Indiana University Department of English

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Graduate Course Descriptions
FALL SEMESTER 2007
Please be sure and check the online schedule of classes for updates on dates, times and rooms as these are subject to change.
PLEASE REMEMBER THAT OUR NEW REGISTRATION SYSTEM OFTEN CREATES LAST-MINUTE CHANGES TO COURSE INFORMATION. BE SURE TO CHECK THE ONESTART SYSTEM AND REGISTRAR WEBSITE OFTEN FOR CHANGES OR UPDATES IN SECTION NUMBERS, DAYS, TIMES, AND ROOM ASSIGNMENTS.
500 LEVEL COURSES
W501 TEACHING OF COMPOSITION IN COLLEGE
L503 TEACHING OF LITERATURE IN COLLEGE
W511 WRITING FICTION
W554 TEACHING CREATIVE WRITING
L599 INTERNSHIP IN ENGLISH

600 LEVEL COURSES
G601 OLD ENGLISH
W611 WRITING FICTION 1
W613 WRITING POETRY 1
W680 THEORY & CRAFT OF WRITING
L613 MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
L622 SPENSER & MILTON
L653 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1800-1900
L656 AMERICAN LITERATURE & CULTURE 1950 - PRESENT
L663 INTRODUCTION TO FEMINIST CRITICAL STUDIES
L680 SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERARY STUDY AND THEORY
700 LEVEL COURSES

L730 RENAISSANCE POETRY & PROSE
L741 ROMANTIC LITERATURE
L779 LITERATURE & SOCIETY
L780 SPECIAL STUDIES IN ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTION
I SEMESTER 2007-2008

W 501 21073/22848 FARRIS/ANDERSON
Teaching of Composition in College

(21073) 2:30p-3:45pT
(22848) 1:00p-2:15p T
(tba) 2:30p-3:45p R
(tba) 1:00p-2:15p R
[Sign up for only one of the days/times.]

This course has two main purposes: 1) to provide Associate Instructors teaching W131 for the first time with various strategies for connecting reading and writing, preparing assignments, and evaluating student writing; 2) to engage new instructors in reflective practice through readings, speakers, and discussion of a variety of approaches and materials.

Requirements include regular attendance of proseminar and consultant meetings; observations of other W131 teachers, and a portfolio of teaching materials and a reflective essay.

Texts: Photocopy collection of materials will be available.

This proseminar, required of all AI’s teaching W131 at IU for the first time, is offered for three credits on a Satisfactory/Non-satisfactory basis; the three credits for the course may be applied for the doctoral degree, but not for the M.A.

W 501 16611 SAMANTRAI
Teaching of Composition in College
Open only to M.A. candidates who have been recommended by the Director of Graduate Studies and to Ph.D. candidates, who, for one reason or another, will not have had teaching experience by the end of their work. W501 is a practice-teaching course: a student is accepted by a faculty member who is teaching a composition course as a kind of intern, conducting a few classes, grading some papers, seeing some students, etc. M.A. students should take the course in their second or third semester of study. Once a student has been accepted by a faculty member with whom he/she will work, the student must report the fact to Ms. Samantrai so that proper records may be kept. The course is not open to students in other departments.

W511 25935 WESTMORELAND
Writing Fiction
2:30p – 5:30p R

Authorization of Instructor Required.

This course is designed for graduate students who are interested in writing fiction but who are not presently enrolled in the MFA Program in fiction. This course is open to students currently enrolled in the MFA Program in poetry, graduate students working toward an M.A. or Ph.D. in English, and graduate students outside the English department. Students will write fictions and discuss the concerns and scope of contemporary fiction.

W554 16755 STANTON
Teaching Creative Writing
3:35p – 6:35p M

AUTHORIZATION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED.

This course is a practical study of the teaching of poetry and fiction writing, and will focus on teaching methods and exercises suitable for beginning and intermediate university creative writing classes. We will discuss the assumptions that underlie the creative writing workshop, look at some exercises for beginning students, invent our own exercises, critique a couple of recent creative writing handbooks, and do some practice teaching. Students will lead the discussion, give several short reports, review general books about creative writing, visit other creative writing classes, teach a lesson to the whole class and design a one-semester creative writing course, which will include a syllabus, a set of exercises, a grading policy, and a detailed rationale.

Required Texts:
The Practice of Poetry , ed. Robin Behn & Chase Twichell
Now Write: Fiction Exercise From Today’s Best Writers & Teachers ed. Sherry Ellis
The Poetry Home Repair Manual Ted Kooser
Reading Like A Writer Francine Prose

L503 16380 SAMANTRAI
Teaching of Literature in College
Open only to M.A. candidates who have been recommended by the Director of Graduate Studies and to Ph.D. candidates, who, for one reason or another, will not have had teaching experience by the end of their work. L503 is a practice-teaching course: a student is accepted by a faculty member who is teaching a 300-level course as a kind of intern, giving a lecture or two, grading some papers, seeing some students, etc. The student must have had some graduate work in the area of the 300-level course in which he or she wishes to practice-teach. M.A. students should take the course in their second or third semester of study. Once a student has been accepted by a faculty member with whom he/she will work, the student must report the fact to Ms. Samantrai so that proper records may be kept. The course is not open to students in other departments.

L599 25005 SAMANTRAI
Internship in English
A supervised internship in the uses of language in the workplace. Each intern will be assigned a problem or task and will develop the methods for solving or completing it. Each intern will complete a portfolio of workplace writing and self-evaluate. Authorization required.

G601 25922 FULK (#6)
Introduction to Old English
4:00p – 5:15p TR

This course is designed to provide all the language background necessary for the professional study of Old English texts, including the essentials of Old English phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and dialect variation. But it also demands some attention to the history and prehistory of the language, particularly its phonology. And so the normal business of the course will be the day-to-day translation of texts in class, supplemented by lectures on the structure and history of the language. We will be reading texts in prose and verse and studying such aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture as runic inscriptions, the making of manuscripts, survivals of pagan and folkloristic belief, and the history of the period, especially the devastating Viking invasions. But this is primarily a language course, so most of our time will be devoted to studying the structure of the Old English language. There will be two or three examinations, along with some shorter assignments, and a final project that will involve a paper of no more than ten pages. The textbooks will be John C. Pope's Eight Old English Poems and Dorothy Whitelock’s revision of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, supplemented by an Old English grammar available through Oncourse. Meets with G405.

W611 24179 UPADHYAY
Writing Fiction 1
2:30p – 5:30 p T

AUTHORIZATION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED.

This is a fiction writing workshop for students enrolled in the graduate creative writing program. We will be writing approximately 60-75 pages of fiction (about three to four short stories or novel chapters) during the semester. We will also be reading three or four collections of stories for insights into how stories and books are made. You will give a presentation on a craft-related topic that’s of interest and relevance to your own writing.
All fiction writers enrolled in the graduate creative writing program are automatically admitted to the workshop, but you must contact the Creative Writing Program secretary for authorization to register. Once these students have been placed, any remaining openings may be given to qualified applicants from outside the program. Interested students should contact the instructor by leaving him a note in the English department mailroom (BH 442) or through e-mail (supadhaya@indiana.edu).

W613 28193 GAY
Writing Poetry 1
2:30p – 5:30p T

Authorization of Instructor Required.

In this course we will work on the details of creating and revising poems. But we will also try to ask fundamental questions about poetics--for instance; what constitutes a good poem? What is it that we, as artists, are trying to do? To the end of engaging these questions we will read essays by people such as Fanny Howe, Audre Lorde, Garcia Lorca, and Longinus, among others. In this class something should break.

W680 25927 AL MILLER
Theory & Craft of Writing
5:45p – 8:30p W

TOPIC: Prose Poem; Micro-Sudden-Flash-Snap-Fiction and/or –Creative Nonfiction: “I’m Big---It’s the Pictures That Got Small”

AUTHORIZATION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED.

I have designed this class to appeal to fiction writers, poets, and creative nonfiction writers alike, and hope we end up with a nice mix. Think Joseph Cornell boxes and dreamscapes; think imp of the perverse and “figure in the carpet”; think masked balls and magic; think scrimshaw and cameos; think “undulations of reverie” (Baudelaire). For me, prose poems and flash prose (fiction and CNF) are complex, intricate forms that expand as much as they distill. Don’t let the “small size” fool you. They’re hard to write! Expect to read various practitioners of the above forms (both contemporary and “old”), with a little criticism thrown in to shake things up, and to learn just a bit about the history of and variations on the forms. We will consider the too-numerous-to-count dimensions of and permutations on what makes us want to call something a prose poem and not a short fiction and v.v.; and we’ll take as our focus concerns about lyricism, narrative line and/or “no lines,” music, image, metaphor, language, slice of life/vignette versus distillation, etc. Expect to write and share work in class, both scheduled and impromptu. We will take a more organic alternative to “traditional workshops” that I hope will allow for both formal and informal conversations, so come with a flexible outlook. You can count on a schedule of regular, weekly writing assignments that will culminate in a final portfolio of revised pieces (you will be asked to present a combo of “forms” tailored to your own interests, and a short critical piece of your choice produced over the semester). You will be encouraged to experiment with method, form, and vision (collaboration, more prose than poem, more poem than prose, persona, surrealism, “found,” “collage,” “translation,” mini-memoir, etc.), and to work against your own strengths.

Other class requirements will include the following: occasionally-scheduled, thoughtful, formal critiques of peer work; full and substantive participation in each class session; out loud reading of your work (sometimes on a schedule, sometimes not); a couple of short response papers on outside readings; and a willingness to try new things and take some chances. And even if you never write another prose poem or short prose piece again (as if you could resist!), the point of this class is to open doors to the unexpected, and perhaps help shed more light on the kind of writer you are becoming. A number of literary magazines are now devoted to these forms, so there is a practical side to this class, as well.

L613 22281 LOCHRIE (#1)
Middle English Literature
11:15A – 12:30p TR

TOPIC: Piers Plowman and Late Medieval Culture

William Langland’s Piers Plowman ranks among the great narrative achievements of the fourteenth century. As a complicated dream vision that exists in three different versions, Langland’s poem mobilizes a complex and tumultuous historical moment in his poem, giving voice to a variety of theological and political positions. At times ambivalent, at times conflictual, Langland’s poem in the B-Text was nevertheless a flash point for the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt. This course will be devoted to reading Langland’s text in the Middle English with a number of goals in mind: a) to examine the layering of personal dream vision with a conscious engagement in political issues surround the three estates, an exchange economy, the corruption of the medieval Church, and just about everything that was up for grabs in late medieval England; b) We will also consider how the poem’s textual history affects its interpretation by comparing it to excerpts from the A- and C-texts, as well as to other allegorical poems, particularly the Romance of the Rose, and to Chaucer’s dream visions; c) we will take up different critical traditions that have built up around this poem, including recent theoretical approaches. Piers Plowman will be the only work we read in Middle English, except for excerpts from the A and B texts. Requirements will include two short papers and one conference-length paper to be presented at the end of the semester.

L622 25915 ANDERSON (#2)
Spenser & Milton
1:00p – 2:15p TR

Mainly, this will be a course on the two major epics in English, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost. Spenser's culturally encyclopedic romance-epic is the most important poem of the English High Renaissance and the equivalent for poetry of what Shakespeare is for the drama in the period. Milton's epic is probably the single most influential poem ever written in English, and is has a close relationship to Spenser's. We'll also be considering ideas about metaphor and allegory as we proceed - the latter most simply defined in the Renaissance as continued metaphor. Allegory is basic to all forms of representation in language, and it conspicuously affects writers both earlier and later than Spenser, including those of the nineteenth century (e.g., Dickens or Hawthorne) or of the twentieth (e.g., Ionesco or Beckett). But I want to emphasize that, while various larger connections will enrich our reading, the first responsibility of the course will be to Spenser's and Milton's epics, in themselves both aesthetically and culturally complex and engaging poems. We'll read them closely and in detail.

Work in the course will feature a presentation, a relatively short exploratory essay, and an essay of conference length (8-10 pages). The major text for Spenser The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2 nd edition (Longman, 2001); discounted copies are likely to be available locally and on-line. If the third edition is out before fall, either the second or third edition will serve. For Milton, I' ll order The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Houghton Mifflin, 1998); again discounted copies are probably easily available. If you want to use another complete, recent, annotated edition of Paradise Lost, the class can cope with your doing so, but there are advantages to using The Riverside, since it includes extensive background material and other writings by Milton to which we'll refer, and in the longer term it provides an essential item for a personal library.

Please try to read or reread Book I of The Faerie Queene before class meets. Aside from this request, the most useful reading beforehand (not required!) would involve broad cultural background: e.g., for pleasure and profit, Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, revised edition; Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth or Frances A. Yates, Astrea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, Part II; or Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power, intro. and chap. 1. If you prefer to read theories of allegory, consider Carolynn Van Dyke's Fiction of Truth, introduction and Part I; or perhaps dipping into Gordon Teskey's Allegory and Violence, or Mendele Ann Treip's Allegorical Poetics and Epic. Every year, I receive a few requests beforehand for suggested readings; I offer these in this spirit.

L653 25919 FLEISSNER (#4)
American Literature 1800-1900
1:00p– 2:15p TR

Topic: American Literary Studies After Feminist Theory

This class takes as its presupposition that feminist theory and criticism has had a shaping impact on the past 20-odd years of American literary studies that goes beyond work on women’s writing and arguments directly announcing themselves as feminist interventions. The emergence and/or reconception of a wide range of core sites for ongoing inquiry—such as sentiment, the body, kinship, regionalist writing, the “sisterhood of reforms,” spiritualism, consumerism, sexuality, diet, children’s literature and child study, domesticity, the rise of the social sciences, and many others—owe a debt, albeit one not always acknowledged, to the advent of feminist approaches. This course admits that debt and aims to survey the field of American literary and cultural studies from roughly 1800 through the early 20th century through the lens that it provides. It is thus aimed both at students hoping to work on American literature of this broad period, irrespective of critical orientation, as well as at those in other fields with an interest in the varying ways that feminist criticism has influenced the kinds of questions scholars ask.

We will read both canonical authors whose work has been positioned anew by the approaches in question (such as Melville, Dickinson, Brockden Brown, Dreiser) as well as more recently rediscovered works that have either become central texts for scrutiny or might become so as a result of their contributions (such as Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs, Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland). Alongside the literary texts, we will read a generous selection of influential recent criticism by such writers as Elizabeth Dillon, Lauren Berlant, Cindy Weinstein, Gillian Brown, Wai Chee Dimock, Bill Brown, Nancy Bentley, Claudia Tate, Rita Felski, James Livingston, and others. The primary work of the class will be reading and discussion. In addition, students will be expected to produce several short response papers, as well as a conference-length (10-12 pp.) essay at the end of the term.

L656 25924 KILGORE (#5)
American Literature 1950-Present
4:00p – 5:15p TR

TOPIC: Postcards for a New Millennium: Science Fiction as Literary/Scientific Speculation

Science fiction, as a cultural form and a set of literary protocols, is the paradigmatic model for how fiction can change social perception and influence the interpretation of physical knowledge. In its evolution the genre has not only engaged the burgeoning power of technoscience and it has also become, as Brooks Landon and others have argued, a cultural force in its own right. As such it is a significant measure of our response to Darwinian evolutionism, space travel, nuclear power, computing, robotics and other technosciences that are indivisible from our perception of modern life. Thus the genre's persistent (often unexamined) determination of social as well as technological change is worth exploration.

This seminar will recover science fiction's professional maturation in the intellectual and cultural ferment that marked the last half of the twentieth century. We will trace the genre’s social and aesthetic trajectory in its American and British registers, following a transatlantic conversation containing points of unanimity and difference. We will consider the reformation of the genre in the 1950s as a significant site of cold war thought and feeling; the counterpoint enacted between the genre’s public role as the voice of the Space Age and the “inner-space” experiments of its radical “New Wave” in the 1960s; the tremendous impact of second-wave feminism during the 1970s as hard science fiction is articulated as a generic core; and the rise of cyberpunk in the 1980s, its fostering of a new information-based, computer-mediated paradigm. We will also be concerned both with how the gender and race-based exclusions that shape the genre's dominant traditions have been resisted by those minority and women writers who otherwise work within the referential system of genre conventions. What is at stake, finally, is a recovery of the genre's satiric edge; the liberatory potential that empowered the political and literary experiments of the 1960s and the feminist and anti-racist formulations that followed.

This seminar also engages current scholarship that examines the interchange between science and literature and their cultural/political relevance. Carl Freedman, Robert Scholes, Vivian Sobchak, Darko Suvin, Marleen Barr, and Samuel R. Delany are among the critics and scholars who will provide critical context and theoretical perspective for our work during the semester. Authors to be considered may include James Blish, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, William Gibson, Octavia E. Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

L663 21631 GUBAR (#6)
Introduction to Feminist Critical Studies
2:30p – 4:00p TR

For the first time, this survey will be taught using the new Norton Reader of Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism. It will open with classic texts in the history of feminism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the nineteen seventies. Here we will pay particular attention to Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Julia Cooper, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, Alice Walker, and Adrienne Rich. Then we will read a cluster of feminist scholars attempting to redefine literary history and the canon: Elaine Showalter, Annette Kolodny, Jane Tompkins, Barbara Christian. With a little help from intellectual historians, we will look at the work of influential feminist thinkers in psychology and anthropology like Nancy Chodorow and Gayle Rubin as well as such French theorists as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Then we will approach the impact of post-structuralism on American feminism through short texts by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and bell hooks. In the second half of the course, we will focus on recent scholarship on gender in critical race, post-colonial, sexuality, trauma, and cultural studies. In an effort to see where feminist theory and criticism is going, we will probably conclude by drawing on some materials on electronic reserve.

Students will be asked to produce two one-page response statements to help generate discussion. These should be made available on Oncourse twenty-four hours before the pertinent class session. There are also two longer required essays, each approximately 10-12 pages long. In the first paper, students will be asked to consider the earlier history of feminist criticism and theory by dealing with a figure prominent before the nineteen seventies. In the second paper, students will be encouraged to examine one significant aspect of the impact of feminist theory and criticism on their future area of expertise. Before Thanksgiving break, we will devote several sessions in workshop to help improve critical writing.

L671 25932 WATT (#5)
Modern British & Irish Drama
9:30a – 10:45a TR

This course is intended to introduce students to the history of modern British and Irish drama. In doing so, the course will focus both on dramatic form and in the representation of historical events. It will begin in the later 19th century by isolating two popular dramatic forms-- melodrama and social realism--and then move through those forms associated with the founding of Ireland's Abbey Theatre and with the contemporary stage: realism, the Irish peasant play, absurdism, the Neo-Brechtian materialist theatre, and Irish "Troubles" drama, which inevitably raises postcolonial issues. Particular attention will be paid to the plays of Bernard Shaw, J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, Brian Friel, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, and Marie Jones. At times, relevant theoretical or critical essays will accompany plays by these writers.

We will also discuss academic writing directly in this course, talking about such matters as abstracts, conference papers, and the construction of scholarly arguments. Indeed, one week early in the term will be devoted solely to such topics. Assigned writing for the course includes the composition of an 8-10 page essay suitable for presentation at a conference (preceded by a 1-page abstract)and a revision and/or brief expansion of the paper as a final assignment.

Interested students with questions or suggestions should feel free to contact the instructor.

L680 24174 ELMER/FAVRET (#3)
Special Topics in Literary Study and Theory
11:15a – 12:30p TR

TOPIC: ROMANTIC ATLANTICs

This course, to be team-taught by Mary Favret and Jonathan Elmer, will consist of two semesters examining a range of texts and problems related to what we will call the Romantic Atlantic. Students can take either semester, or sign up for both. We will divide the class focus more or less chronologically, moving in the fall from the era of the American Revolution and the rise of antislavery discourse, through the era of the Napoleanic wars and England’s second conflict with their former colony (called the War of 1812 in the U.S.). So, say 1776-1815. (The second semester will move enough forward in time to consider the “late” Romanticism represented by antebellum American writers). The luxury of having a full year, and two of us, means that we can aspire both to provide a survey of what has been achieved over the past ten to fifteen years with a trans-Atlantic perspective, as well as highlight some of the emerging archival opportunities and methodological innovations in the field. Although we are trained in British and American literature and culture, respectively, we hope to incorporate other Anglophone Atlantic culture hearths. We are still some way from fixing a reading list, but we know we will be looking past (but not ignoring) the vast network of literary influences of the “Emerson read Carlyle” variety, to consider the ways in which forces larger than literary culture—transformations in spatial experience, geopolitical upheavals like war or revolution or imperial expansion, changes in the materialities of communication, manners and laws of possession and self-possession—impinge upon, form and deform, the expressive cultures of the Romantic Atlantic. We are especially interested, in other words, in approaches that change what we take to be our primary objects of analysis, or the kind of arguments we can make.

We have received a curricular development grant from IU that will allow us to bring in several prominent scholars in the field, who will be able both to reflect on what scholarship in this field has accomplished, and where it might go next. Each speaker will give a public lecture and hold a seminar meeting with the class.

We conceive of this class as a laboratory for advanced graduate work. We would like to experiment with novel ways of approaching collective and individual scholarship, as well as reconfigurations of concepts of expertise and critical practice. While we are still thinking through requirements—and would be happy to receive suggestions from interested students, or merely inquiries—we do expect to ask students to engage in some independent investigation of sources and archives not covered by our joint readings, as well as some work for oral presentation.

L730 25925 LINTON (#2)
Renaissance Poetry & Prose
9:00a – 12:00p T

Topic: Religion AND the Political in Early Modern English Literature AND Culture

In “Religion and Ideology,” Frederic Jameson points to religion as “the master-code of pre-capitalist society.” The claim can be complicated in various ways, and doing so would be especially timely with respect to early modern England’s Reformation religious politics and nascent capitalism. The field has seen a recent turn, or return, to religion in connection with philosophy, questions of civil society, and the cultural politics of imperialism, among other things. This course seeks to recapitulate some of these developments as a basis for discussion, from which students may formulate historically and theoretically informed approaches to the period’s literary and dramatic texts. The course will be organized around two foci: (1) literary engagements with political theologies (how do writers intervene in post-Reformation issues of sovereignty, citizenship, sainthood?); (2) textual encounters with the Other/others (how do genres devise responsibilities to the divine interpellation and to religious others, namely, Ireland and Islam?). The overall objective is to create a conversation that locates these texts between religion and philosophy in addressing concerns relevant to early modern England as well as today.

Primary texts may include: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (selections) and The Religious; Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine; Milton’s Paradise Lost (selections) and Samson Agonistes; Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Othello; Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and Mutalibitie Cantos; Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone; a Turk play.

Critics and theorists may include: Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Fuchs, Jean Howard, Ken Jackson, Victoria Kahn; Emmanuel Levinas, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Nabil Matar, Chantal Mouffe, Edward Said, Eric Santner, Carl Schmitt, Deborah Shuger, Daniel Vitkus.

Course work may include: 1 in-class presentation, reflections/questions on discussion topics, a 20-25 pp. research paper along with proposal and first draft, and participation in an end-of-semester mini-seminar.

L741 23602 WILLIAMS (#3)
Romantic Literature
1:00p – 4:00p T

TOPIC: Romantic Feelings

Although emotional experience has been an object of study since at least the time of Aristotle (as “the passions”), a good case can be made for the “Romantic century” (from roughly the mid-18 th to the mid-19 th century) as a key period for thinking on the topic. Evidence for this centrality abounds: Hume’s derivation of moral principles from sentiment rather than reason; the emergence of the discourse of aesthetics, in Burke and elsewhere, grounding complex judgments of value in sensations of pain and pleasure; Adam Smith’s model of sympathetic moral feeling; the emerging literature of sensibility; and, later still, Wordsworth’s elevation of feeling over action in poetry. The stakes of feeling and the questions raised by it, in these discourses and elsewhere, are considerable: Can feeling serve as the basis for social and national cohesion, at a time when traditional grounds for collective identity were beginning to erode? Or, conversely, is feeling (as “enthusiasm,” for instance) a threat to social stability? Does feeling allow for special access to the experience of others or is it, in naming what is most one’s own, essentially isolating? More fundamentally still, is feeling owned by the subject or a contagion passing promiscuously from person to person?

We’ll survey the key philosophical discussions of feeling mentioned above, and then turn to literary treatments of the topic, including examples of the literature of sensibility, in both prose and verse, but also ranging beyond it. My efforts to think through this topic according to separate emotions have seemed somewhat strained, but suffice it to say that we’ll touch on (at least) pity, anger, terror, desire and nostalgia (something for everyone). For novels, I have in mind Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, William Godwin’s Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering. We’ll also look at Joanna Baillie’s project of “Plays on the Passions,” including her Introductory Discourse on the Passions, and De Quincey’s aesthetisizing of terror in the Essays “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts.” I also want to consider the relation between some sensibility poets (the Della Cruscan group, for instance) and the more canonical project regarding feeling in Wordsworth and Coleridge, which will lead us to think about connections between feeling and mood, as well as those between the Wordsworthean categories of “gross and violent stimulation” (to be avoided) and the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (to be sought). Critics who will accompany us in our discussions include Adela Pinch, Thomas Pfau, Jerome McGann, Jon Mee, Claudia Johnson, Charles Altieri and David Marshall. Work for the class will include a seminar length (20-25 pp.) paper, with prospectus, and a class presentation.

L779 23603 HUTCHINSON (#5)
Literature & Society
1:00p – 4:00p R

TOPIC: The Harlem Renaissance

This seminar will explore the phenomenon of the Negro Renaissance, more popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that helped establish the varied institutional, ideological, and aesthetic trajectories of most African American creative writing of the twentieth century while profoundly influencing transatlantic black intellectual work more generally. Major issues include the “politics” of culture, the historicity of race and its relationship to place, theories of diaspora, the relationship between “race” and “culture,” the uses of the “folk” in modernism, the relationship between nationalism and racial identity in the United States, race and sexuality, interactions between black writing and the publishing industry; and modernist exchanges between Paris and New York, Harlem and Greenwich Village, black popular culture and “high art.” Authors include Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, Eric Walrond, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. Secondary work will include studies on diaspora theory, literary modernism, political radicalism, and race by such authors as Paul Gilroy, Brent Edwards, Michelle Stevens, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Barbara Foley, Hazel V. Carby, and others.

Required work will include thoughtful participation in class discussions, informal writing on the course material posted online by the night before each seminar meeting, one 15-minute presentation, a conference-style paper abstract, and a 20-page seminar paper. The last two weeks of the course will be devoted to seminar papers.

I ask that you read The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (to be published in June 2007) before the first class session. It should provide a useful overview of main issues, texts, and contexts (often by major scholars in the field), as well as an extensive selected bibliography that will help you situate your own interests in relation to the subject matter.

L780/C701 25916/22217 BOSE (#6)
Special Studies in English & American Literature
2:30p – 3:45p TR

TOPIC: Post-colonial Theory

By the twentieth century, over eighty per cent of the earth’s land surface had been colonized. For the British, imperial expansion was accompanied and consolidated by the spread of the English language and the inculcation of British cultural values through education. Colonial educational policies, however, became both politically and culturally double-edged. At the political level, they would result in the cultivation of a native clerical class to serve the Empire, and, simultaneously, the dissemination of bourgeois democratic ideals among the native, educated elite. Inspired by these ideals, this elite would emerge as the leadership of anti-colonial movements. At the cultural level, colonialism would have a profound impact on English literature, introducing semantic systems and epistemologies that have radically reshaped the novel.

This course will investigate the emergence and use of post-colonial theory as a primary intellectual framework through which to analyze colonial relationships and their political and cultural legacies. We will begin by reading foundational texts in the field including Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said’s Orientalism. We will be concerned with how these texts disclose the ideological and discursive operations of Empire and anti-colonial nationalism. In particular, we will ask what kind of relationship these works posit between institutions and the intellectual.

Throughout the course, we will consider some of the seminal issues which define the history of post-colonial studies, such as the role of women in national liberation struggles, the ways that prison serves as an alternative site of learning, the utility of dependency theory for understanding global disparities of wealth, the status of the subaltern and the challenges of archiving subaltern consciousness, and the relationship between colonialism and globalization. Near the end of the course, we will turn to the institutionalization of post-colonial studies and question to what extent it has been driven by identity politics and the structure of global capitalism. Finally, we will examine how the emphasis on South Asia in the field has had an impact on its ability to develop models for understanding colonialism in other geopolitical sites.

Students should expect to write weekly electronic journals, take an active role in classroom discussion, and write a twenty-page seminar paper. In addition, students will be required to attend one or two lectures by visiting speakers outside of class.

A tentative list of readings includes:
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.
Eqbal Ahmed, Confronting Empire.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism.
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Richard Philcox’s translation)
Robert Foster, Materializing the Nation, Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea.
Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak’s edited collection, Selected Subaltern Studies
Harry Harootunian, The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained
Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat editors, Dangerous Liaisons, Gender,Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives.
Edward Said, Orientalism.
E. San Juan Jr.’s Beyond Post-Colonial Theory

I will also assemble a packet of articles on the institutionalization of post-colonial studies and the relationship between colonialism and globalization.

L780/V711 25942/21063 AH MILLER (#4)
Special Studies in English & American Literature
12:20p – 3:20p M

“My one regret in life,” Woody Allen once remarked, “is that I am not someone else.” This course will explore the emotional, ethical, and aesthetic possibilities lurking within this thought—lurking within, that is, the counterfactual imagination of alternate lives. What are the conditioning pressures, social and psychological, that situate individuals within one identity while instilling, as a defining feature of that identity, an identification with--often a longing for--other identities, apparently unattainable? How do these pressures also shape literary form and our reading experience?

Counterfactuals have been of great interest recently to historians, philosophers of history, metaphysicians, and logicians. The deep history of the topic stretches back at least to Leibniz and his discussion of possible worlds, and it has recently been energized by the writing of David Lewis and Niall Ferguson; in these regions of thinking, it bears on questions of causation with special force. We will glance down these historiographical, metaphysical, and logical paths—especially if there is student interest—but our main focus will be on the questions raised above about individual lives.

Our reading and conversations will intersect with recent work on literature and affect; on ethics and literature; and on narrative form in history. I imagine us reading fiction and essays by Henry and William James, Charles Dickens, Charles Lamb, and Phillip Roth; scholarship by Frances Ferguson, Tilottema Rajan, and William Galperin as well as selections from a forthcoming issue of Representations devoted to the topic. My own work so far on this has been in the nineteenth century, and I think there are strong reasons (historical and formal) why counterfactuals would be specially prominent during that time. But I am eager to learn about the counterfactual in other periods, and would welcome students of life writing, narratologists, and theorists of various stripes as well as specialists in other historical moments. Please drop me a note (at ahmiller@indiana.edu)if you have questions.