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{Home > Courses/Schedules> Fall 2007 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions}------------ Fall 2007 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions ENL 200 This course introduces Ph.D. students to the critical methods and theories of English literary studies. We will survey the history of the discipline of English, sampling several critical works that have shaped our field, while also looking at the current state of the discipline, contemporary trends, and possible futures. In addition, this course will address a variety of essential topics for beginning a successful career in English literary studies: professional development, research techniques and trajectories, the role of the humanities in the modern university, and so forth. Different faculty members will visit every class meeting to introduce themselves and discuss their areas of specialization. Enl 235 Candidates for the MA in Creative writing are required to take either this course or ENL 236 (Poetics), which are offered in alternating years. With this in mind, we will approach the Theory of Fiction with the particular concerns of fiction writers: craft issues (narration and point of view, mystery and manners, dramatic structure and rhyming action, style and voice) as well as aesthetic approaches, motives, and traditions (particularly the politics of form and content, and the current drive to undermine perceived exclusivity of categories like “realistic” “experimental” and “fabulous”).
ENL 240
ENL 242 In this seminar, we will examine a range of figures on whom legal and popular concern focused in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (such as the shrew, the rapist, the priest, the whore, the witch, the prophet, and the queen). What is the nature of the threat these figures were imagined to pose? How is the mayhem attributed to them connected to gender? Throughout the quarter, we will consider how representations of gendered disorder on the stage relate to representations in pamphlets, statutes, ballads, autobiographies, and accounts of trials and executions. To that end, we will work our way through clusters of materials organized around particular disorderly figures. For instance, we will read church court depositions about sexual assault, historians’ accounts of changing rape laws, pamphlet accounts of the prosecution and punishment of rapists, and plays that depict rape and its consequences (such as Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling). Wherever possible, we will read pamphlets in their entirety so as to consider them as texts in their own right. I plan to focus on forms of transgression and plays that I have not taught in recent years (or at all); I will also try to include both plays that are on the Early Modern Preliminary Exam list and lesser-known ones. In addition to the plays mentioned above, those read will probably include: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize or the Tamer Tamed, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, Dekker’s Honest Whore I & II, Brome’s The Antipodes, and Brome and Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches. I am ordering The Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama. Plays not included there, as well as other readings for the course, will be in a copy packet. I am also ordering my “texts and contexts” edition of The Taming of the Shrew and Her Own Life, a collection of women’s autobiographies. For our first class, please come prepared to discuss The Taming of the Shrew. Students in the class will write one early short paper as well as a 15-page research paper.
ENL 260
In this course, we will examine the relationship between the rhetorical construction of human rights and the role that literature plays in developing, formalizing, and challenging the form and function of human rights. Particular attention will be paid to the novel and the novelistic subject as it both narrativizes the 'subject' of human rights and points to the limitations of rights-discourse and the definitions of the 'human' that it deploys. The novel and its specific imagining of the individual and character, as both Nancy Armstrong (How Novels Think) and Lynn Hunt (Inventing Human Rights) suggest, was instrumental in constituting the liberal humanist subject and developing a certain sensibility and framework for the construction of human rights. In exploring the contours of the novelistic subject, we will critique the political and legal category of the 'human' and begin to theorize a new framework for thinking humanity. To that end, we will begin with eighteenth-century political theory and then skip ahead to the twentieth century in which we will explore three powerful challenges to the 'human' in human rights: 1)
segregation, apartheid and the construction of the 'minority';
The point of departure for this course is the critical commonplace that literary comparison has become newly complicated in the last several decades. Scholars tend to agree that the institutionalization of postcolonial studies and the prospect of a literature of globalization challenge the centrality of European and American literature in comparative work. So too, scholars speak with one voice in declaring the necessity of formulating new comparative schemes. But how to do this? After a brisk survey of recent arguments about comparison (Chow, Gikandi, Apter, Lazarus, Shih, etc.), we will put theory into practice by comparing fictions clustered around two concepts—the “global city” and the “failed state”—and by considering whether and how grouping fictions that elaborate such notions might leave us with new subgenres—“global city fiction,” “the failed state novel.” Even as we attend to the literary quality of such materials, we will consider the interdisciplinary debates in which they intervene. To this end, we will read fiction alongside materials by Sassen, Davis, Abbas, the Crisis States Research Centre, and other scholars and think tanks. Likely list of fictions: Chandra, Sacred Games; Chang, Love in a Fallen City; Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys; Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun; Vera, The Stone Virgins; Mo, The Redundancy of Courage. Texts:
This course will be an intensive and advanced fiction workshop. We will focus on what I believe to be the real artistry of fiction: the translation of the emotional stakes of the story onto its physical landscape; the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup and pull out what we need, what we can then shape into story. We will be aiming for stories in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. Each student will be expected to turn in three new pieces of fiction during the course of the semester (either stories or novel chapters), and turn in approximately 50 pages of workshopped and polished fiction by the end of the semester. There will be some reading and brief weekly exercises at the beginning of the semester that will become optional as we get farther into the real work. Texts: (This is not the final selection, but it is in the neighborhood of the final selection) Best American Short Stories, 2007 ENL 290P Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry Sandra McPherson<sandyjmc@mindspring.com> Tue 12:10-3 p.m., 248 Voorhies, CRN: TBA (4 Units) The texts for this quarter include books by two poets who have taught at UCD for 22-25 years, in order to give a sense of what can grow here. (It is rare but forgivable, I hope, to use one of my own collections.) A third text is meant to be provocative as it explores poetry without title or name on it. The poetic correspondence between Kooser and Harrison will be used to trigger a weekly-increased simmering pot of short poems or shreds of poems that groups will assemble late in the term into a linked creation. The fourth text gives us international poets in translation (Neruda, Tranströmer, Ponge, Issa, and Horace, among them)—we will base exercises on their work where it intersects thematically with our other authors. Your poems are the heart of our work in this course: class time is entirely devoted to workshopping your new creations except for the time taken to explain the “assignments” and the model poems. At term’s end, you will turn in a portfolio of your weekly work and revisions of it. One-on-one conferencing with the professor is encouraged. Texts: Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems, University of Chicago Press, 2004. ISBN 0-226-89949-7 (paper) Sandra McPherson, Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals, Wesleyan/New England, 1996. ISBN 0-8195-2226-0 (paper) Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, Coppe Canyon, 2003. ISBN 1-55659-187-X (paper) Robert Bly, translator, The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translation, Perennial (HarperCollins), 2004. ISBN 0-06-057586-7 (paper)
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