1997-98 SENIOR SEMINARS

 

(Descriptions last updated: January 20, 1998)

 

Autumn 1997

497/498A
(MW 9:30-11:20)
Patterson
America Everyday. This seminar will be devoted to a mundane question: What is it like to live everyday? The focus of the course will be on the literature, films, and theories of everyday life. A survey of Books in Print discovered over 1000 titles containing the word "everyday," yet it's clear they don't agree what the term means. This course isn't about a definition, but rather about the assumptions we make about the common, the ubiquitous, the mundane. And it is about the ways theorists (Foucault, Marxists like Henri Lefebvre, and poststructuralists), artists, and writers have used the everyday. In order to understand the ways in which we use and yet overlook the everyday, the course will be divided into three sections. The first, "Keeping Record," will be devoted to journals and diaries, including Thoreau's journal, Patricia Meyer Spack's essay on boredom, and Sue Hubbell's book on bee keeping, "A Country Year." The second section, "Objects," will look at how artists and theorists--like Roland Barthes, Susan Willis, and others--focus our attention on everyday things. The final section, "Experiencing the Everyday," will look at fictional and visual representations of everyday existence. Included will be Nicholson Baker, Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, and the films Groundhog Day and Smoke. Requirements will include keeping a journal everyday (naturally), short essays, and one long essay on an everyday subject of your choosing. Texts: Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine; Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; Sue Hubbel, A Country Year; Henry D. Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851; Barthes, Mythologies; Baker, Room Temperature; Wallis, Primer for Daily Life.I.

497/498B
(MW 11:30-1:20)
Toolan
Lowell and Heaney. --CLASS CANCELLED 6/18/97--

497/498C
(MW 1:30-3:20)
Eversley
The Harlem Renaissance. A study of the critical issues and writings associated with what has been called "the Harlem Renaissance." Texts: Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring; Jean Toomer, Cane; Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing; Alain Locke, The New Negro Voices of the Harlem Renaissance; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Zora Neale Hurston, The Complete Short Stories; Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter; Wintz, The Harlem Renaissance 1920-1940: The Politics and Aesthetics of "New Negro Ligerature"; photocopied course packet; optional: Langston Hughes, The Langston Hughes Reader.

497/498D
(T Th 9:30-11:20)
Goodlad
Where the Boys Are: Middle-Class Women and the Marriage Plot, 1816 to Present. This course takes a literary and historical approach to constructions of class, gender, and sexuality and the plotting of "domestic" narratives over nearly 200 years in literature and film. We begin with Jane Austen's Emma (1816), move to poetry, prose and journalism of the early and mid-Victorian period (including works by Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, and Nightingale), read a mid-Victorian "sensation" novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (The Doctor's Wife, 1864), and a late-Victorian "realist" novel by George Gissing (The Odd Women, 1893). Our consideration of twentieth-century courtship and marriage plots concentrates on films from the 1960s (Where the Boys Are), 1970s (Carrie), 1980s (Pretty Woman), and 1990s (Clueless, a cinematic adaptation of Austen's Emma). This course is especially designed for those who enjoy analyzing literature and film within a cross-disciplinary, theoretical and historiographic frame. Reading requirements are demanding. Texts: Austen, Emma; Nightingale, Cassandra; Gissing, The Odd Women.

497/498E
(T Th 10:30-12:20)
Allen
Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Joy and Other Emotions I Have Known While Reading and Living. This is a course about emotional responses to literature (and some film). Its point is to explore the intense reactions we have to some things we read and view, and to try to understand exactly what they are, and why we have them. We'll read fiction and poetry (mostly from modern and contemporary writers) together with essays about emotions, feelings, and affects from other disciplines including psychology, communications, and anthropology. We'll take up some provocative questions: What does it mean to "identify" with a character, really? How much of our own lives do we read into a character's life? What does it mean to "escape" into a book? Why would someone want to do that, anyway? What does "being moved" by something we read/view involve? How do we account for the bodily responses that sometimes accompany intense emotional responses? Students will choose between writing two shorter or one longer paper, and will give a class presentation. Participation in discussion is required. So are lively opinions, and an interest in this topic. Texts: Wintersen, The Passion; Hothschild, The Managed Heart; Lutz, Unnatural Emotions.

497/498F
(T Th 12:30-2:20)
Fuchs
Transatlantic Fictions. In this seminar we will analyze how Renaissance Europe digests or assimilates the New World, with a special emphasis on English texts. The course considers the genres of discovery and colonization--letters, "relaciones," chronicles, utopias--and the transformation of those genres by writers from the Americas and later English authors. How do rhetorical problems of quotation, translation, and certification shape European visions of the Americas? How to literary strategies relate to imperial goals? Some of the issues we will discuss include the contrasts between Renaissance conceptions of the New World and first-person, experiential accounts; the central role of language in the American exchanges; the relation of English imperial expansion to that of other empires; and the intersections between desire and conquest. All readings in English. Texts: Jane, The Four Voyages of Columbus; More, Utopia; Nuqez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Bacon, The New Atlantis; Behn, Oroonoko; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain.

497/498G
(T Th 1:30-3:20)
Simpson
Novels of the Fifties: The U.S. Although the 1950s have been popularly remembered as a period of affluence and conformity, the decade was rocked by challenges to social conventions and beliefs: desegregation; censorship trials; youth rebellion. American novelists in particular attempted to address many of these changes as they developed what, taken as a whole, emerges as a very complex aesthetic and unsettling perspective on a decade that was anything but ideal. In addition to active, regular class discussion, this course will require students to complete at least one oral presenation, infrequent reading response/critiques, and a final long paper. Texts: Ellison, Invisible Man; Salinger, Catcher in the Rye; Petry, The Narrows; Bellow, Seize the Day; Okada, No-No Boy; Nabokov, Lolita; Sinclair, The Changelings.

497/498H
(MW 11:30-1:20)
George
The Academy vs. the Academy. "Prize giving, by nature, is a dangerously subjective task," writes J. Douglas Bates in The Pulitzer Prize: The Inside Story of America's Most Prestigious Award. That subjective danger, he goes on to argue, is one reason why the Pulitzer has become "the Academy Award of almost all American writing," a prize that celebrates the popular cliché rather than the critical masterpiece. In this course, we will test Bates's contention by reading, analyzing, contrasting, and evaluating a winner of the American Pulitzer award with a winner of the British Booker award, and a winner of no literary award. We will also analyze the film adaptations of each text, grounding our analyses in an assortment of theoretical methodologies. Student intellectual expectations are these: a serious commitment to learning about literary and film analysis grounded in cultural theoretical contexts; engaged discussion in every class session; periodic written analyses (3-5 pp.); secondary research; and a final oral and written term project which will require your theoretical conjecturing about why a certain Pulitzer or Booker prizewinning fiction (that we have not read as a class) won that particular award. Texts: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence; Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient; John O'Brien, Leaving Las Vegas; M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms; photocopied course packet.

497/498I
(T Th 11:30-1:20)
Donahue
Extreme Poetry: The Beats. This course will examine the poetry and prose of writers associated with the Beat movement. Our main interest will be the textual procedures and spiritual preoccupations that have inspired a wide range of texts. A special effort will be made to place the Beats in the context of European art movements such as Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, and Negritude, beginning with the crucial reception of the work of Jean Genet and Antonin Artaud by American artists and writers in the early nineteen-fifties. Works by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and many others.

497/498YA
(MW 7-8:50 p.m.)
Shaviro
(Evening Degree)
Science and Culture. This class will focus on the literary and cultural character, and the philosophical presuppositions, of scientific texts. Physical science, natural science, and social science are increasingly seen by their historians, theorists, and some practitioners as socially created constructs rather than as unproblematic "mirrors of nature" (to use the phrase of the philosopher Richard Rorty). The traditional "common sense" assumption that scientific language is a direct, objective representation of the world--one which is somehow very different from poetic or literary language (which is indeterminate in meaning and which invites interpretation) seems rather naive today. In this class we will study the writing and interpretive practices of scientists, as well as the literary and aesthetic character of scientific work. We will first look at theories about the general nature of scientific practice, and then focus on developments in biology, from Darwin to recent controversies about genetics. We will take a careful look at the literary, rhetorical qualities of scientific texts and accounts of scientific discoveries. And we will also grapple with the implications of recent scientific claims for a new understanding of "human nature," something which had previously pretty much been the domain of literature and philosophy. The texts we will be reading contain a diversity of views, and often argue directly with one another; untangling the disagreements and trying to adjudicate between opposing views will be a major part of what we do in this class. The books listed here will be supplemented by additional readings. (Evening Degree students only, Registration Periods 1 & 2.) Texts: Steve Woolgar, Science; Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism; Philip Appleman, ed., Charles Darwin (Norton critical ed.); James D. Watson, The Double Helix; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Ruth Hubbard & Elijah Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth; Matt Ridley, The Red Queen; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.

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Winter 1998

497/498A
(MW 9:30-11:20)
Crane
U.S. Reversal Narratives and Citizenship at the Turn of the Century. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the majority indulges in a little shoe-on-the-other-foot fantasy about how whites wouldn't mind if legal segregation were imposed by a black legislature. When read with the numerous African American texts using reversal devices, such as chiasmus and passing, to turn the tables on racist perception, the Court's "trading places" narrative looks like a kind of rhetorical blackface that attempts to disguise racist law as fair play. Indeed, the Court's imaginative reversal can be read as expressing an apprehension that law must speak in a cultural idiom of justice, an idiom that includes narratives of exchanged identities and figures of speech such as "poetic justice" and "turn about is fair play." In this course, we will attempt to observe and study the development of this cultural idiom of justice and membership by conducting a survey of the figure of reversal in American literature and law at the turn of the century. The reading list will include, among other things, Alger's Ragged Dick, Howells's Rise of Silas Lapham, Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Twain's Puddn'head Wilson, Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky.

497/498B
(MW 10:30-12:20)
Shulman
Literature and Politics of the Cold War. During the early Cold War (1945-1955) gifted Left writers like Meridel Le Sueur disappeared from public view. Using Le Sueur as an example, we'll then go on to look at the politics and cultural politics of the Cold War so that we can get under the surface and engage in detail the still unresolved conflicts, passions, and contradictions of this era, from one point of view as remote as the Age of Chaucer, from another at once the precursor and unarticulated antagonist of postmodernism. In bringing together literature and politics, we'll select from among such topics as foreign and domestic anti-communism, including the role of the UW and the Canwell Committee; the OK literature of the 1950s, represented by Robert Lowell; Beat and other disruptions (Ginsberg; Arthur Miller); the Rosenbergs reconsidered: postmodernism and politics (Doctorow's The Book of Daniel); a unit on Miller's The Crucible, including the Sartre-Yves Montand-Simone Signoret French version and Miller's recent film adaptation; a unit on Naming Names: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Blacklist, including Miller's A View from the Bridge and Kazan-Brando On the Waterfront, Woody Allen in The Front, The Salt of the Earth (film by blacklisted film makers), Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The sexual politics of the 1950s and 1990s are a persistent subtext. I hope for lively discussion of the challenging literary, political, and cultural issues we will be considering.Texts: LeSueur, Salute to Spring; Harvest Song; Ginsberg, Collected Poems; Lowell, Selected Poems; Miller, The Crucible: Text and Criticism; A View From the Bridge; Wilson, Salt of the Earth; Doctorow, Book of Daniel; Chafe, Unfinished Journey.

497/498C
(MW 12:30-2:20)
Khanna
Feminism and Psychoanalysis. This course is designed to allow students to familiarize themselves with some of the most important psychoanalytic texts used in feminist theory. You may have read a few of Freud and Lacan's articles before in your other courses. However, here we will have the opportunity to read these texts in more detail, and in the larger context of these psychoanalysts' work. The course will begin with essays by Freud on the development of sexuality and on femininity. We will then read the works of two women analysts: Karen Horney and Melanie Klein. Both these women, particularly Horney, have been somewhat neglected by feminist theory. In addition to analyzing their work, we will pose the question of why it is that they have been so neglected. We will then move on to the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose writings have been highly influential for feminist theory. His rereadings of Freud in the light of Saussurean semiotic theories have allowed for a psychoanalysis, some say, which resists a universalizing and naturalizing tendency. We will assess whether this claim is valid, and will try to come to some conclusions about why feminists have been caught in the clutches of Lacanian theory. Having studied these "forefathers" and "foremothers" of psychoanalysis, we will then move on to Sarah Kofman's reading of Freud's essays on women, some selected articles by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jane Gallop, Margaret Whitford, Gayatri Spivak, Joan Copjec, Jacqueline Rose, Cynthis Chase, Claire Kahane, Mary Poovey, Judith Butler, Hortense Spillers, Anne McClintock, Parveen Adams and others.

497/498D
(MW 1:30-3:20)
McElroy
Myth and Magical Realism in the Literature of Black Women Writers. We will examine how the elements of time and magical realism work in harmony with mythical images of tricksters and storytellers. Texts: Danticat, Krik Krak; Octavia Butler, Kindred; Toni Morrison, Tar Baby; Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Café; Keri Hulme, Bone People

497/498E
(T Th 9:30-11:20)
Dunlop
Producing Shakespeare. Since enrollment in a senior seminar is limited, it provides an all-too-rare opportunity to participate in a small group, rather than a class of 50+. Another (even more rare?) opportunity it can offer is a period of close and detailed study of a single major work of literature. So this seminar starts with the idea that we have ten weeks to work on a production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Whether this presentation actually takes place is beside the point: we will, by the end of the quarter, have come to know this play very well indeed.  We will also have given plenty of thought to the questions and problems (which remain as complex and debatable in 1998 as they were in 1604) it poses.  And we will have worked to develop a production good enough to delight and instruct (in that order, please) some lucky, if putative, audience. No previous acting/directing experience necessary, but willingness to have a shot at reading parts, directing scenes, etc., is essential.

497/498F
(T Th 11:30-1:20)
Mussetter
Gawain. What we will be doing in this course is tracing the history of Gawain through his many appearances in medieval literature-from Celtic sun god to the vengeful knight whose hatred for Lancelot helps bring down the kingdom of Arthur. Gawain's character is one that evolves with time. He is always recognizable when he appears in different works, but rarely the same. What we will be trying to do is figure out some of the reasons for the changes he undergoes. Why, for example, does such and such an author do thus and so with his inherited figure? What limitations are put on him because he is taking his figure from a ready-made tradition? What freedoms does he have, what liberties can he take? It is not only the changing character of Gawain which we will be looking at, however, but how we judge the relative merits of the various stories in which he appears. What makes a story good? or better than other stories? There will be a substantial amount of writing involved in this course. But we will decide as a group whether you want to do a single long paper or maybe two shorter ones. There will be a seminar report, and everybody will be expected to participate in the discussion. As little lecture as possible. Texts: Vantuono, ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Louis B. Hall, ed., The Knightly Tales of Sir Gawain; Ruth Cline, tr., The Knight of the Lion.

497/498G
(T Th 12:30-2:20)
Brenner
Housekeeping. When asked what books he read again and again, the American poet Robert Frost said "I go back to Robinson Crusoe and Walden. I never tire of being shown how the limited can make snug in the limitless." In this course we'll follow Frost's lead to explore the ways that several novelists (and Frost himself, in some of his poems) have seen the stakes involved in "limited" human beings making a home in a limitless world. We'll begin with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, then to Thoreau's Walden, then to selected poems by Frost, from there to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and to Maitland's Three Times Table. If we have time, we'll also look at Morrison's Beloved. (I won't order this book. If we have time to do it, you'll find it easily on the shelves of contemporary fiction.) Expect to do weekly writing about these books, and be prepared also to deliver and defend your written work in class. No exams: your grade will be based on the considerable body of writing you'll be doing.

497/498H
(T Th 1:30-3:20)
Moody
Conversions and Confessions. This course is designed as an exciting capstone for students how have concentrated their major courses in American literature, especially with a focus on genre, national identity, race, gender, African American culture, feminism, moral values, and/or personal anrratives and other autobiographical forms. Reading and writing about 19th- and 20th-century American first person fictive nasrratives, we will ask (and answer) such questions as: How does an "American" represent in text a life-altering, transformational experience? How does an "American" use text to represent a moral dilemma and the consequences of moral or spiritual choice? What language or discourse does an "American" invoke to describe a conversion experience, be that conversion from sin to salvation, from slavery to freedom, from submission to sovereignty, from certitude to dissolution? What motivates an "American" to confess the issues of personal growth, or personal failure? Texts: Douglass, The Narrative of the Life…; Wilson, Our Nig; Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Wharton, Ethan Frome; Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Sinclair, Coffee Will Make You Black.

497/498I
(T Th 3:30-5:20)
Kaplan
British Writing in the 1930s. We will read fiction and poetry written during the 1930s in England. Authors included are Elizabeth Bowen, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Jean Rhys. We will investigate the relationship between the turbulent events of this decade and the literature that emerged from it. Attendance is required in this seminar, and students should expect to do a considerable amount of reading-historical and critical studies in addition to the assigned texts. Texts: Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart; C. Isherwood, Berlin Stories; Virginia Woolf, The Years; The Pargiters; Three Guineas; George Orwell, Down and Out in London and Paris; Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark; W. H. Auden, Selected Poems.

497/498YA
(T Th 4:30-6:20 p.m.)
Posnock
(Evening Degree)
Thinking Beyond Race in American Literature and Culture. This course will examine how important writers have devised innovative ways to think beyond race, to make racial identity problematic rather than a given. Our central texts include Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man and some of his landmark essays. We will also discuss a key predecessor--W.E.B. DuBois--and some figures who might be said to comprise Ellison's contemporary descendants--Patricia Williams, Adrienne Kennedy and Richard Rodriguez. All of these writers challenge the pervasive, simplistic (and very American) assumptions that tend to stunt our thinking about race, identity, and ethnicity. (Evening Degree students only, Registration Periods 1 & 2.)

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Spring 1998

497/498A
(MW 8:30-10:20)
Frey
Studies in Literature for Adolescents and Young Adults. While much fiction addressed to general readers has from time immemorial treated the topic of adolescence, only in the past few decades has a genre of writings addressed to teen-aged readers ("Young Adult Literature') come into its own. With the publication of such novels as S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Paul Zindel's The Pigman, and Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Young Adult Literature came of age as a serious forum for adolescent study of its own anxieties, desires, conflicts, and joys. Since then, a succession of gifted writers (such as Francesca Lia Block, Sue Ellen Bridgers, Bruce Brooks, Paula Fox, Rosa Guy, Virginia Hamilton, M. E. Kerr, Robert Lipsyte, Norma Fox Mazer, Walter Dean Myers, Richer Peck, William Sleator, Cynthia Voigt, and many others) has brilliantly explored the lives of contemporary youths. Works by such writers are taught in many North American college and university English departments. They have been largely neglected in our own English department. This seminar will help remedy the neglect. We probably will study the following works together with selected secondary readings: Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick; Sarah Orne Jewett, Betty Leciester; Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous; Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage; Maureen Daly, Seventeenth Summer; S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders; Paul Zindel, The Pigman; Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War; Cynthia Voigt, Dicey's Song; Liz Francesca Block, Weetzie Bat. Students will study the works assigned and secondary readings in history and criticism, participate in class discussion, lead discussions of assigned study questions, write brief papers to serve as basis for class discussion, do a collaborative multi-media or performance project, learn about library research in preparation for researching and writing a substantial critical paper, distribute to the class an annotated bibliography of resources to be consulted for the critical paper, and prepare a multi-page evaluation of the seminar and of the English major.

497/498B
(MW 9:30-11:20)
Blake
Literature of Nature: The West. This course is exploratory. It enters a field that is just developing in English departments and provides an exciting new departure for me (as a Western American who loves the region and its writing but usually teaches 19th C. British literature). It offers a perhaps paradoxical capstone course for majors. After "acculturation" in English language and literature, you will go "back to nature." But recall that culture is part of nature, and the two can serve each other. Gary Snyder says words are wild. With an initial selection from Thoreau as a reference point in a tradition of nature writing, we turn to modern and contemporary writing on the West as paradise lost and gained for nature in America. The West for this course is close to home: the West Coast and inland Northwest. Our region has produced writers worthy of Thoreau. The "Western" in story and film is a subject in itself and beyond our range. Paradigms and perspectives include: romantic-sublime, pastoral, ecological, native american, feminine/feminist, zen. We cover quite a number of texts (essays, history, fiction, poetry), many of the in rich but slim volumes or in short (25-100 pp.) selections: Henry David Thoreau, Walden; John Muir, The Yosemite; Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain, Victor Hanson, Field Without Dreams, Defending the Agrarian Idea; Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, The American West and Its Disappearing Water (with John Huston's film Chinatown), James Welch, Winter in the Blood, Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces; Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End; Richard White, The Organic Machine, The Remaking of the Columbia River. The seminar emphasizes discussion, with each student initiating discussion of a primary text. Taking advantage of the seminar format, each student will also present a short secondary selection that enriches the context for primary readings. For this, critical volumes on nature writing and on the human place in nautre by Buell and Cronon are recommended, and literary selections may be drawn from Barry Lopez, Jonathan Raban, John McPhee, Jack Kerouac, Sheila Watson or Ursula LeGuin on reserve. You will prepare informal (ungraded) notes on each primary text. These will be useful for a short paper on a single text or author (c. 5 pp.). I am open to adapt assignments to your purposes as you conclude your undergraduate work. Research, discussion, oral presentation, and critical writing represent practical skills that 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, whether for purposes of graduate school or other training, or employment. Grading: in-class 25%, short paper 25%, longer paper 50%. Texts: Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain; Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces; John Muir, The Yosemite; Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, rev. ed.; Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End; H. D. Thoreau, Walden; James Welch, Winter in the Blood; Richard White, The Organic Machine; optional: Laurence Buell, Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of the American Character; William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature; Victor Hanson, Fields Without Dreams; Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums; Gary Snyder, A Place in Space.

497/498C
(MW 10:30-12:20)
Aravamudan
Clarissa. Here is your chance to read unabridged one of the longest literary works in the English language, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (around 1500 pages), and participate in some of the interesting critical debates and controversies that have taken place around it. Course requirements will include: a weekly journal entry (1-2 pages) to be read by everyone else, a short class presentation on a topic of your choice (10-15 minutes), and a long seminar paper (8-10 pages) due at the end of the quarter. Attendance and active class participation is mandatory. As this is a senior seminar, I expect all participants will be seniors in the English department. Access to computers is necessary as the journal requirements will be dealt with electronically. Some interest in literary theory and criticism is expected, but no specialized knowledge is necessary.

497/498D
(MW 10:30-12:20)
van den Berg
Literature and the Body. As John Donne wrote, "The body is his book," so in this seminar we'll read how different authors have written that book. What is the relationship between body and identity? How can we understand the tensions between different readings of the body as a sign of self or other, as beautiful or monstrous, as private or public, as knowable or unknowable? How are "real" bodies (marked by gender, race, age, disease, deformity) measured against a cultural "ideal" body? We'll use two of Shakespeare's plays, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, as a basis for discussion. Then we'll read 19th-century fictions of monstrosity: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Twentieth-century readings will include Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and The Hunger Artist, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. We'll end with Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, about disruptions in the relationship between the idea of self and the experience of body. There will also be a packet of theoretical readings. Requirements: class discussion and presentations; substantial paper (at least 10 pages).

497/498E
(MW 1:30-3:20)
McNamara
Four Contemporary Poets: Art, History, Identity. This seminar will focus on the works of four contemporary poets dealing with personal and family history. We'll begin with Robert Lowell's Life Studies, a sequence of poems and prose that deal with his childhood in a disintegrating New England aristocracy, his rebellion, and his mental collapse and recovery. We'll follow that with a reading of Derek Walcott's Another Life, a long poem tracing the "growth of a poet's mind" (and, in Walcott's case, a dramatist's and painter's mind as well) in racially and linguistically divided St. Lucia, a small island in the Caribbean. Then we'll turn to Sylvia Plath's Ariel, with its fierce and lucid treatments of failed relationships, and finish with Louise Gluck's Ararat, poems which deal with personal and familial wounds less through description than through the speaker's changing voice. No exams: grades will be based on three short papers and one long one. (497: Senior Honors majors only--add codes in A-11 PDL; 498: Senior majors only.) Texts: Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead; Walcott, Collected Poems 1948 to 1984; Plath, Ariel; Gluck, Ararat.

497/498F
(T Th 9:30-11:20)
Alfar
"Evil" Women in Early Modern Tragedy and Contemporary Film. The over-riding concern of this seminar will be the construction of woman as "evil." We will begin an analysis of this topic by examining a number of Early Modern tracts on female nature by such writers as Juan Luis Vives, Joseph Swetnam, and John Knox. We will take the historical example of Queen Elizabeth I to study the period's anxieties about female power and apply our findings to tragedies such as The Tragedy of Mariam, The Changeling, Women Beware Women, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Piano (film and screenplay). We will then turn to representations of female "evil" in contemporary films such as Fatal Attraction, Malice, To Die For, among others. We will ask questions about the similarities and differences in representation of women's "evil" between early modern texts and contemporary film. What do the similarities say about our culture, about its development and ideological investments? How different are the differences? To what extent are anxieties about female nature based in economics? What does sexuality have to do with it? What does motherhood have to do with it? What about desire? Have legal rights for women really changed the way in which women are represented in the entertainment industry? We will also read a number of theoretical texts on feminist theory, cultural materialism, psychoanalysis, and film studies by theorists such as Irigaray, Kristeva, Goux, Dolan, and Doane. I will assume students have some background in critical theories. Grades will be based on class participation, at least one presentation, and a 15-page research paper. Texts: Middleton, Five Plays; Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; Belsey, Critical Practice; Campion, The Piano; Cary, Tragedy of Mariam; Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

497/498G
(T Th 10:30-12:20)
Lockwood
Remembering Childhood. Stories about the experience of being a child: what it meant then, what it means now, and how that experience gets remembered, or invented, in a narrative. So this will be a course about childhood in literature, but also about grownup memory and imagination on the subject of childhood. Possible reading would include autobiographical memoirs like Wole Soyinka's Ake, Penelope Lively's Oleander, Jacaranda, or Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, as well as fictional or semi-fictional stories like the childhood chapters of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, Camus's The First Man, or Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

497/498H
(T Th 12:30-2:20)
Popov
Ulysses. This is a comprehensive introduction to James Joyce's Ulysses as the summit of modernism, emphasizing Joyce's exuberant comic transvaluation of all novelistic values (narrative devices, generic conventions, topics, perspectives, styles and humors). To dispel fear of Ulysses, we'll approach it one episode at a time, focusing on how it makes sense and what it makes of sense-the limits no less than the leaps, hops and scotches of it. Requirements include weekly assignments and a course-length research project. Desiderata: inklings of Joyce's earlier work, intimacy with The Odyssey, interest in sly uses of language. Texts: James Joyce, Ulysses (The Corrected Text); Don Gifford and Robert Seidman, Notes for Joyce; Derek Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce.

497/498I
(T Th 12:30-2:20)
Sale
Homer: The Iliad and the Odyssey. At one of the wellsprings of western civilization, its great epic about war and one of its great romances of adventure and homecoming, both chanted by a bard known to us as Homer. "Hark to the voice of the Bard." How to do that will be the task of this course, not easy since the latest possible date for Homer to have lived is usually given as about 2700 yaers ago. I hope we can work with equal measures of diligence, caution, and enthusiasm. Texts: Homer, Iliad (tr. Fitzgerald); Odyssey (tr. Fagles).

497/498J
(T Th 1:30-3:20)
Holberg
The Brontës. An intensive examination of the life and works of one of literature's most famous families. Beginning by sorting through the facts and fictions that surround their biographies, we will then read their juvenilia and poetry. We will study the novels in order of their publication. Attendance is required and active participation expected; students should expect at least 2 substantial papers, bibliographical work, and several shorter writing assignments. Texts: Juvenilia and Poems of the Brontës; Jane Eyre; Agnes Grey; Wuthering Heights; Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Shirley; Villette.

497/498YA
(MW 7-8:50 p.m.)
(Evening Degree)
M. Griffith
Love Stories. This senior seminar will be a course in love stories. We will read a variety of conventional and unconventional such stories; we will examine our own love stories (not our own love lives! Or at least not in public), and maybe try our hands at writing one; we will try to understand how stories can make for love and love make for stories; we will ask if the richness of a culture is in any way connected to the variety and quality of love stories available in it.Lots of writing, including a seminar paper, and class discussions in which all members of the class will be expected to participate.  No test nor exams. See me for more details. (Evening Degree students only, Registration Periods 1 & 2.) Texts: Segal, Love Story; Waller, Bridges of Madison County; Winterson, Written on the Body; McCracken, The Giant's House; Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot; Nabokov, Lolita; Larsen, Passing; Wong, American Knees; Byatt, Possession.

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UW English Undergraduate Programs
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Updated April 06 2022

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