthetic excellence the achievement of several canonical U. S. texts by women that deal with servitude: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911), and Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Finally we will read Margaret Mitchell's blockbuster 20th century bestseller, Gone with the Wind (1936) and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone (2001) to hear intertextually from characters on multiple sides of the servitude issue and to frame informed judgments regarding the likelihood of Mitchell's masterwork moving from popular culture to canonical status as Stowe's did in the 1970s with Jane Tompkins' incisive critique of it. We will augment our study of servitude in American fiction with short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Willa Cather, and Flannery O'Connor. My aim will be to persuade you, starting with Persuasion, that servitude is, in fact, a potent stance for characters and a powerfully deconstructive literary force.
Dates for this course will be Tuesdays in May-the 8th, the 15th, the 22nd, and the 29th. In June we will meet Tuesday, June 5th, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays for the other weeks of the month: June 12 and 14, June 19 and 21, June 26 and 28. In July we will not meet, but you will have reading and research assignments. In August we will reconvene on Thursday, August 2nd, as well as on the final exam date: Tuesday, August 7.
ENG 624: Genre: Short Story
We will trace the short-story form from its roots in folklore to its fragmentation in contemporary texts. While the short story holds consistent significance in American literature since 1840, the development of its form is equally attributable to writers beyond our nation: 19th-century Continental writers such as Chekhov and Maupassant; British Modernists such as Mansfield and Lawrence; Irish writers such as Joyce, O'Connor and Lavin; and more recently, world authors such as Borges, Garcia Marquez, Valenzuela, Xingjian, and Rifaat, who use the genre as an act of resistance. Our study will consider historico-cultural conditions that prompted emergence of the short story at different times in different locales while paying particular attention to the ever-evolving narrative form of the genre.
ENG 651: Literary Period Seminar: Medieval
This semester we will focus on medieval epic and romance, considering such texts as Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Havelok, and Chretien de Troyes' Yvain. Our aim will be two-fold: first, to explore the characteristic features of each genre; and second, to gain a better understanding of why romance came to displace epic as the preferred literary form during the early medieval period.
Required Texts:
R. Barton Palmer, Medieval Epic and Romance (College Publishing, 2007)
T. Steinberg, Reading the Middle Ages (McFarland, 2003)
ENG 661: Author: Hardy
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had three careers in his 88 years, each spanning roughly a third of his life: until his mid-thirties he was an up-and-coming architect and aspiring but unsuccessful poet; in his middle years he became a successful, even eminent, Victorian novelist; and then in the last thirty years of his life he made himself into a major 20th-century poet.
From the first period of his life we will look at his rejected poetry and his second published novel, the delightful Under The Greenwood Tree, published by him anonymously and mistaken by reviewers for the work of George Eliot, high praise indeed. From the middle period we will read his two most powerful novels, Tess and Jude. Finally, we will plunge into as many of the 1000 poems in The Complete Poems as we can manage. If we don't read all 1000, never fear: as Philip Larkin remarked, there is always something new and interesting to find in those poems, wherever one dips, even randomly.
This course will cover the major Yoknapatawpha County novels written during what is generally considered Faulkner's major period of artistic achievement, the years 1929-1942. The novels we will cover include Flags in the Dust (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942). We will study the novels through several approaches. First, we will consider relevant aspects of Faulkner's biography to understand how someone without a high school education, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, and battling throughout his life with dire financial circumstances and alcoholism could become arguably the most important American novelist of the twentieth century. We will study the evolution of Faulkner's style from his early work, heavily influenced by French Symbolism, to his later experimentation with stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and his unique handling of time. We will also consider his creation of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and its imaginary population of characters that are diverse in age, gender, class, and race. A major focus will be his handling of the theme of slavery, which he considered to be the "original sin" of the South and the nation.
ENG 661-01: Topic: American Literature and the Holocaust
For six decades American writers and filmmakers have faced a representational dilemma: how to depict an event whose significance over time continues to grow, even being termed a metaphor of our times, yet which challenges the very limits of the imagination? How to confront the Holocaust?
This course will explore the history of American literary and cinematic engagement with Auschwitz, what has been called the Americanization of the Holocaust. We will study the entire sweep of this response, from the immediate post-war years to the present, giving particular attention to the complex cultural dynamics which have impacted these works and their receptions.
Among the texts to be considered: John Hersey,The Wall, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker, Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, William Styron, Sophie's Choice, Art Spiegelman, Maus, Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost, as well as films by George Stevens, Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, and Steven Spielberg.
Winter 2007 | TOP |
ENG 600: Graduate Literature Study Seminar
Dr. Linda Chown
ENG 614: Literature of American Minorities
Dr. Mack Smith
ENG 616: World Literature In English
Dr. Corinna McLeod
This class will negotiate the term "world literature" through the framework of postcolonial studies. The term "postcolonial" has been assigned to a group of literatures that have in common a history of European colonization. The theoretical approach examines the impact colonization and decolonization has had on identity (cultural, national, linguistic), migration, issues of exile, diaspora, and contemporary sociopolitical and geopolitical constructions of nation. We will read a variety of novels, poetry, and critical essays from Africa, the West Indies, Europe, and India.
ENG 651: Period: Renaissance Literature
Dr. Benjamin Lockerd
This course will offer a broad survey of the English Renaissance engaging a wide variety of texts and authors, including a number of minor writers (such as Daniel, Drayton, Davies, Elyot, Googe, Raleigh, Waller) along with some of the greats: More, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Milton. We will be reading non-dramatic texts: poetry, prose fiction, essays, sermons, etc.
ENG 661: The Brontës
Dr. Ashley Shannon
This course will consider the major novels of the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Despite growing up in relative isolation and poverty in the north of England, these three women wrote some of the most significant novels in nineteenth-century England. Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights are probably the most familiar to modern readers, but Anne's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the prolific Charlotte's Shirley, The Professor, and Vilette are all important parts of the English literary canon as well. Dealing with questions of religion, the status of women, the nature of love, and even colonialism, the novels all help us answer the question: what did it mean to be English (and specifically, an English woman) in the nineteenth century?
Since time constraints prohibit us from addressing all of the Brontë's novels (let alone their short fiction and juvenilia), we will limit our exploration to six texts: Jane Eyre, Shirley and Vilette; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These novels will be accompanied by scholarly articles intended to provide a critical vocabulary for our discussion of the novels.
In addition to the reading load, coursework will consist of two major research essays, one due mid-semester and the other at the end of the term. There will also be smaller assignments-such as annotated bibliographies and class presentations-designed to assist you in producing those essays.
Fall 2006 | TOP |
ENG 605: Seminar in American Literature
Dr. Linda Chown
English 605, Studies in an American Literary Period, focuses this time on a moment when much seems new, unfamiliar, uncertain, exciting. Some writers talked not of character but of "allotrophic states," said that "human nature had changed." This world felt propped up by unstable "atoms," centered by physics' an "uncertainty principle," crowded by repressions, the energetic, secretive Unconscious. Additionally, these are the times of The First World War and its various kinds of explosions, the first motor vehicles, the first outdoor lighting and, by the end of the teens, the outbreak of the disastrous influenza epidemic.
Internationally, artists, writers, sculptors, musicians tried to find new ways to keep apace with this speed of change and do so in a way which seemed able to express all this new in a new way. One of our goals will be to discover what makes American Modernism unique. There will be a lot of time spent providing a sense of what the world artistic, political and cultural was like before all this change began. Then, we will read four novels. The first two, Cather's 'A Lost Lady' and Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury,' are each in their own way pieces of regret. Then, we'll read Hemingway's 'In Our Time' and Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' to examine links between the personal and the social more directly.
To help give us both answers and questions, we'll read and discuss, Bradbury's collection of essays, 'Modernism' and then the more recent book by Childs, 'Modernism: the New Idiom.' I'll bring in material from American poets, painters and musicians, which talks about what they want their art to be able to do (from Stieglitz, Stevens, Cummings, Anderson, Williams, Hurston, Hughes, Dreiser, etc.) Several books will be on Closed Reserve, Kalaidjian, Walter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism and A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers We will consult frequently chapters from these books. We'll write frequently in class--both response pieces and also effort to find conclusions. Class requirements include a midterm and final examination, one oral presentation, an analytical paper and a final research project of some 15-20 pages. We'll work together on this latter project from the course beginnings.
ENG 624: Realism and The American Dream
Dr. Victoria Brehm
The genre and technique of Realism was a world-wide phenomenon in the nineteenth century, much as Post-Colonialism is today. This class will focus on how both genre and technique developed in the United States, and how the genre came to interrogate the assumptions of The American Dream. The class will begin with a pre-Civil War Realist novel by an African-American, then trace the development of the genre through the nineteenth century, culminating with Henry James's The Ambassadors. Subsequently, we will explore how realism as technique and Modernism as genre intersect in the twentieth, and end with an examination of the resurgence of realism as magic realism in contemporary American minority literatures. Assignments and readings will be posted on Blackboard.
ENG 651: Period: Old English
Dr. Rachel Anderson
While Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf is an excellent way to initially experience that great poem, nothing compares to actually being able to read and work with the original Old English text. This course will both offer an introduction to the Old English language and the opportunity to examine the texts of this period from a literary analysis perspective. Part of each class will be devoted to linguistic matters: namely, acquiring a basic understanding of Old English morphology and syntax, and forming a rudimentary lexicon for reading Old English poetry. The rest of each class will be devoted to reading a wide variety of Old English texts (some in the original, others in translation) in the context of current scholarly trends in the field.
ENG 663: Shakespeare
Spring/Summer 2006 | TOP |
ENG 600: Literary Studies Seminar
Dr. Linda Chown
This course will introduce graduate students to current literary studies by explicating historical changes in the field of English in both literary content and critical discourse. Students will explore these changes by studying key concepts in the discipline and by completeing a research project. We will be reading texts in prose, poetry, epic and theater in the light of changing concepts of literary study. Two significant critical studies will help contextualize these changes.
TEXTS:
Apollonius of Rhodes. Jason and the Golden Fleece
Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway
Gerald Graff. Professing Literature
Samuel Johnson. Selected Essays
William Butler Yeats. Selected Poems and Four Plays
J. M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg
Robert Scholes. The Rise and Fall of English
ENG 624: Genre: Drama
Dr. Kathleen Blumreich
English 624 involves "intensive study of the historical development of a selected genre...and of the nature of the genre, focusing on selected works." This semester we will begin with a brief survey of the origin(s) and evolution of drama, taking into particular consideration what makes this genre unique. Our energies will be devoted primarily, however, to the study of contemporary, award-winning plays. Course requirements will include (but not be limited to): a major research essay; individual or group performance of a scene; final examination.
TEXTS:
Albee, The Goat
Auburn, Proof
Blank & Jensen, The Exonerated
Brockett & Ball, The Essential Theatre (7th edition)
Edson, Wit
Parks, Topdog/Underdog
Samuels, Kindertransport
Shanley, Doubt
ENG 651: Literary Perspectives: Edwardian Literature
Dr. James Persoon
ENG 661: Post-Apartheid South African Literature
Winter 2006 | TOP |
ENG 616: World Literature in English
Dr. Bertrand Bickersteth
An in-depth study of selected pieces of Asian, African, or South American literature. Issues concerning the development of Third World literature and its status with regard to the canon will be addressed.
ENG 624: Victorian Novel
The era of Queen Victoria saw the English novel reflect back on the Romantics, examine the implications of the British way of life, and predict the modern age. In this course we will read some well-known Victorian novels and look at the history of England as it is mirrored in the fiction of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Thackeray, and Oscar Wilde, and others.
TEXTS:
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale; Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations also Oliver Twist, Bleakhouse and The Pickwick Papers; George Eliot, Middlemarch also Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner, Adam Bede; E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; John Galsworthy, The Man of Property; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd also The Mayor of Casterbridge; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; H.G. Wells, Kipps also The History of Mr. Polly; and Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
ENG 651: Victorian
Dr. Rob Watson
The reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was the longest in British history, the scene of intense religious, social, and intellectual debate and extraordinary literary creativity. This course will examine literature that reflects and addresses the crisis of belief that runs throughout the Victorian Age. The assigned fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfictional prose center on the need for self-examination and re-definition through education in the face of such changes as the industrial revolution, the rising middle class, new theories of geological and biological science, and new notions of the role of women and sexuality.
TEXTS:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In Memoriam.
Matthew Arnold. Poems. Culture and Anarchy.
John Henry Cardinal Newman. The Idea of a University.
Charles Dickens. Hard Times.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh.
John Stuart Mill. On Liberty.
George Eliot. Middlemarch.
Walter Pater. The Renaissance.
Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure. Wessex Poems.
Oscar Wilde. The Critic as Artist. The Picture of Dorian Gray.
ENG 655: History of Literary Criticism and Theory
Dr. Benjamin Lockerd
Literary theory is practically as old as literature itself. This course will examine changing ideas about literature from ancient times to the present. Some of the thinkers who will come under consideration are: Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Sidney, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Nietzsche, Eliot, Marx, Lukacs, Freud, Jung, Frye, Lacan, Bakhtin, Brooks, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Booth, Fish, and Armstrong.
TEXTS:
The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David Richter
ENG 661-01: E. E. Cummings
Dr. Michael Webster
The poetry and prose of E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) is both part of and apart from modernist and avant-garde trends in Anglo-American literature of the first half of the twentieth century. This course will explore how Cummings came to write his funny, lyrical, tender, satirical, idiosyncratic, and typographically challenging works, placing them in the context of avant-garde and modernist experiments of the time. Close reading of Cummings' prose and poetry will be supplemented with examples of analogous or influential avant-garde and modernist texts from authors like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore.
TEXTS:
Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Ed George J. Firmage. New York:Liveright, 1994.
---The Enormous Room: A typescript edition with drawings by the author. 1922. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1978.
---. six nonlectures. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.
Friedman, Norman. (Re) Valuing Cummings: further essays on the poet, 1962-1993. Gainesville: University P of Florida, 1996. [Recommended only]
Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980.
Various articles from Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society [on reserve and on line at http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/Index.htm .]
Fall 2005 | TOP |
ENG 600: Graduate Literary Studies Seminar
We will explore the state of current literary studies by explicating key concepts that inform the discipline today. In the process, we will note significant changes that have occurred in the field over the course of the 20th/21st centuries. The completion of a research project will help students hone their critical, analytical, and research skills.
TEXTS:
Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (U of MN P).
Chopin, The Awakening: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., Ed. Nancy Walker (Bedford/St. Martin).
RECOMMENDED TEXT:
Corbett, Edward. The Little English Handbook, 8th ed. (Longman) - or any up-to date grammer/usage handbook that includes MLA guidlines for online research sources.
COURSE RESERVE AT ZUMBERGE LIBRARY:
Lentricchia, Critical Terms for Literary Study (U of Chicago P).
Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton).
Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (Garland).
Tyson, Learning for a Diverse World: Using Critical Theory to Read and Write about Literature (Routledge)
ENG 603: Fictions of Empire
This course will investigate the construction of British national identity through the treatment of empire in a range of fiction. Texts include (but are not limited to) Edward Said's Orientalism, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe, Cranford, Passage to India, as well as short fiction from Conrad, Kipling and Stevenson. In addition, students will investigate authors who "write back" to the empire, and read a considerable assortment of postcolonial criticism as they navigate the source of political and cultural constructions of identity.
Spring/Summer 2005 | TOP |
ENG 624: Modern Lyric Poetry
This summer term we will focus on contemporary American poetry. We will read complete collections by some of our best-known poets, including such Library of Congress poet laureates as Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and (currently) Ted Kooser; National Book Award winners Robert Bly and Carl Dennis; and Michigan poets Greg Rappleye, Patricia Clark, and Linda Nemec Foster (who will read from their most recent books).
TEXTS:
Contemporary American Poetry, R.S. Gwynn
My Father on a Bicycle, Patricia Clark
Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Linda Nemec Foster
Orpheus and Eurydice, Gregory Orr
Mother Love, Rita Dove
Sailing Around the Room, Billy Collins
Morning Poems, Robert Bly
A Path Between Houses, Greg Rappleye
Practical Gods, Carl Dennis
Delights and Shadows, Ted Kooser
The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser
ENG 661 A1: Flannery O'Connor in Pleasantville: Writing Redemption in the American 1950s
This course will focus on O'Connor's major works--two collections of short stories and two novels, as well as selected essays and letters--in the context of mid-twentieth century Cold War culture and will take up the heated issue of reading O'Connor on her own terms, both then and now: "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy...for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ." In an era when cultural criticism makes a theological lens the one contraband theoretical perspective in literary studies, we will scrutinize not only O'Connor's own uncanny success at controlling reader reception, but also the way her fiction works from a specifically secular perspective. As we reason together, we will engage both her texts and her critical contexts to answer what Martha Nussbaum considers the bottom-line question in literary studies: How then should we live?
TEXTS:
Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. Library of America, 1988.
Jon Lance Bacon's Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture. Cambridge UP, 1993
Ralph C. Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Eerdmans, 2004.
Course assignments will include scripted presentations, an annotated bibliography, and a semester paper.
ENG 651: Literary Period Seminar: The Age of De-Colonization
This course focuses on an array of literary texts that stem from one of the most consequential processes of 20th century history: De-colonization. In the first instance, the latter term denotes the emergence of independent national-states in territories formerly ruled by European colonial powers. However, in addition to denoting a specific political process in a certain cluster of territories during a roughly circumscribable historical period (from the 1940s through the 1980s), the term "de-colonization" and its cognates can embrace a wider set of terrains and meanings. (For instance, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo has written about the need for formerly colonized peoples to "de-colonize" their minds.) While this course will focus chiefly on texts and contextures linked to the formal demise of European imperial rule in the decades after World War Two, it will also address the wider field of significance evoked by "de-colonization." The geographic scope of the novels, plays, and poems that we will read is similarly broad: they hail from five continents and ten countries. To navigate the vast geography of the Age of De-colonization, we will avail ourselves of key chapters from a landmark study of the period, Edward Said's magisterial Culture and Imperialism.
Winter 2005 | TOP |
ENG 600-01: Introduction to Graduate Literary Studies
This course will enable students to acquire a sophisticated understanding of the issues and debates at stake in English Studies today. It will also help them to hone their own critical, methodological, and research skills and abilities.
ENG 655-01: History of Literary Criticism and Theory
Literary theory is practically as old as literature itself. This course will examine changing ideas about literature from ancient times to the present. Some of the thinkers who will come under consideration: Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Sidney, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Nietzsche, Eliot, Marx, Jameson, Freud, Jung, Frye, Lacan, Bakhtin, Brooks, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Woolf, Showalter, Fish, Kermode.
TEXT:The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David Richter
ENG 661-01: Jane Austen and her Literary Contexts
Leigh Eicke
In this course, we will read Austen's six novels and some of her juvenilia and minor works, including "Lady Susan" and "A History of England." We will also read fiction, poetry, and drama that influenced her work, or to which she alluded or responded, including authors such as Frances Burney, Anne Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, George Crabbe, William Cowper, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Elizabeth Inchbald. We will also consider Austen in modern contexts: early and late films of her novels, the continuations of her unfinished novels, and novels and films inspired by her novels, including Bridget Jones' Diary and Metropolitan. Topics for special attention include Austen's place in Romanticism, her role in shaping the novel, the reception history of her works, and her passionate readers and fans, the "Janeites."
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