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Course Goals

The goal of this course is to instill critical thinking skills and improve students’ ability to analyze literary, rhetorical, and cultural texts. Improved writing and reading skills and introduction to a sample of basic critical schools and literary genres are among the secondary goals. The course seeks to achieve these goals through a series of archetypal ‘mythologies’ or grand stories that we use to organize our experience with the world as contemporary citizens of the United States. The reading list chooses from a number of genres, periods, and critical approaches. The central themes of the course are: 1. civilization, 2. love, and 3. America.

Requirements

Students will write three formal papers of approximately 5 pages in length and complete a series of short assignments and reading quizzes.

Readings

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
• Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
• Edward Said, Orientalism
• William Shakespeare, Othello

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, postcolonialism, and globalization.

The course shall explore affinities between Medieval literature and contemporary cultural and political issues 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 depicted these texts cinematically to reflect current issues. Texts and topics include: Beowulf (and about 5 film versions) and the contemporary War on Terrorism; Arthurian Romances (The Vulgate Cycle, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and various films and TV reflecting issues of gender and sexuality; 12th-century Crusades narratives and chronicles and 15th-century Robin Hood ballads and recent films and TV Series based on Robin Hood and the Crusades that engage with the issue of the Iraq War

This course will sample Shakespeare’s writing from the earliest poems to his last play (a romance) and include comedies, tragedies, and a historical play. As a point of entry into the early modern period we’ll take ideas of property (and props), economics, and exchange to study how Shakespeare dramatizes such matters as domestic and marital property, the ownership of land, relationships among masters and servants, and the identities associated with various kinds of ownership or lack thereof. The course will emphasize writing and careful close reading. To complement our reading and discussion of the drama, we will read some literary criticism, social history, and some other materials from Shakespeare’s time—domestic conduct literature, mercantilist tracts, and descriptions of England.

Students are expected to read all the texts including introductions and notes and to do some video viewing outside of class. Honors and Women’s Studies credit available.

Required text

Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: WW Norton, 1997.

Reading list

Subject to change but will likely include: The Rape of Lucrece, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Coriolanus and The Tempest.

Readings

• 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.

Anyone studying Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama becomes as entranced with the plays as the original audiences—immersed in plots steeped in heroic drama, witty comedy, domestic tragedies, ballad opera, and parlor drama. One proceeds form the bawdy comedy of the Court of Charles II to the reformed comedy of Richard Steele and efforts to revive laughter on stage with Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer and Sheridan’s The Rivals.

A possibility exists of the Drama Department’s presenting Wycherley’s The Country Wife during the fall semester. It would be a unique opportunity to study this wild comedy and see it presented on stage.

The history of playhouse management, stagecraft, and costuming in the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century drama becomes a study of the actors and actresses who reinviograted the stage. A great deal has been written about this period. The professor and students will struggle to limit the amounts of material they wish to absorb in the course, but the course will focus upon 16 key plays from 1660-1800.

While it is not possible to view many of these plays--most are not available on videocassettes, other than The Way of the World, The Beggar's Opera, and School for Scandal--but students will compensate for this lacuna by acting out scenes themselves and by demonstrating a live interpretation of dramatic roles.

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

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 Romanticism as 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, the Romantic concept of the hero, and Romantic irony.

On-line VISTA course, with accompanying DVDs

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.

Required texts

• DVD's, available from UH Distance Education
• 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)

Why do we read literature? Should we be expecting instruction, entertainment, beauty, or philosophy from our reading? What should we be noticing as we read? How do we know what’s important? How do we define good, beautiful, or important literature? These questions have been the focus of literary criticism and commentary since the ancient world, and have been answered in many different ways by different philosophers, critics, and theorists. This course introduces students to the long history of literary criticism and theory from Plato to the present, covering major ideas and writers in the field. Particular attention will be paid to literary criticism after 1900 and the development of modern and contemporary theoretical movements including New Criticism, Structuralism, Russian Formalism, New Historicism, Feminism, Marxism, Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism, Postmodernism, and New Media Theory. This course is strongly recommended for students considering graduate study in literature.

Books:

• The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1. Ed Frank Kermode et al.
• Gulliver’s Travels.
• MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.
• Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms.

This course covers the scope of English literature from Old English Beowulf to the works of Robert Burns and William Blake. The course is divided in four segments; Dr. Rothman has published in each of these areas:

• Medieval Literature
• Renaissance Literature
• 17th-Century Literature
• Restoration and 18th-Century Literature

An exam after each part concludes study for that sequence of materials.

Students are asked to study materials closely. There are only two essential questions in literary criticism: (1) what has the author written and (2) how has he written it? An essential part of papers will be the demonstration of the importance of these documents to our understanding of the world we live in. How are they relevant today?

What course cannot interest the reader when it includes Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock? The issue is to provide innovative interpretations, unique insights, and imaginative psychoanalytic and historical understanding. Teaching in the course is shared by the students, with students intermingling their classroom presentations with the professor's lectures.

The course requires (1) a short critical essay (4-5 pages, 1000-1250 words), and research paper (10-12 pages, 3000-3500 words, plus documentation)

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; also available, Amazon.com.]
• 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.

The Nobel Prize in Literature honors a writer’s lifetime of work, unlike the Pulitzer Prize which recognizes a single work. The Nobel Prize is often controversial. The Nobel Prize Committee honored Sinclair Lewis for his satirical treatment of small-town American life, an award that disturbed many critics. Boris Pasternak won his award for works culminating in Dr. Zhivago. His views were anathema to the Soviet Union, the officials of which banned him from accepting the medal in Oslo. While many deserving writers have not won the award, Nobel Prize winners are without a doubt the finest writers in their individual countries—and most have universal appeal. In recent years, the Nobel Committee has awarded the prize to the best writer in a country not previously granted the award.

Requirements:

• All work in the course is conducted by mail and computer webct.
• 2-page expository essay
• 4-5-page critical essay
• 10-12-page research paper, with documetnation
• Mid-Term exam, covering the first half of the novels
• Final exam, covering the last half of the novels

Mainstream 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 should have had college coursework in reading and writing about literature. Competency in written English 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.

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 reading the texts by the assigned date (quizzes possible), for informed, engaging class discussion, and for one essay and a corresponding oral presentation which will combine library and internet research with close reading of text.

All essays must be properly documented (MLA, Chicago/Turabian, or APA style); that is, information, ideas, and text solicited, purchased, or otherwise procured from outside sources/benefactors must be acknowledged and acknowledged in the proper professional format. Failure to comply with documentation policy will result in failure of the assignment and may result in more serious penalty. Please consult the current UH Academic Honesty Policy.

There will be a midterm (date to be announced) and a comprehensive final examination (on the date scheduled by the university).

Contemporary American Fiction will be examined within the context of an emerging postmodern American society. Since the 1960s, a new phenomenon of American social reality has emerged. The emergent forms of a new commercial culture, the rise of computer and information networks, the mechanization of culture, the mediation of culture by the media, the shift from print literacy to images, urbanization, the absence of meta-narratives, and the co-existence of diverse cultures, races, and religions are all features of this new American society. We have diverse urbanization coinciding with the proliferation and extension of mass culture. This is a pregnant moment in the United States because you have the racial and cultural pluralization of institutions and practices and thus the creation of an image of the United States as a newly heterogeneous society. Within the span of the semester, we will hear as many of these diverse voices and examine as many of the literary trends as possible. We will read texts written after 1980. The reading list will be taken from the following texts: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, George Saunders’ In Persuasion Nation, Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Darcey Steinke’s Jesus Saves, Carole Maso’s Ava, Rikki Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet, Richard Powers’s Gain, Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala, Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and A. M. Homes’s Music For Torching.

Requirements

Each student is required to read all materials assigned in the course and to participate in class discussions. Each student is required to write a short paper (5-6 pages). Each student is also required to take a mid-term exam and a final exam.

Preliminary Description

We will take a rare opportunity to study the female characters of one major 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, 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.

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.

Tentative List of Cather Novels

• Pioneers!
• The Song of the Lark
• My Antonia
• One of Ours
• A Lost Lady
• Lucy Gayheart

Texts

• Mansfield, Katherine. Stories
• Cather, Willa. My Antonia
• Porter, Katherine Anne. Collected Stories
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Didion, Joan. Play It As It Lays
• Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall
• Byatt, A. S. Possession
• Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor
• Doerr, Harriet. Stones for Ibarra

The readings for this course have been selected because they present women who differ from the heroines of traditional fiction and/or because they utilize a fictional structure that differs from the that of traditional fiction.

Students will be expected to write logically organized papers that stress the students’ main ideas, that are supported with specific evidence from the readings, and that provide interpretation of those ideas and that evidence.

English 3363 will include a review of themes in African American literature and will focus upon a study of six novels and film adaptations, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), The Color Purple (Alice Walker), Beloved (Toni Morrison), The Women of Brewster Place (Gloria Naylor), The Wedding (Dorothy West), and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Terry McMillan). The course will focus on the core themes reflected in Black literature, life, and culture as explored in both the novels and film adaptations.

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. The discussions will be guided by a series of questions: What are the issues raised in the novels and films? In what ways do the novels and the films critique issues surrounding race, community/nation, gender, class, sexuality, and spirituality? Are there key scenes in the novels that are omitted or revised/reconceptualized in the films, and what are the ramifications of these omissions or revisions/additions? Are there scenes in the films that do not appear in the novel, and how do the additions enhance/focus or distort the primary text? How are the novels and the films in dialogue? How have the film adaptations shaped literary production by Black women writers?

In addition to reading the novels and viewing the film adaptations, students will be introduced to theory and literary criticism relative to the course’s content. The following assignments are likely to be required: five short quizzes as well as two exams, an annotated bibliography, a 7-8 page research paper, and a brief oral presentation on a research project.

Course Goals

The goal of this course is to introduce students to basic themes and genres of Arabic literature of the modern period across national traditions. The secondary goals are to improve the students critical thinking and writing skills and provide a basic cultural literacy regarding the modern Arab world. Specific themes pursued include women and gender in Arab society, the legacy of colonialism and the conflict with Israel, the legacy of the current series of American military interventions, the place of tradition in contemporary Arab society, the development of the novel, Arab economic unequal development, and Arab cosmopolitanism.

Requirements

Two short papers (about 5 pages), a midterm, and a non-cumulative final.

Readings

• Adonis, An Introduction to Arabic Poetics
• Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise
• Yahya Haqqi, The Lamp of Um Hashim
• Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun
• Betool Khedairi, A Sky So Close
• Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley
• Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
• Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door

Course Description:

This course is a survey of early forms of Caribbean writing that precipitated the emergence of the novel in the 1950s.  We will trace the development of Caribbean writing from the oral tradition with its combination of the drum and the voice to its scribal forms of poetry and the short story which emerged simultaneously as experiments with drama.  We will examine samples of the oral tradition such as the legend, elegy, narratives, dreadtalk and signifying (or robber talk) to determine common themes  and aesthetics. Subsequently, samples of Caribbean poetry, short stories and drama will be compared with the oral forms for evidence of continuities and differences in aesthetics and literary strategies.  Critical readings of the texts will assist in the consideration of questions such as: What are the historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to this body of writing? What are some of the common thematic concerns? Can we speak of there being a Caribbean literature?  Are there similarities and/or differences with other canonical and postcolonial literatures? Is there any evidence of a distinctive aesthetic emerging?

Reading samples will be taken from the following texts:

• Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt. Eds. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.
• John Wickham and Stewart Brown. Eds. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories.
• Alison Donneland Sarah Lawson Welsh. Eds. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature.
• Errol John, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl.

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has asserted that the real historians in Latin America are its novelists. We will examine this premise by reading a number of works by contemporary Latin American writers, and discussing the historical events and personages depicted therein. We are interested in how these novelists dramatize the history of their regions, and how their fictional versions illuminate our understanding of the "real" history of Latin America.

• Carlos Fuentes (Mexico): The Buried Mirror
• Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay): Memory of Fire (This is a trilogy: the 3 volumes are Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind)
• Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia): The General in his Labyrinth
• Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia): Of Love and Other Demons
• Elena Garro (Mexico): Recollections of Things to Come
• Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru): The Storyteller

Prerequisite:

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

Text:

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

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

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 author’s 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 Dracula with its implications in historical, sociological, psychological, deconstructionist, and genre theory. (Students may be asked to donate a pint of blood to their local blood bank.)

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).
• Gibaldi, Joseph and Walter S. Achtert. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Sixth Edn. N.Y.: Modern Language Association of America, 1984. (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
• Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Series Ed. Ross C. Murfin. 1897; Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. (pbk.) ISBN: 0-312-24170-4.
• Lanham, Richard. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California P, 1969.(Pbk)

Reserved Shelf: UH M. D. Anderson Memorial Library

• Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Ed. Daphne Patai and Wilfrido Corral. Columbia UP, 2005. PN 81.T445 2005 (ISBN: 0-231-13417-7). Discussion of literary theories, edited by Guerin et al., will recommend readings in Theory’s Empire, which offers counterpoints to contemporary orientation of critical response. Paperback editions may be purchased on a voluntary basis for $29.50.

Evaluation of Performance

• In-Class Presentations: 15%, as assigned
• Editing Task (printed output): 10%, due Sept. 19
• Bibliographic Description (1-2 pp): 20%, due Oct. 3
• Rhetorical Analysis (100 lines of a poem): 10%, due Oct. 17
• Document Restoration: 5%, as assigned
• Research Essay (10-12 pp. plus documentation): 20%, due Nov. 28
• Final Examination (5-8 p.m.): 20%, due Dec. 12

The theory and research of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who worked in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, has had an enormous influence on the emerging discipline of composition and rhetoric. Vygotsky’s work was taken up by compositionists interested in viewing writing as a process (Emig, Britton, Berthoff, Flower), but from 1986 to the present, it has also been applied to understanding writing as social practice (Bazerman, Prior, Zebroski, Gere). Currently, international activity theory which bases itself on Vygotsky’s insights is popular both within the discipline of composition and rhetoric in the US (Baszerman, Russell, Prior, Birkenkotter) and across the globe, in many other disciplines.

Yet Vygotsky, like all of us, was a child of his time. Working in the first third of the 20th century in the newly created Soviet Union, Vygotsky’s work while Marxist in spirit, was suppressed by Stalin’s apparatus until 1956. Vygotsky’s work, among many other things, is modernist. It draws on understandings circulating in Europe and the US during this time which might in fact be called high modernist.

This course introduces Vygotsky’s work and asks two related questions:

First, does Vygotsky’s work have relevance for us who live in 2007 in a postmodern moment in the USA nearly a century after Vygotsky? Does it have relevance for teaching college writing at UH? If so, what is the relevance and what are the Vygotskian concepts that can we add to our tool kit for teaching writing and composing college writing curricula?

Secondly, if Vygtosky seems dated due to his modernism (or his Marxism, or his disciplinary commitment, etc), what can we learn from Vygotsky about ourselves as teachers in our specific time in history that will be helpful to teaching writing and composing college curricula in writing? How can we use the work of Vygotsky to defamiliarize or estrange (a Russian formalist concept – ostranie) our world, to raise questions about our teaching, our curriculum? What do we need to know about culture and cultural rhetoric to teach writing at UH? What effects does social class have on our work, especially in the first year composition course?

This course, while it introduces the work of Vygotsky, is primarily a course about composition pedagogy. It asks you to reflect on your practice as a writer and as a teacher or potential teacher of writing, to construct pragmatic practices you can take into the composition classroom and curriculum. The second part of the course will explicitly discuss teaching writing and successful teaching practices in composition and rhetoric. Obviously, to the extent that the scholarship of the first half of my career is in the area of Vygotsky and Russian and Eastern European language theory, this course is also an introduction to the instructor.

The textbooks will include:

• Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (revised 1986 edition)
• Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society (1978)
• James Zebroski, Thinking Through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing (1994)
• Bronwyn Williams (ed.), Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education (2006)
• Duane Roen (ed.), Strategies For Teaching First-Year Composition (2002)

The course will investigate Chaucer’s early works, placing them in the context of other analogous European examples of the genres of lyric, dream vision, and romance-epic. Chaucerian lyrics will be examined in context of other Middle English lyrics as well as the French, German, and Italian traditions of the troubadour poets. Chaucerian dream visions such as Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, House of Fame, and Legend of Good Women will be examined against such dream visions as Romance of the Rose, and the “dits” of Machaut, Froissart and other French writers, and other Middle English dream visions. Troilus and Criseyde will be examined in context of its sources in Boccaccio’s Philostrato and other analogous texts about the Trojan War and/or Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Seminar members will be responsible for gathering ancillary materials and bibliography about one of the course texts/topics and contributing them to the building of a WebCT site for the course. Writing projects will include a bibliographic essay, an abstract, and a 20-minute conference paper to be delivered at a mock conference at the end of the course.

Probable Texts Used:

• Charles Dahlberg, trans. Romance of the Rose
• R. K. Gordon, The Story of Troilius
• Stephan A. Barney, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (Norton Critical Edition)
• Kathryn L. Lynch, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems (Norton Critical Edition)
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (any edition).
• Robert R. Edwards, ed. John Lydgate Troy Book: Selections (TEAMS) (also online)

Periodization

This course takes up one of the most important developments in English cultural history during the "Age of Johnson" (ca. 1740-1800) the appearance of a series of literary works and genres whose interests were decidedly worldly, empirical, and documentary. Though we might now describe such works as "life-writing," "journalism," or "non-fiction," these writings went into other categories, and belonged to a different literary system when they first appeared. The emergence and popularity of this body of works, however, should make us reconsider certain master-narratives concerning this period, particularly "the rise of the novel" or "pre-romanticism."

Writing and Truth

The authors of such works promised readers a truthful account of the world around them, even while they labored rhetorically to move readers in various ways. In all these works we can see a tension between their claims to transparency (acting as the "window" through which readers could recognize injustice or prejudice) and their persuasive aims (to serve as something more than description). These are writings whose aesthetic interest was inextricably linked with their truth-claims, and this late-eighteenth century phenomenon included confessions, memoirs, biographies, travel writings, autobiographical novels, collections of letters, periodical essays, slave narratives and anti-slavery poetry, political pamphlets, and satirical novels with characters modeled on literary and political celebrities. What this group of writings shared was an assumption that writers were obligated to communicate their truths to the greater public, and that the public's broadly positive response not only confirmed, but ratified the value of such writing. It was assumptions like these, often left unspoken, that underwrote the moral and critical judgments of Samuel Johnson, the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson, the Methodism of John Wesley, and the distinct political positions of Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, and William Godwin. This is why I've treated the writings of this period, whatever their genre, as part of a coherent cultural system.

Some Concepts

One way to understand this coherence is to look at the characteristic conceptual resources of the period: at the most fundamental level, what kinds of words did they use to describe what they were doing, or should be doing, or could never do? How did these words get discussed, defined, argued over, or discarded. Consequently, while we read through some of the most compelling examples of this kind of writing, we will also be investigating these writers' elaboration of a number of key concepts: "public" (etymologically linked with both "publicity" and "publication," and thus closely associated with this period's material consolidation and expansion of print culture); "sensibility" (a capacity for quick feeling that demonstrated one's awareness of other people's suffering); "polite letters" or "literature" (the cultural zone that encompassed not just "fiction" but works of philosophy, history, political thought, and so on. To describe how these concepts were deployed in these works, we will be using not just the framework of an advancing "print culture," but also Habermas's account of the "public sphere," along with certain revisions and critiques of Habermas (Calhoun, Eley, Mah, Warner). One of the questions we will be pursuing is the dependence of particular genres on specific literary or cultural concepts (either tacit or explicit) that give them value and purpose. What happens, for example, to particular genres after those foundational concepts lose their currency or disappear entirely from the scene?

Politics, Literature, Genre

These changes in the constitution and organization of the public, authorship, and knowledge were driven in part by long-term developments in Anglo-British political life, institutions, and communications. Our period begins with a crisis in political leadership in the 1740s and leads into a series of continental wars and imperial adventures driven by European colonial expansion, a process culminating in the French revolutionary upheavals of 1789 and the British counter-revolutionary repression of the 1790s. We will trace concurrent developments in poetry, non-fictional prose, and the novel to give a systemic account of generic relations between 1740 and 1798, an extraordinarily fertile period for generic innovation in both literary and political discourses.

Modernity and Sentiment

Many of these innovations can be construed as formal responses to an important feature of modernity being established during this time: a broadly defined reading audience being assembled together ever more solidly and continuously by the temporalization of pamphlets, newspapers, and political parties. The result was twofold: a new political and aesthetic conception of "the public" and a host of new or revitalized genres in prose, poetry, and the drama. As I will argue, one of the consequences of this increasingly global awareness of the existence (and suffering) of others was the expansive, generalizing concept known as "sensibility." Though this "sentimental" impulse could always be satirized as complacent or self-indulgent, it also provided opportunities for feminists and writers of color to publicize and contest the sufferings of those subordinated to this period's structures of power. The sentimental and anti-sentimental works of this period therefore became a prime locus for debates about the mass suffering produced by its hegemonic institutions of marriage, family, state, and (eventually) empire.

Course Requirements:

• class participation (This means showing up and handing things in on time)
• 2 presentations. These will be relatively brief (ca. 5 mins), but will require some research. Depending on the interests and background of the students, I will either suggest topics (biographical, critical, theoretical) or allow students to develop their own. Each presenter will find two articles or book chapters by the Friday preceding class, and give me a copy. (You can use JSTOR, Project MUSE, or any other resource to get these). The presentation will explain the usefulness, relevance, or persuasiveness of one of the articles regarding the primary reading. You don't need to summarize the secondary reading so much as show how it is useful for reading our text; point out a passage that seems suited to such a reading, and have a question or two ready for the class about the passage, approach, etc.
• 3 brief response papers (1-3 pages) on readings or presentations, due as indicated on the syllabus. I will be circulating questions at the end of each segment. If you've presented during the segment, you will be using one of your critical texts as the jumping-off point for your essay. If not, you will be using one of my questions.
• 1 longer research project (10-15 pages), which can be developed from earlier presentations or response essays, due at term's end. This can take a variety of forms, and will be developed in consultation with instructor.

I'll also be making available certain primary, critical and/or theoretical texts available through xerox packets for each class. These should be available by the Wednesday preceding class, and will be placed on my door for you to xerox.

The seminar will focus on selected major works of the second generation of the British Romantic poets-- Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights will also be studied as expressions of the Romantic sensibility as it was reflected in some of the fiction of the period.

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 various conceptualizations and definitions of Romanticism, Romanticism as an artistic response to a crisis in culture, the interplay between tradition and innovation/revolution in Romantic literature, female Romantic writers and Romantic writings about women, 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:

• McConnell, Frank, ed. Byron's Poetry (Norton Critical Edition)
• Marchand, Leslie, ed. Don Juan (Riverside, Houghton Mifflin)
• Shelley, Mary Frankenstein (Bedford Books, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism)
• Bronte, Emily Wuthering Heights (Norton Critical Edition)
• Reiman and Powers, eds. Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition)
• Keats, John Complete Poems and Selected Leters of John Keats (Modern Library)

Recommended Texts:

• Abrams, M. H. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (Norton)
• Bloom, Harold Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)
• Mellor, Anne Romanticism and Feminism (Indiana UP)

Course Requirements:

Active participation in the weekly seminar discussions, a bibliographic essay surveying selected recent criticism on one major work or topic, and a final seminar paper.

Using the experience of WWI as a trope for defining the modern American novel, American literary critics and scholars historically produced an image of the United States in the first few decades of the twentieth century (and of the modern American novel) as monocultural, in which gender, class, race, colonial, and ethnic differences were massively downgraded. Yet, we know that the United States has always been a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious society, beginning with indigenous Natives, Anglo-Saxon immigrants from Western Europe, and enslaved Africans. The United States’ growth at the beginning of the twentieth century into an economic superpower entailed not only industrial and technological growth and expansion, and urbanization, but also massive multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious immigration (and colonization) from Ireland, Eastern Europe, China, Japan, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Mexico. This new modern American society created the context for American writers of the various gender, racial, class, sexual, colonial, and ethnic differences to conceptualize the United States. This was actually a wonderfully pregnant moment—the 1920s and 1930s—in American literature: American writers struggling to name this new American society.

In this course, I will re-configure Modern America and re-represent the modern American novel, allowing conceptual spaces of race, gender, sex, class, and Anthropology to be critiqued or to be displaced. Using what Derrida calls the logic of le supplement, the course discloses the presuppositions of an American literary studies based on monoculturalism and constitutes the means whereby the intricate interdependency of various forms of cultural/literary exclusion and phobia can be disclosed and de-centered. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, and ethnic minorities of the 1920s and 1930s, who refused to be aggregated within marginalized social spaces, in a discussion of the modern American novel, I hope to effect a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm. The readings will be taken from the list below.

Texts:

• Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Richard Wright, Native Son
• Willa Cather, My Antonia
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
• William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
• John Dos Passos, The Big Money
• Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth
• John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath or Robert T. Farrell’s A World I Never Made
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
• Younghill Kang, East Goes West
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
• D’Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded
• Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez
• Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps

Requirements:

Student is required to write a short paper (8-10 pages), which is due the seventh week of the semester. Student is also asked to write a long seminar paper (15-20 pages), due at the end of the semester. Each student is also required to make a short, twenty-minute oral presentation on one of the texts listed above. The presentation can be a general reading/interpretation of the text or it can focus on a particular section or theme within the text. The presentation and the two papers cannot focus on the same text. One of the papers can be a development of the oral presentation. Student should come to class on the first day prepared to discuss Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.

Studies in Literary Translation will have a dual focus in that it is designed as both a seminar and a workshop. The first four weeks of the semester will be devoted to translation theory, especially hermeneutics and poetics. As an initial application of the study of theory, we will then compare selected passages of noted translations. These may include the Binyon, Ciardi, and Mandelbaum translations of Dante's Inferno, the McDuff, Markov and Sparks, and Raffel translations of Mandelshtam, and the Smollett and Putnam translations of Cervante's Don Quijote, as well as French translations of Wharton's The Age of Innocence. For the remainder of the semester, the format of the course will shift to a workshop in which students will undertake an individual translation project—an English translation of a literary text. The process will include establishment of criteria for translation that are appropriate for the selection and its audience, and the translation exercise itself. The goal of Studies in Literary Translation is to produce a polished, publishable English-language translation. Accordingly, the course will also consider publication protocols and opportunities for literary translation.

Prerequisite

Completion of sophomore-level foreign language courses. If a student wishes to enroll in the workshop without this prerequisite, but claims competency in a foreign language by means other than coursework, please see me prior to registration.

Texts:

• John Biguenet and Reiner Schulte, The Craft of Translation
• George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

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 17th and 18th 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, and postcolonial literature more generally.

Texts

• John Martin, Baroque
• Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction
• Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World
• Alejo Carpentier, Concierto barroco
• 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; use internet)
• Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
• Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions

Website for the seminar with an array of essays on the Baroque and New World Baroque: http://faculty.washington.edu/mkaup/collection/

VISTA website with additional materials.

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