SPRING 2004 |
SDSU ENGLISH & COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
undergraduate & graduate
UNDERGRADUATE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE CLASSESNOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2004 schedule or glass case in front of English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
CLT 445: Introduction to Latin American Literature J. Robinett
This course offers an introduction to contemporary Latin American fiction. We will be examining representations and critiques of social constructions such as the village, the town, the city, the family, the position of women and minority figures, political ideology, and constructions of time, space and futurity. The reading list includes novels and short fiction by Donoso, Argueta, Garcia Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa and others.
CLT 511: Continental Renaissance P. Herman
Throughout this semester, we will read some of the most important and influential texts of the continental Renaissance (meaning, the Renaissance outside of England). Toward the end, we will also look at how some of these texts fared when they crossed the channel into England. The definition of the "Renaissance"and how it was perceived by its originators will be one of the topics of this class, and the texts range from the obviously fictive (e.g., Rabelais) to the obviously non-fictive (Machiavelli) to something strangely in between (Castiglione). In addition to the importance of humanism as a driving cultural force, we will also be looking at the problem of the self, the problem of politics, and how nascent English nationalism conditioned the reception of the continental Renaissance. The authors studies will include Petrarch, Pico, Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and John Donne.
CLT 561: European Children’s Fantasy Fiction J. Farber
Let’s define terms. "Fantasy" here is to be understood in the broad sense: not just epic fantasy, but fantasy in general. "European": we’ll be reading fiction from Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Germany, and Austria (tentative list). "Children’s": Ah, well . . . where do I start? Even though children’s literature has become an important and respected area within literary study, I still feel that there is something like a "secret" that most of us who study literature have to learn (perhaps re-learn) for ourselves: over the past two centuries some of the best writing has been done for children. Great children’s fiction is great fiction. But that doesn’t mean that this is some sort of connoisseur’s course that simply appropriates children’s fiction for adult reading. We’ll be reading these works in the context of the history of children’s literature and in relation to some of the principal issues that have been raised in the academic study of children’s literature. I hope that this will be a very good course both for people who are pursuing a specialization in children’s literature and for people who are just looking for a really good comparative fiction course.
CLT 562: Comedy in 3D J. Farber
Selected works of European and American comedy, from Molière to Caryl Churchill, studied from a theatrical perspective and with special emphasis on the nature and dramatic function of humor. NOTE: This course will require not only written projects but theatrical projects as well, including readers theater and fully staged scenes. It is a literature course, but students are advised not to enroll unless they are prepared to do quite a bit of acting. The course will require a considerable amount of rehearsal time outside of class. You’ll also need to plan on being there for every session. If you know in advance that you’ll have to miss one or two of the weekly classes, you should save this course for another semester.
UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH CLASSES
ENGL 220: INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE G. Butler
I'll ask you to read Homer's The Odyssey, a collection of Japanese haiku poems, a short collection of poetry by American women, Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy, Collette's short novel Chéri, and Céline's novel Journey to the End of the Night. These are in inexpensive paperback editions that will keep the cost down for you. I'll also ask you to watch a film in class. Your grade will be based on quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam, so there won't be any out-of-class writing assigned. I want you to be able to concentrate on the reading and have time to enjoy it and see for yourself what's great about it.ENGL 260B: British Survey 260B T. Cummings
In this class, we'll study a variety of works by authors who have lived in the British Isles during the past 200 years who have attempted to explore the world while letting it retain its unknowability. From the Prisoner of Chillon's encounter with nothingness to the mysterious meeting between Heisenberg and
Bohr that changed the direction of the 20th century, we'll find that there is more to this world than we can easily describe. We'll also find that authors have drawn from and created myths to help them depict the world in all its wonder. Our overall goal will be to explore how various themes and literary devices
change as a result of historical periods and cultural contexts, which a special emphasis on how authors attempt to depict the irreducible.
Readings will include poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism from the Romantic era, the Victorian era, High Modernism, and Postmodernism. Your grade will be based on journal entries, quizzes, two papers, and a final.
ENGL 301: Psychological Novel T. Cummings
One of the more compelling ways to read a novel is to explore its depiction of psychological phenomena. Such readings can enrich our understanding of the novel, and they can make us inquire into ourselves, the people around us...and can help us pretend we understand our families and friends.
In this class, we won't pathologize the characters we'll encounter, but we will bring our understanding of several psychological theories to our interpretations of each novel. We'll spend two weeks reading essays by Freud, Jung, and von Franz to facilitate our interpretations, but the main focus of the class
will be on the novels we'll read.
Readings will include Stendhal, Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison, O'Brien, and others. Your grade will be based on three papers, participation, and quizzes.
ENGL 306A: Children’s Literature C. Scott E-mail: cscott@mail.sdsu.edu
The greatest and most enduring works of children’s literature are those that speak to both children and adults. I have chosen works that encourage analysis from this dual perspective, and we will be using our current and our remembered reactions to them as we explore and analyze what they have to say. The focus will be upon the books as works of literature and we will use a variety of literary methods to probe them. Although I will model a number of ways to engage with the books, this is not a course in how to teach, which comes later in the College of Education’s Credential program. It is important for future teachers (and parents or future parents too, for that matter) to have a deep understanding of the narratives, stories, and picture books which have a profound effect on the way young people are taught to see the world and their place in it.
The initial list (to which a few more titles may be added) includes both British and American classics representing a number of significant children’s literature themes such as nostalgia, home and leaving home, learning, subversion and disobedience, humor and irony, the unfamiliar and the uncanny, and of course, growing up. It also represents a variety of genres such as fantasy, animal, toy and school stories, tales and legends, and picture books.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass ? Lewis Carroll
Twelve Dancing Princesses (A Collection of Tales)
Child of the Owl - Laurence Yep
Peter Rabbit ? Beatrix Potter
Winnie-the-Pooh ? A.A. Milne
Charlotte’s Web ? E.B. White
In the Night Kitchen ? Maurice Sendak
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ? J.K. RowlingThere will be a number of short quizzes, a midterm and an end-of-term test, and a couple of short (500 word) papers/reports. This course is taken in conjunction with English 306W where writing about children’s literature is the focus.
ENGL 306A and 306W: Children's Literature and Advanced Composition M. Galbraith
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." (Mark Twain, Prefatory warning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
You are hereby given notice that everyone who takes this double course will be incited to commit two of the three crimes that Mark Twain promises to punish. My section of 306A is designed as a personal history of children's literature, focusing on the childhood experiences of specific authors and the ways their childhood predicaments are restaged in their works (thus accounting, in my own thinking, for both motive and plot). We will also examine the specific cultural circumstances that give rise to a literature for child readers, and we will debate whether such a literature can be simultaneously disclosing and reassuring. Further, we will inquire into the process of fictionalizing childhood experiences--if authors are indeed writing out of a well of their own actual childhood experiences, as I will argue, what do they honor about those experiences that makes for immortal fairy tales, classic novels, and great picture books? Authors whose autobiographical fictional works will be covered include (in historical order) Hans Christian Andersen ("The Red Shoes," "The Little Mermaid"), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Charles Dickens (David Copperfield), Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn), Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Books), Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit), Ludwig Bemelmans (Madeline), Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), Shel Silverstein (The Giving Tree), Beverly Cleary (Ramona the Brave) and Dr. Seuss (The Cat in the Hat).
The Advanced Composition segment, English 306W, will be devoted to writing closely argued essays about the literature and ideas discussed in 306A. There will be no penalty for disagreeing with the professor, provided you can convince her of your own line of reasoning.
ENGL 410: Literature and the Passions H. Polkinhorn
Where did we get the notion that "love hurts?" The swooning swain, Dido impaling herself on Aeneas's sword, the delirious madness of Sappho's inflamed imagination, Plato's connection of love with the world of eternal forms, the highly refined posturing of the medieval knights being "tried" before the bench in Eleanor of Aquitane's "court of love," Snow White's long sleep, the short incandescence of Romeo and Juliet: these and other texts (including Mozart's "Don Giovanni") will carry us through an examination of the torture and bliss of love.Required Texts
Sappho. Sappho: A New Translation. M. Barnard, tr. UC Press, 1999.
Plato. The Symposium and the Phaedrus. SUNY Press, 1993.
Capellanus, Andreas. The Art of Courtly Love. Col UP, 1990.
Dante. Dante and the Early Italian Love Poets. London: J. M. Dent, 1999.
Castiglione. The Book of the Courtier. Tuttle Publishing, 1994.
Malory. Le Morte D'Arthur. ed. Sanders and Ward. Irvington, 1979.
The Romance of Tristan and Isolt. Norman Spector, tr. Northwestern UP, 1985.
Snow White. Dover, 1995.
Shakespeare. "Romeo and Juliet." Spencer, ed. Viking Penguin, 1981.
Mozart. "Don Giovanni." H Leonard, 1986.
Freud. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
Jung. Aspects of the Feminine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner.
Márquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999.
Rumi. Look! This Is Love: Poems of Rumi. Boston: Shambhala.ENGL 493: Hitchcock's American Films T. Nelson
A critical examination of Alfred Hitchcock's film career in America, from 1940 to his death in 1980. Focus on selected key films and how they reveal a unique Hitchcockian sensibility and film style. Emphasis on recurring narrative patterns and script construction, character archetypes, themes, and film techniques. Comparisons will be made between Hitchcock's films and dominant tendencies in the Hollywood films of the period. Films to be studied include some of the greatest films made in America during this time: SHADOW OF A DOUBT, NOTORIOUS, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, REAR WINDOW, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, VERTIGO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PSYCHO, and others. Extended class time (3 hours, 20 minutes) and out-of-class viewings. Extensive readings and essay exams.
ENGL 494: Modern Fiction of the U.S. R. Gervais
A course in American fiction from around the time of World War I to the present. We will start with a collection of short stories and read them chronologically to get an over-view of this long stretch of literary history and a sense of the distinctive periods within it. Then we will read several significant short novels from these periods. There will be four in-class, open-book, essay exams. I read and teach literature as an aesthetic representation of life, appealing to us by its beauty and truth.ENGL 502: Adolescence in Literature A. Allison
Monday/Wednesday 2-3:15English 502 explores prose in which key characters are adolescents, as well as works that have been specifically written for adolescents, primarily the contemporary Young Adult novel. Adolescence is an exciting time during which cognitive functions, argumentative capacity, identity, ego, sexual relationships and love, societal relationships, authority relationships, justice and conscience, bodily image, career, education--and of course much more--are developed, explored, challenged, outgrown. These issues are depicted frequently in first-person narratives that reveal the keen emotions, humor, and observations of teenagers, and sometimes their agonies. Our approach to adolescence will be through cognitive, developmental, and cultural features, our analysis of the literature aesthetic and formal, and our reading diverse, including short stories by Chekov, Joyce, Roth, Oates, Singer, and Boyle. The novels are W.D. Myers’ Fallen Angels, Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, Anchee Min’s Red Azalea, Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, Russell Hoban’s The Trokeville Way, and Peter Pohl’s Johnny, My Friend (the last two books listed will be available at Cal Copy, along with the course’s Reader.
The class is recommended for students in general and especially for those interested in secondary school teaching. Requirements are four 2 pp. written assignments, four quizzes, a research paper, and a final. The quality of your writing is a very important determinant of your grade.
ENGL 523: Literature of the U.S. 1860-1920 R. Gervais
Fiction from the age of Realism-Naturalism, when literature turned away from what was felt to be the fantasies and delusions of Romanticism toward what was thought to be a more truthful treatment of material, with detailed portrayals of everyday people, intricate attention to the immediate surroundings, and ordinary events seen in their true significance (Realism), but also with a dark sense of determinism by the forces of nature, society, and economics (Naturalism). We will read works by Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. There will be four in-class, open-book, essay exams. I read and teach literature as an aesthetic representation of life, appealing to us by its beauty and truth.ENGL 524: United States Literature 1920-1960 C. Wall
Poetry by T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Fiction: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Gatsby is a scapegoat, obeying American society's dictates), Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (this is high modernism), Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, and Welty's The Golden Apples plus three or four more stories. Drama: Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. I may add items to this list. Course grade will be based on reader responses, three five-page papers, a midterm and a final. Strong contribution to class discussion can raise your grade.
ENGL 525: Literature of the U.S. 1960 to the Present David Matlin
e-mail number: dmatlin@cox.net
What does the term "American Art" mean in relationship to Fiction, Poetry, Playwriting, Painting and Film? How can we access its "Life," its part in our lives both personally and nationally? Is this experience always necessary to understand completely and can it move us and possibly even transform us with its mystery, witness, and imagination of both old and new truths? How are we affected by this term and what it tells us about our society and our world? Does it have, possibly, a metaphysical quality and potency whose disparate qualities erase our senses of safe conduct and give us, instead, as readers, observers, and participants a shared urgency, and renewed senses of risk? This course will examine the fierce exploration and discoveries in American Literature from 1960 to the Present. It will include Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, the Visual Arts, and Film.
ENGL 533: Shakespeare D.A. Shojai
This course will provide a close reading of five plays o Shakespeare’s middle period (1594 ? 1601), including two comedies, two English history plays, and a tragedy. The plays will be, in order of presentation, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part 1, and Hamlet. The writing will consist of three in-class tests: the first on the comedies the second on the history plays, and the third on Hamlet. Regular class attendance and participation will significantly affect the final grade. The class discussions will include viewings of the BBC productions of the plays. This class will be limited to 40 students.
ENGL 533: Shakespeare P. Herman
In this class, we will look at a variety of plays written by Shakespeare over the course of his career with an eye toward examining the range and depth of his achievement. But this class will not be an exercise in bardolatry. Rather than studying the received texts in the received, i.e., ahistorical manner, we will look closely at how Shakespeare's plays are deeply embedded in their time, at how his drama engages a variety of historical and political contexts. Students should be forewarned that we will be challenging a number of misconceptions and assumptions concerning Shakespeare, in particular, that history is irrelevant or a distraction to literary study; that textual issues are thematically uninteresting and have no place in the undergraduate curriculum; and that authorship is a timeless, obvious category. Plays include The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest.
ENGL 534: Study of Shakespeare T. Nelson
A sequel to English 533 for English majors, with an emphasis on approaches to reading (i.e., literary criticism), topics for analysis, and interpreting the complexities of Shakespeare's language, his dramaturgy, and his ideas, with the intent of understanding the unique nature of Shakespearean drama. Short papers and essay exams.
ENGL 548: British Literature 1950-Present D. A. Shojai
Britain’s situation after World War II and its loss of colonial possessions and imperial status have led to extraordinary changes within its culture and society. The works read will reflect these changes and explore how literary artists responded to them. The writers covered include the late T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, Kingsley Amis, Stevie Smith, John Betjemin, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, William Golding, John Fowles, Tom Stoppard, Fay Weldon, Kazuo Ighiguro, Ted Hughes, and new novelistand poet Nick Hornby and Gavin Selerie. Short papers on the readings, a midterm examination, and a final research paper.
ENGL 549: British Poetry and Its Medium J. Farber
This course will focus on British poetry from the early sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in relation to its aesthetic medium. In other words: poetry as poetry. We'll be looking at versification, imagery, diction, figurative language, structure, density, tone, and resonance. This will be a useful course for anyone with a special interest in poetry, and it should also be very helpful—I would hope, even transformational—for those who feel that they haven't yet made, but would very much like to make, a strong aesthetic connection with the British poetic tradition. We’ll be reading the work of a great many poets, beginning with Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, and Sidney (and including often neglected poets such as Anne Finch, Charlotte Smith, and Jane Taylor), but there will be particular emphasis on Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas.
ENGL 560B: British Lit. Romanticism - Present W.N. Rogers
This course--a dreaded Brit Lit "requirement" that some students avoid as long as possible--is in fact a rich trove of the work of important writers extending from the Romantic Era (Blake. Wordsworth, & Co.) through the Victorian Age (Tennyson, Browning, Charlotte Bronte, Inc.) to the Moderns (Lawrence, Lessing, Larkin.com). A good deal of reading is required, and the pace is unrelenting--but, on the positive side, English 560B seeks to draw the literature together (and thereby unify the course) in terms of ideas involving Nature, God, Imagination, and Society that reach to the present. Music and paintings will be drawn on to enrich historical context. Requirements will include midterm, final examination, a thoughtful critical essay, various short writing assignments, and class discussion.
--If you LIKE to learn (and are intellectually CURIOUS) and if you ENJOY literature, art, and IDEAS, this is a course designed especially for you.
ENGL 570: Techniques of Poetry S. Bryan
There are two required books for the course:
Writing Poems, 5th edition, by Robert Wallace and Michelle Boisseau
Poems New and Collected, Wislawa Szymborska, trans. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislav BaranczakStudents will turn in a poem each week, usually in response to a specific assignment. Depending on class size, each student's work will be discussed every second or third session. All student work will be anonymous during those discussions, so they will feel free to try new things and to keep the comments focused on technique. The first book, Writing Poems, has detailed chapters on various aspects of technique, including beginning a poem, line and line break, metaphor and simile, sound in poetry, and so on. We will cover the forces that shape free verse as well as those that shape traditional verse. The second book is the collected poetry of one of the best poets currently writing, Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet who won the Nobel prize for poetry several years ago. I chose this for the sheer joy of reading the poems: she makes writing poems look (deceptively) simple and deeply mysterious at the same time. Grades are based on the work turned in and on class participation.
ENGL 571: TECHNIQUES OF THE SHORT STORY J. Meschery
A survey of the short story from the writer's point of view, including Story Forms, Fiction Techniques, Critical and Literary Response to the Short Story. In addition to writing exercises, this course also includes a workshop in which participants study and apply the techniques of fiction to their own work, as well as in their reading and discussion of other workshop members.
ENGL577: Techniques of Screenwriting T. Nelson
A close examination of the screenplay as craft and art, particularly designed for English majors and students with a creative writing background. The class will study a variety of issues and topics, to include the techniques of classic story structure; character development, arcing, and functions; oppositional strategies and tendencies; stages of conflict; the relation between subjective and objective story elements; of showing versus telling; the use of subplots and the role of subtexts, and more. NOT a course in "screenwriting" (where students develop their own script ideas), but a course in the techniques, practice, and unique logic of screen storytelling. Preparation and prerequisite for English 587 ("Writing the Screenplay"). Weekly writing assignments, out-of-class film viewings, extensive readings, and a final project. Not recommended for students who don't like movies and who don't like to write.
ENGL 580: Writing Poetry S. Bryan
There are two books for the course:
The Making of a Poem, by Eavan Boland and Mark Strand
Poems New and Collected, by Wislawa Szymborska
This course will focus on, but not be limited to, writing in traditional verse forms: sonnet, villanelle, sestina, ode, elegy, and so on. The first book is the best I know of on the topic, with each form placed in its historical context so students will have a sense of the form's origins and uses, as well as its shape. The authors also include terrific examples of the various forms, from early to contemporary. The book is a jewel. Students will turn in a poem each week, in response to an assignment, and there will be time for revision. All student work will be anonymous during class discussion. Grades will be based on work turned in and on class participation.
ENGL 581W: THE WRITING OF FICTION J. Meschery
A workshop in which participants study and apply techniques of fiction writing to their own work, as well as in their reading and discussion of the fiction of other workshop members. In addition to class exercises, each participant will write two short stories and one revision.
ENGL 584W: Writing Informal Essays David Matlin
e-mail number: dmatlin@cox.net
The 584W Creative Writing Workshop will be an exploration of the Art of the Essay.
Students will have a chance to discover the range, care, and resonances this most provocative of forms can offer. There is no articulation that can be at once more challenging and unpredictable than the essay. Its ranges of address can encompass the deeply personal and private to the most public and even experimental voicings. The essay can be a form of criticism, a probing historical scrutiny of one's own life, an improvisation focusing on travel, science, birth, death, portraiture, the arts, sports, politics, and the chaotic fascinating times in which we live. Students will be encouraged to write, to probe, to participate in the act of imagining how to speak for oneself in the actual writing and energies of sustained attentions that are a record of things felt, heard, and lived. The course will also include a series of readings that may help to suggest, to define, and to offer the gain of confidence and nerve to try to make narratives that are new, fresh, and immediate. The writer wants to be aware that an essay, particularly, involves the management of knowledge as a central act of focus and that narrative, is this instance is also an object that can arise by making language come alive through a coherent identity determined by the story itself.
GRADUATE CLASSESNOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2004 schedule or glass case in front of English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
ENGL 601: Literature Study Multicultural World W.N. Rogers
English 601: Literature in a Multicultural World (surely a question-begging rubric) is a graduate course that your instructor believes must always be in a state of process, change, and revision since "literature" and how one can/should/must approach it remain problematic concepts in the wake of the proliferation of "theory" in the last few decades. Since the content of English 601 is often engaged with issues that have public policy implications argued about in the "cultural wars" of the 1990s and extending to the present, this is especially the case. Thus the ideal—and fervently hoped for—student for his class should be (1) intellectually curious, (2) willing, and excited, to move outside the confines of the American culture area, (3) eager to engage theoretical questions, and (4) open to complexity, ambiguity, and open-endedness.
Over fifteen weeks we will consider questions of race, gender, class, canonicity, and literary value in relation to texts and literary traditions from different culture areas, with particular attention being given to East Asia. "Ethnic" texts of various sorts will also be addressed. Critical writings on multiculturalism, post-colonial theory, canonicity, and other issues will be explored not as definitive, valorized conclusions, but as stimuli to original, even contrarian thinking about intensely controverted topics.
Requirements will include extensive and varied readings, in-class reports, and a number of relatively short written assignments leading up to a final long essay that engages, in both practical and theoretical terms, the "multicultural project" in our times. A willingness to discuss, express a considered opinion, and freely share ideas will be expected of all who enroll in English 601 since your instructor considers a graduate class to be by its very nature a collaborative enterprise.
ENGL 606A: THE ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE R. Gervais
Our course will focus on nature writing, one of the newest and fastest growing fields of literary study. We will study non-fiction prose narratives and fiction that consider the relationship between human beings and the natural world, emphasizing the impressive flowering of nature writing in recent decades.
This is a literature course, not a course in scientific natural history or political environmentalism. Our writers, while always scientifically informed and sometimes politically concerned, are marked primarily by a concern for literary values, so our concern will be nature writing as literature.
I’ll ask you to write two papers of 10 to 12 pages each and make an oral presentation.
Book list:
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces
Terry Tempest-Williams, Refuge
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It
Robert Finch, The Norton Book of Nature WritingENGL 624: Romance and Realism G. Butler
Romance and realism seem to be the two great poles of narrative. Do they merely reflect two different perspectives? Or two different kinds of narrative techniques? Or is there a struggle between them, the issue of which is of great importance? In this course we will read examples of romance and realism in narratives drawn from the M. A. Exam Reading List, and you can decide such questions for yourselves. There will be a final essay examination on the reading and a research paper required.
ENGL 626: West Asian and Mediterranean Literatures D. Shojai
In conjunction with the formation of the Modern Language Association’s new Discussion Group on West Asian Languages and Literature, this course will attempt to redefine and to explore the cultural topography of a region of the world interconnected in human history but viewed as being oppositional and fragmented from the Middle Ages down to the present. Colonial terms such as Near and Middle East will be replaced by indigenous terms such as West Asia in an effort to discern the cultural ties that reflect the integrative aspect of the region’s long and rich literary history. Within this context, the literature of North Africa is not apart from that of Europe but a product of the Mediterranean world linked to West Asia through common language and history. Selective readings of major literary works will be drawn from three periods: the Ancient, the Renaissance, and the Modern. Also Edward Said’s major critical work, Orientalism, will be considered closely. This course will involve a midterm paper in response to a question, short paper, a class presentation, and a research paper.
ENGL 700: Major Authors A. Allison
M 7-9:40
Among them, I.B. Singer, Russell Hoban, and Astrid Lindgren have published close to 200 books-but we won't be reading all of them this semester! With our focus on their works for children, we'll delve into their definitive novels, stories, and essays. I'll present the first two authors, we'll share presenting Lindgren, then your major project for the semester will be writing a comprehensive study of books by and critical commentaries on the children's author of your choice (with my okay on your selection) and
presenting your findings to the seminar. This course can be taken as an elective by graduate students in specializations other than Children's Literature.
ENGL 700: FAULKNER C. Wall
We will work at interpreting Faulkner’s fiction by attending to the culture of the white South he lived in. For instance, we will examine the psychology of major characters in Light in August as it shows a spectrum of responses to the white Southern construction of race. My current intention is to assign Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses in the first half of the semester so that people reading them for the first time have some time to get really familiar with them by the end of the semester. Then we will read and talk about some of Faulkner’s lesser books (Flags in the Dust, Sanctuary, Intruder in the Dust, the "Old Man" half of The Wild Palms) and stories to get a fuller picture of his interests and writing. I will assume that everyone has already read and studied The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. As for criticism, students will do research to find the most useful pieces examining cultural influences on Faulkner and his characters. Students may have the option of writing three 8-page papers or one 20-page paper; we’ll see.
ENGL 724: Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer L. Amtower
This course will introduce you to some of the foundational authors of the Western tradition: Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. These three greats, who lived within a single lifetime of each other, permanently altered the shape of the literary landscape, ushering in what we think of today as the humanist movement. Their presence in the cultural memory of their successors is everywhere, even if their contributions in toto are somewhat selectively recalled. In this class we will read some of the works for which these authors are best known: Dante’s Inferno, with its grand political and theological synthesis of the universe; his Vita Nuova, which provides some of his best love poetry and also gives us an account of his life as he’d like us to see it; Boccaccio’s Decameron, a huge collection of literary and folk tales ranging from the bawdy to the bizarrely moral, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which, in addition to rendering some rip-roaring plots, also ushered in a new way of thinking about characterization and even human subjectivity. PLEASE NOTE: This course can count as satisfaction for either the British or the Comp Lit emphases; please see your advisors to arrange credit.
ENGL 725: Major 20th Century American Poet-Critics J. Rother
This course will subject to intensive scrutiny the other, less celebrated side of being an influential American poet in the 20th Century: exercising authority as a critic (and teacher) of the art of verse. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Randall Jarrell and John Ashbery stand out among the numerous poets who, either determinedly or inadvertently, have essayed this role and in the process altered how the American poem would present itself as a visual, auditory, and tactile construct. They also provided, in a collective if disparate display of genius, a set of parameters in terms of which tasted in poetry would be radically redefined within a global context. Through their voluminous critical writings, poetry was made to seem not merely an adjunct to modern literature and art but its legislative arm and defining dimension. Examined in some depth will be the "Selected Essays" of both Pound and Eliot, Pound’s "ABC of Reading" and his edition of Ernest Fenollosa’s "The Chinese Written Character as A Medium for Poetry"; Olson’s "Human Universe" and "Selected Writings"; Creeley’s "Collected Essays"; Jarrell’s "Poetry and the Age"; and "Ashbery’s "Other Traditions." (If time permits, sidelong glances will be cast at the writings of Yvor Winters, R.P. Blackmur and the "American" W.H. Auden.)
Requirements: Oral reports (and brief critical essays) on the readings, and a full-length graduate research paper.
ENGL730: Perspectives in Critical Analysis: Literature and Analytical Psychology
H. Polkinhorn
An examination of the critical approach of analytical psychology to literature, with special attention to the contributions of classical Jungian psychology, developmental analytical psychology, and archetypal psychology. Texts to be examined include The Odyssey, "Genesis, Othello, Dante's "Inferno," Blake's Illustrations to "Job," Moby-Dick, and "The Four Quartets.Formal requirements include readings, a final examination, and individual projects based on extensive outside research. This will be presented both orally in class and in written form at the end of the semester.
ENGL 750F: MFA SEMINAR: FICTION WRITING H. Jaffe
This course is designed principally for MFA students who are writing short or extended "serious" fiction. Each participant will be required to submit a minimum of two individual texts, or self-contained segments of a lengthier work. In addition, there will be occasional brief texts generated by "prompts."
A characteristic session will consist three xeroxed fictions to be read aloud. Then a student-critic will deliver a fairly brief (five to ten minutes) commentary on the particular text. Finally the class and instructor will comment on the text.
Each class participant will have written her/his commentary, and these comments (signed), along with the instructor's, will be passed on to the writer whose text has been critiqued.
Specifically, each participant will be obliged to comment carefully and at reasonable length on each xeroxed fiction. The commentary (which also includes the oral commentary) may be playful and "meta"; but it must also accomplish three overlapping purposes: describe the text, offer remedial suggestions where necessary, and briefly summarize. I will collect and read all the commentaries, which will constitute one of the requirements for the course.
It is possible that I will alter the reading and critiquing format, depending on input from the class.
ENGL 750F: MFA SEMINAR: FICTION WRITING J. Meschery
An advanced fiction workshop devoted to participants' writing and rewriting. Workshops will involve discussion of fiction presented in an atmosphere of constructive suggestions, support, and encouragement of experimentation and risk-taking. Each participant will submit two short stories and one revision.
ENGL 750F: Fiction Workshop David Matlin
An advanced Creative writing workshop concentrating on the writing of fictions. Students will be required to produce new works and to discuss those works in both the workshop and in consultation with the teacher. Because of this advanced level, students will be expected to produce and to demonstrate the evolution of their works on a week-to-week basis. The workshop will explore the particular kinds of fiction each student will be writing, the language, the ideas, the arrangements and rearrangements, and the processes of editing and hearing which will help to bring the work to its "breathed breath of life." What are the modes of articulation and what do those modes require to make a story work or a novel begin to work to both the ear and the eye, to give it stability and the energies of discovery and what those discoveries do to connect to the world and to the reader? What is at stake, what is at risk in the actual making itself? The course also includes a series of defined readings of both prose and poetry which are assigned to help the writer to, among other specific processes, discover consistency of voice, fundamental senses of character identity which arise in the transmission of story, narrative enactment, and the drama of being as it comes to its relentless inner logic, interrogation, and metamorphosis. If, what is at the center of narrative, as the storyteller, poet, and restless investigator, David Antin says is "the confrontation of experience … the threat of transformation or the promise of transformation" then what labors of concentration can the writer create in order to be at the center of a ceaseless interrogation of metamorphosis and, even Truth as these elements appears in either a novel, a novella, or a short story? e-mail number dmatlin@cox.net (Please do not leave any messages on my office phone) ENGL 750P: MFA Poetry Workshop S. Bryan
I've ordered one book for the course: The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry, by Sally Gall and M. L. Rosenthal, but the book is out of print. Try to find used copies online and elsewhere.
This course will focus on the long poem and the poetic sequence. Students will read extensive examples: Gluck, Heaney, Frost, McHugh, Rilke, Eliot, Pound, many others. I'll provide some of these, and students will suggest others. Students will be working on their own long poems or sequences during the course, and these will be discussed in class once mid-term and again near the end of the term.
ENGL 784: SEMINAR: Literary Criticism H. Jaffe
Although listed in the current graduate catalog as a "Seminar in Literary Criticism," English 784 will be taught henceforth as a "Seminar in Creative Nonfiction."
What follows is a provisional description of the course; I am still working out the details: Members of the class will read and be given the option of writing texts in at least three of the following creative nonfiction genres: memoir, personal essay, critical review, performance, interview, "docufiction." and "docupoetry." Each student will produce a chapbook of her or his writing at the end of the term.
The reading list is in the process of being refined but may include several of the following:
JM Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
Erik Erickson, Gandhi’s Truth
John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire
Diane Di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnick
Clarice Lispector, Stream of Life
Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba
Joan Davies, Writers in Prison
Van Gogh’s Letters
Harold Jaffe, 15 Serial Killers
John Berger, About Looking
Assata: An Autobiography
Angry Women (RE/Search)
Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las VegasInquisitive students are encouraged to meet with Hal Jaffe, AH 3114, Tues, Thurs, 5:30-7 PM <hjaffe@mail.sdsu.edu>