Catalog Description: An examination of the theoretical and methodological issues attending the study of written texts including literacy, circulation, production, and reception in premodern and modern manuscript cultures; training in paleography, codicology, manuscript genetics, and archival research methods

This course explores the role of prisons in U.S. culture, with an emphasis on how various cultural texts re-imagine the concepts and practices of criminalization and punishment.  Over the past twenty years critical prison studies has become a major research area in American Studies.  Work by scholars in geography, political science, history, anthropology and literature has examined the changing use of prisons to address various social problems, showing how prisons have in fact consistently exacerbated the social problems they allegedly resolved.  At the same time, critical prison studies scholarship has expanded the field of inquiry beyond the site of prisons themselves.  Interdisciplinary scholarship on the prison industrial complex, the carceral state, administrative violence, moral panics, and processes of criminalization reveal extended networks of punishment that far exceed the boundaries of any specific institutional walls.  This course will pursue readings in critical prison studies alongside sample cultural texts that push the boundaries of scholarship in this area.  Throughout our reading we will ask what constitutes knowledge in relation to various carceral and disciplinary modes and how creative practices and cultural studies frameworks participate in shaping a critical episteme.  We will attend in particular to how humanities objects and approaches participate in this field.

Freud remarks at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents that the “fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” Using this theme as the framework for our discussion, the seminar will consider how British modernist writers responded to the prevalent sense of cultural crisis during and following the Great War. The growth of psychoanalysis during this period --as an explanatory tool for both individual and social malaise-- will be one focus of our attention. Others might be contemporary politics, anthropology, science, and popular culture, depending on interests of members of the seminar.

Texts: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, and Between the Acts, and selected poems by Yeats, Auden, Owen, Rosenberg and other World War One poets.

“The wilderness needs your whole attention,” wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder about human perils in 19th-century American prairielands: “Sadness is as dangerous as panthers and bears.” Since her lifetime, and however ironically, the perils of wilderness are no less complicated and various—physically, emotionally, spiritually, technologically, politically. 1n 1992, for example, within a few months of proudly walking solo into the Alaskan wilderness, Christopher McCandless died from a natural poison that he himself tragically harvested and ingested. In 2012, Sherry Turkle in Alone Together cast a skeptical eye on fervent techies who romanticize the Web’s “wilderness” as purely creative “otherness as thick as a jungle”--thus blinding themselves to possible dehumanizing consequences of inhabiting uncritically that landscape.

Then until now, creative writers as diverse as Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild), Cheryl Strayed (Wild), Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) and Andy Weir (The Martian) have weighed in variously on this wilderness critique, just as Sean Penn, Jean-Marc Vallée,       Ethan and Joel Coen, and Ridley Scott have employed a variety of digital innovations to adapt those wilderness print narratives from print to screen, quite literally amplifying wilderness themes while diversifying audience receptivity.

The contemporary print representation and film adaptation of wilderness forms the focus of this course. Course texts will draw from a variety of literary genres and may include some of the following print and/or film adaptations: The Homesman, Away from Her, In the Bedroom,        We Need to Talk about Kevin, The Social Network, Tracks, Up in the Air, Smoke Signals.

Requirements include: enthusiasm for the seminar topic; sometimes leading and always actively participating in class discussions of the print and film texts; a short annotated proposal and bibliography on your term-end research project; a class presentation of your research ideas; and the project itself, a 12- 15 pp. scholarly research essay due at the seminar’s conclusion.

The course is intended for participants in a variety of disciplines spanning English graduate program’s literature/language/culture/theory/creative writing tracks.

This graduate seminar proposes to introduce students to prominent critical idioms of the humanities in the 21st century, particularly as they pertain to the Anthropocene hypothesis. While the entanglement of industrial activity and planetary systems has been expressed within the geosciences in the informal designation of a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—this term is also becoming an occasion to critically reexamine the place of the earth in the Humanities. Amidst the increasing recognition of the intervention of the anthropos into earth systems, this seminar draws on and extends the inroads that the geos has recently made into traditionally humanistic domains, including geophilosophy, geocriticism, geontology, geopoetics, and geopolitics. How is the legacy of 20th century critical thought and theory challenged by catastrophic climate change and ongoing ecocides? How can literature contend with new climate regimes?

Through readings in the German tradition and beyond, including Kleist, Hoffman, Grass, Frisch, Wolf, and Sebald, the seminar proposes to explore how writers in a geo-poetic tradition inform our current geologic self-understanding. Readings will be oriented around four principal environmental threats associated with the Anthropocene and corresponding aesthetic, political, and ethical questions: 1) pollution  2) extinction 3) terraforming and 4) climate change. Theoretical readings are drawn mostly from contemporary voices as they engage with 20th century paradigms, including Chakrabarty, Grosz, Povinelli, Yusoff, Parikka, Rigby, Colebrook, and Zylinska. The language of instruction is English.  Primary readings will be available in both German and English.

Once upon a time, literary historians depicted the “rise of novel” as the triumph of realism over other modes of fiction.   Recent scholarship has called into question the absoluteness of this triumph, demonstrating that the distinctions between romance, realism, and history remain blurry in various permutations of fiction. But we still tend to use the term “realism” as if its meaning is transparent and we’re all agreed on what it describes. This class will take as its starting point Raymond Williams’s observation in Keywords that “Realism is a difficult word, not only because of the intricacy of the disputes in art and philosophy to which its predominant uses refer, but also because the two words on which it seems to depend, real and reality, have a very complicated linguistic history.”

We will begin by briefly examining the origins of the aesthetic and philosophical disputes surrounding the concept of realism in Aristotle’s Poetics and Plato’s Republic. Together, we’ll trace changing definitions of realism from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1953) and Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1962) to Franco Moretti’s “Serious Century” (2007) and Fredric Jameson Antinomies of Realism (2013). We’ll also examine how novels theorize their own relationship to the real, taking a few select works as case studies. These works, chosen for their status as touchstones in discussions of literary realism, will include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814),Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1866) and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). While we will glance at the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, then, the course will focus primarily on the nineteenth century, the heyday of the realist novel. My hope is that rather than simply using criticism and theory to read these novels, we will use the novels to question theoretical definitions of realism.

This course will be particularly useful for students who are interested in the history of the novel, genre theory, and nineteenth-century literature, but it requires no prior background in these areas.

In contemporary discussions about the shape, scope, and formation of power in the context of economic globalization and neoliberalism the idea of biopower, first developed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s, has gained primacy. This course explores the possibilities and pitfalls of biopower as a description and an analysis of power in the contemporary moment as well as its relevance to our understanding the deployment of power over “life itself” at several key points in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In particular it asks about how scholarship on slavery in the Americas and the long histories of colonialism and empire might challenge and require us to reshape the theory of biopower.

Over the course of the quarter we will construct a genealogy of the concept of biopower across a variety of philosophical and theoretical texts that directly engage Foucault’s formulations. We will also explore recent scholarship that implicitly supplements and/or “corrects” Foucault’s theory through engagement with questions of race, slavery, empire, colonialism, incarceration, sexuality, human reproduction, and the ascendance of knowledge about the human genome. In order to “test out” the theoretical insights we will be gathering and building upon, each student will produce (and possibly present) a conference length paper exploring the how ideas of biopower and biopolitics may be set to work in relationship to a range of cultural texts, contemporary events, and historical transformations.

The aim of the course is threefold: 1) to excavate a genealogy of the concept of biopower; 2) to explore the various ways in which this concept has been expanded by thinkers focused on racialized forms of governance that involve control over “life itself”; and, 3) to examine how biopower is useful in literary and cultural analysis. Since many students (regardless of period of focus or national frame) include theories of biopower on their exam “theory list,” the course is also aimed to help with construction of this list.

Authors to be considered: Foucault, Agamben, Arendt, Mbembe, Hardt and Negri, Haraway, Weheliye, Wynter, Spillers, Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Grace Hong, and Rachel Lee.

This course is designed as an introduction to the environmental humanities, focusing on ecocriticism as an approach, but also dealing with works from environmental history, ethics, economics, epidemiology, climatology and other areas. Ecocriticism grows in part out of a longstanding critical interest in the topic of nature and its representation in literary texts; it differs in adopting a more contemporary sense of the ecological relation between human beings and the environments they inhabit. We will be surveying some of the critical literature in this field, beginning with selections from two collections of essays that attempt to define the field (The Ecocriticism Reader and Uncommon Ground), then looking at several topical areas (economics, religion, evolution, ecology, toxicity and climate), both through the lens of critical analyses and “literary” sorts of texts: Robinson Crusoe, On the Origin of Species, A Sand County Almanac, and Arctic Dreams. This will be a reading-intensive, rather than writing-intensive class, but coursework will include a series of short papers on the primary texts, as well as written/oral group research projects (one small, one larger) on critical literature. Advanced undergraduates interested in this area of study are welcome in the course; contact instructor for further information.

This course, open by permission of the instructor only, will focus on an the work of Immanuel Kant, with particular attention on the third critique, The Critique of the Power of Judgment, in relation to the first two critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason.  To principal concern will be the implications of Kant's critiques for the idea of literature, including recent scholarly work concerned with expanding and revising the conventional reception of Kant, especially in the relation between moral reasoning and reflective judgment.  Participants in the seminar will have the option of integrating study of particular literary works and movements for final papers.  

From its origins in the classical period, rhetoric—its study, its practice, its pedagogies, its theories, its powers—has been valued as a means for addressing matters of urgent public concern and for facilitating collective public decision making in complex situations where no clear solution exists among people with competing ideologies, politics, cultures, sensibilities of the world, and relationships to power.

In this course, we will survey a range of contemporary concepts, theories, and conversations within rhetorical studies—focusing, in part, on what rhetoric and its study might contribute to our understanding of and capacities for responding to contemporary public issues and controversies. We will spend some time exploring key figures and theories throughout the 20th and 21st century, as well as examining emergent concepts in theory and pedagogy of the public, ecology and network, bodies and affect, (new) materialisms, multimodalities, visual culture, among others. In so doing, we will consider how these approaches shift the key terms in rhetorical studies—such as the rhetorical situation, agent/agency, audience, invention, delivery, persuasion, argument, rhetorical objects of study, and so on.

This course, then, will not only explore various rhetorical concepts, theories, and methods that are currently being taken up in contemporary scholarship, it will also examine one of the most enduring concerns of rhetoric and its study: the question of how we might best discover and use the available means of persuasion to ethically and effectively respond to our collective public problems and exigencies.

Texts under consideration:

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Agency

James Herrick, The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction

John Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, Sally Caudill. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

Mailloux, Steven, Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and

Composition

Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

Krista Radcliff, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness

Jim Rodolfo and William Hart-Davidson. Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities

David Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony Michel.The Available Means of Persuasion:

Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric

Selection of articles

The goal of this course is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the historical developments in TESOL methodology from the current perspective of a ‘post-method’ era. This is a practical course that will include workshops and other hands-on activities to familiarize learners with a variety approaches, philosophies, techniques, and materials. The course will explore recent developments in the field, and help students to better analyze learning situations, enhance their professional skills, and increase their ability to promote learning. Students will learn to develop and adapt instructional materials based on their students’ needs, desires, learning processes, and on institutional environments.

This course aims to familiarize students with a variety of research methods in the fields of applied linguistics and TESOL, examining epistemologies, and the strengths, and weaknesses of various approaches. Students will draw on knowledge generated in the context of the class to conduct a small piece of original research. In addition, they will read and critique selected research in second language acquisition and become more sophisticated “consumers” of research in our field. By the end of this course, students will have an understanding of the basic principles behind academic research. They will become familiar with a variety of research methodologies in applied linguistics with a special focus on qualitative research methodologies. Students will become aware of the various parts of academic research papers. They will be able to understand the rigor required of good research but also the messiness involved in the research process. They will know how to search for the relevant literature on a given topic and write a literature review. They will become more informed consumers of research. A salient aspect of the course is to provide students with practical experience in developing research questions, designing a study, finding research participants, collecting and analyzing data, and writing up a report. Students will ultimately be able to have an original piece of research.

An intensive poetry workshop for MFA poetry students. Published poems will be the focus of various class discussions, often with a view toward a specific craft or thematic issue revealed by student poems submitted for that particular day, or revealed as helpful for the group overall. Special attention will be paid to the art of revision and the discoveries of thematic structure or pattern creation. Work may include but is not limited to: an ongoing reading and writing log, the production of 5-8 “finished” poems, with drafts of more. Students can expect to have their own work critiqued by the group every 2-3 weeks, and to critique the work of others every week.

Publication workshop.  Start with a 5,000-10,000 word dissertation chapter or other critical essay that you intend to submit for publication.   In the first half of the quarter we will workshop your essays, with written comments from me and two students.  Then you will rewrite energetically and research journals, with the goal of submitting the essay at the end of the quarter.