Course Listings (Spring 2014)

UNDERGRADUATE

  • ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (16110)
    • MR 3:25-4:50 p.m.
    • Dr. Elda Tsou
    • This course is an introduction to the range of texts called theory.  It covers the major poststructuralist theorists and their philosophical antecedents.  Beginning with Plato, Saussure, marx, and Freud, the course will then move into more recent theories, like deconstruction, postcolonial theory, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality.  Other thinkers we will cover: Foucault, Spivak, Butler, Said.
  • ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (14968)
    • TF 1:50-3:15 p.m.
    • Dr. Gregory Maertz
    • An introduction to the history of criticism and theory from classical antiquity to the late twentieth century. Through discussion of major works, we will examine the fundamental antagonisms that influence representation/mimesis in the Western tradition – freedom of expression vs. political control, tradition vs. originality, realism vs. formalism, didacticism vs. the pursuit of pleasure, feminism vs. patriarchy, and canonical elitism vs. the recovery of marginalized voices. Underlying these antagonisms is the fundamental question of what constitutes “art” as opposed to “non-art.”  Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Friedrich Schiller, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysse Shelley, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Pater, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Susan Bordo.  Please note that from early to mid-April this course will be conducted online.
  • ENG 3110: Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) (16106)
    • TF 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Dr. Nicole Rice
    • This course introduces the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century poetic masterpiece.  This is a work of tremendous variety, containing stories of chivalry and betrayal, fidelity and adultery, piety and blasphemy, romance and bawdy humor.  We will study some of Chaucer’s most important and engaging tales, learning to read and pronounce the original Middle English as we go.  Chaucer lived during a period of major social, religious, and political upheaval.  We will situate the Tales in their historical contexts while introducing some important recent critical approaches to Chaucer
  • ENG 3140: Jacobean Shakespeare: The Kingship Cycle (14952)
    • MR 9:05 – 10:30 a.m.
    • Dr. Steven Mentz
    • This course uses Shakespeare’s plays to investigate political leadership: what makes a good king? The course examines different strategies of political leadership. starting with the civil war between Caesar and Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, reading Machiavelli’s The Prince as a Renaissance model of ruthless statecraft, and eventually engaging with a four-play sequence that presents the education and rule of King Henry V of England.  These four plays of the Henriad – Richard II, Parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV, and Henry V – make up the core of the course.  We’re lucky to have the Adirondack Shakespeare Company and St. John’s DA candidate Tara Bradway returning to St. John’s to perform all four of these the weekend of April 10-12 as part of their “Kingship Cycle.” Students will attend at least one play as part of the course, as well as performing selections from the plays in class.
  • ENG 3240: Romantic Literature (16103)
    • TF 9:05-10:30 a.m.
    • Dr. Gregory Maertz
    • An introduction to the literature and culture of the Romantic Period (circa 1775 – 1830). Major examples of poetry, prose fiction, and literary criticism will be considered alongside philosophy, politics, and the visual arts.  Readings and discussion will focus on issues of stylistic innovation and literary revivalism, nature and the sublime, women and society, revolution and empire, Realism, and the Gothic.  Featured authors will include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and John Keats.  Please note that from early to mid-April this course will be conducted online.
  • ENG 3250: Victorian Literature (16122)
    • MR 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Dr. Amy King
    • The Victorian age (1838 – 1901) in England is defined by the stability of a sixty-three year reign by Queen Victoria, but the period was anything but monotonous. The period is marked by enormous social change, technological innovation, imperial rule and urbanization. Like our own society, Britain in the Victorian age was an urban industrial society – indeed the first in history – and subject to its own form of shock from information overload and technological change.  Our own middle-class, economic, mobile, complex, and interwoven world, increasingly urbanized and organized, was first described and mapped in this period – hence, perhaps, our moment’s continuing interest in the literature of the period. The course will take in a number of genres, including Victorian poetry, journalism, science, and children’s literature, with a particular focus on the period’s dominant genre: the novel. We will consider a number of economic and social contexts, such as the modern city, industrialism, the newly powerful factors of advertising, the newspaper, transportation, social mobility, empire, and labor and humane reform. We will also consider intellectual contexts of the Victorian age, especially the thought of Malthus and Darwin and the particular influence of science and philosophical pessimism. Our largest intellectual task will be to explore the ways in which these texts mark the complex inauguration of our own modern consciousness: this will be our theme, tracked through various texts, various genres, and various geographical sites (including London, the suburbs, the country, and the empire).
  • ENG 3320: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (16397)
    • MR 9:05-10:30 a.m.
    • Dr. Granville Ganter
    • This course will survey both popular and canonical American novels of the nineteenth-century. It will engage with questions of genre and the transatlantic politics of British and American novels. We will discuss concepts of domestic literature and women’s fiction; regionalism; Native-American contact; slavery and the Civil War; industrialization and the development of modernism. Readings will likely include Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; William Wells Brown, Clotel; Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Stephen Crane, Maggie; and Henry James’s Bostonians.
  • ENG 3360: Early National Literature (16121)
    • MR 12:15-1:40 p.m.
    • Dr. Granville Ganter
    • Stretching from the Revolution to the election of Andrew Jackson, this course surveys the literature of the early U.S. republic. This period is marked by both radical enthusiasm for the potential of the new country as well as severe anxiety that America’s children were not as virtuous as their Revolutionary parents. The texts we will read reflect these tensions: Stephen Burroughs’ scandalous autobiographical tale of a young rogue who counterfeits and fornicates his way across the eastern seaboard in the 1790s; Susanna Rowson’s best-selling novel of a seduced schoolgirl; Brockden Brown’s sensational gothic thriller about a father who spontaneously explodes, and whose son then goes on a killing rampage. The presence of Native Americans were important to the nation’s view of itself and we’ll also read the Narrative of Mary Jemison, a white woman captured by the Senecas who chose to stay “Indian,” and several speeches and texts by Native American authors who contested the idea that they were a “vanishing” people.
  • ENG 3460: Contemporary Drama (16120)
    • TF 1:50-3:15 p.m.
    • Dr. Angela Belli
    • This course explores currents in contemporary theater that reference a post-modern era by examining relevant, selected plays. We will consider the response of current drama to socio-political cultural contexts. Paying particular attention to the forces that have shaped the world of the twenty-first century – economic, political, scientific – we will consider how the theater reflects our time. While our primary focus will be on the text, we wil stress the value of the live performance of a drama by paying close attention to issues of performance and to the role of the imagination in realizing the printed text. Students will be encouraged to attend live performances of plays, when feasible.  Selected scenes from film versions of the dramas under discussion will be viewed as part of the study.
  • ENG 3470: 20th Century African/Amer. Literature
    • MR 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Dr. John Lowney
    • In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Beginning with Du Bois’s prophetic statement, this introductory course will explore how selected African American fiction, drama, poetry, and essays have responded to and influenced issues of race and racism, nationalism and internationalism, and racial and gendered identity. The course will present an overview of twentieth-century African American literary history, concentrating especially on vernacular forms of expression and their impact on literature. Readings will include Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Richard Wright, Native Son; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; Amiri Baraka, Dutchman; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; and Paule Marshall, The Fisher King.
  • ENG 3580: Postcolonial Literature (16109)
    • TF 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Dr. Dohra Ahmad
    • This class provides a general introduction to the formidably large category of Anglophone literature from Africa, South Asia, Ireland and the Caribbean. We begin with the entanglement of politics and language, always keeping those determining factors in mind. Why did writers from the colonized world begin to compose in English? What does it mean when they continue to do so? Reading widely in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, we will consider each text as a product of its historical circumstances, while also paying close attention to literary style.
  • ENG 3600 (16102)/CLS 3600 (1614): Classical Epic in Translation
    • MR 9:05-10:30 a.m.
    • Dr. Robert Forman
    • The course considers primarily classical Greek and Latin epic poetry, specifically Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Vergil, and Statius. Recognizing that it is, however, especially important for undergraduate students to appreciate the degree to which epic themes emerge in the works of modern and contemporary writers, artists, and musicians, we will parallel our study of classical epic as often as possible with selections from modern or contemporary works. (The instructor will supply this parallel material or will indicate the appropriate e-text websites.)
  • ENG 3620 (16101)/CLS 1210 (16139): Classical Mythology
    • MR 7:30-8:55 a.m.
    • Dr. Robert Forman
    • The course deals with the universality of myth in literature, art, and music. Specifically, it notes the innumerable number of variations for expressing comparable themes and focuses on the human need to do this. As one example, Apollo is primarily associated with law and natural selection (only in Hellenistic times with the sun). Dionysus of the wine grape and, by extension, of festivity, ecstasy, and disorder. The Dionysia, both Greater and Lesser, are theatre festivals named for him, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, identified the combination Dionysus and Apollo (who represents order among other things) as the synthesis that produces art. We shall use only primary literary texts as a grounding for the course, but support them with art, music, and modern psychology as a means of establishing their timelessness in time.
  • ENG 3670: Ethnic Autobiography  (16118)
    • MR 12:15-1:40 p.m.
    • Dr. Elda Tsou
    • An introduction to twentieth-century ethnic American autobiography in the context of genre, race, and gender.  Moving through the major “ethnic” literary traditions, we will be examining the formal conventions of autobiography in relation to concepts of “ethnicity,” writing, authenticity, and authority.
  • ENG 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (15515)
    • TF 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Prof. Lee Ann Brown
    • This is a collaborative workshop dedicated to exploring and expanding each student’s imaginative writing practice through writing in a variety of forms, both traditional and experimental. An important focus of the workshop will be to introduce and expand definitions of what creative writing can do and to develop a personal practice of it. “We will attempt to write in as many ways as we can imagine” as Bernadette Mayer says, and we will practice linking up what we read and experience to create new assignments for ourselves and each other. We will explore the genres of poetry, short fiction, playwrighting, and cross-genre work, as well as touch on the use of graphics, collage, or other visuals in relation to writing. We will practice group critique of each others; works (workshopping) as well as shared in-class writing in response to prompts that engage that week’s focus. Each student will produce a midterm and final portfolio consisting of creative and critical work. Attendance of at least one literary event is required.
  • ENG 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (13365)
    • W 1:50-4:40 p.m.
    • Prof. Tom Philipose
    • This introductory creative writing workshop will focus on your writing and your thoughts (that means you will be writing a lot).  We will explore the creative aspects of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and playwriting. We will use texts from various genres/media as guides for discovery of what your writing voice/style can be. You will be expected to attend at least one public reading/performance (possibly off-campus and on your own time). We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques of others (outside this workshop) to help us become careful readers and diligent writers. An experimental and non-traditional approach will be encouraged to help elicit fresh, unique work that reflects the individual writers in our workshop. The majority of our classwork will entail reading and discussing your writing (you will read and write in – and outside of – every class every week). Blackboard will be heavily used for the online component of class.
  • ENG 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction (16108)
    • MR 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
    • Fictional Writing Workshop
    • This is a fiction workshop for anyone interested in writing stories. Students will explore their language and their imaginations first in a set of storytelling exercises and then in original short stories. They will read and critique each other’s fiction, and at the end of the course they will put together a portfolio of their best writing. As we work on our own fiction, we’ll read some great writers – a varied set of readings that will help us consider basic problems and difficulties that face writers of stories and novels – and these writers’ work will help us imagine and discuss our own.
  • ENG 3780: Advanced Poetry Workshop (16119)
    • TF 3:25-4:50 p.m.
    • Prof. Lee Ann Brown
    • “As a reader, we are always writing, and as writers, we are always reading.” (Robert Scholes)
    • This poetry workshop is designed for undergraduates who already have established a poetry writing practice of their own. We will seek to create a circle for deepening daily practice and to expand possibilities for each student;s work. This is accomplished through weekly workshops, readings, development of reading lists and a chapbook-length manuscript to be built throughout the semester.  Students will be expected to respond in poetry to the ideas, strategies, and language of a variety of readings and source materials.  This class will also offer a look at a wide variety of poetry from other cultures, from a variety of movements and periods.  The selections are not meant to be a survey of poetry, but to serve as models and inspiration for individual and collaborative poetic works and engagements. Each student will produce a midterm and final portfolio consisting of creative and critical work.  Attendance of at least one literary event is required.
  • ENG 3880: English Studies in the Digital Age (16463)
    • MR 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Dr. Jennifer Travis
    • This course will investigate how digital technologies impact the way we read, study, and understand literature. Digital technologies are changing all aspects of how we access, analyze, and conceptualize information. Together we will ask the following questions: What happens to literature and “the literary: in an age of digital technology? How are modern technological innovations like the computer and e-reader reshaping our understanding of texts and their writers, readers, and interpreters? What is digital literature and how do we contextualize it within a history of literature and literary aesthetic? Although thinking about “technology” may call to mind relatively recent inventions the smart phone, literary texts have been deeply indebted to technological innovations, from the printing press to the typewriter. We will look at some of the key debates in the long history of literature and technology.  The course will introduce students to a rapidly growing field of study known as the digital humanities. From the digitization of printed texts to the analysis of texts using machine algorithms, the course will familiarize students with digital humanities practices that may include data mining, building databases, websites, text encoding (XML) and working with electronic literature. Together we will look at the ways in which the digital humanities pose significant challenges to familiar assumptions in literary study, from how we read to the meaning of authorship.
  • ENG 3890: Topics in Film Genre (16111)
    • MR 12:15-1:40 p.m.
    • Dr. Scott Combs
    • David Lynch and Surrealism
    • At a time when it is difficult to imagine avant-garde or non-narrative filmmakers impacting the look of Hollywood cinema, much less popular culture, we remember the influential films, television pilots and series, and digital films of David Lynch.  This course takes a chronological look back at Lynch’s career to recapture some of its contradictory and turbulent nature – its constant interplay between commercial and artistic success and failure. Lynch has continued to occupy the threshold between art and genre, contributing to popular culture a unique visual style and narrative voice. It is that style and voice that we will discuss in this seminar, and particularly its relationship to Surrealism in its visual and narrative forms. Lynch combines suffering and desire so frequently that such a link asks to be theorized as a signature theme. We will consider cultural, historical, and psychoanalytic models to comprehend the complex work of violent desire as well as fantasy, repetition compulsion, and dreamwork.
  • ENG 4991: Seminar in British Literature: Flood (16107)
    • MR 12:15-1:40 p.m.
    • Dr. Steven Mentz
    • A year after Hurricane Sandy, how can we use literary culture to respond to Flood? This capstone course explores new theoretical, critical, and literary responses to this archetypal catastrophe. The course falls into three sections, each of which using a contemporary theoretical lens to consider a variety of flood-texts. The first unit explores catastrophic floods in mythic and literary texts including Noah, Gilgamesh, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.  We’ll explore these texts through our region’s recent experiences of hurricanes and floods as well as through new developments in ecological theory, including Tim Morton’s The Ecological Thought and Hyperobjects and Jeffrey Cohen’s collection Prismatic Ecologies.  The second unit on networks uses the theories of Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern) to explore sea poetry, Margaret Atwood’s sci-fi apocalypse novel The Year of the Flood, and Shakespeare’s King Lear.  A final unit on poetics reads Iris Murdoch;s novel The Sea, The Sea through the lens of Michel Serres’ Genesis.
  • ENG 4993: Seminar in Special Author(s) (16378)
    • TF 10:40-12:05 p.m.
    • Dr. Angela Belli
    • This course will focus on the works of three major writers for the contemporary American stage: Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, and David Mamet.  Included in the body of work we will explore are works such as Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, The Odd Couple, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, as well as Miller’s Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible, and David Mamet’s American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Oleanna.  We will explore the nature of each author;s reflection of the American scene as they advanced traditional and non-traditional views of Comedy and Trfgedy in constructing their depictions of life in the U.S., reflections that significantly impacted their audiences.
  • ENG 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (14964)
    • Seminar in Sexualities, Literacies, and English Studies
    • MR 3:25-4:50 p.m.
    • Dr. Harry Denny
    • At this sociocultural moment, Pope Francis challenges Catholics to get over our/their “obsession” with issues related to sexuality, just as the Supreme Court overturns federal bans on the recognition of same-sex marriage. On television and in film, a queer presence is now passé, yet sexual minorites, actual or perceived, continue to be the objects of verbal and physical harassment, whether on or beyond campus.  In this seminar, students will explore these issues by examining the texts and textual practices most relevant and challenging to them (literary, media, music, bodies, etc.) to begin to better understand the complex intersection and role of sexuality in our academic lives and personal expression. Identities are fluid and context specific, and sexualities dovetail or compete with racial, class, gender or national identities. From such awareness, students will study a variety of texts to question how our sexualities confound or confirm masculinities and femininities, how racial or ethnic identities mask or hypersexualize, and where and how textual practices offer up pedagogies of sexuality, for dominant as well as subcultural notions.

 

GRADUATE

  • ENG 105: Teaching Practicum (16060)
    • T 2:50-4:50 p.m.
    • Dr. Dohra Ahmad
    • This course prepares graduate students to teach composition and literature courses at St. john’s and elsewhere, with a specific emphasis on English 1000C (English Composition) and English 1100C (Literature in a Global Context).  We will approach the endeavor from theoretical as well as practical angles: familiaring ourselves with ongoing debates around Composition and World Literature pedagogy; and also discussing hands-on techniques for designing syllabi, developing lesson plans, running discussion, and assessing student work.  Prior instructional experience is welcomed but by no means required or expected.
  • ENG 135: Critical Issues in the Teaching of Writing: Histories, Theories and Practices of Writing Centers and One-to-One Teaching (16065)
    • W 7:10-9:10 p.m.
    • Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
    • Over the past twenty years scholars have produced a large body of research that has investigated and theorized one-to-one conferencing and writing support in secondary and higher education and in community settings beyond schools.  In this semester’s Critical Issues in the Teaching of Writing we will explore the ways writers have been and continue to be supported beyond classrooms and writing courses,  We will explore the everyday practices and protocols of writing support programs, from the more familiar college and university writing center to afterschool programs like Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia (http://826valencia.org/) and community literacy centers like the Salt Lake Community College sponsored Community College sponsored Community Writing Center (http://www.slcc.edu/cwc/).  The texts we will read will reveal how individualized writing instruction is informed by theoretical and philosophical stances toward writer’s literacies and identities that are more contested (and contestable) than we might think. Our readings and research will consider the relationship of writing support to students’ language use, to educational access and gatekeeping, to disciplinarity, to teaching and learning and to creative writing.
  • ENG 300: Shakespeare & Early Modern Studies (16057)
    • T 5:00-7:00 p.m. 
    • Dr. Brian Lockey
    • Christians, Turks, and Moors in Renaissance Drama
    • This course will consider a number of canonical and non-canonical works of Renaissance English drama and fiction within the context of what modern historians have called the Ottoman-Hapsburg conflict, which contemporary Europeans mostly perceived as an ongoing war between Christendom and Muslim Ottoman Turks that had been ongoing for hundreds of years.  As we shall see, Protestant England, marginal as it was to the rest of Europe, had a unique perspective on the conflict.  Most fictional portrayals of Moors and Turks during the English Renaissance conformed  to negative perceptions of the infidel that existed throughout Continental Europe but there were more complex portrayals as well, the most famous of which is William Shakespeare’s character Othello.
    • In this course we will consider a number of important works of English fiction as responses to popuilar perceptions of the conflict between Christendom and Islam, focusing on those works in which Arabs, Moors, and Turks assume a prominent role. We will examine a diverse array of literary constructions of the Moor and the Turk, as well as other dangerous, seductive, and sometimes exotic foreign identities that English writers of fiction seemed both to fear and to desire.  We will consider the vexed relationship between England and the transnational Christian commonwealth, portrayals of hybrid identity, the way in which the English nation itself and Christendom were compared to female bodies as well as how foreign lands were figured as feminine and pliant to the conquering European.  Among the works that we will read are Shakespeare’s Titus AndronicusAntony and Cleopatra, and Othello, the Moor of Venice, Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen.
  • ENG 440: Studies in 18th Century Literature (16059)
    • The Rise of the Novel Reconsidered
    • W 2:50-4:50 p.m.
    • Dr. Melissa Mowry
    • In 1957, Ian Watt published his iconic study of eighteenth-century literature, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, transforming eighteenth-century English culture from a quaint, cultural backwater into a major shaping force of modernity.  Claims that the novel emerged almost from nowhere and that its development paralleled the philosophic development of individualism, little has changed in the intervening half century – until recently.  Works by Srinivas Aravamudan and others have begun to challenge the implicit chauvinism in Watt’s works and to take a broader view of the relationship between prose fiction and the fictions of modernity.  The class will introduce students to some of the major writers of eighteenth-century prose fiction: Behn, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne to examine the ways writers reached beyond England’s borders and beyond the limits of individualism to forge fictional communities. We will engage a number of questions: What are the methodologies that currently prevail in literary history; what are the advantages and pitfalls of those methodologies; what is the purpose of form within literary history; does it make sense to talk about the “rise” of a given genre of philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century? This course will be readily accessible even to those with no familiarity with the eighteenth-century novel.
  • ENG 590: Topics in 19th Century Brit Lit & Culture (16056)
    • W 5:00-t:00 p.m.
    • Dr Rachel Hollander
    • Novel Ethics: From Sympathy to Hospitality in Victorian Fiction
    • This course will explore morality in the nineteenth-century British novel. Specifically, we will examine a shift from sympathy as a primary value represented in and enacted by the novel to an ethics of hospitality or otherness. Starting with 18th century writings on sympathy by Adam Smith and David hume, we will read early Victorian fiction in terms of affect and identification, and then move on to consider how the later Victorian novel responds to a greater sense of uncertainty and skepticism.  Paying particular attention to changes in women’s role and the growth of British imperialism as the 19th century progresses, we will consider Victorian writings on morality and literature in light of contemporary philosophy and criticism. While this course obviously reflects my own research on this theme, it is also designed to serve as a more general introduction to key issues in Victorian literature and culture. Authors may include Bronte(s), Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Schreiner, Hardy, and Conrad.
  • ENG 740: Contemporary Novel (16063)
    • M 5:00-7:00 p.m.
    • Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
    • After Post-Modernism?
    • David Foster Wallace concluded his 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” by wondering if U.S. post-modern fiction had run out of gas.  “Today’s most engaged young fiction,” he wrote, “does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end.”  He argued that meta-fictional irony and post-modern self-consciousness of form had been so thoroughly absorbed by advertising and television that they no longer seemed viable approaches to art. Twenty-four years after that essay, and five years after Wallace’s death, we’ll try to get a sense of where contemporary North American literature stands.  We’ll read four books by major writers now over 75 years old (Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth) and we’ll pair each of these with a more recent book by a somewhat younger writer (Anne Carson, Junot Diaz, Edward P. Jones, and Wallace).  We’ll ask, Have the qualities that Wallace so distrusted disappeared, or have they become inescapable?
  • ENG 745: Contemporary Poetry (16058)
    • M 7:10-9:10 p.m.
    • Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
    • Charles Altieri calls Objectivist and New York School poetries the two dominant models of contemporary poetry.  This course will use Conceptual Poetry as a means to analyze New York School Poetry in addition to William Carlos Williams and the Objectivist poets.  The “no ideas but in things” poetics of both movements uses previously set material in imaginative ways. The class begins by considering an idea crucial to Conceptual Poetry: John Cage’s notion that bypassing conscious intention produces vital poetry art work.  Poets such as John Ashbery have long acknowledged a kind of anxiety of influence with John Cage’s “non-writing.”  More recently, Conceptual Poets such as Kenneth Goldsmith also recognize Cage as an “uncreative” predecessor.  Conceptual Poetry selects and adapts what is found and given.  However, a misunderstanding by conceptual poets such as Goldsmith concerning what they assume about Walter Benjamin as a conceptual precursor sheds light upon how Benjamin has been a concurrent poetic influence complementing yet also countering Cage’s influence.  This course will consider a crucial theoretical dynamics at play within Emerson, Benjamin, Cage, and Goldsmith.  Goldsmith uses Benjamin’s most famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to explain the modern and contemporary need for poetry to jettison authorial authenticity.  Since art has lost its unique and intimidating “aura'” of unique authenticity, there would no longer seem to be a need to be “original” or “creative.”  For Benjamin, new reproductive technologies carried the potential for democratizing art making and appreciation beyond the limits of a sacred, unique “aura” that informs works of art.  However, Benjamin’s great 1930s essay asserts that new technologies in themselves do not guarantee the social benefits that they make possible.  Benjamin argues that photography leads to an ideologically regressive art-for-art’s sake perspective that enshrines the sense of the sacred within art itself, and he notes that film can convincingly be put to fascistic uses.
    • For Benjamin, therefore, the given may speak in itself but it must be illuminated in unusual ways.  This is difficult and open to no formula.  All givens are not easily sources and relate dynamically with all manner of objective and seemingly subjective givens.  According to Benjamin, fascism aestheticizes politics, however he views the proper task of criticism to be seeing the pull of property and politics, or ideology, in art.  It is therefore not surprising that Benjamin follows this late essay with his last major essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” At its start, this essay baffles many readers who think of Benjamin as a Marxist, because it depicts cultural and historical materialism, with the economic realities it addresses, as a mere puppet through which theology, as if it were a ventriloquist, speaks. By theology, however, ancient Jewish wisdom and must be made new by using critical “sparks,” that in a sense are given to us by the return of a repressed past to “redeem” history’s victims.
    • Benjamin indicates the socialist and democratic potential of shedding the aura of authenticity.  He notes that socialism is first theorized when photography is invented, which is the same historical moment in which Emerson emerges. However, Emerson also observes a twentieth century loss of common wisdom and experience.  Lacking such a shared living tradition, he writes Gerhard Scholem, “the work of the Torah has been thwarted” and “would have to be reaccomplished in our world’s age.” Benjamin thought the world in need of new bibles. However, Emerson meant that we always need newly inspired texts.  Benjamin broached a more difficult task.  He bemoaned the loss of commonly shared experience that he invariably associated with the sacred (One thinks of Ashbery’s “As You Came From the Holy Land / of western New York state”) and implied that despite the modern loss of “experience” a revelatory registering of this loss could forge new cultural texts and interactive experiences with the text.  For Benjamin, and the poets that we will study, the given is the Emersonian organic poetic material that must be registered and tweaked to experience the hidden power of a language that is untethered from the authority of aura yet in some new sense, sacred.  This kind of “revelatory registering” describes much that the poetry we will study presents.
  • ENG 755: Topics in African/American Literature
    • M 2:50-4:50 p.m.
    • Afro-Modernism
    • Dr. John Lowney
    • African American studies and modernist studies have often been seen as mutually exclusive fields, despite the intensive engagement with modernism and modernity that has distinguished the most acclaimed African American literature of the twentieth century.  This course examines the distinctive strategies by which Afro-Modernist writers, from the New Negro Renaissance through the postwar Civil Rights Movement, have combined modernist formal experimentation with a social consciousness of African American and African diasporic history. Topics that will recur in this course include issues of race, racism, and representation; aesthetics and politics; gender and sexuality; nationalism and internationalism; and folk culture, mass culture, and modernism.  Readings will include Jean Toomer, Cane; Nella Larson, Quicksand; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Richard Wright, Native Son; Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; and probably poetry by Sterling Brown, Frank Marshall Davis, and Langston Hughes.
  • ENG 761: Caribbean Literature, Culture, & Theory
    • Pan-Africanism and Diaspora across the 20th Century
    • T 7:10-9:10 p.m.
    • Dr. Raj Chetty
    • This course studies Anglophone Caribbean Literature spanning the twentieth century, focusing on Pan-Africanism and African Diaspora as movements and concepts. We will route this focus through literary engagements with Afro-creolized Caribbean culture – including but not limited to religion, carnival, music, and sport – to examine how Anglophone Caribbean writers draw from cultural practice to explore histories of imperialism, colonialism, and racism, and the counter-histories of revolution, freedom, and independence. Literary works may come from Ralph De Boissiere, Una Marson, Sam Selvon, J.J. Thomas, C.L.R. James, Earl Lovelace, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid, and Louise Bennett.
  • ENG 800: Forms & Themes in Film (15127)
    • R 5:00-7:00 p.m.
    • Dr. Scott Combs
    • This course is especially designed for graduate students who would like to write about the moving image in their own work.  We will look at the history of film theory, moving chronologically through important essays in the field.  it is a difficult discipline, and most of the significant trends in twentieth-century critical theory have made their way into film theory, creating entirely new approaches to the image and new questions to ask.  However, we will not read the works evolutionarily, that is, as evidence of a continually improved paradigm that posits later works as more “sophisticated”than earlier ones.  Writers we will consider include Munsterberg, Benjamin, Kracauer, Balazs, Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, Baudry, Silverman, Doane, Friedberg, Jameson, and Manovich.  We will supplement readings with occasional film clips in class.
  • ENG 880: Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies (16462)
    • R 2:50-4:50 p.m.
    • Dr. Stephen Sicari
    • This course will examine the relationship between literature and theology.  We will be starting in the eighteenth century but focusing on the literature of the twentieth century.  The disenchantment of the world (a phrase made famous by Max Weber) fueled by the empirical science and begun in the late seventeenth century, changes our orientation toward the divine, toward what we may call “higher things,” and both theologians and poets respond.  We will read some of the analyses of religion and theology that describe and sometimes encourage this disenchantment (Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Durkheim, Freud) and read some theological responses to it (Rudolf Otto, John Cobb, Raimon Panikkar).  But the emphasis will be on poetry as a response to materialist thinking, beginning with Blake and Tennyson and focusing on Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens.
  • ENG 975: Doctor of the Arts Research and Workshop
    • M 5:00-7:00 p.m.
    • Dr. Jennifer Travis
    • This course is designed to assist students through all stages of the dissertation process. Students must register for this course from the start through the completion of the dissertation.  The three credit course, in which students are required to enroll for two semesters, guides students through the early stages of dissertation research and writing and assists more advanced students in peer-review and revision.  Students will choose and/or refine a dissertation topic, write a dissertation proposal, develop a dissertation timeline for completion of chapters, workshop a chapter with peers, and cultivate effective writing strategies.  For more advanced students, the course will emphasize peer-review workshop techniques for revision, and strategies for completion.

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