DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
400- and 500-Level Literature
Course Descriptions
FALL 2008
407 INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH, C. Wright. (CRN 49440) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: Medieval British Literature and MFA Literature
Same as MDVL 407
this pure contemplation / of a language of the dawn
—Jorge Luis Borges, “On Embarking on the Study of the Anglo-Saxon Language”
In this course you will learn to read Old English prose and poetry in the original language, which was spoken by the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of England from the sixth through eleventh centuries. This was the native language of Caedmon, who wrote the earliest surviving English poem (“Caedmon’s Hymn”); of King Alfred, who prevented the Vikings from conquering England, and who then undertook a revival of learning by translating into English “those books which it is most necessary for all to know”; of the anonymous author of Beowulf, who memorialized a Germanic hero’s battles with a man-eating monster, his vengeful mother (the monster’s, that is), and a dragon; and of abbot Ælfric and archbishop Wulfstan, who preached in English for those who could not understand Latin, the official language of the medieval church.
We will begin with some easy prose readings (the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis, and a school dialogue about Anglo-Saxon “career choices”), and as you gradually master the basics of Old English grammar we will work our way up to more challenging narrative prose such as Bede’s story of Caedmon’s miraculous transformation from cowherd to poet; King Alfred’s government “white paper” on education reform; and Wulfstan’s apocalyptic sermon to the English written at the height of the Viking raids. Then in the second half of the semester we will read some of the finest shorter Old English poems, including The Wanderer and The Seafarer, two elegiac poems of exile; The Battle of Maldon, recounting the heroic defeat of an English army by the Vikings; The Dream of the Rood, a mystical vision of the Crucifixion, as told by the Cross; and The Wife’s Lament, about a woman abandoned by her former lover.
For graduate students the course is 4 hours credit and will involve an additional hourly meeting per week (time and place to be arranged).
418 SHAKESPEARE I, L. Newcomb. (CRN 40436) TUTH 2-3:15
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
This course samples works from the first half of Shakespeare’s career, represented here by selected sonnets, a history play; two comedies, and three tragedies. We’ll especially notice how the plays construct identities for male and female characters, stage Elizabethan social tensions, and celebrate theater’s address to its audience. Throughout, we’ll test those features that have kept Shakespeare culturally productive: the openness of staging that invites new interpretations; the flexible language that insists on polyvalence; and the confronting of familial, class, gender, and racial tensions in terms both prescient and ambivalent.
Since the value of studying Shakespeare lies not in the texts alone, but also in their continuous, creative reinvention by performers and critics, this course samples several kinds of interpretive practice systematically, from performance and film analysis to feminist, historicist, and cultural-studies and queer studies approaches. Be ready for proactive discussion, performance experiments, and rigorous written work including skill-developing journals, a response to an on-campus Shakespeare production, two focused short papers, a longer paper using guided research (7-9 pp.), and a final exam.
TEXTS: Greenblatt et al, eds., The Norton Shakespeare (first or second edition); McDonald, ed., Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (2nd edition).
418 SHAKESPEARE I, Perry. (CRN 40438) MWF 10
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
Earlier tragedies, comedies, and history plays. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
418 SHAKESPEARE I, Stevens. (CRN 40439) TUTH 9:30-10:45; (CRN 40440) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
This course studies a range of plays from the first half of Shakespeare’s career (comedies, tragedies, and one “problem play”): Titus Andronicus; Romeo and Juliet; The Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Merchant of Venice; As You Like It; and Measure for Measure. While we’ll certainly consider Shakespeare in his immediate political and cultural context, our emphasis will be on the plays in performance. I would have us try to set aside, for a moment, Shakespeare’s formidable reputation as the “greatest writer in the history of English literature” and instead concentrate on Shakespeare the actor and playwright who made his considerable living writing for the London professional theater.
Evaluation: Participation; one mid-term; one short paper substantially expanded into a final paper; short written assignments or email postings; attendance at one Krannert performance, should their Fall 2008 program reflect class interests; and one in-class performance assignment.
TEXTS: Specific editions of the plays (Bedford Texts and Contexts series); possibly a course reader; Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare.
418 SHAKESPEARE I, Cole. (CRN 32337) TUTH 9:30-10:45
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
The first half of Shakespeare’s career is examined through careful readings of ten plays, each selected for the new things it tells us concerning his changing interests and developing dramatic skills. Discussion centers on the plays themselves, of course, but it also attempts to relate the plays to one another and to the time in which they were written. The first five weeks, for example, deal with three early plays—the tragedy of Romeo And Juliet, the comedy of Love’s Labor’s Lost, and the history of Richard III—as promises of greater things to come. The next twelve
sessions are devoted to tracing the greater historical things—Richard II, I and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V—and during the closing weeks we shall watch LLL turning into the brilliant high comedies of Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. A sixth-week exam covers the first three plays, a paper on Henry V is due the eleventh or twelfth week, and the final exam covers only the last seven plays.
TEXT: The Riverside Shakespeare, G.B. Evans, ed.
428 ENGLISH DRAMA 1660-1800, Markley. (CRN 49200) TUTH 11-12:15
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1660-1800 and MFA Literature
This course will cover some of the major works in British drama written between 1660 and 1777. We will pay particular attention to the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts of theatrical performance, and we will discuss the major issues that find on their way onto the London stage: sexual morality, the role of women in a patrilineal society, and the problems of empire, trade, and colonialism. Because the Restoration period (1660-1700) featured the popular and critical success of a number of women dramatists—Aphra Behn, Susan Centlivre, Mary Pix, and Catherine Trotter—we will devote a good deal of attention to the ways in which these playwrights appropriated the conventions of the seemingly antifeminist genres of wit comedy. In addition to these women dramatists, we will read and discuss plays by George Etherege, John Dryden, William Wycherley, Thomas Otway, Thomas Shadwell, William Congreve, John Gay, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
429 18 TH CENTURY FICTION, Pollock. (CRN 40392) TUTH 2-3:15
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1660-1800 and MFA Literature
This course will examine the link between European colonialism and the development of recognizably “modern” fiction during the course of the long eighteenth century—a period commonly referred to as the Enlightenment—in England, France, and the Americas. One of the central tasks in our project this semester will be to understand the significance of travel both as a literal means of disseminating “enlightenment” between cultures, and as a metaphor for describing the developmental trajectory of the self-cultivating individual. Each of the fictions we will read presents us with characters who undertake a movement out of their own cultures—even “out” of themselves—into trans-cultural or inter-cultural spaces where complicated ethical and political dilemmas must be negotiated. Perhaps the most influential legacy of these Enlightenment fictions (or fictions of Enlightenment) has been their implicit formulation of “cosmopolitanism” as a solution to the often violent clash between cultures. The popular narratives we’ll study in this course test the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan ethos by putting European observers in places as diverse as Africa, Brazil, Persia, Tahiti, and the Caribbean. We will finish by reading some recent philosophical work on the question “What is Enlightenment?” and we will attempt to answer that question ourselves. Texts by Montaigne, Behn, Defoe, Montesquieu, Swift, Montagu, Diderot, Johnson, Voltaire, Equiano, and Kant. Course requirements: regular attendance and participation, three essays, and a final exam.
435 19 TH CENTURY BRITISH FICTION, Courtemanche. (CRN 40394) MWF 2
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
In the 19 th century, British writers took the newly-popular form of the novel and vastly expanded its ambitions, adding cliffhangers, complex moral dilemmas, subtle wit, metaphysical reflections on history, and biting social critique. Many of the novels we’ll be reading are based on a combination of the romance plot (in which a happy marriage solves other problems) and the Bildungsroman plot (in which a young person achieves his or her desires by struggling against a cruel world), but they also deftly undermine and chop up these generic expectations, leading to sudden new perspectives and surprising twists. Readings will include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and several critical essays. These novels are tremendously fun to read, but also very long, so be prepared for a great deal of reading. The course will require one close-reading paper, one research paper, a midterm and final, weekly written assignments, and active class participation.
442 BRITISH LIT SINCE 1930, Hart. (CRN 40397) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: British, 1900-present and MFA Literature
This class asks whether contemporary British fiction is still legible as a national literature—that is, as the product of a specifically “national” experience or identity. We will approach this question in two ways. First, we will read a selection of novels from the 1950s to the present that showcase the changing face of Britain as it recovers from the Second World War and slowly emerges as a multi-ethnic and multi-national state wired into new transnational networks of economic and political power. Authors we are likely to read include Doris Lessing, Sam Selvon, B. S. Johnson, Salman Rushdie, Janice Galloway, Caryl Churchill, and Zadie Smith. This incomplete survey of the ethnocultural landscape of British fiction will be made more rigorous by our concurrent enquiry into the question of “transnational method.” How should literary critics respond to cultural and economic globalization? Is there a world literature? Is literary nationalism reconcilable with cosmopolitanism, creoloization, and a global media? Through critical analysis and theoretical discussion we will ask whether (or how) our small corner of the Anglophone literary field can survive the current challenge to the nation as an explanatory category.
451 AMERICAN LIT 1914-1945, Parker. (CRN 40398) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: American Literature: Civil War to Present and MFA Literature
This course will sample American poetry and fiction from between the world wars, closely studying a set of individual texts and their roles in literary and cultural tradition. Along the way, we will ponder literary responses to changing gender and race relations, to World War I, the roaring twenties, and the Great Depression. We will also consider the growth of modernism and its revolutions in literary form and the relation between experiments in literary form and the era’s social and political conservatisms and radicalisms. We will read work by some of the most famous familiar figures of modern American literature—T. S. Eliot (a selection of poems), Ernest Hemingway (probably short stories), and William Faulkner (probably Light in August)—as well as work by less canonized or more recently canonized writers, including poetry by Langston Hughes and a selection of Imagist poets, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Dorothy Parker’s short stories, Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing. (None of these writers or titles is finally decided on, and the list is not complete, but it gives a picture of the course-plan in progress.) Take this course only if you plan to attend class regularly and join actively in class discussion. If you don’t want to speak in class, then take another course. Writing requirements will probably include several papers and a final exam.
455 MAJOR AUTHORS, Chai. (CRN 40444) TUTH 11-12:15
TOPIC: Melville and Hawthorne
Area Requirement: American, beginning to Civil War and MFA Literature
In this course, we’ll look at Melville and Hawthorne in terms of what they have to say about a common theme: the extent of individual autonomy. For both authors, the crucial question is how that autonomy might be restricted by either internal or external forces. In The House of the Seven Gables, individual autonomy gets co-opted by psychological possession, which works equally against both the possessed and the possessor. Meanwhile, The Blithedale Romance surveys the relation between the sexes as a whole. Here, by means of a careful analysis of the psychology of the voyeur, Hawthorne tries to show why that relation is often more about power than about love. Unlike Hawthorne, Melville wants to worry the issue of autonomy at the level of the involuntary. So in Moby-Dick we get a sense of how individual autonomy might be restricted by the very circumstances that make us what we are. “Bartleby” takes the issue one step further: not just our individual circumstances but our collective circumstances (how we interact) might hinder autonomy. “Benito Cereno” considers a special, unique hindrance to individual autonomy: slavery. Yet here the real hindrance doesn’t come from slavery as a condition but from the tendency of every master/slave relationship to create its own perpetual cycle. Finally, Billy Budd offers a radically different, naturalistic perspective. Instead of motive and/or will, the text asks us to think about autonomy in terms of vital energy or forces.
TEXTS: Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance; Melville, Moby-Dick, Bartleby & Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, Sailor
455 MAJOR AUTHORS, Saville. (CRN 40442) MWF 1
TOPIC: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) Poet of Private and Public Freedom
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
If you’ve heard of the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, chances are you’re most familiar with the romantic, but hackneyed story of her life: the invalid poet, rescued from an overprotective, domineering British father and swept off to a new life in Italy by her poet-lover, Robert Browning, to whom she wrote such sonnets as “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” You may not know that she was also an outspoken defender of civil liberties both in England and abroad, and you might not have considered how freedom to love the person of your choice might tally with civil rights such as freedom of speech, freedom to vote, and other freedoms enjoyed by citizens of the United States in the twenty-first century. In this course, we will study such freedoms and the constraints imagined in Barrett Browning’s poems about child labor in British factories, slavery in 1840s’ America, and the rebellions of Italian patriots against Austrian, Spanish, and French occupation in the 1850s. We’ll consider the similarities that arise between Victorian debates about individual, national, and cosmopolitan freedom, and contemporary debates about our often conflicting patriotic loyalties and global responsibilities. Among the many works we read will be “Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron,” “The Cry of the Children,” “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave,” the long poems Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh, and a selection from Poems Before Congress.
455 MAJOR AUTHORS, Garrett. (CRN 40445) TUTH 9:30-10:45
TOPIC: Dickens
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
Dickens is one of the few major authors in English literature who was also highly popular. From his first rambling comic novel The Pickwick Papers (1837) to his last, uncompleted The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), he held the devotion of a wide and enthusiastic audience. The humor, pathos, satire, and melodrama, the multitude of vivid, eccentric characters and the intricate plots connecting them that enthralled his original readers still entertain readers (and viewers) today. We will have many opportunities to enjoy the performances of “the Intimitable,” but we will also study his fiction from several critical perspectives: biographical, including not only his successful public career but also his private secrets; cultural, including his role not only as social critic and advocate but also as enforcer of middle-class values; and especially artistic, including his growing compositional control over his fertile inventions and his darkening vision of the world in which he played such a prominent role. Caution: Though the reading in this course is highly enjoyable, there’s also a lot of it—about 300 pages a week—and there will be quizzes on each week’s assignment. Don’t enroll unless you’re prepared to keep up.
TEXTS: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend
455 MAJOR AUTHORS, Kaplan-Hartnett. (CRN 40443) TUTH 2-3:20
Meets with CWL 461
TOPIC: J.M. Coetzee
Area Requirement: Anglophone Literature and MFA Literature
The Nobel Prize winning South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s work is formally diverse, playing with the epistolary, the aphoristic, and other disjunctive forms. His work is characterized by a bleak aesthetic wherein there is no room for the sentimental, the romantic, or the hopeful. His central characters, whether men or, as is often the case, women, tend to be solitary types who have a great deal of trouble connecting in meaningful ways to other people. Paternity and maternity are equally characterized as highly problematic ventures (either in their presence or in their lack). There is a consistent fascination with the status of the storyteller and the always troubled relationship between the event and the story. A host of recurring themes and metaphors reappear with intense regularity; these include complicity, culpability, witnessing, isolation, iron, dust, ghosts, ashes, angels, shame, disgrace, memory, love, reconciliation, forgetting, and history. The turmoil of apartheid and then post-apartheid South Africa is often intensely interwoven with the inner turmoil suffered by Coetzee’s characters, but the range of historical traumas explored includes colonialism, slavery, the Vietnam War, totalitarianism, the early stirrings of communism in Russia, contemporary terrorism, and the Holocaust.
The aim of this course is to introduce Coetzee to students and to engage his work on a variety of levels including the literary, political, historical, and emotional terrains covered in his complex texts.
461 TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Castro. (CRN 40446) TUTH 11-12:15
TOPIC: Mixed Metaphors: Literature and Miscegenation
Area Requirement: American Literature: Civil War to Present and MFA Literature
W.E. B. Du Bois famously deemed “the problem of the color line” to be the “problem of the twentieth century.” From our vantage point in the twenty-first, we will consider the metaphorical uses and abuses of blurring that line. This course samples a variety of texts—literary, legal, scientific and theoretical—to investigate the symbolic weight assigned racial and cultural mixture in an American context. We will focus on literary texts that overtly mobilize motifs of racial mixture to evaluate what ends such representations may serve. We will consider those literary cases in dialogue with various theorizations of New World cultural formations that metaphorize mixtures (the “melting pot,” mestizaje, creolité, hybridity), and in so doing we will consider the historical bodies on which such metaphors are predicated. We will draw on some texts from other parts of the Americas for reference and comparison, but our primary emphasis will be on U.S. texts, particularly from Emancipation forward. In addition to careful preparation of the reading and vigorous class participation, students will be expected to give a group presentation and to write various short responses, three essays, a midterm, and a final.
TEXTS: Readings will likely be drawn from among works by Mark Twain, María Ruiz de Burton, Kate Chopin, Thomas Dixon, Pauline Hopkins, José Martí, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Gayl Jones, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, and James McBride.
461 TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Goodlad. (CRN 40447) TUTH 12:30-1:45
TOPIC: Gothic Genres
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
In this course we will approach the topic of “goth” as a characteristically modern and postmodern phenomenon from two perspectives: 1) its historical precursors in the Gothic aesthetics of nineteenth-century literature and 2) its dimensions as a subculture, inside and outside literary works, since the late twentieth century. Our nineteenth-century readings will include James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, A. C. Swinburne’s poetry, Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé and selections from Vernon Lee’s Hauntings. Twentieth-century focal points will include James O’Barr’s graphic novel, The Crow, the music and album art of Joy Division, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and selections from Poppy Z. Brite’s Wormwood. We will read Dick Hebdige’s classic analysis of punk, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, as well as more recent writers on gothic subculture. Students will be encouraged to introduce present-day examples of goth aesthetics in genres such as film, fashion, dance, music, music video, ’zines and club rituals as well as literature.
461 TOPICS IN LITERATURE, C. Wright. (CRN 51247) TUTH 9:30-10:45
TOPIC: Irish Myth and Legend in the Middle Ages
Area Requirement: British, beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
This course examines the “Celtic” myths and legends of medieval Ireland. We will read (in modern English translation) medieval Irish tales of gods and goddesses, druids and druidesses, heroes and heroines: tales of voyages to the Celtic Otherworld, of feasts where warriors contend for the “champion’s portion,” of strange births and tragic deaths, of magical transformations, of courtships and cattle-raids. Texts include the Ulster Cycle stories about the boy-hero Cú Chulainn, king Conchobar, Fergus and queen Medb, culminating in the great Irish epic, The Táin Bó Cuailnge (“The Cattle Raid of Cooley”). In addition to the primary focus on the mythological literature, we will also read some texts representative of the “Celtic” spirituality of early Christian Ireland, such as the Lives of Saints Patrick and Brigid and the Voyage of Saint Brendan. As we read the literature we will also study aspects of the history, art, and culture of early medieval Ireland from the pagan Celtic period through the early Christian era and down to the Viking invasions and the Anglo-Norman conquest.
462 TOPICS IN MODERN FICTION, Valente. (CRN 40448) TUTH 12:30-1:45
TOPIC: Damaged Goods
Area Requirement: British, Twentieth Century and MFA Literature
This course will examine how characters made marginal by historically conditioned forms of debility—physical, emotional, psychic—are represented during the Modernist period as repositories or battlegrounds of moral authority. The course will focus on three crises of the modern period that produced or exacerbated the damage the characters suffer and render that damage socially emblematic: the fracturing of the Victorian social contract, World War I as the supreme expression of that breakdown, and the period of anomie following the war, the so-called lost generation, who testified not just to the damage incurred but to its eclipse of all prospective standards of value.
Texts include Jude the Obscure, The Secret Agent, Testament of Youth, Return of the Soldier, Nightwood, Handful of Dust, Mrs. Dalloway, Murphy, and Into Torment.
462 TOPICS IN MODERN FICTION, Mehta. (CRN 41369) MW 1-2:20
Meets with CWL 441
TOPIC: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
Area Requirement: By Request to Director of Graduate Studies (meets requirement in the Novel)
The subject of this course is the genre of the novel and its concordance with the political and cultural worlds of the bourgeoisie in the 19 th and the early 20 th century. How did the novel in different stages and ages of capitalist development interact with the reading public? How was sexuality in its normative or deviant forms explored in this genre? What was the relation between public and private spheres? How did the shadow of the lands/colonies//empires far away figure in the narratives? What new elements or rules, if any, were introduced into the scene by the bourgeoisie of colonized societies? These are some of the issues that will be explored in this course.
TEXTS: (All texts read in English translation) Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Stendhal, Le Rouge et Le Noir; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers; André Gide, L’Immoraliste; Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karennina; Jane Austen, Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World; Sharatchandra Chatterjee, Devdas
Secondary Texts: Critical writings by a variety of scholars, including Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Eric Auerbach, Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert and Gubar, Jonathan Culler etc.
481 COMP THEORY AND PRACTICE, Hawisher. (CRN 40460) MW 2-3:15
Area Requirement: Critical Theory for Writing Studies Students only. Fulfills no requirement for Lit students.
English 481 will examine theory, research, and pedagogy that have emerged over the past 30 years in the field of writing studies. In particular, we'll look at social theories of writing with an eye toward understanding theoretical issues and practical possibilities. A primary goal for the course is to help you become a better teacher by thinking critically about the instruction you plan and carry out. To this end, we will discuss readings and digital media productions related to writing pedagogies; the development of writing abilities; writing as social action; literacy theories; computers and composition; writing research; and response and evaluation. Extensive writing—both online and off-line––will also be required.
Texts include Bruce, Bertram C. (2003) Literacy in the Information Age: Inquiries into Meaning Making with New Technologies; Dornan, Reade W., Lois Matz Rosen, Marilyn Wilson. (2003). Within and Beyond the Writing Process in the Secondary English Classroom; Dean, Deborah (2008). Genre Theory; Alverman, Donna, ed. (2002). Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World, among others.
500 R INTRO TO CRITICISM AND RESEARCH, Hansen. (CRN 30190) TH 1-2:50
TOPIC: Modern Critical Theory: An Advanced Introduction
Area Requirement: Critical Theory
This course will provide a historical survey of the foundational thinkers, texts, and schools that orient contemporary work in the humanities, from Kant and Hegel to Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory. As an “advanced introduction,” the course is intended primarily for first-year graduate students and for those who feel they have not covered the development of critical theory in a systematic way. The course will include significant discussion of figures such as: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Williams, Hall, Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Zizek, and Butler. Among the topics we will certainly address are: history, the subject, value, power, language, ideology, materiality, gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. The purpose of this course is to ensure that graduate students receive a rigorous introduction to critical theories and methodologies central to a variety of fields in the humanities and to provide the basis for interdisciplinary conversation and intellectual community among graduate students and faculty members from across the university.
Modern Critical Theory will have an unusual format. The course will meet twice a week, once a week in a public session that will include graduate students from Robert Rushing’s Comparative Literature 501 course and once a week in a closed session limited to registered students. Drawing on the resources of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, we will invite to class “guest experts” from around campus (and occasionally from off campus); these guests will visit the public sessions of the seminar and lecture on particular topics throughout the semester. Those Tuesday night sessions will meet from 7-9 p.m.
Requirements: Attendance at all public and closed sessions; active participation; 10-pages of analytical writing during the semester; a timed, 72 hour take-home essay exam of approximately 10 pages at the end of the semester.
More information about the course will be available by late summer on the Unit for Criticism website: http://criticism.english.uiuc.edu.
Please contact me if you have any questions about the course: jhansen1@uiuc.edu
503 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CINEMA, Desser. (CRN 43343) M 3-5:50
Area Requirement: Film
Same as CINE 503, CWL 503
Seminar on historical perspectives on cinema as an institution, a body of signifying practices, a product to be consumed, a phenomenon of modernity, and a cultural artifact and on cinema in relation to other screen media. A detailed description may be posted on English Department web page once it’s available—http://www.english.uiuc.edu/coursecatalog.
505 R WRITING STUDIES I, Mortensen. (CRN 35705) TU 1-2:50
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
Same as CI 563
This course introduces you to Writing Studies and allied fields, with the aim of enabling scholarly inquiry that advances your graduate career. Throughout the semester, you will evaluate claims to disciplinarity that draw variously on ancient traditions (e.g., rhetoric, reaching back some 2,500 years), established institutional practices (e.g., U.S. college composition instruction, dating from the nineteenth century), and contemporary academic activity (e.g., scholarly exchange emergent in twentieth-century studies of rhetoric, composition, communication, information, literacy, language, reading, and writing). You will learn to navigate the print and electronic resources that document knowledge in Writing Studies and allied fields; in doing so, you will gain a sense of the fields’ most pressing questions and the best methods for pursuing answers to them. Seminar discussions, grounded in careful reading of relevant texts, will survey the breadth and depth of scholarship in Writing Studies and allied fields. Your final portfolio will include writing that demonstrates your familiarity with scholarship in Writing Studies and allied fields, and that positions you to make significant contributions to that scholarship.
524 G SEMINAR IN 17 TH C LITERATURE, L. Newcomb. (CRN 30191) W 3-4:50
TOPIC: Romance, Novel and the Work of Fiction in Britain 1550-1750
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1485-1660 and 1660-2800 and MFA Literature
This course engages pre- and non-novelistic prose fiction while eschewing the remarkably persistent ‘rise of the novel’ model that presupposes realism, masculine authority, and English identity as constitutive of the novel proper. The supposed “Englishness” of the eighteenth-century novel is finally visible as an aberration from fiction as a form generated in cultural hybridity. It’s time now to return to the range of earlier forms—romances, scandal and amatory fiction, novellas, topical ‘key’ novels—with a fuller appreciation of their material, political, transnational, and gender-crossing social interventions. We’ll survey a range of fiction forms produced in English from 1550 to 1750, many recently recovered for study by new critical work on fictional narratives’ ties to expository prose genres, on the history of gender and sexualities, and on reader affects and demographics. Our objective is to sketch a fuller collective picture of the prose fictions written and read in early modern Britain, as they participate in transnational ‘romance’ webs of circulation (historically marked as female) as well as in the more specifically English phenomenon that elevated the middle-class novel (initially marked as male). (For the sake of comparison, we will read a few women-authored French novellas in widely-read English translations of the period.) Luckily, many of the works are short, and on-line texts offer new horizons for analyzing their work, individually and collectively, in staking out fiction’s imaginable national, gender, and socioeconomic affinities.
533 E SEMINAR ROMANTIC LIT, Underwood. (CRN 39505) W 1-2:50
TOPIC: The Topic Formerly Known as Secularization, 1750-1850
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1660-1800 and MFA Literature
British Romanticism has long been understood as a consequence of secularization. It stood to reason that, as organized religion declined, supernaturalism would become natural, and secular literature would take on the functions of sacred eschatology.
This basic premise of literary history has turned out to rest on shaky foundations. There was never much evidence of religious decline in the Romantic period itself: on the contrary, the period gave rise to new kinds of evangelical activity. If secularization was taking place in literature, one had to assume that it reflected some wider, slower current of change. But historians of religion have not, in practice, been able to identify a current that bears different nations and periods inexorably in the same direction. The religious histories of different nations (even, say, France, England, and the United States) have unfolded very differently. “Secularization” has begun to look like a word that obscures the real relationship between social and literary history by lumping together unrelated things.
This course will study the problem on two different levels. We’ll start by getting a sense of how the broad debate about secularization has played out among sociologists, philosophers, and historians (Durkheim, Casanova, Taylor, Pecora). Then we’ll focus more specifically on the implications of that debate for literary study, looking in particular at a century when literature is supposed to have begun to displace religion. We’ll read classic accounts of that process (Abrams), as well as a series of recent attempts to sharpen social specificity by replacing secularization with the concept of a “reading nation” (McKelvy), or “toleration” (Canuel), or by describing a transformation of religion itself (Jager, White). We’ll pay particular attention to an enthusiasm for historicity that links Romantic literature to some surprising innovations in Protestant doctrine. Primary texts may include Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, selected works by Robert Lowth, S. T. Coleridge, E. B. Browning, and Jules Michelet, and an occasional pamphlet about the Rapture.
543 E SEMINAR MOD BRITISH LIT, Hart. (CRN 30195) M 1-2:50
TOPIC: Problems in the New Modernist Studies
Area Requirement: British Literature: 1900-present and MFA Literature
The last decade has seen a renaissance of scholarly work on early and mid-twentieth century literature, much of it done under the rubric of the “New Modernist Studies.” But what if anything unites the disparate projects of this critical tendency? What is “new” about it? How has it changed the way we read and identify modernist texts? And are we able, ten years after the inaugural “New Modernisms” conference of the Modernist Studies Association, to describe its contributions and acknowledge its limits?
Because we cannot hope to survey all or much of the field, the class will break down into four thematic clusters or nodes: “The Economics of Modernism,” “Modernist Temporalities,” “Modernist Geographies,” and “Modernism as a Concept.” In each section we will read literary texts with and against key examples of recent critical and theoretical practice. Canonical authors will include James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf; lesser-known writers include Djuna Barnes, Kamau Brathwaite, Mina Loy, and Melvin Tolson. Students will be expected to write a 10-15 page critical essay, a short oral paper on a critical or theoretical topic, and a bibliographic research project.
553 G SEMINAR LATER AMERICAN LIT, Marsh. (CRN 32356) M 3-4:50
TOPIC: The Long 1930s
Area Requirement: American Literature: Civil War to Present and MFA Literature
Critics who have been drawn to issues of class and radical politics in U.S. literary history have tended to focus, quite understandably, on the depression decade of the 1930s. In this course, we will spend some time with the literature of the 1930s, but we will do our best to survey the period Alan Wald has called “the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left”—that is, the period from roughly 1911 (the founding of The Masses) to the mid-1960s. We will do so in an effort to understand how some of the themes and issues that preoccupied 1930s writers—labor, poverty, civil rights—had their start before that decade and did not go away with U.S. entry into World War II or the backlash against left-liberal politics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In addition to treating each of the understudied works on their own terms, we will also try to generate responses to a few questions that currently divide the field of working-class and left-literary studies. First, why have questions of class lagged behind inquiries based on other categories of identity (race, gender, sexuality) and what form should the relation between class and these other categories take? Second, and related, how have critics brought other theoretical perspectives to bear on a discipline ruled largely by Marxism? Finally, what do we lose and what do we gain by treating the 1930s as a unique period of literary history and, conversely, what do we lose and what do we gain by seeing a continuity of concerns across a number of decades?
Writing assignments will include a short annotated bibliography of scholarship that addresses the work or works you take up in the article-length (20-25 pages) essay due at the end of the semester. I will also ask you to turn in an introduction to that essay at least two weeks prior to the final due date.
TEXTS: (all more or less tentative) Upton Sinclair, Oil!; Edith Summers Kelley, Weeds; poems from Genevieve Taggard, ed. May Days: An Anthology of Verse from Masses-Liberator; poems from Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows and Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew; Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing; William Attaway, Blood on the Forge; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio; poems from Granville Hicks, et al, eds. Proletarian Literature in the United States; poems from the United Auto Worker, Justice, Industrial Worker, and The Sharecropper’s Voice; Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead; Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart; the anti-McCarthy poetry of Edwin Rolfe; Ann Petry, The Street; Allan Ginsberg, Howl; Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend; for most weeks, we will also read a critical analysis of the work as well as a relevant primary document.
581 T SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Valente. (CRN 30196) TH 3-5:15
TOPIC: Psycho/Schizo/Psycho – Lacan Deleuze Zizek
Area Requirement: Critical Theory
This is the second of a triptych of courses designed to introduce the graduate students to the history of French Post-Structuralism in a rigorously focused manner. In each course, we will study a key figure in the formation of Post-Structuralism as a discourse of interpretation and the signature concepts whereby he gave that discourse its foundational logic. In the second course, that figure will be Jacques Lacan and the concept will be objet a, along with its variously nuanced correlatives (lack, desire, phallus, castration, jouissance, drive, das Ding. As Lacan is the most important psychoanalytical thinker since Freud, roughly half the course will be devoted to his major works, including Ecrits, SeminarVII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XI: Four Fundamental Concepts, and Seminar XX.
In each course we will proceed to a figure who adapted those signature concepts to some more resolutely sociopolitical form of analysis. In the second course that figure will be Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose signature concept, the rhizome, we will examine in such works as A Thousand Plateaus, Dialogues and others.
In each course, finally, we will look at the work of an heir of the post-structuralist tradition who is particularly indebted, for his master concepts, to the earlier figures studied. In this course that figure will be Slavoj Zizek, whose signature concept, the empty signifier, we will trace through sections from a number of his works, including The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Metastases of Enjoyment, and Looking Awry.
Course 1 - Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben Course 3 - Foucault, Jameson. Negri
582 E1 TOPICS RESEARCH AND WRITING, Prior. (CRN 49615) W 1-2:50
Same as CI 565
TOPIC: Flat CHAT Studies of Literate Activity
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
This seminar addresses a central issue in Writing Studies, how to connect individual discourse practices, and the learning of them, to social contexts. One approach that offers a potential to bridge the gap between micro and macro or local and global is a convergence of cultural-historical activity theories (e.g., Vygotsky, Engestrom, Moll, Rogoff, Cole, Voloshinov) with flat approaches to the social arising from phenomenological, rhizomatic and actor-network theories (e.g., Schutz, Latour, Deleuze & Guattari, Holland, Scollon, Hanks, Irvine, Goodwin, Suchman). This flat CHAT convergence could allow for an open-ended tracing of relationships among functional activity systems, genre systems, and literate activity. In this seminar, we will examine in depth some key examples of theoretical and empirical work in these areas. The examples will be drawn from a variety of research areas, not only Writing Studies. To examine how to implement these approaches in studies of writing and literate activity, we will engage in a number of inquiry activities (practicing in effect how to plan, conduct and analyze research). Finally, students will explore the application of flat CHAT approaches to their current or projected research projects.
READINGS: Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action , James Wertsch; Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Bruno Latour; Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, Sigrid Norris & Rodney Jones (Eds.) and individual readings that will include work by many of the scholars cited above as well as writing researchers (e.g., Arnetha Ball, Charles Bazerman, Carol Berkenkotter, Anne Dyson, Cheryl Geisler, Bill Hart-Davidson, George Kamberelis, Kris Gutierrez, Kevin Leander, Theresa Lillis, Paul Prior, David Russell, Jody Shipka, Clay Spinuzzi, and Christine Tardy).
582 G TOPICS RESEARACH AND WRITING, Hawhee. (CRN 49231) W 3-4:50
Same as CI 565
TOPIC: Spawn of the Dead: Aristotle and Rhetorical Studies
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
This graduate seminar will devote an entire semester to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, arguably the most resilient and proliferating single work in rhetorical studies. Such a sustained study assumes 1) that The Rhetoric should not be read quickly, and 2) that it cannot be read in isolation, so we will read the treatise chapter by chapter and alongside other texts—Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian, ancient and contemporary. The aim of the course is to investigate the historical, cultural, and disciplinary conditions that have given Aristotle such a prominent place in rhetorical studies; how Aristotle’s notions of rhetoric formed in relation to other theories of rhetoric in play during and prior to the classical period; and how Aristotelian arguments and concepts have served to delimit and produce what scholars of rhetoric study and teach these days.
593 P1 PROF SEMINAR COLLEGE TCHG. (CRN 32361) TU 11-12:50
TOPIC: The Teaching of Rhetoric
Area Requirement: None
The professional seminar is designed to prepare graduate students to teach first year composition and is required of all graduate students teaching rhetoric for the first time.
593 P2 PROF SEMINAR COLLEGE TCHG, Frost. (CRN 32365) TU 11-12:50
TOPIC: The Teaching of Business and Technical Writing
Area Requirement: None
The professional seminar is designed to prepare graduate students to teach business and technical writing effectively and is required of all graduate students teaching business writing for the first time. The seminar introduces students to the theoretical foundations of business and technical writing and provides an overview of pedagogical approaches to teaching the topic.
CREATIVE WRITING GRADUATE SEMINARS
502 G PROBELMS IN POETRY WRITING, Kelly. (CRN 45292) M 3-4:50
Area Requirement: None
Examination of the creative process of poetry from the perspective of aesthetics and techniques, illustrated from the work of selected authors.
504 W WRITING WORKSHOP IN FICTION, Shakar. (CRN 45293) TU 5-6:50
Area Requirement: None
An MFA course in the art of fiction, with equal emphasis on craft and that elusive thing called art. Plan on writing three short stories, reading and giving feedback to the work of your classmates, and reading and discussing published short stories of our collective choosing.
506 G WRITING WORKSHOP IN POETRY, Madonick. (CRN 45294) W 3-5:20
Area Requirement: 506
Directed individual projects, with group discussion in fiction.