 Course Descriptions Fall 2007 english descriptions | complit descriptions new!  Check for open seats ASAP! English / ComplitNOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Fall 2007 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing. Comparative Literature CLT 270B WORLD LITERATURE TTH 2:00 - 3:15 M. JAFFE CLT 270B is an inquiry into the basic nature of literature. What purpose does literature serve in the cultural life of humanity? What are its social, philosophical, spiritual, and esthetic values? Some consideration may be given to techniques and major critical theories, but focus will be on practical criticism for non specialists. CLT. 270A is not a prerequisite to 270B, and either may be taken separately. POSSIBLE TEXTS INCLUDE: S. T. Coleridge, Rime of Ancient Mariner, British—poetry, illustrated by Gustave Doré. Bram Stoker, Dracula, Irish—gothic novel. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Russian—novel. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Iranian—nonfiction. Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, American—short stories, nonfiction. Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats, American-Japanese—novel. Art Spiegelman, Maus I & II, American—graphic novel. CLT 440 AFRICAN LITERATURE TTH 11:00 – 12:15 L. EDSON An investigation of African Literature from various countries representing the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence periods. Texts to be read include Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (Nigerian), Flora Nwapa's Efuru (Nigerian), Ferdinand Oyono's Houseboy (Cameroon), Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood (Senegalese), Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (Nigerian), Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter (Senegalese), and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwean). CLT 561 MODERN FICTION TTH 12:30 - 1:45 L. EDSON An investigation of the modern novel with special attention to narrative voice, strategies of representation, the role of language, perception, and issues of truth and authority. Texts to be read include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price, Albert Camus’ The Plague, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Michel Tournier’s Friday, and Albert Camus’ The Fall. In-class writing assignments, oral reports, mid-term and final exams. CLT 563 POETRY OF WITNESS T 7:00PM - 9:40PM L. KOOLISH “O rain of stars in the darkness, constellation of dead brothers I owe you my blackest silence, my resolve..." --Victor Serge Lynda Koolish’s Fall 2007 POETRY OF WITNESS course explores the work of some extraordinarily gifted poets who have commanded themselves to write, to bear witness, to call for resistance to the incendiary violence and cruelty that have marked the previous ten decades. Our three central texts are Angel of History, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (an anthology edited by Forché), and a course reader edited by me; contained within them are--among others--poems by René Char, Guillaume Apollinaire, Siegfried Sassoon, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Wilfred Owen, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Irena Klepfitz, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Yehudi Amichai, Pablo Neruda, Roque Dalton, Naomi Shihab Nye, Eduardo Galeano, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Lester Graves Lennon, and Carolyn Forché. This course will be conducted as a seminar; class participation is not only encouraged, but essential. Even though the course will emphasize close readings of often difficult poems, I encourage you to consider enrolling, regardless of whether you have much of a background in the reading of poetry. I hope that part of the pleasure of the course for each of you will be the process of learning--in a supportive and non-competitive environment--how to fall in love with poetry, with language, how to pay attention to image, line and breath, how to discover your own intuitive gifts of imagination, empathy and intellect. COURSE REQUIREMENTS: weekly ungraded freewrites, two eight-page papers, and engaged, thoughtful contributions to class discussion. Missing more than two classes for any reason other than personal or medical emergency will seriously affect your grade. CLT 571 ORPHEUS AND OTHERS T 3:30 - 6:10 A. ALLISON The study of themes and literary characters as they are changed over time, geography, and authorship is the illuminating comparative approach called Thematology. Situating a work of art according to the spirit of the time (Zeitgeist) reveals conceptual break-throughs as well as dominant modes of thinking and is useful, therefore, in understanding literary and historical periods. In this class, we will spend over half the semester analyzing the different tellings of the myth of Orpheus, starting with Plato, Virgil, and Ovid, then (among many others) Boethius, Sir Robert Henryson, the Church Fathers, Medieval Romance, Ficino, Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach, Shelley, Browning, Anouilh, and Russell Hoban. We'll look at 20th century poets as they rewrite the role and fate of Eurydice, poets such as Rilke, H.D., Margaret Atwood, and Adrienne Rich. Since we have a 2 hour and 40 minute class, we'll be able to see the classic movies "Orphee" and "Black Orpheus." Your research paper will be a substantial study of a theme or character of your choice, okayed by me. Possibilities are myriad; examples are Joan of Arc, Antigone, "Beauty and the Beast" and other fairy tales, Merlin, and Prometheus. There will be objective quizzes every other week. English ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE (Children Literature) MWF 11:00 – 11:50 C. RICHEY What is literature? Why do we read literature? Why do we study literature? What is different about Children’s Literature? What does literature teach children---besides how to read? All of these questions and more will be answered in this Introduction to Literature class that focuses on Children’s Literature. To answer all of these questions, we will begin by covering the basics of how to deconstruct the texts so that the students can examine the elements that comprise a text and thereby critically read and understand the text and the author’s intended theme(s). We’ll also look at the various schools of literary criticism through which the students can view the literature. The students will be evaluated on their abilities to read texts closely and to think critically about literature, including analysis, interpretation, synthesis and evaluation. Grades will be assessed through examination, writing, and individual and group contributions to the class. All the texts the class will read and discuss are “for” children. However, this designation may surprise you. We’ll go through the literature chronologically, beginning with the “first” children’s texts—folk and fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Then we’ll progress to the 19th and 20th centuries and read classics such as the novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Secret Garden and Charlotte’s Web; picture books including The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Where the Wild Things Are, The Cat in the Hat, and Tar Beach; modern texts such as The Devil’s Arithmetic, Tuck Everlasting, Harry Potter, and Esperanza Rising; and movies such as Hook, Holes, and The Little Mermaid. ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE (Literature and Terrorism) TTH 12:30 – 1:45 P. HERMAN Class Mission Statement: The purpose of this class is to introduce students, whether English majors or not, to literature through an examination of how literature has confronted the question of terrorism. According to the catalogue copy, the point of this class is to ask about the basic nature of literature. What purpose does it serve in our cultural life? This class will seek to answer these questions by examining how various writers and artists have dealt with the pre-eminent question of our time: terrorism. How has mainstream literature in the West represented terrorism? How have contemporary novelists, film-makers, and song-writers confronted 9/11 and other similar events? What makes terror “terror”? What does it do and how does it do this? In the mainstream Western tradition, terrorism is something outside of us, something beyond the limits of civilizations and its institutions and values. Terrorism is what threatens us from beyond, be it a supernatural monster, as in Beowulf, or from a cave in Afghanistan. But literature is also supposed to envoice the “Other”; it is supposed to take us outside ourselves and experience viewpoints other than our own. What happens when that viewpoint is that of someone, or something, labeled “terrorist”? We will be looking at such authors as William Shakespeare, John Milton, John le Carrè, and Don de Lillo, screening Munich and United 93, and hearing Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, among others. Students should be warned that some of the works required in this class contains graphic violence and sexuality. Student discretion is advised. 
ENGL
220.17 INTRODUCTION TO
LITERATURE NATHAN LEAMAN MWF 8-8:50What is literature? Salman Rushdie has been quoted saying, "Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart." Obviously, this is a very subjective definition, but that does not make it any less accurate. My hope for this class is to give English majors and non-majors an idea of what literature is today, where it has been in the past and-- to a lesser extent-- what kinds of other writing such as criticism has affected that past, and will affect its future. We will study texts from a wide range of cultures and periods. This class is certainly not meant to be exhaustive as there are so many great artists we will not have time to study. Instead, I hope to give students a taste of many different texts in an effort to promote an interest in what makes Literature so great.  Over
the course of the semester, we will study many different narrative
genres including two novels: Frankenstein; or, a Modern Prometheus, by
Mary Shelley; and Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid. We will
also read short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest
Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Raymond Carter; plays by Henrik
Ibsen, and Sophocles; poetry by Allen Ginsburg, Maya Angelou, W.H.
Auden, Emma Lazarus, William Shakespeare and much more.ENGL 250A LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES MWF 9:00 – 9:50 R. GERVAIS A survey of U.S. literature from its beginnings to just after the Civil War. The first part of the course will deal with the question of emerging American identity in the discovery, colonial, and early national periods, while the second part will deal with the great figures of American Romanticism: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. The course will conclude with a transitional figure between Romanticism and Realism, Emily Dickinson. Four in-class, open book, essay exams. ENGL 260A ENGLISH LITERATURE (Articulating Indentities: Self and Other In Anglophone Writing Historically) MWF 12:00 – 12:50 E. FRAMPTON TTH 12:30 – 1:45 Within this survey course, we will analyze a variety of significant literary texts written in the English language, from Beowulf through works of the eighteenth century. To enliven and unify our study of this long and diverse span of literary history, we will employ a thematic approach, focusing on the ways in which a sense of personal or cultural identity is created in relation to an outsider, or “other,” on the basis of gender, race, economics, nationality, religion, or alternative categories. For instance, we will consider the degree to which narratives of what it is to be a “man” or a “woman,” “civilized” or “barbarian” are formulated in binary terms, within a range of literary genres, including fiction, autobiography, poetry, the essay, and drama. Along the way, we will engage with the work of such writers as Aphra Behn, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Ralegh, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Jonathan Swift, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano. In addition to tracing the shifting perspectives and diverse techniques of these writers and others, you will be encouraged to relate what we read to your own experiences and knowledge of the world and to responses of other students, critics, and theorists. ENGL 260B ENGLISH LITERATURE (1800 – Present) W 7:00PM – 9:40PM Q. BAILEY This course is basically a “Greatest Literary Hits” of the past two centuries, focusing on the period from the French Revolution of 1789 to the present time. This roughly two hundred year period breaks down into 4 general sections: (i) The Romantics, (ii) The Victorians, (iii) The Modernists, and (iv) The Post-Moderns. Within each of these sections, the course will explore the relationship between historical and social events and the literary productions of the period. For the Romantics, for instance, the course will consider the effect of the American and French Revolutions on writers like William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the Victorian section the impact of the industrial revolution will be assessed in terms of the work of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The course will also consider the effect of the political, social and psychological developments of the early twentieth century on writers like Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S Eliot and James Joyce, and will finish with a look at the different possibilities –from the serious to the playful – that writers like Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have explored in contemporary life. English 301: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL: (Naked Surrealisms) MW 2:00 -3:15 WILLIAM NERICCIO  Imagine Freud on speed, Fellini on opium, Dali on LSD
and you will begin to thrill to the vibe of this very experimental
seminar that will fuse the delights of comparative literature, film,
photography, art, and theatre as they relate to the human psyche.
One
of our main obsessions this term will be Surrealism. The
venerable
Oxford English Dictionary has much to say about this famous 20th
century arts movement, one that sought "to express the unconscious mind
by any of a number of different techniques, including the irrational
juxtaposition of realistic images [and] the creation of mysterious
symbols." But we will find as we move through the semester that
there
are many flavors and species of Surrealism, hence our deployment of the
plural Surrealisms in the title of the class.What, then, are "Naked" Surrealisms? Surrealisms that are unclothed, revealed, unadorned and without cover? During the semester will use the concept of nakedness to explore the minds, bodies and art of women and men in some of the tastiest, most outrageous and eye-opening literature this side of the planet! The various naked minds, bodies and psyches we encounter this term will teach us to rethink what it is we think of when we imagine the dimensions of the human mind--in the process we will learn again just how instrumental surrealism, literature, film, and photography can be in exposing the riches and excesses of these artistic minds. We will not limit ourselves to the written word in this seminar, as we will explore as well naked eyes/I in graphic narrative, photography, painting and cinema. If you are breathing, have an imagination and are not easily offended by adult issues, themes and images then you should seriously consider coming along for the ride. Curious about naked surrealist artists and naked surrealist souls? Then hold on to your hats; with your dynamic participation, our adventure promises to be one hell of an experiment. This course is open to all undergraduates without regard to your selected major and assumes no expertise in literature, film or fine art! Writers and artists include Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Thomas Pynchon, Remedio Varo, Frida Kahlo, Franz Kafka, and Daniel Aronofsky. More to be announced. ENGL 302 INTRODUCING SHAKESPEARE MWF 11:00 – 11:50 T. CUMMINGS What happens when you meet someone? You introduce yourself, have a conversation, and find out a little bit about each other. If you're engaged by the conversation you had, you decide to spend more time together. That's the main goal of this class: to introduce ourselves to Shakespeare and to inspire such engaging conversation, we'll want to get to know him well. We'll read six plays by Shakespeare, three of which are being performed live during the semester. We'll talk about his characters, plunge into his sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking plots, and we'll learn how to understand his language. Since most people who are intimidated by Shakespeare say his language pushes them away, we'll listen to recordings of his works. This is the best entry to his language, and it will let us explore how he charges his words with rich, enduring meaning. It's this meaning that will encourage us to move past introductions and into a life-long friendship. REQUIREMENTS: two formal papers, response papers, discussion, and a creative project. ENGL 306A CHILDREN'S LITERATURE MWF 2:00 – 2:50 P. SERRATO Prerequisites: See General Catalog for details. ENGL 306A must be taken concurrently with specific sections of ENGL 306W. See Schedule of Classes for specific groupings. To your amusement, fascination, dismay, horror, and/or surprise, this semester we will explore the amazing complexity of children’s literature. We will begin by acquainting ourselves with some classics, such as Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Then we will look at some more recent works, including George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square, Gary Paulsen’s Nightjohn, and David Levithan’s Marly’s Ghost. Over the last few weeks of the term, things will get curiouser and curiouser as we focus our attention on the ways that different genres of literature create different types of reading experiences for young people. We will analyze texts such as Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants, Jim Murphy’s An American Plague, Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park, Beatrice Gormley’s biography of George W. Bush, and probably a Goosebumps volume. By the end of the course you will wield an expertise in children’s literature that will allow you to think, talk, and write about children’s literature in wonderfully sophisticated—and perhaps unusual—ways. Requirements include one paper, 2 exams, a final exam, frequent in-class writing, and a presentation. For a specific reading schedule, you are welcome to email the instructor (pserrato@mail.sdsu.edu) over the summer. ENGL 306A CHILDREN'S LITERATURE TTH 9:30 – 10:45 J. CUMMINS-LEWIS Prerequisites: See General Catalog for details. ENGL 306A must be taken concurrently with specific sections of ENGL 306W. See Schedule of Classes for specific groupings. This course surveys various aspects of children’s literature, with emphases on fairy tales, picture books, and novels. We will approach the study of these works analytically, focusing on developing an adult understanding of and appreciation for the texts children enjoy. Throughout the course we will be especially concerned with how children’s literature reflects or creates social attitudes toward children. This class is intended for Liberal Studies majors and must be taken in conjunction with 306W, Advanced Composition. ENGL 308W LITERARY STUDY (Analysis, Research, and Writing) MWF 2:00 – 2:50 E. FRAMPTON This course introduces the fundamentals of literary analysis and scholarly writing. We will master literary terminology, learn strategies for analyzing fiction and poetry, study the basics of literary criticism, explore various different theoretical frameworks for studying literature, and practice the techniques of basic research. The course will culminate in a research paper; other requirements include an in-class presentation, short written assignments, and workshop participation. We will make use of such texts as Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, The Art of Literary Research, and How to Read Literature Like a Professor. This course is required for the English Major and satisfies the upper division writing requirement. ENGL401 CHILDHOOD'S LITERATURE T 3:30 – 6:10 J. CUMMINS-LEWIS  
This is a class designed for non-majors who
wish to learn about a field that, although it has been around for
centuries, is recently gaining tremendous popular and critical
attention. Ever since Harry Potter picked up a wand, millions of
people--both young and old--are suddenly hungrily reading children's
literature. But children's books have been around for a very long
time. Why has children's literature been widely read but seen as
relatively unimportant since the Middle Ages, and why are people so
interested in it now? What is the history of children's literature,
and how has it changed over time? What is children's literature
today? In this general introductory course, we will focus on three
main genres of children's literature, fairy tales, picture books, and
novels, in order to explore the links--sometimes symbiotic and
sometimes corrupting--between children's literature and society.
Satisfies G.E. requirements for Explorations: Humanities and Fine
Arts. Not intended for Liberal Studies majors.ENGL 494 MODERN FICTION OF THE UNITED STATES MWF 12:00 – 12:50 R. GERVAIS A course in fiction from around the time of World War I to the present. We shall start with a collection of short stories by such authors as Cather, Fitzgerald, Porter, Steinbeck, Malamud, Updike, Oates, O’Conner, Carver, O’Brien, and Lahire, 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 two significant short novels, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying from the Modern period (1920-1950) and McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses from the from the Contemporary period (1950-present). Five in-class, open-book, essay exams ENGL 501 LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN TTH 11:00 – 12:15 A. ALLISON English 501 introduces students to the literary study of children’s books. Approached historically and generically, readings for the class will be read closely and discussed in terms of post-colonial, gender, aesthetic, and multi-cultural perspectives. Grading is based on four 2 pp. study question responses, the occasional quiz, a midterm, and a final exam that includes an 8 pp. research paper. READING LIST WILL BE SELECTED FROM: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Jane Vejjagiva, The Happiness of Kati I.B. Singer, Stories for Children David and Meeks, Twelve Dancing Princesses (fairy tale collection) L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz F.H. Burnett, A Little Princess Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family Karen Hesse, Witness Julius Lester, Cupid Leon Garfield, Smith B. Feinberg, The Big Big Big Book of Tashi De Brunhoff, The Story of Babar Dr. Seuss, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins Anushka Ravishankar, Moin and the Monster J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting Lawrence Yep, Child of the Owl ENGL 502 ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE MW 3:30 – 4:45 P. SERRATO This semester we will survey the ways that adolescence has been depicted in a splendid sample of texts. We will begin by accompanying Alice, Frank and Joe Hardy, and Nancy Drew on their adventures in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Tower Treasure, and The Secret of the Old Clock, contemplating on the way how the experience of adolescence is configured in these early texts. Then we will take an interesting look at the landscapes of male adolescence drawn out by James Joyce and J.D. Salinger in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Catcher in the Rye. After looking at some other classics like Judy Blume’s Deenie and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and asking, What’s with Deenie’s secret place? and, Why does Pony Boy have Paul Newman on his mind? we’ll plunge into more contemporary fare that expands the parameters of adolescent literature. We’ll consider the breakthroughs managed by Patricia McCormick in Cut, Zoe Trope in Please, Don’t Kill the Freshman, andJuan Felipe Herrera in Downtown Boy. For the last unit we will look at a futuristic vision of adolescence with Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Requirements include 2 exams, a final exam, a paper, and frequent in-class writing. For a specific reading schedule, you are welcome to email the instructor (pserrato@mail.sdsu.edu) over the summer. ENGL 520 AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE TTH 11:00 – 1215 M. BORGSTROM This course will survey the diverse genres that constitute the African American literary tradition, with particular attention paid to key figures in African American literary and cultural history from the colonial period to the late twentieth century. Our readings will include poetry, short stories, slave narratives, plays, novels, and autobiographies, and we'll also consider the way that oral traditions (such as spirituals, folk tales, sermons, and speeches) work within the larger tradition of African American cultural production. We will also likely consider some of the various issues that arise from this course of study itself – such as canon formation, academic fields of study, and definitions of citizenship. We'll also pay attention to the ways in which racial identity overlaps with understandings of other "minority" categories, such as gender, sexuality, and class. Readings will likely include works by Frederick Douglass, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Booker T. Washington, Frances E. W. Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, William Wells Brown, Harriet Wilson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Olaudah Equiano, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, Phillis Wheatley, Toni Morrison, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, August Wilson, and Jamaica Kincaid. ENGL 521 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE MWF 9:00 – 9:50 J. BROOKS What did it mean to be a woman in the Americas before 1800? How were the pivotal and tumultuous eras of colonization and early national formation experienced by Native American, Anglo-American, African- American, and Latin American women? Find out by reading their own narratives, poems, essays, and novels of the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. This class surveys the literary presence of women in the early Americas, as well as representations of early American women. REQUIRED TEXTS: Moore and Brooks, ed., Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions Erauso, Lieutenant Nun Behn, Oronooko Bradstreet, Poems Wheatley, Poems Rowson, Charlotte Temple COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Attendance and participation (10%) Reading quizzes (10%) Book review (15%) Response paper (10%) Literary research paper (30%) Group project (25%) ENGL 522 LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES 1800-1860 MWF 10:00 – 10:50 R. GERVAIS A course in the Romantic period of American literature, when the individual self, the imagination and emotion, and the mysteries of nature were placed at the center of art. We will see how Romanticism was a way of thinking and seeing the world that corresponded closely to the new national consciousness that was awakening in American our own new myth of the American self and landscape. We will compare and contrast the light Romantic school of faith and hope—Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with the dark Romantic school of fear and doubt—Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, concluding with the merging of both schools and the transition from Romanticism to Realism in Emily Dickinson. 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 523 LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES 1860-1920 TTH 9:30 – 10:45 M. BORGSTROM This course will examine some of the ways that the cultural changes following the Civil War were reflected in the country's literary output. We will focus, in particular, on many of the shifts in social identity that occur between 1860 and 1920, such as emancipation, the emergence of the figure of the New Woman, the immigration of diverse populations, and the classification of specific sexual identities. We'll look closely at the ways that these social transformation intersect with the literary genres typically used to define this period (such as realism, naturalism, local color writing, and modernism), but we'll also discuss works that don't fit neatly within these categories. Finally, we'll consider the ways that these cultural changes might influence not only the content but also the form of literary works. We will read at least two novels of the period (by Edith Wharton and Horatio Alger), as well as shorter works by Henry James, Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Antin, Amy Lowell, Sui Sin Far, Willa Cather, Booker T. Washington, and Zitkala _a (among others). ENGL 525 LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES 1960 - PRESENT TTH 12:30 - 1:45 J. ROTHER In this course an attempt will be made to establish a base camp for conquering the Great Rock Candy Mountain that calls itself "postmodern American literature." Poems will be read, and short stories and novels, each with care and solicitude for the author's intention (even though Holy Writ insists that neither authors nor intentions constitute real blips on real people's radars), with an eye to establishing critical perspective on works variously described as mazy, distracting, obstreperous, offroading, and even, on occasion delightful and rewarding, though always in their own unclassifiable way and always in their own inimitable terms. "Authors" (supplying the required scare quotes) as disparate, unassociatable and disturbing to conformist taste as Donald Barthelme (Snow White), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing), and a host of short story writers (appearing in Richard Ford's The "Granta" Book of the American Short Story) and poets (appearing in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry) will fill out the complement of enigmas we will as a class pursue to impasse or breakthrough in the fifteen weeks given us to spend locked in literary embrace. Be prepared, as they say, to "comment upon and discuss" whatever Blue Plate Special is up for review on a given day. TESTS AND PAPERS: A midterm (essay-type and open book), two critical papers (6-8 pages), and a final (essay-type and open book). Regular attendance a must. ENGL 525 LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES 1960 - PRESENT TH 3:30 - 6:10 L. KOOLISH The emphasis in this course will be on American fiction and poetry of the past four decades, although I am including one play by August Wilson, to my mind the greatest playwright of his generation. The format will be primarily discussion, although I expect to offer brief lectures from time to time. Themes will include issues of marginalization, non-canonical writers, the generational, class, sexual and racial conflicts in the literature of the period, the pervasive sense of America as a civilization in trouble, the omnipresence of public and private violence and its effects on people's lives, the search for retreats from these influences, and consequently, themes of affirmation, transcendence and identity. I am definitely including the following five novels: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (Vintage). Michael Cunningham, The Hours Dorothy Allison, Cavedweller Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony Toni Morrison, Beloved (Plume ) The other two novels will be chosen from among the following: Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961); Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969); Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents ( 1991); Richard Ford, Independence Day (1995); E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (1993); Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001); or any one of a number of novels by Joyce Carol Oates. Poems we will discuss will be in a Course Reader available at Cal Copy next to Starbucks on College. Poets include: Naomi Shihab Nye, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Robert Hass, Galway Kinnell,Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov,Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Sharon Olds, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, Victor Hernández Cruz, Toi Derricotte, Robert Pinsky, Carolyn Forché, A.R. Ammons, Lucille Clifton, Forrest Hamer, Joy Harjo, Cherrie Moraga, Jimmy Santiago Baca COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Weekly ungraded freewrites, two eight-page papers, and engaged, thoughtful contributions to class discussion. Missing more than two classes for any reason other than personal or medical emergency will seriously affect your grade. ENGL 526 RACE & AMERICAN LITERARY IMAGINATION W 4:00 - 6:40 L. KOOLISH Lynda Koolish’s Fall 2007 English 526 class, "Race and the American Literary Imagination," focuses on that central preoccupation with race, racial identity, and tropes of whiteness and blackness, by both African American and Anglo American writers, that has characterized the American literary imagination since the nineteenth century. While racial identity clearly marks the literature of Asian American, Native American and Chicano/a writers as well, for the purposes of this course, we will confine ourselves solely to African American and Anglo American writers. Many of these writers have saturated their work with various figurations of race, yet (at least in the case of white writers) whether subversively subtextualized or openly named, the racialization of American literature in the nineteenth century remained virtually undiscussed until recently. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison has described "the ways in which a nonwhite Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served." We will explore both nineteenth and twentieth century texts, including the following: REQUIRED TEXTS: Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagin Yellin (Harvard) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin Herman Melville, Benito Cereno Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Random House) Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl Toni Morrison, Beloved (Plume/NAL) Henry B. Wonham, ed., Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies (Rutgers University Press) Lynda Koolish, ed. English 526 Reader: a xeroxed book of essays, poems & stories, including brief excerpts from William Faulkner’s Light in August and The Sound and the Fury and an equally brief excerpt from Toi Derricotte’s autobiographical The Black Notebooks. COURSE REQUIREMENTS: weekly ungraded freewrites, two eight page papers, and engaged, thoughtful contributions to class discussion. Missing more than two classes for any reason other than personal or medical emergency will seriously affect your grade. ENGL 526 GAY & LESBIAN LITERATURE TTH 2:00 – 3:15 M. BORGSTROM This course will survey some of the various forms that homosexuality takes in literature from classical Greek texts through the late twentieth century. We'll examine the evolution of sexual knowledge and identities, and we'll consider how the issues they represent might affect literary narration, plots, characterizations, and themes. We will discuss changing definitions of gender, reconfigurations of marriage and intimacy, civil rights movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We'll also pay particular attention to the ways in which representations of sexuality overlap with contemporary understandings of other "minority" categories, especially gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Course readings will include several novels (by Rita Mae Brown, James Baldwin, Nella Larsen, Armistead Maupin, and Oscar Wilde) and a host of shorter works by Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Plato, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Leslie Feinberg, and Audre Lorde (among others). ENGL 526 THE FRONTIER The EDGE TH 3:30 - 6:15 H. POLKINHORN 
This
will be a reading/discussion course in which students will explore
various aspects of the course theme. Because of our geographic location
in a major border metroplex between two nations, we see increasing
evidence of how this social/cultural context influences the full
spectrum of activities, from daily life to intellectual debates. New models for the multitudinous processes of international exchange are being developed which are being circulated back through the dominant societies. Elsewhere, the twin forces of globalization and Balkanization continue to generate new kinds of tensions. How do these tensions affect the creation of literature? Required weekly readings will form a basis for the examination of borders or edges between nations, ethnic groups, genders, modes of discourse, languages, disciplines, and art media, among others. Formal requirements include the prescribed readings, a final examination, and weekly written responses to readings. ENGL 527 CLASSIC BRITISH LOVE NOVELS W 7:00PM - 9:40PM J. BUTLER We will read and discuss, in a genuine spirit of inquiry, some of the most famous love-novels written in English, including Jane Austin's Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. One question we can consider is to what extent the concept of love is or is not "culture bound," in this case specifically Victorian culture. Or do these English love-novels try to express a need that—in one form or another—is universal? There will be a midterm and final exam on the reading as well as a paper required that should try to provide some insight into a question raised by the novels in the course. ENGL 540A ENGLISH FICTION T 7:00PM - 9:40PM J. BUTLER We'll read works by most of the famous British novelists of the eighteenth century—Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, as well as some short popular fictions by women. Through lecture and class discussion we'll try to understand them in terms of their literary historical context. The great characteristic of the fiction of most (but not all) of these writers is its realism, and this characteristic will be a central concern of our course. There will be quizzes on the reading and discussions, a midterm, a final essay exam, and a paper written out of class. ENGL 543 THE ROMANTICS T 7:00PM - 9:40PM D. MATLIN The great Blake scholar, Northrop Frye, wrote in the preface of his study Fearful Symmetry, “Today … reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem.” Frye composed his study during the darkest hours of World War II and in the darkening hours since that time can we ask whether the savageries, the griefs, the ordeals of rage, the ordeals of renewal, the inflammations of what Shelley called the new Sphinx riddles never known by previous civilizations might help us to compose a map of necessary readings before the unknowns we face in this time of hazards and trouble. With this sense of both urgency and care the course proposes to examine not only classic British Experimental Romantism but how this tradition vitally influences the most advanced experiments of the present. The course will require a commitment to reading. ENGL 563 IMAGINING ANOTHER WORLD MWF 10:00 – 10:50 J. BROOKS "Another World is Possible!" has become the rallying cry of social movements around the globe in the twenty-first century. Our project in this course is to begin to explore the powers of the literary imagination to create new political realities. Our primary texts include an analysis of the political-economic forces which shape our contemporary world, as well as visions by three American literary geniuses. What have empire, environmental degradation, and human exploitation done to our world in our times? What are the pleasures of hope, enovation, collectivity, and reclamation? REQUIRED TEXTS: Hardt and Negri, Empire Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead Toni Morrison, Paradise Cormac McCarthy, The Road Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Attendance and participation (10%) Weekly journals (30%) Group project (30%) Final paper (30%) ENGL 571 TECHNIQUES OF SHORT STORY W 7:00PM - 9:40PM D. MATLIN What is a narrative that lets the lived world in, and is at the same time a formal body that thinks, moves, is restlessly aware, not entirely sure of its destination, and wants and must be specifically alive? Think of the story space as a place where you might belong filled with a humane, deeply present knowledge; a small intimate space that tinkers with and makes consciousness available and real, nothing grandiose, and faithful to the world it attempts to bring alive filled with what it must have; gossip, rages, perception, graces, hates, saving wonders, summations of deceit; the world as it is extraordinarily attractive and hateful at every unpredictable turn. The workshop will as well include required reading, writings, and class discussion. ENGL 581W THE WRITING OF FICTION T 7:00PM - 9:40PM H. JAFFE This course is designed for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, English majors and other majors, who are writing fiction. Each student will be required to submit six short fictions, five of which will be graded. The story assignments are graduated in difficulty, each text concentrating on a different aspect of the medium, such as dialogue, characterization, point of view, and plot. I will also supply several writing “prompts.” Every student will get at least one opportunity to have her/his story read aloud. A typical class session will consist of four or more stories to be read aloud. Then two (rotating) student-critics will each deliver a fairly brief (five to ten minutes) commentary on the particular story. Finally the class and instructor will comment on the text. Each student will have written her/his commentary, and these comments (signed), along with the instructor's, will be passed on to the writer whose story has been critiqued. Besides reading and critiquing your fiction, we will discuss stories and texts from a reader that I compile which bears on your writing. And we will discuss questions of writing, art and culture which seem relevant to our concerns as fiction writers. ENGL 581W THE WRITING OF FICTION W 4:00 - 6:40 J. MESCHERY 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 the fiction of other workshop members. ENGL 581W THE WRITING OF FICTION TH 7:00PM - 9:40PM D. MATLIN Creative writing workshop in Fiction. Emphasis on the disciplines of writing. Concentration on process, awareness of the word-by-word formation of texture, tone, the intricate close work of balancing life events and language and how these instances of possibility can be intensely combined into the tangles of perception; wonders that might include the currents of a lived world as the expressive reservoirs of language and narrative might discover; quick, without prediction, never standing still. The emphasis will include required readings, writings, and workshop participation. ENGL 584W THE WRITING OF NONFICTION TH 7:00PM - 9:40PM H. POLKINHORN This course involves the exploration of a variety of writing styles. Students will practice writing in class as well as at home. In addition, samples of different kinds of published nonfiction will be studied and discussed. NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Fall 2007 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing. GRADUATE COURSES ENGL 600 INTRODUCTION TO GRADUATE STUDY M 7:00PM - 9:40PM J. BROOKS This class will serve as an orientation to the advanced study of literature. Think of literary criticism as a long conversation that has taken place across the centuries. My goal is to prepare you to join the conversation with an understanding of its basic critical terms, a sense of its rules, forms, and customs, as well as a healthy sense of your own interests, instincts, and goals as a reader and critic. Our readings will allow us approach the work of literary criticism both in theory, through a review of the big questions and important terms that have structured contemporary literary inquiry, but also in practice, as we conclude the semester with a collective reading of Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. REQUIRED TEXTS: Richter, ed., Falling into Theory (2d edition) Lentricchia, Critical Terms for Literary Study (2d edition) Erdrich, Love Medicine (Harper, 2006) COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Weekly journal entries (40%) Presentation (20%) Abstract and outline of a scholarly article (10%) Annotated bibliography of five scholarly articles (10%) Project proposal (20%) ENGL 601 LITERATURE STUDY IN A MULTICULTURAL WORLD W 4:00PM - 6:40PM J. ROBINETT This course will investigate selected issues in literature, cultural criticism, post-colonialism and imperialism. Readings include texts and essays that challenge the idea of cannon, the definitions of genre and dominant cultural views, and offer alternative visions and structures (literary and otherwise). The focus will be on intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, race, diversity, and on the various avatars of colonialism/imperialism/nationalism and post-colonialism. We will focus on the exploration of literature as the site where social and cultural values are inscribed and from which they are also derived. The destruction and re-shaping of cultural values under the influence of colonial powers and the fate of those constructions following the end of empire is central to our exploration. Readings may be supplemented during the semester, but the basic list of required texts includes: Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart Argueta, Manlio One Day of Life al-Shaykh, Hanan Women of Sand and Myrrh Garcia Marquez, Gabriel One Hundred Years of Solitude Kincaid, Jamaica Lucy Ninh, Bao The Sorrow of War Roy, Arndhati The God of Small Things Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony Lentreccia, Frank and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study Possible additions to this list (in the form of short stories and readings from Hardt and Negri’ Empire and Said’s Culture and Imperialism) may appear as handouts. ENGL 604B SHAKESPEARE & HIS CONTEMPORARIES W 7:00PM - 9:40PM P. HERMAN This seminar will have two overarching purposes. The first is to give students a snapshot of early modern public theater and the variety of plays made available to the public. The second purpose is to put Shakespeare’s plays, which are always privileged over and above the work of his contemporaries (sometimes for good reasons, but often not), in conversation with other works written at roughly the same time that deal with similar themes. In other words, rather than studying Shakespeare in splendid isolation, we will look at how early modern dramatists as a group dealt with similar issues, and how their plays reflect, comment, and refract upon each other. For example, Shakespeare’s history plays are well-known, but it is less well-known that Shakespeare’s Henriad (which we will read in its entirety) was one of many history plays crowding the early modern stage, and reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside one by Christopher Marlowe and another by Thomas Heywood (that has only very recently appeared in a modern edition) puts all these plays in a different light. To give some examples, despite the presence of licensing and the threat of lethal consequences, criticism of the monarch appears be fairly common on the early modern stage, the rule rather than the exception. Similarly, Shakespeare’s use of cross-dressing in his comedies has been the subject of frequent commentary, but cross-dressing is also a major theme in other comedies of the period, Dekker’ and Middleton's The Roaring Girl in particular, and Hamlet is but one play among many on the problem of revenge. This class is specifically designed to help students develop their critical abilities. For each class, there will be several reports on the play itself, and if the day’s reading includes an important secondary source, a student will report on that as well. The goal is for students to react to the text at hand and to each other’s reports, thereby generating discussion and, one hopes, a diversity of insight. In addition, students will write two papers, a shorter one (6-8 pp.), which should primarily be a close reading of a play, and a longer research paper (15-20 pages). ENGL 606A AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE TH 7:00PM - 9:40PM R. GERVAIS The environmental imagination, as expressed in classic works of American nature writing. How American writers have responded to the natural world in ways that, while scientifically informed, are also marked by a personal voice and a concern for literary values. Emphasizing the impressive flowering of nature writing in recent decades, and its extraordinary range of genre-pushing achievement, mainly in the non-fiction, prose, personal narrative, but also as seen in selected works of fiction and poetry that put the natural world at their thematic centers. The course will be organized both chronologically, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, but also in thematic pairings of books: Emersons Nature and Thoreau’s “Walking” as manifestoes and prolegomena; John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as religious and philosophical conversion experiences upon first encounter with wild nature; Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year as personal witnesses to the restorative natural rhythms of the seasons; Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard as spiritual pilgrimages in the natural world; Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge as solace and refuge in nature from human losses and suffering; Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It and Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses as tragic pastorals, of fly-fishing and religion, and horses and history; and Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island and Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, Pulitzer Prize-winning collections of poetry by the pre-eminent modern American nature poets who try to get us to think back, even as we think forward, about our natural world. Course requirements: an open mind about a newly emerging literary genre and critical approach, engaged discussions, oral reports, and a paper dealing with a theme or other element—voice, tone, symbolism, characterization, style, point of view, idea, structure—that runs through our readings. ENGL 624 20TH CENTURY IRISH LITERATURE (Modern Irish Literature: Identity Conflicts) TH 4:00PM - 6:40PM J. SHUMAKER Having for the most part lost their native language of Irish, and feeling some ambivalence towards the language imposed by their British conquerors, modern Irish authors writing in English explore identity conflicts related to language, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender. We will be reading poems, short stories, plays, and novels by both well-known and lesser-known modern Irish writers, including Joyce's Dubliners, Kate O'Brien's Land of Spices, Bowen's The Last September, MacLaverty's Cal, Trevor's Fools of Fortune; short stories by Lavin; poems by Yeats, Pearse, Kavanaugh, Montague, Boland, Higgins, and Heaney; and plays by Yeats, Beckett, O'Casey, and Friel. You will present a thirty-minute oral report on a literary work the rest of the class hasn't read, will write a page of reactions and questions weekly, and will write either a twenty-page article or two ten-page essays. ENGL 630 FORM & THEORY OF POETRY W 4:00PM - 6:40PM S. ALCOSSER Our study this semester will be passionate and focused on close readings of texts. Each of you will select one area of study that will deepen your life’s work. You will then share that study with others. English 630 is open to all graduate students and may be repeated with new content. Goals of seminar: to experiment with rhetorical and verse forms; to gain a better historical understanding of the evolution of form and theory; to learn how to do close readings and writings in response to poems; to gain a broader understanding of the arc of poetry. Theodore Roethke wrote: Imitation, conscious imitation, is one of the great methods, perhaps the method, of learning to write. In form and theory we will study the collaboration that takes place between a poet and that poet’s literary ancestors. Participants will be asked to explore the layers of this influence---for instance, what have William Matthews, Anthony Hecht, and Jane Hirshfield, three radically different poets, learned from Horace; who influenced Ovid, and how did Ovid influence Shakespeare, as well as twenty-first century poets; how did Asian poetry shape the poetics of Modernists like Stein, Pound, Eliot, H.D., and Niedecker? Poets will be asked to: give a presentation which they turn into a paper; assemble a chapbook of their own conscious imitation; submit a combined reading journal and practice book; memorize and recite a poem by a poet studied in seminar. Petrarch wrote to Boccacio: there is a shadowy something—akin to what painters call one’s air—hovering about the face, and especially the eyes out of which there grows a likeness. We must write just as the bees make honey, not keeping the flowers but turning them into a sweetness of our own, blending many different flavors into one, which shall be like them all, and better. ENGL 631 FORM & THEORY OF FICTION TH 4:00 - 6:40 J. MESCHERY A seminar in which participants read and discuss the short novel in terms of craft (characterization, point of view/narrative voice, plot and structure, style, and theme.) We'll examine the distinct characteristics of the short novel, as well as its advantages and limitations. Discussions will focus on application of techniques for working writers. Seminar participants will make a class presentation and write a final paper. ENGL 700 SEMINAR: DICKENS M 4:00PM - 6:40PM J. BUTLER Dickens, the "prose Shakespeare," is generally conceded to be the greatest novelist in English. Bringing some necessary knowledge about Victorian literary conventions and society, we will read and discuss some of his most popular novels as well as some not quite so often read—Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations. We will also consider the "classics" of criticism of his fiction, academic and otherwise, such as commentary by G. K. Chesterton, G. B. Shaw, Edmund Wilson, John Carey. Our discussions will, hopefully, help the student to write a paper that can be presented, in some stage of its development, to the rest of the class. Since there is so much written on Dickens already—no one has ever read it all—I'll provide some help to each student in choosing a topic and dealing with it. A review of the critical reactions over time to a specific element or even character in a Dickens novel can be an illuminating study that can be done with the resources of our library. There will be a final (essay) exam on the reading. ENGL 700 SEMINAR: STEVENS AND ELIOT T 4:00PM - 6:40PM J . ROTHER A seminar (in the informal rather than formal sense) on the writings (creative and critical) of two 20th Century poetic giants, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and the literary traditions they helped create in their lengthy careers as pace-setters and conservators (not necessarily equatable with "conservative") of a way of "doing poetry" which remained stubbornly resistant to labels such as "Anglophile," "Franco-American," or "Bloomian-expositive" that critics, when finding the originality of certain figures destabilizing, like to apply. We will approach them and their work by steering a course that circumvents those critical cliches which have kept their writings, other than "classics" like The Waste Land, "Sunday Morning," and "Idea of Order at Key West," from reaching readers weaned on Howl and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. All the major poetry and works in prose by these authors will be probed in detail, with particular emphasis, in Eliot's case, falling on the substantial contribution made by him to literary criticism. (Among Eliot's five plays, only Murder in the Cathedral will be read.) Included among the required texts are T. S. Eliot's,The Waste Land: A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts, Eliot's Complete Poems and Selected Prose, and the Library of America edition of Stevens's Complete Poems and Prose. COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Full-length graduate paper on a researched topic, several critical papers on selected works, and a final examination. ENGL 726 SEMINAR: POSTCOLONIAL WOMEN WRITER T 4:00PM - 6:40PM L. EDSON A study of postcolonial women's writing produced in a wide range of cultural contexts. Authors to be studied include Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe), Assia Djebar (Algeria), Mariama Ba (Senegal), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria). Primary texts to be supplemented with theoretical and critical articles by Nawal el Saadawi, Fatima Mernissi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ketu Katrak, Penina Mlama, Evelyne Accad, and others. Oral presentations, reading journal, mid-term and final papers. ENGL 726 SEMINAR: LITERARY NARRATIVE & THE READER T 7:00PM – 9:40PM J. FARBER How do readers construct and “realize” narratives? Without ignoring the concerns of narrative theory in the structuralist tradition on the one hand, and cultural study on the other, this course will put its primary emphasis on the role of the reader. And here is where things get especially interesting. We’re going to be not only the theorists and investigators, but also the subjects of this investigation; therefore, we’re going to be obliged to throw ourselves enthusiastically as readers into a dizzyingly wide assortment of narratives. This course, in fact, has been conceived as nothing less than a festival of literary narrative. We’ll be reading: a number of folk tales, as well as tales from some of the great story collections such as the Panchatantra, the Gesta Romanorum, the Thousand and One Nights, and the Mabinogion; short fiction by H.C. Andersen, I.B. Singer, Isak Dinesen, and Anton Chekhov; a graphic novel (well . . . a comic book); verse narratives, including a chivalric romance; philosophical fiction; genre fiction; children’s fiction; metafiction; and a couple of comic novels. We’ll also, of course, be reading a certain amount of narrative theory and reader response theory. ENGL 727 SEMINAR: ADOLESCENCE IN CHICANO LITERATURE TH 7:00PM - 9:40PM P. SERRATO This course examines the depiction of adolescence (and adolescents) in Chicana/o literature from the early twentieth century to the present day. We will start the term scrutinizing classic texts such as Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez, Antonio Villareal’s Pocho, and Victor Villaseñor’s Macho!. As these early texts are by male writers and focus on adolescent male protagonists, we will especially concern ourselves with the ways that Mexican-Americans’ socio-political subordination in the United States in the wake of the Treaty of Guadulpe-Hidalgo precipitates the authors’ preoccupation with adolescent Mexican-American masculinity. Soon enough, these conversations about masculinity and Mexican-American socio-political realities will expand into more nuanced explorations of issues of gender, sexuality, cultural identity, and the emergence of literature written for adolescent readers as we engage works such as Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas, Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Luis Alfaro’s Down Town, Gloria Velasquez’s Maya’s Divided World, Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings, and Benjamín Alire Saenz’s Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood. Readings of primary texts will be supplemented with a course reader of critical/theoretical essays. For a specific reading schedule, you are welcome to email the instructor (pserrato@mail.sdsu.edu) over the summer. ENGL 750F MFA SEMINAR: FICTION WRITING W 7:00PM - 9:40PM J. MESCHERY 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 the fiction of other workshop members. ENGL 750F MFA SEMINAR: FICTION WRITING TH 7:00PM - 9:40PM H. JAFFE This course is designed principally for MFA students (MA students may also enroll after consulting with me) who are writing short or extended fiction or creative nonfiction. 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 of three texts 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. Every class member will be responsible for 10-15 written commentaries during the course of the semester, and these commentaries (signed), along with the instructor's, will be passed on to the writer whose text has been critiqued. Specifically, each participant will be asked to comment carefully and at reasonable length on each fiction or creative nonfiction. The 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 The commentaries will also be sent to me electronically so that I can read them. It is possible that I will alter the reading and critiquing format, depending on input from the class. ENGL 750P MFA SEMINAR: POETRY WRITING (Contemporary American Poetry & Its Global Influences) W 7:00PM - 9:40PM I. KAMINSKY The course will consist of three elements: poetry workshop, lecture/discussion, and individual mentorships, which will not be treated separately, but rather as integral components of a course in poetry and poetics. During our workshop sessions, your work will be discussed, and you will receive commentary from each member of the class. During our lecture/discussion we will focus on the work of several generations of American poets, from 1940s to today. We will begin this broad discussion with our readings from four living poets: Galway Kinell, Frank Bidart, Carolyn Forche and Li Young Lee, whose careers over the years examplify the many changes that have occured in American poetry and its ongoing conversation with poetics from around the globe. What can we learn from the ways in which Latin American and French poetries influenced Kinnell? How did the works of Anna Akhmatova and Edmond Jabes contribute to Forche's development? What happened to Frank Bidart's lyric when he discovered the African chant? What was the impact of European film and dance on Bidart's poetics? What did Li Young Lee learn from his reading of Pablo Neruda, Yehuda Amicai and Rainer Maria Rilke, and what is his connection to ancient Chinese poetry? The discussion of these four living American poets and their ongoing development will lead us to many other poets. The point of this discussion will be to find the ways in which your own writing can be broadened by reading international poets. Because this class, in many ways, will be about creating your own connections to a larger tradition, I will expect to spend a great deal of time working with each of you during our individual mentorship sessions. You will be asked to meet with me individually--for several one-hour long meetings during the semester--to discuss your poetry on line-by-line basis. As a final project for this course you will be asked to submit at least 10 pages of original poetry. ENGL 750P MFA SEMINAR: POETRY WRITING TH 4:00PM - 6:40PM S. ALCOSSER English 750P is a workshop for MFA students to write and discuss craft and rhetorical argument with emphasis placed on tradition as well as innovation. Prose writers, as well as poets, will discover forms for their writing. John Keats believed that he could enter the feelings of a billiard ball. Marianne Moore saved pamphlets from the Power Company and the National Park Service to assemble Octopus. H.D. imagined the writing on the wall. Of William Carlos Williams’ poetry, Robert Lowell wrote: it was as though some homemade ship, part Spanish Galleon, part paddlewheels, kitchen pots and elastic bands and worked by hand, had anchored to a filling station.This semester we will study generative methods of composing poems, and short prose pieces, by imitating rhetorical forms including: nocturnes, aubades, elegies, prayers, meditations, nursery rhymes, ekphraseis, analogues , and other hybrids. You will assemble a final portfolio of your workshop writing made up of six or seven of these generative exercises and/or a culminating project in the shape of an epic or a sequence (both of which might well contain a myriad of rhetorical forms). |