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{Home > Literature > Graduate Course Descriptions}--------------- Winter 2006 EXPANDED GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS ENL 205
Old English Language and Literature Grading will based on achievement in three areas: quizzes and exams, the proposal, and the presentation (to be turned in as a formal documented essay in the last week of class), with approximately equal weight given to each. While the proposals and presentations will liven and broaden the class experience, the focus will be on learning the language and translating passages of OE. Once the student has discovered the type of application necessary for this sort of study, it becomes quite pleasurable and will offer a break from the more usual study required for graduate work. Texts:
There will be class handouts, and other items will be made available on the course website.
ENL 225 Theoretical Joyce and the Peculiarities of Irish This course is designed as a window into that debate through a close, detailed focus on Joyce's Ulysses-- perhaps the one work more than any other that has helped constitute Irish Studies as a field. The course will serve a number of functions at once. It will serve as an introduction to Ulysses and criticism of that work; it will serve as an introduction to the critical terrain of Irish Studies; and it will provide an intensive introduction to some theoretical debate or paradigm. This course is a work in progress, and I have not yet chosen exactly what that paradigm will be as of writing this description (students are encourage to contact me in early to mid December for more details). The last time I taught this course, I focused on the status of post-colonial theory in Ireland, and that may well be the case this time around. But I am toying with other possibilities, including: Joyce and the postcolonial archive; Joyce and Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory;" Joyce, Alain Badiou, and "inaesthetics;" Joyce and the various recent arguments concerning the nature of "world literature" and literary history that have taklen place in New Left Review; and Joyce, potentiality, and utopia. Please check back later this quarter for more information. To insure that our time is best served, however, it will be helpful if you have read Joyce's earlier works "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist" recently enough to be able to discuss them in the first class. Some familiarity with Irish political and cultural history will also prove helpful, but not essential; we will cover issues of specific relevance to Ulysses as they arise in our reading. Assignments: Texts: James Joyce, Ulysses
ENL 230: Study Of A Major Author: Poetry Of Sherwood Anderson In this class, we will look at Stuart Downs’ forthcoming book, “American Spring Song: Selected Poetry of Sherwood Anderson.” Downs’ argument, and the core concern of the class, seizes on the question of the rightful place of Anderson’s poetry in the history of American poetry. While Anderson at times considered himself a “poet” before all else, his other writerly lives (journalist, pseudo-journalist, letter-writer, short-story writer, novelist) have come to define him. We will look to his poetry and to his writings outside of poetry that might facilitate a better understanding of his intentions as a writer. We will seek to develop an understanding of the place of his poetry in the trajectory of American poetry, and we will speculate on the currently prevailing notion of its “failure.” Required Texts:
Assignments:
ENL 238-1 This class is based on my book of the same title. The basic thesis is that you can have ecology only if you give up the idea of nature. Human beings are entering a drastic new phase of politics, culture and philosophy, in which getting used to what is meant by ecology without nature will be one of their main tasks. We will be looking at literature, art and music in order to figure out why. In the first part of the quarter we will examine the long history of “nature writing,” a term whose genealogy and resonance will also be one of our subjects. From the Romantic period (though the genealogies reach back before that, this will be our notional starting point), creators of written, visual and musical art have attempted not only to represent something called “nature,” but indeed to “render” it, to borrow a term from cinema theory: to give the illusion of its direct, unmediated, presence, and, in most cases, to go even further and cover up the traces of illusoriness and artifice. This rendering, or as we will be calling it, ecomimesis, has obvious effects on the idea of nature itself as that which is immediate, the “Real” (in the Lacanian phrasing), direct in the manner of the stone against which Doctor Johnson kicked his boot in “refutation” of Berkeley's idealism. In the second part of the class, we will contextualize what we have discovered about ecomimesis. In the third, part, we ascertain whether we can indeed imagine ecology without nature. Our reading list will include not only literature, narrowly defined, with some reference to other media; but also “ecocriticism,” an emerging critical field whose own rhetoric falls within the scope of ecomimesis. There will be authors who, many agree, write about ecology: Blake, William Wordsworth, Thoreau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud and Heidegger figure prominently. Their attitudes are not simple and direct, however, especially in the contexts of the other writers I adduce. We will read Theodor Adorno, whose writing has a strong, often explicit ecological flavor. Where the relationships are less clear (for instance, in the case of Descartes, Derrida, Latour, Husserl, or Walter Benjamin), I trust that the class will explain why a certain writer is appearing. And the study introduces more fully writers who may be unfamiliar to some readers (Leslie Marmon Silko, David Toop, Val Plumwood, David Abram, among others). Add to these a host of artists and composers: Beethoven, Reich, Cage, Alvin Lucier, Yves Klein, Escher. And along the way we will also be encountering a number of kitsch products by Tolkien, Pink Floyd, The Orb and others. An interest in environmental literature and politics will be of benefit, as will some interest in philosophy and literary theory. The class will not seek to urge some particular form of ecological literary criticism, or some specific ecological view. Assignments:
ENL 238-2 TEXTS:
ENL 242 Although Elizabeth I has been the subject of numerous scholarly books and historical novels, her writings have only recently been systematically collected and edited. In this seminar, we will study Elizabeth I as a writer, a ruler, and a figure dominating the imaginations of her subjects. We will begin with a discussion of how and why recent films, such as Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, depict the queen, and with an historical novel about her. What, we will ask, is our own investment in Elizabeth and Elizabethans? To understand what these fictional accounts emphasize and ignore, we will then turn to biographies of the queen, her own speeches, letters, and poems, and crucial contexts for some of the most important writings. We will also examine how writers including Dekker, Foxe, Heywood, Lyly, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and Stubbes address or depict her. Using Elizabeth as our focus, then, will enable us to survey a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century genres and writers. Assignments: Texts:
ENL 262 This interdisciplinary seminar examines the appearance of posthuman discourse in literature, science, and critical theory since the 1950s. What defines “the human”? Does the concept of humanity have a history, and if so, does it have an end? Various sites within postmodern technoculture (including cybernetics, nanotechnology, cloning, genomics, exobiology, artificial intelligence, science fiction and poststructural theory) are actively bringing into being new embodied subjectivities that demolish the boundaries of the human and announce a new post human future. We will explore these technocultural sites through a close examination of their semiotic practices. Topics include: theories of the human, the transhuman and the posthuman; relations between science and literature; social construction of scientific knowledge; deconstruction, discourse archaeology, hyperreality and rhizomatics; media landscapes and the distribution of consciousness; posthuman bodies and the “new flesh”. Our focus will be on developing critical tools appropriate for the integrated study of literary, cinematic, scientific and theoretical texts. Assignments: Required Texts:
Optional Texts:
ENL 290F This is a fiction writing workshop. It’s all workshop all the time. No outside texts this year as I expect most if not all the students in this class will have taken 235 with me. Expect to have two or three workshops and to present around 50 pages of fiction in “ready for workshop” shape, that is: as done as you know how to make it on your own but not so done that you’re finished thinking about it. Bring pieces you are willing and ready to revise. You are expected to show revision work on some but not all your pieces by the end of the quarter. My approach privileges intensity and awareness of language textures and narrative shape, and asks each student to make each new work press the boundaries (intellectual, emotional, formal) of previous work. While making an immaculate-feeling work of art is excellent, and we will work toward making your stories as beautiful as they can be, I am less interested in you finishing pieces than I am in you challenging yourself artistically. Please contact me asap if you are planning to work on longer prose (novel or novella) during this course so that we can plan an appropriate method for workshop.
ENL 290P This will be a critical writing workshop with a focus on "first books." In addition to the usual poetry-writing workload (about one new poem a week, some of them formal assignments; a small collection of new poems and revisions at the end) there will be two essays: one on a first book from a contemporary poet, to be agreed upon in the first fortnight of class; one a critical response to a classmate's work. This is in addition to what remains the basic work of the class: to respond thoughtfully, carefully, usefully, and publicly to the work of classmates. This is the main basis of grading: each student is expected to give an in-class response to each poem. The remainder of the grade is based on the critical essays; quality of poetry will not figure. Required Texts:
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