Spring 2009 Courses

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 American literature. 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 that represent five important contemporary literary theories: psychoanalytic criticism, reader-response criticism, feminist criticism, deconstruction, and new literary 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.

Course Requirements

• Active participation in class discussions
• A 2-page response paper to a poetry reading of the student’s choice
• A group oral report
• Two 5-7 page critical essays
• A final 10-page research paper

 

Methodology and Content

This course is a “hybrid” or “blended” course that meets face-to-face only one day a week, either Tuesday or Thursday, depending on which section you enroll in. The other 50% or more of course work is presented and performed online in a WebCT site for the course. The course is focused on a close reading of Chaucer’s 14th-century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, a story collection told by 29 pilgrims--each representing a late medieval social group or occupation-- journeying from London to Canterbury Cathedral to make a pilgrimage at the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket. The course is organized as a recreation of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, following the map between London and the shrine, in which each town or station on the route corresponds to one week of the course. The text of the Canterbury Tales will be read in the original 14th-century Middle English. Chaucer’s story collection includes a cornucopia of the prominent medieval literary genres: Arthurian romance, secular romance, epic, fabliau or bawdy tale, hagiographical romance, saint’s life, allegory, Breton lay, beast fable, etc. Class members not only will study the typical medieval tales told by Chaucer’s Christian pilgrims, but also will research the concept of comparative world pilgrimage practiced by other non-Christian religions (Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism) as well as secular pilgrimages to modern “shrines” of secular “saints” (Elvis, Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, The Beatles, John Lennon) and other places of memorialization, Ground Zero, the Vietnam Memorial, etc.

Structure of the Course

Students will be responsible for reading the assigned tales in Middle English each week, listening to the instructor’s podcast lectures about the text, watching or listening to the assigned videos, web pages, or sound files illustrating aspects of the tales or facets of late medieval history, culture, or daily life on WebCT, and then taking an online quiz based on that week’s materials by midnight of the day before the face-to-face class day. Each quiz is worth 1% of the final grade. Guides to the weekly study modules will outline the homework activities for each week and present questions for discussion at the face-to face class meeting.

Writing and research projects

• All class members will adopt the persona of one of the pilgrims or another medieval figure as an avatar, in whose voice they will respond to prompts on a message board periodically during the semester.
• Additionally, each student will research another pilgrimage (in multimedia materials found on WebCT or through independent research) and report about the experience of making that pilgrimage in his avatar’s voice.
• A “close reading” critical paper (4 pp.) on a passage from the text
• A group project involving research culminating in the group’s creation of a podcast about a text not covered in class, a performance of a tale, a courtroom trial about one of the issues in a tale, or some other demonstration of mastery of Chaucer’s text or some aspect of medieval culture.
• A final critical paper (8-10 pp.) or creative project.
• A comprehensive final exam (essay).

Required texts

• The Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Broadview, 2008) ISBN 13- 978-1-55111-484-2 (If you own another Middle English edition of the Canterbury Tales, please consult with me about its acceptability.
• Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales 2nd ed. (Oxford UP, 1996) ISBN 0-19-871155-7

 

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

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

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

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

 

Cheating spouses, jealous husbands, reluctant heroes, corrupt rulers, cheeky apprentices—this is not “reality t.v.,” but Elizabethan and Jacobean drama! These are some of the memorable characters we’ll encounter as we explore English drama over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries. These characters populate the stage in castles and shops, in busy London streets, lonely palace dungeons, and even in a madhouse. We will study popular plays from the period and trace the development of a set of conventions that have come to stand for “the English Renaissance stage,” such as the use of plot and subplot, London as a setting, and the soliloquy. Since commercial theaters were still very new in the 1590s (when our study begins), we may catch a glimpse of some of these important theatrical, cultural, and literary conventions as they were being established. Students will read some literary criticism and theatre history. They will be expected to share their written work-in-progress.

Required text

All the readings (except one) will come from: Bevington, David, et al., eds. English Renaissance Drama. New York: WW Norton, 2002. (on order at UH Bookstore)

Individual plays will likely include:

• Marlowe, Dido Queen of Carthage (available via WebCT) and/ or Edward II
• anonymous Arden of Faversham
• Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday
• 2 comedies by Jonson
• Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
• Rowley, The Changeling.

Writing

• 2 formal essays written outside of class
• Midterm exam, final exam
• WebCT discussion board (we may make a portion of the course a hybrid, doing lectures face-to-face and discussion via WebCT)

Honors credit and Women’s Studies credit available.

 

This course serves as an introduction to a rich variety of Victorian texts and to the social and cultural contexts that produced them. Students will gain interpretive and analytical skills to enhance their understanding of novels and poetry written during one of the most complex and challenging periods in modern history. At the heart of the course lie several questions that were as critical for Victorian readers as they are for us today: in an industrial, consumerist society, what is the purpose of art and literature? How does literature offer writers and readers ways to understand and even critique their society? What kinds of (necessary?) escape does art offer? What purpose does fantasy serve? What kinds of truths can only be told through creative forms?

To explore these questions, we will be reading novels, short fiction, prose essays, and poetry that represent the major literary tendencies of the period: narrative realism, psychological and moral inquiry, social critique, and aestheticism.

Key authors include: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Meredith, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Augusta Webster, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde.

 

This course is designed to introduce you to a broad cross section of modern British novels, from the works of Victorian literary realism through various strands of modernism to contemporary works grappling anew with women's issues, class divisions, sexual identity, and the turbulent politics of England after empire. The course will emphasize two basic skills: appreciative reading of literature, and critical writing exploring literature analytically, in relationship to its social and historical context. I will help to provide a sense of British history and the British literary tradition through a series of short lectures. Course time will be spent discussing the assigned texts. These discussions will take place in small discussion groups and as a class. For each small discussion I will designate a group member to summarize group discussion for the class as a whole, so that small group discussions can help to elicit general discussion.

Texts

• Charles Dickens, Hard Times
• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
• Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Writing

There are three levels of writing that this class will demand: informal, semi-formal and formal.

Your informal writing will take the form of weekly reading notes that will allow you to formulate contributions to in-class small group and class discussions of the reading questions. You must, at minimum, come prepared for class with two open-ended questions designed to initiate discussion in your small group or in the class as a whole. If it becomes clear that some students are not doing the reading, I will collect the reading notes and assign grades to them, factoring them into the weekly grade assigned for in-class discussion. In total, in-class discussion/participation and reading notes will account for 15% of the final grade.

Three 2-3 pp. essays responding to one or more of the assigned texts in a particular unit are a cross between the informal “reading journal entry” and a more formal critical essay. These essays are, in effect, a chance to show me essay drafts exploring ideas for the formal essay without a lot of pressure to perfect them, although obviously some revision is likely to result in a higher grade. The short essay should have a clear thesis that is supported with textual evidence, and should be clearly and cogently written, with a clear introduction and conclusion. Each of the three short essays will count as 10% of the final grade.

The 5-8 pp. formal essay represents a central goal of this course. A lot of your in-class and out of class course work will be directed toward its production. I am requiring you to turn in both a formal proposal and a first draft. The proposal should describe what elements of which text or texts you wish to discuss, the perspective you would like to bring to your reading, and either a specific question you mean to try to answer in your draft, or a thesis that you plan to support. It must include an annotated bibliography describing four to six sources that you plan to use in writing the formal essay. The proposal will determine 5% of the final grade. The 3-5 pp. draft will determine 10% of the grade. The final essay will determine 40% of the grade.

Attendance

Attendance is mandatory. I will take roll with every class meeting. Students may permissibly miss five class meetings in cases of illness or emergency. If a student misses six or seven class meetings, his or her final grade will be reduced by one half grade per absence. Students missing more than seven class meetings will receive an F for the course.

The Final Grade Breakdown

• Class Participation: 15%
• Short Essays: 30%
• Proposal: 5%
• Draft: 10%
• Final Essay: 40%

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of someone else's ideas, construction, organization, words or phrases in one's writing. It does not matter if the material came from a published scholar, your roommate, or the Encyclopedia Britannica; if ideas or words that originated with someone else are included in your work without acknowledgment, that is plagiarism. Avoid it by acknowledging the source of all ideas, words or organization in your writing that did not originate with you. In my classes, students submitting work with phrases or ideas that are not theirs without acknowledging their debt with quotation marks and correct bibliographic citation may receive an F for the course. Plagiarism is against the rules of all learning communities because it short circuits learning. A learner can only grow if s/he actually struggles at his/her level. Misrepresenting your skills ultimately cheats you, since by doing it you prevent your professors and peers from offering feedback to you as you are, thus cheating yourself of the feedback and guidance you need.

 

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.

The DVD's that accompany this course were recorded last year, so there may be some topical information that does not relate to you, but the material covered in the lectures will be relevant to your reading. There are two DVD lectures per week, except for week 2, when there are 3 DVDs, and the last two weeks of the semester, which have none. Your reading quizzes and assignments will be posted on our VISTA site as noted on the syllabus. Requirements for the course are described at the end of the syllabus. There are no face-to-face meetings for this course.

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)

 

What is the difference between Modern, Post-Modern and Contemporary verse? Indeed what do we mean by “American Verse” in a poetic era marked by transatlantic exchanges of influence and the increasing globalization of poetry in English? 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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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. More specifically, 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.

Course Requirements

• Active participation in class discussion
• Two papers (approx. 5 pages each)
• A take-home midterm examination
• A final examination

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

 

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.

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

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.

This course will survey twentieth century literature and thought in the literatures of India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, focusing primarily on novels, but with some poetry, film, and criticism also. The central issue for this syllabus is the effect of European colonialism on history, society, and culture in each of the regions we will study. The process of colonizing other countries followed a surprisingly similar pattern in the areas in question. We will organize our reading around the stages of colonization, de-colonization, and the postcolonial. This pattern emphasizes the similarity in social, cultural and literary history in the regions colonized by Europe, but we will not ignore in our readings differences amongst these literary traditions. The course will also ask what relationship these postcolonial literatures have with their respective pre-colonial literary traditions, how culture is affected by politics and economics, and how gender is constructed in a postcolonial context.

Requirements

Students will write two short papers and a medium length final paper. They will also need to pass a series of pop quizzes.

Grades

Paper 1=20%, Papers 2 and 3= 30% each, Pop quizzes = 20%

Readings

• Unit 1 Colonization
  • Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
  • Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind
• Unit 2 Decolonization
  • Raja Rao, Kanthapura
  • Film: The Battle of Algiers
  • Said, Culture and Imperialism
• Unit 3 The Postcolonial
  • MacGoye, Coming to Birth
  • Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
  • Sonallah Ibrahim, Zaat

In the last fifteen years, few sectors of the publishing industry have expanded faster than gay and lesbian literature. Major chain bookstores like Borders or Barnes and Noble as well as smaller independent bookstores, now have sections labeled and full of books they place in this category. The issues of gay and lesbian literature have, to some extent, entered the national media and conversations through popular television shows like Will and Grace and films like Brokeback Mountain. But this popularity is a very recent phenomenon and a very local one. There still are many places in the US –and in Houston-- where such work and such ideas are not acceptable and are even censored if not outlawed. What is rarely acknowledged is that it was only through the work and struggle –and death-- of many people over the last forty years that some acceptance of gay writing has become possible.

How did we get here? How did gay and lesbian literature emerge? How did the social movements for equality of the 1960s and 1970s set the stage for the creation of gay and lesbian literature in the 1970s and 1980s? How did gay and lesbian literature emerge out of the Counterculture? Who were some of the pioneer writers of this era? How did such writing develop and in fact, transform itself, after the AIDS crisis? What accounts for its recent, apparent, popularity?

This course surveys a few relevant texts and traces their cultural rhetoric (see Steven Mailloux, 2006, 1989). That is, we study these texts in relation to the cultural conversations going on at the time of their reception. Further, we look for common metaphors, stories, and arguments that cross from context into text. That is we study these texts as rhetoric. This is especially appropriate to do because these texts are not yet, for the most part, canonical in English departments or, if a few are approaching such status, the struggle for such status is apparent. So this course will be less interested in “appreciating” or “surveying” gay and lesbian literature though we will do some of that, than understanding how gay and lesbian writing has developed as part of a material political economy inside and outside of the gay and lesbian community. How has gay and lesbian literature been socially constructed?

While this course will include many writings by women including the classic lesbian coming out novel Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown, the classic gay male romance The Frontrunner by Patricia Nell Warren and the short story by Annie Proulx that was transformed into the film hit Brokeback Mountain, the primary focus of this course will be the development of gay male writing from the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969 to the present. Given that large sectors of both the gay male and the lesbian community embraced a policy of separatism during the 1970s and 1980s, the subject of gay and lesbian literature reflects this split. That said, this course will question this notion of separatism and will consider the problems it raises. And as counterpoint to this force, the course will provide many opportunities for interested students as part of small groups and as individuals to read lesbian literature and to teach the class about it.

The term ‘literature’ is being used in this course broadly the way it was used in the eighteenth century to mean letters, that is writings in prose and poetry. Rather than signifying only imaginative texts (that is fiction, poetry, and drama), our focus on “literature” will also be concerned with other sorts of important mostly nonfiction writing from this period including biographies, autobiographies, essays, creative nonfiction, book reviews, apologies and confessions, documentary writing, manifesto writing, film scripts and many other forms and genres. We will track out the emergence of “gay literature” from this complex and varied set of writing practices.

This is a course that will obviously require a good deal of reading-- about a novel a week. None of this reading is that difficult; much of it is popular writing. Still, you should not elect this course if you do not want to read. This is a reading intensive course.

Course goals

• Introduce the student to contemporary gay and lesbian literature, especially gay male literature since Stonewall;
• Understand the concept and practice of early gay male literature in terms of an aesthetic ideology disrupted by AIDS;
• Historicize these texts locating them in the broader cultural conversations across time;
• Understand how these texts functioned in the development of the post-Stonewall social formation;
• Embed these understandings in a wider theory of social formation of authorship.

Primary texts (required)

• The Best Little Boy in the World (John Reid, 1973)
• Rubyfruit Jungle (Rita Mae Brown, 1973)
• The Front-runner (Patricia Nell Warren, 1974)
• The Sexual Outlaw (John Rechy, 1975)
• Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin, 1976-78)
• Dancer from the Dance (Andrew Holleran, 1978)
• The Normal Heart (Larry Kramer, 1985)
• Ceremonies (Hemphill, 1992)
• Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. (Annie Proulx et al. 2005)
• Exiles in America (Christopher Bram 2006)

There will be many additional texts provided through handouts in class.

Secondary texts

Students will choose only one text from below. Small groups will read one of the following texts and report to the class on it:

• Stone Butch Blues (Leslie Feinberg,1993)
• Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Patrick Moore, 2004)
• Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited (Andrew Holleran, 2008)
• Texts (especially lesbian literature) chosen by students in consultation with teacher

Requirements

There will be a small group presentation on one of the secondary books, a major written project at end of the course with short oral reports, and several in class essay exams (two or three). The format of the course will not be lecture; this is not a course in which to sit back and take notes. Rather this course will be in an intensive discussion and student presentation format.

This course traces the development of the novel from the 1950s to contemporary times investigating the establishment of traditions and changes in the form over time. While the early novel was dominated by male writers since the 1980s women writers have dominated writing in the region. Critical reading and analysis will consider the particular historical and cultural contexts of the region in which the form developed. Consequently, questions of colonialism, post-colonialism, nationalisms with the contingent issues of race, ethnicity, class and gender will be paramount.

Required texts

• C L R James – Minty Alley
• Roger Mais – Brother Man
• Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea
• V S Naipaul – A House for Mr Biswas
• Earl Lovelace – The Dragon Can’t Dance
• Jamaica Kincaid – Annie John

Expected learning outcomes

• Students should acquire general knowledge of the history and culture of the Anglophone Caribbean;
• Students will demonstrate critical thinking skills through in class discussion, informal and formal writing assignments;
• Students should acquire general knowledge of the development, traditions and changes in the genre of the novel form in the Anglophobe Caribbean;
• Students should acquire an appreciation for the genre of the novel and an understanding of the various approaches and literary strategies used by writers in developing various thematic concerns

Course Requirement/Grading

• Complete readings assigned in preparation for class discussions;
• One short essay assignment (5 pages) 25%
• One longer essay assignment (8-10 pages) 35%
• Pop Quizzes 20%
• Tutorial Presentations 10%
• Class participation and Attendance 10%

This course provides an introduction to early forms of Caribbean writing. It begins the survey with an examination of oral forms (from the drum as a communication tool) that prevailed during plantation slavery to some of the more popular cultural forms such as ska, reggae and the calypso that have since emerged. Poetry and the short story which were the preferred early forms of writing will be also be examined as precursors of the novel form that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Critical reading of the texts will assist in the consideration of questions such as: Can we speak of there being a Caribbean literary tradition? Are there similarities and/or differences with canonical and other postcolonial literatures? What are some of the key thematic concerns that emerge in early Caribbean writing?

Required texts

• Brown, Stewart and Mark McWatt. Eds. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. Oxford: OUP, 2005.
• Wickham, John and Stewart Brown. Eds. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories. Oxford: OUP, 2005.
• John, Errol. Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. London: Faber and Faber, 1958.

Other readings will also be provided.

Secondary readings

• Donnel, Alison and Sarah Lawson Welsh. Eds. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Ashcroft, Bill et al. Eds. The Postcolonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Course Requirement/Grading

• Complete readings assigned in preparation for class discussions;
• One short essay assignment (5 pages) 20%
• One longer essay assignment (8-10 pages) 35%
• Pop Quizzes 20%
• Tutorial Presentations 15%
• Class participation and Attendance 10%

English 3396 sec. 34175
History 4396 sec. 34641

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 novels by contemporary Latin American writers, and discussing the historical events and personages depicted therein. Our interest is 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.

Readings

• Eduardo Galeano Memory of Fire. This is a trilogy. The three volumes are titled Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind. The three books comes in separate volumes, or in a single volume; either edition is fine.
• Carlos Fuentes (Mexico): The Buried Mirror
• Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia): The General in his Labyrinth
• Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia): Of Love and Other Demons
• Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru): The Storyteller
• Elena Garro (Mexico): Recollections of Things to Come (Out of print; buy used on internet)
• Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
• Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

In this course, we will examine the study of style in writing today. What do we mean by the term “style”? What are the social, political, cultural, rhetorical, literary, and linguistic uses of style historically and today? In examining the problem of style in writing, we’ll look at examples in a broad range of written genres (e.g., the essay, journalism, literature, nonfiction, and new media) and analyze what makes style distinctive and rhetorically effective. In addition, students will use stylistic analysis as a means of developing their own writing styles. They will also investigate the writing style(s) prevalent in the profession they hope to enter (or one they wish to explore). This writing-intensive course will require several written assignments of varying lengths, including an analytical essay incorporating some of the techniques studied in the course; a midterm; a final; a “common book” journal based on stylistic analysis; and regular participation.

Texts

• Corbett, Edward P. J., and Robert J. Connors. Style and Statement. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
• Lamham, Richard A. Analyzing Prose. 2nd ed. London: Continuum, 2003
• Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 8th ed. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005.

Note: This is a hybrid course. Students must have regular access to WebCT, the Internet, and Word Processing. Students will meet in the “live” classroom one day a week (Tuesday or Thursday, to be determined by the university) and will take the midterm and final in the classroom. Students will submit required essay(s) in hard copy. Electronic submissions of essays will not be accepted.

We shall read and discuss literature from a Critical Cultural Studies perspective, which means that we examine literature not only as a critique of the culture(s) about which it is written but even more as a repository of the very cultural values, behaviors, etc. it critiques. Our focus in this course will be the way in which American literature, against a foreground and background of other cultural media, represents the automobile as a vehicle of personal, cultural, social, and economic mobility and identity and the experience of space/place. Inarguably, the automobile affected twentieth century life as the computer has already dramatically overhauled twenty-first century life. What is so interesting (and aggravating) is America=s conflicted attitude about the automobile, the love/hate relationship with the car that has existed from its introduction. What is this attitude=s genesis and progress? We shall look at the cultural representation of the car in terms of technology, gender, race, environment. There will be segments on Athe road,@ history, auto racing, and culturally iconic figures associated with the automobile.

The course will require extensive online (and some library) research.

Learning outcomes

• Students participating responsibly will become acquainted with some of the major issues of Critical Cultural Studies and automobile history and culture.
• Students participating responsibly will learn how to discuss those issues in terms of American cultural media, including and especially literature.
• Students participating responsibly will develop their research, writing, and critical skills.

Texts

• Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
• Cather, One of Ours
• Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
• Kerouac, On the Road
• King, Christine
• Miller, Batman (Graphic novel—either The Year One or The Dark Knight Returns)
• Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Selected Stories)
• Erdrich, Love Medicine (Selected Stories)
• Jennings, ed., Road Trips, Head Trips, and Other Car-Crazed Writings
• Clarke, Driving Women

Assignments

There will be a midterm (on a date scheduled by the instructor) and a three-hour final exam (on the date scheduled by the university). Details about the format and scope of the exams will be presented during the semester.

The scheduled written assignments (exclusive of the exams) will consist of a term essay (4-6 pages) and two or three shorter commentaries, details to be provided separately.

Late essays, postings, quizzes, and exams are not accepted.

Emergency situations will be handled on an individual basis.

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

Review of the content areas taught in secondary schools and approaches to their teaching. Particular emphasis is given to traditional content—writing, literature, reading, grammar and usage—and we will review current standards and practices in these areas as well as the knowledge required for Texas teacher certification in English. However, we will also address the broader content of the contemporary English curriculum: media literacy, technology integration, multiculturalism, difference and diversity, critical thinking, and other topics as time and student interest allow.

Field experience. Students in 4319 receive on-site experience through regular observation and/or participation in a classroom or as a tutor working in a structured educational setting. Students keep logs of field experience and acquire a first-hand view of the realities of classroom teaching.

Student-centered learning. Each student in 4319 selects a topic in secondary English teaching to pursue in depth. Students conduct thorough research into the topic, prepare an annotated bibliography of useful resources, and teach a class session on the topic to their peers. The project offers students the opportunity to acquire professional expertise in an area of personal interest and to experience lesson planning and presentation.

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

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

This is an advanced fiction-writing and –reading class that is offered by permission of instructor only. Students will be expected to read a wide range of published fiction, and to write both short essays about the craft elements of the published work, as well as creative work of their own. We will emphasize close reading, advanced workshop activities, and revision processes.

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

Requirements

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

This course will explore the work of a range of 20th-century American women poets, considering their concerns, their methods and the connections among them.

Among the issues we¹ll consider: writing slant, high and low culture dynamics, confessional work as gendered mode, gender and authority claims, sex-race-class intersections, the love ghetto, natural women, sex and age, women and history.

Students will write two papers and a final exam and will participate in an online chat group about the readings.

Poets

Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Edna St Vincent Millay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Rita Dove, Susan Howe.

This class is a workshop, the primary texts of which are student manuscripts. Two submissions are required during the semester; students interested in working on novels are encouraged to claim their workshop time in a single, longer session for which they submit no more than 70 (yet no fewer than 50) pages of material. This workshop will do its best to accommodate writers working in either short or long form, keeping in mind that those are different writerly temperaments. A study of secondary texts will be used to amplify points on technique and structure and unity of purpose.

Possible texts

• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
• So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
• The Paperboy by Pete Dexter
• Collected Stories by William Trevor
• Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
• How Fiction Works by James Wood
• Plus texts by writers associated with the Inprint Brown Reading Series (Spring 09).

This course is a workshop-based study of the short story and novel. We will read and analyze your short stories and novel excerpts from a writer’s perspective, which is to say we will concentrate on how the different elements of fiction writing (dialogue, structure, characterization, metaphor, etc.) function and combine to create compelling narratives. You’ll also read a few novels, short stories, and essays to complement our discussions.

MAXIMALISM AND MINIMALISM: The Shaggy Dog and the Splinter of the True Cross.

This course will be a study of the aesthetics of two ends of the spectrum of literature: the works that attempt to include Everything, and the works that attempt to imply everything by offering a fragment. In poetry, this polarity might be represented by Whitman and Sappho. Kafka and Marquez. Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace.

Would you rather have the buffet this evening, sir, or eat the menu? When does muchness become monotony? When does fragment become intellectual fraud? Is the fragment intrinsically witty, or ironic, or nihilistic?

There’s a fine critical literature on fragment and collage, that 20th century form, and of course lots of contemporary examples. Also of interest is the literature of epigrams. Also Minimalism in the theatrical and visual arts will be visited, hopefully with some guest speakers.

A study of these two extremes of aesthetics probably will include the texts by Melville and Heraclitus, Francis Ponge and David Shields, Kenneth Koch and Campbell McGrath. Critical readings by Sontag, Schlegel, Edgar Wind.

--“By the brokenness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way-“ WC Williams

“ A poet discovers a secret, namely that he can be faithful to real things only by arranging them hierarchically. Otherwise, as often occurs in contemporary prose poetry, one finds a “heap of broken image s, where the sun beats”., fragments enjoying perfect equality and hinting at the reluctance of the poet to make a choice. C- Millosz

This pre-seminar will survey the major genres of the 16th and early 17th centuries—drama, poetry, prose, romance/epic, translation/adaptation—using the frameworks that early modern thinkers and writers created to theorize their culture. So, we will begin with one of the most pervasive concepts of the early modern world: order and disorder. This unit will include Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, essays by Francis Bacon, homilies and current scholarship on such literary and historical topics as madness and social (dis)order. Subsequent units include mercantilism (city comedy, documents from the East India Company, selected poems of John Donne), belief (Milton, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus), and humanism/ courtly life (Sidney, various sonnet sequences, English translation of Vergil’s The Aeneid and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage).

We will use webCT for additional readings and for other correspondence.

Assignments include: in-class presentations on primary and secondary materials from the syllabus; one short paper (summary of critical essay/ chapter); one longer paper or extended annotated bibliography on variety of topics. I am open to creative projects as well.

Required text is George M. Logan and Barbara K. Lewalski, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: the 16th and the early 17th Century, vol. 1B, 7th edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

This course serves as an introduction to a rich variety of Victorian texts and to the social and cultural contexts that produced them. Students will gain interpretive and analytical skills to enhance their understanding of novels and poetry written during one of the most complex and challenging periods in modern history. At the heart of the course lie several questions that were as critical for Victorian readers as they are for us today: in an industrial, consumerist society, what is the purpose of art and literature? How does literature offer writers and readers ways to understand and even critique their society? What kinds of (necessary?) escape does art offer? What purpose does fantasy serve? What kinds of truths can only be told through creative forms?

To explore these questions, we will be reading novels, short fiction, prose essays, and poetry that represent the major literary tendencies of the period: narrative realism, psychological and moral inquiry, social critique, and aestheticism.

Key authors include: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Meredith, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Augusta Webster, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde.

The pre-modernist era in American (United States) literature is in part a direct response to Emerson’s mandate for a national literature and, as such, is filled with antiphonal and oppositional voices. The modernist era, circumscribing an era of increasing nationalism in Western Europe, renegotiates the agenda. As post-modernist age readers, we renegotiate the expanding body of American literature with an astounding diversity of critical and theoretical apparatus, not to mention socio-economic, political, and intellectual history and the apparatus by which to critique these histories. Struggling against the tyranny of “survey” and “anthology” in both literature and criticism/theory, we must nonetheless acquiesce to some of the breadth in order to acquire a background which we take to seminars (and post-seminars?). So . . . what I would like to do in our course is to consider how some modern and early post-modern American writers construct and reconstruct discourses of American literature and how the texts have been critiqued in terms of the forms/contents of American experience. Logically, we will tackle the issue of the differences and similarities between modernism and postmodernism.

I have not yet attempted the impossible: to put together a non-survey survey of the literature of the period that is representative of the canonical and not-yet-canonical voices and yet that allows us in fourteen weeks actually to spend time with the texts. Recent American Lit II anthologies contain in excess of 2000 pages of text representing nearly 200 authors. In terms of fiction, I am playing with a “From Huckleberry Finn (1885) to The Catcher in the Rye (1951)” library, between which bookends I place the “isms”: realism, naturalism, modernism, and existentialism (as a form of modernism). In poetry, we will travel from Whitman to Stevens, with a T.S. Eliot stopover.

For convenience, I will use the dreaded--and heavy--anthology and a few separate texts. Ideally, I would like all students who sign up for this course to visit me as soon as possible so that I might tap them for their needs and interests and design the format of the course accordingly. I will also ask students to read the Cambridge Companions to Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism.

Written assignments will include oral reports, an annotated bibliography, and a final examination.

Learning Outcomes

1. Students participating responsibly will become familiar with major ideas/issues/theories important in current scholarship.
2. Students participating responsibly will build up bibliographic resources in American literature.
3. Students participating responsibly will develop critical skills in reading and writing about American literature.

Prelims

Participants are welcome before class starts to correspond with me via email (plyongue@uh.edu), especially to put “dibs” on a particular writer for purposes of oral presentation and bibliography.

How does the theory of language that one brings to the composition classroom influence the writing pedagogy one creates in that classroom? How do the transactions that occur in the composition classroom (and curriculum) revise the views of language that we hold? What are the basic theories of discourse? What choices does the researcher in rhetoric and composition have in investigating such issues?

This course will begin to address these issues by inviting the student to become a researcher in rhetoric and composition. We will begin with the notion of research in rhetoric and composition as inquiry (Young, Becker, Pike, Dewey, Phelps, Emig). This course is an advanced research seminar which will stress active student participation in inquiry. Because this is a practice-centered course, students will need to either have taught college composition or have previous coursework in rhetoric and composition.

Perhaps the easiest way to suggest what a research seminar does, is to try to describe the basic shape of the course, in a sense to tell the story of the course. At this point, I am thinking that this course will have the following basic design:

1. Introduction to the core readings and to the issue of language theory and composition pedagogy understood in a broad sense. These readings will map out the part of the field in which we will be working. Each text provides a theory of language and describes the resulting rhetoric and composition curriculum. These texts have been chosen to represent four historical periods, four different views of language, and four quite different curricula. All class members will read all of these books so we have a common vocabulary and framework.
2. Small group readings. The texts in this group may be changed. The goal is to provide some sense of the key older work in the area of composition pedagogy, but also note some cutting edge new studies that are just coming out to see what has the discipline’s interest at this moment. Small groups will read one book and do short presentations on them to the class.
3. Students will be doing a great deal of focused reading from about the fifth week of the term on, and will be expected to share this work with the class as whole through short presentations, through bibliographies, especially an annotated bibliography towards the end of the course. I also expect there may be some articles or sections of books which a student has discovered that are so important that small groups or even the entire class may want to read it. There will be a place in this course for this.
4. Students will be writing through the entire course. Following what researchers have discovered in rhetoric and composition, we will be encouraging students to do a good deal of short, informal and explorative writing early on, and then move toward more formal drafting. We will also do workshop with drafts in class and do peer reviews in class along the way. The instructor will also conference with individual class members several times concerning the research project and final portfolio. Students will experience the whole writing process.
5. Students will present their final essay to the class in a professional format which stresses abbreviation and contextualization for the audience. Students will also be encouraged (but not required) to submit abstracts for single paper or panel proposals to 4Cs –the Conference on College Composition and Communication. This is a national conference in rhetoric and composition and their deadline will just about coincide with the end of the course.

Obviously, there will be a range of topics class members will investigate. Some students might be interested in writing centers, others in ESL, others in writing across the disciplines or in writing in the disciplines, still others freshman composition, perhaps the argument course. There may be a few students who want to look at the college composition curriculum as a whole. Some students may be interested in family literacy or in professional writing or historical work in composition. Any of these topics and others brought in by students are fine.

This course is a pilot for the research seminar in the proposed doctoral concentration in rhetoric and composition (RCP).

Core Readings

• James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (1968)
• Janet Emig, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (1971)
• James Zebroski, Thinking Through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing (1994)
• James Berlin, Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures : Refiguring College English Studies (1996)

Small Group Texts (subject to change)

• James Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (1971)
• Ann Berthoff, The Making of Meaning (1981)
• Paul Butler, Out of Style (2008)
• Joddy Murray, Nondiscursive Rhetorics (2009)
• Either Tony Scott, Writing Dangerously
• Nancy Welch, Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World

Student Texts

Students will be reading many books and articles and will select from this material those texts which the class would benefit hearing about and perhaps reading. Students will present on specific texts chosen by student in consultation with the instructor.

Suggested Reference books

• Peter Smagorinsky (ed) Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change (2006)
• Charles Bazerman (ed.) Handbook of Research on Writing : History, Society, School Text (2008) You will need access to the Smagorinsky and Bazerman books though you need not purchase them unless you want to.

Course Requirements

• Curiosity and enthusiasm for intensive reading in areas of your interest in rhetoric and composition
• Several short and two longer class presentations
• One Shorter Bibliography on specialization area
• Two in class essay exams
• Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography specific to this course due at about week 10 or 11.
• An end portfolio that includes a short reflection, a “publishable essay,” several drafts of the essay, and written peer reviews of the essay.

What do we mean when we speak of “confessional poetry”? This course will place the confessional movement of the 1950s and 60s in a wider historical and literary context, and ask if it is possible to write poetry that “reveals but does not confide,” as John Bayley suggests is the case in the verse of Robert Lowell and John Berryman. We will consider if, in fact, confessional verse can ever be “an escape from personality” as T. S. Eliot argues in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. What is it about the American poetic tradition that makes American poets particularly inclined to use the confessional form? Along with primary poetic sources this course will also take into account various critical perspectives on the confessional mode such as Al Alvarez’s study The Savage God and Jacqueline Rose’s The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.

In 1839, his vision altered by his role as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin observed, “The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.” Darwin’s observation captures the central concern of this course: the ways in which nineteenth-century Britons portrayed and imagined their relations to the “varied and animated figures” over which they ruled—or aspired to rule—in this era of high imperialism. To that end, we will explore colonial and imperialist discourse in prose texts of the Victorian and early Edwardian periods, an era saturated with explicit references to and ongoing concerns with Britain’s colonial holdings.

As scholars like Patrick Brantlinger and Edward Said have amply shown, imperialist discourse permeates the texts of his period, even texts not explicitly intended to address the colonial question. This course, however, will focus its attention on prose genres that do explicitly raise such questions—travel narratives, colonialist novels and fantasies, histories of events like the 1857 Indian uprising—in order to enhance our awareness of when and how this crucial strain of imperialist discourse became solidified. Topics to be examined include the role of gender in imperialist discourse; the ways in which genres like travel narratives, fantasy, and “imperial gothic” responded to the pressures of colonial concerns; the change from the exuberant, optimistic imperialism of Martineau and Marryat in the 1830s and 1840s to the beleaguered, anxious vision of late-century writers like Stevenson and Conrad.

Texts may include nautical novels by Fredrick Marryat or Robert Ballantyne; mutiny novels by Philip Meadows Taylor or George Chesney; travel narratives by Richard and Isabel Burton, Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bird, or Henry Morton Stanley; gothic fantasies by Rider Haggard; imperialist history of the Indian uprising; and late-century fiction by Kipling, Stevenson, Conrad, or Doyle. Requirements will include participation in class discussion and some short pieces of writing that will be collected on a class blog. Also required will be a final paper or project.

The course fulfills graduate English requirements in later literature or electives.

Course Description

What do we mean by the term public? How does it differ from such related terms as the state, community, audience, or, more recently, contact zone? Is “public” best understood in contrast to the term private? Are there multiple publics? Alternative publics? Counterpublics? What does “public” mean specifically for writing and literary scholars? What does it mean for pedagogy? Is it possible to bring the public into our classrooms? Can we take our classrooms into the public sphere? What is our role as academic public intellectuals?

Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere investigates the social conditions that allow public issues to be debated rationally by private persons of mixed statuses and positions. Ideas of the public sphere have become important in composition studies as the discipline’s focus has shifted from the individual writer to more social, political, and public investigations of writing and discourse. Some scholars have suggested that the writing course itself is a microcosm of the public sphere. In this seminar, we’ll look at the way Harbermas’s ideas have been applied in composition to rhetorical invention, collaborative learning, public writing, theories of audience, and pedagogy (e.g., the teaching of argument). We’ll also investigate its impact on literature through literary criticism, cultural studies, and the relationships among writers, readers, spectators, and texts.

This seminar will acquaint students with the recent scholarship in what has come to be known as public sphere theory. After reviewing a number of theoretical perspectives on what constitutes a public (e.g., Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Warner, Stacey Margolis), we will turn our attention to the ways that publics intersect with cultures, identities, and classrooms. The course, then, is structured in three major units. The first will examine the theoretical foundations of public sphere theory, with emphasis on the work of Jürgen Habermas and some important responses to his work in composition studies, literary studies, and the humanities. The second will look at how public sphere theory gets inflected through cultures, identities, audiences, and disciplines. The third unit will look at the pedagogical implications of public sphere theory and how it might be adapted to our classrooms, especially composition classrooms.

Course Requirements

The course will encourage graduate students to develop a research interest in the public sphere, which can be related to other intellectual interests in literature, creative writing, composition, and rhetoric.

• Students will write a seminar essay (40%)
• An essay for the public sphere (10%)
• Work on a collaborative project/presentation (e.g., The Public Sphere and Hip Hop; Blogging; Service Learning/Community Literacy; Teaching Community College Students; The Novel; Poetry or Poets; the Black Arts Movement; Political Campaigns; Public Intellectuals; Genres; Comedy, Satire, and Parody; Museums) (15%).
• Students will also turn in five reading responses (10%)
• Complete a midterm (15%),
• Participate regularly (10%).

Potential Texts

While the precise reading list is still being finalized, listed below are some of the possible texts:

• The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Jürgen Habermas)
• Publics and Counterpublics (Michael Warner)
• Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Rosa Eberly)
• The Black Public Sphere (The Black Public Sphere Collective)
• Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere (Christian Weisser)
• Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition (Paula Mathieu)

Other Important Texts (References)

• Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996.
• Crossley, Nick, and Michael Roberts, eds. After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
• Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.
• Pough, Gwendolyn D. Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern UP, 2004.
• Roberts, Miller, Patricia. Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
• Wells, Susan. Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity.
  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

History of Poetry and Poetics will survey some of the major strands of Mediterranean and American poetry, from the Psalms and Greek and Roman antiquity to the present day. Emphasis will be on lyric poetry written in English. Particular attention will be given to Renaissance lyric, the tradition of Romanticism and its aftermath, and the arrival of Modernism.

Required text

Lynne MacMahon and Averill Curdy, eds., The Longman Anthology of Poetry, supplemented by several pdf files, consisting of poetry and critical essays, that I will send to students. The Longman Anthology of Poetry is available fairly inexpensively online.

We shall read six Shakespearean tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. We shall read these plays closely for their study of character, their structure, their imagery and symbolism, and their reflections on English Renaissance language, history, and culture. We shall review the sources, textual issues, performance possibilities, and history of criticism associated with each. We shall also reflect critically on the very editions of the plays we read. To this end, our six texts come from six of the major scholarly series publishing Shakespearean drama in single-play editions: Arden3, Norton Critical Editions, Longman Cultural Editions, Bedford Texts and Contexts, Cambridge Shakespeare in Production, and Pelican. Each of these series brings its own editorial principles, and its own contextual, historical, and critical materials to bear on the plays; each individual edition is intended to frame our understanding of the given text in quite particular ways. We shall think critically about these interpretive frames even as we address ourselves to the plays themselves.

Assignments

• One short (5 page) paper comparing one of the critical editions on our reading list with a second critical edition of the same play.
• One annotated bibliography or bibliographical essay.
• One conference-length (i.e., 8-10 page) paper that engages with a substantial selection of secondary literature in offering an original critical argument.

Texts

• Macbeth. Ed. Robert Miola. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2004.
• Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. David Quint. Longman Cultural Edition. Pearson Longman, 2008.
• Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
• Othello. Ed. Julie Hankey. Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 2nd ed. 2005.
• King Lear: The 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio Texts. Ed. Stephen Orgel. The Pelican Shakespeare. New York: Penguin, 2000.
• Hamlet. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare, third series. Vol. 1. London: Arden, 2006.

This course will consider several of the major novels of the period from a range of critical perspectives.

Texts

• Hannah Foster, The Coquette (Oxford)
• Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Oxford)
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (Penguin)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Bedford)
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Signet)
• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Bedford)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Oxford)
• Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Bedford)
• Samuel L. Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bedford)
• William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Norton Critical)
• Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Signet)
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Norton Critical)

Course Requirements

A bibliographic essay (approximately 10-12 pages) surveying recent criticism on one of the novels, oral presentations, a final paper (10-15 pages), and participation in seminar discussion

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. We will read texts written mostly after 1980.

Required Texts

The readings will be taken from the following texts:

• John Cheever’s Bullet Park
• Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men
• Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy
• Don DeLillo’s White Noise
• Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine
• Percival Everett’s Erasure
• Susan Daitch’s The Colorist
• 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
• Brian Evenson’s Altmann’s Tongue
• George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation
• Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s
• Gary Lutz’s I Look Alive

Course Requirements

Requirements include a short paper, a long seminar paper, and an oral presentation. Student should come to the first class meeting prepared to discuss Cheever’s Bullet Park

Course Description

The goal of this course is to equip the student to understand, deploy, and/or critique the language of postcolonial theory–a very important skill in literary studies in the United States today. In order to do this we will spend the semester probing the limits and challenging together the truisms of this new and most trendy of literary critical fields. The course will begin by focusing on the foundation set down for postcolonial discourse in the work of Edward W. Said and Gayatri Spivak, examining their debts to theorists of 'Third World' liberation, their often ambivalent relationships with continental theory, and their respective departures from the American academic criticism which preceded them. As we move beyond these two foundational figures we will take up the following topics: colonial discourse and the British empire, the relationship between imperialism and culture, difference within the postcolonial world, the politics of literary representation, questions of language and translation, the legacy of the contemporary 'Third World' intellectuals and their differences from American postcolonial discourse, and the discourse of gender in the context of postcoloniality. Since literary study is our primary focus as critics and readers, and postcolonial studies often strays far from the question of the literary, we will regularly return to novels, poetry, and film, as a way of testing the relevance of the critical discourse of postcolonialism for study of the literary.

Course Requirements

Each student will give two brief oral presentations, write a short paper during the semester, and write a longer paper at the end of the course. Each presentation amounts to an oral version of one of the papers. Thus, the presentation itself will not usually require additional reading or research.

Prospective Reading List

• Lane, The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
• Kipling, Kim
• Said, Orientalism
• Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak”; The Death of a Discipline
• Viswanathan, from Masks of Conquest
• Essays on Postcolonialism by Homi Bhabha, Aijaz Ahmed, Ann McClintock, Chandra Mohanty, S. Shankar, Timothy Brennan, Joe Cleary et al.
• Adonis, Arabic Poetics
• Guha, from Selected Subaltern Studies
• Hardt and Negri, from Empire
• Mariategui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality
• Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite
• Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
  
  
• Film: B. Roy (dir.), Do Bigha Zamin


• Novels: Salih, Season of Migration to the North; MacGoye, Coming to Birth

The new world baroque and contemporary Latin American fiction

In this seminar we will discuss European Baroque aesthetics and ideology, and the artistic structures (art, architecture, sculpture) that contained and expressed them. We will then trace the evolution of these ideas and expressive structures in modern Latin American literature. We will also contemplate modern visual arts as a means of understanding the historical traditions that still operate in, and impel modes of cultural expression in Latin America. In short, this is a course in Latin American cultural history, history of ideas, art and literature.

In order to consider modern Baroque and Neobaroque literature in Latin America, 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 and 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.

Required Text

• 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 (out of print; use internet, and make sure you get the English translation, if that is what you want, since this is also the title in Spanish)
• 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 to buy a copy)
• Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
• Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions