LITERATURE.SDSU.EDU
The Department of English and Comparative Literature at SDSU
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS SPRING 2007
UNDERGRADUATE
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE COURSES SPRING 2007
NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2007 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
CLT 460: Modern Asian Literature W. Rogers
T 3:30-6:10pm (The Crisis of Transformation in China and Japan)
Spanning Chinese and Japanese literatures from the years when they began to respond to the “impact of the West” in the late 19th century (somewhat earlier for Japanese literature than for Chinese) to the late 20th century, this course will selectively explore these two great literary traditions as they transformed themselves through tumultuous decades of conflict, war, economic crisis, and social change. Students with curiosity about non-Western cultures and literatures (and a sense of adventure!) should find much in CL 460 to engage them, both conceptually and esthetically. Particular background or expertise in Asian culture is definitely NOT assumed by the instructor. Requirements (depending on class size) will include two examinations (one of which will be take home), a research essay, short written responses, and active participation in class discussion (particularly important for a class that meets once a week).
CLT 513: 19th Century European Literature L. Edson
TTh 9:30-10:45
An investigation of 19th century European literature that includes close analysis of novels by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, the poetry of Baudelaire, and the drama of Ibsen and Strindberg. Issues to be discussed include realist representation, the realist novel as portrait of society, the politics of the family, the nature of desire, naturalism, Symbolist poetry, and the semiotics of the theatre. In-class writing assignments, oral reports, mid-term and final exams.
CLT 561: Modern Fiction L. Edson
TTh 11:00-12:15
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 562: Comedy in 3D J. Farber
T 7:00-9:40pm
Comedy from Aristophanes 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. And it will be important to be there every week; this isn’t a course to take if you think you might have to miss a class or two.
UNDERGRADUATE
ENGLISH COURSES SPRING 2007
English 220:Introduction to Literature (Literature and Social Crisis)
TTh 12:30-1:45pm P. Herman
This class will have two overlapping purposes. The first is to introduce students to the question of "what is literature?” by looking at a variety of books written in a variety of genres in a variety of ages. We will be looking at examples of poetry, drama, and fiction produced in fifth-century B.C. Athens, Renaissance England, and contemporary America. Literature, as we will see, is not defined by any particular genre or the arrangement of words on the page. Often, what is considered "literature" in one age (meaning a text that resonates beyond the first reading or hearing) is not considered "literature" at the time of its production, and so, we will also be looking at contemporary texts (a spy novel and a graphic novel) that may stretch one's definition of "literature." We will also see that literature asks us to think productively about difficult questions. Literature asks us to reflect, to question our assumptions, and to see matters from different perspectives, and there is no better avenue for demonstrating this aspect of literature than examining how the literature produced during periods of cultural crisis, if not outright catastrophe, invites its readers to look critically at the culture's most cherished ideals. Literature is not produced, as we will see, in a timeless vacuum, but as a result of social engagement. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that the pleasure of literature arises from how it makes one think, and that literature helps develop our critical faculties, and thus, not only makes an essential contribution to one's college education, but to one's formation as a member of an informed electorate.
English 220: Introduction to Literature M. Borgstrom
MW 12:00-12:50pm
One of the primary values of literature, the novelist Richard Ford notes, is that it helps readers to see things "that are so well-known to us that they are not well noticed." Taking Ford's comment as our guide, this course will examine some of the key elements of literature by reading and discussing several short stories, poems, plays, and novels. By paying attention to narrative technique, we'll look at how texts are constructed and how they reflect both philosophical and aesthetic values. We will also explore how literature operates across a range of cultures and cultural perspectives. Through close reading and active discussion, the course aims to hone students' analytical skills and to provide a critical vocabulary necessary for literary study.
English 220: Introduction to Literature M. Rancourt
T/TH 12:30-1:45PM (Schedule # 11023)
This is a GE course of introduction to literature.
From the University-supplied “description” (see SDSU catalogue for details) we can construct a set of reasonable goals to achieve in English 220. One goal in this course is to develop skills required for the critical reading of, and writing about, literature, including the development of the vocabulary and insights of close reading and empathic connection to a variety of texts and genres. These responses may take diverse forms, helping to develop students’ versatility to respond in various ways to not only the literature of this course, but to the literature of both academia and culture outside of the English Department. To develop these skills, we will additionally work toward accomplishing a second goal of building knowledge not only of literary terms and the range of literature within and across cultures, but also in the understanding of how literature reflects, affects, and is affected by culture. Apart from these rather intellectually-minded goals, we also have some more personal ones. In this course, we will exchange ideas. That is, this classroom will be a place where the individual’s thoughts are both celebrated and respectfully challenged, where ideas are not stifled or coerced into conformity, as they so often are in mainstream culture (not because it’s a conspiracy, mind you, but simply because life is easier when no one rocks the boat, though sometimes the boat needs a little rocking to keep the crew from nodding off and drifting into dangerous waters). Here, we can be intellectuals in our study of literature, but also in the study of ourselves, in the study of our presence in the world, our place in history. Great literature does not necessarily awaken us in this way, but it can. It has that power, and this is our goal in English 220. How shall we proceed? I have a time machine. I’ve been working on it for years. I got it about eleven years ago from a guy named Aldous Huxley. He had been dead for quite some time, but, well, if you have a time machine, it doesn’t matter when you died. You can visit just about anyone. To be honest, my time machine is sort of rickety. It spews oil everywhere. The quantum flux capacitor is prone to jamming. Sometimes it doesn’t do anything at all , but we’ll try to use it this semester, and if it works, then we’ll have no problem accomplishing our goals. We begin with the 1960 film version of The Time Machine, based on the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. As the time traveler in that story learns about the fundamental nature of humanity from his journey into the future, so will our class learn from its literary journeys. The underlying quest of the course comes from a line in the film in which a character named Filby notices that the time traveler has taken three unknown books from his shelf to share with the illiterate future. Filby asks the scientist’s housekeeper, Mrs. Watchett, “which ones would you take?” This class will perpetually consider which texts might be brought to such a time to help enlighten future humans, who, we will assume, will have forgotten their history, forgotten what it means to be human.
Required Texts
English 250A:Literature of the U.S. (Literature of the United States to 1865) MWF 9:00-9:50 J. Brooks
Once upon a time, there was a place called “Turtle Island,” home to 500 indigenous nations and 7 million indigenous inhabitants. Then, one day, Spanish, French, and English pirates washed ashore. The Europeans declared that they had “discovered” a “new world;” to Native peoples, it was the beginning of a world turned upside down. Millions of European refugees, pilgrims, and accidental tourists followed, as did 12 million captive Africans. This is where American literature begins. This course offers an orientation to the strange and fascinating world of earlier American literature, through narratives, poems, essays, sermons, and novels written by whites, African-Americans, and American Indians between 1492 and 1865.
REQUIRED TEXTS:
• Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A & B (available at Aztec Books)
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
• Close reading paper (2 pages) (10%)
• Mid-term examination (15%)
• Final examination (25%)
• Group project (40%)
• Attendance and participation (10%)
English 250B: Literature of the U.S. R. Gervais
MWF 9:00-9:50
A survey of U.S. literature from just after the Civil War to the present, covering Realism (1865-1895), Naturalism (1895-1920, Modernism (1920-1950, and the Contemporary Period (1950-present). Four in-class, open-book, essay exams.
English 260A: English Literature E. Frampton
(Articulating Identities: Self and Other In Anglophone Writing Historically)
M 7:00-9:40pm
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.
English 260B: English Literature
(English Literature 1800 – present)
MW 2:00-3:15pm 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 260B: English Literature S. Ramachandran
MWF 11:00-11:50 (British Literature from the Romantics to the Present)
We cover three periods of English Literature in this course: The Romantic (1798-1832), the Victorian (1832-1880), the Modern (1800-Present). We will spend one-third of the semester on each period, reading texts by major writers that reflect the conflicts and preoccupations of the times. The readings are in three genres—poetry, non-fiction prose, and fiction. Some of the writers covered are Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Salman Rushdie. Course requirements include active class participation, exams, written and oral responses to readings, and two formal papers. English 260B should be attractive to anyone who has an interest in reading, thinking about, and analyzing literature—or an interest in developing these skills. Daily attendance is required in this course.
English 301: The Psychological Novel R. Gervais
MW 2:00-3:15pm
A study of the psychological novel, which emphasizes the internal state and development of the protagonist, rather than external action or plot, exploring characters through their emotions, fears, dreams, and fantasies. In order to accommodate more authors and themes, we shall be studying some of the most significant novellas of modern Western literature, rather than full-length novels.
We shall study the psychology of approaching death in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Mann's Death in Venice, the psychology of encountering horror in James's The Turn of the Screw and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the psychology of personal confessions in Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground and Camus's The Fall, the psychology of darkly comic dysfunctional families in Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. and the psychology of a day in everyday life in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Bellow's Seize the Day.
There is no expectation that students will be familiar with psychological theory before taking the course. This is a course in literature, not psychology, so theory will be kept to a minimum and used only as needed, as we read and discuss the novellas.
Five, in-class, open-book, essay exams.
English 302: Introducing Shakespeare T. Cummings
MWF 10:00-10:50
What happens when you meet someone? You introduce yourself, have a conversation, find out a little bit about each other, and, 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 seven plays by Shakespeare, three of which will be performed after 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 lifelong friendship.
Requirements: Two formal papers, response papers, discussion, and a creative project.
English 306A: CHILDREN'S LITERATURE C. Scott
TTh 11:00-12:15
For this course in Children’s Literature for Liberal Studies majors, I have chosen a range of classic and contemporary texts covering a wide variety of types and genres, all of special relevance for younger children. Included are fantasies, fairy tales, realistic works and picturebooks.
We will engage in a number of different learning strategies such as small and large group discussions, readers’ theatre and group presentations as well as the usual lecture-discussion format. Please plan ahead to accommodate two required experiences outside of class time: a theatre visit, and a meeting with the author of one of your texts; both of these are on campus.
Besides understanding the basic ways to approach texts, we will consider a number of theoretical approaches which give extra dimension to our discussion, including psychological perspectives (such as those of Freud, Jung, Bettelheim and Lacan), feminist, post-modern and intertextual approaches, graphic-verbal interaction, reader response, dual-audience, and picturebook theory. A special theme throughout will be a consideration of how our experiences depend on the three constructs of time: linear or historic; circular or mythic; and liminal or marginal time.
Charlotte’s Web E.B. White
Classic Fairy Tales Maria Tatar
Princess Smartypants Babette Cole
Peter Rabbit Beatrix Potter
Alice’s Adventures Lewis Carroll
Winnie-the-Pooh A.A. Milne
Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak
Granpa John Burningham
The Tunnel Anthony Brown
Juan Felipe Herrera Calling the Doves and The Upside Boy will be presented in class for the author visit on March 14.
There will be a number of short quizzes, a midterm and a final, and a few short papers/reports. This course is taken in conjunction with English 306W where writing about children’s literature is the focus. Students must enroll in BOTH courses, with separate assignments and separate grades for each.
English306A: Children's Literature M. Galbraith
TTh 12:30-1:45pm
We will explore how childhood has been represented and pictured in Romantic poetry, in literary fairy tales, in Victorian orphan novels, in picture books, and in modern chapter books. Some books I'm planning to use: The Call of the Wild, Little House on the Prairie, The House at Pooh Corner, Charlotte's Web, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Weekly writing assignments.
English 306A: Children's Literature P. Serrato
MWF 10:00-10:50 RESTRICTED
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 Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey, Gary Paulsen’s Nightjohn, David Levithan’s Marly’s Ghost, and, in anticipation of the author’s visit to SDSU on March 14, 2007, several books by Juan Felipe Herrera, including Downtown Boy. Finally, we will focus our attention on the ways that different genres of literature create different types of reading experiences for young people by analyzing books such as Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants, Jim Murphy’s An American Plague, Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park, and Sid Fleischman’s Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini. 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.
Required Texts
Heinrich Hoffman, Struwwelpeter (Dover ISBN 0486284697)
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Dover 0486407845)
David Levithan, Marly’s Ghost (Dial 0803730632)
Franklin Dixon, The Secret of Skull Mountain (Grosset & Dunlap 0448089270)
Sheila Burnford, The Incredible Journey (Laurel Leaf 0440226708)
Gary Paulsen, Nightjohn (Laurel Leaf 0440219361)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Friends from the Other Side (Children's Book P 0892391308)
Juan Felipe Herrera, Downtown Boy (Scholastic 0439644895)
Anthony Browne, Voices in the Park (DK Publishing 078948191X)
Dav Pilkey, The Adventures of Captain Underpants (Scholastic 0590846280)
Jim Murphy, An American Plague (Clarion 0395776082)
Sid Fleischman, Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini (Greenwillow 0060850949)
English 306W: Advanced Composition M. Galbraith
TTh 2:00-3:15pm or 3:30-4:45pm
English 306A is linked to this Advanced Composition class, in which you will write formal essays on the fairy tales, novels, and picture books read in 306A. In my 306W sections, there will also be grammar quizzes and class presentations.
English 493: Literature and Film W.Nericcio
(literature and film: the obscene machine--gender, ethnicity, and visual culture)
W 4:00-6:40pm
English 493 has traditionally been an exploration of cinema and literature, their connections, interactions, collusions , etc. and we will honor that tradition this term; however, we will bring other new kinks to the adventure. for example, our experimental seminar will attempt to answer a very simple question: do we create fiction or does it create us? the obscene machine of literature and the obscene machine of film reveal themselves, upon close examination, to be nothing more and nothing less than an attempt by humans to immortalize themselves in living facsimiles, ersatz, seductive mannequins in whose forms we create and recreate our psyches! throughout the semester, in the books, films, art, and photography we consume feverishly --allowing the influenza of textuality to consume our imagination--we will confront various odd, curious, bizarre, perverse (hide the children! yikes) writers and artists who have created various odd, curious, bizarre, and perverse characters: "women" and "men," "gay" and "straight," "black," "white," "mexican," and "asian." the beauty or the (there it is again) perversity of these figures, the thing they share in common, is that each, in its own way, transcend the category that it "represents." this will very much be a course in "cultural studies," sensitive at once to the machinery of race and class, gender and ethnicity, desire and destruction. man as "the obscene machine"--the printed word (the novel, essay, and poetry) and film will emerge during the course of the semester as a remarkable semiotic and semantic factory of sorts, a voyeuristic while rhetorical, rhetorical while voyeuristic asylum movie theatre; weekly we will wrestle with twin media that represent in the course of entertaining, and entertain in the course of forging the very ether that makes thought possible. this class is open to ALL majors and all "ranks" of students--freshman, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and, even, graduate students (if they want to take it as a special study class, e798).
books to include...
(nota bene!: this is a working list of texts)
maría amparo escandón esperanza's box of saints
cristina river garza no one will see me cry
gilbert hernandez flies on the ceiling
william nericcio text[t]-mex
humberto eco the mysterious flame of queen loana
films to include...
peter greenaway the pillow book
hal hartley flirt
orson welles touch of evil
king vidor gilda
friz freleng speedy gonzales shorts (various)
English 494: Modern Fiction of the U. S. R. Gervais
MWF 1:00-1:50pm
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 overview of this long significant short novels, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying from the Modern period (1920-1950) and McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses from the Contemporary period (1950-present).
Five in class, open-book, essay exams.
English 501: Literature for Children M. Galbraith
M 7:00-9:40pm
"In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon . . ."
"There is no lake at Camp Green Lake."
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."
"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind . . . "
"Where's Papa going with that ax?"
If these lines don't stir up childhood memories, don't worry. It's never too late for childhood reading. In English 501, you'll read and respond to fairy tales, picture books, and novels published over the past two hundred years. Many of the books planned for Spring 2007 have also been adapted as movies-- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlotte's Web, The Polar Express, Howl's Moving Castle, and Holes. This gives us an opportunity to compare books and film. Weekly writing assignments--Study Questions, Responses, and In-Class Writing--and a final paper.
English 502: Adolescence in Literature P. Serrato
MW 2:00-3:15pm
This semester we will survey the ways that adolescence has been depicted in a splendid sample of texts. We will begin by accompanying the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew on their adventures, contemplating issues of gender and the socializing function of adolescent literature on the way. Then we will take a much more interesting turn to a wryer portrayal of adolescence with J.D. Salinger’s 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, Michael Cart with Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth, and, in anticipation of his visit to SDSU on March 14, 2007, Juan Felipe Herrera in Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found in a Cereal Box. For the last unit we will look at some futuristic visions of adolescence with Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Sonia Levitin’s The Cure. Requirements include 2 exams, a final exam, a paper, and frequent in-class writing.
Required Texts
Judy Blume. Deenie (Laurel Leaf ISBN 0440932599)
Lori Carlson (ed.). American Eyes: New Asian-American Short Stories for Young Adults (Fawcett 0449704483)
Franklin Dixon. The Tower Treasure (Grosset & Dunlap 0448089017)
S.E. Hinton. The Outsiders (Puffin 014038572X)
Carolyn Keene. The Secret of the Old Clock (Grosset & Dunlap 0448095017)
Patricia McCormick. Cut (Push 439324599)
J.D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye (Little Brown 0316769487)
Zoe Trope. Please, Don’t Kill the Freshman (HarperTempest 0965901564)
Michael Cart (ed.). Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth (Simon Pulse 0689856687)
Juan Felipe Herrera. Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found in a Cereal Box (Rayo 0060579862)
Sonia Levitin. The Cure (HarperTrophy 038073298X)
Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange (W.W. Norton 0393312836)
English 519: Ethnic Literature of the U. S. J. Brooks
MWF 11:00-11:50 (Native American Women Writers)
“If we saw each other as human beings, rather than symbols, what would happen? If other cultures were seen as viable and important as European cultures, what would happen? If we realized that what is called progress is just consumerism in a new dress, what would happen? If we listened to wisdom and paid attention, what would happen?”—Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet, blog for September 14, 2006 (www.joyharjo.com)
Can you name one American Indian woman writer? Can you name more than one? What matters to Native women writers? What do they have to teach us about the past? What are their visions for a humane and sustainable future? In this course, we will find answers to these questions as we read powerful and moving essays, poems, novels, and plays by American Indian women authors and learn about the historical and cultural contexts that have shaped this rich and important body of American literature.
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Andrea Smith (Cherokee), Conquest
Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) and Gloria Bird (Spokane), Reinventing the Enemy’s Language
Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Storyteller
Louise Erdrich (Annishinabe), Love Medicine
Jaye Darby and Stephanie Fitzgerald (Cree), Keepers of the Morning Star
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Attendance and participation (10%)
Indian Country Today presentation (5%)
Five two-page response papers (50%)
Final poetry project (25%)
Reading quizzes (10%)
English 523: Literature of the U. S. 1860-1920 R. Gervais
MWF 10:00-10:50
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 the 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, psychology, 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.
English 525: Literature of the U. S. 1960 to Present H. Polkinhorn
TTh 2:00-3:15pm
Students will read and discuss a variety of primary texts to gain an overview of contemporary American literature. Because of the dynamic qualities of the literature of our own period, no selection of texts can be representative of the whole. Class discussions will focus on fiction and poetry by Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac, N. Scott Momaday, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and a selection of texts from a compilation of U.S. Hispanic literature. There will be one mid-term essay exam and the final comprehensive essay exam. In addition, students will write 10 responses in class to the readings we will be discussing.
English 526: Contemporary American Poetry L. Koolish
W 3:30-6:10pm
This course will be conducted as a seminar, with class participation not only encouraged, but essential. The course will involve close readings of poems, with a goal of gaining a sense both of the oeuvre of individual poets, and of the movement known as contemporary poetry in America. Although 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 if imagination, empathy and intellect.
Requirements
1. Two approximately 8 page papers on topics of student's choice (but to be approved in advance by the instructor, and to focus on a more complex topic than the reading of a single poem). Graduate students will be expected to write somewhat longer papers—in the 10 to 12 page range.
2. Weekly freewrites on some aspect of the week’s reading are due as a Blackboard submission. This assignment should take at most 30 minutes a week: 5-10 minutes to decided which poem, image or idea you want to write about; 5 minutes to read to yourself the section of the poem relevant to your freewrite at least twice, and fifteen minutes (timed please) to type it directly onto your computer with no edits, spelling changes etc. This exercise is designed to help you feel comfortable responding to, thinking about, and writing about poems.
Grading:
20% Active class participation, including the freewrites
40% each: midterm paper and final paper.
Required texts:
A. Poulin and Michael Waters, eds., Contemporary American Poets
Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah
Carolyn Forché, Angel of History
Lynda Koolish, ed., Course Reader for English 527
Poets include: Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop. Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Judy Grahn, Sharon Olds, Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka, Clarence Major, Audre Lorde, Al Young, June Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa , Forrest Hamer, Rita Dove, A.R. Ammons, Robert Pinsky, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forché, Gary Synder, Galway Kinnell, Czeslaw Milosz and William Everson
English 528: Milan Kundera Q. Bailey
MWF 11:00-11:50 (Milan Kundera and the art of the European novel)
In The Art of the Novel the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera writes: “As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truth parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world”. In this class we will look at how Kundera’s own novels explore these myriad relative truths – about sex, love, politics, art – of the Modern Age. Kundera’s delight in ambiguity, his detestation of kitsch, and his appreciation of the history of the European novel will be explored in relation to some of his most important novels – The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Immortality – as well as in some of his critical essays. We will also look at a couple of early works – including the romantic and political satire The Joke – and one of his most recent works, Slowness, the first of his fictional works written in French rather than his native Czech. We, however, will be reading all of them in English.
English 533: Shakespeare D. Shojai
TTh 2:00-3:15pm
This course will provide a close reading of five plays of 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, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, 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.
English 534: Study of Shakespeare P. Herman
TTh 11:00-12:15
In his last book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Edward Said turned to looking at works produced toward the end of the artist’s creative life. Some, Said writes, “reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity . . . .” In others, we find artistic lateness expressed “not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” He will explore, Said announces, “the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension,” a sort of “going against . . . .” In this class, we will examine some of Shakespeare’s “late” works as expressions of what Said terms “Late style.” According to the usual descriptions of Shakespeare’s career, he moved from the unrelenting, unredeemed world of the final tragedies toward the resolutions of the romances (that is how Said sees late Shakespeare), but in this class, we will read such plays as Measure for Measure, King Lear, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest more as expressions of “going against.” We will also spend some time on Shakespeare’s sonnets, looking at how these poems refract and continue the themes of the late plays. Evaluation will likely consist of a short analytical paper, a longer research paper, and a final exam.
English 540A: English Fiction E. Frampton
(Home and Beyond: Fiction in English Through the Long-Eighteenth Century)
Th 7:00-9:40pm
Within this seminar, we will analyze a variety of significant literary texts written in the English language between 1660 and the turn of the eighteenth century. In order to lend unity to our study of this long and diverse period, we will maintain a focus on the ways in which different narratives either imagine the space of “home” or, alternatively, construct a sense of the world beyond, outside the sphere designated as “home.” We will thus consider how various writers either consolidate or deconstruct national identity, through their representations of Britain, colonial America, and Africa, within this time of intense exploration, nation building, and institutionalized slavery. In particular, we will consider how such oppositional notions as “light” and “dark,” “civilized” and “barbarian,” and “self” and “other” are constructed and perpetuated within a variety of novels. We will read both well-established writers, such as Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austin, and those who have only more recently begun to attract critical attention, such as Aphra Behn, Olaudah Equiano, and Unca Eliza Winkfield. In addition to tracing the shifting perspectives and diverse techniques of these writers, you will be encouraged to relate what we read to your own experiences and knowledge of the world, as well as considering the responses of other students, critics, historians, and theorists. There will be a research essay and a final exam, as well as other forms of assessment. The reading load will be substantial, as is appropriate for an upper-division course.
English 540B: English Fiction Q. Bailey
MWF 9:00-9:50 (19th Century English Fiction)
The nineteenth century was, for many, the heyday of the novel and this course explores some of the most famous and important works from this period. From Mary Shelley’s frequently-evoked Frankenstein, written when she was only a teenager, to Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the model for Apocalypse Now), we will look at the many different kinds of lives the novelists of the century imagined. The realism of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, the gothic romanticism of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and the tragic sexuality of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles will also be examined, as will socially important works like Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. To start this tour of the nineteenth century, we will look at Jane Austen’s Emma, a romantic comedy that “inspired” Amy Herckerling’s 1995 film Clueless.
English 543: Romantic Idealism: Blake & Shelley W. Rogers
(Decadence, Transformation, and Modernity in British Literature, 1870-1925)
M 3:30-6:10
A shy yet radically subversive university professor (Walter Pater), a world-wandering Scots “romancer” who traveled as far as California, Hawaii, and Samoa (R.L. Stevenson), a playwright, outrageous wit and flamboyant personality who played a dangerous game with sexual identity (Oscar Wilde), a sharp-eyed reporter in “exotic” India who used the short story to reveal the “otherness” of the ”Jewel in the Crown” of Britain’s Empire (Rudyard Kipling), a working-class creator of unsettling science fiction.(H.G. Wells), a socialist, gadfly, and problem-setting playwright (G.B. Shaw), and “The New Woman” who challenged all conventional morality and social roles--these are some of the writers (or figures) we’ll read (or read about) as the long Victorian era (1837-1901) came to an end. In probing this period of British literature on the cusp of modernism with its radical displacements and startling innovations, we should expect to be both entertained and challenged.
Requirements (depending on class size) will include two examinations (one of which will be take home), a research essay, short written responses, and active participation in class discussion (particularly important for a class that meets once a week).
English 544: British Literary Periods 1950-Present D. Shojai
TTh 9:30-10:45
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, Philip Larkin, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, John Fowles, Fay Weldon, and Kazuo Ighiguro, and a number of leading contemporary poets, including Paul Muldaon and Seamus Heaney. Short papers on the readings, a midterm examination, and a final exam.
English 571: Techniques of Short Story D. Matlin
T 7:00-9:40pm
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.
English 573: Techniques of Novel D. Matlin
Th 7:00-9:40pm AH 2134
The course will emphasize both readings and writing. The readings will consist of authors writing on their experience of making both prose and poetry. Many novelists have practiced making both forms and their relationship to these arts and their traditions is usefully informative and provides a fascinating measure and entrance for a semester-long examination. In addition students will have the chance to experience their own attempts at writing introductory chapters to a novel.
English576: Literary Editing & Publishing B. Boston
T 4:00-6:40pm (Principles and Practices of Editing and Literary Publishing)
This course, taught by the Managing Editor of Poetry International, will offer students an in-depth approach to the entire process of publishing a literary journal from solicitation and evaluation of manuscripts through the development of special features, art selection, editing, layout, design, printing and marketing. Students will undertake individual projects related to one or another of these aspects of literary publishing. Guest speakers will address specific topics of their expertise.
English 580P: The Writing of Poetry I. Kaminsky
W 4:00-6:40pm
English 580 is a course designed for upper level undergraduates and graduate students, wherein you will submit a chapbook of six pages of original poetry. The course will consist of three elements – poetry workshop, lecture/discussion, and individual mentorship, which will not be treated separately, but rather as integral components of a course in poetry and poetics. You will have an opportunity to have your work discussed in class, and will receive commentary from each member of the class. I will give you detailed, line-by-line comments on all six pages of your submission in our individual meeting. Each week, you will be asked to provide written comments on your fellow students’ work. During the semester, you will also be asked to memorize at least one poem, and to keep an ongoing journal about your readings.
It is my hope that in this class you will learn a great deal about contemporary world poetry and also about the history of poetry in English. As we read poets from around the world, we will consider ways in which they have influenced the work of writers in America today. It is my goal that by the end of this course, you will feel confident in approaching the literary tradition not a as a reader, but as a practicing writer. I hope that the devices, forms and approaches learned in this course will support you as you begin to express in your own writing your vision of our moment in time.
English 581W: The Writing of Fiction J. Meschery
W 7:00-9:40pm
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 might be intensely combined into the tangles of perception; wonders that might be able to 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.
English 584W: The Writing of Nonfiction T. Cummings
M 3:30-6:10pm
Why do you write essays? Merely to fulfill a school assignment? To prove that you read a book? Are your essays just tools for communicating facts when you would rather be writing fiction? Are they therefore necessarily dry? In this class, we'll explore an alternative to all this. Essays truly can be different from our stereotypes of them. After all, Michel Foucault says they free us from our prejudices and allow us to think differently. Informal essays liberate us. They are opportunities to express creativity, to make us laugh, and to help us reveal to others what we have revealed to ourselves. And, writing informal essays in this class may improve the writing you create elsewhere in your life.
Requirements: Three essays with revisions, discussion, informal response papers, oral feedback, weekly reading.
GRADUATE COURSES
NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2007 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
English 600: Introduction to Graduate Study J. Brooks
W 7:00 – 9:40pm
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 to 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%)
Two presentations (20%)
Abstract and outline of a scholarly article (10%)
Annotated bibliography of five scholarly articles (10%)
Project proposal (20%)
English 601: Seminar: Literary Study in a Multi-Cultural World
T 7:00-9:40pm L. Koolish
Course Description: An investigation of selected issues in literature, cultural criticism, and theory, primarily of the postcolonial age. Readings include texts and essays that challenge the idea of a canon of "great works" written by white male authors in the Western tradition. Focus on the intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, and race; exploration of literature as the site where social and cultural values are inscribed.
The course is still in the process of fine-tuning, but the required reading thus far includes:
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Nadine Gordimer, July's People
Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
J.M. Cotzee, Disgrace
Lynda Koolish, ed. English 601 Course Reader: a selection of essays, poems and short stories
Two very recent films about the Palestinian conflict: Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now and Steven Spielberg's Munich
There will be some other texts, (García Marquez? Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things?) And some postcolonial anthology to be determined.
Course Requirements:
1. Active, thoughtful participation in class discussion.
2. Weekly freewrites on some aspect of the week's reading are due as a Blackboard submission the
day before class.
3. Each student will prepare one oral presentation of approximately fifteen to twenty minutes (please,
no longer!) based on any aspect of that day's reading assignment.
4. One shorter and one longer seminar papers, approximately 7-8 and 10-12 pages in length.
Grading:
35% Shorter paper
45% Longer seminar paper
English 602: Literary Theory and Critical Practice J. Rother
Th 4:00-6:40pm
The aim of this course is both to introduce graduate students in English to the recent background of contemporary literary criticism and to assess, so far as is possible in a single semester, the value and continuing relevance of the now receding wave of Theory that inundated English studies since the infamous Human Sciences Conference at Johns Hopkins, attended by Levi-Strauss, Derrida and others, in 1966. Earlier models of American literary analysis (the New Criticism, archetypalism, rhetorical and neo-Aristotelian theory, and more) will be contrasted with representatives of the mostly French tendency to treat writing in all its form and dispositions as pure text. Two books by the most important American advocate of inter-disciplinary studies, Kenneth Burke, will be examined in detail. These are: Attitudes toward History, which anticipates, formulates, and largely refutes the notions of Focault, Lacan, and De Man as early as 1937; and Language as Symbolic Action (1966), which does much the same for the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Bourdieu, Deleuze/Guattari, and others.
The two texts around which most of the course will revolve will be The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (ed. Leitch et al.) and Theory's Empire (ed. Pattai and Corral). Students will be asked to report orally on a particular pairing of essays (with a common topic) from these two volumes, following which they will convert some aspect of issue on which the essays markedly differ into a critical discussion of some 6-8 pages. Each student will be responsible for three such report-and-paper assignments (depending on time available) over the semester. Also assigned will be a full-length graduate essay of some 20-25 pages (with bibliography of secondary sources) on the works of Kenneth Burke, as well as a final exam on all readings listed in the course syllabus.
English 604A: Seminar: Modernism/Postmodernism L. McCaffery
W 7:00-9:40pm
What is "postmodernism"? Why did this term
arise in the 1970s to describe the sort of radically innovative literature and
other cultural forms that had emerged during the 1970s? What was the relationship between
postmodernism and the great modernist program that dominated aesthetic
innovation throughout most of the 20th century? What relevance does the concept of postmodern have for
contemporary art, which is emerging under very different circumstances than
those responsible for the experimentalism of art four decades ago?
These are some of the questions this class will explore. But the main question I will be examining throughout this semester is: is it possible to apply postmodernism to an art form such a rock music, which originated only in the 1950s and (hence) presumably never went through a "modernist" phase at all? And in particular, IF postmodernism can be applied to rock music, then why should Bruce Springsteen be seen as postmodernism's MOST exemplary figure?
During this class, we will examine a wide selection of Springsteen's albums, including Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils and Dust, The Rising, and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. We'll also be examining a wide range of musicians who have influenced Springsteen (eg., Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, Elvis, Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan) Readings for the class will include Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, excerpts from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Racing in the Streets—The Bruce Springsteen Reader.
Class requirements--lots of reading and listening, class presentations, one term project, and a willingness to examine rock music from a variety of perspectives you probably won't be familiar with. Be forewarned: this class really will be mainly focusing on Springsteen, so if you're looking for a class featuring Jameson, Baudrillard, and Derrida, look elsewhere.
English 604B: Seminar: British Modernism Literature S. Little
W 4:00-6:40pm
Close reading of works by authors of the first half of the 20th century, such as Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Bowen, Auden, Spender, Thomas, and Beckett, with a focus on identifying characteristics of "modernism." Additionally, exploring major scholarly work addressing the works of these authors and this time period. Class activities will include oral presentations, critical written responses to assignments, and two formal papers.
Other graduate courses of interest:
Joyce
Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot
Such topical subjects as Experimentation in Fiction and/or Poetry in Modern Literature
More TBA
English 604C: Euro Poets 19C Early 20C J. Farber
W 7:00-9:40pm
Most of the poems we'll be reading were not written in English, and that, of course, presents a problem. On the one hand, it's hardly likely that everyone in the class will have reading knowledge of French, German, and Spanish. On the other hand, how can we possibly engage in serious poetry study based on translations? Imagine studying Blake's "Tyger" or Rossetti's "Goblin Market" or Hopkins's "Windhover" if all you have are the French translations. Ridiculous, right?
So what's the solution? (1) Every single poem that wasn't written in English will be there for you in the original as well as in translation. (And in many cases, there will be multiple translations of a given poem). (2) Throughout the semester, we will be attending to the original versions as well as to the translations, so that, even if you start the semester with no knowledge of these three languages, you're going to come out knowing more than you came in with. As a matter of fact, let me make a suggestion: if, before the semester starts, you have time to fool around with any of the languages that you don't know, you might just want to learn a little about pronunciation. If you look around online, you can find websites that have pronunciation guides with audio, and even lessons for beginners. Or, if possible, find someone who speaks the language and pick up some pronunciation from them.
English 606D: Seminar: Major Works Of Children's Fantasy
M 7-9:40 pm A. Allison
This new class will cover theoretical, aesthetic, and cognitive aspects of Fantasy as a genre, depictions of fantasizing in children's books, sub-genres such as High Fantasy and Alternative World, and intertextuality and influence among the books and authors. Books selected are fantasies, that is, science fiction is not part of this class.
The course Reader includes essays and excerpts from critics and authors. Complete works of criticism and assigned books will be available on Reserve in the library for your reading and for your research paper. This research paper will link a theoretical approach to a book/s of your choice.
The other major assignment will be either to 1. report on and write about the additional books in a series, e.g. Susan Cooper's books, Ursula LeGuin's, or J.K. Rowling's OR 2. select among the dozens of brand new, unread Fantasy titles I will bring to class and report/write on one of those.
You'll see in the booklist below some choices among books. Once you choose your book, you'll have class time to meet with other students of your literary proclivity to make collective reports on the book to the rest of the class. You'll do this twice; thus, there are four assignments in this class.
I will assume students have read Alice in Wonderland, a basic text for discerning the "rules" of Fantasy, and are familiar with Tolkien, to whose works our discussion will sometimes refer.
Many of these books can be bought on line for much less than cover price or found at your local library.
In probable order of reading:
Russell Hoban, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen
Dr. Seuss, To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street
James Thurber, Many Moons
Ann and Barbara Fienberg, The Big Big Big Book of Tashi
Daniel Pinkwater, Fat Men from Space
Roderick Townsend, The Great Good Thing
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
T.H. White, Mistress Masham's Repose OR
Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden OR
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Lloyd Alexander, ed., Firebirds, short stories by various contemporary writers
Rowling vol. 3 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban
Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising OR
Christopher Paolini, Eragon
Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child
Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
English 724: Seminar: Literature in English S. Ramachandran
T 7:00-9:40pm
This seminar explores the exciting world of contemporary literature written in English from regions around the world including Afghanistan, Iran, Zimbabwe, U.S.--Native American, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and India. The course examines theories of decolonization and globalization and considers how literary texts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century negotiate questions of race, cultural hybridity, class struggle, gender, displacement, and exile. Course requirements include active class participation, presentations, a short paper, and a seminar paper.
Partial Reading List
Hosseini, Khaled The Kite Runner
Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran
Head, Bessie A Question of Power
Selvadurai, Shyam Funny Boy
Ama Ata Aidoo, Christina Changes: A Love Story
Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
Grace, Patricia Potiki
Rushdie, Salman Satanic Verses
Lahiri, Jumpah The Namesake
Roy, Arundhati The God of Small Things
English 725: Seminar: Ethnic Am Film & Lit W. Nericcio
T 3:30-6:10pm (Ethnic Mannequins or the Obscene Machine)
What will we do in our seminar? We will pursue a cultural study of stereotypes and chase as well, resistant aesthetic antidotes of the same. If we think of stereotypes as a species of puppet or mannequin, who then are their authors, their agents, their puppeteers? Extending this allegorical premise, who builds and finances the theater within which these puppets Ôplay'? And why are we such a captive, supportive audience?
Film and fiction hand us artifacts that traffic in verisimilitude. A graduate seminar in a literature department, then, is an agent in the commerce of illicit fictional exchanges—an economy of the obscene, which grows even more complex when we aspire to attend to the categories of ethnicity and gender.
And, aspire we do!
Books include: flor gardu–o's inner light; mar’a amparo escand—n's esperanza's box of saints; cristina river garza's no one will see me cry; gilbert hernandez's flies on the ceiling; william nericcio's text[t]-mex: seductive hallucination of the mexican in america; and frida kahlo's diary. Films include: peter greenaway's the pillow book; orson welles's touch of evil; charles vidor's gilda; friz freleng's warner brothers speedy gonzales animated shorts (various); and richard fleischer's mandingo. Additional readings will include cultural studies essays by Sander Gilman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Spike Lee, Thelma Golden, and Jessica Hagedorn.
Graduate students in Film, Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, Art, Anthropology, and Latin American Studies are strongly urged to consider joining our cultural studies cohort.
English 726: Seminar: 20th Century Literary Exiles D. Shojai
M 4:00-6:40pm
Up till the 20th century, most writers lived and wrote in their countries; thereafter, cultural displacement became increasingly widespread. This course will explore the works and experiences of various writers in exile between World War I and the present. The first part will cover selected topics and texts. Included will be sessions on Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation in Paris; Henry Miller in Greece; James Baldwin in France and Turkey; Vladimir Nabokov in Montreaux; Milan Kundera in Paris; Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld in Israel; Iranian novelist Bozorg Alavi in East Berlin; British immigrant Salman Rushdie in hiding; and journalist Martha Gellhorn in London and elsewhere. The second part will be devoted to discussing the works of authors selected and presented by students. In the process, an attempt will be made to consider the experience of exile as a major aspect of 20th century literary history. The grade will be based on weekly two-page papers on the readings and on a midterm essay examination, a class presentation, and a research paper on the writer and work of the student's choice.
English 750F: MFA Seminar: Fiction Writing J. Meschery
W 4:00-6:40pm
English 750F: MFA Seminar: Fiction Writing J. Meschery
Th 7:00-9:40pm
English 750F: MFA Seminar: Fiction Writing H. Jaffe
T 7:00-9:40pm
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." At least a few of these texts will be collaborative.
A characteristic session will consist three Xeroxed (or electronically distributed) 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. (The critical commentaries may also be sent electronically to the author).
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 what the text appears to be doing, address those aspects of the text that work in its favor, and offer remedial suggestions where necessary. Everyone will send me a copy of his or her commentary as a word attachment, so that I can read them.
Your timely critiques of your colleagues' writings will constitute one of the core requirements of the course. The other requirements are your own writing submissions and your ongoing presence in the weekly class meetings throughout the semester.
*Depending on input from the class, we can alter the reading and critiquing format,
English 750P: MFA Seminar: Poetry Writing I. Kaminsky
T 4:00-6:40pm
Osip Mandelshtam once compared the writing of poetry to architecture. Each word, he proposed, was a single stone. In this graduate poetry workshop, we will learn how to borrow other author's designs for our own construction, on the page. We will: 1) read the works of the Masters and imitate their forms; 2) discuss our own writings & findings. There will be a substantial amount of independent reading (Homer, Sappho, Ovid, Li Po, Shakespeare, Dickinson and Coleridge; and also Calvino, Jabes, Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Montale, Anna Swir, etc.). You will be asked to meet with me individually—several times during the semester—to discuss your work on line-by-line basis.
Requirements: At least 10 pages of original poetry produced and/or edited during the semester; memorization of at least 3 classical poems; class project (an online literary project; details TBA)
English 784: Seminar: Creative Non-Fiction H. Jaffe
AL 269, Office Hrs: 5:30-6:45, TTh Office phone: 594-5469 E-Mail: hjaffe@mail.sdsu.edu
I haven't settled on the readings yet but am considering these texts and visuals among others:
-Joseph Beuys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOD5Pu6uVM&mode=related&search= (parameters of art, art and revolution)
-Angry Women (Interviews, performance).
-Jean Baudrillard's America (description, theory)
-Excerpts from Pablo Neruda's Memoirs
-Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (memoir, dialogue, pacifism)
-Samples from Sophie Calle (performance art)
-Jay Neugeboren's Imagining Robert (memoir, art brut)
-Antonin Artaud (theory, art brut)
-Orlan (manifesto, body art)
-Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor (theory, technology)
-Harold Jaffe's Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (creative nonfiction and "docufiction")
-Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Paul Reps), parables, visionary.
-Various films, videos and documentaries.
This creative nonfiction course will mostly proceed from the underside, and many of the readings will be "deviant" readings generated by those discourses which are mostly unseen, unheard, unwitnessed; in effect, subjugated discourses. The imprisoned, homeless, diagnosed schizophrenic, gender-benders, the anti-institutional in various guises.
A majority of the exercises will be imaginative and generated by the readings and visuals, but other exercises will be more precisely analytical. The journal which I want everyone to maintain will consist of all the exercises and whatever other thoughts and feelings you've recorded during the semester.
The final project will be either a collaborative presentation or performance employing at least two of the creative nonfiction modes: interview, docupoem, docufiction, memoir, manifesto . . . Or a non-collaborative text divided into at least two chosen modes: film review, interview, memoir, polemic, manifesto etc.
** I am asking every student who is considering taking this course to confer with me before enrolling.
The Department of English and Comparative Literature at SDSU
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS SPRING 2007
UNDERGRADUATE
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE COURSES SPRING 2007
NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2007 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
CLT 460: Modern Asian Literature W. Rogers
T 3:30-6:10pm (The Crisis of Transformation in China and Japan)
Spanning Chinese and Japanese literatures from the years when they began to respond to the “impact of the West” in the late 19th century (somewhat earlier for Japanese literature than for Chinese) to the late 20th century, this course will selectively explore these two great literary traditions as they transformed themselves through tumultuous decades of conflict, war, economic crisis, and social change. Students with curiosity about non-Western cultures and literatures (and a sense of adventure!) should find much in CL 460 to engage them, both conceptually and esthetically. Particular background or expertise in Asian culture is definitely NOT assumed by the instructor. Requirements (depending on class size) will include two examinations (one of which will be take home), a research essay, short written responses, and active participation in class discussion (particularly important for a class that meets once a week).
CLT 513: 19th Century European Literature L. Edson
TTh 9:30-10:45
An investigation of 19th century European literature that includes close analysis of novels by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, the poetry of Baudelaire, and the drama of Ibsen and Strindberg. Issues to be discussed include realist representation, the realist novel as portrait of society, the politics of the family, the nature of desire, naturalism, Symbolist poetry, and the semiotics of the theatre. In-class writing assignments, oral reports, mid-term and final exams.
CLT 561: Modern Fiction L. Edson
TTh 11:00-12:15
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 562: Comedy in 3D J. Farber
T 7:00-9:40pm
Comedy from Aristophanes 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. And it will be important to be there every week; this isn’t a course to take if you think you might have to miss a class or two.
UNDERGRADUATE
ENGLISH COURSES SPRING 2007
English 220:Introduction to Literature (Literature and Social Crisis)
TTh 12:30-1:45pm P. Herman
This class will have two overlapping purposes. The first is to introduce students to the question of "what is literature?” by looking at a variety of books written in a variety of genres in a variety of ages. We will be looking at examples of poetry, drama, and fiction produced in fifth-century B.C. Athens, Renaissance England, and contemporary America. Literature, as we will see, is not defined by any particular genre or the arrangement of words on the page. Often, what is considered "literature" in one age (meaning a text that resonates beyond the first reading or hearing) is not considered "literature" at the time of its production, and so, we will also be looking at contemporary texts (a spy novel and a graphic novel) that may stretch one's definition of "literature." We will also see that literature asks us to think productively about difficult questions. Literature asks us to reflect, to question our assumptions, and to see matters from different perspectives, and there is no better avenue for demonstrating this aspect of literature than examining how the literature produced during periods of cultural crisis, if not outright catastrophe, invites its readers to look critically at the culture's most cherished ideals. Literature is not produced, as we will see, in a timeless vacuum, but as a result of social engagement. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that the pleasure of literature arises from how it makes one think, and that literature helps develop our critical faculties, and thus, not only makes an essential contribution to one's college education, but to one's formation as a member of an informed electorate.
English 220: Introduction to Literature M. Borgstrom
MW 12:00-12:50pm
One of the primary values of literature, the novelist Richard Ford notes, is that it helps readers to see things "that are so well-known to us that they are not well noticed." Taking Ford's comment as our guide, this course will examine some of the key elements of literature by reading and discussing several short stories, poems, plays, and novels. By paying attention to narrative technique, we'll look at how texts are constructed and how they reflect both philosophical and aesthetic values. We will also explore how literature operates across a range of cultures and cultural perspectives. Through close reading and active discussion, the course aims to hone students' analytical skills and to provide a critical vocabulary necessary for literary study.
English 220: Introduction to Literature M. Rancourt
T/TH 12:30-1:45PM (Schedule # 11023)
This is a GE course of introduction to literature.
From the University-supplied “description” (see SDSU catalogue for details) we can construct a set of reasonable goals to achieve in English 220. One goal in this course is to develop skills required for the critical reading of, and writing about, literature, including the development of the vocabulary and insights of close reading and empathic connection to a variety of texts and genres. These responses may take diverse forms, helping to develop students’ versatility to respond in various ways to not only the literature of this course, but to the literature of both academia and culture outside of the English Department. To develop these skills, we will additionally work toward accomplishing a second goal of building knowledge not only of literary terms and the range of literature within and across cultures, but also in the understanding of how literature reflects, affects, and is affected by culture. Apart from these rather intellectually-minded goals, we also have some more personal ones. In this course, we will exchange ideas. That is, this classroom will be a place where the individual’s thoughts are both celebrated and respectfully challenged, where ideas are not stifled or coerced into conformity, as they so often are in mainstream culture (not because it’s a conspiracy, mind you, but simply because life is easier when no one rocks the boat, though sometimes the boat needs a little rocking to keep the crew from nodding off and drifting into dangerous waters). Here, we can be intellectuals in our study of literature, but also in the study of ourselves, in the study of our presence in the world, our place in history. Great literature does not necessarily awaken us in this way, but it can. It has that power, and this is our goal in English 220. How shall we proceed? I have a time machine. I’ve been working on it for years. I got it about eleven years ago from a guy named Aldous Huxley. He had been dead for quite some time, but, well, if you have a time machine, it doesn’t matter when you died. You can visit just about anyone. To be honest, my time machine is sort of rickety. It spews oil everywhere. The quantum flux capacitor is prone to jamming. Sometimes it doesn’t do anything at all , but we’ll try to use it this semester, and if it works, then we’ll have no problem accomplishing our goals. We begin with the 1960 film version of The Time Machine, based on the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. As the time traveler in that story learns about the fundamental nature of humanity from his journey into the future, so will our class learn from its literary journeys. The underlying quest of the course comes from a line in the film in which a character named Filby notices that the time traveler has taken three unknown books from his shelf to share with the illiterate future. Filby asks the scientist’s housekeeper, Mrs. Watchett, “which ones would you take?” This class will perpetually consider which texts might be brought to such a time to help enlighten future humans, who, we will assume, will have forgotten their history, forgotten what it means to be human.
Required Texts
- The Coup (musical group). Steal This Album (Compact Disk or MP3’s available at legal download sites - this text is also available as a later re-issured double album called Steal This Double Album. Either version is appropriate, but the double version is more expensive and not worth it).
- Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Harper Perennial Classics Edition. (They have a new one, but just make sure you get whichever one they have in the book store).
- The Seagull Reader: Literature. Edited by Joseph Kelly, WW Norton: College of Charleston, 2005.
- Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
- Trujillo , Carla. What Night Brings. Willamantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2003.
English 250A:Literature of the U.S. (Literature of the United States to 1865) MWF 9:00-9:50 J. Brooks
Once upon a time, there was a place called “Turtle Island,” home to 500 indigenous nations and 7 million indigenous inhabitants. Then, one day, Spanish, French, and English pirates washed ashore. The Europeans declared that they had “discovered” a “new world;” to Native peoples, it was the beginning of a world turned upside down. Millions of European refugees, pilgrims, and accidental tourists followed, as did 12 million captive Africans. This is where American literature begins. This course offers an orientation to the strange and fascinating world of earlier American literature, through narratives, poems, essays, sermons, and novels written by whites, African-Americans, and American Indians between 1492 and 1865.
REQUIRED TEXTS:
• Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A & B (available at Aztec Books)
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
• Close reading paper (2 pages) (10%)
• Mid-term examination (15%)
• Final examination (25%)
• Group project (40%)
• Attendance and participation (10%)
English 250B: Literature of the U.S. R. Gervais
MWF 9:00-9:50
A survey of U.S. literature from just after the Civil War to the present, covering Realism (1865-1895), Naturalism (1895-1920, Modernism (1920-1950, and the Contemporary Period (1950-present). Four in-class, open-book, essay exams.
English 260A: English Literature E. Frampton
(Articulating Identities: Self and Other In Anglophone Writing Historically)
M 7:00-9:40pm
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.
English 260B: English Literature
(English Literature 1800 – present)
MW 2:00-3:15pm 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 260B: English Literature S. Ramachandran
MWF 11:00-11:50 (British Literature from the Romantics to the Present)
We cover three periods of English Literature in this course: The Romantic (1798-1832), the Victorian (1832-1880), the Modern (1800-Present). We will spend one-third of the semester on each period, reading texts by major writers that reflect the conflicts and preoccupations of the times. The readings are in three genres—poetry, non-fiction prose, and fiction. Some of the writers covered are Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Salman Rushdie. Course requirements include active class participation, exams, written and oral responses to readings, and two formal papers. English 260B should be attractive to anyone who has an interest in reading, thinking about, and analyzing literature—or an interest in developing these skills. Daily attendance is required in this course.
English 301: The Psychological Novel R. Gervais
MW 2:00-3:15pm
A study of the psychological novel, which emphasizes the internal state and development of the protagonist, rather than external action or plot, exploring characters through their emotions, fears, dreams, and fantasies. In order to accommodate more authors and themes, we shall be studying some of the most significant novellas of modern Western literature, rather than full-length novels.
We shall study the psychology of approaching death in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Mann's Death in Venice, the psychology of encountering horror in James's The Turn of the Screw and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the psychology of personal confessions in Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground and Camus's The Fall, the psychology of darkly comic dysfunctional families in Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. and the psychology of a day in everyday life in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Bellow's Seize the Day.
There is no expectation that students will be familiar with psychological theory before taking the course. This is a course in literature, not psychology, so theory will be kept to a minimum and used only as needed, as we read and discuss the novellas.
Five, in-class, open-book, essay exams.
English 302: Introducing Shakespeare T. Cummings
MWF 10:00-10:50
What happens when you meet someone? You introduce yourself, have a conversation, find out a little bit about each other, and, 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 seven plays by Shakespeare, three of which will be performed after 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 lifelong friendship.
Requirements: Two formal papers, response papers, discussion, and a creative project.
English 306A: CHILDREN'S LITERATURE C. Scott
TTh 11:00-12:15
For this course in Children’s Literature for Liberal Studies majors, I have chosen a range of classic and contemporary texts covering a wide variety of types and genres, all of special relevance for younger children. Included are fantasies, fairy tales, realistic works and picturebooks.
We will engage in a number of different learning strategies such as small and large group discussions, readers’ theatre and group presentations as well as the usual lecture-discussion format. Please plan ahead to accommodate two required experiences outside of class time: a theatre visit, and a meeting with the author of one of your texts; both of these are on campus.
Besides understanding the basic ways to approach texts, we will consider a number of theoretical approaches which give extra dimension to our discussion, including psychological perspectives (such as those of Freud, Jung, Bettelheim and Lacan), feminist, post-modern and intertextual approaches, graphic-verbal interaction, reader response, dual-audience, and picturebook theory. A special theme throughout will be a consideration of how our experiences depend on the three constructs of time: linear or historic; circular or mythic; and liminal or marginal time.
Charlotte’s Web E.B. White
Classic Fairy Tales Maria Tatar
Princess Smartypants Babette Cole
Peter Rabbit Beatrix Potter
Alice’s Adventures Lewis Carroll
Winnie-the-Pooh A.A. Milne
Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak
Granpa John Burningham
The Tunnel Anthony Brown
Juan Felipe Herrera Calling the Doves and The Upside Boy will be presented in class for the author visit on March 14.
There will be a number of short quizzes, a midterm and a final, and a few short papers/reports. This course is taken in conjunction with English 306W where writing about children’s literature is the focus. Students must enroll in BOTH courses, with separate assignments and separate grades for each.
English306A: Children's Literature M. Galbraith
TTh 12:30-1:45pm
We will explore how childhood has been represented and pictured in Romantic poetry, in literary fairy tales, in Victorian orphan novels, in picture books, and in modern chapter books. Some books I'm planning to use: The Call of the Wild, Little House on the Prairie, The House at Pooh Corner, Charlotte's Web, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Weekly writing assignments.
English 306A: Children's Literature P. Serrato
MWF 10:00-10:50 RESTRICTED
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 Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey, Gary Paulsen’s Nightjohn, David Levithan’s Marly’s Ghost, and, in anticipation of the author’s visit to SDSU on March 14, 2007, several books by Juan Felipe Herrera, including Downtown Boy. Finally, we will focus our attention on the ways that different genres of literature create different types of reading experiences for young people by analyzing books such as Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants, Jim Murphy’s An American Plague, Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park, and Sid Fleischman’s Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini. 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.
Required Texts
Heinrich Hoffman, Struwwelpeter (Dover ISBN 0486284697)
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Dover 0486407845)
David Levithan, Marly’s Ghost (Dial 0803730632)
Franklin Dixon, The Secret of Skull Mountain (Grosset & Dunlap 0448089270)
Sheila Burnford, The Incredible Journey (Laurel Leaf 0440226708)
Gary Paulsen, Nightjohn (Laurel Leaf 0440219361)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Friends from the Other Side (Children's Book P 0892391308)
Juan Felipe Herrera, Downtown Boy (Scholastic 0439644895)
Anthony Browne, Voices in the Park (DK Publishing 078948191X)
Dav Pilkey, The Adventures of Captain Underpants (Scholastic 0590846280)
Jim Murphy, An American Plague (Clarion 0395776082)
Sid Fleischman, Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini (Greenwillow 0060850949)
English 306W: Advanced Composition M. Galbraith
TTh 2:00-3:15pm or 3:30-4:45pm
English 306A is linked to this Advanced Composition class, in which you will write formal essays on the fairy tales, novels, and picture books read in 306A. In my 306W sections, there will also be grammar quizzes and class presentations.
English 493: Literature and Film W.Nericcio
(literature and film: the obscene machine--gender, ethnicity, and visual culture)
W 4:00-6:40pm
English 493 has traditionally been an exploration of cinema and literature, their connections, interactions, collusions , etc. and we will honor that tradition this term; however, we will bring other new kinks to the adventure. for example, our experimental seminar will attempt to answer a very simple question: do we create fiction or does it create us? the obscene machine of literature and the obscene machine of film reveal themselves, upon close examination, to be nothing more and nothing less than an attempt by humans to immortalize themselves in living facsimiles, ersatz, seductive mannequins in whose forms we create and recreate our psyches! throughout the semester, in the books, films, art, and photography we consume feverishly --allowing the influenza of textuality to consume our imagination--we will confront various odd, curious, bizarre, perverse (hide the children! yikes) writers and artists who have created various odd, curious, bizarre, and perverse characters: "women" and "men," "gay" and "straight," "black," "white," "mexican," and "asian." the beauty or the (there it is again) perversity of these figures, the thing they share in common, is that each, in its own way, transcend the category that it "represents." this will very much be a course in "cultural studies," sensitive at once to the machinery of race and class, gender and ethnicity, desire and destruction. man as "the obscene machine"--the printed word (the novel, essay, and poetry) and film will emerge during the course of the semester as a remarkable semiotic and semantic factory of sorts, a voyeuristic while rhetorical, rhetorical while voyeuristic asylum movie theatre; weekly we will wrestle with twin media that represent in the course of entertaining, and entertain in the course of forging the very ether that makes thought possible. this class is open to ALL majors and all "ranks" of students--freshman, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and, even, graduate students (if they want to take it as a special study class, e798).
books to include...
(nota bene!: this is a working list of texts)
maría amparo escandón esperanza's box of saints
cristina river garza no one will see me cry
gilbert hernandez flies on the ceiling
william nericcio text[t]-mex
humberto eco the mysterious flame of queen loana
films to include...
peter greenaway the pillow book
hal hartley flirt
orson welles touch of evil
king vidor gilda
friz freleng speedy gonzales shorts (various)
English 494: Modern Fiction of the U. S. R. Gervais
MWF 1:00-1:50pm
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 overview of this long significant short novels, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying from the Modern period (1920-1950) and McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses from the Contemporary period (1950-present).
Five in class, open-book, essay exams.
English 501: Literature for Children M. Galbraith
M 7:00-9:40pm
"In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon . . ."
"There is no lake at Camp Green Lake."
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."
"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind . . . "
"Where's Papa going with that ax?"
If these lines don't stir up childhood memories, don't worry. It's never too late for childhood reading. In English 501, you'll read and respond to fairy tales, picture books, and novels published over the past two hundred years. Many of the books planned for Spring 2007 have also been adapted as movies-- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlotte's Web, The Polar Express, Howl's Moving Castle, and Holes. This gives us an opportunity to compare books and film. Weekly writing assignments--Study Questions, Responses, and In-Class Writing--and a final paper.
English 502: Adolescence in Literature P. Serrato
MW 2:00-3:15pm
This semester we will survey the ways that adolescence has been depicted in a splendid sample of texts. We will begin by accompanying the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew on their adventures, contemplating issues of gender and the socializing function of adolescent literature on the way. Then we will take a much more interesting turn to a wryer portrayal of adolescence with J.D. Salinger’s 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, Michael Cart with Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth, and, in anticipation of his visit to SDSU on March 14, 2007, Juan Felipe Herrera in Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found in a Cereal Box. For the last unit we will look at some futuristic visions of adolescence with Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Sonia Levitin’s The Cure. Requirements include 2 exams, a final exam, a paper, and frequent in-class writing.
Required Texts
Judy Blume. Deenie (Laurel Leaf ISBN 0440932599)
Lori Carlson (ed.). American Eyes: New Asian-American Short Stories for Young Adults (Fawcett 0449704483)
Franklin Dixon. The Tower Treasure (Grosset & Dunlap 0448089017)
S.E. Hinton. The Outsiders (Puffin 014038572X)
Carolyn Keene. The Secret of the Old Clock (Grosset & Dunlap 0448095017)
Patricia McCormick. Cut (Push 439324599)
J.D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye (Little Brown 0316769487)
Zoe Trope. Please, Don’t Kill the Freshman (HarperTempest 0965901564)
Michael Cart (ed.). Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth (Simon Pulse 0689856687)
Juan Felipe Herrera. Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found in a Cereal Box (Rayo 0060579862)
Sonia Levitin. The Cure (HarperTrophy 038073298X)
Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange (W.W. Norton 0393312836)
English 519: Ethnic Literature of the U. S. J. Brooks
MWF 11:00-11:50 (Native American Women Writers)
“If we saw each other as human beings, rather than symbols, what would happen? If other cultures were seen as viable and important as European cultures, what would happen? If we realized that what is called progress is just consumerism in a new dress, what would happen? If we listened to wisdom and paid attention, what would happen?”—Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet, blog for September 14, 2006 (www.joyharjo.com)
Can you name one American Indian woman writer? Can you name more than one? What matters to Native women writers? What do they have to teach us about the past? What are their visions for a humane and sustainable future? In this course, we will find answers to these questions as we read powerful and moving essays, poems, novels, and plays by American Indian women authors and learn about the historical and cultural contexts that have shaped this rich and important body of American literature.
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Andrea Smith (Cherokee), Conquest
Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) and Gloria Bird (Spokane), Reinventing the Enemy’s Language
Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Storyteller
Louise Erdrich (Annishinabe), Love Medicine
Jaye Darby and Stephanie Fitzgerald (Cree), Keepers of the Morning Star
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Attendance and participation (10%)
Indian Country Today presentation (5%)
Five two-page response papers (50%)
Final poetry project (25%)
Reading quizzes (10%)
English 523: Literature of the U. S. 1860-1920 R. Gervais
MWF 10:00-10:50
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 the 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, psychology, 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.
English 525: Literature of the U. S. 1960 to Present H. Polkinhorn
TTh 2:00-3:15pm
Students will read and discuss a variety of primary texts to gain an overview of contemporary American literature. Because of the dynamic qualities of the literature of our own period, no selection of texts can be representative of the whole. Class discussions will focus on fiction and poetry by Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac, N. Scott Momaday, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and a selection of texts from a compilation of U.S. Hispanic literature. There will be one mid-term essay exam and the final comprehensive essay exam. In addition, students will write 10 responses in class to the readings we will be discussing.
English 526: Contemporary American Poetry L. Koolish
W 3:30-6:10pm
This course will be conducted as a seminar, with class participation not only encouraged, but essential. The course will involve close readings of poems, with a goal of gaining a sense both of the oeuvre of individual poets, and of the movement known as contemporary poetry in America. Although 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 if imagination, empathy and intellect.
Requirements
1. Two approximately 8 page papers on topics of student's choice (but to be approved in advance by the instructor, and to focus on a more complex topic than the reading of a single poem). Graduate students will be expected to write somewhat longer papers—in the 10 to 12 page range.
2. Weekly freewrites on some aspect of the week’s reading are due as a Blackboard submission. This assignment should take at most 30 minutes a week: 5-10 minutes to decided which poem, image or idea you want to write about; 5 minutes to read to yourself the section of the poem relevant to your freewrite at least twice, and fifteen minutes (timed please) to type it directly onto your computer with no edits, spelling changes etc. This exercise is designed to help you feel comfortable responding to, thinking about, and writing about poems.
Grading:
20% Active class participation, including the freewrites
40% each: midterm paper and final paper.
Required texts:
A. Poulin and Michael Waters, eds., Contemporary American Poets
Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah
Carolyn Forché, Angel of History
Lynda Koolish, ed., Course Reader for English 527
Poets include: Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop. Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Judy Grahn, Sharon Olds, Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka, Clarence Major, Audre Lorde, Al Young, June Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa , Forrest Hamer, Rita Dove, A.R. Ammons, Robert Pinsky, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forché, Gary Synder, Galway Kinnell, Czeslaw Milosz and William Everson
English 528: Milan Kundera Q. Bailey
MWF 11:00-11:50 (Milan Kundera and the art of the European novel)
In The Art of the Novel the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera writes: “As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truth parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world”. In this class we will look at how Kundera’s own novels explore these myriad relative truths – about sex, love, politics, art – of the Modern Age. Kundera’s delight in ambiguity, his detestation of kitsch, and his appreciation of the history of the European novel will be explored in relation to some of his most important novels – The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Immortality – as well as in some of his critical essays. We will also look at a couple of early works – including the romantic and political satire The Joke – and one of his most recent works, Slowness, the first of his fictional works written in French rather than his native Czech. We, however, will be reading all of them in English.
English 533: Shakespeare D. Shojai
TTh 2:00-3:15pm
This course will provide a close reading of five plays of 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, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, 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.
English 534: Study of Shakespeare P. Herman
TTh 11:00-12:15
In his last book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Edward Said turned to looking at works produced toward the end of the artist’s creative life. Some, Said writes, “reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity . . . .” In others, we find artistic lateness expressed “not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” He will explore, Said announces, “the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension,” a sort of “going against . . . .” In this class, we will examine some of Shakespeare’s “late” works as expressions of what Said terms “Late style.” According to the usual descriptions of Shakespeare’s career, he moved from the unrelenting, unredeemed world of the final tragedies toward the resolutions of the romances (that is how Said sees late Shakespeare), but in this class, we will read such plays as Measure for Measure, King Lear, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest more as expressions of “going against.” We will also spend some time on Shakespeare’s sonnets, looking at how these poems refract and continue the themes of the late plays. Evaluation will likely consist of a short analytical paper, a longer research paper, and a final exam.
English 540A: English Fiction E. Frampton
(Home and Beyond: Fiction in English Through the Long-Eighteenth Century)
Th 7:00-9:40pm
Within this seminar, we will analyze a variety of significant literary texts written in the English language between 1660 and the turn of the eighteenth century. In order to lend unity to our study of this long and diverse period, we will maintain a focus on the ways in which different narratives either imagine the space of “home” or, alternatively, construct a sense of the world beyond, outside the sphere designated as “home.” We will thus consider how various writers either consolidate or deconstruct national identity, through their representations of Britain, colonial America, and Africa, within this time of intense exploration, nation building, and institutionalized slavery. In particular, we will consider how such oppositional notions as “light” and “dark,” “civilized” and “barbarian,” and “self” and “other” are constructed and perpetuated within a variety of novels. We will read both well-established writers, such as Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austin, and those who have only more recently begun to attract critical attention, such as Aphra Behn, Olaudah Equiano, and Unca Eliza Winkfield. In addition to tracing the shifting perspectives and diverse techniques of these writers, you will be encouraged to relate what we read to your own experiences and knowledge of the world, as well as considering the responses of other students, critics, historians, and theorists. There will be a research essay and a final exam, as well as other forms of assessment. The reading load will be substantial, as is appropriate for an upper-division course.
English 540B: English Fiction Q. Bailey
MWF 9:00-9:50 (19th Century English Fiction)
The nineteenth century was, for many, the heyday of the novel and this course explores some of the most famous and important works from this period. From Mary Shelley’s frequently-evoked Frankenstein, written when she was only a teenager, to Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the model for Apocalypse Now), we will look at the many different kinds of lives the novelists of the century imagined. The realism of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, the gothic romanticism of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and the tragic sexuality of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles will also be examined, as will socially important works like Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. To start this tour of the nineteenth century, we will look at Jane Austen’s Emma, a romantic comedy that “inspired” Amy Herckerling’s 1995 film Clueless.
English 543: Romantic Idealism: Blake & Shelley W. Rogers
(Decadence, Transformation, and Modernity in British Literature, 1870-1925)
M 3:30-6:10
A shy yet radically subversive university professor (Walter Pater), a world-wandering Scots “romancer” who traveled as far as California, Hawaii, and Samoa (R.L. Stevenson), a playwright, outrageous wit and flamboyant personality who played a dangerous game with sexual identity (Oscar Wilde), a sharp-eyed reporter in “exotic” India who used the short story to reveal the “otherness” of the ”Jewel in the Crown” of Britain’s Empire (Rudyard Kipling), a working-class creator of unsettling science fiction.(H.G. Wells), a socialist, gadfly, and problem-setting playwright (G.B. Shaw), and “The New Woman” who challenged all conventional morality and social roles--these are some of the writers (or figures) we’ll read (or read about) as the long Victorian era (1837-1901) came to an end. In probing this period of British literature on the cusp of modernism with its radical displacements and startling innovations, we should expect to be both entertained and challenged.
Requirements (depending on class size) will include two examinations (one of which will be take home), a research essay, short written responses, and active participation in class discussion (particularly important for a class that meets once a week).
English 544: British Literary Periods 1950-Present D. Shojai
TTh 9:30-10:45
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, Philip Larkin, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, John Fowles, Fay Weldon, and Kazuo Ighiguro, and a number of leading contemporary poets, including Paul Muldaon and Seamus Heaney. Short papers on the readings, a midterm examination, and a final exam.
English 571: Techniques of Short Story D. Matlin
T 7:00-9:40pm
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.
English 573: Techniques of Novel D. Matlin
Th 7:00-9:40pm AH 2134
The course will emphasize both readings and writing. The readings will consist of authors writing on their experience of making both prose and poetry. Many novelists have practiced making both forms and their relationship to these arts and their traditions is usefully informative and provides a fascinating measure and entrance for a semester-long examination. In addition students will have the chance to experience their own attempts at writing introductory chapters to a novel.
English576: Literary Editing & Publishing B. Boston
T 4:00-6:40pm (Principles and Practices of Editing and Literary Publishing)
This course, taught by the Managing Editor of Poetry International, will offer students an in-depth approach to the entire process of publishing a literary journal from solicitation and evaluation of manuscripts through the development of special features, art selection, editing, layout, design, printing and marketing. Students will undertake individual projects related to one or another of these aspects of literary publishing. Guest speakers will address specific topics of their expertise.
English 580P: The Writing of Poetry I. Kaminsky
W 4:00-6:40pm
English 580 is a course designed for upper level undergraduates and graduate students, wherein you will submit a chapbook of six pages of original poetry. The course will consist of three elements – poetry workshop, lecture/discussion, and individual mentorship, which will not be treated separately, but rather as integral components of a course in poetry and poetics. You will have an opportunity to have your work discussed in class, and will receive commentary from each member of the class. I will give you detailed, line-by-line comments on all six pages of your submission in our individual meeting. Each week, you will be asked to provide written comments on your fellow students’ work. During the semester, you will also be asked to memorize at least one poem, and to keep an ongoing journal about your readings.
It is my hope that in this class you will learn a great deal about contemporary world poetry and also about the history of poetry in English. As we read poets from around the world, we will consider ways in which they have influenced the work of writers in America today. It is my goal that by the end of this course, you will feel confident in approaching the literary tradition not a as a reader, but as a practicing writer. I hope that the devices, forms and approaches learned in this course will support you as you begin to express in your own writing your vision of our moment in time.
English 581W: The Writing of Fiction J. Meschery
W 7:00-9:40pm
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 might be intensely combined into the tangles of perception; wonders that might be able to 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.
English 584W: The Writing of Nonfiction T. Cummings
M 3:30-6:10pm
Why do you write essays? Merely to fulfill a school assignment? To prove that you read a book? Are your essays just tools for communicating facts when you would rather be writing fiction? Are they therefore necessarily dry? In this class, we'll explore an alternative to all this. Essays truly can be different from our stereotypes of them. After all, Michel Foucault says they free us from our prejudices and allow us to think differently. Informal essays liberate us. They are opportunities to express creativity, to make us laugh, and to help us reveal to others what we have revealed to ourselves. And, writing informal essays in this class may improve the writing you create elsewhere in your life.
Requirements: Three essays with revisions, discussion, informal response papers, oral feedback, weekly reading.
GRADUATE COURSES
NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2007 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
English 600: Introduction to Graduate Study J. Brooks
W 7:00 – 9:40pm
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 to 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%)
Two presentations (20%)
Abstract and outline of a scholarly article (10%)
Annotated bibliography of five scholarly articles (10%)
Project proposal (20%)
English 601: Seminar: Literary Study in a Multi-Cultural World
T 7:00-9:40pm L. Koolish
Course Description: An investigation of selected issues in literature, cultural criticism, and theory, primarily of the postcolonial age. Readings include texts and essays that challenge the idea of a canon of "great works" written by white male authors in the Western tradition. Focus on the intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, and race; exploration of literature as the site where social and cultural values are inscribed.
The course is still in the process of fine-tuning, but the required reading thus far includes:
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Nadine Gordimer, July's People
Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
J.M. Cotzee, Disgrace
Lynda Koolish, ed. English 601 Course Reader: a selection of essays, poems and short stories
Two very recent films about the Palestinian conflict: Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now and Steven Spielberg's Munich
There will be some other texts, (García Marquez? Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things?) And some postcolonial anthology to be determined.
Course Requirements:
1. Active, thoughtful participation in class discussion.
2. Weekly freewrites on some aspect of the week's reading are due as a Blackboard submission the
day before class.
3. Each student will prepare one oral presentation of approximately fifteen to twenty minutes (please,
no longer!) based on any aspect of that day's reading assignment.
4. One shorter and one longer seminar papers, approximately 7-8 and 10-12 pages in length.
Grading:
35% Shorter paper
45% Longer seminar paper
English 602: Literary Theory and Critical Practice J. Rother
Th 4:00-6:40pm
The aim of this course is both to introduce graduate students in English to the recent background of contemporary literary criticism and to assess, so far as is possible in a single semester, the value and continuing relevance of the now receding wave of Theory that inundated English studies since the infamous Human Sciences Conference at Johns Hopkins, attended by Levi-Strauss, Derrida and others, in 1966. Earlier models of American literary analysis (the New Criticism, archetypalism, rhetorical and neo-Aristotelian theory, and more) will be contrasted with representatives of the mostly French tendency to treat writing in all its form and dispositions as pure text. Two books by the most important American advocate of inter-disciplinary studies, Kenneth Burke, will be examined in detail. These are: Attitudes toward History, which anticipates, formulates, and largely refutes the notions of Focault, Lacan, and De Man as early as 1937; and Language as Symbolic Action (1966), which does much the same for the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Bourdieu, Deleuze/Guattari, and others.
The two texts around which most of the course will revolve will be The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (ed. Leitch et al.) and Theory's Empire (ed. Pattai and Corral). Students will be asked to report orally on a particular pairing of essays (with a common topic) from these two volumes, following which they will convert some aspect of issue on which the essays markedly differ into a critical discussion of some 6-8 pages. Each student will be responsible for three such report-and-paper assignments (depending on time available) over the semester. Also assigned will be a full-length graduate essay of some 20-25 pages (with bibliography of secondary sources) on the works of Kenneth Burke, as well as a final exam on all readings listed in the course syllabus.
English 604A: Seminar: Modernism/Postmodernism L. McCaffery
W 7:00-9:40pm
What is "postmodernism"? Why did this term
arise in the 1970s to describe the sort of radically innovative literature and
other cultural forms that had emerged during the 1970s? What was the relationship between
postmodernism and the great modernist program that dominated aesthetic
innovation throughout most of the 20th century? What relevance does the concept of postmodern have for
contemporary art, which is emerging under very different circumstances than
those responsible for the experimentalism of art four decades ago?These are some of the questions this class will explore. But the main question I will be examining throughout this semester is: is it possible to apply postmodernism to an art form such a rock music, which originated only in the 1950s and (hence) presumably never went through a "modernist" phase at all? And in particular, IF postmodernism can be applied to rock music, then why should Bruce Springsteen be seen as postmodernism's MOST exemplary figure?
During this class, we will examine a wide selection of Springsteen's albums, including Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils and Dust, The Rising, and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. We'll also be examining a wide range of musicians who have influenced Springsteen (eg., Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, Elvis, Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan) Readings for the class will include Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, excerpts from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Racing in the Streets—The Bruce Springsteen Reader.
Class requirements--lots of reading and listening, class presentations, one term project, and a willingness to examine rock music from a variety of perspectives you probably won't be familiar with. Be forewarned: this class really will be mainly focusing on Springsteen, so if you're looking for a class featuring Jameson, Baudrillard, and Derrida, look elsewhere.
English 604B: Seminar: British Modernism Literature S. Little
W 4:00-6:40pm
Close reading of works by authors of the first half of the 20th century, such as Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Bowen, Auden, Spender, Thomas, and Beckett, with a focus on identifying characteristics of "modernism." Additionally, exploring major scholarly work addressing the works of these authors and this time period. Class activities will include oral presentations, critical written responses to assignments, and two formal papers.
Other graduate courses of interest:
Joyce
Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot
Such topical subjects as Experimentation in Fiction and/or Poetry in Modern Literature
More TBA
English 604C: Euro Poets 19C Early 20C J. Farber
W 7:00-9:40pm
Most of the poems we'll be reading were not written in English, and that, of course, presents a problem. On the one hand, it's hardly likely that everyone in the class will have reading knowledge of French, German, and Spanish. On the other hand, how can we possibly engage in serious poetry study based on translations? Imagine studying Blake's "Tyger" or Rossetti's "Goblin Market" or Hopkins's "Windhover" if all you have are the French translations. Ridiculous, right?
So what's the solution? (1) Every single poem that wasn't written in English will be there for you in the original as well as in translation. (And in many cases, there will be multiple translations of a given poem). (2) Throughout the semester, we will be attending to the original versions as well as to the translations, so that, even if you start the semester with no knowledge of these three languages, you're going to come out knowing more than you came in with. As a matter of fact, let me make a suggestion: if, before the semester starts, you have time to fool around with any of the languages that you don't know, you might just want to learn a little about pronunciation. If you look around online, you can find websites that have pronunciation guides with audio, and even lessons for beginners. Or, if possible, find someone who speaks the language and pick up some pronunciation from them.
English 606D: Seminar: Major Works Of Children's Fantasy
M 7-9:40 pm A. Allison
This new class will cover theoretical, aesthetic, and cognitive aspects of Fantasy as a genre, depictions of fantasizing in children's books, sub-genres such as High Fantasy and Alternative World, and intertextuality and influence among the books and authors. Books selected are fantasies, that is, science fiction is not part of this class.
The course Reader includes essays and excerpts from critics and authors. Complete works of criticism and assigned books will be available on Reserve in the library for your reading and for your research paper. This research paper will link a theoretical approach to a book/s of your choice.
The other major assignment will be either to 1. report on and write about the additional books in a series, e.g. Susan Cooper's books, Ursula LeGuin's, or J.K. Rowling's OR 2. select among the dozens of brand new, unread Fantasy titles I will bring to class and report/write on one of those.
You'll see in the booklist below some choices among books. Once you choose your book, you'll have class time to meet with other students of your literary proclivity to make collective reports on the book to the rest of the class. You'll do this twice; thus, there are four assignments in this class.
I will assume students have read Alice in Wonderland, a basic text for discerning the "rules" of Fantasy, and are familiar with Tolkien, to whose works our discussion will sometimes refer.
Many of these books can be bought on line for much less than cover price or found at your local library.
In probable order of reading:
Russell Hoban, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen
Dr. Seuss, To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street
James Thurber, Many Moons
Ann and Barbara Fienberg, The Big Big Big Book of Tashi
Daniel Pinkwater, Fat Men from Space
Roderick Townsend, The Great Good Thing
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
T.H. White, Mistress Masham's Repose OR
Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden OR
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Lloyd Alexander, ed., Firebirds, short stories by various contemporary writers
Rowling vol. 3 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban
Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising OR
Christopher Paolini, Eragon
Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child
Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
English 724: Seminar: Literature in English S. Ramachandran
T 7:00-9:40pm
This seminar explores the exciting world of contemporary literature written in English from regions around the world including Afghanistan, Iran, Zimbabwe, U.S.--Native American, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and India. The course examines theories of decolonization and globalization and considers how literary texts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century negotiate questions of race, cultural hybridity, class struggle, gender, displacement, and exile. Course requirements include active class participation, presentations, a short paper, and a seminar paper.
Partial Reading List
Hosseini, Khaled The Kite Runner
Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran
Head, Bessie A Question of Power
Selvadurai, Shyam Funny Boy
Ama Ata Aidoo, Christina Changes: A Love Story
Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
Grace, Patricia Potiki
Rushdie, Salman Satanic Verses
Lahiri, Jumpah The Namesake
Roy, Arundhati The God of Small Things
English 725: Seminar: Ethnic Am Film & Lit W. Nericcio
T 3:30-6:10pm (Ethnic Mannequins or the Obscene Machine)
What will we do in our seminar? We will pursue a cultural study of stereotypes and chase as well, resistant aesthetic antidotes of the same. If we think of stereotypes as a species of puppet or mannequin, who then are their authors, their agents, their puppeteers? Extending this allegorical premise, who builds and finances the theater within which these puppets Ôplay'? And why are we such a captive, supportive audience?
Film and fiction hand us artifacts that traffic in verisimilitude. A graduate seminar in a literature department, then, is an agent in the commerce of illicit fictional exchanges—an economy of the obscene, which grows even more complex when we aspire to attend to the categories of ethnicity and gender.
And, aspire we do!
Books include: flor gardu–o's inner light; mar’a amparo escand—n's esperanza's box of saints; cristina river garza's no one will see me cry; gilbert hernandez's flies on the ceiling; william nericcio's text[t]-mex: seductive hallucination of the mexican in america; and frida kahlo's diary. Films include: peter greenaway's the pillow book; orson welles's touch of evil; charles vidor's gilda; friz freleng's warner brothers speedy gonzales animated shorts (various); and richard fleischer's mandingo. Additional readings will include cultural studies essays by Sander Gilman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Spike Lee, Thelma Golden, and Jessica Hagedorn.
Graduate students in Film, Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, Art, Anthropology, and Latin American Studies are strongly urged to consider joining our cultural studies cohort.
English 726: Seminar: 20th Century Literary Exiles D. Shojai
M 4:00-6:40pm
Up till the 20th century, most writers lived and wrote in their countries; thereafter, cultural displacement became increasingly widespread. This course will explore the works and experiences of various writers in exile between World War I and the present. The first part will cover selected topics and texts. Included will be sessions on Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation in Paris; Henry Miller in Greece; James Baldwin in France and Turkey; Vladimir Nabokov in Montreaux; Milan Kundera in Paris; Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld in Israel; Iranian novelist Bozorg Alavi in East Berlin; British immigrant Salman Rushdie in hiding; and journalist Martha Gellhorn in London and elsewhere. The second part will be devoted to discussing the works of authors selected and presented by students. In the process, an attempt will be made to consider the experience of exile as a major aspect of 20th century literary history. The grade will be based on weekly two-page papers on the readings and on a midterm essay examination, a class presentation, and a research paper on the writer and work of the student's choice.
English 750F: MFA Seminar: Fiction Writing J. Meschery
W 4:00-6:40pm
English 750F: MFA Seminar: Fiction Writing J. Meschery
Th 7:00-9:40pm
English 750F: MFA Seminar: Fiction Writing H. Jaffe
T 7:00-9:40pm
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." At least a few of these texts will be collaborative.
A characteristic session will consist three Xeroxed (or electronically distributed) 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. (The critical commentaries may also be sent electronically to the author).
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 what the text appears to be doing, address those aspects of the text that work in its favor, and offer remedial suggestions where necessary. Everyone will send me a copy of his or her commentary as a word attachment, so that I can read them.
Your timely critiques of your colleagues' writings will constitute one of the core requirements of the course. The other requirements are your own writing submissions and your ongoing presence in the weekly class meetings throughout the semester.
*Depending on input from the class, we can alter the reading and critiquing format,
English 750P: MFA Seminar: Poetry Writing I. Kaminsky
T 4:00-6:40pm
Osip Mandelshtam once compared the writing of poetry to architecture. Each word, he proposed, was a single stone. In this graduate poetry workshop, we will learn how to borrow other author's designs for our own construction, on the page. We will: 1) read the works of the Masters and imitate their forms; 2) discuss our own writings & findings. There will be a substantial amount of independent reading (Homer, Sappho, Ovid, Li Po, Shakespeare, Dickinson and Coleridge; and also Calvino, Jabes, Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Montale, Anna Swir, etc.). You will be asked to meet with me individually—several times during the semester—to discuss your work on line-by-line basis.
Requirements: At least 10 pages of original poetry produced and/or edited during the semester; memorization of at least 3 classical poems; class project (an online literary project; details TBA)
English 784: Seminar: Creative Non-Fiction H. Jaffe
AL 269, Office Hrs: 5:30-6:45, TTh Office phone: 594-5469 E-Mail: hjaffe@mail.sdsu.edu
I haven't settled on the readings yet but am considering these texts and visuals among others:
-Joseph Beuys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOD5Pu6uVM&mode=related&search= (parameters of art, art and revolution)
-Angry Women (Interviews, performance).
-Jean Baudrillard's America (description, theory)
-Excerpts from Pablo Neruda's Memoirs
-Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (memoir, dialogue, pacifism)
-Samples from Sophie Calle (performance art)
-Jay Neugeboren's Imagining Robert (memoir, art brut)
-Antonin Artaud (theory, art brut)
-Orlan (manifesto, body art)
-Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor (theory, technology)
-Harold Jaffe's Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (creative nonfiction and "docufiction")
-Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Paul Reps), parables, visionary.
-Various films, videos and documentaries.
This creative nonfiction course will mostly proceed from the underside, and many of the readings will be "deviant" readings generated by those discourses which are mostly unseen, unheard, unwitnessed; in effect, subjugated discourses. The imprisoned, homeless, diagnosed schizophrenic, gender-benders, the anti-institutional in various guises.
A majority of the exercises will be imaginative and generated by the readings and visuals, but other exercises will be more precisely analytical. The journal which I want everyone to maintain will consist of all the exercises and whatever other thoughts and feelings you've recorded during the semester.
The final project will be either a collaborative presentation or performance employing at least two of the creative nonfiction modes: interview, docupoem, docufiction, memoir, manifesto . . . Or a non-collaborative text divided into at least two chosen modes: film review, interview, memoir, polemic, manifesto etc.
** I am asking every student who is considering taking this course to confer with me before enrolling.