DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
400- thru 500-Level Literature
Course Descriptions
SPRING 2008

411 1U/1G CHAUCER, M. Camargo. (CRN 32131) TUTH 9:30-10:45
Area Requirement: British, beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
same as MDVL 411

We will read and discuss most of the Canterbury Tales, with the object of appreciating and enjoying Chaucer's poetic originality and understanding the literary tradition within which he wrote and the world-picture that he brings to life. Topics that will be emphasized in class discussions include Chaucer's innovative poetics, his complex engagement with issues of gender and social class, and his place in the major philosophical and political controversies of fourteenth-century England.

419 1U/1G SHAKESPEARE, II, Kay. (CRN 32137) TUTH 9:30-10:45
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

This class will trace the stages of Shakespeare's development from mid-career onward, including: 1) the tragic-comic experience of his “problem comedies” like Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, where characters must come to terms with the guilt for acts which they intended but never actually committed; 2) his major tragedies ( Macbeth, Othello, King Lear ), where evil exacts a terrible cost for folly and temptation and self-knowledge is bought only by suffering and loss; and 3) his late romances like The Winter's Tale or The Tempest, which contrast innocence and experience and connect the cycle of generations to the regeneration of nature and society. We'll also look at Shakespeare's Dark Lady Sonnets and at Roman plays like Antony and Cleopatra, where love and manliness are tested in the struggle for empire. There will be regular brief in-class writings on our reading, several medium-length papers involving critical readings, an hour-exam, and a final.

TEXT: The Riverside Shakespeare , revised edition.

419 2U/2G SHAKESPEARE II, L. Newcomb. (CRN32140 ) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

This course looks at “later Shakespeare,” that is, plays from the second half of Shakespeare's writing career (1600-1612), as they have produced meaning in the early seventeenth century and beyond. Why did these plays seem urgent in the context of early modern Britain, and why do they remain urgent in many national contexts today? We'll look at debates sparked by seven plays, among the playwright's most enduring: Henry V and the ethics of war, Much Ado About Nothing and the instability of sexual bonds; Hamlet and the possible political bite of theatre, Othello and the production of gender and racial differences, The Winter's Tale and class fantasy, King Lear and problems of sovereignty in the family and nation. We'll conclude with The Tempest and its re-invention in global debate. Throughout, we'll note some features that help keep the plays culturally central: the openness of staging that invites new interpretations; the flexible language that makes the plays polyvalent; and the confronting of familial, class, gender, and racial tensions in terms both prescient and ambivalent.

Be ready for proactive discussion, performance experiments, and rigorous written work. 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. We'll start with close textual analysis, then consider performance choices and film interpretations. By midterm, we'll be ready to contextualize and question the plays' social visions through historicist and materialist criticism, and feminist, queer, and race studies. Expect frequent in-class group activities including performance of a scene; three focused short papers; a longer paper involving research (7-9 pp.); and a midterm and final.

TEXTS: Greenblatt et al . eds, Norton Shakespeare (first edition); McDonald, Bedford Companion to Shakespeare ; critical articles on e-reserve.

419 3U/3G SHAKESPEARE II, Stevens. (CRN 32142) MWF 11
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

This course, which joins theater history (what we know about performance in Shakespeare's time) to close textual analysis, studies seven plays from the latter half of Shakespeare's career, including some of his most notable tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear . We'll also study one “problem” play that seems to defy its categorization as a comedy ( Measure for Measure ), one late romance ( The Tempest ), and one lesser-known tragedy (Coriolanus). As we read these plays we'll situate Shakespeare within a broader political, cultural, and above all theatrical context, reminding ourselves that these plays were intended as scripts for performance and were also conceived and produced under specific economic and material conditions. We will also consider the “afterlives” of these plays, noting how Shakespeare gets revised and rescripted by different generations and cultures.

Evaluation will be based on participation, including a willingness to block scenes in class; one formal in-class performance assignment; one midterm; and finally one short essay (5-6 pages) which will be substantially developed, with instructor suggestions for revision, into a longer final paper involving secondary research (12-15 pages).

This course assumes no prior college-level study in Shakespeare, but English 200 (or 101 and 102) is prerequisite.

TEXTS: Russ McDonald, Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (2 nd edition); individual editions of the pays (TBA).


419 4U/4G SHAKESPEARE II, Cole. (CRN 39227) TUTH 9:30-10:45
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

The second and richer half of Shakespeare's career is examined through very careful readings of nine plays, each selected for the new things it says about his changing interests and developing dramatic skills. The first nine weeks deal with five of the mature tragedies; discussion centers on the plays themselves, but it will also attempt to relate the plays to one another and to the time in which they were written. This section is followed by several weeks on at least two of the dark comedies (where romance turns sour) and several more on the last two romances (where romance turns philosophical). A sixth-week exam covers the first three plays, a 10-12 page paper on one of the dark comedies is due the tenth week, and the final exam includes only the last six plays.

TEXT: The Riverside Shakespeare, Evans, ed.

419 5U/5G SHAKESPEARE II, Shapiro. (CRN 39722) TUTH 11-12:15
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

I expect to cover 8-10 of Shakespeare's later plays, drawn from three categories—problem comedy, tragedy, and romance. I conduct the class by discussion rather than by lecture. There will be a final, plus one or two short papers (c. 5 pp.) and a long paper (c. 12-15 pp.) on an appropriate project (e.g. acting or design for theater students). Students will also participate in workshop productions of one or two short scenes. Approaching the plays as scripts for performance is, I feel, an effective way to understand Shakespeare's language, imagery, characterizations, and dramaturgy.

TEXT: I recommend the Norton Shakespeare.

421 1U/1G LATER RENAISS POETRY & PROSE, Mohamed. (CRN 32147) MW 2-3:15
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

This course will examine seventeenth-century English writing at crisis points of religious controversy. From the assassination attempt on King James I, to the civil wars and execution of Charles I, to the restoration of monarchy, the religious tumults of the period produce explosive political consequences—and an unprecedented amount of print. We will explore how the concerns of the time reveal themselves in key literary texts of the period, such as the devotional poetry of John Donne and George Herbert and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. We will also explore the radical political settlements arising from left-wing Protestantism, including the Levellers' arguments for universal male suffrage and the Diggers' proto-communism. Along the way we will also see in our study of the seventeenth century some of the first women poets to be published in England, particularly Lady Mary Wroth, Rachel Speght, and Aemilia Lanyer.
 

423 1U/1G MILTON, Gray. (CRN 45972) TUTH 9:30-10:45
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

This course introduces you to one of the greatest British writers—John Milton. Milton was a blind seer, a regicidal prose-writer, and an inspired poet. He also wrote arguably the most ambitious English epic, one that aimed to explain the origins of life itself: Paradise Lost . This class will explore Milton 's prodigious and ostentatiously learned output in the context of his own life and the historical turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century that transformed it. We will focus on the complex issues of religion, gender, and politics he engages, looking at his often contradictory responses to the ideas, literature, and men and women of his time. We will also trace his carefully crafted public image, thinking about Milton 's view of the role of poetry and polemic within a revolutionary historical context.
 

427 1U/1G LATER 18 TH CENTURY LITERATURE, Wilcox. (CRN 32152) MWF 12
Area Requirement: British, 1660-1800 and MFA Literature

Later eighteenth-century British literature speaks to our own cultural moment: How do you discern excellence and identify representative works when new media are blurring the boundaries between pop culture and high art? The literature produced between the 1740s and the 1790s emerged from a world in which the literary elite tried to define “British Literature” at the same time that a growing popular market for reading material was challenging those definitions. What counts as literature and why was a pressing question during this time. Answers emerged that have shaped our habits and expectations of reading—but they are not necessarily the same answers we would give today, nor are they answers that the writers and thinkers of the later eighteenth century agreed on. In this course, you will gain first-hand experience in doing literary history as you sample the larger body of literature from which the canonical texts of later eighteenth-century literature were drawn and decide which literary texts from this period warrant scrutiny and why. Working closely with your classmates and instructor, you will create and master a class anthology of selected readings from this period, which will convey the breadth of this period while addressing the themes that most interest you in greater depth. By the end of the semester you will have read a wide variety of late eighteenth-century texts with comprehension, insight, and enjoyment; you will have a well-grounded critical framework for taking part in the ongoing scholarly debate about how to weave these texts into narratives of British literary development; and you will have first-hand knowledge of how scholarly research creates a teachable order out of the chaos of the literary past.

Initial course readings will include Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and a course packet of selected late eighteenth-century poetry and nonfiction prose designed to build skills in comprehending and interpreting the language of the period; subsequent readings will be determined by student interest and made available through e-reserve and ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

Course requirements will include participation on the course blog, two analytical papers, a short project in archival scholarship, and a final.

429 1U/1G 18 TH CENTURY FICTION, Pollock. (CRN 43201) TUTH 11-12:15
Area Requirement: British, 1660-1800 and MFA Literature

“Fictions of Enlightenment.” 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.
 

431 1U/1G ENGLISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE, Wood. (CRN 32164) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature

This course examines the major preoccupations of British Romanticism: nature and the sublime; orientalism and the Gothic; social revolution and reform; the modern, psychologized literary subject; and the death-driven trajectory of the artist-hero from “gladness” to “despondency and madness.” The class will emphasize the broad nature of the Romantic movement, with references to its European context and frequent discussion of romantic art and music. In addition to our study of major figures Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, Austen, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, the infusion of French revolutionary ideology after 1789—and the violent ambivalence of Britain's writers toward it—will serve as the cornerstone of a broader historical investigation of this vital and culturally rich period.
 

435 1U/1G 19 TH C BRITISH FICTION, Garrett. (CRN 32170) TUTH 2-3:15
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature

The nineteenth century was a period of accelerating social change, driven by such modernizing forces as industrialization, urbanization, and the expansion of the political franchise, means of communication, and literacy. All these factors helped in making the novel the dominant cultural form of the age, the site for staging ideological conflicts and imagining their resolution, for projecting broad panoramas of social relations, probing the subjectivity of individual experience, and struggling to relate those disparate perspectives. The novels we will read display many of the new possibilities writers developed as they tried to meet these challenges: from Austen's restricted comedy of manners to the large social landscapes of Dickens and Eliot; from the versions of pastoral by Trollope and Hardy to the versions of romance by Shelley, the Brontës, and Conrad. In each case, our approach will be through features of narrative form and craft, seeing how each novelist's strategies of narration, characterization, and plotting work to produce different visions of and responses to a changing world.

TEXTS: Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Shelley, Frankenstein; C. Brontë, Jane Eyre; E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Dickens, Bleak House; Trollope, The Warden; Eliot, Middlemarch; Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Conrad, Lord Jim

441 1U/1G BRITISH LIT 1900-1930, Hansen. (CRN 39271) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: British, 1900-present and MFA Literature

Modernism and Crisis - Virginia Woolf once claimed that, “on or around December 1910, human nature changed.” Of course, much of the literature written in the Britain between 1900 and 1930 betrays a sense that the old ways of making sense of the world seemed to have failed, and the Europe was in the midst of a series of profound political, social, and cultural crises. By evaluating some of the works by W.B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Rebecca West, and Woolf herself, we will try to understand these various crises and the long-term effects that they had on British, and subsequently on international, culture. Requirements will include a daily reading journal, two 6-8 page essays, a midterm, a final, and active in-class participation.
 

451 1U/1G AMERICAN LIT 1914-1945, Parker. (CRN 32194) TUTH 12:30-1:45
Area Requirement: American, 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 figures, including poetry by Langston Hughes and a selection of Imagist poets, Nella Larsen's Passing, Dorothy Parker's short stories, and Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . (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 1U/1G MAJOR AUTHORS, Courtemanche. (CRN 32205) TUTH 2-3:15
TOPIC: Dickens and the Victorian City
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature

As the writers of Lost are aware, Charles Dickens was a pioneer of the long-form multi-plot narrative that sprawls over different places and times while desperately trying to tie everything together. Dickens's novels are informed by what was in the 19th century the new experience of living in an unfathomable metropolis, with its surging crowds and solitary alienation. His narratives make the city of London legible through complex mapping strategies in which strangers turn out to be related in every way imaginable: family ties, legal claims, violent accidents, common acquaintances, work contracts, ancient passions, or simple proximity. These novels make you care both about the private realm and the public sphere: they draw you in with melodramatic tales about quirky individuals, and then ambitiously try to make sense of their whole society, attacking religious hypocrisy, political complacency, the ideological delusions of the wealthy, and the petty vanity of established power.

In this class, we will read the (warning: long!) Dickens novels Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, as well as descriptions of the Victorian city, and of urban mapping in general, by such critics as J. Hillis Miller, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, and Franco Moretti. The course will require one close-reading paper, one longer research paper, a midterm and final, weekly written assignments, and active class participation.
 

455 2U/2G MAJOR AUTHORS, Garrett. (CRN 32210) TUTH 11-12:15
TOPIC: George Eliot
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature

Marian Evans was a prominent Victorian intellectual before she began writing fiction as George Eliot, and her tales and novels grow as much from her ideas and convictions as from her personal and historical experience. From Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) to Daniel Deronda (1876), she is centrally concerned with the disrupting effects of modernity and modernization, with the loss of the traditional religious beliefs that had grounded moral values and the loss of the traditional pre-industrial way of life that had provided a sense of community. Those concerns lead to her ethical humanism, her efforts to reground values in personal and social obligation, as well as her artistic realism, which was part of her effort to reestablish community by promoting sympathy. “Art is the nearest thing to life,” she wrote; “a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” In pursuing those efforts, she wrote some of the greatest and most complex fiction of the nineteenth century, distinguished by both its social and historical scope and its psychological depth, and ranging in style from the enclosed Gothic nightmare of “The Lifted Veil” to the sweeping social panorama of Middlemarch. Following the course of her development will offer us many opportunities to appreciate those artistic achievements as well as to probe the cultural conflicts she tried to resolve.

TEXTS: Selected Essays, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, “The Lifted Veil,” Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda

455 3U/3G MAJOR AUTHORS, Pollock. (CRN 32215) TUTH 2-3:15
TOPIC: Eliza Haywood and Mary Wollstonecraft
Area Requirement: British, 1660-1800 and MFA Literature

This course will focus on the major writings produced by two of the most widely-read women writers in eighteenth-century England, with the primary goal of understanding the different forms that early feminist discourse could take: what would it have meant to be a “feminist” in the generations after the Glorious Revolution (1689), when Parliament undermined the notion that kings ruled legitimately on the basis of an automatic “divine right,” when the potentially egalitarian political ideals of Locke (and others) suggested that personal industry and merit should enable any person to rise in the world, and when the official end of censorship made it possible for more and more writers to publish and to engage in socially consequential public debate? To give ourselves a broader sense of the cultural contexts within which Haywood and Wollstonecraft developed their influential perspectives on England's gender system, we'll begin by reading some of the works of Mary Astell (often referred to as England's “first feminist”) against the popular tradition of paternalistic conduct-books and essay-periodicals from the 1680s to the 1710s. The second section of the course will situate Haywood's subversive “amatory fictions” in relation both to Astell's work and to Samuel Richardson's moral-realist fiction of the 1740s. Finally, the third section of the course will read Wollstonecraft's major works (both philosophical and fictional) as critical engagements both with Richardson and with the sentimentalist gender ideologies of Rousseau and Burke. Course requirements: regular attendance and participation, three essays, and a final exam.

455 5U/5G MAJOR AUTHORS, Doherty Mohr. (CRN 44786) MWF 12
TOPIC: Willa Cather
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature

In this course, we will read the major works of Willa Cather, including her well-known novels, O Pioneers! and My Antonia, as well as less familiar but equally important works, such as The Song of the Lark and the Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours. Although Cather's works are associated with the Great Plains, her fictional settings include urban and provincial locales from the southwestern to the northeastern United States. With this in mind, we will consider the intertwining influences of regionalism and cosmopolitanism on her work. We will also explore the significance of different aspects of identity—regional, national, racial, and sexual—to her characterization of settlers and wayfarers of all stripes—immigrants and migrants, farmers and artists, professors and soldiers, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Requirements include active participation in group discussions, response papers, two critical essays, a midterm, and a final exam.

TEXTS: Willa Cather's Collected Stories, Alexander's Bridge (1912), O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Additional short fiction and critical essays will be assigned.

461 1U/1G TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Courtemanche. (CRN 32225) TUTH 11-12:15
TOPIC: Pulp Fictions of the 1890's
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature

In the 1890s, the predominant form of British fiction shifted from the long three-volume novel to the shorter novella meant to appeal to a mass public. This economic development combined with a cultural reaction against the mid-Victorian pieties of respectability and religious duty to produce a series of intense fantastic tales that have been popular for a hundred years, but have not always made it into the literary canon. Many of these stories were deeply sexualized, featuring liberated New Women and male aesthetes as well as magnetic superhumans like Ayesha, Dracula, and Svengali. Others celebrated the primacy of science and the masculine will, jingoistic imperialism, or irrational violence.

We will approach these texts from four different critical angles: tracing philosophical influences through readings from Nietzsche and Freud; historical contextualization including developments in Victorian science and the Woman Question; political criticism using categories derived from contemporary cultural studies; and aesthetic appreciation of the stories' uncanny beauty, narrative innovations, and campy extravagance. Texts will include Bram Stoker's Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, H. Rider Haggard's She, Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, George du Maurier's Trilby, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, Grant Allen's The Woman who Did, stories by Olive Schreiner and Ada Leverson, and secondary critical readings by figures such as Q.D. Leavis, Janice Radway, and Susan Sontag.

461 2U/2G TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Barrett. (CRN 32230) TUTH 9:30-10:45
TOPIC: Medieval English Literature (excluding Chaucer)
Area Requirement: British, beginning to 1465 and MFA Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is an amazing masterpiece—but it isn't the be-all and end-all of medieval English literature. Many other great texts were produced in premodern England, and this course is an introduction to several of them. The reading list is divided into three thematic units: “Body and Soul,” “Debate and Vision,” and “Love and War.” In “Body and Soul,” we'll concentrate on the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, a treatise for female recluses, and the fifteenth-century York Mystery Plays, a cycle of bible pageants staged by male guildsmen. “Debate and Vision” will feature two fourteenth-century visionary texts: William Langland's Piers Plowman, a wanderer's quest for justice in a society governed by sin, and the anonymous Pearl, a father's encounter with the spirit of his dead daughter. The last unit, “Love and War,” reads the twelfth-century Lais of Marie de France against the fifteenth-century Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory —composite texts featuring the interplay of violence and desire. Each unit will also feature a selection of thematically-appropriate Old English poems, allowing us to consider the issues of the course in a longue durée context that defies the traditional period boundary of 1066. Although we will occasionally pause to consider snippets of each text in its original linguistic form, we will stick to Modern English translations for the most part. Assignments will include a number of short reading responses, three papers (one for each unit), and a final exam.

461 A1 TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Hilger. (CRN 39305) MW 3-4:20
meets with CWL 450
TOPIC: Gender Benders
Area Requirement: Critical Theory and MFA Literature

This course examines literary texts and other cultural documents (biographies, opera, films) from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, which all question the gender roles of their time through a representation of characters with unstable, ambivalent, or ambiguous gender identities. We will pay special attention to social and historical contexts and try to understand the function of transvestites, hermaphrodites, castrati and other gender benders in these texts.

In addition to the primary literature, we will read selections from Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex and Londa Schiebinger's The Mind Has No Sex? to help us understand how biology and science are used to construct and justify gender identity at various historical moments. This course therefore has particular relevance to current debates about gender and sexual identity, reproductive rights etc.

461 P TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Olsson. (CRN 41764) TUTH 1-2:20
meets with SCAN 496
TOPIC: Exile and Literary Modernism
Area Requirement: British, Twentieth Century and MFA Literature

Exile, displacement, and transnational existences are defining features of European avant-garde culture from the late 1800s and onward. Like their counterparts on the continent, Scandinavian writers and artists chose to live abroad and in many cases produced their most important works of art and fiction (often in a new language) during their time in exile. British and French authors from the same time period, like Joseph Conrad and Gérard de Nerval, have been closely associated with the transnational movements of that period. Important works of German literature were being written in Sweden and in the US during WWII, while renowned Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman went into voluntary exile in Germany in1976. Why? What pattern is to be found amongst these different forms of exile? Why, so it seems, is a change of country and language of decisive importance to the work of art?

Already in classical antiquity, writers were being expelled from their native countries – and this continues even today. But exile might be chosen and voluntary, or forced; it might be an inner or an outer exile. Modern literature, in particular, displays different aspects of exile, and the development of modernist literature is closely related to different forms of exile. The interconnectedness between modernism, emigration, and the internationalization of literature is discussed in this course, as well as the importance of exile for the construction of self and identity, experiments in language and aesthetic renewal. Critical and theoretical key concepts central to the course are inner and outer exile, voluntary and forced exile, modernism, world literature, experiments in language, and the construction of identity.

The course will discuss broadly comparative and European-related aspects of Scandinavian and Swedish modernist literature against a backdrop of Western modernism, from August Strindberg to Samuel Beckett, from Joseph Conrad to Gunnar Ekelöf, and on to J.M.G. Coetzee and Ingmar Bergman. The course will be conducted in seminar format and will be of particular interest to undergraduate students with some background in literary or film studies, as well as to graduate students. All reading, class discussion, and assignments in English.


462 1U/1G TOPICS IN MODERN FICTION, Valente. (CRN 32235) 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 2U/2G TOPICS IN MODERN FICTION, Castro. (CRN 48033) MWF 11
TOPIC: The Caribbean Novel
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature

In his influential collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Barbadian novelist George Lamming states that for him, there are “just three important events in British Caribbean history”: “the discovery”; “the abolition of slavery and the arrival of the East”; and “the discovery of the novel by West Indians.” Taking Lamming's assertion of the importance of Caribbean novelistic production seriously, this course offers sustained attention to the work of authors who call this tempest-tossed region, the cradle of the modern Americas, “home.” Hailing from a place whose inhabitants can trace ancestry to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Caribbean writers invite us to reflect on “ New World ” histories and the societies they have produced. We will ask what the novelistic genre offers these writers, while attending to the particularities of its form and themes in their hands. Most of our texts will be of the twentieth-century and drawn from the English-language tradition, but we will read enough in translation to at least begin to ponder what commonalities exist among islands that have been subject to different European colonial powers (England, Spain, France, Portugal, and Holland). Along the way, we will encounter some Nobel laureates, and many recurring concerns, including the legacies of slavery and colonialism--with particular attention to the role the novel is asked to play in projects of postcolonial historiography, the symbolic weight of the Haitian Revolution, and the nature of “independence.” We will attend to the tropes of diaspora, exile, and migration as well as of negritude, mestizaje/métissaje, hybridity and creolization that emerge from their pages, situating them with respect to Caribbean intellectual traditions. As themselves the products of crossroad and at times roaming cultures, these texts offer a rich opportunity for thinking beyond national borders. We will ask how they help to map our world, in these days of increasing “globalization.” This course would be of particular relevance to students interested in postcolonialism, African diasporic cultures, hemispheric American studies, and transational studies.

Requirements: In addition to careful preparation of the readings and vigorous class participation, students will write short responses, three papers, a midterm, and a final.

TEXTS: Readings will mostly be drawn from among the following: Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, Alejo Carpentier, V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Earl Lovelace, Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Erna Brodber, Caryl Phillips, Junot Diaz, and Edwidge Danticat.

475 1U/1G LIT AND OTHER DISCIPLINES, Littlefield. (CRN 43335) MW 2-3:15
TOPIC: Literature and Forensic Science
Area Requirement: By Request to Director of Graduate Studies and MFA Literature

“The job of a forensic scientist is not one of glamorous celebrity. [ . . .] If Sherlock Holmes, the detective invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, worked a shift with us at the Manhattan medical examiner's office, he might be assigned to pick up trash in the parking lot at Memorial Park...”

~ Forensic Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Investigative Techniques

According to contemporary undergraduate textbooks, the forensic sciences suffer from two longstanding associations: glamour and fiction. In the late nineteenth-century, fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes embodied the mystique of the intuitive detective, able to gather information and solve impossible cases based only on a footprint, a scrap of paper or a strand of human hair; in recent years, the spate of forensic-centered television and film has created a “CSI: effect” on American juries and helped fill the ranks of undergraduates enrolled in forensic science programs at universities around the country. Most forensic textbooks make the obligatory references to Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Daniel DeFoe, and Mark Twain—the literary giants who imagined, foretold, and commentated on the rise of the scientific detective—and, then in the same breath, dismissing fiction as a flawed origin story

In our course we will begin with the opposite assumption: that literature is an essential component in the development of the forensic sciences. Our course will span over a century of fiction, science, and technology that runs through Sherlock Holmes, Edwin Balmer and Philip MacHarg, Mark Twain, Kathy Reichs and many others. We will also read scientific tracts, journal articles, and book selections that provide a window on historical and contemporary forensic practices. Assignments will include several short papers/projects, a presentation, and a final project.

481 COMP THEORY AND PRACTICE, Schaffner. (CRN 44165) MW 2-3:15
Area Requirement: Critical Theory for Writing Studies students only. Fulfills no requirement for Literature students.

In exploring some of the major theories that inform the teaching of academic writing, we will pay particular attention to the role of innovation in written communication. Can innovation be taught? Should it be? Topics we will explore include: the use of writing as punishment, note passing, cheating, formulaic writing, writing with images, and YouTube composition. Students will be responsible for presenting on a popular film about composition and for writing regular reading response papers.

482 WRITING TECHNOLOGIES, D. Baron. (CRN 44168) MW 9:30-10:45
same as LIS 482
Area Requirement: None

There is no doubt that the digital revolution has penetrated every aspect of our communication processes. Most of us do all of our writing on keyboards and much of our talking takes place on a cell phone.

These changes in our reading, writing and talking practices have inspired both enthusiasm and fear. Computers are praised as tools for democratizing information and liberating the oppressed, for leveling class and gender distinctions, for expanding the frontiers of knowledge and bringing both enlightenment and a better life to everyone. Yet they are also condemned as tools for controlling information flow, restricting access to knowledge, subjugating the world's oppressed, increasing the gap between the haves and have-nots, spreading lies, fraud and disinformation, and condemning us all to a life of ignorance and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Do computers really extend our ability to interact with friends and loved ones far away and at the same time prevent us from ever having a real conversation with anyone? Who's right? Is the computer the biggest thing to hit our intellectual life since the printing press? The most important human invention since the wheel? Or is it a ticket to mindless time-wasting, the vast intellectual wasteland that is fast replacing TV as the new opiate of the masses? Do we need to control computers and impose censorship before they control us and rot the fabric of society, or are they the ultimate liberators, defying controls and freeing everyone to be a writer, a musician, a filmmaker?

Whatever side you come down on, it's clear that computers are here to stay, that they are changing not just the way we write and talk, but the kinds of writing and speaking we engage in. In addition, they're changing our notions of public and private communication: the computer brings the outside world to our desktop and laptop, and allows us to emerge from our private cocoons and project our ideas on a global screen. But it also invades our privacy, and allows us to intrude on others who may not welcome our presence. It's also clear that, despite the impact of computers on our lives, they signal not the last, but only the latest communication technology that we will develop. If speech-to-text capabilities are perfected, for example, the next step in our communication revolution could easily be the elimination of the keyboard entirely and a return to the oral composition that was so prevalent before writing became universal.

In this course, we'll try to resolve these and other apparent paradoxes that the computer has brought to the fore. We'll also look closely at the new genres of communication that the digital computer has enabled: email, instant messaging, the blog, the web page, the space pages (MySpace and Facebook), the wiki (Wikipedia), the cell phone video and the whole YouTube phenomenon. By the time the semester is done, new genres we have yet to imagine may be on the scene.

These electronic genres may not be entirely “literary,” but they are conventional forms of writing nonetheless, and because they are soooo successful, they have brought everyday writing into focus more sharply than anything that's preceded them. While we can only look back and guess at the development of earlier genres—the heroic and lyric poems, the novel, the diary, the memo, the drama—we are in the enviable position of being able to watch the new digital genres establish themselves as cultural practices. It's a little like being present at the birth of stars.

This semester we will examine the impact of the new digital genres on our reading and writing practices and look at ways in which the requirements of readers and writers impact the direction of technology. We'll look as well at how these genres arise; what their relationships may be to earlier, more traditional genres; how they develop unique conventions and practices; how they self-regulate, moving from freewheeling anarchy toward definable forms and expected behaviors; how they deal with violations of conventional norms; and how new practitioners learn and perfect their art. We'll consider how the new genres create an aesthetic, a rating system that allows us to determine what counts as a good email, an effective web design, an appropriate Facebook entry, or a blog worth reading.

Like their predecessors, the new genres also pose legal and ethical problems. The novel was initially condemned as trivial, no better than a comic book, or should I say, a manga. Today's genres are often dismissed as trivial as well: a Delaware court ruled in 2005 that a blog could not be libelous because no one expects to find facts on a blog.

On the other hand, electronic discourse has become both essential and troublesome: many legitimate news and information sources maintain blogs; Google, Yahoo, and MSN.com drew international criticism for agreeing to regulate the content on Chinese web sites and email, and the USA Patriot Act permits the FBI to subpoena web and email records of American citizens; schools have expelled students for blogging and forbidden their participation on MySpace and similar sites. MySpace has recently appointed an overseer to make sure that minors are shielded from inappropriate content. And this year, Cornell University and the University of Illinois joined the list of colleges warning new students of the dangers of Facebook. Yet some schools require teachers to maintain daily blogs and contact parents over email; and employers—even employers like Google—have fired employees for posts on private blogs while at the same time developing corporate blogs to sell their products and services.

Critics worry that digital genres will replace conventional ones—and to some extent their fears are justified: first-class mail is down, replaced by email, and while junk mail continues to fill our real-world mailboxes, spam fills our virtual ones even faster. But the computer has not led to the death of the book: Borders and Barnes & Noble are full of customers, and book sales thrive (though to be sure, bookstore cafés are full of patrons using laptops, possibly ordering cheaper books from Amazon.com). Several novels are written as email exchanges—e-pistolary, if you —and it won't be long before there's an IM or blog novel as well.

Critics warn that electronic communication is ruining the English language, yet more people than ever are writing more than ever. And skeptics fear that the more time we spend on line, the less we interact with one another face to face; yet a recent survey discovered that Americans use digital communication to maintain deep connections with friends and family, and that face to face interaction actually increases with on-line interaction. We'll look at these apparent contradictions and try to make sense out of present practice and where it all may be heading.

There will be a number of short essays and exercises, and a longer project tailored to the student's interest. All readings will be available online.

Copies of the syllabus, handouts, and supplementary readings will be posted on the class web page.

504 A THEORIES OF CINEMA, Kaganovsky. (CRN 43352) TUTH 3-4:50
Area Requirement: Film
same as CINE 504, CWL 504

Contact CINE for a description.

506 R WRITING STUDIES II, Prior. (CRN 37165) M 1-3:15
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
same as CI 564

This seminar (for which Writing Studies 1 English 505/C&I 563 is not a prerequisite) aims to foster an in-depth experience of theory, research, and pedagogy in Writing Studies. It introduces textual, cognitive, and cultural-historic approaches to writing in diverse contexts (school, workplace, home, community) and at different levels of development (from pre-school children to adults). The seminar begins with an overview of some of the central contexts/issues that have shaped the field. That overview will be followed by an in-depth examination of two central issues in Writing Studies: process and response. In the 1970s, the emergence of a process approach to writing led to calls for pedagogical reform from kindergarten through college, initiated new lines of research, and, many have argued, allowed the formation of a discipline of rhetoric and writing studies within English departments in the U.S. Process approaches to composing also directed increased attention to the issue of response, which originally appeared as a question of method: how teachers should comment on students' texts. However, the assumptions underlying such practical issues were soon challenged from two directions. First, research on writing processes and response practices in a variety of academic and non-academic settings revealed unanticipated complexities. Second, a confluence of constructive theories of reading, social views of writing, and critical/cultural accounts of social formations destabilized key terms: writer, reader, text, and context. In this seminar, we will trace the development of theories of process and response in Writing Studies; examine the research literature, particularly the growing body of qualitative studies of writing and response; and consider ways of structuring process and response to enhance writing and learning. In addition to active participation in the seminar and regular informal writing, each student will be expected to explore and write on an issue of particular interest in greater depth.

508 F BEOWULF, Trilling. (CRN 43342) MW 2-3:15
Area Requirement: British, beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
same as MDVL 508

Beowulf has been a foundational text of the English literary canon since J.R.R. Tolkien's 1936 lecture on “The Monsters and the Critics,” and it formed the bedrock of philological studies long before that. Although most students will have encountered Beowulf in at least one undergraduate literature course, this course offers an opportunity to work with the text in its original language of composition. During the semester, students will work through Beowulf in Old English while also working through the poem's critical history. Beginning with the landmark Tolkien essay, students will survey a range of Beowulf criticism, from its philological origins to the most recent theoretical reappropriations of the text. We will consider major critical issues such as the dating of Beowulf, its manuscript context, Christian and pagan influences, sources and analogues, historical background, orality and literacy, gender, empire, and canonicity. We will make use of 21 st century tools such as The Electronic Beowulf to bring the manuscript into the classroom, and we may even have time to discuss modern reflexes of the poem, such as the Julie Taymor opera Grendel and the new film of Beowulf directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Our primary text will of course be Beowulf itself. Readings will also include a course packet of secondary literature. Students will be responsible for less formal in-class discussions, prepared presentations to the rest of the seminar, and a formal seminar-length paper at the end of the term A reading knowledge of Old English is required for this course; students who have taken “Introduction to Old English” or the equivalent will be adequately prepared. Undergraduates may register with the consent of the instructor.

524 R SEMINAR IN 17 TH C LITERATURE, Gray. (CRN 32264) TH 1-2:50
TOPIC: Violence and Gender in the British Civil Wars
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature

This seminar will address the middle decades of the seventeenth century, when a political imaginary still influenced by the idea of the body as the cohesive, organizing principle of the state collides with the outbreak of civil war, in which individual bodies are experienced as particularly vulnerable, permeable, and subject to violent dismemberment. This collision is clearest at the execution of the King in 1649, whose joined personal and political bodies had traditionally guaranteed the legitimacy and coordinates of what we would call the nation state. However, the regicide is just a particularly spectacular instance of a widespread problem: newsbooks, government publications, polemical pamphlets, and literary texts all struggle to assimilate civil violence, and its pervasive effects, into old and new models of statehood and gender identity. This course will explore the literary response to this crisis in representation, analyzing the way that visions of state and gender formation are challenged by representations of military violence and its effects on the bodies of soldiers and civilians and on the body of the nation. To what extent, we will ask, do mid-century literary representations of violence test the boundaries of competing models of political legitimacy and efficacy? To what extent do they recast traditional gender identities—male and female? Or challenge traditional literary forms? The course will begin with selections from a handful of theoretical and historical texts and at least one classical epic. We will then analyze a range of works from the period 1640-1668 by male and female writers such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Lucy Hutchinson, Mary Cary, and Anne Bradstreet.

537 E SEMINAR VICTORIAN LIT, Saville. (CRN 32276) W 1-2:50
TOPIC: Cosmopolitan Republican Poetics: 1840-1885
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature

Between the 1790s and 1850s, republicanism—an anti-monarchist political movement focused on liberty and equal justice both individual and national—was marginalized in England. Still associated with the violence and anarchy of the French Revolution, republicans were considered “unpatriotic” and “unEnglish.” Only in the late 1840s did English attention to republican movements abroad—such as the establishment of the Second French Republic and its subsequent leadership by Napoleon III, or the Italian Risorgimento resisting Austrian occupation—begin to create common ground between republicans and mainstream liberals in Great Britain as a whole. This produced a vibrant cosmopolitan republican ethos centered in London at a time when both “cosmopolitan” and “republican” were contentious terms.

Framed by the republican-liberal debates over the scope and limits of individual, national, and international liberties, this course will focus on the contribution of poets such as Arthur Hugh Clough, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne to public debates about civic duties and freedoms of body and mind both at home and abroad. Using Walt Whitman—to Swinburne “the first poet of Democracy”—as a transatlantic touchstone, our studies will include comparative discussions of the aesthetic challenges involved in creating a distinctively English or American democratic poetics. We will also include considerations of the parallels that arise between such Victorian public debates and our own often conflicted views about patriotic loyalties and global responsibilities.

Our primary texts may include Clough's Amours de Voyage, and radical political writings (e.g. the Letters of Parepidemus); EBB's Casa Guidi Windows, Poems Before Congress, “Mother and Poet,” and Letters…to her Sister Arabella ; and Swinburne's, Atalanta in Calydon, Poems and Ballads, Songs Before Sunrise and Tristram of Lyonesse. Critical readings will include the work of current theorists such as Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah on cosmopolitanism; Frank Prochaska and Stephanie Kuduk Weiner on republicanism; as well as numerous Victorian theorists such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold to name only a few.

553 M SEMINAR LATER AMERICAN LIT, Parker. (CRN 32278) TUTH 9:30-10:45
TOPIC: American Indian Literature
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature

One course cannot “cover” the enormous chronological, cultural, or generic range of Native American literature, but it can gather a sampling of fascinating works, and it can introduce the fields of American Indian literature and American Indian studies both in themselves and in relation to the larger framework of contemporary American literary study. We will begin with oral tales and the practice and theory of translating and writing down Native American oral literature, looking at both older and newer models. Then we will read two novels from the 1930s: John Joseph Mathews' Sundown and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded . In the second half of the semester we will concentrate on fiction and poetry from the great burgeoning of American Indian literature in the last thirty years, including Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, and Thomas King's Medicine River, as well as poetry by Ray A. Young Bear, Joy Harjo, Erdrich, Chrystos, and Sherman Alexie. Please note that students registered for the class will receive a possibly lengthy reading assignment for the first class at least one week before classes begin. Anyone considering the course is welcome to talk with me before registering (my office is English Building 329). Writing assignments will include your choice of either a) three short-to-medium length papers or b) one short paper followed by a paper that aspires to article scale. Assigned reading will include (tentatively) the novels and poetry listed above, the volumes listed below, and a large amount of additional material. (Students in the class will have the opportunity to prepare a paper for the annual CIC American Indian Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, either for 2008 or for 2009.)

TEXTS: Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956; Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, ed. Dennis Tedlock, 1972, 1999; Ray A. Young Bear, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives, 1992; R. D. Parker, The Invention of Native American Literature, 2003. Recommended: R. D. Parker, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, 2008.

581 R SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Markley. (CRN 48036) W 1-3:15
TOPIC: Contested Pasts, Alternative Futures: Literature, Science and Ecology
Area Requirement: Critical Theory and MFA Literature

This seminar is devoted to reading and assessing some of the key works by recent thinkers in the postdisciplinary field called (variously) Literature and Science, the Cultural Study of Science, or Science Studies. Our approach this semester has both theoretical and historical dimensions, and it will give us the opportunity to read in-depth some important works that, in various ways, explore humankind's complex relationships to the natural world and our built environments. The theorists we will read come from a range of disciplines (literature, cultural criticism, anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, and biology) and will be structured within several broad areas in the cultural study of science: biology and gender; ecology; new media; and technoculture and the advent of the “posthuman.” The syllabus will include several novels (by Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, and H.G. Wells) as well as critical works (including short selections) by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Karen Barad, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter, Marshall McLuhan, and Lynn Margulis.

The writers we will discuss offer us the opportunity to explore two fundamental and often antagonistic responses to “Nature”: the Baconian desire to master the world by exploiting its resources and developing ever-more sophisticated technologies to raise or maintain living standards and the wish to return to a golden age in which human desires and natural resources existed in what we now call ecological balance. Because we will consider a variety of theoretical approaches and literary texts, the seminar will give you the opportunity to write on periods, texts, and literatures of your choosing.

581 T SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Valente. (CRN 32282) TH 3-4:50
TOPIC: Difference/Differend/Exception
Area Requirement: Critical Theory and MFA Literature

Derrida Lyotard Agamben: This is the first 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 premiere course, that figure will be Jacques Derrida and the concept will be difference, along with its variously nuanced correlatives (dissemination, the supplement, the trace, the hinge, iterability, the spectre etc. As Derrida is quite possibly the most important philosophical thinker since Nietszche, roughly half the course will be devoted to his major works, including Of Grammatology, Dissemination, Specters of Marx, “Signature-Event Context” essays from Writing and Difference and Philosophy on the Margins and others.

In each course we will proceed to a figure who adapted those signature concepts to some more resolutely sociopolitical form of analysis. In the premiere course that figure will be Jean Francois Lyotard, whose masterwork, The Differend , we will read in full, along with essays from The Lyotard Reader and others. We will focus particularly on his concept of the differend and its implications for dominant contemporary trends and agendas such as multiculturalism.

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 Giorgio Agamben and his notion of the exception, as delineated in The Coming Community and Homo Sacer. The importance of this idea to contemporary notions of terror, the enemy, and internment will be examined, with an eye to the prophetic quality of Derridean deconstruction in elaborating their structural inevitability.

Course 2: Lacan, Deleuze, Zizek; Course 3: Althusser, Foucault, Jameson

593 G PROF SEMINAR COLLEGE TCHG, Loughran. (CRN 32290) W 3-4:50
TOPIC: The Teaching of Literature
Area Requirement: None

Cynics say that those who can't do, teach, but in fact a great many things get done in a good classroom. This course is devoted to just these things: conceptualizing courses, building syllabi, delivering lectures, leading discussions, creating assignments, and grading papers. Although we will read some pedagogical theory to get us on our way, our own pedagogical practice will be our primary text, as students in the course do the work of preparing to teach literature by crafting courses, syllabi, and class plans that the seminar will then critique on a week-by-week basis. Seminar members will be asked to produce a teaching philosophy and conceptualize a unique literature course by the end of the semester, and final grades will be based both on how well these tasks were executed and on how actively and effectively feedback was offered from session to session.

 

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
500-Level Creative Writing
Course Descriptions
SPRING 2008

504 E WRITING WORKSHOP IN FICTION, Graham. (CRN 43388) M 1-2:50
Area Requirement: None

Directed projects in fiction writing, either short stories or sections of a novel, with group discussion and critique. There will be a course packet for the class, featuring short stories and essays on the writing of fiction and related topics; there will be a discussion of these readings at the beginning of each class meeting.

506 T WRITING WORKSHOP IN POETRY, Jess. (CRN 43390) TH 3-4:50
Area Requirement: None

Directed individual projects, with group discussion in fiction.

560 NL LITERARY PUBLISHING & PROMOTION, Stanley. (CRN 43391) Arranged
Area Requirement: None

A working practicum designed to teach graduate students the basics of literary journal publishing and to introduce them to career and entrepreneurial opportunities in other types of literary arts organizations. Students will attend weekly editorial meetings, complete weekly reading assignments, and will work 2 hours per week in the 'Ninth Letter' office, reading manuscript submissions and completing various clerical tasks for the journal. Approved for both letter and S/U grading. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite: MFA candidate standing.

563 DW SPECIAL TOPICS, D. Wright. (CRN 43392) Arranged
TOPIC: Creative Nonfiction Writing
Area Requirement: None

Examination of the process of creative nonfiction writing from the perspective of aesthetics and techniques, illustrated from the work of selected authors. This is not a workshop but a directed study. The students will meet individually with the professor and will write a series of essays, among them the personal essay, food writing, travel writing and research-based narrative history.