Indiana University Department of English

16589 – 8:00a-8:50a MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16590 – 8:00a-8:50a MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16591 – 9:05a-9:55a MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16592 – 9:05a-9:55a MW (25 students) 3 cr. (SPEA AND HPER MAJORS ONLY)
16588 – 12:20p-1:10p MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16593 – 12:20p-1:10p MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16594 – 1:25p-2:15p MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16595 – 1:25p-2:15p MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16596 – 4:40p-5:30p MW (25 students) 3 cr.
16597 – 6:50p-8:45p T (25 students) 3 cr.
16598 – 8:00a-8:50a TR (25 students) 3 cr.
16599 – 8:00a-8:50a TR (25 students) 3 cr.
16600 – 9:05a-9:55a TR (25 students) 3 cr.
16601 – 1:25p-2:15p TR (25 students) 3 cr.
16602 – 3:35p-4:25p TR (25 students) 3 cr.

This course is designed to help students in any field develop writing and research skills which will be useful in the professional world and any future writing project. This course concentrates on the writing of concise, informative prose, and emphasizes the importance of writing with a clearly defined purpose and audience. Assignments will be based on general principles of communication but will usually take the form of writing done in the world of work: letters, memos, summaries, and abstracts, reports, proposals, etc. Students will often be able to write on subjects related to their field of study. The course requires constant, careful attention to writing and rewriting, and many classes will be conducted as workshops, with writing exercises and detailed discussion of the work of class members.

Offers instruction and practice in writing argumentative essays about complicated and controversial issues. The course focuses on strategies for identifying issues, assessing claims, locating evidence, deciding on a position, and writing papers with clear assertions and convincing arguments.

16606 – 4:00p-5:15p TR (25 students) 3 cr. IW.
16607 – 10:10a-11:00a MWF (25 students) 3 cr. IW.

Advanced writing course focuses on the interconnected activities of writing and reading, especially the kinds of responding, analyzing, and evaluating that characterize work in many fields in the university. Topics vary from semester to semester.

In this section of W350, we will develop and practice strategies for writing about visual images. For what audiences, and with what aims, might we write about visual “texts”? How might we describe, analyze, and judge them through our own prose? We’ll consider these questions through a series of activities both large and small. In class sessions, we will focus mostly on photographs, films, and paintings. The major writing assignments will consist of three papers, each approximately four pages long. You will have various options for their topics, including the opportunity to study areas of the visual arts not dealt with in class (e.g., posters, video, sculpture, memorials, Web sites).

Discussion:
16387 9:05a-9:55a WF (15 students)
16389 10:10a-11:00a WF (15 students)
28190 10:10a-11:00a WF (15 students)
16391 11:15a-12:05p WF (15 students)
22275 11:15a-12:05p WF (15 students)
16392 12:20p-1:10p WF (15 students)
22276 12:20p-1:10p WF (15 students)

This course is designed to facilitate your first adventure into the world of creative writing. You will write both fiction and poetry, producing one 10-12 page story and 5-7 poems for your final portfolio. We will meet as a large group once a week to discuss issues of craft in poems and stories. We’ll also do some class exercises, read poems and stories from an anthology or two, and take tests. More intimate discussion of the students’ own work will take place in the twice weekly meetings with your associate instructors. There will be two exams, one in each genre. The course is stimulating and challenging, and it will help you expand your imaginative horizons as well as teach you to be more critical and disciplined in your writing.

Discussion:
16394 12:20p-1:10p WF (15 students)
16395 12:20p-1:10p WF (15 students)
16396 1:25p-2:15p WF (15 students)
16397 1:25p-2:15p WF (15 students)
22278 1:25p-2:15p WF (15 students)
16399 2:30p-3:20p WF (15 students)
28191 2:30p-3:20p WF (15 students)

W103 is an introduction to the writing of poetry and fiction. How to we write poems? How do we write stories? Students will attend a weekly lecture designed to introduce them to all aspects of writing poetry and fiction. They will also meet twice weekly in small workshop sections where they will practice the art and discuss the poems and stories they write. There will be exercises and assignments built around craft. Students will write several original poems and stories. We will read works by published writers as models. There will be weekly reading and writing assignments and two exams. The major focus of the course will be on the student's own writing and original creative work.

PREREQUISITE: Completion of the English Composition requirement; English major, W103 or permission of the Director of Creative Writing Program.

Poetry:
16578 – 11:15a-12:30p TR (15 students) 3 cr.
16579 – 1:00p-2:15p TR (15 students) 3 cr.

This exploratory course in poetry and/or fiction is designed for students with basic familiarity of creative writing. Students will read the work of published authors in conjunction with composing and revising original work. A final portfolio of original work is typical of these courses.

Fiction:
16583 – 2:30p-3:20p MWF (15 students) 3 cr.
16584 – 11:15a-12:30p TR (15 students) 3 cr.
16586 – 2:30p-3:45p TR (15 students) 3 cr.

Principles of editing and publishing literary writing. Kinds of journals, varieties of formats (including print and e-zine), introduction to editing and production processes. Possible focus on genre publishing (fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose), grant writing, Web publishing, etc.

Intended for students with prior background and familiarity with contemporary literature and fictional devices, this course will be largely conducted as a workshop in which students’ own writing will be the subject of discussion. (Note: Introduction to Fiction Writing is a prerequisite for taking this class.) A basic understanding of the elements of fiction (narration/dramatization/flashback, description, dialogue, and point-of-view) will be assumed, though we will cover these matters on a more sophisticated level than in English 381A. Moreover, we will focus on the more difficult tasks of producing publishable quality work. Issues of consistency of voice and tone, freshness of style and originality, as well as aesthetic and audience, will be discussed and emphasized through writing exercises and assigned readings.

We will divide our time between your work and that of professional writers. I expect many issues will arise including, for example, the idea of place and how it affects characters’ lives, as well as the actions, diction, tone, and ultimately the shape of fictional narratives. Through close reading and writing you’ll be asked to answer questions such as: What is place and how is it achieved? How has narrative design evolved and what is our current concept of “story”? We can expect that many other related questions and topics will arise and you are encouraged to bring in craft essays or supporting materials for exploration.

Students will be expected to bring in their new original fiction on a regular basis—at least two original short stories to be workshopped by your peers. Participation is a must, and students should be willing to share their own work, listen to the work of others, and both accept and provide insightful, judiciously offered commentary about each other’s work. At the end of the semester you’ll be expected to turn in a portfolio of your work, including your reading journal, both short stories and the comments your peers provided, a substantial revision of one story, a process note, and a 5-10 page critical essay evaluating your literary technique.

The focus of this workshop should be on process and discovery, and for the experience to be satisfying, you must be willing to invest yourself, learn from others, reinforce your own fictional voice/identity, and in some cases grow beyond any misguided preconceptions you have about what it means to create meaningful fiction. I urge you to look closely at the requirements described and think about whether this is really the course you want, and also whether you have the time and energy to devote to this class.

Students interested in this class should promptly submit 15-20 pages of fiction, together with a list of other creative writing classes they have taken and pertinent biographical information about themselves, to my mailbox in BH442. Students admitted to the course will be notified by e-mail, and on-line authorizations for admission will be issued by the Creative Writing Secretary.

PREREQUISITE: W103 or W203 or equivalent. Section requires permission of the instructor.

This upper-level poetry workshop will focus on developing students’ original work while reading and discussing what’s being written and published in contemporary poetry. We will read multiple examples of work by contemporary poets, and we will explore the work both through class discussion and in our own writing.

In class, we will focus on an understanding of craft through close reading of poetry along with a few essays on poetics as well as through various writing exercises. In the workshop component of the class, we will focus on the experience of the poem in process: how craft elements are put to use, the ways in which the poem engages the form and its conventions, and what is wonderful and what might be improved about the poem.

You will be expected to hand in 10-12 new and original poems, several of which will be in response to prompts or developed from in-class exercises. All poems will go through several revisions, the experience of which you will discuss in a preface to the course’s final portfolio of your original work. You will be expected to offer substantive written critique of peer work as well as participate actively in all workshops and class discussions. In preparation for class discussion, you will keep a writer’s journal of reflections on course readings.

Possible course texts : A Best American Poetry anthology and/or American Poetry Now (ed. Ed Ochester); Claims for Poetry (ed. Donald Hall); and a few individual collections of poetry (possibilities include: Beckman & Rohrer’s Nice Hat. Thanks.; Bowman’s Notarikon, Levis’ Winter Stars; McHugh’s Hinge & Sign; Walker’s Affrilachia).

To apply for admission to the course, place the following materials in a manila envelope in my BH442 mailbox (Romayne Rubinas Dorsey):

5 pages of what you consider your best poetry.
A brief letter outlining your interest in the course and your background in creative writing (you should have taken at least one of the following: W103 or W203). Please include in your letter previous creative writing instructor’s name.
Your name and a current email address. I will admit and notify students as they apply, so chances for admission increase with early submission of materials.

I will notify you via email of my decision and copy the program secretary who can clear admitted students for registration.

Fiction, like physics or philosophy, is a mode of knowledge. While it should be entertaining, fiction at its best is also revelatory. It is a powerful medium for musing or remembering or dreaming, for speculating or documenting, for probing the depths and heights of human experience. In this course we will closely examine a series of short stories in order to see how they are made, paying attention to matters of style, form, characterization, point of view, and voice, all with an eye toward understanding how fiction explores and illuminates our mysterious existence. The class will be conducted as a discussion, and therefore thorough preparation and faithful attendance are crucial. You will be asked to submit a brief (1-2 page) response or creative exercise each week, a 4-6 page story or critical essay at mid-semester, and an 8-12 page story or critical essay at the end of the semester. You will also be asked, along with a partner, to lead the discussion in two class meetings during the semester. Our readings will be drawn from a trio of moderately-priced anthologies: David Madden, ed., Vintage Short Fiction, Vol. I and Vol. II, and Tobias Wolff, ed., The Vintage Book of Contemporary Short Stories.

Designed primarily for the creative writing student: the study and practice of the techniques used in the writing of poetry, including meter and other rhythmic structures more commonly relied on in nonmetrical or free verse, such as rhyme, alliteration, and stanza structures.

Interested students are asked to submit no more than 20 pages of their best fiction and a short letter of application (one single- spaced page) to the instructor. In the letter of application, please include the following:

2. names of previous writing courses (including names of previous instructors and the grades earned)

3. any pertinent information about yourself, your interest in fiction writing and workshop experience, reasons for wanting to take the course, and anything else you want to tell me

1. Application material (letter and writing sample) should be placed inside a 9x12 manila envelope, with your name and email address, and the words “W401 Application” clearly marked on the front of the envelope.

2. Applications should be placed in my mailbox in BH 442 (note there is another “A. Miller,” so be sure the box is mine). Applications are reviewed as they come in, and students are notified by email on a continuous basis of acceptance (usually within a week). The early bird gets the worm, so apply early. Since application materials cannot be returned, please keep copies.

English W401 is an advanced class in fiction writing. Expect to write a minimum of 40 pages of new creative work, the bulk of which will be discussed in regularly-scheduled workshops. Members should be prepared and willing to give and receive thoughtful and constructive peer criticism, both in class and in writing. Workshops are self-generating and therefore require the active participation and careful advance preparation of every member. Attendance is extremely important. You can also expect to read a range of interesting works by published writers, and contribute to detailed discussions of the readings. Because there is limited space in the class, please determine in advance if you have schedule conflicts or other reasons that could prevent you from making a full commitment to the class.

Reading prerequisite: If you haven’t already, please take the time to read Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction (any version of it), and familiarize yourself with basic craft terms. Familiarity with contemporary fiction writers is also encouraged.

This course is a workshop in writing poetry. Students will turn in a poem a week, which will be discussed in class. The poems will be formal exercises drawn from Wendy Bishop's Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem.

Students will learn to work with accentual and syllabic meters, as well as to create contemporary versions of ancient forms such as sonnets and sestinas. No tests. No auditors. Students will distribute copies of their work to all members of the class.

Approval of the instructor is required for admission. To apply, submit 5 pages of poetry and list of creative writing courses (including the name of their instructors) by attachment to my email address: cecilr@indiana.edu at least one week before your registration day. To improve your chances of getting a place in the workshop, submit your manuscript as soon as possible, since places will be filled as people apply. Those who register late should apply at the beginning of the registration period so that, if admitted, a place will be reserved for them in the class.

No places will be saved for late registration. I will post a list of those admitted on my office door (BH 458), and give a copy of the list to the Undergraduate Secretary in BH 442. As soon as you are admitted, pick up an authorization to register from the secretary.

TOPIC: "Green Writing"

This course is designed to introduce you to some basic concepts in the analysis of literary texts and to encourage you to think creatively about individual works (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama) from different periods of English and American literature.  Our main emphasis will be on texts that have an environmental significance or reflect concepts of biodiversity.  In the first half of the class, the focus is on poetry, since shorter texts will give us a better opportunity to practice and hone our critical skills.  We will move slowly (quality is more important than quantity), and we will learn that in the analysis of literature no detail is insignificant.   Readings will include texts by Elizabeth Bishop, Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Herman Melville, Aldo Leopold, and Sam Shephard.

You will be evaluated on your ability to read all assigned texts thoroughly and thoughtfully, to share your opinion of these texts in class, and to express your views succinctly and coherently in writing.  If you are interested, we will leave some time for original work by participants.  My main ambition will be to help you acquire confidence in your argumentative abilities as good and efficient readers of literary texts.  The occasional inclusion of suitable critical contexts (in the shape of "secondary" essays or reviews) will enable you to identify some major critical approaches and balance your views against those of other critics.

We will read, discuss, and write about a range of literary works from the last four centuries. Our primary attention will be on developing those skills that are particularly useful in discovering, articulating and exploring fruitful topics for literary analysis, and in developing a better understanding of how to support interpretive arguments with literary evidence. Texts will include a literary anthology of poetry, drama and fiction, supplemented by a novel or two. Intensive sessions being what they are, both the reading and writing requirements will be heavy. Several short papers and a final exam will be required.

This course is an introduction to the study of literature in English, and it is designed for English majors and minors. We will study examples of fiction, poetry, and drama (including film) from a range of historical periods, in part for the purpose of developing skills in literary analysis, in part as a basis for gaining familiarity with some of the variety of critical approaches available to literary practitioners. Most important of all, this is an introduction to the practice of writing about literature, and there will be considerable emphasis on developing competence in written analysis. Thus, there will be frequent writing assignments, as should be expected in an Intensive Writing course. Discussion in class will be an important component of the course, and so attendance will be mandatory. There will be frequent quizzes, but no exams. Novels to be read will include Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Morrison, The Bluest Eye.

evelopment of critical skills essential to participation in the interpretive process. Through class discussion and focused writing assignments, introduces the premises and motives of literary analysis and critical methods associated with historical, generic, and/or cultural concerns. May be repeated once for credit by special arrangement with the Department of English.

16338 – 11:15a-12:30p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H, IW.
16337 – 2:30p- 3:45p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.

Development of critical skills essential to participation in the interpretive process. Through class discussion and focused writing assignments, introduces the premises and motives of literary analysis and critical methods associated with historical, generic, and/or cultural concerns. May be repeated once for credit by special arrangement with the Department of English.

Rather than taking you on a drive-by of Literature’s Greatest Hits, this introductory course focuses on a seemingly simple, supposedly obvious topic—Norms and Deviance—to question how the notion of “the misfit” influences and informs the ways in which writers and critics have carved out their creative worlds. Rephrased: by concentrating on losers, liars, fakers, and troublemakers, we jumpstart an ongoing discussion over some of the most pressing issues that face literary interpreters today. Over the course of the semester, we’ll read works about madwomen and their haunted houses, redneck serial killers, gym bunnies, Chinese-American woman warriors, southern freaks, plastic surgery addicts, cockroaches in Prague, Brittney Spears in Europe, rebellious slaves, regional grrrls, queer youths in central Pennsylvania, horny aliens, a door slam heard across the world, and, for good measure, a story told by the moon. But besides this crash course in cultural analysis, you’re also going to learn how to read—and read closely. If I do my job right, then by the end of semester you should be pretty cozy with literary interpretation; your awareness of the formal characteristics of fictional, poetic, and dramatic texts should skyrocket; you’ll have some cornerstones of critical theory under your belt; and you’ll fret (like I do) about how literature really ‘matters’ in what some have called a post-literary age.

Representative significant plays to acquaint students with characteristics of drama as a type of literature. Readings will include plays from several ages and countries.

16343 – 8:00a-8:50a MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16344 – 9:05a-9:55a MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16345 – 10:10a-11:00a MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16346 – 12:20p-1:10a MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16347 – 11:15a-12:05p MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16348 – 1:25p-2:15p MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16349 – 2:30p-3:20p MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16350 – 3:35p-4:25p MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16351 – 8:00a-9:15a TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H, IW.
16352 – 9:30a-10:45a TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16353 – 11 :15a-12:30p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16355 – 1:00p-2:15p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16356 – 2:30p-3:45p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16354 – 4:00p-5:15p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16357 – 5:45p-7:00p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.

Representative works of fiction; structural techniques in the novel. Novels and short stories from several ages and countries.

16358 – 11:15a-12:30p TR (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.
16359 – 1:25p-2:15p MWF (25 students) 3 cr. A&H,IW.

Kinds, conventions, and elements of poetry in a selection of poems from several historical periods.

L208 29387 TOPICS IN ENGLISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE & CULTURE
Ivan Kreilkamp

Have you ever looked at your pet dog or cat and wondered, "What is she thinking? If she could speak, what would she say? What does she think about me?" Have you ever fantasized about what it would be like to become an animal? From the late nineteenth century onwards, many literary authors have had these sorts of thoughts, and have created a body of compelling and important work that examines human
relationships with animals and attempts imaginatively to enter their consciousnesses. We'll begin with Anna Sewall's 1877 best-seller Black Beauty: the Autobiography of a Horse and H.G. Wells' creepy 1903 scientific fable The Island of Dr. Moreau. From there, we'll go on to encounter many more dreams, nightmares, fables, and speculations about animals, usually in relation to those humans who control, dominate, and sometimes befriend them. Much of the course will focus on such early twentieth-century Modernist authors as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for whom animal narrators and subjects offered a path to literary and philosophical innovation and experiment. In the last month or so of
the semester, though, we'll turn to more contemporary fiction and film, including Peter Dickinson's 1988 young- adult novel Eva (about a girl who wakes up as a chimpanzee), Yann Martel's 2002 Booker Prize-winning The Life of Pi, Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (1999), and two amazing films, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977) and Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005). The
readings will focus on fiction but will also include some poetry and critical essays. We'll focus on skills of literary interpretation and analysis and effective argumentation and writing.

Assignments will include regular short response papers, three 4-6 page formal papers (one of which can take a "creative" option fiction, poetry, or possibly visual art), regular on-time readings of all assigned texts. dedicated class participation, and a take-home final essay exam.

Rapid reading of at least a dozen of Shakespeare’s major plays and poems. May not be taken concurrently with L313 or L314.

TOPIC: "American Mirrors"

The American cinema has been both a crucible and a reflecting pool for American culture for more than a century. This course investigates great historical cruxes and enduring cultural complexes of the twentieth century in the light of the great films that both represented and re-envisioned them. In each unit, study of our central film text will work side by side with study of relevant, and sometimes urgent, literary and print material (including Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, an exemplary dime Western, publicity materials, script extracts, and newspaper reports on lynching) as well as secondary films, shorts, and substantial clips (from works by, among others, Von Stroheim, Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Stanley Kubrick). Topics and central films will be: race hatred and the legacy of the Civil War in D.W. Griffith's 1915 masterwork, The Birth of a Nation (the foundational text of modern cinema and a recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan); the killing fields of Flanders and the trauma of World War I as envisioned in Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); mechanized city life and the plight of the urban "Tramp" in Chaplin's Modern Times (1936); the Hollywood "Dream Factory" run amuck in Billy Wilder's cynical film noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950); sex, violence, and Freudian gender relations in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958); Sergio Leone's satirical extravaganza Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), American frontier-lust, and the American Western genre; Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam revisiting of Conrad's British Imperialist nightmare in Apocalypse Now (1979); and Ridley Scott’s dystopian return to the themes of Frankenstein in the film noir, urban-gothic, sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Mandatory weekly screenings (Monday, 7:15p-10:00p); mandatory discussion questions; two midterms, paper, and final.

This course surveys 600 years of British literature, from the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf to (much of) Shakespeare. As a result, we’ll read more than we should this term, and, at times, the pace will leave you a little breathless. Nevertheless, every work we’ll read justifies itself: we won’t waste time on bad examples. And nearly every work also plays a significant role in English literary history. All of our texts are collected in the Norton Anthology of British Literature and include the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf (in translation), the alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in translation), the morality play Everyman, the mystery play called The Second Shepherd’s Pageant, several of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and a wide array of lyric poems from Chaucer to Shakespeare, focusing especially on some by William Dunbar, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Queen Elizabeth, Michael Drayton, and Shakespeare. In conjunction with the lyrics, we will read some other minor texts included in the anthology.

But the course is about more than the works we read: it is a course in the study of literature, and the terms of that discipline are not entirely of one’s making, not simply a matter of taste. One values according to what one understands, and genuine understanding is never easy: one needs to know some fundamental things about British history, about literary history, about the English language, about how literature gets written, about how you can read it with pleasure and profit, and how you can express your ideas about it most effectively. This course will promote your literary understanding in all of these aspects; it will develop your technique while (and because) you encounter a number of great and influential works. Besides the reading, coursework will include three in-class examinations, an essay (8-10 pages), and a comprehensive final examination.

This course introduces students to important authors, influential texts, and historical and cultural contexts of English and American literatures from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. To that end, we will identify and practice strategies for reading and writing about literature that represents a variety of genres, conventions, and techniques as we strive to acquire a greater understanding and appreciation of works by Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Johnson on the one side of the Atlantic, and Bradstreet, Wigglesworth, Taylor, and Franklin, among others, on the other side. Receiving special attention in this section of the course will be issues related to the various conceptions of the function of poetry and the role of the poet that emerge and develop throughout our period.

Because much of the work of this course will be carried on through class discussion and other class activities, regular attendance and participation will be required. Also required will be a number of “first pass” exercises, two formal essays, a midterm and a final exam.

Required text: THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, Vol. 1
(or 1B and 1C), 8th ed.

Representative study of British and American literature of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in the context of transatlantic cultural developments.

E303 16316 LITERATURES IN ENGLISH, 1800-1900
Rae Greiner

12:20p-1:10p MWF (30 students) 3 cr., A&H.

TOPIC: "States of Injury, Scenes of Distress"

Everybody knows that the nineteenth century was a time of great social and political unrest: there were wars (the Napoleonic, Crimean, and US Civil War, among many others), people agitated in the streets and in print for better pay, shorter workdays, legal protections, cleaner streets, and the right to do and define things we sometimes take for granted: vote, own property, get a divorce, have a fair trial, be considered human. This was also a time of great scientific innovation (and error), in the natural sciences (geology, biology), the social sciences (sociology, ethnography), and the sciences of the mind (phrenology, psychology). We’ll be looking at how scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses speak through, and give shape to, literary ones (and vice versa): how cutting-edge theories about the accelerated passing of modern time inform novels obsessed with the Gothic past; how the discourse of evolution upsets (or organizes) tales of revolution; how the features of geologic distress recur in scenes where distress takes the shape of sentimental tears; how Darwin evokes Milton and how Eliot evokes Darwin; how the tropes of psychology manifest in urban planning for better sewers. In particular, we’ll be looking for rhetorical and discursive patterns: identifying linked metaphors, shared assumptions, recurring images, similarly altered states, and other commonalities across disciplines, fields, and ideologies, especially those that think themselves antagonistic or opposed (like the scientific and the romantic). Finally, in our focus on injury, distress, and pain—states, qualities, and conditions we tend to think of as abnormal, unusual, unwelcome, unjust, needing remedy, and otherwise bad news—we will consider the degree to which living in a state of injury is the necessary precondition for citizenry, being distressed the very foundation of (and requisite to) civil rights.

Texts will likely include works by Austen (Persuasion), Bronte (Wuthering Heights), Rowlandson (Captivity and Deliverance), Franklin (Autobiography), Jacobs (Incidents in the Life), Melville (Typee or Omoo), Dickens (Great Expectations), Eliot (The Mill on the Floss), Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), and stories, poems, and excerpts from Lyell, Darwin, Wordsworth, Poe, Thoreau, Dickens, Arnold, Curie, Irving, Browning, Jewett, Dickinson, Chadwick, Mayhew, Freud, Ruskin, Carlyle and Stead.

TOPIC: “Voices of the Nineteenth Century”

The expanding world offered to nineteenth-century readers was haunted by voices: from the vox populi or democratic “voice of the people” that announced the new century, to the sputtering, intermittent voices that crackled out from new machines – telephones and phonographs – at century’s end. It was a world where face-to- face encounters, even between family members, could grow less frequent; where print media rapidly filled in for oral communication; where news traveled not simply from household to household, but from continent to continent. At the same time, the English language with its literature found itself increasingly in the company of other tongues. As it was carried to the ends of empire, English itself was altered: in the accent and additions of a Jamaican or Canadian, a Kentuckian or Brahmin Indian, English in the nineteenth century could sound foreign to itself – if indeed, in the growing Anglophone empire, anyone had a right to say what English “itself” sounded like. Finally, modernity’s devotion to the promises of science and capitalism seemed to announce a waning from the world of the voice of divinity: prophecy was threatened by rational calculation and formulas for prediction. Not surprisingly the period fostered a culture of psychic mediums and spiritualists, poised to channel voices from other realms. It was a world both losing its voice and struggling to make intelligible so many disparate voices.

Nineteenth-century literary works in English – printed on a page, increasingly standardized in grammar and punctuation – struggled with their relationship to the embodied human voice. We will begin the course by reading the American Declaration of Independence (meant to be read aloud to the new citizenry), and proceed with texts gathered from the newly formed United States as well as Great Britain and the growing Anglophone world. The course will feature novels, stories, speeches, poems and plays by writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Sojourner Truth, Emily Bronte, Frederick Douglass, Robert Browning, Amy Levy, Manmohan Ghose, Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Lincoln, George Bernard Shaw, William James, and James Joyce. At the end of the semester, thanks to the miracle of phonographic recording, we will listen to actual transcriptions of nineteenth-century voices. We’ll take advantage of another nineteenth-century invention, the moving picture, to supplement the syllabus with two (fairly recent) films.

The course will require attentive reading out of class and spirited voices in class! There will be two 6-8 page papers required and one long research project due at the end of the semester; you will also be asked to contribute bi-weekly written responses to the reading. Please contact me ( favretm@indiana.edu) if you have questions about the course or would like to start your reading over the summer.

TOPIC: “Travelers’ Tales: Exploration and Adventure in American and British Writing”

The twentieth century marked the peak of global exploration motivated by imperial ambition and missionary zeal, commercial interest and scientific curiosity. This course considers the record of that movement in British and American writing during the past hundred years. Through our reading of fictional and non-fictional narratives of travel, exploration, and adventure we will explore the following questions: How did English-speaking writers come to know and exercise imaginative control over the world beyond their native lands? What are the conventions necessary to literary narratives presenting the relationship between the West and the rest; how were they created, maintained or subverted? What role does race and gender play in the making of western and “native” persons? And how have the rest used the tropes of exploration to contest and rewrite their place in the Anglo-American imagination? Our principle destinations will be Africa, Antarctica, India and South America. We will explore several modes of rendering other people and places including popular and cinematic representations. Our literary guides will likely include Owen Wister, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Salman Rushdie.

This course requires two papers (3-5 typewritten pages, double-spaced), two exams, one research team project, active and informed classroom participation and attendance.

This course will examine one of the most important and problematic issues of the twentieth century – empire. Although the term “empire” may be applied to formal practices of colonialism, scholars like Amy Kaplan, Antonio Hardt, and Michael Negri have encouraged us to redefine empire more broadly. Indeed, for the last century, empire has taken many forms with multiple repercussions, ranging from unincorporated territories, to “special relationships,” to global capitalism. In this course, we will focus on works of fiction published from the 1900s to the present; these texts consider U.S., British, French, and Spanish empires in Africa, India, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. We will apply the term “fiction” not just to the literary form that we will study in this class, but also to the fictions that have made and still make empire possible, such as the construction of “other” figures, or representations of differences between “east” and “west,” “first” and “third” worlds, “white” and “nonwhite.” We will also think about fiction as a way of constructing counter-narratives or counter-constructs that might oppose the sweeping rhetoric of empire and its legacies. In our analyses and discussions, we will investigate exile and alienation; imagined constructions of home, the homeland, and the nation; masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in a new nation or national community; migration and immigration; the development of multivalent, flexible, or hybrid identities; and the use of places such as Hawaii to articulate in between identities or spaces.

Tentative reading list includes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Onoto Watanna’s The Japanese Nightingale, W.E.B. DuBois’s Dark Princess, Ama Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the Rs, Rosario Ferre’s Sweet Diamond Dust, Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

Requirements for the class will include active participation and attendance, two exams, two papers (5-6 pgs), one presentation, and informal written assignments.

Representative study of twentieth-century literatures in English. In addition to Britain and North America, cultural locations may include the Indian subcontinent, Australasia, anglophone Africa, the Caribbean, etc. Focus on themes associated with modernity and cross-cultural contacts.

Did the Middle Ages have sex? Contrary to popular ideas of the Middle Ages, it was a culture that invented our modern concept of love and that understood sex and sexuality in much more complex ways than we do today. Although many people assume the medieval church somehow policed and censored medieval sexual expression, in fact, the church of the Middle Ages was much less interested in controlling sexuality than many modern religious movements are. In this course, we will investigate medieval attitudes towards sex and gender through a variety of texts, including works by Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Margery Kempe, Marie de France, and many others. Many of the texts we read will be in Middle English, which students will learn to read and translate, as well as pursue its words for sex and gender concepts. In addition, the course will include critical and historical commentary on the issues we are studying. Requirements include two papers (8-10 pages in length), some short response pieces, a midterm and final examination. One of the long papers will be a research paper.

This course will examine social and political politics, familial relations, and competing versions of "history" in six of Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays. We will pay special attention to how social and economic systems organize familial and love relations, how conflicts between individuals and social codes are worked out (or not, depending on one's viewpoint), through strategies of genre, scapegoating, misrecognition, marriage, death and revenge. We will ground our reading of the plays in Renaissance social and cultural history, looking at the effects of female rule in a patriarchal culture, an emerging capitalist economy, and other factors that strongly influenced gender, family and class relationships. We will read several comedies, history plays, and tragedies; and look at how the choice, structure, and conventions of genre alter, disguise or reveal the debates and crises circulating in early modern England and the theatre.

Plays will include Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. Requirements will be two papers, a midterm, attendance and participation, and a final exam.

This course will examine social, familial, and sexual politics in six of Shakespeare's later plays. We will pay close attention to how ideological and economic systems organize familial and love relations, how conflicts between individuals and social codes are worked out (or not, depending on one's viewpoint) through strategies of genre, scapegoating, misrecognition, marriage, death and revenge. We will ground our reading of the plays in Elizabethan/Jacobean social and cultural history, considering how the transition from Queen Elizabeth to King James, and an emerging capitalist economy affected the representation of gender, family, and class relationships. We will also read and discuss short selections from Renaissance treatises on court life, the theatre, women, marriage, the body, and the family, as well as several articles representative of some current critical approaches to Shakespeare. One topic for consideration will be postmodern "Bardolatry": the ongoing influence and visibility of Shakespeare's plays in contemporary mass culture, especially over the last five to ten years.

Format will be a combination of occasional mini-lectures from me and lots of discussion and participation from you. There will be two papers, a midterm, and a final exam; and attendance and participation will count for a portion of the course grade.

Plays: Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.

L320 25928 RESTORATION AND EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
Richard Nash

TOPIC: "What do you mean by 'Public Sphere'. . . and what are those animals doing?"

This course will take as its starting point Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Beginning with his observation that in England at the end of the seventeenth- and the beginning of the eighteenth- centuries there opened up a discursive space mediating between the private citizen and state authorities, we will examine the roles played by literature in shaping, changing, and resisting the ideas of 'public-ness' and publicity that we more or less take for granted today. While we may glance back to some of the later works of the Restoration, our emphasis will fall heavily on the early eighteenth century--most heavily on the consolidation of the Walpole administration immediately preceding and following the death of George I and the succession of George II. Surprisingly, perhaps, in doing so we will pay particular attention to the significance of animals and agriculture in this cultural moment. As this narrative suggests, we will be insistent in reading literature in its historical context. Authors will include Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, and Defoe, and may include Dryden, Otway, Rochester, Behn, Wortley-Montague, Finch, Hogarth, or Fielding, among others. Students will write one short (4-6 page) and one longer (9-15 page) paper, and may be asked to lead class discussion.

In this course we will focus on English poetry since 1940. Late Modernism, The New Apocalypse and The Movement, as well as the ongoing debate about “English” tradition in a post-modern, post-colonial era, will be studied through the work of a few major poets. Instead of jumping around in a fat, discouraging anthology, we’ll read a number of individual books by poets such as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney and Moniza Alvi. Course work may include short response papers, side-bar research projects, in-class writing, tests and a final creative writing project.

In this course we will read some of the most significant–and enjoyable–of nineteenth-century novels, focusing on the political, moral, and aesthetic questions they presented for their first readers and present for us reading them today. Our focus will be on the technical means by which the novelists achieve their effects. How do these authors convey the thoughts and feelings of their characters, for instance? How do they represent the interactions between their characters within broader social environments? How do these novels represent different social, national, and ethnic groups? H do they represent different genders? By means of what literary devices do they do all this? My aims in the course are to give you a better understanding of the fiction of the period and to see how the devices used by these authors to understand their psychological, ethical and political worlds continue to bear on our own understanding of our lives and world. Texts are likely to include novels by Austen, Scott, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. Students will probably write two papers and take two exams.

American publishing experienced unprecedented, exponential growth during the first half of the nineteenth century. An emerging market economy, widespread religious revival, reforms in education, and innovations in print technology worked together to create a culture increasingly formed and framed by the power of print. While debates raged about whether the United States even had its own literature, other debates concerning American printed material appeared as well. This course will examine American literature and its place in the cultural landscape through the lens of the popular literature of the time. What were Americans reading before the Civil War, and what effect did it have on their lives. There will be frequent reading quizzes and both shorter and longer papers. Texts may include: Charlotte Temple by Susannah Rowson; The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper; Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick; Ten Nights in a Bar-Room by T.S. Arthur; portions of Quaker City by George Lippard and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Why did Gothic fiction become popular in the late eighteenth century, and again at the end of the nineteenth? Put otherwise, why, in two eras known for their leaps forward into “modernity” and attendant discourses of progress (political modernity in the 1700s, with the French and American Revolutions, and cultural modernity in the 1800s, with industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of consumer culture), would authors and audiences turn to writings that speak to the darkest, least “civilized” recesses of the human psyche?

These questions are particularly intriguing to address in the context of the United States, where Nathaniel Hawthorne once argued it was almost impossible to write a Gothic work (or “romance”) due to the nation’s cheery disposition, its many freedoms, and its lack of a gloomy feudal past. And yet the fiction of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century America in fact overflows with Gothic texts (very much including Hawthorne’s own). We’ll explore how this could have been the case, and what ongoing questions about modernity and its potential “dark side” the American Gothic can still pose to us as readers today. Topics will include: the Gothic and modern science; the Gothic and slavery; the Gothic and marriage; the Gothic and the rise of evolutionary theory.

Readings will most likely include short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and longer works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Pauline Hopkins, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Henry James. We'll also look at slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and at the beginning of the class we will ground our investigations in a couple of pertinent essays by Sigmund Freud.

Students will be expected to write three essays (two 4-5 pp., one 7-8 pp.) and to take a midterm and a final exam.

The course provides an introduction to the rich and fascinating tapestry of voices that constitutes nineteenth-century American poetry, including, of course, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman but also less familiar names such as Lydia Sigourney, George Moses Horton, and Frances Harper. In our dealings with the now safely canonical writers, the no-longer-canonical ones, and the many forgotten ones, we will ask ourselves what, if anything, distinguishes a "major" from a "minor" poet, what it meant to be a "public" poet, what forms poets used, what audiences they had in mind, and how they responded to the major crises of the century, the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, and the Civil War. At the end of the course, the myth, still perpetrated by mainstream critics today, that no poetry worth our time was written in America before Whitman, will have evaporated. Or so I hope. Students are required to buy the two-volume edition, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, edited by John Hollander and published by the Library of America, as well as John Hollander's slim volume, Rhyme's Reason.

What did—and does—it take to make or unmake a “man” in modern U.S. literatures and cultures? It’s a deceptively simple question that will guide our readings as we map competing representations of “masculinities” across the first third of the twentieth-century and beyond. Along the way, we will chart how vexed ideas about maleness, manhood, and masculinity provided rough-riding presidents, High Modern novelists, Provincetown playwrights, queer regionalists, star-struck inverts, surly bohemians, and others with a means to negotiate—and gender—the cultural and political turmoil that constituted modern American life. In so doing, we too will use evolving frameworks of “masculinity” to revisit key controversies such as:

·       The rise of hetero/homosexual identities
·       Masculinity and racialization
·       New Women vs. New Men
·       Manliness, nativism, and primitivism
·       Sheiks and bohemian life
·       Interracial male friendship
·       Female masculinities
·       Class instabilities
·       Postmodern carry-overs

L366 25933 MODERN DRAMA: ENGLISH, IRISH, AMERICAN, AND POST-COLONIAL
Stephen Watt

This course offers a survey of the most influential twentieth-century playwrights writing in English, devoting particular attention to the rise of a so-called "modern" drama and the subsequent evolution of more postmodern forms. Writers include Bernard Shaw, J.M. Synge, Eugene O'Neill, Sophie Treadwell, Elizabeth Robins, Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, and David Mamet. There will be two exams and two formal essays, the latter a formal research paper. Research writing and critical reading will provide yet another focus of the course. Interested students are invited to meet with the instructor before the course begins to discuss particular theatrical or research interests.

PREREQUISITE: L202 with grade of C- or better. NOTE: The English Department will strictly enforce this prerequisite. Students who have not completed L202 with a grade of C- or better will have their registration administratively cancelled.

This course is designed to acquaint students with the conceptual and historical roots of contemporary critical practice in literary and cultural studies. Students enrolling in this class should expect a seminar (not a lecture) and be ready to participate actively in a hands-on ("workshop"), actively reading/discussing essays exemplary of current critical practice and writing about them. We will take an eclectic approach. Our primary category for analysis will be "meaning and pleasure" and we will use these categories to examine a variety of critical and theoretical assumptions about texts and how they mean. Readings will include examples from psychoanalytic, deconstructive, structuralist and poststructuralist, French feminist, materialist, postcolonial, and queer theories. While you will gain a good sense of the intellectual history of contemporary critical methods, our primary commitment will be to ask questions about the meaning, value, and implications of various critical perceptions and aesthetic experiences. We will emphasize careful reading, engaged discussion, and focused writing. Authors to be read include Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Homi Bhabha, Barbara Johnson, Herman Melville, Jeanette Winterson, J.M. Coetzee, Judith Butler, and others. In order both to help you orient yourself in the readings, and to work steadily on improving critical perceptiveness and critical prose, there will be weekly short, focused writing. There will also be two papers, a midterm and a final.

This course introduces students to some of the critical practices that have shaped the field of English Studies, and aims to help each student develop the knowledge and skills necessary to become a critically responsible reader of literature and culture. While most English courses focus primarily on literary works, this course explores questions fundamental to all critical practice. What does it mean to “interpret” a work? What critical choices are in play and what assumptions come with these choices? What roles do literary texts and writers play in society? What expectations do we have about different literary genres and why? What can literary texts tell us about ourselves, our world, our history, our received ideas about “the way things are,” or about other cultural subjects and other worlds? How do we situate ourselves as critically responsive readers? How do literary texts relate to non-literary texts, including theoretical writings? What critical, theoretical, and historical freight do terms like author, writing, representation, structuralism, deconstruction, ideology, tradition, imperialism/nationalism, the unconscious, ethics, performance, etc. carry? How do we create conversations between literature and theory? In what ways might literary texts theorize the world and address us as agents in history? These questions provide starting points for examining a number of critical and theoretical perspectives for their strengths and limitations. Through assigned readings, discussions, and presentations, we will learn how to engage with critical and theoretical writings, challenging the ideas presented and allowing them to challenge our thinking, and bringing these ideas into conversation with literary texts and cultural issues. In written assignments students will developing their own critical practice in applying, building on, and even refining the critical/ theoretical approaches. Texts may include: Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
William Shakespeare, Othello
Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine
Critical and theoretical essays on E-Reserves Course work includes a number of skills-building response to readings, 2 essays (5 and 7 pages long), a group presentation, and weekly questions/comments. Regular attendance and participation are expected.

.PREREQUISITE: L202 with grade of C- or better. NOTE: The English Department will strictly enforce this prerequisite. Students who have not completed L202 with a grade of C- or better will have their registration administratively cancelled.

This course will be organized around a set of critical approaches, such as formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, post-colonial and ethnic studies, feminism and queer studies. Rather than provide an exhaustive survey of critical theory, we will concern ourselves with investigating the ways in which these critical approaches conceptualize the relationship between narrative, on the one hand, and history, on the other. In addition to analyzing the conceptions of representation that underwrite our readings, we will contextualize them within the history of contemporary literary theory and social movements. Throughout the course, we will ask: what is the connection between representation in the mimetic sense and political representation in the public sphere? And what sorts of ethical, moral, and political responsibilities are attendant on being an intellectual today? We will approach individual readings fairly systematically by inquiring how each text 1) defines its object of investigation; 2) organizes its argument by ascertaining its key critical terms, its structure, and the kinds of evidence it employs; 3) contains conceptual gaps which cannot be elaborated within the terms of the argument. There are three required texts: Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction
Vincent B. Leitch's edited collection The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
David Lodge's Nice Work. Students should expect to write one 5-6 page paper and one 8-10 page paper, and to take three exams.

For almost as long as human beings have been creating literary texts, they have also persistently asked questions about literature and the other arts. What effect ought art to have? Does it support the stability of the state or undermine it? What is its connection to the lives of ordinary people? The passing centuries have only added further questions, while continuing those of the ancients: Is there such a thing as a true interpretation? What role does the reader play in the meaning of a text? What is the nature of the author’s relation to the text? What is the structure of the language of which literature is made up? We’ll consider these and other questions in a broad survey of literary and cultural theory, testing our ideas in connection to a few literary texts: William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & of Experience, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, as well as stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Julian Barnes. Writing assignments will ask students to place theoretical positions in conversation with each other. Papers dealing with a literary text using theory will also be required.

L371 16368 CRITICAL PRACTICES
Rae Greiner

10:10a-11:00a MWF (30 students) 3 cr. A&H.

PREREQUISITE: L202 with grade of C- or better. NOTE: The English Department will strictly enforce this prerequisite. Students who have not completed L202 with a grade of C- or better will have their registration administratively cancelled.

TOPIC: "A Cerulean Sweater, and Other Theory Matters"

This course is designed to introduce English majors to the “practice” of criticism: the analytic methods and critical techniques underwriting (what is, perhaps, literally) the discipline of literary study. The subtitle of this course, and especially the phrase “Theory Matters,” highlights our fundamental consensus that—whether or not its influence is always obvious—theory matters to us: in the books we read (and how we read them), the films we watch (and how we talk about them afterwards), the cultural practices in which we engage, the products available to us, and the political and ideological forces shaping our choices and desires. Like Anne Hathaway’s “lumpy blue sweater”—betraying little if any of its cultural and material production—the literary and cultural texts we will analyze have histories. They too have been “selected” and marketed in complex ways; they too manifest in other forms; they too represent the silences and gaps of other (perhaps unrecognizable) forms, and contain the (cerulean?) traces of precedent texts and acts. We will consider it axiomatic, then, not only that theory “matters”—it is relevant to us in and outside the classroom—but also that “theory matters” are implicitly material (not just intellectual) concerns. Whether we are reading a novel by Jane Austen, a cereal box, a movie poster, or a map, we will be considering the ways in which theory matters shape how we comprehend, interpret, and navigate those cultural products.

Course texts will likely include: Modern Criticism and Theory, 2nd edition (Lodge and Wood); M.H. Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms; essays and excerpts from a panoply of cultural, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and critical theorists; and a select number of literary and cinematic texts, including “The Purloined Letter” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (Poe), Hamlet (Shakespeare), Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), Persuasion (Austen), The Picture of Dorian Gray,/i> (Wilde), Grey Gardens (1975), and episodes of The Office and Six Feet Under. Students will complete a midterm (take-home) and final exam, write two short papers (5 page), and complete a final project (8 page) analyzing a “theory matter” of their own choice.

Through a study of poetry, short stories, and novels, we will analyze the intersections between African American and Native American literature. Our first frame will be Sherman Alexie’s own framing of "reservation blues" with the story of Robert Johnson as the lone black man who wanders, from one crossroads to another, into an Indian reservation. Representations of the Native American in the African American imagination will then be explored through an analysis of Alice Walker’s By the Light of My Father's Smile . After this juxtaposition of texts that directly address the Black/Indian interface, we will analyze the more subtle connections that emerge when we begin to think about the specificity of the African American and Native American literary traditions. As we consider both the conscious and unconscious dialogues between African American and Native American literature, our focal points may be images of the displaced homeland, body politics, cultural syncretism, naming rituals, racialized primitivism, and representations of otherness in African American and Native American imaginations. The course will include a focus on the history of “Black Indians” (as well as the history and literary representations of black cowboys). The film Daughters of the Dust may highlight many of our central questions about the Black/Indian interface. Our texts may include When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature ,Reinventing the Enemy's Language, Leslie Silko's Ceremony, Alice Walker's By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Toni Morrison's Paradise, Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down , and Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues and Indian Killer. The course will be discussion-oriented. Active class participation is required. Two essays will be written: a 5-7 page essay and a final 12 page essay. There will also be a final exam.

This course is designed for English majors. If you are a non-major (or an English major outside the College of Arts and Sciences) you are strongly encouraged to talk to the instructor before signing up for this course Literary modernism (encompassing works that appear roughly from the beginning of WW I to the beginning of WWII) is a movement characterized by enormous experimentation: in literary styles, subject matter—as well as with sexuality, ways of life, and outlook on the part of many of its practitioners. To some, it is also the last moment of indisputably great literary production, giving us masterworks by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner, to name but a few. This course introduces students to the leading figures of the era (as well as some more minor ones), with particular attention to understandings of time and history on the part of the authors that we read.

In this course we will read and discuss a number of memoirs by American writers, mainly from the last ten or twenty years. In examining each book, we will pay close attention to the way memory serves to establish a sense of self, the way narrative reveals or creates patterns in experience, and the way the thread of an individual life is woven into larger contexts, such as family, community, nature, religion, or history. We will read perhaps seven or eight books, and we will spend one or two weeks on each, depending on its length and complexity. You will be asked to write for each book a short (1-2 page) response, which may be either “creative” or “critical” (to use those clumsy categories). In addition, you will be asked to write a 4-5 page essay at mid-semester, and an 8-10 page essay at the end of the semester. Here are some of the books I’m considering: Kim Barnes, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country; Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; Bernard Cooper, The Bill from My Father; Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking; Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning; Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education; Barry Lopez, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory; James McBride, The Color of Water; Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography; Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory; Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe; Mark Spragg, Where Rivers Change Direction; Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life: A Memoir. The class will be conducted as a discussion, and therefore thorough preparation and faithful attendance are crucial. Grades will be based primarily on the quality of your written work, and secondarily on the quality of your participation in class.

The second half of the twentieth century has been a tumultuous period for England, both materially and symbolically. The era began with the nation emerging from war at once victorious and devastated, and still ruling an enormous but increasingly rebellious empire. Then followed an ambitious experiment with socialism, the development and eventual fragmentation of the welfare state, decolonization, increased migration, and attendant seismic changes in the class structure, gender relations, and racial affiliations of the population. The literary texts for this class interrogate the idea of England by re-visiting significant moments of national history. They also re-narrate national myths, often by invoking ironically the aesthetic gestures and literary precursors most valued by their nation. We will discuss the habit of measuring national character and distinctiveness through a literary tradition, and ask how writers respond to the burden of national representation. We will attend to the generic conventions of plays, novels, and the occasional cinematic text, and will track aesthetic shifts in the period from the realist to the postmodern, and from the postcolonial to historiographic metafiction. Readings likely will include J.B. Priestly, John Osborne, Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Kwame Kwei-Armah. Assignments will include two analytical essays, a mid-term examination and a final examination, and may include informal writing and in-class presentations.

L390 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Staff Lecture:
16369 – 11:15a-12:05p MW (144 students) 3 cr. A&H. Discussion:
16371 – 9:05a-9:55a F (24 students)
16372 – 10:10a-11:00a F (24 students)
16373 – 11:15a-12:05p F (24 students)
16374 – 12:20p-1:10p F (24 students)
16375 – 1:25p-2:15p F (24 students)
16370 – 2:30p-3:20p F (24 students)

Historical and modern children’s books and selections from books; designed to assist future teachers, parents, librarians, or others in selecting the best in children’s literature for each period of the child’s life.

This course provides academic credit for a supervised, career-related work experience in a cooperating institution, agency, or business. Evaluation is made by the employer and the English Department. Credits do not count toward distribution or English requirements. S/F grading. For details students should consult either the Director of Undergraduate Studies (Ballantine 442A) or the Undergraduate Academic Advisor (Ballantine 442B).

Permission of the instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies required. Obtain authorization from BH 442.

Under the aegis of this course, a student arranges with a faculty member for a tutorial on a literary subject, author, or group of authors. Ordinarily, teachers are most willing to conduct an independent reading project with a student whom they know from a previous course, and on a topic within their field of expertise. If a student has a project in mind, but no idea about appropriate teachers, she or he can ask the Director of Undergraduate Studies (BH 442A) to recommend names of possible directors. In undertaking L495, the student and teacher ordinarily agree on a sequence of readings, on a schedule of meetings, and on written assignments. This agreement must be written down on a form available from the Undergraduate Secretary in the English Department (BH 442) and returned BEFORE authorization to enroll in the course can be granted.

PREREQUISITE: Major standing and 12 credits of English at 200-level or above including L202. Permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Supervised experience in teaching undergraduate English course or in editing departmentally based journal or allied publication. May be repeated once for a maximum of 6 credit hours; only 3 credit hours may count toward the major.

Above section requires approval from the Director of English Honors, Ed Comentale ecomenta@indiana.edu. Obtain Authorization from BH 442.

This course serves as an introduction to the English language in all of its formal aspects: phonetics and phonology (sounds and sound system), morphology and lexicology (the structure of words and vocabularies), syntax (the structure of phrases, clauses, and sentences), semantics (meaning), discourse (the structure of conversation and other extended speech), and style (the linguistic aspects of literature and other writing, as well as stylized speech). We will also consider variation in English, how the language has developed over time, and the politics of usage. Language is so natural to us that we use it and judge it without thinking about it much. Obviously, educated folks should be thoughtful about language, which, after all, is central to our social, professional, and intellectual lives. This course will help you to think more precisely about language as a natural and social phenomenon; it will introduce you to the forms and functions of English in particular; it will inform your use of the language, but also your judgments about others’ use; it will prepare some of you to teach about English, some of you to write about it, and all of you to participate in public debate about the role of English (and language generally) in American culture.

The text is Anne Curzan and Michael Adams, How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction (AB Longman, 2006). Coursework includes frequent quizzes, three examinations (including the final), and two brief essays (5-8 pages).

The topic of the course will be the Old English language, i.e. the English language of the period 600-1100, the language of Beowulf, The Seafarer, King Alfred the Great, and the Venerable Bede. We will spend some time studying various cultural aspects of the world of the Anglo-Saxons (as English speakers of that period are now called), such 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 for the most part class time will be devoted to examining the structure of the language and learning to decipher Old English texts. Course requirements will include two or three examinations, but no papers. There will be frequent shorter assignments, as well, including daily exercises and some quizzes. The textbooks will be John C. Pope’s Eight Old English Poems and an Old English grammar. Meets with G601.