Fall 2008 Courses

This course functions as an introduction to the English major. In the course, you will learn techniques of literary analysis, and become familiar with the basic terms and concepts of literary analysis. Assignments include two papers, required drafts, class participation, and group work.

Please note that this section of 3301 is centered upon readings in orientalism, imperialism, post-colonialism, and globalization.

The course shall explore affinities between Medieval literature/history and cultural and political issues of the past century through the present in a variety of medieval texts that have been adapted into film and television. We shall study the texts and how contemporary popular culture has adapted these texts cinematically to reflect current issues (of the period of film production). Texts and topics may include: Beowulf and its various film versions reflecting the contemporary War on Terrorism; Arthurian Romances such as The Vulgate Cycle, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and their various films and TV adaptations reflecting issues of gender construction and sexuality; Crusades narratives and and 15th-century Robin Hood ballads and recent films and TV Series based on Robin Hood and the Crusades reflecting various wars, most recently the Iraq War, and issues of sexuality and gender.

Probable Texts

• The Lancelot-Grail Reader, ed. Norris J. Lacy (NY: Garland, 2000).
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans, James Winney (Lewiston NY: Broadview Press, 1992). (if you already own another translation of SGGK, you may use it, but check with me about the translation. Not all are good).
• Beowulf: Norton Critical Edition, trans. E.T. Donaldson.
• The Crusades: A Reader, S.J. Allen and Emilie Amt, ed. (Broadview 2003).
• Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, Stephen Knight/ Thomas Ohlgren, ed. (TEAMS).
• Various texts and articles put on Webct.

Projects

• Avatar Writing: The class population will be divided into groups of about 10 students. Within each group you will adopt the avatars of the characters in the texts/films of the course: Residents of Camelot; The Danes and the Geats; Sherwood Forest Outlaws and Royal Authorities; The Crusading Franks (all European allies fighting the Third Crusade) and the Muslims (Saladin etc.). Each class member will adopt an avatar during our study of that unit (e.g. King Arthur, Guenivere, Lancelot, Merlin, Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel's mother, Robin Hood, Little John, Maid Marian, Sheriff, King Richard II, Saladin) After researching your avatar, you will write to a message board in the voice of your avatar during that unit.
• One short critical paper (4-6 pp.) that engages with a passage from a medieval text and a specific scene from one to 2 film adaptations.
• A Long critical paper (6-8 pp.) that treats a theme from one of the units and how it is reflected in texts and films. A digital project may substitute for this. Further details later.

You’ll find all the Shx. readings in The Norton Shakespeare unless otherwise marked. Which means that the reading is available electronically via our course web site.

Exemplary Educational Objectives

• To demonstrate awareness of the scope and variety of works in the arts and humanities.
• To understand those works as expressions of individual and human values within an historical and social context.
• To respond critically to works in the arts and humanities.

Course requirements/ credit

• Midterm exam 15 points
• Final exam or research essay 25 points
• Paper 1 15 points
• Paper 2 20 points
• Homework 10 points Attendance, professionalism 15 points

Class Syllabus

• ENGL 3306

Major plays in comedy and tragedy will be on the syllabus for this course.  In addition to motifs and plots, the course will concern itself with the leading actors and actresses of the period, the unique qualities of the playwrights, and techniques of staging.  Several of the plays will be shown by videocasstte or DVD--The Country Wife, The Beggar's Opera, School for Scandal, She Stoops To Conquer.  Students have the opportunity to present dramatic readings from key scenes in the plays.

Learning objectives

• To gain an historical understanding of dramatic literature.
• To gain knowledge of the conduct and business of the theatre in an historical period.
• To demonstrate critical skills in writing.
• To demonstrate contextualized understanding of specific texts.
• To implement appropriate methodologies for research and/or interpretation.
• To have students recognizes the value of their English studies for future pursuits.

Reading List

• The Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early Eighteenth-Century Drama. Gen. E. J. Canfield. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2001. [pbk]
• MLA Handbook for Writers of Research. 5th edn. N.Y.: Modern Language Association, 1998.

The course focuses on some of the major works of the English Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. We will also read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an expression of the Romantic sensibility as it was reflected in fiction. The main thesis of the course is that Romanticism represented a fundamental redirection of European life and thought that constituted the beginnings of the modern world. Topics of discussion will include the way Romanticism represents an artistic response to a crisis in culture, tradition and revolution in Romantic art, the Romantic mythology of the self, Romantic legendry (portrayals of Napoleon, Prometheus, the Wandering Jew, etc.), "natural supernaturalism" (secularization of Biblical myths such as the Fall, Paradise, etc.), "Dark Romanticism" (the interest in the satanic, the erotic, the exotic, etc), the Romantic concept of the imagination, the Romantic symbol, and Romantic irony.

Requirements

Active participation in class discussion, two papers (approximately 5-8 pages each), a take-home midterm, and a final exam.

• What did Charles Darwin find in the Galapagos Islands that changed the way everyone, then and now, views our planet?
• What do Victorian prostitutes reveal about relations between the sexes?
• What can Bram Stoker’s Dracula teach us about the Victorian global empire and about our own?

This course will consider these and other questions, many of which highlight the ideas, concerns, and attitudes we share with nineteenth-century Britons. We will read poems, novels, and nonfiction prose that was published between 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, and 1901, when she died—a reign longer than any other British monarch until the current Queen Elizabeth and a reign that witnessed enormous technological, cultural, and social change. Our explorations will take us into remote corners of the British Isles and to the far reaches of the earth during an era when people first began to make distinctions between “regional,” “national,” and “global.” Texts will include poetry by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti; novels by Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, and Anne Brontë (Charlotte’s sister); and prose by Charles Darwin, Henry Mayhew, one of the first oral historians, and Mary Kingsley, one of the first women to undertake world travel on her own.

Lectures about the Victorian period and assigned texts will take place in class on Mondays and Wednesdays; discussions about the texts and writing assignments will occur in “Victoria’s Blogspot” and several smaller blogs, which will enable students to attend class for most Friday sessions without coming to campus. Requirements include a midterm, a final, a paper, and an individual blog which each student will create on his or her own.

This is an advanced writing course that provides students with an occasion to practice and extend their writing abilities. This course is open to any student with an interest in improving their writing and who has successfully completed the UH required freshman composition courses or their equivalent. This course will be an inquiry-driven course, that is, the course will be structured according to an investigation into a question or a series of related questions. One of the primary questions we will ask--- how is writing constituted for the UH student in 2008?

That is, if we make visible writing in its myriad forms in the student's life, on and off campus, what are the expectations for writing? What are the different types or genres of writing done? How do their contexts shape those various kinds of writing? How do the writing processes and discourse communities of various majors or groups shape texts? The course will be structured by these sorts of primary questions.

The first section of the course will review writing experiences students have had so far at university and beyond. Students will reflect on their literacy experiences. Students will also be asked to reflect on their own individual writing processes (Didion, Villanueva). We will read some literacy narratives (Gilyard). Then students engage in some new writing practices, those of creative nonfiction (Miller and Paola; Didion). This section of the course will give students some time to get their writing skills back in practice and will allow students to do some experimenting with writing about issues important to them. There will be one shorter essay (about five pages) and many very short writing activities in this part of the course (paragraph and sentence exercises).

The second part of the course will consist of a study of the key concepts that the discipline of rhetoric and composition has produced for the study of writing. This part of the course will briefly introduce the student-- whatever their major may be-- to a few of the key findings of the field of rhetoric and composition. The point of this study will be to provide students with both the tools they will need to do research on writing and an overview of what the research on writing seems to currently show. There will be a midterm essay examination over this material. The class textbook for this section of the course will be a free downloadable PDF version of Villanueva's first edition of Cross-Talk.

The third part of the course will be research-based. Students will research some aspect of writing -whether it be writing in their profession, in their major, family literacy, writing at a community center or in the public schools or in a specific community in the Houston metropolitan area. The goal will be to create new knowledge about writing as it occurs in the student's world and beyond. The end project will be this research project, an essay about ten pages in length.

Requirements

Attendance will be mandatory since we will workshop papers and because nearly all of the course subject matter will be focused on helping students draft the writing. Conferences with instructor on drafts of essays will also be required.

Writing

• Two major papers.
• Many short, informal writing practice activities will be part of the course.
• One mid term essay examination over the course content.

Readings

(a final decision will be made before the end of spring semester 2008)

• Tell It Slant: Writing and shaping Creative Nonfiction (Brenda Miller & Suzanne Paola)
• Voices of the Self (Keith Gilyard)
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)
• A free online PDF version of Crosstalk (first edition) (Victor Villanueva)

Students will need to know and have access to the MLA style to write the final research essay. The Purdue Owl web site is one such resource.

Each year the Nobel Prize Committee awards a prize in literature to a writer for a lifetime of work.  In many instances, the awards are made to the best writer in a given country. In many instances, the awards are political in nature, rewarding a great writer who has protested his government's policies. This course features lectures on different writers. Written assignments are mailed in or delivered to Dr. Rothman in the English Department. Both the mid-term and final exams are taken online.  There are no live sessions.

Learning Objectives

• To gain an appreciation of outstanding writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
• To develop insights into various genres of literature--the novel, the short story, drama
• To study the cultural, socioeconomic, and political implications of the works.
• To develop critical skills in writing about literature.

Reading List

• William Butler Yeats [Ireland 1923. Selected Poems and Three Plays. 3rd Edn. Collier Books. Macmillan.
• Sinclair Lewis [U.S. 1930]. Main Street. Signet.
• William Faulkner [U.S. 1949]. Absalom! Absalom! Random
• Ernest Hemingway [U.S. 1954]. In Our Time.; Men Without Women. Scribner's.
• Pearl Buck [U.S. 1938]. 14 Stories. Pocket Books. [Available in the copy center, University Center.]
• Albert Camus [France 1957]. The Stranger. Vintage.
• Isaac Bashevis Singer [Poland/U.S. 1978]. Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories. Also “Blood” (in Short Friday and Other Stories) and “Two,” short story in The New Yorker, Dec. 20, 1976, pp. 37-42.
• Wolè Soyinka [Nigeria 1986]. The Plays. Vol. I. Oxford.
• Wislawa Szymborska [Poland 1996]. View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems. Harvest/Harcourt Brace
• Dario Fo [Italy 1998]. The Plays: One. Methuen World Dramatists. [1st floor -Library Reserve Desk.]
• Gunter Grass [Germany 1999]. The Tin Drum. Available edition.
                  See http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates

Two of the books are out-of-print, although students have been able to obtain them through Amazon.com. The books will be placed on non-circulating reference in the first floor library; Dario Fo and Pearl Buck.  The Pearl Buck packet can be obtained in the Copy Center in the basement of the UC. Students have been successful in finding these books on Amazon.com, some at very low price.

Students may write papers about Nobel Prize winners listed above or more recent winners named in the 21st century, such as Doris Lessing (2007), Orhan Pamuck (2006), Harold Pinter (2005) and Imre Kertész (2002).

Papers in the Department of English must conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, latest edition. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2006.  If students do not wish to obtain a copy of this book, they may check style in the PMLA [Publications of the MLA] in the library at PB6.M6.]

Fiction in this time frame (1900-1940) is responsive to modernism, an early twentieth century artistic movement in western culture currently receiving a great deal of scholarly attention. We will pay attention ourselves to modernist practices and perspectives, but we will also consider the socio-cultural/historical backgrounds of American fiction, including popular fiction. We will consider such intellectual movements as literary naturalism and existentialism, which overlap modernism. My emphasis tends toward studying texts as both constructing representations of and representing culture and gender.

This is an advanced English course. Students enrolling in this course must have completed the university Core Communication requirement. Competency in written English and composition at the advanced level is expected in all written assignments, including exams.

NOTE: ENGL 3353 does not satisfy the university Core requirement satisfied by ENGL 3350 and 3351.

Learning Outcomes

• Students participating responsibly will gain knowledge about and insight into the modernist era of American fiction.
• Students participating responsibly will increase their ability to analyze literature critically and will be introduced to applications of gender and cultural criticism methodologies.
• Students participating responsibly will increase their understanding of and skill in writing from a position of informed opinion about a topic, issues, etc.

Texts

• Wister, The Virginian
• Cather, A Lost Lady
• Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Assignments

Students will be responsible for informed, engaging class discussion and for a project comprised of research, an oral presentation (within a group), and an essay. The project will combine library and internet research with close reading of text.

This course is designed to study black women’s novels and film adaptations and will include the following novels and film adaptations: Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich (Alice Childress), The Color Purple (Alice Walker), The Women of Brewster Place (Gloria Naylor), Beloved (Toni Morrison), The Wedding (Dorothy West), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Terry McMillan), and Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash).

The course will focus on healing rituals in the novels and film adaptations, particularly rituals linked to issues surrounding race, class, gender, sexuality, trauma, community, and spirituality. Additionally, the seminar examines the changes that occur as the novels are transformed into a different medium and analyzes what, if anything, those editorial changes mean socially, linguistically, culturally, and politically, particularly as related to the theme of healing and the wounds that necessitate healing. The discussions will be guided by a series of questions: In what ways do the novels and the films critique issues linked to healing? Are there key scenes in the novels that are omitted or revised/reconceptualized in the films, and what is the impact on healing as a result of these omissions or revisions? Are there scenes in the films that do not appear in the novel and vice versa, and how do the additions or deletions enhance/focus or distort the vision expressed in the novel, particularly with regard to the theme of healing? How are the novels and the films in dialogue? Why are certain novels by black women been made into films and others have not? How have the film adaptations shaped literary production by black women writers? Students will also read a wide range of theory and criticism most appropriate to the selected texts, with emphasis on African American criticism as well as feminist/womanist and pos-colonial theories.

The most general goals of this course are to improve our ability to think critically and write clearly and to improve our understanding of the complicated relationship between history, politics, and economics on the one hand, and literature or culture on the other. The second question will be addressed in the context of the history of colonialism, with its decisive role in the literatures of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Our emphasis is on the novel, not only as literary genre, but also as anti-colonial, nationalist and postnationalist text. Through the three distinct units of the course, we will examine the recurring deep structure of histories in the various regions that were colonized by Europe and consider how this history affected culture, especially literary culture, in these areas. The course will also ask what relationship these postcolonial literatures have with their respective pre-colonial literary traditions, how postcolonial literary form parallels or diverges from European literatures, and how gender is constructed in a postcolonial context.

Required Texts

• Abouzeid, Leila. Year of the Elephant.
• Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.
• Farah, Nuruddin. Sweet and Sour Milk
• Ibrahim, Sonallah. Zaat.
• Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy.
• Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World.
• Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism.
• Toer, Pramoedya Ananta. This Earth of Mankind.

Requirements

Students will write two short papers and a medium length final paper. They will also need to pass a series of pop quizzes. There will be at least 8 quizzes given over the course of the semester at the beginning of class. Quizzes cannot be made up, but the 2 worst quiz grades will be dropped before your average is calculated.

Class Syllabus

• English 3365: Postcolonial Literature

This course is designed to introduce you to a broad cross section of modern Irish literature and culture, from the late nineteenth- century milieu and the writing of the Celtic Twilight to the Irish Literary Renaissance, and through the emergence of Irish literary modernism. The works we will read grapple with women's issues, class and linguistic divisions, sexual identity, and the turbulent history of Irish nationalism.

The course will emphasize two basic skills: careful, appreciative reading of literature, and critical writing exploring literature analytically, in relationship to its social and historical context. I will provide a sense of Irish history and the Irish literary tradition through a series of short lectures. Course time will be spent discussing the assigned texts. These discussions may take place in assigned small discussion groups or as a class. For each small discussion I will designate a group member to summarize group discussion for the class as a whole, so that small group discussions help to elicit general discussion.

Texts

• Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary
• Padraic O’Conaire, Exile
• George Moore, Hail and Farewell, Volume I
• The Collected Writings of Lady Augusta Gregory
• J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
• W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems
• James Joyce, Dubliners
• Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars
• Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

Assignments and Grading

There are two modes of writing in this class: informal and formal.

Informal writing will take the form of reading notes and online discussion. Students will also produce a short (2-4 pp.) close reading of a poem, and a longer critical essay that should incorporate published literary criticism.

For the longer assignment I will require a proposal, an annotated autobiography, a 4-5 pp. draft, and a revised 8-10 pp. essay on some aspect of identity in one or more works of modern Irish literature.

Students will work with audio interviews recorded by hurricane survivors from fellow survivors in the Houston area as part of the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston Project [SKRH]. Students will also work with the database developed by the project; this is a research tool whose quality has attracted the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council's Katrina Task Force.

The course is well suited to UH's focus on undergraduate research. It has been offered once before, in the fall of 2006. Two Provost's research awards were bestowed upon one student in that class, and other participants went on receive credit for project research in independent studies in the fields of English, History, and Vietnamese studies.

Students attending 3396 will have direct access to the SKRH database. They will begin by working with individual interviews to learn the organizing principles and content of the database. They will expand the database by adding to the transcriptions and keywords currently posted.

By midterm, each student will have chosen a term research project. Past projects include an exploration of evacuees' housing issues, correlation of narrators' physical complaints with traumatic experiences, race and class in the shaping of Katrina narratives, and rumors and legends surrounding New Orleans levees and the assertion that they were intentionally blown.

Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bow line, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

–Mark Twain

To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it–but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

–Oliver Wendel Holmes

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from nearest land.

–Joseph Conrad

Who is staring at the sea is already sailing a little.

–Paul Carrel

There is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

–Kenneth Grahame

Let’s go Sailing! On the pages of literature of the sea–which comprises some of the very best elements of fiction, travel literature, adventure narratives, nature writing, autobiography, essays, and creative non-fiction. Many literary greats have enriched the genre: Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allen Poe, Richard Henry Dana, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C.S. Forster, C.F. Forrester, Steven Crane, and numerous others. This semester we will read and discuss a few of the classics as well as some more modern non-fiction narratives. Some of the categories include: solo-voyages, circumnavigation, storms, capsize, shipwreck, survival, piracy, mutiny, naval battles, living off the land, coming of age, high latitude sailing, getting away from it all, and finding oneself.

The sea serves as a symbol for escape, vastness, possibility, fertility, natural resources, romance, ambition, solitude, and danger. For thousands of years, humans have been venturing beyond the shore, past the horizon, and into the unknown. In the process they have learned about other customs and cultures; they have learned about nature, and most importantly, they have learned about themselves–their limits, their fears, their strengths, their thoughts, and their desires. For centuries the sea has also served as a testing ground for manhood and maturity.

Though some of these works were written centuries ago, the essence of the sea is still unchanged. Sailing these days may take place on fiberglass hulls with carbon fiber spars, nylon rope, aluminum blocks, and Dacron sails, but the basics of an ocean voyage are fundamentally unchanged: casting off, hoisting sail, trimming sheets, navigation, seasickness, standing watch, enduring storms, anchoring, and reaching port.

The sea is already a significant part of our culture, and nautical terminology permeates our language. We might, for example, say: high and dry, aground, water-logged, set sail, drifting, rudderless, stormy sea, safe harbor, three sheets to the wind, between the devil and the deep blue sea, the whole nine yards, taken aback, to go by the board, make headway, batten down the hatches, crew cut, skyscraper, toe the line, pipe down, wind-fall, bitter end, beyond the horizon, close quarters, deadwood, down the hatch, fend off, from stem to stern, give leeway, overboard, halcyon days, haul up short, hit the deck, in the doldrums, learn the ropes, loose canon, lower the boom, main stay, even keel, on another tack, plain sailing, run afoul of, show your true colors, snub, standoff, take someone down a peg, take the wind out of his sails, weather a storm.

All of these familiar expressions, and many others, originate from the sea, boats, and nautical literature.

Requirements

Attendance and participation, quizzes, 2-3 short essays, two exams.

Texts

(subject to change)

• First you have to row a little boat, Richard Bode
• Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Dana
• Sea Wolf, Jack London
• The Oxford Book of Sea-Stories, Tony Tanner
• Sea Change, Peter Nichols
• North to the Night, Alvah Simon
• The Voyage of Northern Magic, Diane Stuemer

The Caribbean, which was forged on the basis of forced and coerced migrations remains today a site of intra- and extra- regional migration. The routes to these migrations crisscross Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. The region’s writers have been grappling with notions of home, dislocation, exile, diaspora and return from the beginning of the literary tradition. This course investigates these issues as they are interrogated in the novels of Caribbean writers located in the US, Britain and Canada. Some of the questions that will be examined are: does the Caribbean constitute a diaspora? How are notions of home constructed in adopted homelands? How do notions of identity adjust, resist or metamorphose in the context of the adopted homelands? What differences and/or similarities are evident in the experiences of migration among the various locations of origin and of migration?

Texts

(Subject to change)

• US
  • Edwidge Danticat – Breath, Eyes, Memory
  • Cristina García – Dreaming in Cuban
  • Michelle Cliff – No Telephone to Heaven
• UK
  • Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners
  • Jean Rhys - Voyage in the Dark
• Canada
  • Ramabai Espinet – The Swinging Bridge

The collection of texts canonized in the Bible constitutes a veritable anthology of literary genres: narrative, dream vision, folktale, lament, meditative lyric, dramatic dialogue, parable, proverb, heroic biography, epistle, etc.

This generic variety is matched by copious literary craft, including close plotting, irony, complex characterization, rhetorical address, metaphor, allegory, and much else. In addition, the biblical canon, written over the course of some twelve centuries, includes within itself many layers of repetition, redaction, reworking, and self-commentary. This complex of texts offers a rich and varied field for literary analysis; it also raises fundamental issues of originality and derivativeness, vision and revision, authorial intention and interpretive latitude.

Our readings will include

Genesis, parts of Exodus, 1-2 Samuel and the beginning of 1 Kings, selected Psalms and Proverbs, Ezekiel, Job, the Gospels of Mark and John, and the Epistle to the Romans; time permitting, we shall peek at Revelation.

We shall read the Bible in the King James Version (1611), which scholars consider a generally reliable reflection of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek originals – but which, for our purposes, has the additional advantage of being itself a classic work in English. For some texts, the Psalms in particular, we shall compare the KJV with other versions. NB: this is not a course on biblical theology or biblical archeology: we shall emphasize neither the claims of faith that have been or may be made on these texts nor the claims that these texts may make or seem to make on historical verisimilitude.

The capacity to see has long been associated with knowledge, pleasure, and control. Similarly, the capacity to capture visual attention is commonly attributed to its immediacy, exhibitionism, and excess. This course in film studies explores the history, theory, and aesthetics of photographic and cinematographic media, in order to investigate the various ways in which vision exercises power. That is, vision is a power equally capable of destroying originality and oppressing individual liberties, as it is for exercising justice and facilitating artistic innovation and contemplation.

Requirements

This advanced-level course incorporates substantial reading. Required films are to be viewed independently by the student, outside of class time. Graded work includes midterm, final, and pop quizzes.

This course is an introduction to syntactic theory, focusing on the analysis and description of English sentence structure using the tools of linguistic science. In it, we examine a number of topics in English grammar such as word classes, phrase and clause types, constituent structure and constituent functions. The theoretical framework presented in our text is that of generative grammar, more specifically, that of Noam Chomsky's Principles and Parameters model. Accordingly, it (and we) will use concepts and devices of X-bar theory, binding theory, theta theory and transformational theory to explore and characterize various English grammatical structures.

There will be four examinations. These will call for both short objective-style answers and more extended analytical and argumentative essay responses. Students will also be called upon to present in class their answers and solutions to homework problems assigned throughout the semester.

The course is intended primarily for linguistics students but is open to any qualified student interested in a more technical study of English grammar.

Requirements

Prerequisite: English 4300 Introduction to the Study of Language or equivalent. This prerequisite will be strictly enforced.

Text

• Andrew Carnie, Syntax: A Generative Introduction, Second edition
  (Blackwell Publishing)

We will take a rare opportunity to study exclusively the work of a female author, modernist American writer Willa Cather, who has generated a great deal of discussion since the 1990s over the appearance vs. the reality of her feminist positioning. The texts and subtexts of Cather’s fiction, particularly the portrayal of her female characters and their circumstances, respond to her insights into woman’s being in the world—as the object of the male gaze--and to her desire/need to sell books to as many readers as possible while still maintaining the integrity of her perspective.

In our study of Cather, we will read and discuss at least five (maybe six) of her novels and consider the complexities of her portrayal/construction of the female character. We will also integrate into our study specific feminist theoretical approaches and we will consider how Freud’s theories, however incomplete and outrageous with respect to female psychological development, were nonetheless important to Cather as well as to modernist writers in general. Cather’s biography will also play a significant part in our study.

Learning Outcomes

• Students participating responsibly will experience more intensely than in a multi-author course the genesis of a writer, and, in this case, of a female writer.
• Students participating responsibly will learn aspects of feminist, cultural, and biographical criticism and methodology.
• Students participating responsibly will gain experience in critical thinking and writing critically and in oral presentation.

Assignments

• There will be a combined research, writing, oral presentation assignment—a project (20% of the grade).
• There will also be a midterm (25% of the grade) and final examination (50% of the grade).
• Discussion and attendance matter in the final grade.

This is not a course for students who anticipate missing more than three classes!

Tentative List of Cather Novels

• Pioneers!
• My Antonia
• A Lost Lady
• The Song of the Lark
• One of Ours
• Sapphira and the Slave Girl

Introduction

The first order of scholarship is verification of the text. One must know the first edition of a text and whether subsequent editions brought changes to our study of the text. The course will, therefore, focus on our understanding of early printing technology. Students will have the opportunity to study rare books and documents in the Special Collections Library of the University of Houston and in public repositories where they will have the opportunity to engage in the restoration of historical papers. The next business is to answer the only two questions important in literary analysis: (1) What has the author written? and (2) How has he written it? Modern theory affords a variety of ways of questioning what we find in a text. The authors writing technique is a study of diction, syntax, and the imagination. To assist in the study of text, this seminar will focus on studies of the novel Tristram Shandy--both an anti-Lockean satire and a study in associational behavior-- with its implications in historical, sociological, psychological, deconstructionist, and genre theory. The study of Tristram Shandy will enable each member of the class to study an original commentary, parody, or collection of essays about the book published during the author's lifetime or shortly thereafter.

Objectives

• To enable students to conduct research in libraries throughout the world.
• To provide instruction in historical, descriptive, and analytical bibliography.
• To provide background in printing history and printing methodology.
• To establish principles of editing, collational analysis, and textual variants
• To study restoration of historical documents.
• To survey computer applications in language and literature (TEI [Text-Encoding Initiative] Mono-Conc, QuarkXPress)
• To introduce students to diverse critical approaches in scholarly writing.
• To provide instruction in the writing of a publishable paper.
• To prepare for researching and writing theses and dissertations.
• To inculcate the ethics of the profession of English.
• To prevent error and omission in scholarly writing.

Required Texts

• Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. N.Y. and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Paperback. ISBN l-8847l8-13-2 (Oak Knoll Press).Required Texts
• Gibaldi, Joseph and Walter S. Achtert. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Sixth Edn. N.Y.: Modern Language Association of America, 1984. or latest edn. (pbk)
  [For a student membership in the Modern Language Association, which includes quarterly issues of the PMLA, write 10 Astor Place, N.Y., N.Y. 10003-6981, and send a $20 student fee.]
• Harner, James L. Literary Research Guide: A Guide to Reference Sources for the Study of Literature in English and Related Topics. Fourth Edn. New York: Modern Language Association, 2002. (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-73529839
• Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) Norton Critical Edn. (pbk)
• Lanham, Richard. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California P, 1969. (pbk)

Note: All books will be available in the UH bookstore in the University Center. However, all of them have been used in previous courses, and you may be able to obtain copies on www.amazon.com.

This is an advanced introduction to the various current feminist theories and an overview of feminist criticism. Some of the foundational texts that defined much of the earliest feminist debates will make up the initial course work. Current discussions and methodologies will represent the final section of the course. The goal is to recognize feminist interpretive strains in texts and use feminism as a framing device to articulate arguments.

Course Requirements

Consistent attendance and class participation is expected (15%). One oral presentation (25%), a mid-term exam (20%), and an annotated bibliographic essay on a specific topic in feminist thought (15-20 pages, 40%) will make up the bulk of the course credit.

Learning Outcomes

The expected learning outcomes of this course include becoming familiar with some of the conceptions in feminist methodologies, becoming familiar with the different traditions in feminist praxis, and the development in the skills necessary to do feminist analysis on texts.

Texts

• Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
• Hooks, Bell, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation
• Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
• Fuss, Diana, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference
• Gonzalez, Maria, Contemporary Mexican-American Women Novelists: Toward a Feminist Identity
• Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman
• McDougall, Richard, trans. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite
• Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea
• Warhol, Robyn and Diane Price Herndl, ed. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism
• Plus essays by Marx, Althusser, Saussure, Freud, Lacan, and Spivak, which I will provide.
• Each student will choose a text and apply a feminist reading to that text.

This workshop centers on the poetic sequence. We will read and discuss a group of modern and contemporary poetic sequences, discuss student work in progress with an eye toward the development of sequences, and each student will complete some form of poetic sequence during the semester.

India in the Writer's Eye. This is a seminar-style course where we will read a variety of books about India, both fiction and nonfiction, and examine how the position of the writer (insider or outsider) influences his/her vision, understanding of history and culture, and choice of fictional techniques for presenting the material chosen. In addition to analysis & discussion of texts from a writer's perspective, students will each do a presentation on a writer of their choice. Some writers to be discussed: Rudyard Kipling, E.M.Forster, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise (coauthoring), Anita Desai, V.S.Naipaul, Jhumpa Lahiri.

The final project can be a critical paper or a creative project connected to the works studied.

This course will examine texts written in Great Britain from 1660 to 1798.  As the dates suggest, politics will loom large in our consideration of English (later British) culture during this time: we begin just after a period of rebellion in England, and conclude in the midst of domestic turmoil over foreign rebellions in France and Ireland. We will therefore trace developments in poetry, drama, satire, non-fictional prose, and the novel to give a global description of generic relations in this period.  Those who have taken other courses with me will find that with the exception of one or two texts is there is very little overlap with texts in my novel or late-18th century course.  [All information here subject to change.]

• Restoration: 1660-1700
  • Introduction
  • Samuel Butler, Thomas Hobbes
  • Aphra Behn, John Wilmot
  • John Dryden, William Wycherley
  • *John Dryden, William Congreve (annotated bib due)>
    
    
•  Augustan to Novel: 1700-1742
  • Joseph Addison/Richard Steele, Daniel Defoe
  • Jonathan Swift
  • Alexander Pope
  • John Gay
  • *Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding (response essay due)
    
    
• Age of Sensibility: 1742-1780
  • Samuel Johnson
  • James Boswell, Laurence Sterne
  • William Collins, Thomas Gray, William Cowper
  • *Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan (annotated bib/summary essay)
    
    
• Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin: 1780-1798
  • Robert Burns, William Blake
  • Edmund Burke, Ann Radcliffe
  
  

  Course Requirements:

• class participation (This will include not only regular attendance and discussion, but brief, weekly contributions (ca. one paragraph) to the *courseblog, which I will moderate, and which will be graded cumulatively as a portfolio at the end of term; format TBA)
• 2 presentations. These will be relatively brief (ca. 5 mins), but will require some research. Ideally, these should develop out of the blog posts, class discussions, or students‚ own research interests. Each presenter will select a topic in consultation with me, then locate two articles or book chapters by the Friday preceding class, placing the citations, pdfs, or links online, along with a brief post (ca. one paragraph) discussing some aspect of the text in detail. This post will briefly summarize one of the articles and explain its relevance to the chosen topic.  Students are encouraged to comment on these mini-essays either before or after classtime, but should read them prior to class meetings.  At classtime, discussion will focus on our responses to the posted material, and the presenter will extend discussion with additional questions or textual passages from the primary text that seem relevant for discussion.
• 3 graded assignments, one per segment, which will take the form of one annotated bibliography, one response essay, and one annotated bibliography/essay assignment, due as indicated on the syllabus.
• 1 longer research project (10-15 pages), which can be developed from earlier presentations, bibliographies, or response essays, due at term‚s end. This can take a variety of forms, and will be developed in consultation with instructor.
  

*Class members will join the courseblog at http://engl7364fall08.wordpress.com/ after the first day of class, and submit at least one comment per week to the questions or essays etc. posted there by me or by other students.  Students may also be asked to post their own questions or comments to the readings or presentations.

I'll also be making available certain primary, critical and/or theoretical texts available through the courseblog, either as scanned PDFs or as links.  Please download and print these to bring to class for discussion.

 
Texts:

Because I assume that students will need to learn how to find the information to gloss and annotate these texts, I am encouraging students to choose their own editions for class readings, including online editions.  I‚ll put up pdfs or links to assigned readings each week, except for the longer prose works on the syllabus that will be available at the bookstore.  
 
For those seeking additional background reading, two excellent overall guides to the poetry of the period are Margaret Doody, Daring Muse (Cambridge) (on order) and Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Poetry (Routledge).  Roger Lonsdale's general guide, Dryden to Johnson (now in print under the Penguin imprint) also contains much useful information in its individual essays.  For social history, see Roy Porter's English Society in the 18th Century (Penguin) (at bookstore).  For political history, try 1) Christopher Hill, Century of Revolution (Norton) for events in Civil War (1640-60), Restoration (1660-1688), Glorious Revolution (1688) through the end of the reign of Queen Anne (1714); 2) for 1688-1832 events, try Willcox and Arnstein, Age of Aristocracy; J.H. Plumb's Pelican History of England in the 18th Century; or Linda Colley's recent Britons (Yale UP).

This seminar will look at the history of the practice known as rhetoric. We will start by asking what a practice is. We will then look at major texts within the rhetorical tradition as a way of moving inside the practice of rhetoric. We will proceed loosely in a chronological fashion, but our goal is not to arrive at a coherent narrative history of rhetoric. Rather, we will use close readings of major texts to allow us to discover rhetoric as a philosophical problem and as a productive intersection of theory and practice.

Requirements

A critical or creative project appropriate to the student's interests. These projects must be approved in advance by the instructor. In scope they should be equivalent to a scholarly essay in an advanced seminar.

There will be a reading assignment for the first class meeting. Prior to the first class meeting, I will distribute a selection from Alasdair MacIntyre's On Virture, and we will use that selection as a resource to develop an intellectual frame for the course.

Texts

• Sophocles, Philoctetes
• Plato, Gorgias
• ---, Phaedrus
• ---, Portagoras's "Great Speech"
• --Gorgias "Encomium of Helen"
• --Aristotle, Rhetoric
• Cicero, de Inventione
• Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
• Machiavelli, The Prince
• Sidney, Defense of Poetry
• Sartre, What Is Literature?
• Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
• Burke, Grammar of Motives
• DeMan, selected essays

This graduate seminar will attempt to draw feminist discussions of place and location together with rhetorical theories on the construction of space. The central concept explored in this course will be the ways in which space and place are both productive of language and at the same time produced by language. Traditional philosophy, including rhetoric, tended to treat space as a somewhat neutral container for human events. However recent critical theory has reconnected with space as a site of inquiry, examining the ways in which one's understanding of the world is limited by the histories and memories of the place from which it emerges. Whether it be a classroom at UH or the Houston Skyline, particular spaces produce specific, located knowledges. This course will use theories of the production of both space and language to help us better understand our current place - Houston, TX - and more specifically the particular location - UH - from which we work. Because these concepts -- location, space, and place -- have been taken up in many fields, the course readings will be interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on work from composition and rhetoric, feminist geography, feminist ethnography, and literary studies. Possible course readings include selections from the following:

Texts

• Auge, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
• Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project.
• Boyer, M. Christine. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imaginary and Architectural Entertainments
• Code, Lorriane. Rhetorical Spaces.
• Giddens, Anthony. The Construction of Society.
• Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space.
• McComiskey, Bruce and Cynthia Ryan. City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices.
• Mitchel, Don. Cultural Geography.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory Practicing Solidarity.
• Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference.
• Rose, Gillian. Feminism & Geography.
• Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York London Tokyo.

In this seminar, we will explore how Western autobiography has been appropriated by minority writers generally, and Caribbean writers in particular. Starting with an examination of slave narratives by Mary Prince and Estaban Montejo, we will trace the origins of the genre and its development by contemporary writers as they sought to articulate a Caribbean aesthetic and imagine and inscribe nationness. Critical readings of the selected texts will form the basis of consideration of questions such as how male and female writers imagine the nation and negotiate the complex issue of cultural identity. How effective is the auto/biographical text in articulating nationness? Can such texts testify to the challenges and struggles of the so-called postcolonial condition or aid the decolonisation process?

Expected Learning Outcomes

• Understanding of the general paradigms governing the conventional genre of Western autobiography.
• Understanding of the origins of ‘minority' autobiography and how it is distinguished in form and function from its Western antecedent.
• Knowledge of the main theories and theorists of minority auto/biography in Africa, African-American and Caribbean contexts.
• Understanding of tradition and change in Caribbean auto/biography and how it has been deployed in the re-inscription of history, the imagining of nation and identity in the region.
• Critical interpretation of various forms of auto/biographical texts (in English) of the region.

Primary Readings

(Included among these readings are the following autobiographical texts as well as theoretical readings in the areas of nation and identity)

• Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. 1831. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993.
• Montejo, Esteban. The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. Ed. Alistair Hennessy. 1968. London: Warwick/Macmillan Caribbean, 1993.
• Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr Biswas. London: Penguin, 1969.
• Walcott, Derek. Another Life. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1982.
• Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. London: Vintage, 1997.
• Espinet, Ramabai. The Swinging Bridge. Toronto: Harper Flamingo Canada, 2003.
• Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. (Selected portions will be read).
• Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (Selected portions will be read).

This seminar would invite participants to consider the work of Flannery O'Connor as a criticism of twentieth-century American culture. O'Connor is usually classified as a religious writer, driven by theology rather than ethics or politics. But she was also an acerbic critic of mid-century American attitudes, practices, and institutions. Certain that a fiction writer could not properly function as a hortatory uplifter of the spirit, she bent most of her considerable aesthetic and philosophic energy to satire and critique. She was, for personal and circumstantial reasons, particularly interested in the grotesque, and she famously populated her stories with "oddballs," "freaks," and "lunatics." For her, American responses to "evil" were often characterized by a sentimental faith in mastery, and the motive for control is explored in her essays and letters as well as her fiction. Her critique of American "mastery"-characterized by denial, correction, or containment of threatening otherness-can and does speak to many of the confounding ethical, social, and political issues that are still with us.

While our collective focus will lead us to view O'Connor in a historical and political context, students will be encouraged to pursue their own interests in O'Connor in a 12-15 pp. writing project and a class presentation. (Writers who are interested in O'Connor's craft, for instance, should feel welcome.) Requirements of the course will include short weekly response papers, 8 in all, a prospectus due roughly halfway through the course, the presentation, and the longer paper.

This is a general, graduate-level reading course in American Indian and Asian American literatures. The current renaissance in these two literatures, which are not taught on a regular bases in the department, is an exciting phenomenon. The course will focus on fiction and will examine the various trends and diverse voices within the literatures of the two groups. It will take a historical and developmental approach to each literature, beginning with the early part of the twentieth century and focusing on the diverse national groups within each and how that diversity impacts the production of the two literatures. As two of America's major minority literatures, one is an immigrant literature and the second one is indigenous, the course is particularly interested in examining how this difference is re-inscribed in the literatures. The American Indian readings will be taken from McNickle's The Surrounded, N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, James Welch's Winter In The Blood, Leslie Silko's Ceremony, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit, Diane Glancy's Pushing The Bear, Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus, Joseph Bruchac's Dawn Land, Susan Power's The Grass Dancer, and Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian In The World and/or Ten Little Indians. The Asian American readings will be taken from Louis Chu's Eat A Bowl of Tea, John Okada's No No Boy, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Frank Chin's Donald Duk, Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, Carlos Burlosan's America Is In The Heart, Fae Myenne Ng's Bone, Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, Theresa Cha's Dictee, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker, Jish Gen's Typical American, Chitra Divakaruni's Arranged Marriage, David Wong Louie's The Barbarians Are Coming, Andrew X Pham's Catfish and Mandala, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters or Dream Jungle, and Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine. Student is required to make a short, twenty-minute presentation, to write a short paper ((8-10 pages), and, finally, to write a graduate-level seminar paper (15-20 pages). Student should come to the first meeting prepared to discuss McNickle's The Surrounded.

This course is for students who have completed all coursework toward the MFA or PhD in creative writing, and involves individual attention to degree manuscripts in progress, as well as group discussion of each student's manuscript.

Poets and their first collections
From Manuscript to print
Seventeenth-Century Lyric Poetry and the Single-Author Verse Collection

In the Renaissance, as today, the lyric poem gains resonance from its place within the collection where it is published. Readers recognized this, and authors and editors did as well when they planned their collections. The preparation of one’s first volume of poems for publication is always a significant step in the fashioning of an author’s career. Decisions about its contents and organization are rarely left to chance. This was true in the English Renaissance, when the publication of single-author collections was still rare, daring, and a significant political, artistic, and (of course) personal event; then, as now, it was sometimes orchestrated by the editor and publisher as much as by the author.

During the seventeenth century, the fashion for the personal collection was part of the shift from a manuscript to a print culture, and away from the patronage system of the sixteenth century. Single-author collections were deliberately designed to contribute to the aesthetic, cultural, and political controversies of the period. It is no accident that at this time women writers began to make their appearance in the literary marketplace, as authors of verse collections.

In this seminar, we will explore the art of the seventeenth-century lyric and the cultural history and context of some of the single-author collections of the period. We will review the major seventeenth-century authors and their work (including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and Marvell), and then we will examine the form, content, design, and publication context of select “first books.” Students will have an opportunity to study the collections of seventeenth-century writers of their choice.

First Class

Students should come with a selection of ten favorite lyrics from at least three different seventeenth-century authors, and be ready to read one or two of them and explain why they chose those particular ten poems.

Requirements

Active participation in seminar discussions, a bibliographic essay surveying representative scholarship on a particular work or topic, and a final seminar paper on a topic of the student's interest.

The seminar will focus on selected major poems of the first generation of English Romantic poets--Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Although the topics for class discussion will, in part, follow the critical issues and questions raised by the bibliographic essays, recurring matters of interest may include Romanticism as an artistic response to a crisis in culture, the interplay between tradition and innovation/revolution in Romantic literature, Romantic concepts of the imagination, Romantic concepts of the self and of consciousness, the tension between empiricism and transcendentalism/idealism, Romantic irony, Romantic ideology, the Romantic concern for origins, Romantic legendry and mythology, cultural transcendence, "Dark Romanticism" (the Romantic interest in the satanic, the erotic, the exotic, the pathological, and the abnormal), the Romantic concept of heroism, the Romantic adaptation of the epic, and the Romantic symbol.

In addition to discussions of issues of this sort, the seminar will be designed to encourage the participants to think about the commonalities that justify categorizing these writers as "Romantic" as well as the distinctive qualities that also make each writer a special case, and to consider the view that the Romantic Period represents the origins of the modern world.

Required Texts

• Johnson and Grant, eds. Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton Critical Edition)
• Wordsworth, J., Abrams, M., Gill, S., eds. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton Critical Edition)
• Halmi, Magnuson, and Modiano, eds. Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition))
• Abrams, M.H., ed. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (Oxford University Press)
• Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism (Norton)
• Bloom, Harold, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)

The objectives of this course are two: (1) a study of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, its thematic concerns and its technical innovation and (2) an investigation into the ways in which twentieth-century and twenty first-century artists respond to the person and the artistry of Emily Dickinson.

In our study of Dickinson's poetry we will emphasize the following:

• Dickinson's manuscript fair copies as evidence of her innovative use of poetic language and her concept of the lyric
• Publication, Dickinson's relationship with the "Master," and her use of correspondence as an alternate form of publication;
• The importance of the fascicle;
• Dickinson's response to the social and political events and ideas of her time;
• Dickinson's response to the Calvinist tradition, and her use of the tropes, themes, and structures of scripture and hymnody.

For our investigation of current responses to Emily Dickinson and her work, we will study a broad range of poems that respond to her work and art songs that set her poems as lyrics. For this part of the seminar, we will consider the work of some of the following poets: John Berryman, Lucy Brock Broido, Larry Eigner, Marilyn Hacker, Susan Howe, John Kinsella, Mary Oliver, and Mary Jo Salter, as well as that of some of the following composers: John Adams, Ernst Bacon, Aaron Copland, and Michael Tilson Thomas. In October we will also participate in the premiere of Lighting at Our Feet, a dramatic production that is a collaboration between New York's Ridge Theater and composer Michael Gordon of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Our participation will include attending the performance and then meeting with the dramaturge, director, and composer to discuss the production.

Required Texts

• Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Ed. ThomasJohnson (Little Brown)
• Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters (Belknap)
• Others to be determined

Requirements

• One prospectus
• One presentation
• One essay (20-25 pp.)
• Participation in events surrounding Lightning at Our Feet

English 8384 is a course designed to study healing in the following black women's novels and film adaptations: Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), A Hero Ain't Nothin' But A Sandwich (Alice Childress), The Color Purple (Alice Walker), The Women of Brewster Place (Gloria Naylor), Beloved (Toni Morrison), The Wedding (Dorothy West), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Terry McMillan), and Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash). The course aims to examine healing rituals linked to issues surrounding race, class, gender, sexuality, trauma, community, and spirituality. Additionally, the seminar examines the changes that occur as the novels are transformed into a different medium and analyzes what, if anything, those editorial changes mean socially, linguistically, culturally, and politically, particularly as related to the theme of healing and the wounds that necessitate healing. The discussions will be guided by a series of questions: In what ways do the novels and the films critique issues linked to healing? Are there key scenes in the novels that are omitted or revised/reconceptualized in the films, and what is the impact on healing as a result of these omissions or revisions? Are there scenes in the films that do not appear in the novel and vice versa, and how do the additions or deletions enhance/focus or distort the vision expressed in the novel, particularly with regard to the theme of healing? How are the novels and the films in dialogue? How have the film adaptations shaped literary production by black women writers? Students will also read a wide range of theory and criticism most appropriate to the selected texts, with emphasis on African American criticism as well as feminist/womanist and pos-colonial theories.

Course Requirements

Students will make one or two oral presentations, submit an annotated bibliography, and write a research paper approximately 20-25 pages in length. The aim is for students to develop an extended scholarly paper that could be published in one of the leading journals in the discipline.

This course has a two-fold agenda. The first unit of the course will devote itself to reading, discussion and analysis of some of the major texts of postcolonial theory. Around midterm, we will turn our attention to the writing of “Third World” intellectuals on the following broad topics: history, gender, poetics, and space. At the most general level, the primary contrast between the two units would be that postcolonialism began as a critique of western thought, with virtually no ambition to describe the thinking, criticism, and cultural production of postcolonial societies, whereas for intellectuals of the “Third World,” the concreteness of history, culture and thought in their local environments is unavoidable. We will trace the development of postcolonial theory from its self-reflexive, West-centered origins through the various evolutions and backlashes that have been going on more recently over the course of Unit 1. Unit 2 will sample the smallest tip of the iceberg of third world intellectual histories in order to present a jumping off point for comparison and contrast between the trendy postcolonial studies movement and the cultural production of the actually existing postcolonial world. At the end of the semester, we will read two novels in order to consider the relevance of the criticism we have read to the literary study that is our primary motivation.

Required Texts

• Adonis. Introduction to Arabic Poetics.
• Chrisman and Williams, eds. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory.
• Flaubert, Gustave. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour.
• Kipling, Rudyard. Kim.
• Macgoye, Marjorie Oludhe. Coming to Birth.
• Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite.
• Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism.
• Salih, Tayib. Season of Migration to the North.
• Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development.
• All other readings are available via the “packet” outside my office door.

Course Requirements

Each student will give two brief oral presentations, write a short paper during the semester, and write a longer paper at the end of the course. Note that the first oral presentation will also require a Friday afternoon conference the previous week.

Class Syllabus

• English 8386: Topics in Postcolonial Studies: Postcolonial Theory and “Third World” Intellectuals