GENEALOGIES OF MODERNITY & TRANSHISTORICAL STUDIES: THE BAROQUE AND THE NEOBAROQUE

Put most broadly, the goals of this course are to deepen our understanding of transhistorical continuities in English studies (and related studies in Comparative Literature and Culture) and of the multiple genealogies of modernity. We do this by examining the Baroque, a fascinating phenomenon because of the prolific afterlife it has had in generating “new” Baroques, both in the 17th and 18th centuries and again in the 20th and 21st centuries. This seminar traces the changing nature of Baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries, from its 17th-century origin in the European State Baroque of Absolutism and the Counterreformation, to its subsequent and contemporary function as (among other things) a postcolonial and counter-institutional expression. Milestones of the Baroque’s wayward trajectory are the Neobaroque (the 20th - and 21st-century recovery of the Baroque in modern and postmodern literature, visual arts, film, and cultural theory), and the New World Baroque (a transculturated mestizo Baroque produced in the Iberian New World colonies in the 18th century by African, indigenous, and mestizo artisans who built and decorated Catholic art).
After four centuries of non-linear development, the Baroque today is a poster child of inter-artistic, inter-disciplinary, transhistorical and transcultural expression. Baroque forms are exuberant, dynamic, and porous, allowing for the expression of the different and the strange, which is why few representational styles bend so well—and in so many ways—as the Baroque. We will focus on how the “same” Baroque aesthetic strategies—for example, hyperbole and excess, the “open” work of art (the idea of fragmentation, the broken whole, the impulse to spill beyond set limits), or the systematic impulse to bend the rules (e.g., to turn structure into ornament)—are found in both Baroque and Neobaroque works. Concretely, this means, for example:
• reading Baroque lyric (including John Donne and the English Metaphysicals) before turning to the renaissance of the Metaphysical conceit in T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and Eliot’s theory of the dissociation of sensibility in The Clark and Turnbull Lectures.
• reading Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack and tracking its Neobaroque and queer adaptation/parody of early modern hagiography and saints’ cults and the discourse of Renaissance melancholy, via Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
• reading W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn while attending to his parallel recovery of Renaissance melancholy and Baroque prose (Burton and Sir Thomas Browne)
• studying Calderón’s Spanish Golden Age play Life Is a Dream alongside Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz’ irreverent adaptation of Calderón’s play about Absolutist sovereignty and tyrannical rule as a critique of state terror under Pinochet in his Neobaroque film Memory of Appearances; or Life Is A Dream.
We will be looking for the Baroque in lowbrow as well as highbrow expression, literature, film, philosophy, and visual art—for example, in Chicano lowriders and the Hip Hop Baroque in Luis Gispert and Kehinde Wiley.
Secondary readings (by Walter Benjamin, Wellek, Irlemar Chiampi, Severo Sarduy, José Lezama Lima, Haroldo de Campos, Alejo Carpentier, Edouard Glissant, Heinrich Wölfflin, Foucault, Deleuze, César Salgado, Angel Rama, and others) will be theorizing the transhistorical and transcultural continuities of the Baroque, New World Baroque, and Neobaroque. We will examine the claim that the Baroque constitutes an alternative modernity, a modernity without an irreversible break with the past. Looking both forwards and backwards, the Neobaroque in particular is defined by constitutive anachronisms, suturing futures to pasts rather than expanding the distance between them. The Baroque and Neobaroque’s alternative modernity beyond the logic of rupture is appropriately expressed in the prefix –neo, contrasting with the dissociative –post. Throughout its history, an antagonism between classicism/rationalism and Baroque has underpinned the use of this term: first, when “Baroque” was coined as a pejorative term (Baroque = bizarre) by 18th-century Neoclassicism and Enlightenment (which successfully expunged the Baroque from artistic canons, sending it into purgatory for two centuries); second, when the Baroque was revived at the beginning of the 20th century, as a direct response to the crisis of Enlightenment modernity.
Ideally, this course would attract both specialists in 20th and 21st studies and early modern studies. There will also be a section on Neobaroque cinema, and opportunities for research projects on Neobaroque cinema and the Baroque in contemporary media cultures. I encourage students to contact me before the end of the quarter about their individual research interests. Assignments: 10-15 page research paper; mock review of journal article; presentation on course readings.

Required works:
Djuna Barnes, Ladies’ Almanack (Dalkey Archive, 1992)
T.S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark and Turnbull Lectures (Harcourt Brace, 1993)
Alejo Carpentier, Baroque Concerto, trans. Asa Zatz (Andre Deutsch; out of print, please await further notice on copies)
Raúl Ruiz (dir.), Mémoire des apparences (Memory of Appearance; or, Life Is a Dream)
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (New Directions, 1999)
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño / Life Is a Dream (Dover Publications, 2002)
Lois Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Duke, 2010)

A (small) course reader with readings by Deleuze, Foucault, Angel Rama, Jorge Luis Borges, César Salgado, Baroque poetry. Visual art by Rubén Ortiz Torres, Luis Gispert, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Kehinde Wiley and others will be made available via links to the course website.

This course provides a general introduction to graduate study in English. Together we will review the making and unmaking of “English” as a discipline, focusing in particular on the rise of professional literary criticism and its relationship to continental philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory. Course materials will include a range of theoretical and critical writing about the following key topics: language, literature, culture, aesthetics, political economy, racial formation, gender, sexuality, nation and empire.

Shakespeare Adaptations (Then and Now)

Convinced that they knew Shakespeare’s original texts nineteenth and early Twentieth century critics reacted with horror at any attempts to adapt them. Today critics are more likely to find adaptations interesting as responses to particular social, political, or theatrical conditions, or as examples of implicit Shakespeare criticism. We will consider adaptations of a select group of Shakespeare’s plays—Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, and Henry V. We will have an opportunity to reexamine the notion of a single, original Shakespeare text, to investigate the survival of adaptations of his plays from the early seventeenth century, and to examine the social, political, theatrical, and critical contexts for Restoration and eighteenth century adaptations on stage and late twentieth and twenty first century adaptations on film.

Requirements: Collaborate with one or more of your colleagues in leading the discussion on a scheduled seminar topic. Write a critical essay of medium length on a course related topic (any period, any medium). Proposal due 15 November. The course is adaptable to a wide variety of interests and methodologies.

Required Books: A course pack and your favorite collected edition of Shakespeare’s works. If you do not own an edition you may be able to pick up a used one cheaply on line . For our purposes the best student editions are Riverside, Bevington, Pelican, and the old Penguin editions. The New Pelican and the Norton contain the texts of Q1 and F1 King Lear, but this is available cheaply enough in Orgel, ed., King Lear: the 1608 and 1623 Texts (Penguin) at the Bookstore.


2. English 323a, Shakespeare to 1603

Use standard course desription. I will use Bevington. ed. Complete Works of Shakesepare (any edition)

Concurrent with the undergraduate capstone, English 430a, Major Works by Charles Dickens. Graduate students will develop and discuss strategies for researching and teaching the literary and cultural dimensions of the assigned readings. Here is the undergraduate course description:
In thirty-five productive years Dickens published fourteen novels, a number of shorter works such as A Christmas Carol, two travel books, and considerable journalism. The most popular novelist of his day (1835-1870), he remains second only to Shakespeare among English writers read now around the world, constantly attracting biographical and critical commentary.
Required readings will be A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. Students, individually or in small groups, will develop a research topic ( involving content, theme, or style with the assigned texts as focal points). In addition to material in the four required texts, I will provide bibliographical citations to Dickens criticism and biography, as well as assistance with individual topics. Research can also involve hands-on work with rare Dickens materials in UW special collections. The final 15-20 page paper will be due the last day of class, and for a midterm students will submit prospectus for the longer paper.

Alternative Spaces, Shifting Landscapes: Perception, Orientation and Literary Form in Nineteenth-Century America

An exploration of nineteenth-century American texts, supplemented by appropriate theory and some attention to visual culture, which throw the constructed, culturally mediated character of landscape and inhabited space into relief. On the one hand, controlling the perception and intelligibility of landscape, and situating space within the US national imaginary, are fundamental to an expansionary American nationalism in an era of so-called “Manifest Destiny.” Such projection of US nationhood into landscape and milieu includes: 1) extensive mapwork organizing an initially alien continent into sections and townships mandated by the Congressional Land Ordinance of 1785, effectually ensuring what William Boelhower terms a “single bounded juridical space” whereby great variations in climate and topography become visible in print as a “uniform” geometric language; 2) picturesque, highly aestheticized images of national landscape, widely circulated in picture-books or available on museum canvas, that cater to a growing geographic chauvinism while often relying, nevertheless, on European painterly techniques extending all the way back to the seventeenth century; 3) the emergence in art and writing of an American sublime whereby natural spectacles such as Niagara Falls are located within a specifically nationalized geography but are nevertheless assumed to endow such geography with a timeless, sacred dimension. Even as sense of landscape is controlled and mediated through such organizing lenses, a counter-sensitivity develops to the way landscape ultimately remains in the play of culturally mediated truth, falling between, for example, Western paintings and cartography and an alternative sense of landscape that writers such as Thoreau and Margaret Fuller begin to develop in studying native tribal cultures. In what will be predominantly a literary course supplemented by extra-literary cultural materials, our focus will be on how landscape remains an unsettled question rather than a site of visual and cartographical settlement in the nineteenth-century US. Let me add that I’ve reserved a portion of this course for the study of architecturally organized space and how it is also deconstructed by certain authors–among them Poe and Henry James–by way of reaching through ostensibly settled, culturally controlled space into the underlying openness of the here and now.

Beyond the US and the British Isles. This course asks what it might mean to study contemporary Anglophone poetry without privileging the the stories of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. We will be exploring possible global, postcolonial, transnational, and comparative approaches. In addition to a handful of longer works-probably Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe (2002), John Kinsella's Divine Comedy (2008), and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! (2008)-we will be reading poems by such figures as Agha Shahid Ali, Dione Brand, Kamau Brathwaite, Pam Brown, Kamau Dawes, Ingrid de Kok, Les Murray, Christopher Okigbo, A.K. Ramanujan, John Tranter, and Derek Walcott.

Women of Color Feminism and Racial Capitalism

This course will explore the intellectual, political, and creative outpouring of women of color starting in the late 1970s. It will situate this contribution in historical perspective seeking to understand how it changed the terms of debates among activists, writers, and scholars across the disciplines, reshaping received understandings of racism, sexism, homophobia and class formation and their intersections. The course will explore women of color feminism, especially black women’s contributions, in order to limn an emergent critique of racial capitalism (the manner in which capitalist expansion has pursued racial directions) that is also attentive to gender and sexuality. Rather than assuming the field of inquiry as unified, or as comprising a predictable canon, the course will seek to understand the complex and sometimes contentious tendencies within women of color feminism, as well as the variety of formal and stylistic experiments by and about women of color that might be usefully included within the parameters of “woman of color feminism.” To this end, readings will include fiction and poetry as well as more recognizable theoretical prose. Some background in feminist theory and/or the history of feminism is useful, but not required.

This course is a head-first introduction to contemporary literary and cultural criticism that increasingly takes “Diaspora” seriously as not only an alternative to national or racial paradigms for historical and intellectual inquiry, but also to de-center the privileged black/white binary of much racial discourse and techniques of culture-based criticism. This implies a strong questioning of the status of American, African-American and first world notions of race and the phenomenon/praxis of cultural dispersal. Though contemporary in its focus, the course will also provide some historical context for the evolution of a “Diasporic” framework in the African dispersal, but also a rich context for understanding its standard deployments; we will also have cause to explore is limits and contradictions. Texts include writers primarily from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and America.

This course is an introduction to and survey of the basics of language analysis beyond the sentence level, covering approaches both to discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. It is also a survey of the various ways in which discourse analysis is theoretically grounded, with a special focus on critical discourse analysis (CDA) in its two major presentations, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian. Students in ENGL 562 will also study the social theorists–Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, and Giddens–so that they will be able to ground their work in theory.

Required Texts:
Mills, Discourse, 2nd ed.
Wodak and Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis

Course Pack

Recommended Texts:
Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton, The Handbook of Discourse Analysis
Yates, et al., Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis (2001)
A good linguistics dictionary

This seminar serves as an introduction to pedagogical theory (primarily through the field of rhetoric and composition) for new Teaching Assistants. The course begins with an overview of current debates within rhetoric and composition about the teaching of writing, and then turns to readings and discussions that explore some of the theories and practices that guide various aspects of the teaching of writing. In the process of examining various pedagogical theories that guide the study and teaching of writing, we will make every effort to help you understand the “why” behind the “what we do” and “how we do it” when we teach writing. To this end, we will ask you to participate in some workshops in class and to undertake a series of shorter assignments that will give you an opportunity to reflect critically and build on the work you are doing as a teacher. By the end of the course, we will ask you to submit a final teaching portfolio in which you revisit the work you have done in the course, reflecting on its cumulative effect, and begin to develop a teaching philosophy which will guide you and which you can build on over the course of your tenure as a teacher and scholar, both with us here in the English Department and in the rest of your career. Course reader available on e-reserve. (Restricted to English department Teaching Assistants.)

This seminar serves as an introduction to pedagogical theory (primarily through the field of rhetoric and composition) for new Teaching Assistants. The course begins with an overview of current debates within rhetoric and composition about the teaching of writing, and then turns to readings and discussions that explore some of the theories and practices that guide various aspects of the teaching of writing. In the process of examining various pedagogical theories that guide the study and teaching of writing, we will make every effort to help you understand the “why” behind the “what we do” and “how we do it” when we teach writing. To this end, we will ask you to participate in some workshops in class and to undertake a series of shorter assignments that will give you an opportunity to reflect critically and build on the work you are doing as a teacher. By the end of the course, we will ask you to submit a final teaching portfolio in which you revisit the work you have done in the course, reflecting on its cumulative effect, and begin to develop a teaching philosophy which will guide you and which you can build on over the course of your tenure as a teacher and scholar, both with us here in the English Department and in the rest of your career. Course reader available on e-reserve. (Restricted to English department Teaching Assistants.)

English 570 is a credit/no credit course in which students sharpen their understanding of the technical, interpersonal, and practical elements involved in effective ESOL teaching. The course involves daily language teaching, weekly observation of other language classrooms, a video teaching demonstration, and seminar discussion. There are weekly writing assignments and a final project. No required texts. Only open to MAT(ESOL) students.

As one of the first courses MATESOL students take in the program, this course aims to familiarize them with key concepts and theories in the field of TESOL as well as their implications in classroom teaching. The first few classes provide a basic foundation in second language acquisition (SLA)—things you definitely need to know in order to be an effective language educator, such as Universal Grammar, Monitor Model, Output Hypothesis, and Focus on Form. The rest of the course explores topics that have become increasingly important in TESOL in recent years. Issues such as language and identity, bilingualism, bilingual education, nonnative professionals, imagined communities, and critical applied linguistics will be discussed. TESOL is becoming a richly interdisciplinary field, incorporating ideas not only from linguistics and psychology, but also from education, sociology, and anthropology. In all topics we discuss, I strongly encourage you to reflect critically on how these ideas inform your beliefs about language teaching and the image of the teacher you want to be.

This course covers the basic syntactic structures of English. Students develop a working knowledge of those grammatical structures most crucial in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. They also practice relating and applying the structures studied to classroom situations (i.e., student errors, student questions, lesson planning, adapting textbooks, etc.). There is a strong focus on grammar in use as students analyze authentic discourse and design teaching materials that emphasize form, meaning, and use of grammar. Coursework includes grammar quizzes, analysis projects, class presentations, materials development, and daily homework.

581A. Creative Writer as Critical Reader. In this course, students will read several books of literary collage, write brief response papers to these books, and then write/compose/create their own literary collages.

David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing
Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain
Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist’s Mate
Barry Hannah, Boomerang
Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces
Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Leonard Michaels, The Essays of Leonard Michaels
Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s
Renata Adler, Speedboat
George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context
David Markson, This Is Not a Novel

Adaptation

This class is about adaptation and will explore the strategies of beginning with one form of writing and ending with another—from a box of scribbled notes to completed story, from poem to short story, from short story to novel, from novel to film, from non-fiction essay to fiction, from prose to stage play, from story synopsis to screenplay. Students will take something they’ve written and transform it into something else as a way of discovering the process of writing and using the tools of other genres. For example, what can the stage play version of a short story teach a writer about writing a short story? Or, how can the visual storytelling of a film teach a writer about scene narration in prose?

3 credits
This class will concern itself with various methods and pedagogic frameworks that govern the teaching of creative writing, both in fiction and in poetry. We’ll engage in discussions of both nuts-and-bolts practice (designing syllabi, crafting exercises, choosing texts, the leading of class discussion, etc) as well as broader pedagogic and theoretical articulations by poets and teachers in the field.

As in previous incarnations of this class, written work will include a list of learning outcomes; a grading system; an annotated bibliography of anthologies, text books, or how-to books; a group of exercises focusing on a particular issue of technique; and an annotated list of readings to serve as examples for ways of handling that technique. By the end of the quarter, each student will have a refined syllabus that reflects his or her thinking on all these issues and will write a brief paper relating the syllabus to his or her teaching philosophy.

This course is required of MFA students teaching either 283 or 284 at any point during the 2008-2009 academic year. It is also open to other MFA students, priority give to second year students. Students entering the MFA program should contact the Director of Creative Writing about the advisability of taking the course. Other interested graduate students admitted at the instructor’s discretion.

“Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

If space is haunted by the body, the body is also haunted by space, sometimes bringing with it the feeling that there’s more than the body there. Some call it spirit, others may call it illusion, or whatever it is that is other than what we usually think of as life. Whatever this otherness is, real or illusory, it is very much there in the theater, which seems to have been troubled from the beginning with some ghostliness of appearance, along with the recurring question of whether all the world’s a stage or life is really a dream. Since the advent of deconstruction, this has often been approached as a delusion of representation, but there were times in Symbolist theater when it was hardly a question at all, or if life remained stubborn and resisted being a dream, the plaintive feeling was so much the worse for life.

In any event, we shall be moving across a landscape of drama that is at first an interior space, strange, sacerdotal, meditative, and unmooring, quite specifically there but indefinite in the mind’s eye, as if in the corporeality of theater there were no body at all. You may feel at times, indeed, that you’re out of this world, or perhaps in a world only too familiar, what Freud called the uncanny, that estrangement of the unconscious that finally brings you home. This was the condition of being, or “soul-complex,” that Strindberg was dramatizing even when he was deeply invested in a theater of naturalism, no less in The Ghost Sonata or A Dream Play, which we’ll probably be reading in the seminar, along with other Symbolist drama, haunted by introspection or with sensations of the abyss, by Maeterlinck or Hoffmansthal, or with an Orphic love of the infinite, in Yeats’ The Shadowy Waters.

Some of what we’ll be reading may seem, with an esoteric fundamentalism, a kind of born-again drama, as with certain plays of Expressionism or those of the avant-garde, from Jarry’s Ubu Roi to Dada and Surrealism, no less the work of Artaud, whose Spurt of Blood is an ecstatic preface to The Theater and Its Double, itself a demonic text not only influential on the most experimental theater practice, but on critical theory as well. “Theater is theory, or a shadow of it,” I wrote some years ago. And we’ll surely see that not only in Brecht, Beckett, and Genet, and the theater of the Absurd, but in the “continuous present” of the wordplays of Gertrude Stein, as well as in the emergence of Happenings from Action painting, and subsequent manifestations of (non-theater or anti-theater) performance, including body art. In a wide range of such events, from those affiliated with a self-punishing conceptualism (Chris Burden, Stelarc, Orlan) to aspects of feminist and gender-bending performance (Carolee Schneeman, Karen Finley), or the transgressive scandals of Viennese Actionism, one may have a sense that at the extremity of performance, and no little risk to the body, what’s being performed is theory—which, in its reflective shadow, brings us back to theater.