Spring 2010 Courses

This course provides an introductory survey of literary and cultural theory. We will examine the development of various schools of theory and criticism from the earliest period to contemporary times. We will read literary texts using these critical tools to determine the extent to which each of these schools may be applicable to works that have emerged from various geographical, cultural and political contexts.

Primary texts

• Peter Barry – Beginning Theory – An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory


• Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre


• Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea


• Hanif Kureishi – The Buddha of Suburbia


• Junot Díaz - Drown


• Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place

Instructor: Dr. Lorraine Stock winner of the 2008 UH Teaching Excellence Award for Innovative use of Technology in Teaching, for developing the Chaucer Hybrid course; Winner of Southeastern Medieval Association Teaching Excellence Award, 2009.
Email: lstock@uh.edu
Phone: 713-743-2958
Office: C- 227B
Office Hours: 11:30-1:00pm T/TH and by appointment

Course Methodology and Content:

This course is a “hybrid” or “blended” course that meets face-to-face only one day a week, either Tuesday or Thursday, depending on which section you enroll in. The other 50% or more of course work is presented and performed online in a Blackboard site for the course.

The course is focused on a close reading of Chaucer’s 14th-century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, a story collection told by 29 pilgrims--each representing a late medieval social group or occupation-- journeying from London to Canterbury Cathedral to make a pilgrimage at the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket.

The course is organized as a recreation of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, following the map between London and the shrine, in which each town or station on the route corresponds to one week of the course. The text of the Canterbury Tales will be read in the original 14th-century Middle English. Chaucer’s story collection includes a cornucopia of the prominent medieval literary genres: Arthurian romance, secular romance, epic, fabliau or bawdy tale, hagiographical romance, saint’s life, allegory, Breton lay, beast fable, etc.

Class members not only will study the typical medieval tales told by Chaucer’s Christian pilgrims, but also will research the concept of comparative world pilgrimage practiced by other non-Christian religions (Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism) as well as secular pilgrimages to modern “shrines” of secular “saints” (Elvis, Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, The Beatles, John Lennon) and other places of memorialization, Ground Zero, the Vietnam Memorial, etc.

Structure of the Course:

Students will be responsible for reading the assigned tales in Middle English each week, listening to the instructor’s podcast lectures about the text, watching or listening to the assigned videos, web pages, or sound files illustrating aspects of the tales or facets of late medieval history, culture, or daily life on WebCT, and then taking an online quiz based on that week’s materials by midnight of the day before the face-to-face class day.

Each quiz is worth 1% of the final grade. Guides to the weekly study modules will outline the homework activities for each week and present questions for discussion at the face-to face class meeting.

Writing and Research Projects:

1. All class members will adopt the persona of one of the pilgrims or another medieval figure as an avatar, in whose voice they will respond to prompts on a message board periodically during the semester.


2. Additionally, each student will research another pilgrimage (in multimedia materials found on WebCT or through independent research) and report about the experience of making that pilgrimage in his avatar’s voice.


3. A “close reading” critical paper (4 pp.) on a passage from the text


4. A final project  or paper involving research culminating in the demonstration of mastery of Chaucer’s text or some aspect of medieval culture.


5. a comprehensive final exam (essay).

Required Texts:

• The Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Broadview, 2008) ISBN 13- 978-1-55111-484-2  (If you own another Middle English edition of the Canterbury Tales, please consult with me about its acceptability.


• Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales 2nd ed. (Oxford UP, 1996) ISBN 0-19-871155-7. You may use any edition of this book; it is expensive, but the best accompaniment out there. Be looking for a bargain online well before the course starts.

This class is offered online, so there will be no classroom meetings on the UH campus. Students must have regular access to a reliable high speed internet connection.

The class will take up seven plays by Shakespeare representing his history plays, comedies, and tragedies. Students will also be responsible for background material on Shakespeare’s life and times. There will be approximately four tests during the semester and five papers of moderate length. In addition, students are required to participate at their convenience in weekly discussion sessions and other inter-active activities.

The class website is quite extensive offering full lecture notes on specific plays, short 7-10 long mini-lectures as mp3 files which students may download to an ipod or similar device, and a host of other materials including direct access to other helpful websites such as: the Globe Theatre, Stratford, England, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Individual initiative is very important to succeed in this class. Regular (3-4 times per week) visits to the class website are essential. A full syllabus for the class is posted on my website www.uh.edu/~djudkins

Office Hours:

T, 1:30-2:30 & by appointment; W, 1:00-2:00 p.m.

Objectives:

• To introduce the rich literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1800).
• To offer a variety of texts: poetry, prose, drama, satire, and philosophical treatises.
• To have students read an eighteenth-century periodical in its original state.
• To strengthen students’ understanding and application of poets’ rhetorical techniques.
• To demonstrate the currency of the literature and its contemporary appeal.
• To enable students to express their critical opinions about their reading.

Required Texts:

• Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. The Norton Edition.
• British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology. Ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1996.
• Gibaldi, Joseph, and Walter Achtert. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th Edn. N.Y.: MLA, 1984.
• Richard Lanham. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. A Guide for Students of English Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.

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.

Course requirements

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

In an 1870 lecture at Oxford, Victorian writer John Ruskin urged Britain to “found colonies as fast and as far as she is able . . . seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on” (“Lecture 1: Inaugural”). Precisely because he is not widely considered to be an important theorist of imperialism, Ruskin captures here the widespread Victorian preoccupation with Britain’s global presence, a preoccupation that seeped into every nook and cranny of Victorian life.

With “Global Britain” as its central theme, this course will reflect these Victorian concerns. We will sample all major genres of Victorian literature—poetry, novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose—with the goal of understanding how Britain responded aesthetically, culturally, and ethically to the privileges and anxieties prompted by its position as a world power in this era of high imperialism. Our authors will include Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mary Kingsley. We will also examine some original, archival texts of the period in hard copy form and on-line.

Topics to be examined include the necessity of empire in establishing England as an industrial power; the role of gender in imperialist discourse; the ways in which genres like travel narratives, industrial fiction, and “imperial gothic” responded to the pressures of colonial concerns; the change from the exuberant, optimistic imperialism of the 1830s and 1840s to the beleaguered, anxious vision of late-century writers like Stevenson; the ways in which literary form registered imperial issues.

Requirements:

Students will be required to complete a number of written assignments (including a final paper), a midterm, and a final exam. Some Friday sessions will be held on-line (and off -campus).

During the nineteenth century, the novel flourished both as a form of popular entertainment and as an avenue for cultural commentary.

This course will focus on six representative novels, situating them within their historical context, including Victorian concerns about the new industrial economy, gender relations, imperialism, and other social issues. Selected theoretical readings will focus on the history and structure of the novel form, encouraging us to examine how the literary form of these books relates to their social content.

Novels will include Jane Eyre, Hard Times, The Mill on the Floss, The Moonstone, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Dracula.

This course will focus on recent novels that have been described by the term "magical realism." Magical realism engages the usual devises of narrative realism, but with a difference: the supernatural is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence, accepted and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. We will read a number of novels from different cultural contexts in order to compare the workings of magical realism in North and South America and explore the diversity of its contemporary styles and subjects. We will also pay attention to the visual arts and their connection to the novels we are reading.

There will be no face-to-face meetings.

Required texts:

• Magical Realism:Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Duke University Press, 1995)


• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Colombia)


• Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (Argentina)


• Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World (Cuba)


• Louise Erdrich, Tracks (USA)


• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (USA)


• Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits  (Chile)

This course will consider the various rhetorical features, metrical patterns and poetic forms of verse, both recent and traditional.

Is it true, as Robert Frost said, that writing free verse is a bit like playing tennis without a net? We will ask how significant the links between form and content are in poetry. What can poetry express that prose cannot?

You will be asked to consider if there are certain subjects that are better suited to verse than others. Why is this? We will also think about what it means to be a poet and what role the poet serves in society. Can there ever be one definitive version of a poem’s meaning? Might poetry’s greatest strength lie, rather, in its frequent ambiguities? What does it mean to interpret a poem and how does one go about this process? What makes a good poem good and a bad poem bad?

This class is offered online, so there will be no classroom meetings on campus. It is essential that students have access to a reliable high speed internet connection.

This survey of English literature will begin with Geoffrey Chaucer and conclude with literature of the 18th century. We will read one full text novel, Robinson Crusoe. The class requires substantial reading both online and from printed texts. There will be approximately 4 tests and 5 papers of moderate length.

The class website is quite extensive with lecture notes on all the reading assignments. These notes are supplemented by short 7-10 minute mini-lectures which students may download to ipods or similar listening devices. (The mini-lectures may also be heard on a personal computer.) The class website also has other information and links to other helpful websites.

Individual initiative is very important for students to succeed in this completely online class. Students must be prepared to visit the class website regularly (a minimum of 3-4 times per week) and to participate in the class. A full syllabus for the class is posted on my website www.uh.edu/~djudkins

In this course, we will examine the study of style in writing today.

What do we mean by the term “style”? What are the social, political, cultural, rhetorical, literary, and linguistic uses of style historically and today?

In examining the problem of style in writing, we’ll look at examples in a broad range of written genres (e.g., the essay, journalism, literature, nonfiction, and new media) and analyze what makes style distinctive and rhetorically effective. In addition, students will use stylistic analysis as a means of developing their own writing styles. They will also investigate the writing style(s) prevalent in the profession they hope to enter.

Course requirements:

This writing-intensive course will require several written assignments of varying lengths, including an analytical essay incorporating some of the techniques studied in the course; a midterm; a final; and active participation.

Dr. Patricia Lee Yongue
Office: 221C
Phone: 713-743-2944
Email: plyongue@uh.edu

Course Description

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, and the origins and construction of heroism. We will consider such intellectual movements as literary naturalism and existentialism, which overlap modernism. My theoretical emphasis tends toward studying texts as both constructing representations of and representing culture and gender. I always emphasize the craft of fiction.

This is an advanced English course that satisfies three hours of credit in the English major and minor. 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 exam responses and essays. Students should also have some background in the analysis of literature, including the function of figurative language. The course is not an introduction to fiction.

NOTE: ENGL 3353 does not satisfy the university Core requirement satisfied by ENGL 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 as well as to close text reading.
• Students participating responsibly will increase their understanding of and skill in writing from a position of informed opinion about a topic, issues, etc.

Texts (Tentative List)

• Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
• 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, bibliographic reports, and an essay. The project will combine library and internet research with literary criticism. Details for the essay format and submission requirements will be provided in Guidelines.

There will be a midterm (date and format to be announced) and a comprehensive final examination (format to be announced) on the date and at the time scheduled by the university. Quizzes may occasionally occur.

Attendance

I do have an attendance policy and will drop students for excessive absences. Generally, I allow three absences a semester before penalties (instructor drop or grade reduction) are issued. The three absences cover necessary absences (emergency, illness, etc.) and so should not be used frivolously. You should not take this course if you anticipate more than two or three absences. Similarly, I penalize consistent lateness (more than three times a semester) and count as an absence arrival 15 minutes after class starts and 15 minutes before class ends.

The course surveys some of the most significant texts in gay and lesbian literature during the past forty years and traces their cultural and historical contexts. While LBGT literature has entered our cultural conversations through films like Milk and Brokeback Mountain as well as through television, the Internet, and other forms of visual media, its popularity is a relatively recent phenomenon. How did we get here? How did gay and lesbian literature emerge? How did the social movements for equality in the 1960s and 1970s set the stage for the creation of a rich variety of LBGT texts? How did gay and lesbian literature emerge out of the counterculture? Who were some of the pioneering writers of this era? How did the writing develop out of and transform itself in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis?

Course requirements

Include substantial reading, a midterm and final, reading quizzes, a film review or editorial written for the public sphere, one research essay, a presentation, and active participation.

The celebrated figures of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett have left the world with the general impression that Irish writing is something that Irish writers are often obliged to produce and publish somewhere other than Ireland. “Contemporary Irish literature” will start by acknowledging the reality of official and cultural censorship in post-Treaty Ireland, and go on to explore the consolidation of a national literature in the Irish Republic after partition.

The course starts with the crucial period of the 1930’s and the writing of Behan and Kavanagh, and goes on to explore the development of two genres in contemporary Ireland: drama and the novel. A section on drama and its significance within contemporary Ireland will start with the Field Day Company, and Brian Friel’s Translations A crucial shift in dramaturgical aesthetics occurring in the 1970’s will, if possible, be demonstrated with a videotaped production of the Druid Theater’s groundbreaking production of The Playboy of the Western World, a play with which many students will already be familiar from the modern Irish literature course. The Druid’s Playboy will be set against the recent Abbey Theatre production of a new Playboy of the Western World co-written by Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun. Plays by emerging playwrights may (subject to availability) include Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow, and Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus.

The course will also focus on several important recent novels, probably including:

• Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry,
• Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys,
• Edna O’Brien’s Down By the River and
• Ann Enright’s The Gathering.

Course Description:

This course surveys the development of the novel as a genre across the Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean. In our reading, we will investigate the establishment of traditions and changes in the Caribbean novel genre as it has contested and refashioned the traditional conventions of the British/European novel. We will also consider the historical and cultural contexts in which the genre developed in the Caribbean and examine themes of colonialism, imperialism, gender, multiculturalism, ‘coming of age’.

Novels may include:

• Roger Mais – Brother Man
• Sam Selvon – A Brighter Sun
• Earl Lovelace – The Dragon Can’t Dance
• Patrick Chamoiseau - Texaco
• Edwidge Danticat – The Farming of Bones
• Julia Alvarez – In the Time of Butterflies
• Jamaica Kincaid – Annie John
• Oonya Kempadoo – Buxton Spice

What is the difference between Modern, Post-Modern and Contemporary poetry? We will survey American, and / or British and Irish verse from the Modern period to the present day. We will look at how poets themselves define their work, especially the way in which poets distinguish themselves from the poetics of previous generations through the founding of movements and the creation of manifestos. Are poetic manifestos liberating or limiting? We will start with a consideration of Modernist verse and the Imagist movement (in particular the pronouncements of Ezra Pound) and the doctrine of impersonality espoused by T. S. Eliot. We will then consider the manner in which post-modern poets on both sides of the Atlantic sought to “Make it New” in the shadow of Modernism. This will include readings of the Black Mountain poets; a consideration of “The Movement” in the United Kingdom; and a discussion of the works of various “Beat” and “Confessional” poets. We will then turn to more recent developments, such the as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement, Neoformalism, and postcolonial poetry.

Course Description:

This course will introduce students to some of the forms, tropes, and critical issues in a variety of recent examples of this increasingly popular form of creative non-fiction. The assigned works range from autobiographies that have already attained the status of classics--Tobias Wolf's This Boy's Life, and Mary Karr's The Liar's Club-to 2005's critically-acclaimed The Tender Bar, a memoir by the Los Angeles Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent, J.R. Moehringer. Because the form has become a particularly rich source for the diverse voices seeking to express their particular vision of American identity, one cluster of the readings will focus on ethnic autobiographies: Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America and Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala.

Gender will also be a major critical issue in discussions of the works of McCall, Moehringer, and Karr. Allison Smith's Name All the Animals provides an example of an important sub-genre, the trauma autobiography, as well as a construction of gender and sexual orientation very different from those found in Wolf's account of coming-of-age in the 1950s or Karr's female bildungsroman set on the Texas Gulf Coast. The other readings--Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, Emily Fox Gordon's Mockingbird Years, and Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City-offer stimulating examples of experiments in form and content.

Recurring issues for discussion will include the writers' motivations for writing about their lives, the different ways they construct their visions of identity, questions about authenticity and truth in publishing accounts of their personal experiences, and the cultural needs that this form of writing satisfy.

Because the course will be taught in a seminar format, students should be prepared to assume a greater responsibility than the conventional lecture-discussion class requires. Students will write 1-2 page response papers on each work that will provide the basis for the initial class discussion of the books and two 5-7 page critical essays on topics that reflect their developing interests in issues raised by the works. The final assignment is the traditional end-of-the-seminar essay in which the students will reflect on the characteristics of memoir as a genre or a theme or issue found in several works.

English in Secondary Schools is designed primarily to meet the needs of upper division English or education majors preparing to teach middle or secondary school English. The course introduces participants to the content of middle and secondary English teaching, offers them opportunities to observe and assist in functioning classrooms, and helps to prepare them for the state Teacher Certification exam. English 4319 is also open to upper division students in other fields with an interest in incorporating language skills effectively into classes across grades and disciplines.

The course features the following components:
Review of the content areas taught in middle and secondary schools and approaches to their teaching. Emphasis is given to traditional content—writing, literature, reading, grammar and usage—and we will review current standards and instructional practices in these areas as well as the knowledge required for Texas teacher certification in English. We will address the broader context for teaching contemporary English—such topics as media literacy, school violence, multiculturalism, difference and diversity, teacher stress and burnout, etc.—as time permits.

Field experience. Students in 4319 receive on-site experience through in-class observations and/or participation. Students keep logs of field experience and acquire a first-hand view of the realities of classroom teaching.

Student-centered collaborative research. Students in 4319 will design a collaborative research project focused on an issue of significance to area schools. Working in groups, students will determine a focus of inquiry, conduct thorough research into the topic, prepare an annotated bibliography of useful resources, make a presentation to the class, and select a public forum in which to share their work. The project offers students the opportunity to acquire professional expertise in an area of personal interest and to conduct educational research of real value to the education community.

Technology-enhanced learning. Class discussion is enhanced and extended through the use of Blackboard Vista. Students also make wide use of e-mail, blogs, Power Point, and other technologies and are introduced to a variety of online teaching resources.

Portfolio assessment. Students in 4319 are encouraged to begin thinking of themselves as professionals and to engage in active reflection about their development and evolution as teachers. Throughout the semester students will be building teaching portfolios containing reflective writing, teaching resources to which they might return in the future, and a final researched project. Portfolios will also provide a vehicle for students to assess and improve their own reading, writing, and language skills.

Course Description:

The field of literary criticism has now moved into the realm of sexuality and its implications to society and culture are now an important field of knowledge. The course will begin with recognizable foundational texts that begin much of the discussion of sexuality for continental western thought:

• Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (selections)
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol 1, An Introduction (This text provides one of the more persuasive discussions on the formation of the modern concept of homosexuality.)
• Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (provides a coherent and brief overview of the field of study)

Moving into the work of gay and lesbian studies that informs much of contemporary queer theory, selections from Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia’s edited work, Queer Cultures, will provide the historical intellectual foundations of lesbian and gay studies. This will allow for the exposure of the ongoing debates and assumptions between those who would argue for a lesbian/gay studies field and those who would argue for queer studies. Selections from the work of Anglo-American lesbian feminists, like Lillian Faderman, Bonnie Zimmerman, and Adrienne Rich, gay historians like David Halperin, and the work of French Feminist will represent the majority of the readings.

The work of two important thinkers in queer theory will be discussed. These authors have consistently been cited as some of the most important writers of queer theory:

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Finally, one text that addresses many of the questions in queer theory in far more pragmatic form, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, introduced and discussed by Michel Foucault, explores the complexity of queer identity and exposes the assumptions within queer theory. This memoir is a creative articulation of the understanding of an individual identity and its relationship to sexuality.

Texts Required:

• Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol 1, An Introduction
• Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction
• Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGarzia, ed., Queer Cultures
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
• Micheal Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite

Course Description:

This course is a workshop-based seminar on fiction writing for students who have already taken at least one fiction workshop. You will write three thematically linked stories in the form of a triptych (two shorter pieces, one longer piece) and read a fair amount of short fiction. We will read and analyze all that we read from a writer’s perspective, which is to say we will concentrate on how the different elements of fiction writing (dialogue, structure, characterization, metaphor, etc.) function and combine to create compelling narratives.

Course Description:

This class will offer students an opportunity to identify a variety of "forms" that short fiction takes. Students will read and discuss a many different types of stories, both classic and contemporary, while also engaging in exercises to lead to a finished creative project that displays their acquired knowledge.

Course Overview

This is a general, upper-division reading course in the literatures of America’s four major racial/ethnic groups: Asian Americans, American Indians, African Americans, and Latinos/Latinas, with acknowledgment of an emerging Muslim community.

The current renaissance in these four (or five) literatures is an exciting phenomenon, which is engaging and re-writing America. The course will focus on fiction and will examine the various trends and diverse voices within the literatures of the four 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 four literatures. As four of America’s major minority literatures, two immigrant literatures and two indigenous literatures, the course is particularly interested in examining how these differences are re-inscribed in the literatures.

The American Indian readings will be taken from James Welch’s Winter In The Blood, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian In The World and/or Ten Little Indians.

The Asian American readings will be taken from John Okada’s No No Boy, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Andrew X Pham’s Catfish and Mandala.

The African American readings will be taken from Percival Everett’s Erasure, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, and William Henry Lewis’s I Got Somebody in Staunton.

The Latino/a readings will be taken from Dagoberto Gilb’s The Magic of Blood, Julia Alverez’s How The Garcia Girls Lost their Accents.

The Muslim text will be taken from mohja kahf’s the girl in the tangerine scarf.

Requirements:

Student is required to take a mid-term exam and a final exam and write a short paper.

Folklorists see folklore as the foundation upon which all other culture is based. To understand culture at all, one must understand folk culture. This introductory course concentrates on American folk culture from the eighteenth century forward, with particularly emphasis on the roles of folklore in the lives of the students taking the class.

After two weeks devoted to a definition of folklore, the course surveys major scholarly approaches to folklore and the genres best known to residents of the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century: beliefs, legends, historical traditions, festivals, jokes, tall tales, riddles, and proverbs. The course also devotes considerable time to many of the cultures well represented in Houston’s population: African American, Anglo-American, Asian American, Cajun, Creole, Mexican American. We conclude with assignments focused on the question of what, if anything, is unique about or definitive of American folklore.

The two major writing assignments require students to collect folklore: first, students conduct a self-survey, collecting folklore exclusively through their own memories; later, they record and analyze the lore of others.

There are also two exams.

Goals:

A basic understanding of folklore and its working in the student’s personal experience and in the lives of others; an introduction to the scholarship of folklore, its premises, and its uses; an exploration of folklore's role in American culture; an introduction to folklore fieldwork

Texts:

[The first two items will be available for sale only at the College Store (3503 Elgin St., ne corner of Scott and Elgin; 713 659-2665]. They will NOT be available at the bookstore in the University Center. Be sure to phone first to see if the books have arrived. They are scheduled to be in the store by the first week of classes.]

• Brunvand, Jan H., ed. Readings in American Folklore. New York: Norton, 1979.
• Dorson, Richard M., ed. Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
• Reader. A booklet of outlines assembled for this course and available via email from the instructor

Course Overview

Titled “Myth, Ballad, Folktale” in the course catalog, this course concentrates on oral folktales.

We approach folktale and myth as expressions of local art and local knowledge rather than as universal archetypes. After two weeks during which some of the most widespread properties of oral narrative are discussed and some leading folkloric approaches to narrative study are outlined, the class focuses on the genres most familiar in contemporary Western experience: the märchen, known best as adapted by and from the Grimms' Fairy Tales, and the legend, known best through such modern-day examples as urban legends.

Working from our shared experience, we will then study oral artistry in traditional communities: Irish tales as rendered by Seanchais; the art of Hungarian marchen teller Zsuzsanna Palko, who could entertain an audience for 12 hours at a stretch; the animals tales of African Americans, Creoles, and Cajuns; and such Appalachian narratives as Jack Tales. Myth will be examined briefly and principally in relationship to Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving written story, as well as Native American (Ojibwa, Thompson, and Koasati), South Asian, Polynesian, and Melanesian cultures.

Requirements

include one written midterm and a final oral (with written outline). There is an extensive writing assignment with proposals and progress reports that will be due at regular intervals. Each seminar participant will choose a narrative community or culture (e.g,, African Americans in Nova Scotia, Hungarian Szekely, Louisiana Cajuns, Palestinian märchen tellers) and study the narratives of that culture with the goal of understanding their meanings and functions on the tellers’ own terms.

Goals:

basic understanding of oral artistry’s place in your personal experience; beginning understanding of folktale and myth as complex artistic and social statements within the performance contexts of traditional societies; introduction to the scholarship of folktale and myth, its premises, and its uses.

Texts:

• Dégh, Linda. Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palko. Jackson: UP of Miss, 1994.
• Dorson, Richard M., ed. Folktales Told Around the World. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1975.
• O’Sullivan, Sean. Folktales of Ireland. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.
• Roberts, Leonard. South from Hell-fer-Sartin. Lexington: UP of Kentucky,1989.
• Sandars, N.K. The Epic of Gilgamesh. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin, 1972.
• Zipes, Jack, trans. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. 2nd ed. NY: Bantam, 1987.
• [PLUS web readings from Lindahl, Carl, et al. Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997 and other texts and a booklet made available to students via email]

Important Note:

[books for sale only at the College Store (3503 Elgin St., NE corner of Scott and Elgin; 713 659-2665). They will NOT be available at the bookstore in the University Center. Be sure to phone first to see if the books have arrived.]

Course Overview

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.

Description

We shall indulge in the rare undergraduate experience of studying a single author, and the even rarer experience of studying a female author, the American modernist Willa Cather. Until the mid-1970s Cather’s texts were understood as and praised for being fiction celebrating the American working class, namely the American and immigrant pioneers of the nineteenth century. Scholars today understand the fiction much differently, especially as we negotiate the intricate patterns and meanings beneath the supposed romantic surfaces. In addition to the primary texts, we shall pay attention to some major essays in feminist literary theory and criticism, especially as they apply to the fiction.

Note: English 4378 satisfies three advanced credit hours of elective for the English major and minor and is also applicable to the Women’ Studies Minor.

Required Texts:

• Alexander’s Bridge
• O Pioneers!
• My Ántonia
• A Lost Lady
• The Professor’s House
• Sapphira and the Slave Girl

Learning Outcomes

1. Students participating responsibly will achieve familiarity with a prominent female novelist of the modernist period.
2. Students participating responsibly will learn aspects of feminist, cultural, and biographical criticism and methodology.
3. Students participating responsibly will gain experience in critical thinking and writing critically and in oral presentation.

Assignments

Students will be responsible for informed, engaging class discussion and for a project comprised of research, an oral presentation, and an essay. The project will combine library and internet research with close reading of text. Details for the essay format and submission requirements will be provided in Guidelines. Students will also submit a series of page length annotations of bibliographic sources.

Examinations

There will be a midterm and a three-hour final exam. The final will be administered on the day scheduled by the university. Late exams will not be administered except in cases of emergency.

Attendance

Attendance is mandatory. Three absences (including excused absences) before the midterm exam will normally result in a drop. Three absences accumulated throughout the semester will normally result in the lowering of the final grade.

Course Overview

This course is an outgrowth of ongoing research for my current book project, 1771, which analyzes the diverse genres of Anglophone writing produced during a single year in the British Empire. The course is designed a series of locations that will ground our semester’s discussions of particular authors and works published in and around the year 1771: London, Edinburgh, Jamaica, and Philadelphia. These four locations will orient our readings in the year 1771 both geographically and historically. Moreover, students will be reading both literary and biographical texts involving such exemplary figures as Tobias Smollett, Henry Mackenzie, Benjamin Franklin, and Olaudah Equiano. 

Research Intensive, Archival Dimension of the Course

At the same time, because this is an advanced, research-intensive capstone course in undergraduate research, I also expect students to go beyond the assigned readings by learning about this era from other primary sources, which might include additional literary works, as well as contemporary political pamphlets or newspapers, and by doing their own independent research into the historical background and secondary criticism. Students will be expected to participate in a course-blog with weekly responses and questions, prepare annotated bibliographies, present their research and other kinds of materials to the class, and develop a final research project (12-15 pp. research paper) in consultation with the instructor.

Prerequisites

Because of the research demands for this course, students must have completed ENG 3301: Intro to Literary studies before enrolling in this course. Any student who enrolls in the course without the prerequisites will be automatically dropped. If you have any questions about your eligibility for the course, you may contact the instructor at dmazella@uh.edu.

Pattern and variation is the basis of all established poetic forms and provides the tension that quickens memorable poetry, especially the most powerful free verse. For our purposes, pattern refers to formal rhyme, accent and syllabics, meter, and organization, as well as classic modes of argument, phrasing, syntax, subject, and tone. Similarly, variation includes play and improvisation against and beside any of the above patterns. To become more proficient in recognizing and appropriating formal structures, we will read and discuss influential essays on the subject, read work by other poets, and experiment with inherited and newly invented forms.

This course is a workshop-based study of the short story and novel. We will read and analyze your short stories and novel excerpts from a writer’s perspective, which is to say we will concentrate on how the different elements of fiction writing (dialogue, structure, characterization, metaphor, etc.) function and combine to create compelling narratives. You’ll also read a few books, short stories, and essays to complement our discussions of your work. Writer's we'll examine may include Haruki Murakami, Denis Johnson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, Steven Millhauser, Annie Proulx, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stuart Dybek, etc. etc. We'll also read essays by Robert Boswell, Stephen Dobyns, E.M. Forster, John Gardner, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and David Jauss.

The Graphic Novel course is an introduction and exploration of modern graphic storytelling through both critical examination and workshop of original creative work within the form. We will focus on the medium and tools of graphic storytelling, its reoccurring themes and genres, and their relationship with modern storytelling. We will be applying a critical eye to the medium and identifying a scholarly language to examine the form through close readings of several major graphic texts across the spectrum from traditional comic books such as The Watchmen to realist memoirs including Harvey Pekar's My Cancer Year. Students will experiment with the form as creators as well, with submission of graphic scripts in both promoted exercises and individual projects.

What to do with Little Nell? Ever since Oscar Wilde famously quipped, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, The Old Curiosity Shop and the melodramatic death scene of Dickens’ Nell have symbolized the worst excesses of Victorian sentimentality.And yet, for most Victorians—even as late as Wilde’s nineties—the evocation of sentiment was key to the formation of sympathetic community and the pursuit of social reform. This course will take seriously the Victorian belief in sentiment, with a special emphasis on the exploration of its function as a mode of persuasion in the public square.

This emphasis is especially appropriate to a preseminar, a course that introduces graduate-level students to a period and its literature, because a keen grasp of sentiment is essential to a historicized understanding both of Victorian literature itself and of its place in literary studies today. Beyond these disciplinary concerns, however, we may also see in Victorian culture the beginnings of our own culture’s uses and abuses of sentiment as a form of persuasion. With these multiple arenas in mind, we will explore a number of representative Victorian texts and consider the uses of sentiment in a range of issues and cultural practices, including the role of sentiment in Victorian reform movements, the relation of gender and domesticity to sentiment, the commodification of sentiment, and the uses of sentiment in the rhetoric of empire.  In addition to Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, our texts will include Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Trevelyan’s Cawnpore (a historical account of the 1857 Indian Mutiny), stories and poetry by Kipling, dramatic monologues by D.G. Rossetti and Augusta Webster, and selections of sentimental poetry published in popular periodicals.

Students will be offered a range of options for final projects with various audiences in mind, including course plans, websites, or a traditional research paper. Each will require significant research beyond the primary reading requirements. Students should have completed The Old Curiosity Shop by the first day of class on January 20. It is also advised that they start reading Middlemarch—a novel whose length is exceeded only by its virtuosity—before the semester begins.

This course will consider the complex ways in which the fiction of Hawthorne and Melville illustrates, challenges, and enlarges our understanding of American Romanticism.

Texts:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry (Norton)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches (Library of America, Penguin Paper)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Bedford/St. Martin’s)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Norton)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Bedford/St. Martin)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Penguin)
• Herman Melville, Typee (World’s Classics, Oxford University Press)
• Herman Melville, White Jacket (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston)
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Signet)
• Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (Penguin)
• Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and Billy Budd in Melville’s Short Novels (Norton)

Requirements

• Two papers (the first approximately 10 pages; the second, 10-15 pages),
• Oral presentations, and
• Participation in seminar discussion

Critical pedagogy teaches students how to challenge dominant beliefs and practices with the central tenet being: if students can be taught to understand the dominant systems of power which determine their worlds, they will be come more apt to understand and challenge said systems, thus becoming actively engaged citizens. The underlying assumption is that to be “critically conscious” students must not only become invested in critical thinking, but they also must recognize their place within systemic oppression and want to resist said oppression. But what happens when the students we teach do not see themselves as oppressed, nor do they see the function of education as one of “liberation”? What if students see their college education as just one of the many sites of material consumption they encounter everyday? What happens to critical pedagogy when students see themselves as empowered consumers both in their daily lives and in the classroom?

The central questions for this course will focus on what it means to practice critical pedagogy in an era of corporate sponsorship of the university. In order to investigate what it means to practice critical pedagogy in our current transnational neoliberal economic and educational moment, we must first understand the historical context and practice of critical pedagogy and the development of the corporate university. Therefore, the course will take the form of roughly three overlapping sections of readings. The first will be the classic literature of critical pedagogy with works from Paulo Freire, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, Suresh Canagarajah, Alastair Pennycook, bell hooks, and others; the second will focus on the development of the corporate university model with works from Shelia Slaughter, Gerald Graff, Michael Berubé, Cary Nelson, and others; and the final section of the course will be student driven with readings and foci selected by the students with the guidance of the professor in order to understand who our students are, what they are looking for from their education, and how can critical pedagogy work to resist and assist our students in their desires.

In addition to providing the structure and readings for the last part of the semester, each student will be responsible for reading response papers, a mid-term synthesis essay, two in class presentations, and a final paper that can take the form of either a seminar paper or a teaching portfolio and rationale.

The works of post-structural (and post-structural feminist) and postmodern theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Felex Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Krestiva, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and Jean Francois Lyotard attempt to sketch out a culture beyond existential humanism, the ego-centered subject, the patriarchy, the Freudian psyche, the nuclear family, capitalist economies, Western imperialism and xenophobia, hierarchies of class, race and gender--in short, beyond modernity and modernism.

There is agreement on the general understanding of postmodernism as a new socio-cultural and socio-economic era. The break, expressed particularly by Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard, with modernity, which is central to postmodernism, is an objection to any form of systemacity, closure, or totalization, i.e. discursive formations and narratives, recognizing such activity as arbitrary and suppressive. The postmodern vacuum, the product of deconstructive activity, is a space in which the focus is shifted from homogeneity to heterogeneity (differences) as a result of the shift from repressive ‘center’ to the previously repressed margins.

This course will focus on the literature that is produced by the culture that is beyond modernity and modernism. It will examine the literature that is a product of notions of de-centeredness and heterogeneity and differences, and that is from the previously repressed (modern) social, psychological, racial, sexual, imperial, and economical margins. It focuses on the literature that takes the lessons of poststructuralist theories/analyses into domains of life and attempts to re-fabricate these endeavors on these de-centering, deconstructionist premises.

Global/international readings will be taken from

• Bhanu Kapil (The Diary of the Wolf Girls of Midnapura or The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers)
• Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy or Travels in the Scriptorium),
• Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities),
• Angela Carter (Wise Children)
• Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children),
• Christine Brooke-Rose (Amalgamemnon),
• Kathy Acker (Pussy, King of the Pirates),
• Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo),
• J.M. Coetzee (Foe),
• D.M. Thomas (The White Hotel),
• Milorad Pavic (Dictionary of the Khazars), and
• Clarice Lispector (The Stream of Life),
• Susan Daitch (L.C. or The Colorist),
• Rikki Ducornet (The Jade Cabinet),
• Carole Maso (AVA),
• Graham Swift (Last Orders),
• Amanda Michalopoulou (I’d Like),
• Marie Redonnet (Hotel Splendid),
• Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl or Half Life),
• Merce Redoreda (A Broken Mirror or Death in Spring),
• Sumitru Tsepeneag (Vain Art of The Fugue),
• Magdalena Tulli (Dreams and Stones or Flaw),
• Christine Montalbetti (Western), and
• Lily Hoang (Parabola).

Requirements

Student is required to make an oral presentation on one of the novels and write a short paper (10 pages) and a long seminar paper. Student should come to the first class meeting prepared to discuss Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

If you should ever want-- or need-- to teach college composition, you should seriously consider taking this course. It will provide an historical framework for understanding the teaching of writing as it has developed in American universities in the last fifty years. This course is a required research seminar for students in the RCP concentration, but it is open to any other interested literature or creative writing graduate students.

College composition by the late 1950s had devolved into what the historian Robert Connors characterizes as a “moribund” affair, but by the start of the 21st century had been transformed into one of the most prosperous and dynamic sectors of English studies. How did this happen? Why did this happen? What can people including persons within our own department and within the greater Houston area who experienced these changes –including the students who took college writing themselves and the professors who taught it --tell us about these changes? How have research and scholarship affected how we think about writing during these years? What does research and scholarship tell us about the development of composition during these years?

In studying and creating historical narratives, people who take this course are encouraged to look into local communities and their histories, to interview teachers and former students who experienced these changes, to study textbooks of the era, to construct oral histories and memoirs that document how these changes took place in the Houston area as well as on the national stage.

Traditionally, histories have told the stories of the “great men” and the “great events” of an era— according to Eric Hobsbawm, a British historian, histories have tend to be written “for the glorification of, and perhaps the practical use of, rulers.” Traditional histories, even in rhetoric and composition, have been descriptions of events as viewed from the upper class. In contrast, this course will be interested in what the British (and other) scholars call “history from below” (see Hobsbawm, Kranz, Sharpe, but also T. Miller, Gold, Scott, Foucault) —grassroots histories that stress how ordinary people do extraordinary things and create their own histories, which too often go unnoticed by the elite.

This course will investigate the ways that the new student populations coming to the U.S. university in the 1960s and 1970s, often supported by federal government money, began to influence composition courses and composition teachers. These forces then shaped research and put pressure on scholars and researchers to come up with new and more rigorous ways of investigating writing. Certain publishers (Boynton Cook) supported these changes by putting out books on college composition –there had been few such scholarly books before 1980 because composition was seen as pedagogy not scholarship. Collectives like the Bay Area Writing Project (later becoming g the National Writing Project) which incorporated this ‘new composition’ into its agenda, had huge effects on writing in the public schools in this period. This course will flesh out and qualify this narrative through documentation, offering a critique of the limits of this emplotment (Hayden White).

This course is a research seminar, that is, the first half of the course will provide a foundational framework for understanding methodology and the basic historical landscape of this period, while the second half of the course will be student-centered, asking students individually and in groups to find, choose, and share texts to read, to contribute to a research workshop, and to recognize and apply the rigorous methods to their individual projects. Students will have many opportunities in this course to pursue individual interests in this area.

In addition to a selection of articles and hand-outs, the required texts for the first half of the course will include:
    Two “broad brushstroke” histories—

James Berlin Rhetoric and Reality(1986)
Thomas Masters The Practice of Writing(2004)

And three exemplary books that, in a sense, document the interests of each decade:
John Dixon. Growth Through English (1967, 1975)
Janet Emig. The Composing Processes of Twelfth-Graders (1971)
David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Facts, Artifacts, Counterfacts (1986)

Students will be expected to --

This is a course on Shakespearean Comedy and History and a review of modern Shakespearean criticism. We shall read six Shakespearean plays: Richard II, I Henry IV, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest . We shall read these plays closely for their study of character, their structure, their imagery and symbolism, and their reflections on English Renaissance language, history, and culture. We shall review the sources, textual issues, performance possibilities, and history of criticism associated with each.

Our texts will be chosen from six of the major scholarly series publishing Shakespearean drama in single-play editions: Arden3, Oxford, Norton Critical Editions, Longman Cultural Editions, Bedford Texts and Contexts, New Cambridge Shakespeare, and Cambridge Shakespeare in Production. Each of these series represents a distinct critical approach to Shakespearean drama: each brings its own contextual, historical, and critical materials to bear on the plays; each is intended to frame our understanding of the given text in quite particular ways. In the aggregate, these different editions provide an overview of modern Shakespearean criticism and, by extension, much of modern literary criticism in general. We shall think critically about these interpretive frames even as we address ourselves to the plays themselves.

Assignments

• One short (5 page) paper comparing one of the critical editions on our reading list with a second critical edition of the same play.
• One annotated bibliography or bibliographical essay.
• One conference-length (i.e., 8-12 page) paper that engages with a substantial selection of secondary literature in offering an original critical argument.

If a defining aspect of Romanticism is internalization, the continuities and differences that early nineteenth-century authors held with their high Romantic predecessors might be similarly be described as externalization. This externalization, which reifies and concretizes ideals and abstractions that the first generation developed, summarizes a number of the era’s chief characteristics, including the rise of sensationalism and female sentiment; the increase in prose, narrative, and the move away from Wordsworth’s language of “plain speech”; the impact of print and visual representation and reproduction; the geopolitical expansion from internal revolution to imperial conquest; and the necessary changes in the longstanding Romantic tension between art and commerce.

This seminar on the major works and figures of the later Romantic era explores this notion of “externalization” through various inquiries. What did Keats borrow from Wordsworth, and why then did Wordsworth dismiss Keats? What did the East mean for Byron, and how does it compare it with the Lakes and other domestic locations that exerted significance for the high Romantics? What happened to Shelley when his short verse was anthologized in the later nineteenth century, and why are his major works so hard to read? In exploring these questions, as well as works by other influential contemporary authors (such as De Quincey, Hazlitt, Hunt, Hemans, and Landon), we will uncover the distinguishing trends of British culture and literature from around 1815-1832. Although often characterized as a devolution or degradation of the revolutionary achievements of 1789-1802, the different but related efforts of the later Romantic authors are equally intriguing, and indeed constitute a crucial bridge in understanding the modernities of nineteenth-century culture.

Requirements

Two oral presentations and one seminar paper.

please contact instructor for readings to be discussed in first class.

Course Description

This seminar will explore the work of a number of female poets – largely from the 20th and 21st centuries, though we will make forays into previous centuries at various points to look at antecedents. Occasionally we’ll look at the some poems by men as well, to explore the relation of that work to that of the women.

We’ll explore the evolution of the meaning of gender in poetry – and in poetic reception. How do women make authority claims, and to what extent do those claims convince readers? How/Has that changed over the past century? What do women have to say [qua women], and what ways, new or old, do they chose to say it? What about women who don’t want to be identified by gender, preferring just to be seen as poets? By what means have women been excluded from the canon over years? How do women poets build on the work of female precursors, and how do they build on the work of males? What is the response of male poets to female poets’ successes? How do specific poetic modes intersect with the interests and voices of women (modernism, confessionalism, language poetry, etc.)

Among the poets we’ll discuss in varying depth:

• Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop
• Lucille Clifton, Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Louise Gluck
• Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Harryette Mullen, Susan Howe
• Readings for each week will include both poetry and critical and theoretical texts.

Requirements

One 20-30 page final paper, one short paper presented in class, lots of class participation.

Texts

• John Martin, Baroque


• Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction


• Elena Garro, Recollections of Things to Come (out of print; buy online)


• Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World


• Alejo Carpentier, Concierto barroco
  (out of print; buy online; make sure to get the English version, if that’s what you want, because both the Spanish and English versions have the Spanish title.)


• Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons


• Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera


• José Donoso, A House in the Country (out of print; buy online)


• Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths


• Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions

VISTA Website For Course

Essays on the Baroque, the New World Baroque, and the Neobaroque:
http://faculty.washington.edu/mkaup/collection/

In this seminar we will discuss Baroque aesthetics and expressive structures, and trace their evolution in modern Latin American literature. We will, of course, contemplate the visual arts as well as the literary arts.

In order to consider modern Baroque and Neobaroque literature, we must have a firm grasp of the historical Baroque. We will, therefore, spend most of the first four weeks of the semester in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will trace the exuberant expressive forms of the Baroque from their beginnings in Rome and their expansion through Counter Reformation Europe (especially Spain), to their implantation in the Spanish New World. We will consider the ideology of the Catholic Counter Reformation, the revolutionary new science of the time, which created a brand new sense of space and the self. We will inevitably pay close attention to certain recurring Baroque themes: life as dream, the labyrinthine world, the layered, self-reflexive nature of consciousness, science and the rise of modern skepticism, etc.

Having established a shared sense of the historical Baroque, the seminar will then move to modern and contemporary works of Latin American literature that may be understood in terms of Baroque aesthetics and thematics. Recent theories of the New World Baroque will be particularly useful to our reading of contemporary Latin American literature.

FIRST WEEK: Introduction to the course

Jan 20 - Octavio Paz, “Mexico and the U.S.” POSTED ON OUR VISTA SITE

SECOND WEEK: THE EUROPEAN BAROQUE

• Jan 27 - John Martin, Baroque

This book should serve as your "handbook" on the European Baroque. Its thematic structure is very useful for our purposes, and will serve to alert you to certain Baroque literary techniques employed by the writers we will read later in the semester.

There are excellent websites on the European Baroque and Latin American Baroque, some of which are noted on our VISTA site. You may want to google the work of individual artists, architects and sculptors discussed by John Martin. (On google, select "images" for your search.)

THIRD WEEK: THE NEW WORLD BAROQUE

• Feb 3 - Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2, Conclusion

FOURTH WEEK: INDIGENOUS FORMS IN THE NEW WORLD BAROQUE: ELENA GARRO

• Feb 10 - Elena Garro, Recollections of Things to Come

FIFTH WEEK: AFRICAN FORMS IN THE NEW WORLD BAROQUE: ALEJO CARPENTIER

• Feb 17 - Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, Chapter 3


• Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World


• Alejo Carpentier, "The Baroque and the Marvelous Real." In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 89-108. POSTED ON OUR VISTA SITE

SIXTH WEEK: ALEJO CARPENTIER, continued

• Feb 24 - Alejo Carpentier, Concierto Barroco

SEVENTH WEEK: THE BAROQUE SELF: GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

• Mar 3 - Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, Chapter 4


• Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera


• Posted on our VISTA Site: Texts by and about García Márquez, and images associated with his depiction of the Baroque self

EIGHTH WEEK: GARCIA MARQUEZ, continued

• Mar 10 - Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons
• Posted on our VISTA Site: Essays about García Márquez

• Mar 16-21 - SPRING BREAK

NINTH WEEK: No class

TENTH WEEK: THE ALLEGORICAL IMPULSE: JOSE DONOSO

• Mar 31 - José Donoso, A House in the Country

ELEVENTH WEEK: BAROQUE ILLUSIONISM: JORGE LUIS BORGES

• April 7 - Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, Chapter 5


• Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, with emphasis on "Partial Magic in the Quixote," "Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote," "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," "Kafka and his Precursors," "The House of Asterion," "The Circular Ruins," "The Library of Babel," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"


• Posted on our VISTA Site: Additional essays about Borges’ narrative strategies, “Trompe l’oeil Tricks”

TWELFTH WEEK: BORGES, continued

• April 14 - Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, with emphasis on "History of Angels," "After Images," "A New Refutation of Time," "The Translators of the 1001 Nights," "A History of Eternity," "From Allegories to Novels," "Personality and the Buddha," "Pascal's Sphere"


• Please also read "The Aleph," POSTED ON OUR VISTA SITE.

THIRTEENTH WEEK: WORK ON FINAL PAPERS

• April 21 - “Swords and Silver Rings,” POSTED ON OUR VISTA SITE


• Discuss paper topics and otherwise catch our breath.

FOURTEENTH WEEK: PAPER DUE, April 28

• April 28 - Present your final paper to the class in abbreviated form

Final Paper

(usually connected to your class reports) Is due at the final meeting of the seminar (Apr 28). Your paper should be between 10 and 15 pages long, but that is just to give you an indication of length. It would be very nice if you found a way to integrate a discussion of visual forms into your literary and cultural analysis. I am glad to suggest topics and to read rough drafts, if you give me at least two weeks to do so. Please submit your paper to turnitin.com. Class number and password are noted at the top of the syllabus.

Course Outcomes:

Students will conduct independent research and write a significant research paper, as described above. They wil demonstrate knowledge of particular periods and/or genres, and work to acquire the professional skills required to teach at a four-year colleges or university.