Indiana University Department of English

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Course Descriptions
Spring 2008

PRE-ENROLLMENT FOR SPRING REGISTRATION

We will have pre-enrollment for Spring Semester 2008 seminars October 16 and October 17, 8:30-11:30A and 1:30-4:30P.

PRE-ENROLLMENT PROCEDURES: Pre-enrollment procedures were developed jointly by the Director of Graduate Studies and elected representatives of the Graduate Student Union. Priorities are based on the number of seminars remaining to complete a degree requirement (two seminars for M.A. candidates; an additional two seminars for Ph.D. candidates). Non-degree and special students may not pre-enroll. Students unsure of their priority status should check with Bev Hankins or the Director of Graduate Studies.

Students may pre-enroll for only one seminar. No student may reserve places for another student. RESERVATIONS MUST BE MADE IN PERSON, NOT BY PHONE. Seminars are capped at 10 and instructors have been asked not to over-enroll to ensure that all graduate courses are filled.

Tuesday, October 16
8:30-11:30A
Ph.D. candidates who have two or fewer seminars remaining in order to complete the requirement.

Tuesday, October 16
1:30-4:30P

M.A. candidates who are completing course work for the degree during the coming semester, & students pursuing both the M.F.A. & Ph.D.

Wednesday, October 17
8:30-11:30A
Ph.D. candidates who have three seminars remaining to complete the requirement.
Ph.D. candidates who have completed their seminar requirements (for no more than one additional seminar).
M.F.A. candidates in their third year.
M.A. candidates completing course work for degree this current semester, but not yet admitted to the Ph.D. program.

Wednesday, October 17
1:30 -4:30P
All other degree candidates from 1:30-3:00P; from 3:00-4:30P
Students interested in taking a second seminar may enroll on a first-come, first-serve basis.

NOTE: SIGN-UP TIME IS 8:30-11:30A AND 1:30-4:30P EACH DAY.

Please see the Director of Graduate Studies if you have any questions about these procedures.

PLEASE REMEMBER THAT OUR 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.

W 501 7448 SAMANTRAI
Teaching of Composition in College

Authorization of DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDIES Required.

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.

W513 25261 GAY
Writing Poetry

2:30p – 5:30p R

Authorization of Instructor Required.

This workshop will run almost like a traditional workshop, except we will have the underlying question of “what is mysterious?” or “how does mystery work?” or “why are we attracted to mystery” or “what are the ethical questions raised by mystery?” As such, we will be reading a number of poets and prose writers, in addition to the likely engagement with other genres. Among the several texts we will read for this class is Federico Garcia Lorca’s Duende.

L502/W602 25266/28102 FARRIS
Contexts for the Study of Writing
Contemporary Theories in Rhetoric & Composition

4:00p – 5:15p TR

TOPIC: The Relation of Composition to Rhetoric, Literature, & the University

This course will be historical and speculative as well as practical. We will examine the role of rhetoric and composition in the formation of the university and the rhetoric-poetic relationship in terms of literature and writing instruction within the larger context of the history of the profession of English studies. Then we will investigate disciplinary identity issues within the field of English and composition studies, including the extent to which claims that discourse is community-situated conflict with requirements and practices that still presume writing is a transferable set of skills and moves foundational to learning in college. Finally, we will consider what it would take, not just theoretically, but pedagogically and institutionally, to un-do the division between literature and composition in ways that do not reinforce the dominance of one over the other, including various arguments and practical strategies for teaching literature, writing, and culture together.

Texts will likely include Scholes’ The Rise and Fall of English, Graff’s Clueless in Academe, Shumway and Dionne’s Disciplining English, Berlin’s Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures, Crowley’s Composition in the University, and Smit’s The End of CompositionStudies, Bloom, Daiker, and White’s Composition Studies in the New Millenium, and Anderson and Farris’s Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction, plus other photocopied or e-reserved articles.

Assignments will include bi-weekly written responses and a final paper.

This course may be taken as either L502 or W602. It fulfills requirements for the departmental Pedagogy Minor, the Composition, Literacy and Culture concentration, and the interdepartmental Literacy Minor.

L503 7270 SAMANTRAI
Teaching of Literature in College

Authorization of DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDIES Required.

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 28100 SAMANTRAI
Internship in English

Authorization of DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDIES Required.

Primarily for Special Field M.A. candidates. Students will define a project and secure both a faculty and external sponsor. Likely external sponsors will include the IU Foundation, the IU Press, advertising agencies, charities, legal or political offices, health agencies, and writing centers. Number of credit hours depends on length of commitment.

W612 7449 AL MILLER
Writing Fiction 2

2:30p – 5:30 p R

AUTHORIZATION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED.

Prerequisite: Enrollment is generally restricted to graduate fiction students enrolled in our MFA program.

You will be encouraged to take chances, and try writing fiction you’ve always wanted to, but maybe never have. If you find yourself typically more comfortable writing in third person, maybe this is the semester to try first person (we will talk a lot about point of view). If your fiction usually winds up at a certain page length, you may want to experiment with “length” and “space,” going either shorter or longer to play with expansion and compression. If you want to try “experimental fiction” (however you define that), go right ahead. We will also focus on revision, and what it means to “see again.”

Expect to draft and revise around 60 pages. Reasonably self-contained novel chapters that don’t require “epic setup” are welcome.

We will read the equivalent of two or three story collections, and maybe a novel.

Course Philosophy: Craft is inextricably connected to worldview, which is directly connected to point of view, and we will consider not only how stories are made through a writer’s choices, but “how and what” stories “mean.”

Some pre-course highly suggested reading includes all/some/a little of the following medley of “old chestnuts” and at least enough familiarity that you can hum part of the melody:

The Rhetoric of Fiction Wayne Booth; Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster; The Art of Fiction, John Gardner; Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey; Ways of Seeing, John Berger; The Poetics of Prose, Todorov; The Reader’s Guide to Literary Theory, Raman Selden; Story and Discourse, Chatman; Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Calvino; The Art of the Novel, Kundera; Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison; Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Eco; stories in Norton Anthology of Short Fiction(long editions); The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin; Being and Race, Charles Johnson; Mythologies or Image, Music, Text, Barthes; anything by Foucault, but you should definitely know his “What Is An Author” essay; Feminisms, edited by Robyn Warhol; Culture Outlaw, bell hooks; The Dubliners, James Joyce; etc.

Please note: We will have a full class session the first day. You will receive by email the first assignment by the end of the fall semester. If some reason you have not received this information by January 1, 2006, please contact me right away at almiller@indiana.edu.

W614 15383 MANNING
Writing Poetry 2
2:30p – 5:30p T

Authorization of Instructor Required.

This will be a standard poetry workshop. For each workshop meeting, students will write one poem and provide written, constructive critiques of their peers’ poems. We will also read five collections of contemporary American poetry: Natasha Tretheway’s Native Guard; Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife; Terrence Hayes’s Wind in a Box; Eugene Gloria’s Hoodlum Birds, and Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven. Students will choose two of these books and write a professional book review for each. A portfolio of drafts and revised poems will be due at the end of the semester.

W615 25263 SANDERS
Writing Creative Nonfiction

7:00p – 10:00p M

AUTHORIZATION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED.

This is a workshop in writing personal essays, personal forms of documentary or reportage, and memoir. The writing might deal with travels, nature, or science, with falling in or out of love, with growing up or growing old, with any subject under the sun or beyond the sun; but, whatever the subject, you must be willing to draw primarily on your own experience, reflection, and observation—as well as research, when appropriate—and to make your discoveries accessible to strangers. Therefore the workshop will not address such worthy but impersonal modes as scholarship and conventional journalism, nor such private modes as the diary, nor the freely invented modes of fiction.

We will spend the first third of the semester reading and talking about published works of nonfiction, and writing brief exercises in light of that reading. (For possible authors, see the next paragraph.) We will spend the rest of the semester discussing manuscripts produced by members of the workshop. You will be expected to write, in addition to the exercises, roughly 40 pages of finished work. You will be expected to read with care the manuscripts handed in by others, and to write for each manuscript a one-page critique, a copy of which will be turned in to me. The schedule allows for each person to submit new work for discussion twice and revised work for discussion once. And you will be expected to give a brief oral report on a book-length work of nonfiction of your own choosing.

To suggest my taste, I list a few of the writers whose nonfiction I have found engaging: Ed Abbey, James Baldwin, Wendell Berry, Bernard Cooper, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Loren Eiseley, Nadine Gordimer, Patricia Hampl, Jim Harrison, Edward Hoagland, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, D. H. Lawrence, Primo Levi, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Bill McKibben, John McPhee, N. Scott Momaday, Kathleen Dean Moore, V. S. Naipaul, Kathleen Norris, George Orwell, Chet Raymo, Richard Rodriguez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Wallace Stegner, Henry David Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, Virginia Woolf, and Ann Zwinger.

The course is open to students in the Ph.D. as well as the MFA program, and to qualified writers from outside the English Department. I do not expect members of the workshop to have any considerable experience of writing personal nonfiction, but I do expect you to be able to write good prose.

By permission of the instructor : Send me a message by email (sanders1@indiana.edu) or leave a note in my mailbox (Ballantine Hall 442) briefly describing your reasons for wishing to take the course, and anything about your background that seems pertinent. Please include your telephone number and email address. I will respond as soon as possible, to let you know whether you have been admitted to the workshop.

W664 25264 DEAN
Topics in Current Literature

5:45p – 8:45p W

TOPIC: The Place of Poetry

AUTHORIZATION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED.

According to Roderick Nash, in many traditions, paradise was located on an island; like the biblical garden of Eden, it was believed to be a place set apart, a place where there was no gap between desire and fulfillment. Beginning with the Romantic poets, childhood became the locus of a private paradise, lost through an inevitable fall out of innocence and into the world of experience. If we have, indeed, fallen, where is it we find ourselves? To grapple with another’s answer to this question is to consider some of the assumptions underlying our sense of our selves, our world, and our place in it.

Through the poetry and prose of contemporary poets, we will be exploring “place” in two senses of the word: place as location, both geographical and spiritual, and as it is related to the idea of place as function or duty. Among the collections of poetry being considered for this course are Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III, Robert Hass’ Praise, Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, W.S. Merwin’s The Rain in the Trees, Yusef Komunyakaa’s Magic City, Martín Espada’s The Republic of Poetry, Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country without a Post Office, Wislawa Szymborska’s Poems New and Collected, Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, and Ko Un’s Abiding Places. Supplementary reading will include essays by Salman Rushdie, Terence Des Pres, and Larry Levis.

Work for this course includes two short (5 pages) papers, a presentation, and one long (10-15 pages) paper.

W602/L502 28102/25266 FARRIS
Contexts for the Study of Writing
Contemporary Theories in Rhetoric & Composition

4:00p – 5:15p TR

TOPIC: The Relation of Composition to Rhetoric, Literature, & the University

This course will be historical and speculative as well as practical. We will examine the role of rhetoric and composition in the formation of the university and the rhetoric-poetic relationship in terms of literature and writing instruction within the larger context of the history of the profession of English studies. Then we will investigate disciplinary identity issues within the field of English and composition studies, including the extent to which claims that discourse is community-situated conflict with requirements and practices that still presume writing is a transferable set of skills and moves foundational to learning in college. Finally, we will consider what it would take, not just theoretically, but pedagogically and institutionally, to un-do the division between literature and composition in ways that do not reinforce the dominance of one over the other, including various arguments and practical strategies for teaching literature, writing, and culture together.

Texts will likely include Scholes’ The Rise and Fall of English, Graff’s Clueless in Academe, Shumway and Dionne’s Disciplining English, Berlin’s Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures, Crowley’s Composition in the University, and Smit’s The End of CompositionStudies, Bloom, Daiker, and White’s Composition Studies in the New Millenium, and Anderson and Farris’s Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction, plus other photocopied or e-reserved articles.

Assignments will include bi-weekly written responses and a final paper.

This course may be taken as either L502 or W602. It fulfills requirements for the departmental Pedagogy Minor, the Composition, Literacy and Culture concentration, and the interdepartmental Literacy Minor.

L607 25267 J ANDERSON (#6)
History of Literary Criticism to Enlightenment

2:30p – 3:45p TR

This course will engage the history of literary theory from Plato and Aristotle to the Enlightenment, often making connections with representative modern theories and thus with history in the broader sense.

While the course will treat landmarks of theory focally, its aim is less to be comprehensive than to explore important threads of theoretical inquiry. I expect them to include idealism, realism, rhetoric, signification, imagination, and affection (of which imagination is one expression and emotion and passion two others). This course is meant to offer fundamental background both for periods before 1800 and periods after 1800. I hope to keep readings manageable and broadly accessible.

Work for the course will feature a presentation, a relatively short exploratory essay, and an essay of conference length (ca. 9-10 pages).

To date (mid-September!), I've not settled on all the texts, but late in the fall I will have the list and would be happy to share it with you.

L612 25272 INGHAM (#1)
Chaucer

9:30a – 10:45a TR

TOPIC: Chaucer’s Haunted Aesthetics

Chaucer’s poetry is haunted by figures of the dead and the undead: the drowned Seys, the little clergeon from the Prioress’s Tale, Troilus in the eighth sphere. Chaucer’s poetry remains haunted in another way too: by Ovidian tropes and ambiguities, by Petrarchan figures and forms, by Italian poetic models and by what Charles Muscatine long ago noted as “the French Tradition.”

In this course, we will think not only about individual visitations, about Chaucer’s relation to time and to his poetic inheritance, but also about what it means to consider Chaucerian hauntings as part of the poet’s “aesthetics.” Engaging with criticism of Chaucer’s poetic mode (through the work of scholars like Muscatine, David Wallace, Warren Ginsberg, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Marilynn Desmond) we will consider the Chaucerian corpus to discern what forms of sensory impression – of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching – might be encoded in all this haunting. We will be assisted in this thinking by the work of theorists of translation (particularly Walter Benjamin but also medievalists working in postcolonial cultural studies and the tradition of translatio studii and imperii), of affiliation (particularly Carla Freccero’s notion of “queer spectrality,” but also medievalists interested in cross-temporal affiliations and ruptures), of influence (particularly Harold Bloom’s account of its anxiety, but also medievalists interested in aesthetics and feeling). How might Chaucer’s “haunted aesthetics” help us to think differently about poetic indebtedness and about the project of source study? While medieval poets have traditionally been excluded from the project of ‘aesthetics,’ this course will examine how the case of Chaucer might contribute to our understanding of the term, and what it means (ethically, politically, critically) for us (as readers, as scholars, as medievalists, or even Chaucerians) to remain haunted by these texts.

No previous course work in Middle English or in Chaucer is expected; translations of primary texts will be available. Students should, however, be willing to learn some Middle English and work with the original language to some extent. Requirements: 3 short writing “exercises”; one seminar presentation; one final conference-length paper; regular attendance and active participation.

L631/L731 14390 CHARNES (#3)
English Literature 1660-1790

4:00p– 5:15p TR

Topic: Milton and the Libertines

This course begins with Milton late in his career, and will move through selections of literature and drama from the “Restoration” of the English monarchy to some of the radical English writings that helped contribute to the revolution in America. Our impetus will be to explore how the “failed” republicanism of the Interregnum affects subsequent attitudes towards belief and desire—individual, political, religious. At the center will be the raging cultural contest over what, and who gets to, define the concept of “ Liberty.” We will consider royalism and radicalism as fundamentalist modes in their own right, and try to understand the emerging political psychology of early eighteenth-century England, bookended by the Interregnum on the one hand, and the “Age of Reason” on the other.

A substantial portion of the semester will be devoted to Paradise Lost; other authors will include Aphra Behn, Thomas D’Urfey, John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester), Etherege, Wycherly, John Wilkes, Thomas Paine, and other rakes and radicals, male and female. Secondary materials may include political theorists such as Zizek, Elster, Agamben, Badiou, and Benedict Anderson; and critics and historians such as Gordon Teskey, Lynn Hunt, James Turner, Jane Spencer, Stanley Fish, Derek Hughes, Kirk Combes, and John Durham Peters.

Students taking the course as L631 will write weekly response notes, and two ten-paged position papers.

Students taking the course as L731 will write weekly response notes, and submit a 20-25pp seminar paper at the end of the semester.

L645 27088 MARSH (#4)
English Fiction 1800-1900

2:30p– 3:45p TR

L645 cuts several swathes through the rich field of nineteenth-century fiction, highlighting such issues and subjects as: Romantic inheritances; the "birth" of the Victorian novel; women's writing & New Woman fiction; writing as a profession; censorship and offensiveness; "industrial" fiction; the "Newgate" novel; serialization and the novel market; "sensation" fiction"; "decadence" and the fin de siecle; Victorian realism(s); loss of faith; "Darwinian" narrative; the Victorian bestseller; fiction and illustration; fiction of/and Empire; and theatrical and cinematic adaptation. Main texts: Shelley, Frankenstein; Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard; Gaskell, North and South; Eliot, Adam Bede; Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; Collins, The Woman in White; Haggard, She; Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Gissing, New Grub Street; Grand, The Heavenly Twins. We will aim to cover a limited amount of essential secondary reading (such critics as Levine, Beer, Armstrong, Green-Lewis, Brantlinger, Showalter, and Arata), and--according to individual interests--each to delve into and orally to report on particular “conversation” texts (that is, significant contextualizing or inter-texts), which will include: Godwin, Caleb Williams; Polidori, “The Vampyre”; Stoker, Dracula; Du Maurier, Trilby; Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Beach at Falesa; Dickens, Oliver Twist; The Newgate Calendar; government & periodical reports on factory conditions; Ward, Robert Elsmere; Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret; Moore, Esther Waters & Literature at Nurse; Linton, The Autobigraphy of Christopher Kirkland; Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan; Pater, Marius the Epicurean; and the transcript of Oscar Wilde's 1895 trials. Several sessions of this class will meet in the Lilly Library, to facilitate access to archival and primary materials. Weekly discussion questions; oral reports on secondary and “conversation” reading. The primary writing requirement for this course may be fulfilled either by an annotated bibliography (or similar research project), or by an open-book final exam, or (if inspiration strikes) by a formal paper (in the format of an essay, a critical article, or a review essay).

L655 27024 HERRING (#5)
American Literature & Culture 1900-1945

1:00p– 2:15p TR

TOPIC: Sex, Gender, and American Modernisms

This course functions as an intensive immersion into the major creeds, conflicts, and concerns of the new modernist studies as the field overlaps with U.S.-based sexuality/gender studies. It reintroduces students to stalwarts such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein, and Cather as well as writers who, for too many decades, fell off or under or somewhere alongside the critical radar—Bruce Nugent, Randolph Bourne, Tillie Olson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among many others. To do so, the course evolves through several epistemological, historical, and conceptual lightning rods: Proto-modernities; Heterosex and Masculinity; Highbrow Anglo-philia; Sapphism, Newer Women, and Sexology; Anti-modernism; Regional Sexualities; Queer Transnationalism; New Negro Unmanning and Gendering; and Proletariat Desire. We’ll pair these topics with weekly keywords from old-ish modernist studies to see how the field has regenerated itself since the heydays of The Pound Era: metropolitanism, difficulty, impersonality, deracination, snobbery, and novelty, to name a few. Readings are very heavy and consist of a major primary text as well as two and sometimes three secondary readings each week. For compensation, writing assignments are minimal and consist of a conference abstract, an annotated bibliography, and two five-page responses. If you do register for this course, please email me for a link to readings for our first week of class.

PRIMARY readings will include “The Beast in the Jungle”, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, In Our Time, Nightwood, Cathay, My Ántonia, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, Three Lives, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade”, “Transnational America”, As I Lay Dying, Quicksand, A Few Figs from Thistles

SUPPLEMENTARY readings by Martha Umphrey, Lisa Duggan, Diana Fuss, Janet Lyon, Susan Stanford Friedman, Siobhan B. Somerville, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Hazel Carby, Gail Bederman, George Chauncey, Nayan Shah, Elizabeth Povinelli, Catherine Cocks, Shari Benstock, Michael Trask, Heather Love, Marianne DeKoven, Nina Miller, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Dana Seitler, Amie Elizabeth Parry, José Esteban Muñoz, Jeremy Braddock, Michael Cobb, Jani Scandura, Mary Esteve, Matt Wray

L656 25271 CRAWFORD (#5)
American Literature & Culture 1950-Present

5:45p – 7:00p TR

TOPIC: The Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and the Black Arts Movement

The field of African American literature often privileges two distinct literary periods, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement. In order to focus on the local and transnational texture of these movements, this course adds the Négritude movement as it disrupts the false binary often set up between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement.

We will compare the literature, visual culture, and aesthetic theories of the Harlem Renaissance, the Négritude movement, and the Black Arts movement. Different interpretations of the movements will be examined as we study visual culture, literature, and aesthetic manifestos.

The following passages offer a glimpse of the tensions this course interrogates:

In that case the Negro renaissance is a misnomer, a fad, a socially assertive movement in art that disappears and leaves no imprint. A cultural renaissance that engenders barriers to the emergence of the creative writer is a contradiction in terms, an emasculated movement. (Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967)

Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée Noir, 1948)

Orphée Noir is a date in the intellectualization of the experience of being black. And Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source but in a certain sense to block that source. (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1967 [1952, French original])

We will explore the circular as well as the disjunctive paths between these three cultural movements. Our reading list may include the following texts (or selections from the following texts):

Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic ,
In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal ,
The Practice of Diaspora ,
The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White ,
Fire ,
Black Fire ,
The Black Woman,
Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance ,
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land ,
The System of Dante’s Hell ,
Black Skin, White Masks,
The Black Arts Movement ,
New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement .

Reading responses will shape our discussions and the beginning (10-12 pages) of a journal-quality essay will be written.

L680 14393 ELMER/FAVRET (#4)
Special Topics in Literary Study & Theory

11:15a – 12:30p TR

TOPIC: THE ROMANTIC ATLANTIC, PART 2

This course, team-taught by Mary Favret and Jonathan Elmer, continues a year-long examination of a range of texts and problems related to what we will call the Romantic Atlantic. The first half of the course was offered in fall 07; this will be the second half. But students need not have taken the first half in order to enroll in the second. We have divided 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 Napoleonic 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 forward in time, through the so-called second-generation of Romantic writers, to consider the “late” Romanticism represented by antebellum American writers –roughly 1810-1850. The luxury of having a full year, and two of us, has meant that we can aspire both to provide a survey of what has been achieved over the past ten to fifteen years using 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 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 materiality 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 that has allowed us to bring in prominent scholars in the field, who are 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. Our spring visitors will be Ian Baucom ( Duke U.) and Wai Chee Dimock ( Yale U.).

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

L680/C601 7272/6429 VOGEL (#6)
Special Topics in Literary Study & Theory

1:00p – 2:15p TR

TOPIC: CRITIQUES OF EVERYDAY LIFE

This introduction to the interdisciplinary field, methods, and debates of cultural studies will be focused by an investigation into the quotidian and unrarefied domain of everyday life. Cultural critic Raymond Williams notes three different senses of the word “culture” in contemporary use: (1) a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development; (2) a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general; and (3) the works and practices on intellectual and especially artistic activity. In this course we will explore the ways in which these three senses of “culture” are braided together, following first one, than another of these threads as we pursue the relationship between material cultural production and symbolic systems of meaning. Specifically, we will move between a specialized notion of late-capitalist popular culture, on the one hand, and an anthropological notion of a whole way of life, on the other. Indeed, some of the questions that will concern us are whether or not these two domains have more in common than is usually assumed, and even if the distinction can be maintained at all in a world shaped by transnational and global capital.

Our exploration into these questions will be focused by the notion of the everyday. Examining the terms and principles by which “culture” has been constituted as a realm of academic study and critique, we will ask what humanistic and social scientific academic study can—and cannot—tell us about the material and psychic domain of the everyday. The everyday is that largely taken-for-granted world where culture is lived, a sphere where agency and subjection exist in dialectical tension, where transnational flows of capital, commodities, and signs shape the ways in which people come to know and express themselves and their worlds. As the realm where culture is consumed, the everyday is where official knowledge confronts practical and unofficial knowledge, putting various theories to the test. By focusing our inquiry at the interface of “culture” and the “everyday” we will investigate the myriad ways that the everyday is constituted, managed, and administered, and subsequently how it is reimagined, remapped, and reinhabited.

The course will ground itself with some of the institutional and disciplinary histories of cultural studies and then consider a number of more recent studies that suggests new directions for the field. As such, readings will likely include books by Seyla Benhabib, Lauren Berlant, Veena Das, Michel De Certeau, Michel Foucault, Robin D. G. Kelley, James Scott, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Raymond Williams, and additional readings by Simon During, Judith Halberstam, Michael Berube, Rita Felski, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, Paul Gilroy, Laura Kipnis, James Clifford, Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, and Manthia Diawara.

Reading in this course will be heavy (about a book a week, sometimes more) and often dense; however, no prior knowledge of critical theory or expertise is required or expected. Writing assignments will be somewhat lighter, combing informal response papers with a longer final paper. Class will be a combination of discussion, lecture, and student presentations. This course is joint-listed between English and Cultural Studies and meets the core requirement for the Ph.D. minor in Cultural Studies. It is open to all interested students.

W795 15259 SAMANTRAI
Dissertation Prospectus Workshop

7:00p – 9:00p R

Led by the Director of Graduate Studies, this course is a workshop for the writing of the dissertation prospectus. Students will consider the practices, methods, conditions and structures of the doctoral dissertation in English as they write and revise their prospectuses and as they comment productively upon those of their peers. Students may submit their prospectuses for defense at any time during the semester.

Prerequisites: documented completion of graduate coursework, language requirements, and successful completion of Part I of the qualifying examination; admission must be approved by the DGS.

Having passed the first part of their qualifying examination, students will be expected to enter the class in the spring semester with a clearly identified research project and a draft bibliography for the dissertation in hand.

L707 25273 KATES (#6)
Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism

1:00p – 4:00p R

Topic: Historicity

History remains the baseline methodology of literary criticism (in the old, new, and newer historicisms, cultural studies, and much other contemporary work) despite the fact that a “crisis of historicism” and historical methodology has been with us since at least the late nineteenth century, as Hayden White has persuasively argued in his pathbreaking 1973 work Metahistory. In this class we will examine both the crisis of historicism and the single most powerful response to it: the notion of historicity, of all historical inquiry as grounded in the inquirer’s own intrinsic being-in-history, ultimately in her or his own temporality. In addition to White himself and Dominick LaCapra, we will read such pioneering reflections on history as those of Jakob Burkhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Arthur Danto.

The problematic of historicity that we pursue here is by no means extrinsic to literature, however. In the twentieth century two privileged sites for a specifically literary engagement with this topic are provided by early modernism (especially the criticism and poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) and the resurgence of the historical novel in the second half of this century (especially under the influence of Thomas Pynchon). Depending on the interests of the participants in the seminar, the course will focus on one or the other (or some combination of both) of these moments.

Participants are required to write a final seminar-length paper (20 pages), and class presentations or their equivalent will be required as well. The course aims to provide an open-ended theoretical matrix (through week 8) and a literary one (through week 12), to which students are strongly encouraged to connect their already existing research interests.

L711 25274 FULK (#1)
Old English Literature

5:45p – 8:45p T

A reading knowledge of Old English is required, and so a prerequisite is G601 or an equivalent elementary Old English course. A good part of the semester will be devoted to intensive study of the Exeter Book, both the shorter lyrics and the longer narrative poems. We will also study a few poems from other sources, and some prose selections, with the aim of illustrating the wide variety of textual types in Old English. In the earlier portion of the course there will be some attention to honing competence in the language of poetry, as most of those enrolled will not have taken L710 (Beowulf). Over the course of the semester we will devote individual class periods to exploring major critical issues, with a particular focus on those relevant to textual editing, but also, for example, the identification of genres, research in sources and analogues, authorship and date, metrics, theories of composition, stylistics, historical and comparative approaches, manuscript studies, and the history of OE scholarship (historical, aesthetic, formalist, exegetical/patristic, postmodernist). Each member of the seminar will write a substantial research paper. In addition, since this is a seminar, members of the class will engage in typical seminar activities, including presenting reports on works of scholarship. If the class size permits, each member will present a report on her/his research at the end of the semester. Since time will be limited, we will need to make good use of every class session, and so members of the seminar should come to the first session prepared to translate and discuss The Fortunes of Men and Part II of Maxims I (lines 71–137). These are both in the Exeter Book.

Texts: Krapp, G. P., and E. Van K. Dobbie, edd., The Exeter Book (Columbia Univ. Press).
Clark Hall, John R., A Concise Anglo Saxon Dictionary, 4th ed. ( Univ. of Toronto Press). Other readings will be made available in Oncourse.

L731/L631 26443 CHARNES (#3)
MILTON

4:00p – 5:15p TR

TOPIC: Milton and the Libertines

This course begins with Milton late in his career, and will move through selections of literature and drama from the “Restoration” of the English monarchy to some of the radical English writings that helped contribute to the revolution in America. Our impetus will be to explore how the “failed” republicanism of the Interregnum affects subsequent attitudes towards belief and desire—individual, political, religious. At the center will be the raging cultural contest over what, and who gets to, define the concept of “ Liberty.” We will consider royalism and radicalism as fundamentalist modes in their own right, and try to understand the emerging political psychology of early eighteenth-century England, bookended by the Interregnum on the one hand, and the “Age of Reason” on the other.

A substantial portion of the semester will be devoted to Paradise Lost; other authors will include Aphra Behn, Thomas D’Urfey, John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester), Etherege, Wycherly, John Wilkes, Thomas Paine, and other rakes and radicals, male and female. Secondary materials may include political theorists such as Zizek, Elster, Agamben, Badiou, and Benedict Anderson; and critics and historians such as Gordon Teskey, Lynn Hunt, James Turner, Jane Spencer, Stanley Fish, Derek Hughes, Kirk Combes, and John Durham Peters.

Students taking the course as L631 will write weekly response notes, and two ten-paged position papers.

Students taking the course as L731 will write weekly response notes, and submit a 20-25pp seminar paper at the end of the semester.

L761 27025 IRMSCHER (#4)
AMERICAN POETRY

5:45p – 8:45p M

This seminar will explore the rich array of voices that constitutes nineteenth-century American poetry, from William Cullen Bryant and Lydia Sigourney to Steven Crane and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The nineteenth century was the time when the vocabulary and reality of private life took shape, and yet much of this poetry was almost insistently “public,” concerned not with selfhood and versions of intimacy, but with general and generalizable feelings as well as the major crises of the century, ranging from Native American genocide, slavery, and the Civil War. In this seminar we will have to consider carefully the interpretive challenges that arise from this fact by asking ourselves how we can recover reading practices specific to this period. Should we at all? Can nineteenth-century American poetry be recovered for the classroom today? Other issues to be discussed will include the role of gender in the emergence of a distinctly American poetry, the conflict between nationalist and transnationalist conceptions of culture, poetic “orientalism,” the role of sentimentalism and race, the emergence of “popular” poetry, and, inevitably, questions of canonicity. We will pay special attention to the development of American print culture and its impact on the dissemination of poetry; half of our time will be spent working in the Lilly Library. Secondary authors to be studied will include, among others, Paula Bennett, Lawrence Buell, Joan Dobson, Angus Fletcher, Virginia Jackson, David Reynolds, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Alan Trachtenberg. With the exception of the poetry of such well-known authors as Dickinson and Whitman, nineteenth-century poetry remains woefully under-researched—a great opportunity for new and creative scholarly work!

Course requirements will include active participation in class discussions, one 15-minute presentation, and a 20-25 page seminar paper, which may include archival research and should eventually be in a format ready for submission to a journal. I will also ask each participant to prepare a 10-minute teaching presentation and to design a unit (or their own course) that he or she could teach at the college level.
Participants should plan to acquire John Hollander’s two-volume hardcover edition of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, the most comprehensive anthology to date, which offers extensive notes and a useful chronology.

L780 28253 MCKAY (#2)
Special Studies in English & American Literature
(Comparative Drama)

10:10a – 1:10p W

TOPIC: TOXIC THEATRE

Devised for students interested in the theory and history of performance, this course will explore the longstanding tendency to account for the theatre’s impact in pathological terms. Strictly speaking, our object will be to consider a number of historical and critical conditions under which the institution of the stage in general or a particular play is said to make its audience sick. Special emphasis will be placed on the early periods ( Rome to Romanticism), guided by our reading of Walter Benjamin’s On the Origins of the German Tragic Drama. Among the other philosophers, theorists, and theologians we may consult in this pursuit are Plato, Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine, Chrysostom, Athenagoras, Gosson, Prynne, Collier, Diderot, and Artaud and Brecht; our plays will include Ibsen’s Ghosts, Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr, the Cornish Death of Pilate, Baillie’s de Montfort, O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ron Athey’s performance art; and the diseases we will investigate for their discomfiting relation to the stage are the plague, tuberculosis, syphilis and AIDS. Along the way, we will pose a range of questions about the hygiene of theatrical spectatorship, the toxicity of representation and, most important, the communicability of feeling. These lines of questioning should lead us to some larger interventions in the methods and practices of our discipline—for instance, how might metaphor, or figurative thinking, limit the stakes of theatre and performance studies? Is there a value to understanding theatre history as a forensic science? Close reading and rash speculation will be equally emphasized here; lively participation and a sustained and thoughtful course of research, leading to a final seminar paper, are crucial to the successful completion of the course.

L780/C701 25275/27045 BOSE (#6)
Special Studies in English & American Literature

5:45p – 8:45p W

TOPIC: Post-colonial STUDIES

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, 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.

The final section of the course will focus on how to translate the concepts of post-colonial theory to an engagement with specific literary works. In this unit, we will also consider how literature offers an alternative form of knowledge to theory. Our literary readings will represent a small sample of post-colonial fiction, but will be drawn from a number of different contexts.

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.

Readings:
Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose ( Lebanon)
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.
Eqbal Ahmed, Confronting Empire.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism.
Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life ( El Salvador)
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)
Harry Harootunian, The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns ( Afghanistan)
Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat editors, Dangerous Liaisons, Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives.
Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost ( Sri Lanka)
Edward Said, Orientalism.
Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India (Pakistan/India)
Robert Young, Post-Colonialism: A Historical Introduction