Whenever you have a party, everyone always ends up in the kitchen. The kitchen is warm, inviting, the place where food is made and eaten, where drinks are poured and quaffed. It isnot necessarily a place we associate with poetry—or writing of any kind.

However, lots of writers, especially women writers, seem to be preoccupied with the space of the kitchen, what it might symbolize, and what we share there. This course is designed as an exploration of American women writers who see connections between the delights of the culinary palate and the delights of the written word. We will ask how cooking and
conversations around a soup pot might inspire creativity, constrain creativity, or represent creative activities themselves. In this course we will explore these questions through careful readings of novel, film, and possibly other works. We will look closely at imagery, language, form, characterization, and narration. We will attempt to connect these works to a broader context by considering societal expectations about women in the kitchen and the varying responses of women of different backgrounds to these expectations. In other words, we will try to discover why kitchen poets cooking up words matter in real life.

4. Book List—

Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate, # 978-0385420174

Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory, # 978-0375705045

This course surveys American war literature from the Vietnam War (1965 – 1975) to the War on Terror (2001 – present) from a critical cultural studies perspective. Texts and the wars they represent will be contextualized within their historical and cultural moments and will be read for the ways in which they explore the complexities of war and violence in relation to social and political issues. Questions that motivate this inquiry include (but are certainly not limited to): What is the relationship between war and representations of war in literature and popular culture? How might war literature contribute to understandings of the complex relationship between military conflict abroad and social and political issues at home? What are the generic and literary features of war narratives? How do these features change in relation to specific military conflicts? How do different modes of representation (novel, film, photography, memoir, etc.) affect the way wars are represented? Can the violence and trauma of war be effectively represented, and, with that in mind, can a war narrative ever be “true?” How do war narratives shape and respond to collective understandings of war and violence?

Texts include: Dispatches (Michael Herr), The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien), Generation Kill (Evan Wright), The Watch (Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya), and Redeployment (Phil Klay); excerpts from Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (Mark Bowden), My War: Killing Time in Iraq (Colby Buzzell), Love My Rifle More than You (Kayla Williams), and others will also be read. Film texts include Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick) and Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott).

In addition to introducing students to contemporary American war literature, this course will also help students: develop critical close reading skills of literary texts, films, and photography; situate texts in their historical, political, and social contexts; develop more sophisticated discussion skills; and expand as critical thinkers and writers who can formulate substantive arguments supported with evidence.

This course meets the University’s W-credit requirement. Formal writing assignments include a take-home midterm exam and 7-10 page final paper; informal writing assignments include weekly reading responses, and some in-class writing.

Textbooks:
*Course Packet w/secondary and excerpted primary readings AND:
Dispatches, Michael Herr, ISBN: 978-0679735250
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, ISBN: 978-0140147735
Generation Kill, Evan Wright, ISBN: 978-0425224748
The Watch, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, ISBN: 978-0307955913
Redeployment, Phil Klay, ISBN: 978-1594204999

This course will focus on a variety of contemporary literary texts - including short stories, novels, essays, film, poetry, etc.
– for the purpose of academic enjoyment and critical engagement. In exploring these genres, we will investigate “literary
geographies” to better understand how cultural representations examine, define, and complicate ideas of home, place, history,
identity, and belonging. “Literary geographies” refer to the ways in which we will ask questions about what constitutes the
literary and how texts are contextualized and placed as physically and metaphorically belonging to the U.S. nation. This means
that the texts will ask questions and complicate what belonging entails and how history, place, and home are further influenced
by issues of race, class and gender. We will develop and practice strategies for reading, writing, thinking about, and discussing
different types of texts.

We will read a broad range of contemporary texts, most of which will be included in the Course Reader. Other texts will include
novels like Ruth Ozeki’s World Over Creation, Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, and short story collections like Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven. We will watch Alexander Payne’s film adaptation of The Descendants and some other contemporary television episodes. Other readings may include in whole or part: Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Gary Pak, Cathy Song, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lisa-Linn Kanae, Junot Diaz, Ian McMillan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Haunani Kay-Trask.

Students should expect to actively participate in class activities, including lectures, group presentations, group work, and
discussions. It is crucial to bring an open-minded, curious, and respectful attitude to this class in order to foster engaging
and productive discussion.

This class counts for a "W" writing credit, and will require students to write two 5-7 page revisable papers. Students can also
expect to write semi-formal reading responses and to participate in a group presentation.



*Books will be available at the bookstore

*Course pack will be available from Ave Copy


4. Book List:
-Ruth Ozeki, World Over Creation,
* ISBN-10: 0142003891
* ISBN-13: 978-0142003893
-Chang-Rae Lee, A Gesture Life,
* ISBN-10: 1573228281
* ISBN-13: 978-1573228282
-Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,
* ISBN-10: 0802121993
* ISBN-13: 978-0802121998

Most of us take for granted the myriad influences of the visual in our daily lives. We have cameras in our phones. We consult
Google Maps to know exactly what the library looks like from the outside, so we don't get lost. And, we know that our own images will be recorded. In this course we will explore changes to the concept and application of visuality in the 20th century. Some of the central questions guiding our inquiry will be: how does technology (ie, mass print circulation, photography and cinema) shape the way we look at the world? How does visual culture differ today compared to 100 years ago? We will consider the category of visuality as a lens through which to view related issues in 20th century US culture, including economics, race and govern
mentality.


Books:

invisible man ASIN: B004TN6C6U
stuck rubber baby ISBN-10: 9781563892554
house of mirth ISBN-10: 0486420493
(other readings by course packet + films to be left on library reserve)

This course will explore the relationship between slavery and freedom in the 19th-century United States. By reading texts produced within various factions of the abolitionist movement, we will explore the way that concepts of “race” and “freedom” emerge simultaneously in the first full century following American independence. We will look to answer questions such as: How does the slave narrative form allow enslaved individuals to write themselves into, critique, or radically challenge understandings of national subjecthood? How do antebellum texts produced in the North represent the relationship between race and the nation-form? How can fictional texts produced under slavery be read as re-imaginings of the relationship between freedom, race and slavery?

This course counts as a “W” credit and will require the completion of two 5-7 page papers. Class sessions will include a combination of lecture, discussion, group work, presentations, and writing assignments.

Course texts available at the bookstore will include David Walker’s “Appeal,” Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of the Slave Girl. There will also be a course packet available at the Ave. Copy shop that will include short stories and secondary and theoretical texts.

David Walker's "Appeal": ISBN: 978-0-8090-1581-8
Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno": ISBN: 978-0-312-45242-1
Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: ISBN: 978-0-307-47745-3
Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ISBN: 0-674-00271-7

Jthis class has two main objectives. The first will be an interrogation of the literary and cultural category of “Black Modernism,” during which we will question the term as a historical, generic, formal, and thematic descriptor. Is “Black Modernism” meant to indicate Black subjects’ interest in modernist texts? Or self-identified Black artists whose artistic expression aligns with modernist tenets? Or perhaps cultural texts of a certain historical period whose content deals with Blackness and/or “Black topics”? While modernism is described as a reaction to the social changes of modernity that involved a sometimes tentative overturning of tradition in their experimentation with form (as famously urged in Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make it new!”) and/or content (as famously demanded in William Carlos Williams’s motto “No ideas but in things”). In what ways does this definition also describe the work of the Harlem Renaissance and/or the “New Negro”? What connections are there between what became constituted as a primarily white European literary and arts movement and the work of African American writers and artists of the same time period? What differences might there be between modernism and Black modernism and how might we think about any differences as connected to a difference in subject position in U.S. (and global) racial formation? Might Black Modernism be in reaction to a different modernity, a racial modernity that is certainly, in some way, conditioned by modernism’s role in reproducing racial formation through its dalliance with the racial other, most famously in the erotic exoticism of its primitivism and its representation and salient understanding of racialized others through the frame of sexual stereotypes.

This class’s second related objective, then, will be to think about the politics of sex in the gendered production of race in America that Black modernism engages. While sex is had, used, and exchanged for many reasons (for reproduction, pleasure, intimacy, and securing financial and other forms of well-being), it is also used as a mode of control and manipulation, as a source of moralizing and shaming, and as a form of violence and a legitimization of other violences. Sex and sexuality have also come to mean many things as part of our socialization, as forms of identity, as ways of evaluating people, and as indicators of normativity and even rationality. Sexual stereotypes are also modalities through which race and gender are (re)produced and lived and one way bodies are disciplined. For these reasons and more, sex has also been the subject, whether explicitly or implicitly, of many (if not most) literary narratives. This class will analyze the representations of sex in the cultural forms of Black modernism, including fiction, poetry, visual arts, and performance. We will investigate what sex does in these texts and how it is used, including the way it is deployed to negotiate U.S. racial and gender formation. We will question what sex does in and to the narratives we read and the ways different cultural forms represent and engage the subject of sex to make claims about the social world and to intervene in the hegemonic and stereotypical definitions that label people. Finally, we will wonder about whether any definition of Black modernism doesn’t need to include some discussion about how this cultural work questioned sexual stereotypes in U.S. racial modernity as well as the discourses of respectability, identity, rationality, desire, and authenticity that these stereotypes frame.

Authors may include Countee Cullen, W.E.B. DuBois, T.S. Eliot, Jessie Fauset, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, Ann Petry, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright and others.

In the last fifteen or so years, paranormal romance has emerged as a major rubric of mass-market fiction; major booksellers now have entire sections devoted to the category and its proliferating subgenres (e.g., zombie romance). This course will focus in particular on the fusion of two established genres, the romance and the vampire novel (the latter historically allied with horror and the gothic), as it unfolds in twenty-first-century vampire romance. How does romance and its defining preoccupation with exclusive affection and emotional reciprocity come to interface with vampire fiction, conventionally focused on themes of domination and promiscuous desire? What emerge as the organizing motifs of vampire romance and why does this genre take off at this particular historical moment? In order to engage these questions, we will consider a few different critical approaches to genre fiction and what these offer for understanding both the conventions of vampire romance and the heterogeneous ways specific novels inhabit those conventions. We will remain attentive throughout the quarter, as well, to the complex relations between the novels, the publishing industry, and the readers (especially those active or involved in fan culture).

Required texts will include Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories,
Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark, Robin McKinley, Sunshine, Bram Stoker, Dracula, and
J.R. Ward, Dark Lover.

Catalog Description: Introduction to twentieth-century literature from a broadly cultural point of view, focusing on representative works that illustrate literary and intellectual developments since 1900.

Down to the time of Revolutions in America and in France at the end of the 18th century Kings (Queens and Consorts) enjoyed extraordinary power across and beyond Europe. Louis XIV of France famously equated himself with the state—“L’état, c’est moi”—but that was a modest claim. He was also identified with the Sun—“Le roi soleil”—and he, like the English Elizabeth of Shakespeare’s time, ruled “by the Grace of God.” No public opinion polls, no elections. Generally speaking, they reigned until they died. They were not subject to the Law; their word was Law. But they were not infallible. . . .and they certainly were not invulnerable. We will study five of the major Shakespearian plays that turn on the mystery (and the history) of kingship. Shakespeare’s fascination with monarchy may exceed that of his creature, Hamlet, who tells us that “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” So will we. Lecture, discussion, short essays written in and out of class.
William Shakespeare: Richard II, I Henry IV, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear
(All Penguin/Pelican editions)

“Everything we encounter involves an act of interpretation on our part. And this doesn’t just apply to what we encounter in books, but to what we respond to in life. Oh, we live comfortably because we create these sacred domains in our head where we believe that we have a specific history, a certain set of experiences. We believe that our memories keep us in direct touch with what has happened. But memory never puts us in touch with anything directly; it’s always interpretive, reductive, a complicated compression of information.”
~Mark Danielewski, interview

“If you’re expecting to get the answer in a few notes, you’re mistaken.”
~“Bailey” in Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café

Course Overview:
Think of one of your favorite songs. Along with the tune, beat, rhythm, instrumentation, or lyrics, what else comes to mind? We form visceral ties to the music that moves us the most, and more often than not these ties are bound up with specific memories that extend far beyond the several minutes of the song. Associations like these exist in the realms of the personal, political, cultural, and historical moments in which they are experienced. This course will explore the relationship between music, memory, and storytelling in twentieth and twenty-first century American fiction.

The course title, Playing Genre, highlights an element of play that will be central to several lines of inquiry: how are particular genres of music represented in fiction; or, how does fiction “play” music? When authors take music as a major theme, how does music influence the composition of the narrative, from overall structure and organization, to sentence-level phrasing, pacing, or word choice? Musicality in prose may occur in more abstract or figurative ways, or it can be quite literal and direct, as in House of Leaves, for which the author’s sister, a popular singer songwriter in her own right, composed a companion album in tandem with the novel. How does the fiction in this course play with, through, and/or against music? When we consider the memory of particular time periods, how does the music of a temporal location play a role in shaping perceptions, and misconceptions, of the time? Many of the stories in these novels are set decades before they were published. Doctorow writes about the time leading up to WWI from the standpoint of the 1970s; Naylor about the time just after WWII from the 1990s; Egan about the 1960s from our present in the 2010s. How do ragtime, jazz, the blues, punk, post punk, alternative rock, or electronic—as genres of music, and as components of larger cultural and artistic movements—inform the composition of these narratives and our reception of them?

Course Objectives:
This course will develop students’ critical reading, thinking, and writing skills through class discussions; low-stakes writing in weekly blogging and in-class writing assignments; and formal writing in a creative multimodal project, and a final essay that will expand on and revise material generated in previous assignments. Students will also learn to articulate an understanding of their own reading and writing processes, and how these processes shape the original lines of inquiry students choose to explore in their essays.
Required Materials:
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975)
Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Café (1992)
Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues (1995)
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011)

Other materials will be made available electronically.

Assessment:
Participation 30%
Weekly Blogging 20%
Midterm Project 25%
Final Paper 25%

This course fulfills the University’s W (writing) requirement, as well as the VPLA (visual, performing, and literary arts) requirement.

Please note that this course requires a heavy reading load and meets at 8:30am four days a week. Participation in every single class period is crucial to your success in this course. If you fall behind in the reading, just come talk to me. Do not miss class. If you think making it to every session at 8:30am will be a problem for you, you may want to consider finding another course.

This course explores a range of provocative science fiction from the late 1950s to the present. It will focus on science fiction’s critical capacity to challenge cultural and political authority though estrangement, wonder, and the sublime. Readings engage themes that include state surveillance, animal rights, corporate hegemony, genetic engineering, consumer culture, religion, and gender constructions.

Readings will pair various forms of theory and works of social criticism or history with literary texts.

This class will guide students in analyzing prose literature by practicing close reading strategies, situating works in historical or cultural context, and applying the insights of genre and literary theory to engage in ideological critique.

This course satisfies the “W” requirement, which means students will be required to produce 10-15 pages of graded writing throughout the quarter. This will take the form of 3-4 reading response papers and one 6-8 page final paper. Students can also anticipate a small research project. Please note that students are expected to keep up with the daily reading and come to class prepared to discuss and engage with the texts.

Novels:

The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut, 1959
Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi, 2009

Short Stories:

“Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” Harlan Ellison, 1965
“Aye, and Gomorrah,” Samuel R. Delaney, 1967
“The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” James Tiptree, Jr., 1973
“Faith of Our Fathers,” Philip K. Dick, 1968

others to be determined

Graphic Novels:

V for Vendetta, Alan Moore, 1982 – 1989
Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1, “Back on the Street,” 1997
WE3, Grant Morrison, 2006

In his book Modernity at Large (1998), Arjun Appadurai writes, “The United States, always in its self-perception a land of immigrants, finds itself awash in…global diasporas, no longer a closed space for the melting pot to work its magic, but yet another diasporic switching point. People come here to seek their fortunes, but they are no longer content to leave their homelands behind” (172). In a similar vein, David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), writes that the U.S. is no longer the mediator of global capital. As he puts it, “The rest of the world no longer looks to the US for military protection and has broken free from US domination in almost everything. The US has never been so isolated from the rest of the world politically, culturally, and even militarily as now. And this isolation is not, as it was in the past, the product of a US withdrawal from world affairs but a consequence of its excessive and unilateralist interventionism” (196). Both scholars point to the ways in which the relevance of U.S. power has been in sharp decline over the past two decades. In fact, many scholars have argued that due to robust global circuits of capital, the nation form (as theorized by Etienne Balibar), is perhaps even “post-national.” Taking this as our starting point, this course takes up the central concern of reading contemporary transnational fiction at a time when the relevance of the U.S. nation-state as a mediator of global power is becoming increasingly irrelevant. To that end, we will study several texts published in the post-9/11 era and take up central questions that deal with the ambiguity of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and national belonging in a variety of ways. The critical questions for this class: how does transnational literature mediate U.S. national belonging and claims to citizenship? How does this grouping of texts complicate the boundaries of the U.S. nation-state? What roles might imperialism and Empire-building play in the production of nationalism and by extension, the mediation of national belonging? Furthermore, what new ‘imagined communities’ might this literature create? Students are expected to come to class and intellectually engage with the material as well as engage with their peers in the form of small and large group discussions. Please note: This course is a “W” class, which means it is both a reading and writing intensive class. Thus, students should expect 50+ pages of reading per day in addition to reading critical secondary sources for the chosen primary text. Two papers will be assigned, one of which is revisable. You will also be required to maintain a critical reading journal, which will be audited periodically and turned in at the end of the quarter.

Primary texts will include Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(2005), Dave Eggers’ What is the What (2006), Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2008), and
Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Critical secondary readings will also be provided in the form of a course
pack available at Ave Copy Center.



4. Book List (author, title, and ISBN #):

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003) 978-0618485222

Junot Diaz, A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar War (2005) 978-1594483295

Dave Eggers, What is the What (2006) 978-0307385901

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2008) 978-1594482854

Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah (2013) 978-0307455925

From czars to comrades and to new Russians, from Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky to Boris Akunin and Alexandra Marinina, the course will cover more than two centuries of Russian crime writing. Other featured writers include Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov. It’s all about who is good, who is evil, who is up, who is down, and, of course, who dunnit. All readings, lectures, and discussions will be in English. No prior knowledge of Russian, Russian literature or history is required to take this course. No prerequisites.

1. Sheinin, The Diary of Crimonologist

http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Criminologist-Lev-Sheinin/dp/1410210391/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368910547&sr=1-4&keywords=sheinin

2. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Definitely that edition and translation.

Http://www.amazon.com/Crime-Punishment-Norton-Critical-Editions/dp/0393956237/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368910982&sr=1-1&keywords=crime+and+punishment+norton

3. Nabokov, Despair

http://www.amazon.com/Despair-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0679723439/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368911036&sr=1-1&keywords=nabokov+despair

4. Chekhov, Murder

http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Anton-Chekhov/dp/1162702850/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368911155&sr=1-1&keywords=chekhov+murder

5. Pushkin, Queen of Spades

http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Spades-Stories-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140441190/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368911211&sr=1-4&keywords=pushkin+Queen+of+spades

6. Gladilin, Racetrack

http://www.amazon.com/Moscow-Racetrack-Novel-Espionage-Track/dp/B006G89E3O/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368911429&sr=1-7&keywords=gladilin


7. Boris Akunin, Winter Queen

http://www.amazon.com/Winter-Queen-Novel-Fandorin-Mystery/dp/0812968778/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368926120&sr=1-1&keywords=akunin

8. Kurkov, Death and the Penguin

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Penguin-Melville-International-Crime/dp/1935554557/ref=sr_1_28?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368927556&sr=1-28&keywords=russian+mystery+novels

As the title of this course implies, this is a course primarily about reading prose fiction, but there are many parts to this that will interrogate our process of reading. First, of course, we will develop our reading skills by engaging with a variety of texts, both literary and critical, throughout the quarter. We will be pushing ourselves out of traditional boundaries of fiction and expanding our critical thinking skills. As well, we will be attempting to answer why we read prose fiction, why it maintains cultural relevance, why one would study it, and what it provides to us as we make sense of our own lives. This will also engage us in the form of frequent writing assignments, as we begin to learn how to approach these texts as opportunities for cultural critique and cultural understanding, reading beyond the emotive experience of literature.

The texts for this course are contemporary and place the analysis of culture as their primary literary goal. These range from post-9/11 paranoia and our place in history in Gibson's Pattern Recognition to the difficulties of finding a place in a diasporic and fantastical world in Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In reading these texts, we will grow not only as readers and thinkers, but as empathetic citizens of a world that is always expanding in its variance and difficulty.

4. Book List –

Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (2001), ISBN#: 978-0385498203

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002), ISBN#: 978-0312427733

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003), ISBN#: 978-0425198681

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), ISBN#: 978-1594483295

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), ISBN#: 978-0307477477

Course Reader, available at Ave Copy Center

This seminar will explore the genre of comedy. Its main objectives are (1) to read closely several famous ancient and modern comedies; (2) to grasp the esthetics of major writers such as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière, and Beckett; (3) to develop an overall sense of the traditions and cultural contexts of comedy, how comedy has changed over time, and which features have remained constant. Specific topics include: the origins of comedy; the forms and features of “high” and “low” comedy; the conventions and techniques of romantic and satirical comedy; types and functions of laughter; tragicomedy, travesty, and farce. Reading List: Aristophanes, Four Plays by Aristophanes (read: The Frogs, The Birds, and Lysistrata), tr. Dudley Fitts (Harvest). Plautus, Four Comedies (read: The Braggart Soldier and The Brothers Menaechmus), tr. Erich Segal (Oxford World’s Classics). Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Measure for Measure (any edn). Molière, The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, tr. Richard Wilbur (Harvest). Wycherley, The Country Wife (Cambridge ppb). Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Dover Thrift). Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove). The editions above are recommended; you can use other editions so long as they contain the full text; many of the plays can be read online (at gutenberg.org and elsewhere). Several brief assignments on individual authors and a final.

It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being
an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken
scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realize our parents,
remember our grandparents, and know ourselves, and our history
is complete.
The old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,
that is the story that I mean to tell, for that is what really is and
what I really know.

--Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans


When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

--Flannery O’Connor
“The Fiction Writer and His Country”

The course title and the above quotations define the main objectives of this course: to use the stories of American literature as startling narratives that reflect American history, culture, ideology, and writers’ attitudes about those matters. We will read and reflect on many centuries of American—primarily short fiction—publications from the 18th- 21st centuries so as to analytically consider their historical, cultural, aesthetic, and biographical contexts. As we move through these, we will attempt to connect American eras and authors with the substance and style of the stories penned such that by the end of the quarter, you should have a sophisticated understanding of what American literature "really is" as well as what more you'd like to read after course completion to "really know" past and present “Americas” that help to configure you in contemporary America.

Requirements include active, consistent, vocal, and critically-informed discussion; essay-focused midterm and final exams; pop quizzes, presentations.

The syllabus will be distributed in person on the first day of the course, auditing is not an option, and extra credit cannot substitute for exams.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the methods and theories used in the analysis of American culture. Emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to American literature, including history, politics, anthropology, and mass media.

This class will introduce you to the connections between the English language and its literature. We will read a limited number of texts—a few stories, a few poems. As we do, we’ll also study elementary linguistics to account for many of the effects these texts have. We’ll look at the sounds of English to study rhyme; we’ll look at the forms of sentences to understand tone; and we’ll look at how words mean in order to understand how poems—in English or in any language—develop symbolic meaning.

Though much of what we do will be in English, I also hope to have students who speak other languages enrolled so we can do some comparing of the phonetics and syntax of one language with those of another. So: Subject? Language and literature. Object? Fun with language and a solid introduction to the basics of reading literary English.

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

While 281 has no formal prerequisite, this is an intermediate writing course, and instructors expect entering students to know how to formulate claims, integrate evidence, demonstrate awareness of audience, and structure coherent sentences, paragraphs and essays. Thus we strongly encourage students to complete an introductory (100 level) writing course before enrolling in English 281.

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

While 281 has no formal prerequisite, this is an intermediate writing course, and instructors expect entering students to know how to formulate claims, integrate evidence, demonstrate awareness of audience, and structure coherent sentences, paragraphs and essays. Thus we strongly encourage students to complete an introductory (100 level) writing course before enrolling in English 281.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

This course is framed by two sets of questions. One set is focused on examining the cultural value assigned to fictional narratives. Why are some texts deemed “major” and others not? Who decides what is major (besides Oprah)? How does knowing that a text is “major” change what we notice in a text?
The other set of questions is focused on the relationship between reading, self-making, and aesthetics. How does reading form how we see our individual selves in relation to larger notions of desire and beauty? In what ways does reading both potentially foster and foil compassion? And in an age of declining readerships and the ascendancy of electronic media, why focus on reading fiction anyway?
We will read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and a third book that will be announced later, supplemented by selected theory on narrative, genre, and aesthetics. In order to best develop answers to the questions in the previous two paragraphs, I will be asking you to practice some different forms of analytical writing this quarter. Some writing will be of the kind expected in traditional English class analyses, but others will use more open formats to better access the deep and myriad ways that reading affects our imagining of ourselves and our culture.
Please note that I do not get addcodes until the first week of class.



To Kill a Mockingbird 0060935464 Harper Perennial Modern Classics

The Bluest Eye 0307278441 Vintage International

How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (February 5, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307961524
• ISBN-13: 978-0307961525

Paperback: Vintage 978-0-345-80272-9 (Nov 5, 2013)
University Bookstore: 206.634.3400

As a “gateway” to the English major, and hence a preparation for further study, this course is intended to introduce students to contemporary debates in the interpretation of literary works. It will place literary texts in conversation with critical/theoretical works, paying particular attention to the historical contexts in which both literature and criticism emerge and in which our own discussion of them occurs. The emphasis will be on intensive or close reading rather than extensive reading, and on “exemplary” rather than “representative” texts and issues. We will use our close readings of literary works including William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to explore some of the big questions at the heart of the English major: Why is close reading the foundational method of literary study? How and why do we historicize literary works? Does the meaning of a work lie in the text or in the reader? What is the literary canon and how do we decide which works belong in it? What does it mean to deconstruct a text? Course requirements will include midterm and final exams and participation in a discussion section. Students must also enroll in a writing link (English 297).

Catalog Description: Intensive study of, and exercise in, applying important or influential interpretive practices for studying language, literature, and culture, along with consideration of their powers/limits. Focuses on developing critical writing abilities. Topics vary and may include critical and interpretive practice from scripture and myth to more contemporary approaches, including newer interdisciplinary practices.

This course will introduce students to one of the leading and strongest currents of literary criticism currently practiced in the U.S. and globally: Marxian cultural theory. Based on the philosophical and theoretical interventions to European thought of Karl Marx, Marxian cultural theory attends to the literary, aesthetic and cultural ramifications of Marx’s foundational understanding of the historically distinct emergence of both modernity and urban industrial capitalism. At the broadest level, Marxian cultural theory produces nothing less than a total re-presentation of the literary and/or cultural object. Beginning with Marx before moving on to his intellectual inheritors, we will ask, firstly: What was unique about the rise of modernity and industrial capitalism? Why did Marx argue that modernity required a wholesale rethinking of the foundations of European thought? And lastly, what method did Marx innovate and promote as a corrective to the thinking that he argued was foundationally unsound and critically and practically useless in the era of scientific modernity? The second aspect of the course will then present to you a set of methods developed by Marxian scholars in the twentieth century for understanding, examining and theorizing literary production. We will pay close attention to both how these methods understand literary and cultural production and also why these scholars argue that under the conditions of capitalist modernity literary and cultural production becomes an essential, foundational and indissociable aspect of modern life and society. By the end of the course we will be able to perform the following action: offering a Marxian interpretation of a literary object.

Catalog Description: Introduces rhetorical theory from the classical period to the present, including an overview of core issues, vocabulary, and concepts in rhetorical theory; a discussion of methods for studying rhetoric, and a consideration of the social importance of studying rhetoric in the contemporary moment.

This critical studies course is premised on two understandings: the first is that the past is accessible only in and through the narratives that we impose on the messiness of events; the second is that the histories we craft determine the present and future. Required texts place scholarship on historiography and trauma in conversation with dominant and insurgent histories of the “Cold War,” the U.S. war in Vietnam, immigration, “the free market” economy, and “the other America.” We will turn primarily to literature and documentary film for accounts of these subjects and events, but also to the “official histories” (eg., government documents, news reporting and other institutionalized memories) that they engage. Along with short fiction, essays and other cultural documents collected in a course packet, expect to read The Book of Daniel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For and The Tropic of Orange and to watch Trouble the Water, a counter-history of Hurricane Katrina and the storm’s aftermath. Three questions will orient our investigation of every text: 1. how does it make sense of the past; 2. what factors are likely to have influenced this interpretation; and 3. what are the social consequences of constructing history in this way.

Catalog Description: Various modern authors, from Wordsworth to the present, in relation to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, who have helped create the context and the content of modern literature. Recommended: ENGL 230 or one 300-level course in 19th or 20th century literature.

This course introduces African literature, one of the most dynamic and fertile literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries. It features a variety of novels that draw upon traditional cultures as well as European forms, and deploy satiric, realist, and experimental styles to represent African experiences. The course engages with a historical range of literature and considers the political experiences of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, and decolonization as contexts for textual production. We will also explore such issues as language choice, racial identity, gender construction, and the impact of capitalist globalization, which are central to many African writers and critical commentators. Students should come away from the course with an understanding of how ideological struggles about national and postcolonial identities continue to inform global literature, and have insight into the shifting dynamics of colonialism and its aftermath. Students are expected to keep up with an intensive reading schedule.

Catalog Description: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and other poetry, with attention to Chaucer's social, historical, and intellectual milieu.

Catalog Description: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their contemporaries.

English 337a The Modern Novel
“The Modern Voice”
Heather Arvidson
Fall 2014 | Savery 132
TTh 7.00–8.50 pm


In a bird's eye view of the English novel from Fielding [c. 18th C] to Ford [c. 20th C], the one thing that will impress you more than any other is the disappearance of the author.
--J. W. Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel (1932)

This class begins with one of the defining features of modern fiction: what Joseph Warren Beach in 1932 called "the disappearance of the author." This class will address a host of questions provoked by Beach's observation: first, how true is it? If the author no longer speaks, whose voices do we hear? Once the author has disappeared, where do we locate narrative authority? Is the author’s "silence" the hallmark of the modern voice? And finally, what makes a voice "modern"?
We approach these questions through landmark transatlantic novels that privilege formal and political problems of voice, ranging from Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. These novels span Britain, Ireland, and the U.S. from 1915 to 1937, and they will give us a broad sense of the voices that animate the modern novel. Through analysis of narrative form and theme, we will investigate the social, political, and historical implications of how a novel represents consciousness, objectivity, and temporality.

Grading is based on participation, weekly short assignments, and formal papers. Class time will be divided between short lectures and large- and small-group discussions.

Course Definition & Goals


“Novel, a, short story padded.”

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911



“Each writer's prejudices, tastes, background, and experience tend
to limit the kinds of characters, actions, and settings he can honestly
care about, since by nature of our mortality we care about what we
know and might possibly lose (or have already lost), dislike that which
threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has
no visible bearing on the safety of the people and things we love.”

--John Gardner
The Art of Fiction


This class in fiction celebrates the shorter rather than the longer narrative—the reading, writing, and interpretive critique of it. Ambrose Bierce will be one of the “unpadded” writers we read with the above quotations in mind; that is, we will read stories as a means of investigating what subjects Ambrose Bierce and assorted other writers cared about and thought they might lose, just as we’ll analyze their narrative styles that often shocked reading publics—both then and now. Primary goals of the course include:

increasing your reading enjoyment of the short story by sophisticating your reading practices and your awareness of how you interpret and assess fiction
exposing you to a variety of fictional authors, genres, styles, and literary movements
enhancing your critical abilities, both orally and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate responses to stories
convincing you that the critical reading of fiction can help in the critical reading of life


Course Texts

Ann Charters, The Story and Its Writer

Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual (available at UW Bookstore)

Course Requirements: weekly class attendance linked with active, vocally thoughtful participation in class discussions, all centered on critical interpretation and analysis of stories; research of secondary criticism; objective quizzes on formal literary elements in short stories, essay exams--final and possible midterm essay exams that you compose out of class, plus objective identification of story quotations and literary terms. Please note that this is not a composition course but rather a course in which you will be expected to articulate oral analyses of stories and write critical, persuasive analyses of stories. Extra credit is not an option for course requirements.

How can studying vampires, sentient grizzly bears, cloning, and hyper-empathy syndrome help us better understand our past, and even change our present? What can these subjects teach us about how we structurally value (and devalue) each other, and how we understand ourselves in the so-called “real” world? This course enters into conversations that differently theorize the social value of speculative fiction and considers how, and in what ways, this genre can potentially contribute to, create, and/or incite social change. We will pay particular attention to 1) how, in this genre, language is theorized in relation to protest; and 2) how language shapes the creation of differing speculative communities and the varying contours of what it means to belong and not belong.

Animating Questions:

*How is language—visual, musical, written, and bodily—shaping the terms of belonging and exclusion for the communities in our texts?

*What counts as protest in these differing futures?

*How is social difference and race, class, gender and sexuality differently represented and negotiated within the various speculative imaginations of “community”?


Possible Texts Include:

Parable of the Sower & Fledgling by Octavia Butler
Bailey’s Café by Gloria Naylor
Babel-17 by Samuel Delany
Singularity’s Ring by Paul Melko
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
So Far from God Ana Castillo

Catalog Description: The study of the development of and specific debates in the related genres of fantasy and science fiction literatures.

In January 1938 Benny Goodman brought jazz to Carnegie Hall; later that summer the great Hank Greenberg hit 58 homeruns for the Detroit Tigers, just two behind Babe Ruth. In 1945 Bess Myerson, a Jewish girl from the Bronx, became Miss America. Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award in 1954; in 1953 Bellow’s translation from the Yiddish of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” appeared in The Partisan Review. The Magic Barrel (short stories) by Bernard Malamud won the National Book Award in 1959; Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (also stories) won the next year. In the 1970s Bellow (1976) and Singer (1978) would both win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in the interval the musical Fiddler on the Roof (derived from the Yiddish stories of Sholom Aleichem in 1964) would begin an extraordinary run of 3000+ performances.
It would appear that after the rigors of immigration American Jews had finally—in the metaphoric sense—“arrived” in the new world. The enormous success of several generations of Jewish writers, comedians, musical comedians and movie makers in the post-War period would seem to confirm that sense of cultural integration. But it is precisely the persistence of old—that is, old-world and immigrant—obsessions that would be the signature of this apparent success. The earlier experience of downright aliens—that is, recent immigrants—would continue to nourish less tangible forms of alienation in works by Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Woody Allen and the Coen brothers in the post-War period. We will approach these post-War artists after a look at the Eastern European—largely Yiddish—and immigrant tradition that precedes them. Lecture, discussion, short essays.
Readings:
Abraham Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom (1896-98) Dover Books
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) Penguin Classics
Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel (1959)
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979) Vintage Books
Films:
Norman Jewison, Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Woody Allen, Annie Hall (1977)
Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man (2009)
All other readings are on Catalyst

This course investigates the language and culture of the Middle English period in England (1100-1500). We will examine Middle English texts with an eye to the cultural importance of written material and the shifting roles of literacy in early England. We will consider different kinds of texts: letters, instruction manuals, poems, saints' lives, court documents, scientific treatises, and religious or mystical writings. In our readings, we will encounter the differing relationships of English speakers to their language: the ways that French, English and Latin coexisted in this period, the ways that regional dialects of English divided up the linguistic landscape, the use of literacy as a means for ecclesiastical authority, the importance of gender for the use and change of English, the function of written texts prior to the advent of print culture.
Along the way, we will learn to read Middle English, and experience the excitement and challenges of early language. Although Middle English manuscripts appear very foreign at first, we find that early speakers of English had many of the same goals for their language use that we do: conducting business, expressing love, creating meaning, telling stories, teaching their children, insulting their neighbors. This class explores these purposes for language, finding the shared ground of English users over the centuries while analyzing our differences. No background in linguistics or medieval literature is required. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement.

Marco Polo and Mark Twain are just a couple examples of travel writers who, through their rendition of faraway locations in persuasive prose, radically altered how readers pictured the world. Through descriptions of people encountered and landscapes traversed, travel writers familiarize, exoticize, or destabilize the unknown in order to transform places into cultural significant landmarks in the imagination of their armchair readers. As a genre, travel writing is an excellent illustration of the immediate power of prose and lends itself well to the study of the effective use of words. In this class, we will analyze some signature pieces of this genre as a way to develop our own prose styles. Classwork will consist of discussion of various essays and peer critiques of student writing.

Please note that I do not get add codes until the first week of the quarter.

REQUIRED

Best American Travel Writing 2010
Bill Buford (Editor) , Jason Wilson (Editor)
Mariner Books
0547333358
9780547333359


OPTIONAL

The Writer’s Way
By Jack Rawlins
ISBN: 0618426809
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin


Title: The Travel Writer's Handbook: How to Write - and Sell - Your Own Travel Experiences
Author: Louise Purwin Zobel

Publication Date: November 2006
Publisher: Surrey Books

Country of Publication: United States
Market: United States
ISBN: 1-57284-084-6
ISBN 13: 978-1-57284-084-3
EAN: 9781572840843
Item Status: Active Record (Readily Available)
Binding Format: Perfect
Edition: 6, Revised, illustrated
Pages: 290
Price: $18.95(USD)

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft verse. Readings in contemporary verse and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft of fiction or creative nonfiction. Readings in contemporary prose and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft of fiction or creative nonfiction. Readings in contemporary prose and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

War, Fashion, Big Cities, and Sex: all four are embattled terrain, if not constitutive features, of modernity. This class gives the student a grounding in foundational literary and non-literary modernist texts, alongside an emphasis on the body as it appears in literature, sociology, and contemporary prose of the period; we will track changing depictions of sexuality with the emergence of the New Woman, Dorian Gray's relentless quest for new sensations, the "invention" of shell shock as a form of trauma, sartorial fashion, and urban experience. We will read novels, modern poetry, some manifestos, one popular best-seller of the 1920s, and close-read one great painting by the Impressionist Edouard Manet that mingles advertising, prostitution, sensual pleasure, the (proto-) little black dress, and urban spectacle.

This is a course about different ways to tell time. And the only way we can tell time is by telling a story about time. Note that the word “tell” figures heavily in both aspects. Stories engage us in issues of time in two ways. First, narrative happens in time, and we are always experiencing the different ways that stories shape this experience (“How long will it take me to read this novel before class?” Or “I had to read the same sentence three times before I understood it”). Second, narrative is always about time, or at least about different ways to represent time (historically, experientially, deep time, etc.) We will read a series of novels and study several films that engage these different ways of experiencing time. Among the works we’ll read will be H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Virginia Woof’s Orlando, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, and Martin Amis’ Times Arrow. There will also be several films in the course, including La Jetée, The Terminator, and Back to the Future. These works will help us think about and discuss issues like the representation of history, the deep time of evolution, the expansion and contraction of time (and space) in our contemporary global society and narrative techniques like stream of consciousness and the distinction between fabula and sjuzhet.

Course Description: This course, designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, will be devoted to an intensive reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. The primary goal is simply to get a handle on Joyce’s sprawling modernist novel, but we’ll also survey some recent critical approaches to the text. Coursework will include weekly quizzes, a group project and presentation on one specific critical approach, and an 8-10 page final paper. Previous Joyce experience useful, but not required; doing an initial reading of the first few chapters prior to the first class is strongly encouraged.

Required Texts:

James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (Vintage, ISBN: 978-0-394-743127)
Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge, ISBN: 978-0-415-13858-1); 3rd. ed.
Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Dalkey Archive, ISBN:978-1-56478-428-5)

Recommended Texts:

Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (U of California P, ISBN: 978-0-520-253971)

Transgression: the crossing of a boundary or limit—by extension, the violation of a taboo. Transgression of this sort is ultimately a two-way activity. On the one hand, from inside a well-bounded space, a set of regulations and rules, or a presumed social identity, a transgressive figure breaks through ostensible limits, as when Edna Pontellier in The Awakening transgresses socially prescribed limitations of gender, or when Whitman transgresses limitations conventionally imposed on poetic language as he has inherited it. On the other hand, boundaries can be transgressed from without, as when Santa Claus in A Visit from Saint Nicholas invades the world of middle class, bourgeois domesticity from an alternative universe of the supernatural functioning with its own set of rules. If boundaries, limits, and horizons hedge in the sense of possibility, this is to imply that they entail curtailments of what in various ways is opened up by varieties of transgression. Freedom (ostensibly valued but often repressed throughout American society) is at issue. This course is based on the proposition that in a manner that has little to do with the freedom of voting for one’s favorite candidate, an ongoing interplay between transgressive and well-bounded consciousness, as it takes place in the poems, novels, and tales of nineteenth-century America, is where “freedom” in the deepest sense remains a living issue, and is either cultivated or betrayed. At issue, let me emphasize, is not freedom to run wild in the streets and to proclaim anarchy and total misrule, but to extend the boundaries of community and culture in ways which are open to fresher, more inclusive, and more venturesome frameworks of order.

Background theorists will include Raymond Williams on hegemony, Bakhtin and Geoffrey Harpham on the grotesque, Mary Douglas on what we can learn from what society dismisses as dirt and waste, and Witold Gombrowicz on the aesthetic subversion of prevailing codes and norms. Primary readings will range across a spectrum nineteenth-century American texts; these will include readings in Poe, Whittier, Clement Moore, Margaret Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Catalog Description: Concentrates in alternate years on either prose or poetry of the Pacific Northwest. Prose works examine early exploration, conflicts of native and settlement cultures, various social and economic conflicts. Pacific Northwest poetry includes consideration of its sources, formative influences, and emergence into national prominence.

Catalog Description: Reviews the research, core debates, and politics tht have shaped the practice, teaching and study of writing. Introduces theoretical and methodological approaches that inform the teaching and learning of writing

Catalog Description: Surveys basic issues of language variation: phonological, syntactic, semantic, and narrative/discourse differences among speech communities of North American English; examines how language policy can affect access to education, the labor force, and political institutions.

Catalog Description: Intensive verse workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student poetry.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Intensive prose workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student fiction and/or creative nonfiction.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Experience in planning, writing, and revising a work of long fiction, whether from the outset, in progress, or in already completed draft.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383 or 484

What stories does memory tell? How do they take shape and what do they highlight and keep hidden? In this course, we'll read recent novels and some theory centered in thinking about the forms, politics, and emotions of personal memory as they happen in literature and in life. We'll ask such questions as: What if you're haunted by the place you came from? Does nostalgia filter out the painful past? How are shame and guilt related to memory? What happens if you repress your most powerful feelings? Does current joy depend on past sadness? When does memory of love create obsession? Novelists for the course may include Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee, and Nicole Krauss among others. Come expecting lively conversation and differences of opinion. You'll be doing some short exploratory writing, an annotated bibliography, a longer paper and a class presentation.

This course will address two cross-pollinated products of literary and visual culture – the hardboiled detective novel and film noir – that have proven both remarkably durable, persisting from the early 1930s to the present moment, and remarkably hard to specify. Rather than comprise a genre, hardboiled and noir seem rather, and more elusively, to describe a look, an attitude, a feel – a visual and narrative style – that traverses any number of established genres, including ‘true crime’ fiction, police procedurals, melodramas, and thrillers. The hardboiled/noir ‘style’ appears mobile and plastic in other ways, as well, spanning, as it does, the divide between elite modernisms and mass culture, and a political spectrum marked at the one end by something like the Red Scare thematics of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and at the other by what Mike Davis describes as the quasi-Marxist sensibilities of Hollywood noir directors such as Billy Wilder and Orson Welles.

This class will explore the complex articulations of narrative style and cultural politics in hardboiled and noir. If ‘style’ is always a market phenomenon (a way of branding and selling cultural products), when and for whom might it function critically? To what extent does the dissemination of a style (the way the style catches on), create possibilities for appropriating and repurposing it – for example, possibilities for women writers to repurpose the expressly misogynist conventions of classic hardboiled fiction? Conversely, to what extent is there a politics intrinsic to the style – an orientation to sexual and racial difference, for instance -- that is ‘written in’ to the touchstone figures, settings, and organizing motifs of these narrative modes?

I am still tinkering with the syllabus, but reading will likely include Dashiell Hammet, The Continental Op, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Vera Caspary, Laura, Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers, Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only, and Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, alongside a range of critical materials on modernism and popular culture (Andreas Huyssen, Walter Benjamin) , the cultural and material contexts of hardboiled and noir (Mike Davis, Michael Denning, James Naremore), and its cultural politics (Elizabeth Cowie, Frank Krutnik, Liam Kennedy, Greil Marcus, Manthia Diawara). Films may include Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1959), Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1986), and Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995).

The literary relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth constitutes a unique episode in literary history and has been the object of great fascination among critics and biographers, particularly in recent years. As Thomas McFarland accurately states, Coleridge and Wordsworth “not only pervasively influenced one another; they did so in a way that challenges ordinary methods of assessment.” Indeed, it is hard to bring to mind two other writers whose literary careers changed so dramatically under each other’s influence and who appropriated each other’s identity to such an extent that one critic thinks it plausible to regard their poetry as a single work, constituted by two interdependent voices (Paul Magnuson). The myth that Wordsworth was the great poet of nature, as demonstrated by “Tintern Abbey,” and Coleridge was the great poet of the supernatural, as evinced by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” obfuscates the fact that prior to meeting Coleridge, Wordsworth’s primary interest was in Gothic supernaturalism and victims of social injustice with no model of the mind’s relationship with nature in sight, whereas Coleridge wrote successful nature poetry. During their collaboration of the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge began to explore the nightmarish effects of supernaturalism on the psyche, though, ironically enough, just at the time when Wordsworth, under Coleridge’s influence, lost interest in the subject. Such moments of merging and separation are particularly instructive, showing the extent to which Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s literary careers were shaped by what each took to be the identity of the other, often misconceived through the distorting lens of self-projections.

In this course we shall study the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth from the perspective of gift and sacrifice, a richly suggestive model that will shed new light on this remarkably intimate and conflicted friendship and will offer the opportunity of investigating a new theory of literary influence based on the dialectic of contractual exchange.

We will begin with a close examination of Marcel Mauss’s seminal study of the gift and the response to it by Claude Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Bourdieu, Lewis Hyde, Georg Simmel and Jacques Derrida, followed by an analysis of theories of sacrifice, as proposed by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Robertson Smith, Sigmund Freud, Rene Girard and Georges Bataille. Among other topics we will focus on: the principle of over-reciprocation in the gift, the incommensurability between originary and return gifts; the erasure of the distinction between donors and receivers in gift exchange, and conversely, between sacrificer, victim, priest and deity in sacrifice; the role of intermediaries in sacrifice and the gift, i.e. the sacrificial victim and the person through whom the gift passes; the recuperative nature of gift and sacrifice; and the function of misrecognition in both economies. In the second half of the course, we will study the successive phases of Coleridge’s literary exchange with Wordsworth, from an early period when they regarded their productions as “one work” in the spirit of gift exchange, to progressive alienation and rivalry.

Requirements: two brief (2-3 pp.) response papers on theories of gift and sacrifice; a final paper on Coleridge and Wordsworth (10 -15 pp.). Texts: The Logic of the Gift, ed. Alan D. Schrift; Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function; Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings; Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (Norton); Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton). Additional articles and excerpts from books will be provided in photocopy.