497/8aA (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
M-Th 1:10-3:20
McRae
(W)
(A-term)
Heroes and the Women Who Scare Them: Gender and Myth,
and Myths about Gender. This course concerns mythologies
of gender, specifically notions of male and female power as depicted
in myth. Two recurrent mythological figures that embody concepts
of male and female power respectively are the hero and the witch.
In some stories, these figures conflict, in others they depend on
each other -- occasionally they're the same person. We'll begin
the course with a selection of literature from various cultures (epics,
folktales, poems) that present heroic male and threatening female figures,
discuss the gender ideologies these tales express, and also ways they
complicate or undermine these ideologies. From there, we'll move
on to an exploration of various critical approaches by which the gender
depictions in these texts can be usefully discussed, and then to development
of individual student projects. Students should be interested
in the intersections of literature and myth, familiar with the mythology
of at least one culture, and have some familiarity with literary or anthropological
critical theory. Students will engage in their own research projects
during the quarter, on any text that fits the theme from any period that
interests them, and turn in a 20-page paper at the end of the quarter.
497/8aB (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
M-Th 10:50-1:00
George
(W)
(A-term)
Ravishing Reads—“Difficult Pleasures” and Reading
Practices in Our Time.
“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar:
that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to
know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self
and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most
authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional
canon is the search for a difficult pleasure.” –Harold Bloom, How
to Read and Why
In this intensive 5-week, multimedia course, we will investigate what it means to read traditional—and nontraditional—texts in the 21st century to experience “difficult pleasure”—however different that meaning might be from what Harold Bloom intended. Some of what we read will be pleasurable, some frustrating, some even painful. We will read certain texts in traditional hard copy, but much of our reading will be online, and we will use technology to experiment with ways we might “read” poetry, fiction, and drama in multi-sensory fashion, however unconventional that proves to be. We will, for example, listen to texts almost as much as we look at them, and we will test standard reading practices against nonstandard reading experiments, some solo and others communal. In essence ours will be a class that critiques ways of reading and textual engagement in the 21st century—intellectual, imaginative, sensual. Course methods include reading and discussing reading practices critically, as well as conducting primary and secondary research about reading practices, both online and off, together as a class and individually in non-classroom locales. Writing online journals and regular class attendance is a must: this is not a distance-learning course, despite its in-class experimentation with computer technology. 497: Honors English majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: senior English majors only. Texts: Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age; Birkerts, ed., Tolstoy’s Dictaphone; Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
497/8C (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
MW 12:00-2:10
Oldham
(W)
(full-term)
Subjectivity and Personhood in the Age of Trusts. The
period between the Civil War and World War I is often referred
to as the Age of Trusts-those great concentrations of capital that were
the forerunners of the modern corporation. This period saw, among other
things, the most intense social upheaval, after the Civil War, the United
States has ever known, which one historian has called the closest America
has come to a socialist revolution. It was also during this period that
the Supreme Court declared corporations to be "persons" for the purposes
of Constitutional law, entitled to the same rights and protections as
"natural" persons. The controversies of that time often eerily echo our
present-day arguments about globalization and corporate power, as we continue
to debate the ongoing changes that began, or achieved critical mass, during
this time. How did these profound and far-reaching developments affect
the way that individuals understood themselves, their inner lives and personal
identities? Did thinking of corporations as "persons" change the way that
"natural" persons saw themselves? How did the intense controversies over
and changes in the economy impinge upon the subjective experience of ordinary
people? In this course we will read some contemporary texts dealing with
"the trust problem" and some theorists of subjectivity who interrogate
the relationship between the social and the "personal." Then we'll read
some literary texts for evidence of such effects in their representations
of subjectivity. We will be primarily concerned with literary-historical
questions, but informing our inquiry will be the larger, continuing question
of how the disparate realms of economics and of inner experience, each profoundly
important yet usually treated as separate and incompatible, interact and
mutually shape each other. Requirements: One long final paper,
in-class presentations, regular participation, lots of reading.
497: Honors English majors only; add codes in English Advising,
A-2B PDL; 498: senior English majors only. Texts: Wharton,
Ethan Frome; Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware;
Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; Zitkala Sa, American Indian
Stories; Dreiser, The Financier; photocopied course pack
including various writers on trusts and corporations; Althusser, Butler,
Foucault, R. Williams (on subjectivity); Crane.
497/8 A
MW 9:30-11:20
Blake
Self-Help and Inheritance. “Self-Help”
is the title of a best-selling book from 1859 by Samuel Smiles.
It serves in the title for a course exploring literature in English
from the 19th – 20th C., a period that has sharply promoted self-making
through “self-help.” But with this has also come a complication
in thinking about inheritance. Inheritance fills out the title
and sets questions for the course about the extent to which we are
“made” by what has gone before, whether through family, gender, race,
class, national/imperial legacy, or cultural/literary tradition.
The class is designed as an appropriate capstone for seniors completing
an English major given its theme and its seminar format. It provides
a forum for reflection on your own educational experience as an interplay
between self-help and inheritance. Primary readings drawn from:
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion (with
recent BBC production or film), J. S. Mill, ch. “Of Individuality” from
“On Liberty,” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (with recent
film), Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Virginia
Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own,” V. S. Naipaul (recent Nobel
winner), A
House for Mr. Biswas, selection of fictional re-imagining of material
(short selections, not read by all) covered by presentations, drawn from:
Samuel Smiles, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith,
critical survey of Naipaul’s controversial reputation, Frederick Jameson
on post-modernism, more from Peter Ackroyd, English Music.
Requirements: on-going seminar discussion plus two presentations (whether
leading discussion of a primary text or reporting on a secondary text);
4-5 pp. paper; 8-10 pp. paper treating more than a single text. If
you choose, these can be related, so that the second paper revises and
expands on the first. The above requirements count 25%, 25%, 50%.
No final. I am open to adapt assignments to yoru purposes as you
conclude your undergraduate work. Research, discussion, oral presentation,
critical writing (in tight focus and more synthesizing formats) are practical
skills you can enhance and lay claim to via this course. Past senior
seminars of mine have proved helpful to students for providing the basis
of letters of recommendation and writing samples, for purposes of graduate
school or other training, or employment.
497/8 B
MW 10:30-12:20
Lockwood
The Novels of Roddy Doyle. Roddy
Doyle (b. 1958) is a contemporary Irish writer whose novels of Dublin
life have established themselves internationally for their brilliant
gifts of language, artistic range, and humanity. Doyle taught high
school in North Dublin for fourteen years before writing his first
novel, The Commitments (1991), about a ratty and slightly
ridiculous group of local kids who form a band to copy American soul music
into the ears of Dublin. Then came two more novels about the same
working-class world, The Snapper and The Van. With his fourth
novel Doyle made a startlingly experimental shift to an intensely immediate
and disorienting first-person narrative reproducing the consciousness
of a ten-year-old boy in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker
Prize. His next novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, belongs
in an equally surprising way to a completely different kind of character.
Doyle’s most recent work, A Star Called Henry, is a consciously “big” novel
about modern Irish history, pitched on a panoramic scale. This course
will be a close reading of these novels.
Doyle has an ear for language and speech, and a gift for making an
expansive world out of a restrictive Dublin, which have led many to see
him as the natural successor of Joyce. He made his reputation first
with a loopy kind of urban comedy but in later work shows an equally
powerful talent for storytelling from a darker side of experience.
In this course we will have the somewhat unusual opportunity to read
and reflect on the whole of an important novelist’s work and career while
still very much in progress. Doyle also has a Dickensian knack
for writing novels which are accessible and popular while also artistically
challenging and sometimes risky. That combination of characteristics
will be one focus of study in the course. We will also screen
Alan Parker’s film of The Commitments, with a script by Doyle
in collaboration, one of the great small-scale music movies ever made.
Texts: Doyle, The Barrytown Trilogy; Paddy
Clarke Ha Ha Ha; The Woman Who Walked into Doors; A Star Called
Henry.
497/8 C
MW 12:30-2:20
Solberg
Race and America. Here we explore
race as a central fact of American life and its literary expression. Readings
range from the 19th-century Huckleberry Finn to the
contemporary Meena Alexander. We will look at the controversies
surrounding Twain’s classic, race and the color line as seen by DuBois
at the beginning of the last century, and briefly how those problems have
played out down to the present. You will be encouraged to bring
your own experience of life to bear on the topic as we trace the often
tenuous-seeming links between “literature” and “life.” Two
papers
and one class presentation. Texts: Mark Twain, Huckleberry
Finn; W.E.B. DuBois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade,
The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, Essays, Articles from the Crisis;
Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Carlos Bulosan,
America is in the Heart; Meena Alexander, The Shock
of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience; Manhattan Music.
497/8 D
MW 1:30-3:20
C. Fischer
Transgression. This seminar will examine
transgression from a literary, philosophical, and religious perspective.
The protagonist(s) of Nabokov's "Lolita" and Cormac McCarthy's "Blood
Meridian" violate ethical prohibitions as a means to experience divinity
-- with predictably disastrous results. We will look at the
nature of their bad faith from the standpoint of a large theoretical
tradition: Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, Girard, Foucault, Derrida, and
Walter Burkert. We will also explore the relative merits of poetry's
and philosophy's ability to represent experiences which exceed the limits
of ethics and rationality. Course requirements include a number
of short papers, a class presentation, and one long paper.
497/8 E
TTh 9:30-11:20
Raine
Environmental Imaginations: American Modernism
and Nature. This course will explore encounters with
nature in the work of American modernism writers, beginning with
Willa Cather’s novel, The Professor’s House, and moving
on to look at other modernist poetry and fiction, including William
Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, William Faulkner’s “The Bear,”
Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and selections from
Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, as well as related
critical and historical materials. Questions we’ll consider include:
What is the relationship between nature and art in a rapidly modernizing
world? How are modern encounters with nature shaped by science
and technology, and by the social relations of gender, race, and class?
Can we go “back to nature,” and why would we want to? What kinds
of encounters with nature were modernist writers interested in, and how
and why do they use experimental literary forms to represent those encounters?
These texts are challenging, and reading them will require time, effort
and curiosity on your part. Some background in studying poetry
will be helpful; genuine interest in the topic and in modernist literature
is essential. Expect to be daunted, mystified, and (hopefully)
delighted. Requirements: lost of discussion, a class presentation,
response papers, and a longer seminar paper.
497/8 F
TTh 10:30-12:20
Popov
James Joyce’s Ulysses. This
seminar focuses on James Joyce’s Ulysses as the summit of
literary modernism. To dispel fear of Ulysses, we’ll
read the book one episode at a time, familiarizing ourselves with its
Irish and European contexts and extensions, tracking the progressive making
and unmaking of sense, and reveling in Joyce’s comic transvaluation of all
novelistic values (narrative devices, generic conventions, topics, perspectives,
styles and humors). Desiderata: inklings of Joyce’s early work,
intimacy with Homer’s Odyssey, interest in sly uses of language.
A portion of each meeting is devoted to the musical “subtext” in Ulysses
(Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Irish street ballads and turn-of-the-century
music-hall favorites). Students interested in Joyce’s continental
influences (Flaubert, Mallarmé, Ibsen, Wagner) are encouraged
to enroll in ENGL 313. Requirements: weekly page-long
assignments and a course project involving some independent research
and resulting in a longer final paper (15 pages). Text:
Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (ed. Gabler).
497/8 G
TTh 11:30-1:20
Dillon
Electronic Essays: Writing with Images on the Web.
A great deal of the course reading will be viewing Web sites that
address personal and social issues such as ethnicity and sexual orientation,
gender identity, immigration, nuclear arms, pollution/preservation,
homelessness, and others which may come to our attention. We
will analyze these sites for technique and critique them for effectiveness.
We will especially be keeping track of how images are used and how linear/nonlinear
the site are. Final projects will be a Web site taking a position
on an issue. Necessary support for writing the HTML will be provided,
but it is probably not a good idea to take this course if you have
never written a line of HTML.
497/8 H
TTh 11:30-1:20
Fuchs
Imagining the Mediterranean in Early Modern England.
This course will examine English representations of the
Mediterranean -- that place in between Europe and Africa, Christianity
and Islam, East and West -- in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. Central questions we will address include: How is
England's identity negotiated in relation to Italy, Spain, and Africa?
What is the relationship between literature and empire? How does
early modern England think about "race"? What is the place of
gender in representations of the exotic, on the one hand, and the domestic,
on the other? Strongly recommended: At least one class in sixteenth-
or seventeenth-century literature. Texts: Virgil, The Aeneid;
Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Jew of Malta; Kyd,
The Spanish Tragedy; Shakespeare, Othello;
Anthony and Cleopatra; The Tempest; Heywood,
The Fair Maid of the West; Massinger, The Renegade.
497/8 I
TTh 12:30-2:20
Mandaville
Comics Literature. Comics have long
been considered a low cultural art form. In this course,
students consider comics as a genre worthy of academic attention.
The course offers a whirlwind history of comics: early forms of writing
in ancient times, medieval illuminated manuscripts, political satire
and caricature, and contemporary comic strips and graphic novels.
The ways in which the interaction of pictures and words produces effects
special to this genre will shape student investigations. Students
engage in focused study of a relative explosion of late twentieth-century
graphic novels. Questions of race, class, and gender inform this
exploration of a genre that is popularly classified as being a white-boy thing. Though the texts are in English, Japanese-style comics will
be considered by comparison. Readings include both literary and
critical texts. Assignments include response papers, a creative
project and presentation, and a literary research paper. Texts:
McCloud, Understanding Comics; Sacco, Palestine;
Spiegelman, Maus I & II; Barry, Cruddy; Dimassa,
Complete Hothead Paison; Kelso, Queen of the Black Black;
Horrocks, Hicksville; Chabon, The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier & Clay; Knight, Dances With Sheep: A K Chronicles
Compendium; optional: Robbins, From Girls to Grrlz:
A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines; Varnum, & Gibbons,
eds., The Language of Comics: Word and Image.
497/8 U
TTh 7-8:50 pm
Lundgren
The Aesthetics of Multiculturalism. The
advent of a politics of multiculturalism in Canada and the
United States over the past few decades has brought overdue
attention to literary
works by authors outside of the white, anglophone dominant group.
Just as these works unsettle any complacent notions about what it means
to be North American, they challenge the universality of aesthetic standards.
In some cases, efforts have been made to develop more appropriate critical
frameworks for the reception (and indeed the production) of works by minority
authors. Occasionally, these efforts have involved guidelines that
prescribe a certain content or form to authors based on their ethnic heritage:
for example, white authors who treat minority themes have been maligned
for cultural appropriation, whereas minority authors who do not foreground
ethnicity and/or oppression have been seen as co-opted. The (real
or perceived) prescriptiveness of multicultural aesthetics has in turn
contributed to a backlash against “political correctness.” Multiculturalism
has also received criticism for underestimating the depth of diversity
and for perpetuating the centre/margin model of ethnicity. Whether or not
the concept of multiculturalism can support the emergence of more radical
or autonomous forms of difference remains to be seen. Recently, renewed
attempts to define aesthetics in a multicultural age have involved a re-engagement
with questions of beauty, universality and pluralism. This course
will trace these critical and political developments, exploring both the
utility and the limits of multiculturalism for teh study of North American
literature. The reading list will include short stories and poetry,
with an emphasis on contemporary work and on the novel. The discussion-based
seminar will rely on active student participation. In addition
to the texts listed, there will be a course packet. Texts:
Mary Frosch, ed., Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural Anthology;
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joy Kogawa,
Obasan; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee; Jeannette
Slash Armstrong, Theytus; Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin
of a Lion; photocopied course packet.
497/8A.
MW 9:30-11:20
Melamed
Reading Literature, Thinking the Politics of Feeling. How
can the question of what it is to read literature be a window
to investigate the politics of feeling and its role in the reproduction
of social institutions, practices and norms? The course begins
with the recognition that the politics of literature in the U.S. (even
when the politics is that literature has no politics) have often been
understood to be identical with literature’s influence over how a putative
heterosexual white middle class majority thinks and feels. Along
these lines, reading literature has been thought to raise consciousness,
to produce sympathy, to teach good citizenship, and to catalyze psychic
liberation from conformity. On the other hand, another understanding
of the politics of literature in the U.S. decenters the idea of raising
the consciousness of white middle class readers and unravels conventional
notions of identity, nation and reform. Loosely, it theorizes
a place for literature within what Chela Sandoval has called “the methodology
of the oppressed”; for example, literature has been seen to revise
the past or to make visible censored experience, with political implications.
The reading list will include the work of Adam Smith, Arthur,
Karl Marx, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz
Fanon, Michel Foucault, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Gayatri Spivak,
among others. In addition, we will read novels and short stories
for their investigations of the politics of feeling in particular locations
and at specific historical moments. Texts: Chester Himes,
End of a Primitive; John Okada, No-No Boy; R.
Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R's; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy;
photocopied course packet.
497/8B
MW 10:30-12:20
Modiano
Contracts of the Heart: Sacrifice, Gift Economy
and Literary Exchange in Coleridge and Wordsworth. In
this seminar we will study the literary relationship of Coleridge and
Wordsworth who, as one critic remarked, “not only pervasively influenced
one another, but did so in a way that challenges ordinary methods of assessments.” We
will explore the possibility of deriving from theories of gift exchange and sacrifice
a new model of literary influence that would shed light
on this remarkably intimate and deeply conflicted relationship.
We will spend the first four weeks of the quarter studying theories
of gift exchange and sacrifice as proposed, among others, by Marcel
Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, Georg Simmel, Lewis Hyde and Pierre Bourdieu
(on the gift); and by Sigmund Freud, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, René
Girard and Georges Bataille (on sacrifice). The next six weeks will
be devoted to the study of major poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth
in chronological order, showing how the two poets, while desiring to
imitate each other, find themselves competing for the same themes and
appropriating each other’s subjects. Thus, while early Coleridge
wrote successful nature poetry and Wordsworth portrayed moving stories
of human suffering in a supernatural setting, after their collaboration
on the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth turned to the philosophy
of the mind’s relationship with nature, while Coleridge started to
explore the effects of supernaturalism on the psyche.
Such moments of merging and separation can be profitably viewed through
the lens of gift exchange and sacrifice. The gift, for example,
generates a number of paradoxes that are relevant to the relationship
between Coleridge and Wordsworth, being at once an altruistic model
of social interaction, placing value on human bonds above economic
or private interests, while at the same time remaining embedded in
a self-interested power structure. Gift exchange often secures
the privileged position of the donor at the expense of receivers and yet,
as Mauss showed, receivers seem to retain “a sort of proprietary right”
over everything that belongs to the donor. The gift thus generates
the obfuscation of ownership rights and an erasure of the differences
between donors and beneficiaries. We will see how Wordsworth and
Coleridge, while collaborating early on a single unauthored volume (Lyrical
Ballads) and wanting to write the same poem (“The Wanderings of
Cain,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), found themselves increasingly
asserting “proprietary rights” over the stock of inventions which they
initially passed on to each other according to the law of the gift.
Wordsworth continued to use Coleridge’s ideas but tried hard to displace
Coleridge as a gift-giving source, turning to nature or his private fund
of “possessions,” to “Something within, which yet is shared by none”
(“Home at Grasmere”). Assignments: A long paper (10-16
pp.), written in two stages and subject to revision; bi-weekly comments on assigned
readings; a final exam. Texts: Marcel Mauss, The Gift;
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; S. T. Coleridge,
Selected Poetry (ed. Beer); Wordsworth, Selected Poetry.
497/8C
MW 11:30-1:20
Coldewey
Medieval to Renaissance English Literature: From
Script to Print, from Orality to Literacy. In this class we
will be examining English literature as it evolves out of the Middle
Ages into the Renaissance, and focusing on two main cultural events:
first, the invention of printing as an important material consideration;
second, the concomitant shift from orality to literacy. Early English
literary invention is to an extraordinary degree both a witness and
a child of its own age, and as it moves from a manuscript culture to a
print culture, the ground rules of textual production, dissemination,
and consumption themselves change. Coursework: Three quizzes (10%
each), two Summary Evaluations of critical articles or chapters from
secondary reading (10% each), class discussion (10%), a class presentation
(15%), and a 7-10 page paper (25%). Readings will
include the following and perhaps others: Primary:
The Battle of Maldon; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale;
Malory’s Morte
Darthur; various Sonnets from Petrarch to Shakespeare; The Wakefield
Second Shepherds’ Play; The York Play of the Crucifixion; Everyman;
Dr. Faustus. Secondary: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe;. Walter
Ong, Orality and Literacy. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge.
497/8D.
MW 1:30-3:20
Shulman
American Empire, American Imperialism?
Conservative intellectuals have recently argued that America is an
empoire and that American imperialism is a good thing, that our imperialism
is benign and benevolent. One of the growth industries in the
study of American culture, on the other hand, is the critique of America
as an empire, a left-oriented criticism that in American Studies circles
has become increasingly influential over the last decade. We will
read representative selections from both sides. What is the history
of the left critique of imperialism? Of the conservative celebration?
As we try to develop a balanced view of America from the 19th century
through the post-World War II period into the immediate present, are
we obliged to accept American imperialism as a central reality in our
political culture? Has imperialism been persistent or fluctuating
-- or is the concern with empire and imperialism an unwarranted distortion
of our past and present? If it is a distortion, how do we deal
with the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the War in Vietnam,
and the current Iraq war (or threat of war)? In the course we
will pay special attention to the Spanish-American War, to the origins
of the Cold War in the immediate post-World War II period, to the
U.S. in Central America during the 1980s, and especially to the current
Iraq war (or threat of war). Is there a connection between American
racism and American imperialism -- or again, is asserting the relation
a libel on America? What light do our writers have to shed on the
issues of empire and imperialism? What light do the issues of empire
and imperialism have to shed on the war with Iraq, to bring matters up to
the present?
We will read Melville's Typee, Whitman's "Passage to India," Twain's Connecticut Yankee and "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," Joan Didion's Salvador, Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us (selections), Wallace Shawn's play, The Fever, and Gore Vidal's essay, "The Last Empire." For the left critique of empire we'll read selections from Cultures of American Imperialism, from John Carlos Rowe's Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, and Lenin's Imperialism. We'll sample historical studies of American imperialism (Walter LaFeber, William Appleman Williams, Reginald Horsman). We'll read selections from William Kristol, Max Boot, Michael Hardt, and perhaps other conservative proponents of America as an empire. Under the pressure of reality I'll probably have to scale back the reading but material we can't cover together will be available for papers. Texts: Melville, Typee; Twain, Connecticut Yankee; Didion, Salvador; Forche, The Country Between Us; Shawn, The Fever; photocopied course packet.
497/8E
TTh 8:30-10:20
Elkington
Bodies and Spaces. The relationship
between our bodies and the spaces around them is taken for granted
as we go about our daily business. The act of moving from Point
A to Point B would seem simple, and the means by which we understand
the positioning of our bodies within the space that surrounds them
would seem a basic building block of consciousness, one that does not
require investigation. Yet the relationship between bodies and spaces
has become increasingly the location of theoretical and artistic investigation,
particularly as technology continues to break down the boundaries between
our physical selves and the world around us. This course investigates
the concepts of bodies and spaces, drawing upon numerous theoretical approaches
to the topic. It also looks at several literary and filmic examples
of body/space dialectics. Note: This course requires intensive reading
of numerous complicated theoretical texts. A basic background in
critical theory is useful, if not required. Grading will be based
on response papers, an in-class presentation, and one 15-20 page paper.
Texts: Nicholson Baker, Room Temperature; photocopied
course packet including excerpts from Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
and Michel de Certeau; several films including The Draughtsman's Contract,
Prospero's Books, Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, Time Code, The Celebration
497/8F
TTh 9:30-11:20
Mandaville
Literary Transformations. What is lost
or gained in translating text to film, painting of sculpture to poetry,
or comics to live-action? Translation -- texts from one language
to
another -- is a fraught and fascinating process. In the translation of
poetry, for example, does the translator focus on formal aspects, or
on semantics? What about sound effects? Is the translator a technician
or an artist? This course explores such questions of translation, but as
applied to translations between artistic mediums rather than languages
-- more properly, transformations. Is a picture really worth a thousand
words? Can a word be worth a thousand pictures? We will
also consider
partial transformations, the increasing phenomena of "mixed mediums." We
will read and view a variety of literary transformations and students will be
expected to do significant research, writing and creative presentation
in a focused area of this broad field. In-class time will be supplemented
with several field trips to museums and the UW book arts collection.
497/8G
TTh 11:30-1:20
Kaup
Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Women’s Writing.
Constructions of madness as a “female malady” (Elaine Showalter) in
19th and 20th-century women’s writing. Women’s continuing interest
in insanity and mental illness derives from their insight into cultural
associations of femininity with irrationality in Western thought. The
course traces the shift of the figure of the madwoman from the margins
to the center of women’s narratives: from the 19th-century formation of
“the madwoman in the attic,” the duality of the sane Victorian heroine and
her “mad double” (Jane Eyre) through modernism (Mrs. Dalloway)
to “madwomen protagonists” in confessional and experiential narratives
of the 60s and beyond (Plath, Rhys, Morrison) and to new developments
towards “visionary madness” and the reinterpretation of madness as “spiritual
quest” (not breakdown, but renewal) (Atwood, Head).
Texts: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre;
Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Virginia
Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Jean Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Margaret Atwood,
Surfacing; Bessie Head, A Question of Power.
497/8H.
TTh 1:30-3:20
Lundgren
Politics of Multiculturalism in North America.
The advent of a politics of multiculturalism in Canada
and the United States over the past few decades has brought overdue
attention to literary works by authors who identify with minority
communities of many kinds. Just as these works unsettle any complacent
notions about what it means to be North American, they challenge the
universality of aesthetic standards. In many cases, critics have
made efforts to develop more appropriate frameworks for the reception
(and indeed the production) of works by minority authors. Occasionally,
these critical frameworks have involved guidelines that prescribe a certain
content or form to authors based on their ethnic heritage: for example,
white authors who treat minority themes have been maligned for cultural
appropriation, whereas minority authors who do not foreground oppression
have been seen as co-opted. The (real or perceived) prescriptiveness
of multicultural aesthetics has in turn contributed to a backlash against
"political correctness." Whether or not the concept of multiculturalism
can support the emergence of more radical or autonomous forms of difference
remains to be seen. Recently, renewed attempts to define aesthetics
in a multicultural age have involved a re-engagement with questions
of beauty, universality and pluralism. This course will trace
some of these literary and critical developments, exploring both the
utility and the limitations of multiculturalism in the conjunction with
the study of North American short stories, poems and novels (most of
them contemporary). In our first unit, we will study three multicultural
anthologies and consider their role in disseminating the concept6 of
"multiculturalism." Turning to individual novels and their critical
contexts for the remainder of the course, we will explore the relationship
between narrative aesthetics and multicultural politics. The discussion-based
seminar will rely on active student participation. Texts:
Mary Frosch, ed., Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural
Anthology; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching
God; Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Jeannette Armstrong,
Whispering in Shadows.
497/8I.
TTh 2:30-4:20
George
Ravishing Reads: Textual Pleasures, Pains, and
Reading Practices in Our Time.
The way we read now, when we are alone with ourselves, retains considerable continuity with the past, however it is performed in the academies.... To read human sentiments in human language, you must be able to read humanly, with all of you. --Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
In this class, you will investigate what Harold Bloom means by "all of you," academically as well as non-academically, professionally as well as personally. Throughout your research, you will decide whether you agree with him and whether you believe that the "you" of our time is in fact different from the "you" of past times--before the digital revolution. Ours is a class that will explore ways of reading as well as the pleasures and pains of the reading experience -- intellectual, imaginative, and sensual. Why? Because some assume that the act of reading refers to eyes scanning hard copy print, with little regard to the larger realm of the senses and aspects of the self. Others believe that the notion of isolated reading is erroneous, too narrow a reading regiment that eliminates community, restricts the imagination, and ignores altogether readers' multi-sensory perceptions and potential pleasures of textual engagement. In our course we will analyze these academic and popular notions of reading, as well as Bloom's and other scholars' theories of reading. We will measure them against our readings, in and outside of the academic classroom. Course text include conventionally bound books, audio and videotapes, and hyperlinked literature. Course methods include summarizing and investigating our findings. We will conduct many of our discussions and much of our research not just alone and in print, but face to face and online. Course requirements include an interest in reading and theorizing about reading practices, exploring your own and others' reading practices and preferences; writing about reading; questioning theories of reading of reading (your own as well as others', past and present); reflecting upon your reading habits and prejudices; and diving deeply into the Internet. Please note: although a good deal of our class time will be spend online, this is not a distance-learning course: you need to be able to attend class regularly in the English Department's computer-integrated classrooms in Mary Gates Hall, where much of the human as well as computer interaction of our studies will take place. Texts: Sven Birkirts, The Gutenberg Elegies; Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler; Sven Birkirts, ed., Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse; David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age; photocopied course packet of critical and theoretical articles, and other creative writings.
497/8U
MW 4:30-6:20
Abrams
Stereotype and Complexity: Visions of 19th-Century
American Culture. We’ll begin by studying efforts to create
mainstream middle-class models of nineteenth-century American life;
safely stereotypic visions of national culture and experience promoted
through popular “fireside poetry,” Currier and Ives engravings, and
other art forms. Then we’ll explore, in dramatic contrast, a series
of literary texts in which the meaning of America is hazarded into an
agitated interplay of perspectives, in which voices excluded from the
official cultural mainstream are attended to, and in which otherwise
neglected aspects of the historical moment are granted visibility. We’ll
be studying the battle between stereotype and underlying social complexity,
between the official cultural mainstream and what it would exile to its
margins, as this battle is fought in novels and biographies, poems and
tales. Readings in Douglass, Fuller, Whittier, Whitman, Thoreau,
Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Chopin, and Crane. Texts:
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes; Frederick Douglass,
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave;
Henry Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau; Rebecca Harding Davis,
Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories; Kate Chopin, The
Awakeing and Selected Stories; Stephen Crane, The Portable
Stephen Crane; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne.
497/8A
MW 9:30-11:20
Solberg
Colonial and Post Colonial Writers and Writing from
the Archipelago and the Continent. This course will look at Philippine
writing under colonialism (Spain, United States) and after with side
trips to the cosmopolitan center with Philippine-American writers.
Texts: Jose Rizal, Noli me tangere; N. V. M. Gonzalez,
A Season of Grace; Work on the Mountain; Carlos
Bulosan, America is in the Heart; F. Sionil Jose, Dusk;
Jessica Haggedorn, Dogeaters; Peter Bacho, Cebu.
497/8B
MW 10:30-12:20
Wacker
I am constantly aware of the subjectivity of this or that of my thoughts and opinions, constantly aware of the relativity--that is, universality--of my preferences. All around me, all around us--a few hour’s journey to the east, west, north, or south--there are thousands of writers bending over pages full of words and caressing or reviling “the most beautiful, the most proud, the most modest, the most bold, the most touching, the most voluptuous, the most chaste, the most noble. the most intimate, the most mad and most wise” language on earth . . . ( Danilo Kis, “The Gingerbread Heart, or Nationalism.”).
The fact is that each writer has a mythical family tree of ancient and noble lineage, and his coat of arms leaves a proud mark on his manuscript, on his palimpset. It is like the watermark on the paper he uses, a visible sign of his origins. And when a writer begins tabula rasa, when his paper lacks a watermark, he has no choice but to cite historical tradition and create his pseudo-family tree on the basis of a historical heritage, a heritage of local mythology, rather than the literary or (cultural) heritage (Danilo Kis, “Individuality”).
Central European Writing Since 1960. This course
focuses on Central European writing since the 1960’s and on the role its
writers played in recalling and reconstructing fractured European identities.
The holocaust, ethnic persecutions and resettlements conducted in the aftermath
of World War II and the partitioning of Europe created two distinct Germanies,
an augmented and ethnically cleansed Poland, a subject Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia, a Czechoslovakia tilting away from historic ties to Vienna and
Berlin towards remote Moscow, an independent, multinational and communist
Yugoslavia under Marshal Tito. The postwar map of Europe also created
black holes in European culture and memory. The contributions of Central
European Jewry and the linguistic tapestry formed by Central Europe’s diverse
small nations had contributed between the wars to a truly pan-European modernist
culture. After the ravages of the war proper, the region was partitioned
between the West and the East with the greater portion of the region subsumed
beneath the cultural policing of Soviet internationalism.
In the West preoccupation with reconstruction and later with the “economic
miracle” constituted a kind of systematic “forgetting,” a perception of
a radical discontinuity between war time totalitarianism and the prosperous
and democratic present. In the East doctrinaire “antifascism” and
Communist Party cultural indoctrination placed a great burden on public
attempts to revisit and process the traumas which both sanitized and polarized
the New Europe. Nonetheless, the imaginative recall and questioning
of the thread that joined past and present was taken up by the writers of
the region. Whether exercising dissident or minority points of view,
or simply trying to reconcile the lived experience of actuality with
“official” History, these writers represented the holocaust, the ethnic
and pre-industrial cultures “time has forgotten,” as well as the wartime
and Stalin era reigns of terror, while posing questions about the sources
of the “economic miracle” in the West and the “soft totalitarianism” and
stagnation of the East. Texts: Gunter Grass, Cat and
Mouse; Czeslaw Milosz, Captive Mind; Milan Kundera, The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Vaclav Havel, The Garden Party and
Other Plays; Danilo Kis, “Encyclopaedia of the Dead,” Peter
Handke, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Tadeusz
Konwicki, Moonrise, Moonset; Christa Wolf, Cassandra; Dubravka
Ugresic, Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Selected poetry,
essays and criticism.
497/8C
MW 11:30-1:20
Mandaville
Feminism and Science Fiction. Beginning
with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and ending with Nalo Hopkinson’s
Caribbean cyberpunk novel Midnight Robber, we will explore feminism
and science fiction through nearly 200 years of women’s work in the genre.
We will read SF that is both literary and pulpy, philosophical and sexy.
This is a senior seminar, so come prepared to do a lot of reading, and
good hard thinking. Assignments will include weekly response papers/questions,
a creative exercise, and a final project in which each course member frames
and rigorously explores a significant question of his/her own choosing
related to the course theme. While novels and a few short stories
form the required reading for the course, topics for final projects may
address feminism through other genres of science fiction (comics, film, music,
etc.) and/or SF work by men. Please read Frankenstein before the
first class. Texts: Shelley, Frankenstein:
The 1818 Text Contexts, 19th-century Responses, Modern Criticism; Charlotte
Perkisn Gilman, Herland; Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand
of Darkness; Joanna Russ, The Female Man; Suzy McKee Charnas, The
Slave and the Free; Walk to the End of the World; Motherlines; Marge
Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s
Tale; Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower; Nalo Hopkinson,
Midnight Robber.
497/8D
MW 12:30-2:20
Simpson
US Global Politics in the Late Twentieth-Century Novel.
In this course, which is a study of both the aesthetic and
political transformations evidenced in the novel, we will read a range
of novels by US-based authors interested in exploring the sometimes catastrophic,
sometimes revolutionary effects of US global politics and culture in
the last half of the twentieth century. In the cold war era that
followed the end of World War II, these influential novelists, writing
with a pronounced sense of anxiety about the future of US culture and
global politics, tried to account for the cultural and political developments
of that ear. Their focus was principally: the sudden and horrific
destruction precipitated by the dropping of the atomic bomb; the legacy
of the Jewish holocaust in Europe; the strategic importance of the Pacific
Rim and Asia; the entrenchment of anti-communist narratives and rhetoric;
a wave of postcolonial revolutions and nationalisms; the growth of new
global media and cultures; and debates about scientific and reproductive
technologies.
Through an engagement with these complex issues and
the sometimes violent debates they provoked, our materials offer a sampling
of how artists and intellectuals attempted to record and bear witness
to wartime traumas and postwar revolutions, as well as how they sometimes
reflected and reinforced the effects of new forms of a globalization and
cold war nationalisms. As graduating seniors, student in the course
will be expected to participate vigorously and daily in class discussions;
they should also expect weekly writing assignments and a final long paper
(12-15 pages). For more information, contact Professor Simpson.
497: Senior English honors students only; add codes in English
Advising office, A-2-B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: James
Michener, Tales of the South Pacific; Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's
Cradle; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything
is Illumintted; Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats.
497/8E
MW 1:30-3:20
Keeling
Passing. Many scholars, such as Juda
C. Bennet, suggest that the passing figure is distinctly American and
is crucial to our understandings of race. In this course, though,
we will seek ways to extend the concept of “passing.” As we might
discover, every conscious effort to achieve or appear to achieve a specific
and/or recognizable identity is an instance of active “passing” because
it changes the way others view and experience us and the ways we view
and experience ourselves. We will consider the concept of “passing”
in order to explore the motivation behind a person’s decision either
to adopt a specific racial/gendered/ethnic guise or to conceal one.
Because this is your Senior Seminar, a capstone course to your undergraduate
career, our primary goal this quarter will be to make the most of all
of the opportunities for scholarship at our disposal, which includes the
small-class size. Attaining this goal rests on all of us as a community
of scholars, but primarily on you as individuals and the individual commitments
you are willing to bring to the course. Texts:
Diana Fuss, Identification Papers; Janet Lewis, The Wife
of Martin Guerre; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre;
Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; Ruthann
Robson, A/K/A; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body;
Mayra Santos-Febres, Sirena, Selena; D. H. Lawrence, Women
in Love; Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; James Baldwin,
Giovanni’s Room.
497/8F
TTh 9:30-11:20
Byron
Introduction to Australian Literature and Film.
In this seminar we will read and discuss a selection of modern and contemporary
Australian novels, short stories, and poetry; we will also view an
example of the recent and significant revival in Australian film.
The aim of the seminar will be to acquaint ourselves with major themes
in Australian literature and film, and to situate these themes with
regard to their historical, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. These
themes will include: indigenous storytelling/writing and first contact;
European homesickness; colonial ballads; the ‘yarn,’ tall stories, and
hoaxes; writing and the idea of a nation; women’s writing and writing for/about
women; history and myth; exile and expatriation; the pastoral and anti-pastoral;
iconoclasm, rebellion, and disrespect. No prior knowledge of the
literature or the cultural landscape of Australia is required, although
a keen spirit of inquiry would be an advantage. Relevant contextual
material will be provided in a course reader and will be developed in class
during the quarter. Course participants will be welcome to make links
between the course material and indigenous and New World experiences in North
American (certain links will become clear rather quickly, as will some fundamental
differences between Australian and North American contexts). Most
classes will follow a seminar format. Assessment: Class participation
15%; seminar presentation 15%; short research assignment 20%; mid-term
paper (5 pages) 20%; final paper (10 pages) 30%. (Mark
Byron is a visiting professor from the University of Sydney, Australia.)
Texts: Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career; Peter Carey,
The True History of the Kelly Gang; Richard Flanagan,
Gould’s Book of Fish; Les A. Murray, ed., The New Oxford Book
of Australian Verse; Jack Davis, Mudrooroo Narogin, and Stephen Muecke,
eds., Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings; photocopied
course packet; films: Stephan Elliot, dir., The Adventures of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994); Phil Noyce, dir., Rabbit-Proof
Fence (2001).
497/8G
TTh 10:30-12:20
Lundgren
Politics of Multiculturalism in North America.
The advent of a politics of multiculturalism in Canada and the United States
over the past few decades has brought overdue attention to literary works
by authors who identify with minority communities of many kinds. Just as
these works unsettle any complacent notions about what it means to be North
American, they challenge the universality of aesthetic standards.
In many cases, critics have made efforts to develop more appropriate frameworks
for the reception (and indeed the production) of works by minority authors.
Occasionally, these critical frameworks have involved guidelines that prescribe
a certain content or form to authors based on their ethnic heritage: for
example, white authors who treat minority themes have been maligned for
cultural appropriation, whereas minority authors who do not foreground oppression
have been seen as co-opted. The (real or perceived) prescriptiveness
of multicultural aesthetics has in turn contributed to a backlash against
"political correctness." Whether or not the concept of multiculturalism
can support the emergence of more radical or autonomous forms of difference
remains to be seen. Recently, renewed attempts to define aesthetics
in a multicultural age have involved a re-engagement with questions of beauty,
universality and pluralism.
This course will trace some of these literary and critical developments,
exploring both the utility and the limitations of multiculturalism in the
conjunction with the study of North American short stories, poems and novels
(most of them contemporary). In our first unit, we will study three
multicultural anthologies and consider their role in disseminating the concept6
of "multiculturalism." Turning to individual novels and their critical
contexts for the remainder of the course, we will explore the relationship
between narrative aesthetics and multicultural politics. The discussion-based
seminar will rely on active student participation. 497: Honors
senior majors only, add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: senior majors
only. Texts: Mary Frosch, ed., Coming of Age in America:
A Multicultural Anthology; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching
God; Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Jeannette Armstrong, Whispering
in Shadows.
497/8H
TTh 11:30-1:20
Osell
British Literary Periodicals. This course
will investigate the 18th-century English essay periodical, a popular
genre in its time, but one that is now nearly forgotten except for three
major examples: Richard Steele’s and Joseph Addison’s Tatler (1709-1711),
and Spectator (1711-1712), and Samuel Johnson’s Rambler.
After having fallen from the canon in the 20th century, these journals
are now beginning to receive renewed critical attention: discussing why,
and thinking about what the possibilities and limitations of these new
critical approaches are, will be an important part of this course.
Hence, this course is as much about methodology and historicism as it is
about these early journals.
We will read selections from both major and minor, even obscure essay
periodicals in order to gain a broad overview of the genre, and students
will be responsible for both reading and leading class discussion on
a number of critical works representative of the new work in the field.
Writing assignments will require primary research and archival work in
the Special Collections and Microfilm rooms at Suzzallo library, and we
will also discuss the particular challenges and excitement of this kind
of research.
Our primary concerns will be (1) to gain an understanding of the essay
periodical’s generic conventions; (2) to consider these journals as
both literary texts and historic documents; (3) to begin to understand
the distinctions and continuities between “literary” and “historic” analytic
methods; (4) to grapple with the genre’s peculiar contingency – that
is, to attempt to understand why the English essay periodical was both
popular in its day and short-lived, not really surviving into the 19th
century; (5) to learn about primary and archival research methods and techniques.
Texts: Downie & Corns, Telling People
What to Think; Haywood/Spackes, Selections from the Female
Spectator; Johnson/Bate, Selected Essays from the
Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler; Morgan, The Female Tatler;
Steel, Addison/Mackie, Commerce of Everyday Life.
497/498I
TTh 12:30-2:20
Harkins
Literary Violence and Political Fictions: The
Art of Protest in Contemporary America. In his 1949 essay
“Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin outlines what has become a
central critique of protest fiction in the late twentieth century United
States. As Baldwin complains, “the avowed aim of the American protest
novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They are forgiven,
on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language,
whatever excessive demands they make of credibility.” By suggesting
that the aims of protest and fiction might be antithetical, Baldwin introduces
some of the key questions will we explore in this course: how do we know
the difference between literature and politics? What makes certain
kinds of language “literary” and others “political,” and how do these
two categories continually overlap and redefine one other? In this
class we will read a range of writing that explores the relationship between
literature and politics in the post-1945 United States, asking how this
relationship has been shaped by changing geographic and historical contexts.
In particular, we will explore how changing definitions of violence –
social, political, disciplinary, economic, symbolic – shape our understanding
of protest at the end of the twentieth century. What might it mean
in Baldwin’s terms to “do violence to language”? Does language
itself perform certain kinds of violence, or do people use language for
violent ends? What is the relation between the violence of language,
of bodies, of states, of economies? To begin answering these questions,
we will read a series of novels, poems, and films alongside critical
writings about sentimentalism, politics and aesthetics, national and
transnational social movements, and postmodern literary form, exploring
together the specific historical conditions that shape what Baldwin
terms the “credibility” of protest in the contemporary era. Final
book list TBA, with possible selections from: James Baldwin, Richard
Wright, Ralph Ellison, Leslie Marmon Silko, John Okada, Audre Lorde, Don
Dellilo, Adrienne Rich, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Maxine Hong Kingston,
Ishmael Reed, Harryette Mullen, Cherrie Moraga, Jessica Hagedorn.
497/8J
TTh 1:30-3:20
Allen
Landscapes of the Interior: Adventures in Autobiography.
In this course, we’ll read modern and contemporary fictions of the self
– mostly autobiographies and memoirs – to see how their authors write
about their own psychic spaces. How does memory work in rethinking
one’s childhood? Is nostalgia to be cherished or feared? Do
readers want to hear the life-story of someone they’ve never met?
If so, why? Does writing a memoir create a way out of pain/
Can personal joy be captured on paper? We’ll also read some essays
about autobiography as an idea. Students will write either 2 shorter
of one longer seminar paper, and give a class presentation. We’ll
do some of our own autobiographical writing, but the seminar paper(s) may
be an adventure either in autobiography or in critical analysis.
Come prepared with an interest in fictions of the self and look forward
to lively exchanges of ideas in the discussions and an interest in the
topic. Texts: Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty;
Alice Sebold, Lucky; Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit; Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude; Rebecca Walker,
Black White and Jewish; Jimmy Baca, A Place to Stand;
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed Virginia Woolf, Moments
of Being.
497/8 K
MW 10:30-12:20
Dornbush
Women Writers Across Cultures. In this seminar
we will explore dialogues of women writers within and across cultures. Through
a reading of sample pairs of writers the class will pay particular attention
to the issues of women's authority, identity, and community. Writers will
include: Virginia Woolf; Marie de France-Susan Glaspell; Helene Cixous-Clarice
Lispector; Charlotte Bronte-Jean Rhys; Zora Neale Hurston-Alice Walker.
A small seminar setting (15 max.) encourages participation of groups members
from diverse backgrounds. Literature and non-literature majors
in the Honors Program and those with special interest in the topic are
encouraged to register. Grades based on participation (class discussion,
journals) and two papers (one 5-page and one 10-page). Offered
jointly with C LIT 493.
497/8TS
TTh 7-8:50 pm
Weinbaum
Gender and Consumption. This course
will exmaine a variety of literary, social scientific and theoretical
texts that examine the social role of women as consumers and shapers
of consumer culture. It will consider how modern femininity has
been conceived of as a consumer practice, and how consumption emerges
as a constitutively gendered and raced activity. In particular
it will focus on the so-called "modern girl," a figure who emerged around
the world in the early to mid twentieth century, who was defined in large
part by her consumption of specific commodities and leisure activities,
her sartorial style, and her explicit eroticism. It will consider
how this new modern identity expanded notions of consumption by rendering
it a practice that had as much to do with shopping as with self-creation.
The course will conclude by bringing the historical concerns that it
treats into the present moment through an examination of gndered consumption
and the production of contemporary "girl culture." Some background
in women's studies, feminist studies or feminist theory a plus.