Spring 2009 Course Descriptions!
NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2009 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
of course, open to all english and
comparative literature majors regardless
of emphasis!
CLT 270A WORLD LITERATURE K. GUTHRIE
MWF 8:00-8:50am
This course will survey primarily ancient and medieval world literature while offering comparisons with several contemporary novels and films. We will, for example, in discussing the trope of the hero, pair Homer's Iliad with Zhang Yimou's film Hero, Greek tragedy and the theme of the irrational with Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and medieval French and English romances with Alain de Botton's comic novel of relationship anxiety, On Love.
CLT 405 THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE P. KUHLKEN
MWF 12:00-12:50pm
As a foundation of (high or low) culture, the Bible is impossible to ignore--the source of over 1,000 references in Shakespeare alone. While it has admittedly held moral and religious sway over Judeo-Christian culture for centuries, consensus has never been attained, nor will it be in this section. The goal is for students to analyze the many layers of biblical literature, approaching the Bible with new and old questions to gain a fresh, unbiased awareness about the enduring significance of this best-seller, unsurpassed in world literature, and undeniably present in our everyday realities. Regardless of personal conviction, this multidisciplinary, multimedia experience will help students cultivate an appreciation and understanding of biblical literature in its aesthetic, historic, cultural, ethical, and theological contexts, encouraging us to respond with original midrash (creative and critical). Join us if you are curious about the origin of origins: of life; good and evil knowledge; the Exodus; an Arthurian King David; biblical prophecy; Esther and Judith; erotic love poetry; hymns of praise and despair; gospels of Jesus and swashbuckling tales of the first missionaries; bleeding sacrifices and loving atonement; God on trial in Job but God's trial waged in Revelation. Using the New Oxford Annotated Bible and a supplementary reader, we will consider the history, fiction, poetry, prophecy, gospels, and apocalypse of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, with selections from the apocrypha and Dead Sea Scrolls.
Requirements: include attendance; participation; three papers; and short in-class responses to the reading.
CLT 440 AFRICAN LITERATURE L. EDSON
TTH 9:30-10:45am
An investigation of African literatures from various countries representing the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence periods. Texts to be read include Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (Nigerian), Flora Nwapa's Efuru (Nigerian), Ferdinand Oyono's Houseboy (Cameroon), Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood (Senegalese), Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (Nigerian), and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwean).
Requirements: In class writing assignments, oral reports, mid-term and final exams.
CLT 455 CLASSICAL ASIAN LITERATURE W. ROGERS
TH 3:30-6:10pm
Let’s drop the dull catalog title for this course “Classical Asian Literature” and replace it with words that define the semester-long theme of CLT 455: Love/Desire/Individuality as against Society/ Tradition/ Authority in Pre-Modern China and Japan.
Our subject matter will be Chinese and Japanese literatures from their written beginnings in the distant past—for China about 600 BCE and for Japan 700 CE—to the mid-nineteenth century when contact with the West brought about drastic changes in both literature and society. We’ll touch on masterworks from one of the greatest literary traditions in all of world literature, that of China, as we explore poetry, prose narratives, essays, drama, and fiction, as well as anecdotes, parables, and jokes. Then will follow the particular accomplishments of Japanese literature, which acknowledges the massive cultural influence of its neighbor China, but which asserts its own distinct literary voice and produces, through the genius of Lady Murasaki of the 11th century, a work of stunning accomplishment, the world’s first psychological novel and a text still considered the greatest work in all of Japanese literature: The Tale of Genji.
As we survey each tradition we’ll note how Love, Desire, and Individuality contend with the pressures of Society, Tradition, and Authority and discover how these tensions lead to literatures that remain living cultural traditions in present-day China and Japan, providing endless sources of quotations and examples that reach even into daily speech.
Students with a lively curiosity about literature and life that takes them beyond American, British, and European literature will find much in CLT 455 to engage them both conceptually and esthetically.
Requirements: (depending on class size) will include two examinations (one of which will be a take home), a research essay, short written responses, and active participation in class discussion (which is particularly important for a class that meets once a week).
Note: No particular background or expertise in China and Japan will be assumed by your instructor, so don’t pass up this course out of a fear that only students with Asian backgrounds or skills in the Chinese or Japanese languages are the target audience for this class. That is definitely NOT the case!
If you have any questions about CLT 455, feel free to e-mail Professor Rogers at rogers@mail.sdsu.edu.
CLT 561 MODERN FICTION L. EDSON
TTH 11:00-12:15pm
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, Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Toni Morrison's Sula, Marguerite Dura’s The Lover, and Albert Camus’ The Fall.
Requirements: In-class writing assignments, oral reports, mid-term and final exams.
CLT 563 EUROPEAN POETS 19C EARLY 20C J. FARBER
W 7:00-9:40pm (European Poets of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries)
After a very quick look at some earlier poems, we’ll be focusing primarily on only six poets: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Dylan Thomas. We’ll begin with two very different poets who came into their powers as European Romanticism was waning, then look at the French Symbolist movement (along with Rimbaud, we’ll be reading some poems by Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé). Finally we’ll be studying three poets who to some extent show the influence of French Symbolism.
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 not very 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 Hopkins’s Windhover, if all you have are the French translations. Ridiculous, right? But then wouldn’t it be even more ridiculous to exclude major figures like Baudelaire or Rilke from our comparative literature curriculum?
So how do we deal with this problem? (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. (3) 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.
CLT 580 THE LITERATURE OF ROMANTIC LOVE J. FARBER
TTH 12:30-1:45pm
Does the course title sound . . . oh, you know, a little fluffy? Actually, this course is likely to ride on two very different kinds of energy: one celebratory, the other astringent and demystifying. And the reading list? It’s trying to be a whole curriculum in comparative literature. We’ll begin, of course, with Sappho. And after her: Euripides, Plato, Catullus, Ovid, Vatsyayana, Murasaki, Al-Hakam, Ibn Abd Rabbihi, Ibn Hazm, Andreas Capellanus, Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, Goethe, Stendhal, E.B. Browning, Chekhov, Schnitzler, Colette, Proust, García Márquez, Olds, and one additional novelist to be announced.
CLT 594 BORN TO RUN: ROCK & AMERICAN DREAM
TH 4:00-6:40pm L. MCCAFFERY
What is rock music and where did it come from? How has it evolved since the infinitely hot and dense hillbilly cat (Elvis Presley) helped give birth to it in Memphis during the mid 50s? What role has rock music played in contemporary and postmodern culture? In particular, how has rock music’s emphasis on freedom, passion, and the endless Saturday night served as a mythic expression of the set of values and beliefs associated with the American dream. In order to answer some of these questions, this class will focus on the 4 albums Bruce Springsteen released from 1975-1982: BORN TO RUN (1975), DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN (1978), THE RIVER (1980), and NEBRASKA (1982). We’ll also be listening to and discussing a wide range of musicians who have influenced Springsteen (e.g., Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan). Readings for the class will include Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, stories by Flannery O’Conner, excerpts from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Racing In The Streets—The Bruce Springsteen Reader. Finally, we’ll also look at several films that influenced Springsteen during this formative period of his career, including Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, and Terence Malick’s Badlands. Class requirements: Lots of reading and listening, class presentations, one short paper and one term project, and a willingness to examine rock music from a variety of perspectives you probably won’t be familiar with.
CLT 596 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES P. SERRATO
M 4:00-6:40pm
This course is an ambitious foray into the field of Latin American cultural studies. We will explore the aesthetic, cultural, political and critical significance of various (mostly contemporary) examples of popular culture culled from different parts of Latin America. Certainly, we will attend to the configurations and images of gender and sexuality as well as the machinations of class, privilege, and beauty in, for instance, the variety show Sábado Gigante, the telenovelas Betty la Fea and Rebelde, the film Decent People, and The Case of Juan Gabriel. Moreover, we will unpack the socializing function of a selection of children’s programs such as Xuxa and Plaza Sésamo, and we will delineate the social commentaries articulated by films like City of God, the street performance work of Dr. Sinister Frenzy, and the music of groups such as El Tri and Molotov. On top of everything, we will trace some of the shifts that have taken place—and continue to take place—within different Latin American cultural formations vis-à-vis various other cultural productions and recombinations. To conclude our work, we will examine the significance of cross-over artists such as Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, Paulina Rubio, and, of course, Shakira.
Ultimately, this course will allow students to hone their cultural studies skills as well as indulge an interest in Latin American popular culture.
Required work: includes two exams and a paper on an individually selected topic.
For a finalized list of the “texts” we will cover, feel free to email the instructor (pserrato@mail.sdsu.edu) over the winter break.
ENGLISH
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
of course, open to all english and
comparative literature majors regardless
of emphasis!
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE Q. BAILEY
MW 12:00-12:50pm
“Love, death, and literature”: A tour of some of the greatest depictions of love and death in Western literature. From the passionate “friendship” between Achilles and Patroclus, described by Homer in The Iliad, to the deaths of adulteresses like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, literature has fixated on moments of desire and destruction. Some of these scenes have got writers prosecuted and books banned; others – like Don Juan – have become part of the cultural fabric of our lives. This course will look at these scenes and many more, pulling on the resources of film, music, and painting, to explore the emotions provoked by these works and the literary techniques which produced them.
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE J. BROOKS
MWF 8:00-8:50am (Love & Hate American Style)
America: Land of the free? Home of the brave? Gorgeous disaster? Intercontinental car wreck? Does your America look more like a scene from Disney's Pocahontas or from Apocalypse Now? In our 15 weeks together, we'll read and see heart wrenching, mind blowing literature, art, and films that grasp for the meaning of life in America. Along the way, you'll learn about how literature works, how to read it, and why it matters.
Requirements: Two class participation projects (20%), two short papers (20%), midterm (20%), final (30%), attendance (10%)
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE P. HERMAN
TTH 12:30-1:45pm (Great Works: What do they Have to Offer us?)
The purpose of this class is to introduce students to literature through the study of literary texts that pose difficult and interesting questions about the fundamentals of life. What is the nature of justice? What is the best sort of political system? Should politicians be moral, or should they be more interested in being effective? What is the individual’s obligation to the state? What happens when the state’s laws are, in the individual’s view, immoral? What sort of a world does technology create for us? These questions, and more, are posed in enduring ways by these texts (which range from the Bible to Plato to Shakespeare to George Orwell), and in exploring them, we will see that literature is more than a mere “aesthetic” artifact: the point of literature is to provoke questions, and not in ways that allow for easy answers. Works will include Genesis, The Book of Job, Thomas More's Utopia, and 1984.
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE A. ROGERS
What prompts humankind to create imaginative literature? What purposes does literature serve in the cultural life of humanity? What are its social, philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic values? These and other questions that delve into the basic nature of literature will form the foundation of our investigation of works that span the globe and the ages. From ancient Greek poetry to contemporary personal narrative, from Icelandic epics to Latin American fiction, we will investigate some of the persistent themes in literature such as love, death, fate, destiny, transformation, and redemption, and explore the characteristics of the major literary forms. Through short fiction, novels, essays, drama, and poetry we will delve into a variety of critical approaches and literary periods, as well as examine elements of literature such as plot, setting, character, point of view, imagery, and symbolism. In addition, we will spend some time considering intersections of literature with other forms of cultural production.
ENGL 250-B LITERATURE OF THE U.S. R. GERVAIS
MWF 10:00-10:50am
A survey of U.S. literature from just after the Civil War to the present. The course will be organized around major, representational works from the four literary-historical periods of Realism (1865-1890), Naturalism (1890-1920, Modernism (1920-1950), and Contemporary (1950-present), with an in-class, open-book, essay exam concluding the study of each period. Required text: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Seventh Edition, Volume 2: 1865 to the Present (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).
ENGL 260A ENGLISH LITERATURE E. KUGLER
M 7:00-9:40pm
English 260A is meant to give students a general introduction to literature from the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon era through the eighteenth century; examining over eight hundred years of literary history, however, raises the question of how to organize and shift through all that material. With this in mind, the course will examine texts from three angles: the cultural context that produced the texts, thematic connections between the texts, and how these texts connect to our lives today.
Three main questions will run through the course:
1) What kind of society does the text present? Is it one that it is advocating or criticizing?
2) Who is allowed into this society? How does the text categorize people (hero vs. villains, native vs. alien, man vs. woman)?
3) How does its perspective differ or connect with your own?
Many of the texts went on to actively shape their society and still impact our popular culture today, so in addition to examining the texts in relation to their historical contexts, students will be encouraged to link this work to their own interests and perspectives.
Requirements: There will be weekly discussion board participation, two take-home essays, and a final exam.
ENGL 260B ENGLISH LITERATURE E. FRAMPTON
T 3:30-6:10pm (English Literature from the 19th Through the 21st
Centuries: Narrative and Identity)
This survey course introduces a variety of significant British literary texts, produced from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Our reading will include a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, essays, and drama, which we will historically and culturally contextualize, attempting to come to terms with the immense social and ideological shifts of this vast period. We will structure our exploration of this diverse span of literary history by focusing our analysis on the relationship between narrative and identity, asking why and how certain kinds of stories are told, what kind of characters they represent, and what kind of readers they, in a sense, create. As a part of this undertaking, we will interrogate the traditional periodization that divides the literature of these centuries into the “Romantic,” the “Victorian,” the “Modernist” and the “Postmodern.” The primary text through the semester will be the concise edition of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume B, but the course will conclude with an examination of the 2005 multicultural, transatlantic, intertextual novel On Beauty, by Black British writer Zadie Smith.
ENGL 301 PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL R. GERVAIS
MWF 12:00-12:50pm
A study of the psychological novel, which emphasizes the internal state and development of the characters, rather than external action or plot, exploring characters through their emotions, fears, dreams, and fantasies.
We will study the psychology of approaching death in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, of sexual hallucination in James's The Turn of the Screw, of cultural disintegration in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Mann's Death in Venice, of personal confession in Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground and Camus' The Fall, of darkly comic, dysfunctional families in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and the psychology of 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.
Requirements: Five, in-class, open-book, essay exams.
ENGL 306A CHILDREN'S LITERATURE J. CUMMINS-LEWISW 3:30-6:10pm
In this class, we will survey various aspects of children’s literature, with emphases on fairy tales, picture books, and novels. In addition to learning basic literary terms and concepts, you will learn about various genres of children’s literature, including adventure, fantasy, and realism. We will learn to analyze children’s books through various perspectives to help us consider how children’s books are used and understood—by both children and adults. Throughout the course, we will be especially concerned with how children’s literature reflects–or creates–social attitudes toward children.
ENGL 308W LITERARY STUDY E. FRAMPTON
TTH 11:00-12:15pm (Analysis, Research, and Writing)
This course introduces college-level literary analysis, criticism, research, and scholarly writing. We will begin by raising some questions about the nature of literature and the history of literary criticism. Then we will move on to an examination of various schools of contemporary theoretical thought, such as psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, and post-structuralist theory. From there, we will read E.M. Forster’s Howards End, of 1910, and a series of critical essays that adopt different theoretical approaches to this early-twentieth-century novel. Following this, we will read Black British writer Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel, On Beauty, which is based on Howards End. At the end of the course, you will write a research essay on this recent, multicultural novel, choosing a theoretical perspective on which to base your analysis. The course will also include a module on the scholarly analysis of poetry, and throughout the semester, we will be familiarizing ourselves with techniques, strategies, and expectations for college research and writing, as these are explicated in The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. You will be expected to contribute to group activities, to complete short written assignments and exercises, and to give a brief presentation to the class. Active participation in class discussions, debates, and exercises is required.
ENGL 401 CHILDHOOD’S LITERATURE J. THOMAS
TTH 12:30-1:45pm
Because children's literature, perhaps more than any other literary genre, operates directly in the process of interpellation, of inscribing gender roles, class consciousness, in this course we will engage children's literature as a cultural apparatus that creates for its young readers representations of race, class, and gender that are often problematic, often laudable. In addition to attending to structural and aesthetic matters, we will investigate the historical moment in which the children’s texts on this syllabus were produced as well as the implicit and explicit ideology within them. Furthermore, we will discuss how the reception to these texts may have changed over time.
ENGL 405 THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE P. KUHLKEN
MWF 12:00-12:50pm
As a foundation of (high or low) culture, the Bible is impossible to ignore--the source of over 1,000 references in Shakespeare alone. While it has admittedly held moral and religious sway over Judeo-Christian culture for centuries, consensus has never been attained, nor will it be in this section. The goal is for students to analyze the many layers of biblical literature, approaching the Bible with new and old questions to gain a fresh, unbiased awareness about the enduring significance of this best-seller, unsurpassed in world literature, and undeniably present in our everyday realities. Regardless of personal conviction, this multidisciplinary, multimedia experience will help students cultivate an appreciation and understanding of biblical literature in its aesthetic, historic, cultural, ethical, and theological contexts, encouraging us to respond with original midrash (creative and critical). Join us if you are curious about the origin of origins: of life; good and evil knowledge; the Exodus; an Arthurian King David; biblical prophecy; Esther and Judith; erotic love poetry; hymns of praise and despair; gospels of Jesus and swashbuckling tales of the first missionaries; bleeding sacrifices and loving atonement; God on trial in Job but God's trial waged in Revelation. Using the New Oxford Annotated Bible and a supplementary reader, we will consider the history, fiction, poetry, prophecy, gospels, and apocalypse of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, with selections from the apocrypha and Dead Sea Scrolls.
Requirements: include attendance; participation; three papers; and short in-class responses to the reading.
ENGL 493 SEX IN LITERATURE & FILM W. NERICCIO
TTH 8:00-9:15am
Shocking! Outrageous! Obscene! Yes, this class will be all of that and more as we delve into literary and cinematic meditations on everyone's favorite extracurricular activity. But this class will be more than just an excuse to ogle voyeuristically at gorgeously entwined bodies, more than an indecent perusal of erotic excesses. Truth be told, some of the finest works in literature and film depend on sex and sexuality to drive their storylines. While a study of human sexuality in literature and film will be the order of the day, other crucial sex-related themes will drive our curiosity; these include: psychological pathology, fetishism, taboos, the nature of human desire, voyeurism, masochism, etc. etc. The list of texts is still in flux, so don't buy your books yet; the working titles include:
Barbin, Herculine Memoirs of an 18th Century Hermaphrodite (Michel Foucault, Ed)
Brown, Jericho Please
Derrida, Jacques Right of Inspection (Monacelli Press)
Fuentes, Carlos Aura : Bilingual Edition (Farrar)
Hernandez, Gilbert Human Diastrophism: A Love & Rockets Book (Fantagraphics Comics)
Kahlo, Frida Diary of Frida Kahlo (Harry Abrams)
Mayer, Oliver Hurt Business (Nericcio Ed)
Rivera Garza, Cristina No One Will See Me Cry (Curbstone)
Tanizaki, Junichiro Quicksand
Ware, Chris Acme Novelty Library (Random)
West, Nathanael Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of Locust
Films to be announced later; this film is OPEN to ALL majors and will feature graphic narrative, art, photography in addition to cinema and literature!
ENGL 494 MODERN FICTION OF THE U.S. R. GERVAIS
MW 2:00-3:15pm
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 stretch of literary history, and a sense of the distinctive periods within it. Then we shall read two significant short novels, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying from the Modern Period (1920-1950) and McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses from the Contemporary Period (1950-Present).
Requirements: Five, in-class, open-book, essay exams.
ENGL 501 LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN A. ALLISON
TTH 11:00-12:15pm
Here's a chance to reconsider the books you read as a child, or perhaps a chance to read them for the first time and to consider them as you would other works of literature: as meaningful expressions of artistry, as emotionally impacting, and as social messages. Each book is multi-layered, open to diverse interpretation including post-colonial, historical, feminist, and philosophical perspectives. Works include fairy tales and classics like Tom Sawyer and The Wind in the Willows, culturally-diverse novels such as Salman Rushdie's fantasy Haroun and the Sea of Stories, very contemporary books such as Gene Yang's graphic American-Born Chinese and Mark Haddon's world-wide bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and genre-bending books like Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child and Karen Hesse's Witness.
Requirements: include the occasional quiz and in-class writing, a midterm, and a final exam.
ENGL 502 ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE P. SERRATO
TTH 2:00-3:15pm
This semester we will survey the ways that adolescence has been depicted in a splendid sample of texts about, for, and by adolescents. We will begin by accompanying Alice, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys on their adventures in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Secret of the Old Clock, and The Tower Treasure, respectively, contemplating on the way how the experience of adolescence is configured in these early texts. Then we will take a look at the emergence of modern, more complicated depictions of adolescence in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Judy Blume’s Deenie, and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Once we have finished asking, among other things, why does Holden insist on wearing that stupid hat? What’s with Deenie’s secret place? and, why does Pony Boy have Paul Newman on his mind? We will plunge into more contemporary fare that—for better or worse—pushes/Pushes (you’ll catch the joke embedded here around week 11) the parameters of adolescent literature. We will consider the breakthroughs managed by Patricia McCormick in Cut, Ellen Hopkins in Crank, Bejamin Alire Sáenz in Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood, and Laura Whitcomb in A Certain Slant of Light. To close the semester, we will indulge a mini-unit on Asian-American literature of adolescence with Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, Lori Carlson’s American Eyes, and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese, all in anticipation of Yang’s visit to campus on May 6.
Course requirements: Includes 2 exams, a final exam, a paper, and a lot of in-class writing that expects you to keep up with the reading.
Carroll, Lewis Alice in Wonderland (Dover 0486416585)
Dixon, Franklin The Tower Treasure (Grosset & Dunlap 0448089017)
Keene, Carolyn The Secret of the Old Clock (Grosset & Dunlap 0448095017)
Salinger, J.D. Catcher in the Rye (Little Brown 0316769487)
Hinton, S.E. The Outsiders (Puffin 014038572X)
Blume, Judy Deenie (Laurel Leaf ISBN 0440932599)
Alire Sáenz, Bejamin Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (Rayo 0060843748)
Carlson, Lori (ed.) American Eyes: New Asian-American Short Stories for Young
Adults (Fawcett 0449704483)
McCormick, Patricia Cut (Push 439324599)
Hopkins, Ellen Crank (Pulse 0689865198)
Whitcomb, Laura A Certain Slant of Light (Graphia 061858532X)
Sone, Monica Nisei Daughter (U of Washington P 0295956887)
Yang, Gene American Born Chinese (Square Fish 0312384483)
ENGL 522 LITERATURE OF THE U.S. 1800-1860
TTH 11:00-12:15pm M. BORGSTROM
This course will survey some of the key texts of the era commonly identified as the American Renaissance, a period that extends roughly from 1820-1865. The term “American Renaissance” designates a moment in America’s literary history in which the texts considered to be the nation’s “classics” first appeared. Until fairly recently, however, study of this period excluded a body of literature that is indispensable to a complex understanding of the era – a group of texts now frequently referred to as “the other American Renaissance.” Consequently, this course will focus on the work of both classic and newly-classic authors of the period. We will pay particular attention to the underlying political tensions between the desire to affirm a democratic self and the social realities of slavery and gender inequity. In so doing, we will explore larger issues of national and cultural identity and their relationship to personal identity.
ENGL 523 LITERATURE OF THE U.S. 1860-1920 R. GERVAIS
MWF 9:00-9:50am
Fiction from the age of Realism-Naturalism, when literature turned away from what was felt to be the fantasies and delusions of Romanticism and toward what was thought to be a more truth treatment of material, with detailed portrayals of everyday people, intricate attention to the immediate surrounds, and ordinary events in the true significance (Realism), but also with a dark sense of determinism by the force of nature, society, and economics (Naturalism). We will read works by Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.
Requirements: There will be four, in-class, open-book, essay exams.
ENGL 526 JEWISH-AMERICAN LITERATURE J. CUMMINS
TTH 9:30-10:45am
In this class we’ll explore how various authors respond to and create Jewish American experiences through their writing. We’ll study the interaction between this literature and the major historical events that affected it, including immigration, assimilation, discrimination, the Holocaust, the Rosenberg trial, the establishment of Israel, religious revivalism, etc. We will see what connects various Jewish texts to one another as well as what might separate them, which might include an author’s gender, ethnicity, politics, and sexual identity. We’ll determine if we are able, ultimately, to construct a coherent definition of Jewish American literature or if it is a genre that must be marked by division and discontinuity. While this is a course primarily concerned with literary texts, we might also examine film and popular culture. A preliminary list of authors includes Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Kate Simon, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow, Allegra Goodman, and Art Speigelman, among others.
ENGL 526 THE BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS D. MATLIN
T 7:00-9:40pm
The course will examine the poets and artists of the legendary Black Mountain College, one of the most unusual experiments in education in the 20th century. Many of the participants helped to create a new American vision not only in poetry but painting, film, dance, architecture, and the crafts. Black Mountain's influence resides still as a fresh and active foundation of permission and courage. Such an examination seems particularly appropriate in this time of disillusion and fragility. The poise of these artists represents a central risk and challenge to be curious, inventive, and wholly alive before the unexpected.
ENGL 527 RETHINKING THE WESTERN S. GREGORY
TH 7:00-9:40pm
Although the western is no longer a dominant genre in movies and television, its influence continues to pervade American thought and expression. Indeed, to understand the values and principles of the western hero is to understand the essential American character. At the heart of the genre is the issue of violence: when is it right to take up arms? How do we justify killing to achieve peace? This course will identify and examine the components of the traditional western and trace how these elements have evolved through contemporary literature and film. Starting with Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Louis L’Amour’s Hondo, the class will read works by Leslie Marmon Silko, Ron Hansen, Robert Coover, and others, as well as view seminal western movies.
Course requirements: will include weekly quizzes and writing, a reading journal, and a 7-10 page final paper.
ENGL 533 SHAKESPEARE T. CUMMINGS
TTH 9:30-10:45am
We no longer say that Shakespeare was a man for all time, but we do admit that he was a man of his time. When we read his works, we ask how his plays praised and criticized his era. We wonder to what extent his works disturbed his audience. We also remark on the many contemporary controversies his works anticipated.
Whether or not Shakespeare fit the cultural model of Tudor England, his poetry is gorgeous, his themes are fascinating, and his art helped create the society that we live in now. After all, the cultural beliefs that some Europeans had before Shakespeare were often very different from the ones many of us have now. And, the plays our society produces are remarkably different from the plays that were produced in 1501! How did Shakespeare's plays participate in the many changes we've experienced since the 1500's?
In order to begin answering these questions, we will read a half dozen plays. Through them, we will explore Shakespeare's language and a number of thematic issues. We'll examine the implications raised by various performances of his plays. We'll read two introductory level books to explore the cultural context that shaped Shakespeare's works. And, we'll read scholarly articles to delve into the ways that Shakespeare is an early explorer of race and gender and sexuality and political authority. Expect to work hard. Expect controversy.
Requirements: Read all assigned works, class participation, student presentations, library work,
two formal papers, and a reading journal/class quizzes.
ENGL 533 SHAKESPEARE C. FIELD
MW 2:00-3:15pm
In this course, we will read eight plays by the Renaissance playwright, William Shakespeare (1564-1616). We will start with two comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado about Nothing. We will look at how the comic storyline (involving mistaken identity and jealousy) in Much Ado turns to tragedy in Othello, a play obsessed with ways of “seeing,” “seeming,” and “being.” We will read Hamlet, a tragedy whose hero poses the question of how to live, exist, or “be” within the confines of an unjust, “rotten” Denmark. We will then read Twelfth Night, a play that in its celebration of drinking, eating, and cross-dressing seems to provide an answer to Hamlet’s dilemma. We will read one history play, Henry V, and we will read As You Like It, a comedy that, like Twelfth Night, features a woman who dresses as a man in disguise. We will end with one of Shakespeare’s late plays, a romance called, The Winter’s Tale, which tries to resolve the opposing elements of comedy and tragedy, in its tale of Perdita, a lost woman found.
In this course, we will gain a sense of Shakespeare’s imaginative range as a writer, dramatist, thinker, and poet. Specifically, we will analyze his plays in terms of genre, poetic language, and historical context. We will look at the ways Shakespeare’s characters comment on and challenge the cultural, social, and political realities of their time (and our own). We will be doing close reading of these texts as well as seeing them translated in performance on film. The goal of this course is to teach you how to read and understand Shakespeare’s writings as literary texts, as historical artifacts of a particular time and place (Elizabethan and Jacobean England), and as vehicles for performance. You will become familiar with Shakespeare’s complex use of the English language, and you will meet some of his most famous characters and critically analyze their varied (and often conflicting) motives, needs, and desires.
Course requirements: will include research paper (with an optional re-write), class presentation, mid-term, and final exam. Students may also be required to attend a “live” performance of a play at an area theater.
ENGL 540A ENGLISH FICTION E. FRAMPTON
TTH 12:30-1:45pm (Through the Long-Eighteenth Century: Home and Beyond)
Within this course, we will analyze a variety of significant English fiction, written 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 that sphere. We will thus consider how various writers either consolidate or subvert ideas about national identity, through their representations of Britain, colonial America, and Africa, within this time of intense exploration, nation building, and institutionalized slavery. We will also test the hypothesis of literary theorist Homi Bhabha, that “the recesses of the domestic space become the sites for history’s most intricate invasions.” Our reading will include both well-established writers, such as Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austin, and those who have only, in more recent decades, begun to attract critical attention, such as Aphra Behn, Olaudah Equiano, and the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield.
ENGL 543 DECADENCE AND MODERNITY W. ROGERS
W 3:30-6:10pm (Decadence, Transformation, & Modernity in British Literature, 1870-1925)
A shy yet radically subversive university professor (Walter Pater), a world-wandering Scottish “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 reporter in “exotic” India who wrote with vivid precision about 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 (and 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.
If you consider yourself curious and open-minded about controversial issues, this could well be an ideal class for you.
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 (which is particularly important for a class that meets once a week).
ENGL 549 GENDER, FOOD, CULTURE C. FIELD
MW 4:00-5:40pm
This special topics course will survey writings from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century to explore how we construct our individual, social, and communal identities in relationship to food. We will explore how food is never just about food; it is always standing in for or pointing towards something else in the various literary and cultural texts that we will encounter. We will begin with texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: William Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night (which celebrates feasting, drinking, and cross-dressing), Book IX of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Addison and Steele’s Tatler essays on chocolate, tea, and women’s fashion. We will then look at how food functions in Charles Dickens’s famous ghost story, A Christmas Carol. Other texts will include Laura Esquivel’s romantic fable, Like Water for Chocolate and Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast, as well as excerpts and recipes from contemporary cookbook authors, Nigella Lawson and Alice Waters. We will read excerpts from Michael Pollan’s recent books on the food industry in America: In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. We will also study part of M.F.K. Fisher’s classic food memoir, The Gastronomical Me, along with contemporary essays and reviews by writers in The New York Times and Gourmet magazine (on the topics of food politics and the slow food movement). In all of these texts, we will look at how the discourses of food, identity, and power become linked (or not), and we’ll explore these writers’ various stances towards food (as sacred, taboo, fetish, or other). At the end of the course, we will watch clips from two films about food as art: Babette’s Feast and the animated film, Ratatouille.
Course assignments will include the following: research paper (with an optional re-write), class presentation, mid-term, and final exam. In addition, students may be required to visit a local farmers’ market, and they may also be asked to contribute one recipe (and accompanying narrative) to a class cookbook.
ENGL 563 GAY LESBIAN TRANSGENDER LITERATURE
TTH 2:00-3:15pm M. BORGSTROM
This course will survey some of the various forms that homosexuality takes in literature from classical Greek texts through the late twentieth century. We'll examine the evolution of sexual knowledge and identities, and we'll consider how the issues they represent might affect literary narration, plots, characterizations, and themes. We will discuss changing definitions of gender, reconfigurations of marriage and intimacy, civil rights movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We'll also pay particular attention to the ways in which representations of sexuality overlap with contemporary understandings of other identity categories, especially gender, race, and class. Finally, we will spend some time talking about other genres of cultural production (such as film, music, and the musical).
ENGL 576 LITERATURE EDITING & PUBLISHING B. BOSTON
TH 3:30-6:10pm
This course offers students a hands-on approach to the publication of a literary journal. Students explore the various aspects of editing and production, including the conception of the magazine itself, envisioning and defining its editorial philosophy and focus, the submission process (the solicitation and reading of manuscripts and the evaluation and selection of work), the consideration of special features, art selection, editing, layout, design, copyediting, printing and marketing, culminating in the production of the students’ own literary journals. Students should expect a portion of class time devoted to the consideration of the elements of good writing, both poetry and prose, as an essential part of the selection process in a course devoted to the production of quality literary journals. The course includes individual and collaborative student projects and research, field work, guest speakers, and the attending of at least one department literary event during the semester.
ENGL 577 TECH: SCREENWRITING N. KENDRICKS
M 4:00-6:40pm
In ENGL 577, artist, filmmaker, writer and MCASD Film Curator Neil Kendricks will lead adventurous students on an exploration of the screenwriters’ creative process, techniques, discipline and vital role in shaping the content and thematic concerns of contemporary cinema. The course’s lively discourse will delve into reading such award-winning screenplays as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s Sideways, Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, and other powerful examples of contemporary screenplays that dare to make viewers’ experiences of the cinema into an active engagement for both the intellect and the senses.
During the course, the instructor will screen excerpts from films (along with select feature-length and short films to be screened in their entirety) to further examine the screenplay’s function in primarily narrative-driven films. These examples will also facilitate engaged class discussions on how great screenplays help to establish a solid foundation of compelling storytelling that makes remarkable filmmaking possible. Kendricks - who is a talented visual artist, filmmaker, photographer and writer - has also assembled an informative ENGL 577 Reader, which includes many of his published interviews with such filmmakers as Tarantino, Anderson, and other notable cinematic artists, as well as numerous short pieces on jump starting your creativity as an aspiring screenwriter.
In addition to looking at the screenplays of established filmmakers, this experiential course will incorporate a workshop where students will develop and write their own, original short-film scripts, following the format and techniques used by working screenwriters and auteurs alike. Students will also write either a treatment for a feature-length, narrative film or a documentary proposal for a non-fiction film project. During the course’s workshop sessions, students will share their writing, as well as receive and offer feedback to their fellow budding screenwriters.
Throughout the course’s investigation of the screenplay’s central role in the filmmaking process, as well as students crafting their original short-film scripts, ENGL 577 will also look at how the other arts – literature, painting, photography and other creative disciplines – often impact the cinema and screenwriters’ ambitious quests to create compelling and insightful, moving and illuminating, cinematic worlds.
ENGL 581W THE WRITING OF FICTION T. CUMMINGS
TTH 12:30-1:45pm
Tell me a story. No, tell me a good story.
We tell stories every day, but few are memorable. How can we write stories that move our readers?
In this class, we'll participate in a number of activities designed to hone our ability to write good stories. We'll write several times during every class meeting. We'll write stories and analyze them in a workshop environment. We'll read published stories and write pastiches of novels. Students will present on published authors.
Requirements: This class will focus on your performance. You must engage and participate in class. You will be assessed on that engagement and participation through: a series of writing exercises, a creative work of fiction, a revision of that work of fiction, a pastiche, your presentation on your pastiche, and your oral participation during workshop.
ENGL 581W THE WRITING OF FICTION M. FREILICHER
TH 7:00-9:40pm
Students will write two complete short stories, in drafts. The first story will be critiqued by me and members of your peer group. Your revised version will then be graded, but you can continue working on this story, showing me as many drafts as you wish: in that case, your grade would be based only on the final version you submit. The second half of the semester will be devoted to reading and critiquing everyone’s first drafts of story #2: you’ll need to supply copies to the whole class. (You’ll be responsible for providing written critiques for about half of these drafts.) Revised story #2 will be due finals week. Course readings include fiction by Kafka, Edith Wharton, Isaac Babel, Clarice Lispector, Kenzaburo Oe, Jane Bowles, John Cheever, Lydia Davis, Stephen-Paul Martin, Julio Cortazar, Nella Larsen, and others. We’ll talk about the rich social, historical and autobiographical contexts from which these diverse works emerged: you will not be responsible for knowing that information, but hopefully it will be helpful in understanding and appreciating this literature. Scheduled reading quizzes will not ask you to interpret the stories: they function to show me that you’ve done the reading, and to stimulate class discussion. Several analytic writing exercises on these stories will focus on their structures and the writers’ rhetorical strategies.
NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Spring 2009 schedule or glass case in front of the English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing.
GRADUATE COURSES
ENGL 600 INTRODUCTION TO GRADUATE STUDY M. BORGSTROM
W 3:30-6:10pm
This course introduces students to the critical methods and theories of English literary studies. We will survey the history of the field, discuss many of its contemporary conversations, and examine the discipline’s essential critical terms (as well as its rules, forms, and customs). Our readings will allow us to approach the work of literary criticism both in theory, through a review of the big questions and important movements that structure modern critical inquiry, and also in practice, through collective readings of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and Toni Morrison’s Love. The course also aims to give students the opportunity to develop their own research interests through a series of assignments culminating in a written conference paper (which might then be delivered at a professional conference). This course thus covers several fundamental topics for beginning a successful career in literary studies – such as professional development, research techniques and trajectories, and an understanding of the role of the humanities in the modern university.
ENGL 601 LIT. STUDY MULTICULTURAL WORLD J. ROBINETT
M 7:00-9:40pm
This course will investigate selected issues in literature, cultural criticism, post-colonialism and imperialism. Readings include texts and essays that challenge the idea of cannon, the definitions of genre and dominant cultural views, and offer alternative visions and structures (literary and otherwise). The focus will be on intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, race, diversity, and on the various avatars of colonialism/imperialism/nationalism and post-colonialism. We will focus on the exploration of literature as the site where social and cultural values are inscribed and from which they are also derived. The destruction and re-shaping of cultural values under the influence of colonial powers and the fate of those constructions following the end of empire is central to our exploration. Readings may be supplemented during the semester, but the basic list of required texts includes:
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
Argueta, Manlio One Day of Life
al-Shaykh, Hanan Women of Sand and Myrrh
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel One Hundred Years of Solitude
Kincaid, Jamaica Lucy
Ninh, Bao The Sorrow of War
Roy, Arndhati The God of Small Things
Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
Lentreccia, Frank and
Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study
Possible additions to this list (in the form of short stories and readings from Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Said’s Culture and Imperialism) may appear as handouts.
ENGL 606A THE DESERT AND LITERATURE L. McCAFFERY
TH 7:00-9:40pm
Head east from San Diego and soon you’ll find yourself in the mountains; keep going and soon you’ll begin descending into one of the strangest and most inhospitable places on earth: Imperial Valley. Carved out from the much larger Colorado Desert by politics and geography, Imperial Valley is a six thousand-square-mile palm shaped basin that stretches from the Mexican border to U.S. Interstate 10. As is true of all desert landscapes, the vast magnificent desolation of Imperial Valley has always resisted simple narratives. This course will examine the ways that people have used storytelling to make sense of their lives and to connect themselves with their natural surroundings. Along the way, we use Imperial Valley to explore what makes “desert writing” so challenging and distinctive. The class will begin with the very first book-length study of the desert: John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901), a work that spawned a new storytelling tradition across the West. We’ll then move on to examine a wide range of stories, novels, films, and other cultural artifacts, including Harold Bell Wright’s 1911 bestseller, The Winning of Barbara Worth (and the 1926 film version, staring Gary Cooper), Wakako Yamauchi’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, the nature writings of Marshall South, Dorthea Lange’s depression-era photographs (AMERICAN EXODUS), Jon Krakaeur’s Into the Wild, Maris Silver’s The God of War, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer’s award winning documentary, Plagues and Perils of the Salton Sea.
Course requirements: Class presentations, one short paper and one major term project. Depending on student interest, field trips to Imperial Valley and the Anza Borrego Desert may also be scheduled to supplement our studies.
ENGL 606B VICTORIANS: REBELS/DECEIT J. SHUMAKER
T 3:30-6:10pm
In the 1840s the revolutionary model pioneered by the French seemed likely to spread across Europe. The French novel The Red and the Black combines class resentment with romance to create political fiction in which the anger of the peasant plays out in a limited, domestic space. Discussing Victorian novels such as Wuthering Heights, North and South, The Mill on the Floss, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hard Times, The Warden, The Princess Casamassima and Jude the Obscure, we will see how English writers transpose similar tensions between workers and their employers into sadistic romance.
Two ten-page essays or one-twenty page essay will be assigned, along with weekly one-page ruminations, and a 30-minute oral report and discussion leading session.
ENGL 606C GREEK TRAGEDY J. GRISWOLD
W 7:00-9:40pm
A graduate research seminar. After an introduction to the Greeks and their gods, we will do close study of Sophocles’ Theban trilogy (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonnus, & Antigone) as a way of defining tragedy. Then we will turn to Sophocles’ predecessor (Aeschylus and the Orestian Trilogy) and then his successor (Euripedes and a number of his plays). Please be advised that characters will be poking their eyes out, marrying their mothers, etc. Parents will kill their children, children will kill their parents, and spouses will slay each other. Throughout, the gods will be interfering. Not for the faint-hearted.
ENGL 606D TRICKSTER/ICONOCLAST/KIDS J. THOMAS
TH 7:00-9:40pm (Tricksters and Iconoclasts in Children’s Literature)
In ENGL 606: Tricksters and Iconoclasts in Children’s Literature, we’ll theorize the odd, the queer, the nasty, funky, strange, & disgusting; we will investigate the counter & those who embody it: tricksters, oddballs; the deformed, the geek, the circus freak, the sword swallower, the child, the adolescent. We’ll explore outlaws, practitioners of the Hype or the Bill, the Murphy Man, & Diddlers, runners of “The Big Store,” & “pickpockets trained from early childhood.” We will read from Freaks, Freakshow, The Cat in the Hat, Trickster Makes the World, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Black Folktales, (including the story of “Stack” who shoots a man for jostling his hat [“Don’t shoot me, Mr. Stagolee!” the offender begs, “I got two children and a wife to support.” Stack responds: “The Lawd’ll take care of your children. I’ll take care of your wife.”]), No Future, The History of Shit, “A Metamorphosis of Shit,” Harriet the Spy, American Born Chinese, and other unpalatable, difficult, mistaken, wrongheaded, and beautiful texts.
This class is a seminar. Students will be responsible for engaging in rigorous, peer led discussion, producing one in-class presentation on a theoretical text, and writing a short, mid-term paper and a longer, final paper.
ENGL 626 FRIGHT FEST 2009 P. SERRATO
TH 4:00-6:40pm (The Aesthetics and Politics of Horror Literature and Film)
This seminar explores the aesthetic, cultural, and political significance of various classic and contemporary works of literary and cinematic horror. We will unpack the complicated, sometimes brilliant, sometimes problematic, always meaningful dynamics at play in an array of texts of various degrees of “respectability.” The literature we examine will range from Bram Stoker’s masterpiece Dracula to Rob Zombie’s schlocky graphic novel The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. Films to be interpreted will include cult classics such as “Strait-Jacket and Night of the Living Dead “ as well as more contemporary milestones such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, “Halloween”, and “House of 1,000 Corpses”. A course reader with articles and chapters by the likes of Barbara Creed, Barbara Clover, Julia Kristeva, Klaus Theweleit, Richard Dyer, George Haggerty, Rick Worland, and many, many others will provide critical and theoretical lenses for thinking about horror texts.
Preliminary list of texts to be covered:
Literature
Stoker, Bram Dracula
Levin, Ira Rosemary’s Baby
Zombie, Rob et al. Rob Zombie Presents: The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
Stine, R.L. one or two selected Goosebumps volumes
Films
Dracula (1938)
Strait-Jacket
Night of the Living Dead
Blood Freak
Halloween
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
From Dusk til Dawn
House of 1,000 Corpses
Hostel
For a finalized list of the texts we will cover, feel free to email the instructor (pserrato@mail.sdsu.edu) over the winter break.
ENGL 631 FORM & THEORY OF FICTION D. MATLIN
TH 4:00-6:40pm
English 631 is a graduate MFA creative writing workshop/tutorial. The course will focus on the act of writing fiction and the making of a personal language that is crucial to narrative movement, music and development. The course will also probe the craft of imaginative focus which directs itself to the action of sustained interest the novelist must at once invent and transform into the details and awarenesses that determine whether the writing comes alive or goes dead.
ENGL 700 SEMINAR: JOYCE S. LITTLE
M 3:30-6:10pm (James Joyce)
Critical reading and analysis of the major works by James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and a brief introduction to Finnegans Wake. A survey of scholarship on Joyce and his work.
Because I see a seminar as a site where we will be exploring and sharing the knowledge we will be accumulating during the semester, the bulk of the class activities will consist of informal, brief oral and written reports and discussion of the assigned readings. Some reports may be a result of collaborative work. These reports will support your research interests and the final, formal seminar paper and presentation, which are the culminating projects for the class.
ENGL 724 SEM: MILTON & ENGLISH REVOLUTION P. HERMAN
T 7:00-9:40pm
In this seminar, we will study Paradise Lost in the context of the English Revolution and Milton's earlier contributions to the Revolution. To that end, we will start by familiarizing ourselves with some of the political vocabularies current in early modern England (i.e., absolutism and the Ancient Constitution), and then read some of Milton's prose as examples of and contributions to the political climate of the mid-seventeenth century. Students should be forewarned that we will not be concentrating on Milton's theology or regarding Paradise Lost as an essentially apolitical text. Instead, we will read Paradise Lost as engaging in an exceedingly complex fashion the failure of the Revolution and as a radical revision of Milton's earlier positions (hence the necessity of reading the prose).
ENGL 725 LITERATURE & GENDER IN EARLY AMERICA J. BROOKS
M 7:00-9:40pm (Early American Women Writers)
This course offers a survey of American women writers from the multiple literary "beginnings" of this continent's writing traditions to the U.S. Civil War. Our course of study includes the writings of Native American diplomats, Basque transgender mercenaries, mestiza visionaries, freedom-seeking African-Americans, and Anglo-American colonists and citizen women trying to make sense of the violent new realities they have shaped and inherited. We will read across genres including autobiographical narratives, novels, essays, and poems.
REQUIREMENTS: Two presentations (20% each), one 15 - 20 page seminar paper (50%), attendance and participation (10%)
ENGL 725 SEMINAR: POSTMODERNISM L. McCAFFERY
W 4:00-6:40pm
Was there a sudden break during the 1960s and 70s in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism? If so, what was responsible for this break? And what connections (if any) can be made between the kinds of literary experiments that characterized works from that period and those of the past twenty years? Some of the authors we will be examining this semester will include Borges, Nabokov, Coover, Gass, Barthelme, Federman, Acker, Gibson, Vollmann, and Danielewski. Course requirements will include A LOT of reading, class presentations, and one major final project.
ENGL 730 SEMINAR: MADLY IN LOVE H. POLKINHORN
TH 7:00-9:40pm (A Psychoanalytic Examination of Passion in Literature)
Where did we get the notion that “love hurts?” The swooning swain, Dido impaling herself on Aeneas’s sword, the delirious madness of Sappho’s inflamed imagination, Plato’s connection of love with the world of eternal forms, the highly refined posturing of the medieval knights being “tried” before the bench in Eleanor of Aquitane’s “court of love,” Snow White’s long sleep, the short incandescence of Romeo and Juliet: these and other texts (including Mozart’s Don Giovanni) will carry us through an examination of the torture and bliss of love and other extreme mental states. This course will develop the capacity to use psychoanalysis as a way of interpreting works of the literary imagination. We will use insights from psychoanalytic theory and practice to deepen our understanding of the works themselves, and as an aid to discovering why we like what we like. Students will be expected to use their own reactions to interpret literature and to understand why certain works appeal to them and why others don’t. In addition to course readings, students will write a final examination and carry out a semester-long research project.
ENGL 750F MFA SEMINAR: FICTION WRITING H. JAFFE
TH 7:00-9:40pm
This course is designed principally for MFA students (MA students may also enroll after consulting with me) who are writing short or extended fiction or creative nonfiction. Each participant will be required to submit a minimum of two individual texts, or self-contained segments of a lengthier work.
In addition, there will be occasional brief texts and longer collaborative generated by "prompts."
A characteristic session will consist of three texts to be read aloud. Then a student-critic will deliver a fairly brief (five to ten minutes) commentary on the particular text. Finally the class and instructor will comment on the text.
Every class member will be responsible for 10-12 written commentaries during the course of the semester, and these commentaries (signed), along with the instructor's, will be passed on to the writer whose text has been critiqued. Specifically, each participant will be asked to comment carefully and at reasonable length on each fiction or creative nonfiction that is addressed in class. The commentary may be playful and "meta"; but it must also accomplish three overlapping purposes: describe the text, offer remedial suggestions where necessary, and briefly summarize. The commentaries will also be sent to me electronically so that I can read them.
*I am prepared to alter the reading and critiquing format, depending on input from the class.
ENGL 750F MFA SEMINAR: FICTION WRITING D. MATLIN
W 7:00-9:40pm
An advanced creative writing workshop concentrating on the writing of fiction. Students will be required to produce new work and to discuss that work in both the workshop and in consultation with the teacher. Because of this advanced level, students will be expected to produce materials on a week-to-week basis and to complete required readings.
ENGL 750P MFA SEMINAR: POETRY WRITING I. KAMINSKY
M 7:00-9:40pm (20th Century South American and European 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.
During our workshop sessions, your work will be discussed, and you will receive commentary from each member of the class. During our lecture/discussion we will concentrate on our study of various poets from South America and Europe.
I have created this class in response to the fact that a vast majority of contemporary American poets have been influenced, in various ways, by 20th Century poets from South America and Europe. However, only some of those South American and European poets are available to us in popular anthologies today, and many of them, while largely influential, are misunderstood, or explored in only a very limited way.
Therefore, our lecture/discussion in this class will focus on what we can learn from such brilliant and unforgettable traditions as Magical Relism, Futurism, Poetry of Witness,Achmeism, and numerous other movements and authors at work during the 20th century in South America and Europe. On line-by-line basis, we will discuss the process, the forms, and possibilities of music, image, and tone in the poems from those regions.
We will try to find guidance in works from various authors such as Calvino, Tsvetaeva, Mistral, Cortazar, Amichai, Borges, Akhmatova, Bobrowski, Michaux, Swir, Holub, Milosz, Parra, Boland, Neruda, Pessoa, Ponge, Szymborska, Heaney, Paz, Popa, Ritsos and numerous others. We will also observe how their writings reflect and influence the works of our own American tradition. We will read these poems very attentively and respond extensively with our own writings.
Because this class, in many ways, will be about creating your own connections to a larger tradition,
I will expect to spend a great deal of time working with each of you during our individual mentorship sessions. You will be asked to meet with me individually--for several one-hour long meetings during the semester--to discuss your poetry on line-by-line basis.
This course is open to MFA and MA students. Interested undergraduate students should contact the instructor directly before signing up.
The priority in signing up for this class will be given to students who have not previously taken courses with this instructor. If you have any questions, please contact the instructor at: ilya_kaminsky@yahoo.com.
ENGL 784 SEM: CREATIVE NON-FICTION H. JAFFE
T 7:00-9:40pm
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 commonly unseen, unheard, unwitness, 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, responses to some (not all) of the readings, the “script” of your final presentation, 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, letters, “docufiction,” memoir, manifesto . . . Or a non-collaborative text (“term paper”) divided into at least two chosen modes: film review, interview, memoir, polemic, manifesto, etc.
Required reading or viewing
Brett, Guy Through Our Own Eyes (Popular art and modern history)
Artaud, Antonin Artaud Anthology
Writings and Art by Political Prisoners Hauling up the Morning
Berger, John Hold Everything Dear (Dispatches on Survival and Resistance)
Weintraub, Linda ed. Art on the Edge and Over
Day, Dorothy Loaves and Fishes
Endo, Shusaku Deep River
Jaffe, Harold Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer’s Guide to Post- Millennial Culture
(Conversations between Thich Nhat The Raft is Not the Shore
Hanh and Daniel Berrigan)
The J. Peterman Company Owner’s Manual
Films, videos, documentaries, including Diamanda Galas, Marina Abramovich, Alberto Giacometti, Joseph Beuys, The Weather Underground, depending on availability.
*The readings above are provisional; I am still putting together the reading list.
Please note: ENGL 784 may substitute for three credits of a ENGL 750F if you are a poetry MFA student; and substitute for three credits of ENGL 750P if you are a fiction MFA student.
Students interested in ENGL 784: Please consult with Professor Jaffe for more details.