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{Home > Courses/Schedules> Spring 2007 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions}------------ Winter 2008 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions
The requirements will be the same as in most graduate seminars: attendance, an in-class report, and a final extended paper. Textbooks:
ENL 238: Sovereignty and the Political (4 units) The policies of the Bush administration in the so-called "war on terror" have provoked on-going debates, transacted in courtrooms and legislatures as well as in the pages of legal scholars and political theorists, regarding the limits of state and executive power — or, in short, the question of sovereignty. This course will attempt a theoretical interrogation of sovereignty both as an inescapable horizon of all political thought and as an urgent practical problem of our era. We’ll consider, among other things, Carl Schmitt’s famous definition of sovereignty as the power to decide on "the exception" (which we’ll follow from Schmitt himself to the reinterpretations of Agamben, Mouffe, Derrida and others), Georges Bataille’s recasting of sovereignty as a mode of radical transgression that "has little to do with the sovereignty of states," and recent right-wing assertions of a so-called "unitary executive" as a necessary tool of government. Textbooks: ENL 246: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (4 units) This course investigates early modern English theories, social practices, and representations of maleness, masculinity, and manhood. Although we will engage with contemporary theorists of masculinity, our primary focus will be the historical and aesthetic conditions in which early modern masculinity took shape, particularly the critical role of England’s all-male public stage. Among the questions we will consider: How did theatrical practices, such as age- status- and gender-transvesticism help produce English ideas about manliness? What, according to early moderns, are the biological markers of maleness? How is masculinity inculcated differently across the human life cycle, from boyhood to old age? What appear to be the psychic costs for men who fail to live up to certain ideals of manhood? In what ways is masculinity constructed in tension with femininity? We will also consider the methodological challenges and arguable limitations of working on maleness and masculinity. What is at stake when scholars of gender shift attention away from the study of women? In what ways can the study masculinity constitute a feminist project? What is the relationship between masculinity and patriarchy? To answer such questions, we will read plays by a range of dramatists (canonical and lesser-known) alongside some prose treatises concerned with male conduct and identity formation and a range of criticism on early modern masculinity and drama.
ENL 248: Narratives of Cultural Contact (4 units) This course will explore the eighteenth century's fascination with narratives of cultural contact. Our readings will encompass both tales of first contact and of contact zones--spaces of more sustained intercultural interaction. We will be particularly interested in
ENL 250: The Romantic Novel (4 units) British Romanticism has long been received as a movement whose best efforts are in poetry, but it also encompasses important developments in the history of the novel. Everyone knows about Jane Austen and about /Frankenstein-- /so we won't read them. Instead, we will study a few (seven or eight) other novels that have only recently begun to receive critical attention, or have yet to attract it (fresh meat!). We will sample the Gothic novel, the Jacobin novel, the novel of empire and the historical-national novel as well as the society novel; and we will pay some attention to some important theories of the novel as well as to significant criticism of Romantic novels. Possible authors will be chosen (depending on availability etc.) from among: Scott, Radcliffe, Inchbald, Edgeworth, Hamilton, Hogg, Porter, Earle, Godwin, Burney, Polidori. English 254: Modernism and British Women Writers (4 units) In this course we will accomplish several aims: first, we will study the emergence of a tradition of female modernism in conjunction with the pioneering scholarship of such feminist critics as Shari Benstock, Susan Stanford Friedman, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and others. Second, we will examine how the “new modernist studies” of scholars such as Ann L. Ardis, Rita Felski, Jane Garrity, and Laura Doan impact that earlier understanding of a women’s tradition. In its emphasis on formal experimentation as a criterion, for example, how did the emergent women’s canon work to exclude such writers as Mary Butts, Radclyffe Hall, Olive Moore, and Sylvia Townsend Warner? We will read both canonical and marginalized women writers, some writing in formally innovative ways, others in seemingly conventional ways. We will pay close attention to the various ways in which the author’s inscriptions of gender intersect with issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and national identity. Among the questions the course seeks to address are: can we define a female aesthetic? did women modernists adhere to essentialist or constructionist notions of gender? how do women modernists understand the terms “British woman”–i.e. how do they represent British women as national subjects? In answering these questions, we will touch on such topics as suffrage, sexology, sapphism, primitivism, mysticism, psychoanalysis, and cinema. We will also look at the way current scholarship challenges the dating of “modernism,” pushing the boundaries back into the nineteenth century and forward into mid-century. We will end by reading several mid-century Anglophone writers whose works reflect back on the early decades of the century; we will discuss how their perspectives alter our understanding of British women’s modernism. Required Texts (in the order we will read them): Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1916) Xeroxes of the additional readings will be available. ENL 258: The Emersoniad (4 units) This seminar will use Emerson’s life and writings as wayposts through the tumultuous middle of the American 19th century, aiming to both clarify and complicate our understanding of a New England literary culture that was once nearly synonymous with early US literature in general. Beginning with a consideration of his theological development and early apostasy, we will consider Emerson’s Transcendentalism in the light both of high-brow Boston debates on globalizing post-Unitarianism and of Swedenborgianism and Evangelicalism. The complex relation between British and American Romanticism will be gauged through Emerson’s essays and correspondence with Carlyle, while his immersion in contemporary natural history will be illuminated by its French sources and Thoreauvian issue. Later meetings will consider the political application of Emersonianism in the antebellum period (polite abolitionism), the postwar development of Emersonianism into a distinct American politico-economic ideology, and the reclamation of Emerson’s more radical aspects in the 20th century (via Nietzsche). At all points, Emerson’s complicating posse (Parker, Thoreau, Fuller, Brownson, Alcott, Very, etc.) will be kept in view, as will his pervasive stylistic influence on later American writing. Requirements Required Texts: Recommended Texts:
English 262: The Global South (4 units) What is the South in America? What, for that matter, is America? And precisely where are these places? Increasingly, many scholars have been unable to answer these questions with any certainty. When combined to factor in how we might imagine where the South as both a concept and geography stretches, and how it goes beyond the conventional national borders, the conceivable answers are no longer as straightforward as they may have been in the past. One thing that many contemporary scholars in a field such as the "new Southern studies" have come to understand is that when we think about the South, it is necessary to think globally. For instance, some scholars who work on Latin America and the Caribbean, through comparative methodologies, have examined the impact of these contexts in shaping southern literature and expanded the conventional definitions of this field. Work that situates the South in the United States in postcolonial perspective is invested in disrupting the conventional nation-based North-South binary to explore the region's continuities and discontinuities with formerly colonized (i.e. plantation-based) societies in the Caribbean and Latin America. These dialogues on the global South are also important because they highlight the international geographies that shaped the South in the United States in the antebellum and post-Civil War eras, linkages that conventional approaches to the region have typically obscured. Not qualifying the word "South" when invoked in relation to the United States seems problematic when we consider the "Souths" in other areas of the world like Europe, Asia and Africa whose dynamics are also salient in shaping the paradigm of thought on the global South. In recent years, scholars who work in southern studies have emphasized that a term such as "American South" is inadequate to the extent that it enacts an appropriation of the term "American" exclusively for the United States in a way that devalues other conceivable "American" geographies in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, theoretical insights related to the global South, in helping to revolutionize scholarship on the U.S. South under the heading of the "new southern studies," are also in turn helping to transform fields such as American literature and American studies. That literally all of the major journals in American literature have had features on the new Southern studies in recent years; that an annual interdisciplinary conference focuses on the "global South"; that the journal American Literature devoted a special issue to the global South in 2006; and that there is now a university press-based journal called The Global South are factors that speak to the growing importance of this area of research. In this course, we will overview some of its most important dimensions. We will examine primary writings that have shaped the dialogues on the global South, including William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, foundational critiques from W.E.B. DuBois and Edouard Glissant, and critical writings from Brent Hayes Edwards, Tara McPherson, James Peacock, Judith Jackson Fossett, George Handley, Jon Smith, Deborah Cohn, Annette Trefzer, Kathryn McKee, Gayatri Gopinath, Hortense Spillers, and Madhu Dubey. ENL 290F: Seminar in the Creative Writing of Fiction (4 units) 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. Texts: Your fiction in progress Your all-time most grounding or confounding reads
This poetry writing workshop will in many ways be a traditional model: participants will write roughly one new poem/week (along with occasional revisions); will read (largely contemporary) published poetry regularly; and will have as their chief obligation the careful and caring response to peer work. That said, we will not focus too much on polishing the banisters of individual poems, but on their overall operation. As poets and as readers, we'll set as a goal the ability to articulate the communicative structure running through the whole poem, and then discuss it by measuring any independent parts (a phrase, the rhythm, an image) against that overall structure--discussing whether they take part in, or take away from, that larger communication. We will, along the way, attempt to pay some nice attention to the question of what it means to be writing poetry in 2007 as opposed to other times, in the US as opposed to, e.g., Sri Lanka, and so on--to develop an understanding of the particular circumstances of our art. No eternal truths will be offered, as there are none. Text:Ramazani, Ellman, O'Clair,eds., Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry Vol. 2: Contemporary Poetry
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