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.