Fall 2009 Courses

English 2330 is designed to introduce undergraduates interested in the English major to basic practices of reading and writing in the discipline of literary studies. This course teaches writing about literature, with emphasis on writing the critical essay and the research paper. 

Students write 8 papers, and revise 2 of them.

This section of English 3301 is designed to be an introduction to literary studies in several different respects.

The works we will study have been chosen to offer historical range and context. We will begin with the seventeenth century poet John Donne and proceed to the Victorian Age as it is mirrored in Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations and twentieth-century Modernism with its desire to "make it new" as it is illustrated by James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The second half of the course will emphasize modern and contemporary American poetry and Postmodernism. In addition to reading selected poems, we will focus on Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon.

The course will also introduce the students to a variety of critical approaches. For the week on Donne's poetry, we will use the close textual analysis favored by New Criticism. I have chosen the Bedford Case Studies editions of the Dickens and Joyce novels because they include essays represent important contemporary literary theories such as psychoanalytic criticism, reader-response criticism, feminist criticism, deconstruction, and new historicism. We will spend three weeks on each of these novels so that the students can study the works from the perspective of several of these models of interpretation.

Another dimension of the course is that it will also include a consideration of art as performance. We will attend as a group a performance of a contemporary play staged at one of the city’s professional theatre companies, and students will write a response paper that will form the basis of class discussions the following week. In addition, students will attend a creative writing reading of their choice and write a response paper about that experience. This assignment will also complement our academic critical analysis of the poetry and fiction on the reading list.

The Middle Ages as "A Distant Mirror" of Contemporary Culture: Gender and Sexuality; Terrorism; War

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

Texts

• The Lancelot-Grail Reader, ed. Norris J. Lacy (NY: Garland, 2000) ISBN 0-8153-3419-2.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. by James Winney (Lewiston NY: Broadview Press, 1992) ISBN 0-921149-92-1
• Beowulf: A Prose Translation, Second Edition (Norton Critical Editions) (Paperback) by Nicholas Howe (Editor), E. Talbot Donaldson (Translator)( New York: W. W. Norton; 2nd edition, November 2001) ISBN-13: 978-0393974065
• S.J. Allen and Emilie Amt, ed. The Crusades: A Reader (Lewiston: Broadview 2003). ISBN 1-55111-537-9
• Stephen Knight/ Thomas Ohlgren, ed. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo: University of Western Michigan Press; TEAMS Medieval Texts) ISBN 978-1580440677
• Selected texts and readings put on Webct.
• Highly recommended: If you are able to, purchase a copy of the DVD or the VHS tape of John Boorman’s 1981 film, Excalibur. I do a lot with this film in the first third of the course. It is widely available for under $10. At local stores or from ebay, Amazon sellers, Buy.com, Half.com etc. I will put copies on reserve in the library, but having your own copy will be convenient.

This course will survey some major genres and writing practices of the 16th and early 17th centuries—poetry, prose, romance/epic, translation/adaptation—using the frameworks that early modern thinkers and writers created to theorize their own culture. So, we will begin with one of the most pervasive concepts of the early modern world: order and disorder. This unit will include selections from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, essays by Francis Bacon, Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, and homilies. Subsequent units include place and travel (travel writing; selected poems of John Donne, Ben Jonson, Amelia Lanyer, Andrew Marvel and others); work and economic life (poems by John Skelton, Isabella Whitney and other materials); rereading/ rewriting the classics, the continent and the bible (The English Bible translations; Milton, Petrarch and English sonnet sequences, Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam). A rich and varied picture of early modern English life and writing will emerge from our studies.

Required text

Greenblatt, Stephen, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century, The Early Seventeenth Century. 8th edition. Vol. 8B (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) on order at the UC Bookstore. Used copies are available.

Course components

Writing is a major component of this class. We will devote some class time to your formal papers-in-progress and to revision. I offer a research essay as an option and am always willing to talk with you about your writing. Two short papers, 1 midterm exam, a final project, informal responses to reading focus questions (discussion board) posted on Webct. Students are expected to read all the texts including introductions and notes in preparation for each class period.

Honors and Women’s Studies credit available; see me.

Taxes, occupations, job transfers, global economies, toxic assets—today’s economic world differs from that of Shakespeare’s time, but he has a lot to say about economics that we will find interesting. From a belief in nature’s “bounty” to the institution of service, from bribes to contracts and legal quibbles, from joint-stock companies to the price of a theatre ticket, a range of economic experience was possible in early modern English life. In this course, we will study Shakespeare’s writing from the earliest narrative poems and some sonnets to his late plays and include comedies and tragedies. As a point of entry into the early modern period we’ll take ideas of labor, property (and props), economics, and exchange to study how Shakespeare dramatizes such matters as domestic, national, personal, and marital property; the ownership of land; relationships among masters and servants; mercantilsim and global trade; and the identities associated with various kinds of work, money, ownership, poverty, and social mobility. The course will emphasize writing and careful close reading. We will read some literary criticism, social history, and some other materials as well as works by Shakespeare.

This class will be constructed as a hybrid, meeting typically on M or W for lecture and via WebCT for weekly discussion board posts. 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; see me. .

Required text

Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: WW Norton, 1997 on order at the UC Bookstore, though any scholarly editions will do. Be sure the text you use has decent footnotes and a useful introduction. Skim before you buy!

If you do not get the Norton or other Collected Works, you will need the following poems and plays (list is subject to change): Venus and Adonis, the sonnets, A Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, and The Tempest.

Course components

Writing is a major component of this class. We will devote some class time to your formal papers-in-progress and to revision. I offer a research essay as an option and am always willing to talk with you about your writing. One short paper, 1 midterm exam, a final project, informal responses to reading focus questions (discussion board) posted on Webct.

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.

Text

Novels will include:

• Jane Eyre
• Hard Times
• The Mill on the Floss
• The Moonstone
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Dracula

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 whatís 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 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. The central course text is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

This course will not attempt the usual survey of nineteenth and early twentieth British literature. Instead, it will focus on four poets and four novelists who are representative in certain ways of the Romantic, Victorian, and early modern periods. We will pair Lord Byron and Jane Austen, Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, and T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. The opportunity to study intensively a limited number of writers and works will allow us to consider some of the issues and conflicts that helped to shape the modern world.

Examples of some of the topics we may discuss include artistic responses to a crisis in culture, the conflicting claims of science and religion, the possibilities of individualism in an increasingly mass society, the value of imaginative vision in a utilitarian world, and the viability of myths in a world that is paradoxically seen as both ruled by tradition and marked by chaos.

Reading List

• Austen: Pride and Prejudice
• Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred
• Dickens: Hard Times
• Tennyson: In Memoriam
• Hopkins: selected sonnets
• Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Eliot: The Waste Land
• Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

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 emphasis tends toward studying texts as both constructing representations of and representing culture and gender. Of late, a renewed interest in the modernist period focuses on its similarities to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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.

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

Learning Outcomes

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

Required Texts

• 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
• Strunk and White, Elements of Style
• Kennedy, et al., Handbook of Literary Terms

Assignments

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

All essays must be properly documented (MLA, Chicago, 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 project and may result in more serious penalty. Please consult the UH Academic Honesty Policy.

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. Students must complete the essay portion of the final in blue books. Quizzes may occasionally occur.

Attendance

Attendance is mandatory. Three absences before midterm will result in a Drop. Three absences incurred during the semester will result in the reduction of the final grade by one full grade. Those with excused absences (absences for university authorized business) will still be responsible for the material covered during those absences. Students who anticipate more than two absences should probably not take this course. Exams rely heavily on lecture and discussion material.

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, religious, 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.

Texts

We will read texts written mostly after 1980. The readings will be taken from the following texts:

• John Cheever’s Bullet Park,
• Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy,
• Don DeLillo’s White Noise,
• Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,
• Toni Morrison’s Jazz,
• Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,
• Darcey Steinke’s Jesus Saves,
• Rikki Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet,
• Richard Powers’s Gain,
• Andrew X Pham’s Catfish and Mandala,
• Carole Maso’s Ava,
• Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,
• David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,
• A. M. Homes’s Music For Torching,
• George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation

Requirements include a short paper, a mid-term exam and a final exam.

This course will examine writing that has emerged from formerly colonized countries such as Africa, India and the Caribbean particularly from the period of the diasporic anti-colonial and nationalist movements to the present time. Consequently, the course will consider ideas around empire, activism, nationalism and its disillusionment, migration, gender and hybrid identities. Some questions that will be considered based on our reading of these texts include: To what extent have these writers contested the colonial histories of their respective counties? How successful has nationalism been in these “new nation states”? What are some of the challenges of these former “new nation states” in the era of global capitalism?

Texts may include

• Jane Austen nization – Pride and Prejudice
• Ama Ata Aidoo – No Sweetness Here and Other Stories
• Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things
• Chitra Divakaruni – The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
• Edwidge Danticat – Krik? Krak!
• Julia Alvarez – In the Time of the Butterflies
• Sam Selvon – A Brighter Sun
• Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place

The purpose of this course is to help students develop advanced research and writing skills by allowing them to develop their own research questions and/or sites of inquiry about a place – Houston. I have chosen the city and its outlying areas, as the focal point of the course because UH students have daily relationships with the city, its freeways, and its culture. They will therefore be able to find interesting and viable subjects for research and analysis from their own experiences and contacts with and within the city. Furthermore, students’ connection to the city will allow for an exploration of how research and writing (either critical, creative or electronic) are deeply connected to our personal understandings and memories of places.

The course will be taught in roughly four units that are designed to help students formulate, research, and produce a product about place that is based in their own inquiry about Houston. As a class we will explore both research methods (archival, ethnographic, visual), as well as products (autobiography, critical essay, electronic media) that help showcase the integrity of their inquiry, as well as the site-specific research they have performed. In other words, the goal is for students to understand research and writing as a process, not a predetermined series of events leading to a particular kind of product (i.e. a critical essay or research paper). Instead, the research in this course should allow students to not only better understand their own world, but also allow them to better understand modes of discourse (i.e. visual, audio, written) and how each have rhetorical purposes that can add to the presentation of their findings. Because I want students to be able to present their research in multiple forms, I have asked that video cameras, digital voice recorders, and laptop computers be accessible for this course.

Ultimately this course will produce sound, video, and written documents that should help us understand the city of Houston from the point of view of those who experience it everyday. By creating inquiries based on experience, and then contextualizing those experiences within larger bodies of text and context (i.e. laws, cultural practices, art, neighborhood lore), I believe the students will begin to see research as a viable means of understanding their world. At the end of the course, the students and I will publish their products in a website archive that will allow students and faculty to learn about Houston from the work of this course.

The readings for this course will include essays on archival research, ethnographic research (Dorothy Smith), interviewing methods (Marge DeVault), visual rhetoric (Cindy Selfe), sound and video essays (Jeff and Jenny Rice, Cindy Self, Ann Wysocki), alternative research writing (Nancy Mack), theories of the development of cities (Setha Low, Neil Smith), and creative non-fiction about Houston and place (Mark Doty, Phillip Lopate, Joan Didion).

[An undergraduate research course offered as part of a QEP interdepartmental initiative]

This undergraduate research course constitutes a term-long project dedicated to docume ntingthe effects of hurricanes Rita and Katrina upon displaced people currently living in and around Houston. The course will take place in conjunction with a national effort that involves the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the American Folklore Society, and the Houston Institute for Culture, among other organizations.

Students will work with interviews recorded by the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston Project (SKRH), the first large-scale project in which survivors of a disaster have taken the lead role in documenting that disaster. Hurricane survivors receive training and pay to record the narratives of fellow survivors in the Houston area. The recorded narratives (which number more than 430 as of March 2009) include not only the survivors’ storm stories, but also their accounts of the communities where they lived before the storm and the new communities that they are creating in the Houston area. The project presents substantial possibilities to all students interested in the effects of Katrina and Rita. Students interested in anthropology, folklore, history, psychology, public programming, social work, sociology, and a number of other fields may choose research paths directly related to their areas of specialty.

The course begins with a description of the project and an intensive introduction to the project database. Students will listen to survivors’ recorded narratives, edit and/or transcribe specific narratives, and work with the keyword and topics functions of the database as they prepare for more specialized work.

The chosen term project may involve further work with the database, including specialized projects on such topics as legal issues, housing, narrative style, the formation of new communities in the Houston area, the role of religion in survivors’ lives, legends circulating in survivor communities, and the musical traditions of survivors. Students with prior experience in oral narrative fieldwork (ENGL 4366 or its equivalent) may engage in interviewing people who took part in the local response to the hurricanes. There exists a possibility for internships dedicated to public programs involving the survivor community.

Requirements

• Extensive work with the Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston archive database;
• A term-long project centered on archiving, fieldwork, public programming, and/or a specific research topic related to the contents of the project’s database.

Texts

Most of the common readings will be works generated by the project – in addition to the interviews themselves, there are a few publications:

• Armstrong, Eugene, Griffin, Jasper, and Lindahl, The Houston Survivor Project. Callaloo 29:4 (2006): 1504-1538.


• Lindahl and Nash, “Survivor-to-Survivor Storytelling and Trauma Recovery,” The Dialogue: A Quarterly Technical Assistance Bulletin on Disaster Behavioral Health 5, 1 (2008)
  http://mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/dtac/dialogue/Issue1_08.asp#three


• Lindahl et al., Archiving the Voices and Needs of Katrina’s Children: The Uses and Importance of Stories Narrated Survivor-to-Survivor. [46 ms. pages, in Children, Law, and Disasters: What Have We Learned from the Hurricanes of 2005? Chicago: American Bar Association, 2008.]


• Also assigned: Folklife and Fieldwork. Booklet published by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Creation and Performance of Dramatic Literature aims to teach skills that will prepare students to read critically and write analytically about dramatic literature as well as to write a one-act play.

The course will introduce students to a study of dramatic literature while simultaneously concentrating on the craft of playwriting. We will study selected one-act plays by such American playwrights as Susan Glaspell, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Alice Childress, David Henry Hwang, Maria Irene Fornes, Douglass Turner Ward, and Josefina Lopez.

The course will include a study of the elements of drama, such as conflict, identity, character, irony, ambiguity, etc. We will pay close attention to how to read and interpret stage directions, how to imagine the theatrical effects of sound and silence, and how the effect of colors, costumes, groupings, and positions on stage create drama. We will explore other elements of drama, including understanding the understated meaning of the dialogue, dramatic structure, rhythm, and pacing. To enhance students' craft, we will attend and review productions of plays at local theaters as well as invite local theater practitioners to campus to give talks and lead discussions about the playwriting process and other topics related to the world of theater.

Over the course of the semester, students will write their own one-act plays and participate in the workshop process. Finally, students will produce public staged readings of their plays to audiences that they help develop. In sum, this course teaches students how to read, view, and write critically about a play, how to write and revise a play, and how to develop an audience to attend the staged readings of the one-act plays.

What is the difference between Modern, Post-Modern and Contemporary verse?

We will survey American, 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.

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

Novels to be examined may include:

• US
  • Edwidge Danticat – Breath, Eyes, Memory
    Cristina García – Dreaming in Cuban


• UK
  • Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners
  • Jean Rhys - Voyage in the Dark


• Canada
  • Ramabai Espinet – The Swinging Bridge

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, 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.

Prerequisite

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

Texts

Andrew Carnie, Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 2007.

We shall study some of the works of two nearly contemporary American women novelists, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, both of whom were responsive to the naturalist and modernist movements in literature, traveled between the American East Coast and France frequently, and emphasized women’s conditions within a patriarchal world and patriarchal narratives, and yet had nothing to do with one another. Class was partly responsible for their aloofness from one another (Wharton came from old money, Cather from middle class background), but it was not uncommon, in fact was all too common, that female writers shunned one another’s company, a situation we might explore. Nonetheless, as well as considering their unique narratives and lives, we shall also consider what their fiction shares. Cather, the younger of the two by about ten years, likely had Wharton’s The House of Mirth in mind, for example, when composing A Lost Lady.

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

Gilbert and Gubar, eds., Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism

• Wharton, The House of Mirth
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Cather, Alexander’s Bridge
• Cather, A Lost Lady

(I may add two other novels, one each by Wharton and Cather)

Learning Outcomes

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

Assignments

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.

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. Two absences (including excused absences) before the midterm exam will normally result in a drop.

This is an introduction to the literary study of the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament, though we shall also consider the composition (“genetic”) history of these texts. The Bible includes a veritable anthology of literary genres: narrative, song, dream vision, folktale, lament, dramatic dialogue, parable, proverb, epistle, etc. This generic variety is matched by copious literary craft, including close plotting, irony, complex characterization, rhetorical address, metaphor, allegory, and much else. In addition, the biblical canon, written over the course of some twelve centuries, includes within itself many layers of repetition, redaction, reworking, and self-commentary. This complex of texts offers a rich and varied field for literary analysis; it also raises fundamental issues of originality and derivativeness, vision and revision, authorial intent and interpretive latitude. Our readings will include: Genesis, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, Psalms and Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Ezekiel, Job, the Gospels of Mark and John, the Epistle to the Romans, and Revelation. We shall read the Bible in the King James Version (1611), which scholars consider a generally reliable reflection of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek originals – but which, for our purposes, has the additional advantage of being itself a classic work in English. For some texts, we shall compare the KJV with other versions. NB: this is not a course on biblical theology or biblical archeology: we shall emphasize neither the claims of faith that have been or may be made on these texts nor the claims that these texts may make or seem to make on historical verisimilitude.

This course satisfies three hours of the British Literature pre-1798 requirement for English majors. The course is open to all students; it may be taken for Honors credit by students of the Honors College.

This course begins with Ferdinand de Saussure and his revolutionary developments and advancements in Modern Linguistics. These developments and advancements serve as the foundation of modern literary theories such as structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalytical theories, post-structural feminism, reader-response theory, and post-colonial theory. The course aims to test the applicability of these theories to representative texts.

Three novels have been assigned for the first three (3) weeks of the semester. They include a traditional/realistic novel, a post-structural feminist novel, and a postmodern novel.

Beginning the fourth week, we will devote each session to an assigned critical work. As the course/semester develops we will set those works against each other to test their limitations and tacit assumptions about theory. We will attempt to discover the sorts of narrative to which they respond. During the second half of certain sessions, we will continue to discuss the week’s theoretical reading, but these sessions will focus on practical applications: what the week’s theory can and cannot illuminate in the works that we are reading.

The required theoretical books and novels are available in the bookstore. Other books/articles are on reserve in the library.

Requirements

Student is required to write a short paper (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. In addition, each student is required to participate in a group presentation, where the group, using one of the theories discussed in the course, offers a reading of one of the required texts.

Required Texts

• C. Brontes, Jane Eyre
• Clarice Lispector, The Steam of Life
• D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel
• Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies
• Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
• Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Selections from)
• Luce Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman
• Helen Cixous, The Newly Born Woman
• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
• Gayatri Spivak, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” and Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism”

Student should come to class the first day prepared to discuss Jane Eyre. Student can also read the first chapter of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and the introduction to Michael Lane’s Structuralism, which will be on reserve in the library.

Folklorists consider folklore the foundation upon which all other culture is based and hence indispensable to any inquiry into the workings of culture. This introductory course concentrates on American folk culture from the nineteenth century forward, with particular 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 the Houston area: 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 workings 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 some basic premises and practices of ethnography.

Texts

[The first three items will be available at The College Bookstore, northeast corner of Scott and Elgin]

• 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.
• Georges, Robert A., and Michael Owen Jones. Folkloristics: An Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
• Reader. A booklet assembled for this course and distributed b y the professor

Carl Lindahl will be accessible principally through e-mail: Lindahlc9@aol.com

Fiction workshop: In this course we will closely examine student stories and give suggestions for improvement. Students will revise at least 1 (2 if time permits) stories and re-submit them for discussion, a process which enables them to become better revisers. Additionally, we will analyze how different elements of fiction have been used in selected stories from master writers and discuss essays that focus on different aspects of the art of writing. This is a workshop geared to hone your strengths, make you understand your weaknesses, and push you to the next level.

This seminar will look at the history of the practice known as rhetoric. We will begin by reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion as a work in rhetorical theory that sets out some of the major issues for the course. Next, we will ask what a practice is. We will then look at major texts within the rhetorical tradition as a way of moving inside the practice of rhetoric. We will proceed loosely in a chronological fashion, but our goal is not to arrive at a coherent narrative history of rhetoric. Rather, we will use close readings of major texts to allow us to discover rhetoric as a philosophical problem and as a productive intersection of theory and practice.

Requirements

A critical or creative project appropriate to the student’s interests. These projects must be approved in advance by the instructor. In scope they should be equivalent to a scholarly essay in an advanced seminar. And although I am technologically challenged, I am also toying with the idea of using a class blog to allow students to pose questions and comments. As your fellow students will tell you, I have a tendency to talk a lot and the blog may allow a few other voices to enter the class.

For the first class meeting, please read Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Also, either at the end of the first class or beginning of the second class, we will discuss a selection from Alasdair MacIntyre’s On Virture, using that selection as a resource to develop an intellectual frame for the course. I will distribute a copy of the MacIntyre selection before our first class.

Texts

• Austen, Persuasion
• Sophocles, Philoctetes
• Plato, Gorgias
• ---, Phaedrus
• ---, Portagoras’s “Great Speech”
• --Gorgias “Encomium of Helen”
• --Aristotle, Rhetoric
• Cicero, de Inventione
• Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
• Machiavelli, The Prince
• Sartre, What Is Literature?
• Burke, Rhetoric of Motives
• DeMan, selected essays—if we have enough time

Decades ago, in his presidential inaugural address, John F. Kennedy rallied Americans to dedicate themselves to public service with a sentence that has become a part of our national lexicon, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The phrase, whose call to volunteerism ultimately resulted in the start of the Peace Corps and similar initiatives, endures today not only because of its laudable purpose, but also because of its style—that is, in two short clauses Kennedy reverses the order of repeated words, using a figure of speech known as antimetabole (sometimes also called chiasmus). The stylistic effect, achieved through the parallel rhythm and syntax of the words, is to make the sentence moving and memorable.

Regardless of whether students know the term “style,” they can easily recognize writing that has a powerful impact on them. The study of style, which is concerned with analyzing readers’ responses to texts and how writers achieve those effects, can, in turn, give students knowledge of how to deploy similar techniques in their own writing.

Composition and literary scholar Richard Ohmann has defined style as “a way of writing,” and his short definition, though just one of many, indicates what’s really at stake with style: Given all the possible ways of conveying our meaning, how do we choose which ones to use? Style, then, involves a series of both conscious and unconscious choices writers make about everything from the words we use (diction) and their arrangement in sentences (syntax) to the tone with which we express our point of view (e.g., ironic, formal, or colloquial) and the way we achieve emphasis in a sentence (e.g., by placing the most important information at the end). The figure of speech in Kennedy’s address, another stylistic choice, is just one of hundreds of similar devices—like parallelism, alliteration, and metaphor—that writers use for specific effects. Style can thus be seen as a rich array of resources for writers, borrowing, for instance, from the fields of grammar, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and literature, to achieve their aims. In composition, however, style, one of the five canons of rhetoric (along with invention, arrangement, delivery, and invention), is, above all, a rhetorical concept, meaning that it is connected to a writer’s purpose, subject matter, audience, and context.

If style offers such a rich array of resources for readers and writers, why is it relatively invisible today in the field of composition and rhetoric—and often in composition classrooms, as well? The short answer is that style fell out of disciplinary favor among practitioners in the 1980s when it became associated with formalism and current-traditional rhetoric, and thus focused on the textual product and static language practices (e.g., mechanical correctness). Ironically, at the same time that it was acquiring these pejorative affiliations—a period that paralleled composition’s process era—some scholars were devising innovative techniques like sentence combining and generative rhetoric to connect style to invention and other forms of language production. Yet, style’s decline also resulted from larger forces inside and outside the field. It got lost, for instance, amid the advent of new ideas from literary and rhetorical theory that caused an unprecedented bouleversement in disciplinary thinking about language and culture. Thus, the study of style, competing in a climate of tremendous change, waned.

Despite its sometime disappearance from composition theory and pedagogy, however, style has reemerged in the 21st century as an area of significant interest in the field. Indeed, amid composition’s various disciplinary reincarnations—the rhetorical turn, the public turn, the visual turn, and the digital turn, for example—another shift is now occurring: the stylistic turn in rhetoric and composition. What accounts for the renewed interest in style at this point in history, and why does its recent recuperation matter to composition students and instructors? The recent rehabilitation of style will be the central area of exploration in the course. After a thorough grounding in some of the literary and rhetorical history leading up to style’s current place in the field, we will investigate the areas where style has migrated in the field (e.g., studies of genre, technology, culture, and visual rhetoric) and will discuss some of the future uses and study of style in the discipline. Seminar participants will have the opportunity to apply the study of style to their own scholarly interests and to develop a research project suited to their individual research needs. The seminar, though grounded in the field of rhetoric and composition, is highly interdisciplinary in nature, and, as such, will also examine stylistic study in literature, creative writing, and linguistics.

Requirements

The requirements for the course include:

• A seminar essay of publishable quality (40%);
• A writing journal with specific assignments (10%);
• A midterm exam (15%);
• An individual presentation (10%);
• An annotated bibliography (15%);
• And regular, lively participation (10%).

Texts

• Brummett, Barry. A Rhetoric of Style. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008.
• Butler, Paul. Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric. Logan: Utah State UP, 2008.
• ---. Style in Rhetoric and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.
• Flannery, Kathryn T. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Literature, Literacy, and the Ideology of Style. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.
• Johnson, T. R. A Rhetoric of Pleasure: Prose Style and Today’s Composition Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 2003.
• Johnson, T. R., and Tom Pace. Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2005.
• Lanham, Richard A. Analyzing Prose. 2nd ed. London: Continuum, 2003.
• ---. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.
• Schroeder, Christopher, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell. Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 2002.
• Smitherman, Geneva, and Victor Villanueva, eds. Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.

This seminar will focus on James Joyce’s Ulysses. I will presume some prior familiarity with Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and will incorporate particular events and trajectories within Irish history into the course framework.

The seminar will be organized on a week-by-week basis, exploring methodological and theoretical categories as they may be applied to Ulysses at the rate of one or two a week. I will ask each student to pick an appropriate critical essay, book or edited collection and introduce it to the class, leading our discussion for a given week. Students are encouraged to pick an area that will be of significant interest to and use for one or both of the assigned essays. Each critical methodology will be connected to a particular chapter of Ulysses, so if students have to present a methodology they aren’t crazy about, they may still have a chance to present a chapter that interests them. Students will sign up for weekly discussions at the first class meeting, when we will talk as we go about the assigned readings and how they might intersect with various participants’ interests.

I will facilitate the formation of a weekly reading group outside of class time where those who wish to may read at least part of each week’s primary reading aloud. It is my observation that comprehension of Ulysses goes up by over 100% when the novel is read aloud in a group setting. Time spent actually doing the assigned reading, on the other hand, does not go up significantly, since group readings cut way down on the amount of time one spends reading the same lines over and over again. Group reading forces one to keep moving, so that periods of confusion are shorter and less upsetting, and allow one to make the intuitive connections that are a significant element of the book’s famous but too often elusive pleasures.

Final grades will reflect seminar participation (presentation, 10%; general participation, 10%); and two essay assignments: 8-10 pp. (20%), and 15-25 pp. (60%) in length. The shorter paper may be revised and resubmitted, and it may be used as the basis for the longer final essay.

Sample Syllabus

M 1/23, Introduction
Get to know each other, schedule a time and place for weekly readings, sign up for weekly discussions. Suggestions for reading strategies.

M 1/30, Biographical approaches and “Telemachus”
Margot Norris’ Companion to Ulysses: Biographical and Historical Contexts and A Critical History (Norris)
Ulysses, Chapter 1, “Telemachus”

M 2/6, Philosophical and Classical approaches, “Nestor” and “Proteus”
David Richter, Falling Into Theory: Introduction (Richter)
Ulysses, Chapters 2 and 3, “Nestor” and “Proteus”

M 2/13, Minority Literature, “Calypso” and “The Lotus Eaters”
David Richter: DeLeuze and Guattari, “What is a Minor Literature”
Ulysses, Chapters 4 and 5, “Calypso” and “The Lotus Eaters”

M 2/20, Psychoanalysis and “Hades”
Margot Norris: Psychoanalysis (Devlin)
Ulysses, Chapter 6, “Hades”

M 2/27, Deconstruction and “Aeolus”
Margot Norris: Deconstruction (Derrida)
Ulysses, Chapter 7, “Aeolus”

M 3/6, Marxism and “The Lestrygonians”
Margot Norris: Marxism (McGee)
Ulysses, Chapter 8, “The Lestrygonians”

SPRING BREAK, MONDAY MARCH 13-FRIDAY MARCH 17

M 3/20, Canon formation and “Scylla and Charybdis” and “The Wandering Rocks”
David Richter: Gauri Viswanathan, Lillian Robinson and Edward Said
Ulysses, Chapters 9 and 10, “Scylla and Charybdis” and “The Wandering Rocks”
FIRST (8-10 pp.) ESSAY ASSIGNMENT DUE

M 3/27, Critical Race Studies and “The Sirens” and “The Cyclops”
David Richter: Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe and Wilson Harris
Ulysses, Chapters 11 and 12, “The Sirens” and “The Cyclops”

M 4/3, Feminism/gender studies, popular culture and “Nausicaa”
Margot Norris: Feminism and Gender Studies (Mahaffey)
David Richter: Janice Radway
Ulysses, Chapter 13, “Nausicaa”

M 4/10, Queer Theory and “Oxen of the Sun” (14)
David Richter: Eve Sedgwick

M 4/17, “Circe” (15)

M 4/24, Postcolonial theory, “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” (16-17)
David Richter: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

M 5/1, “Penelope” (18)
REVISED FIRST ESSAY OPTION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY 5:30 PM TODAY

This course is designed to prepare its members to analyze film, using the discourse of film criticism, to teach literature using film, and to practice critical writing about film adaptations of literature.

1. Theory of Adaptation:

Typically, film adaptations of literary texts reflect the contemporary cultural developments (various wars--WWII, Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq War-- the rise of feminism, complications of gender construction and sexuality) that parallel the production of these cinematic materials throughout the past century. Attention will be paid to the kind of audience these literary materials, as adapted, are projected to, whether in the medium of theatrical films or television. Initially, the course will ground the students in the major landmarks of film criticism, theoretical writings about the adaptation process, and exemplary specimens of such theory as applied to specific adaptations of classic literary texts.

2. Literary Texts Covered:

As a laboratory for learning about reading, viewing, teaching, and writing about film adaptation, seminar members will study selected major medieval authors, works, topics, and genres, such as Beowulf, Arthurian romance, Chaucerian tales, Robin Hood narratives as well as the 20-21st century film and television adaptations that interpret these medieval materials. The first two thirds of the course will consist of the study of selected medieval texts and their cinematic adaptations. Select scenes will be shown and discussed in class. Seminar members will explore additional film materials outside of class on Webct. Reflecting my recent interest in 18th-century medievalism, we shall also consider cinematic adaptations of early examples of the rise of the novel, Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana and their film adaptations. While studying the medieval and eighteenth-century models, seminar members will be encouraged to begin collecting critical and cinematic materials about their own chosen topics (see below) as early as possible.

3. Film in Pedagogy:

The course is also a practicum in how to teach literature by using film materials. The final third will consist of each seminar member teaching a sample class (about 80 minutes long) about a selected literary text (which may or may not be medieval or 18th century). Each class member will develop a sample syllabus for an invented literature course using literary texts and film materials, and will create a teaching portfolio with materials collected about the developed course and the specific unit about which the seminar member will present to the rest of the group a sample class using film materials to complement the literary text. Possible developed courses might include (in addition to topics of medieval literature, medievalism): various 18th-21st century period novels and their film adaptations; Shakespeare (or other dramatists) adapted in Film; American literary topics adapted in film, or suitable topics of your choice. These teaching portfolios will be useful for Ph.D. students on the job market or for secondary school English teachers. Instruction will also be given in the technology of teaching with film: creating film clip compilations, instructor voiceovers, the use of WebCT, etc.

4. Writing Film Criticism:

As a complement to the teaching portfolio, members will write a conference-length paper (8-10 pp.) about some aspect of the film adaptation of a literary text. The topic can reflect the medieval course materials or some aspect of your portfolio topic. Theoretically, this paper could be submitted to a conference CFP or expanded for submission for publication by a journal.

Required Texts
(some of these may be provided as PDF files in the course Webct site):

• The Lancelot-Grail Reader, ed. Norris J. Lacy (NY: Garland, 2000). (particularly good to match with the plethora of cinema Arthuriana).


• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. by James Winney (Lewiston NY: Broadview Press, 1992) [or any translation you already have]. There are at least 5 interesting film adaptations.


• Beowulf: Norton Critical Edition, trans. E.T. Donaldson [or another translation you might already have]. There have been 5 major film adaptations of Beowulf in the past 10 years.


• Stephen Knight/ Thomas Ohlgren, ed. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (TEAMS). There is a plethora of Robin Hood themed movies and television series. This book is also available electronically at the TEAMs site.


• Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Selections). There are many interesting interpretations (medieval and contemporary) of the Canterbury Tales for film and television, including animated adaptations.


• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (any edition); Roxana (any edition).


• A book of theoretical/ critical writings about film adaptation (as yet not chosen).

Fiction Master Workshop: This course is for any Cr. Wr. graduate student who has written all or most of his/her manuscript. It is an excellent and unique opportunity to have your entire book read carefully by the class and to receive thoughtful and extensive line edits as well as a holistic evaluation. Depending on the size of the class and the nature of the manuscripts received, we will also read novels/story collections which I feel will help you with your project. This course will enable you to zero in on the strengths and weaknesses of your manuscript and will help you prepare your manuscript for the thesis/dissertation defense.

Construction of the Poet and the Reading of Paradise Lost and Selected Prose and Verse
Thus far … I have given an account of myself, in order to stop your mouth and refute your lies, chiefly because of the good men who otherwise know nothing of me.
(Milton, Second Defense of the English People)

John Milton was a man of contradictions. A classical humanist and a radical revolutionary; a man of action and of contemplation; a lyric poet and a writer of polemical political treatises; a poet of the “cult of chastity” and an advocate for divorce. In his own lifetime he was regarded as a heretic, a “fornicator,” a Puritan saint, a misogynist, and proto- feminist. He was also the poet’s poet and prose writer’s prose writer: that is, he was deeply concerned about his artistic craft and the construction of his identity and future as writer. Milton continues to be a site of controversy about the ways in which the life of the poet intersects with his or her art.

We do not just “read” Milton – he challenges us to understand him as a person and artist (as we see from the passage from the Second Defense), to consider how he and his work relate to major social and political issues. He asks that we read his art in the context of his personal and artistic development and of the conflicts of his generation – in this he thinks of himself as an “author” in Foucault’s sense of the word, and not just as a “writer.” As a result, there has been a rash of new biographical and critical studies that try to understand the man and poet from difference perspective – literary, psychological, and spiritual.

This seminar will take up Milton’s invitation to study and understand both him and his work. Our reading will be selected and organized to provide an approach to understanding his artistic and intellectual development, and an opportunity to read Paradise Lost and other works in that context. Thus, there are two aspects to our work together: we will familiarize ourselves with Milton’s artistic and intellectual development through selections of his minor verse and polemical prose, and we will read and discuss Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Class discussion, reports, and seminar presentation will reinforce this broad outline of our study of Milton.

Recommended Text

John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, New York, 1957.

For the first day of class: read Milton’s verse letter “To His Father” (“Ad Patrem”), Sonnets 7 (“How soon hath time…”) and 19 (“When I consider…”), and the first verse paragraph of Paradise Lost.

This semester we will examine two questions, one historical, the other pedagogical. The first question centers on how Austen figures into our received narratives of literary and generic history. In keeping with such traditional historical questions, we will examine how the mid-18th century sentimental novelists, many of whom were female, contributed to a generic tradition culminating in the psychological realism of Jane Austen. And the appeal of such an historical narrative lies in its placement of Austen and “realism” at the end of a long line of development.

The other question centers on how Austen can be taught in undergraduate novel courses at this point in time, when students are less likely than ever to read for pleasure, to recognize unassisted the genre’s conventions, or to know the historical and literary contexts necessary for understanding pre-20th century fiction. Whatever we wish students to learn about a particular domain of fiction, we must teach--and they must acquire--during a semester’s worth of reading, research, and writing assignments. So a portion of our time will be taken up with the problem of teaching students how to contextualize novels like Austen’s on their own, through their own independent research and inquiry, without relying on instructors to predigest the books for them. Consequently, we will have assigned readings in pedagogy as well as Austen criticism and theory, and some degree of independent research, too.

Primary Texts

• Jane Austen,
  • Juvenilia
  • Northanger Abbey
  • Sense and Sensibility
  • Persuasion
• Eliza Haywood, Fantomina
• Mary Davys, The Coquet
• Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
• Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
• Frances Burney, Evelina
• Ann Radcliffe, The Italian
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary

Class Requirements
(all information subject to change)

• one annotated bibliography (1-2 pp.) on Segment I (Haywood, Davys, Richardson)
• one formal presentation (ca. 10 mins.), which includes an annotated bibliography and response essay (1-2 pp. ) handed in afterwards, on Segment II (Lennox, Burney, Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft)
• two informal presentations (5 mins.), during Segments I and III on course readings class participation, including in-class group-work, contributions to course-blog, etc.
• final research project (10-20 pp.), developed in consultation with instructor

The course will be a close study as to the assumptions and characteristics of the American Realist and Naturalist literary periods. We will evaluate some of the present criticism in American literature along with the classical discussions of Realism and Naturalism. Using literary works recognized within the categories, classical critical texts, and contemporary criticism, the course will attempt to develop the conceptions that currently make up our understanding of American Realism and Naturalism.

Learning Outcomes

The expected learning outcomes of this class include becoming familiar with the literary categories of Realism and Naturalism, the ability to recognize the characteristics of each literary historical division, and the ability to write comprehensively about authors within each of the divisions.

Required Texts

• Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Henry James, Portrait of a Lady and “Daisy Miller”
• Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez
• Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don
• Mark Twain, Huck Finn
• Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
• Richard Wright, Native Son

Required Critical Texts

• Donald Pizer, ed. Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism
• Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
• Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

Course Requirements

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

Over the past few decades postcolonial theory has examined the traces left by Anglo-French imperialism on the high culture of Europe, through the method known as "colonial discourse analysis." This method has been applied to everything from opera to Jane Austen. Far less work has been done addressing the question of the traces left by imperialism on America culture. When the topic has been taken up, the focus has predominantly been on popular culture. Even though the writer of the literary novel in America, for example, increasingly turned her/his attention to America's spheres of influence in the "Third World" after the end of World War II, postcolonialists have mostly avoided thinking about the correlation between these novels and American foreign policy. This course juxtaposes writing about the social history of America's foreign relations after World War II with American novels set in "Third World" countries during this period in order to ask what if any correlation is discernible between U. S. literary culture and imperialism.

The hoped for outcomes of the course include a conversational command of the most basic paradigms in postcolonial theory, a more specialized command of debates and rhetoric around American imperialism, and broader familiarization with genres, themes, settings, and situations in the contemporary American novel.

In addition to keeping up with the reading and attending class, requirements include a shorter paper to be presented in class during the semester and a longer paper to be handed in at the end. Typically, students present their conclusions from their paper to the rest of the class in brief, informal remarks at the last class meeting.

Reading List

A (8 or 10 novels from the following list)

• Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952), or The Spider's House (1955)
• Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (1959)
• Thomas Pynchon, V (1961)
• Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato (1978)
• John Updike, The Coup (1978)
• Kathy Acker, Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978)
• Russell Banks, The Book of Jamaica (1980)
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
• Reginald McKnight, I Get on the Bus (1990)
• Norman Rush, Mating (1991)
• William T. Vollman, Butterfly Stories (1993)
• Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
• Patricia Henley, Hummingbird House (1999)

B (parts or all of the following critical/historical texts)

• Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb.
• Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire.
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror.
• McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945.
• Pease, Donald. essays
• Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism.
• Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America.