"Hughes, T.: Tom Brown's Schooldays; Collins, W.: Moonstone; Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India or Howards End; Orwell, G.: ""England Your England""; Ishiguro, K.: The Remains of the Day; Smith, Z.: White Teeth; and a course reader with selected poems by Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins and critical essays "
"This is a research intensive junior seminar that explores some of the compulsions and contradictions inherent in the fabrication of a national culture. We will begin by posing two questions: who are the ""English"" who have named our language, this department, and a vast literature that has often had little to do with ""England""? What is ""Englishness""? This course is an attempt to play with these questions while reading a collection of late-19th- and 20th-century works (poems, essays, and novels mostly) and using the resources of the library and various kinds of criticism to thicken our inquiry. Our major reading (i.e., the longer novels) will include Wilkie Collins' Moonstone (1868) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000). We will try to study how ""Englishness"" constantly defined (and redefined) itself alongside and against issues of race, sexuality, nation, location, class, gender, and empire. In keeping with the research and methods mandate of English 100, we will make several class trips to Doe and Bancroft Libraries in order to prepare to write a major research paper. Course requirements include attendance and active participation in all meetings, 1 graded oral presentation, 2 short papers, and a longer (15 page) research paper. There will be no midterm or final exam.
Note: Students are required to have completed at least two courses from the 45A-B-C sequence prior to enrolling in this seminar. "
See below
"This course will focus specifically on women and style while covering a diverse range of texts. We will be interested in the way women writers styled themselves-in what manner they present themselves as authors and artists, how they encode textual self-presences, and the way women and art are represented in their texts. The course will also look at the way women?s texts are styled, and how those texts are positioned in relation to specific aesthetic, formal, and literary values, especially as these construct the feminine. All of the texts will confront issues of gender and style through the formal qualities of the work, and many will feature a central female figure who herself practices a literary, fine, domestic, plastic, or dramatic art. Attention will be paid to the larger cultural context and aesthetic debates that these arts reference, and especially to Stowe?s, Spofford?s, Wharton?s and Gilman?s books on the style of homes.
Texts include: poetry by F. Osgood, E. Dickinson; F. Fern, Ruth Hall; H. B. Stowe, Uncle Tom?s Cabin; E. Keckley, Behind the Scenes; E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh; H. Spofford, The Amber Gods; L. M. Alcott, ""A Pair of Eyes"" and ""The Marble Woman;"" E. Wharton, The House of Mirth; C. P. Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper "
"Niedecker, Lorine: Collected Works; Oppen, George: New Collected Poems; Zukofsky, Louis: ""A""; Zukofsky, Louis: Complete Short Poetry "
"With strong literary affiliations to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (and with political commitments thoroughly antithetical to those of Pound), the Objectivist Poets emerged as a group in a 1931 issue of Poetry magazine, guest edited by the group?s ostensible founder (or curator), Louis Zukofsky. Announcing their program, Zukofsky defined ""an objective"" as ""The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. That which is aimed at. ... Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars."" What such poetry looks like is, as we will see, enormously varies.
There are five central figures among the Objectivist Poets; while looking at the work of all of them, this course will focus primarily on the writings of George Oppen (1908-1984), Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), and Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978). In order to read their works well (and in order to understand the reasons for their enormous influence on postmodern and contemporary experimental writing) we will consider this important facet of late Modernism in terms of methodology as well as technique. "
Carson A.: Autobiography of Red; Dove, R.: Thomas and Beulah; Gl?ck, L.: Wild Iris; Shakespeare, W.: Sonnets; Course Reader
"This seminar focuses on the protean form of the poetic sequence in a broad range of poets mostly writing in English. It is NOT a survey course in literary history and makes no pretense to canonical coverage. It IS a chance to read some great poetry while exploring different modes of repetition, revision, retraction, call-and-response and completion between poems, as well as formal problems of structure, variant orders, groupings, double plots and multiple voices.
What makes a poem free-standing as well as part of a larger structure? How do poetic sequences organize time differently than more explicitly plot-dependent narrative or dramatic genres? What kinds of experimental patterns--constellations, parallelisms, circular and recursive movements--emerge as alternatives to linear development?
Particular focus will be given to the overlap between problems of formal unity and social and political questions of erotic union, social cohabitation, community and relationship. What kinds of porous, tenuous, shifting, even failed structures or ""houses"" do sequences represent? How is the isolated lyric poem to the sequence as the sexual act to marriage or life-long companionship?
Readings include sonnet cycles, elegiac sequences, marriage sequences, meditative or devotional verse and novels in verse by Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Barrett Browning, Meredith, Whitman, Hardy, Yeats, Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Gl?ck, Anne Carson and Rita Dove, among others. Independent readings of other poetic sequences also encouraged. "
Aristotle: Poetics; Bakhtin, M: The Dialogic Imagination; Barthes, R: S/Z; Chesnutt, C: The House Behind the Cedars; Propp, V: The Morphology of the Folktale; Sophocles: Sophocles I: Three Tragedies; course reader
"This is an introduction to some classics in the theory of narrative. We will look also at a number of, mainly, short narratives and analyze them closely, slowly. Theorists as early as Aristotle always used an exemplary narrative for their analyses, and so we shall have to read the narratives of the theorists along with the theories. We shall strive to listen to stories, to see how plots are composed, organized.
There will be a number of exercises, many of them ungraded but required. And I project that there will be required about five papers that will be graded. "
Acosta, Oscar: Revolt of the Cockroach People, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Castillo, Ana: Sapogonia; Maya-Murray, Yxta: Locas; Ramos, Manuel: The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz; Ruiz, Ronald: Happy Birthday Jesus, Big Bear; Viramontes, Helena: Under the Feet of Jesus; Santiago, Danny: Famous All Over Town
"This course will examine representations of working class characters and their encounters with the law in nine Chicana/o novels. All of these novels tell stories of workers who challenge the law in one form or another. Six of the novels were written by practicing attorneys, and four of them are narrated from the perspective of an attorney. What is the social significance of the centrality of the law in these novels? How are the events of the novel to be interpreted when narrated from the perspective of a lawyer? What do the representations of legal struggles reveal about history, class positioning, and the formation of cultural identity? These are the kinds of questions we will seek to answer in our study of these novels. All members of the seminar are expected to attend class regularly and participate actively in classroom discussions. Students will be required to present at least one oral report in class and write at least two papers.
Be sure to read the paragraph starting on page 1 of this Announcement of Classes regarding enrollment in English 100! "
Jane Austen, Emma; Mikhail Bahktin, The Dialogical Imagination; Honor? de Balzac, P?re Goriot; Roland Barthes, S/Z; Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education; E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel; Georg Luk?cs, Theory of the Novel; D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style; Course reader with texts by Bahktin, Barthes, Woloch, et al.
"The seminar undertakes to read four major novelists, each in conjunction with a theorist or critic who has based his account of the novel-form on this one particular practitioner. The pairings are: Balzac/Barthes, Flaubert/Bourdieu, Dostoevsky/Bahktin, and Austen/Miller. These accounts will also help us reflect on two ostensibly universal understandings of the novel, by Lukacs and Forster, and vice versa.
Requirements: As befits a seminar, attendance is required at every meeting, and the quality of your participation in class discussion will be no less important a factor in your final evaluation than your written work. The latter will consist of two papers and a final examination. "
Austin, M.: Land of Little Rain; Norris, F.: McTeague; Stegner, W.: Angle of Repose; Twain, M.: Roughing It; West, N.: Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust; Chandler, R.: Farewell, My Lovely. A course reader will contain selections from: Browne, J.R.: A Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited; Muir, J.: The Yosemite; Ridge, J.R.: The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta; Stevenson, R.L.: The Silverado Squatters; + Jeffers, R.; Gunn, Th.; Hass, R.
"Reading, discussion , and writing about fiction, poetry, memoirs, and essays that have western settings, or that try to describe or account for western experience in ""regional"" terms--emphasizing, for example, the formative influence of the natural landscape, or of racial, economic, and social groups in distinctive, defining relationships with their surroundings (and with one another). "
Richard Sylvester (ed.), Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Verse; John Milton, Samson Agonistes; John Bunyan, Grace Abounding; Erin Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator; Frances Burney, Evelina; Jane Austen, Persuasion; John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled; a course reader with additional poetry and theoretical essays.
"Reading across a wide historical and generic range, we will explore how literary works conceive of their creators. Whether presented as a literal ""expression""-a symptom of melancholia, lovesickness, or religious ecstasy-as an extension of the author's senses, or as an entire world pervaded by authorial omnipresence, every text has an implied author, with which the actual author may identify but to which he is not identical. This author in the text, however, inevitably shapes our impression of the author of the text. We will try to sharpen our sense of the relationship between ideal authors and their real-world counterparts by tracking the comings and goings of the author's body and the scene of literary composition, from the Renaissance lyric ""I,"" through personae like Mr. Spectator and the Female Spectator, to their disappearance and redistribution in epistolary narration and free indirect discourse, i.e., the novel. We'll end by considering a few recent texts in which the author appears in a self-portrait as variously populated as the world. Throughout the course we will reflect on the role of the author in our own work as well, paying close attention to how our choice of terms (work versus text, intention versus strategy) modifies the kinds of assertions we make as critics."
Austen, J., Pride and Prejudice; Dickens, C., Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend; Shakespeare, W., 1 Henry IV; Shaw, G.B., Pygmalion
"Big nineteenth-century novels are noted for sprawling. The novels of Charles Dickens are particularly noted for sprawling. I want this course to show you that genuine sprawl can and often does coexist with organizations of wholes and parts as precise and delicate in their scale as the smaller, usually cruder ones that commonly thrust themselves upon one's consciousness when one reads a short, openly delicate lyric.
I mean to spend at least half the in-class time of the course on two examples of precision sprawl--Dickens's Bleak House and his Our Mutual Friend.
I will want first, however, to look just as hard at one other great nineteenth-century British novel--Pride and Prejudice--and one notable but academically uncelebrated twentieth-century novel: EITHER Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles--1920--or her The Secret Adversary--1922 (I haven't decided which and don't expect to before July, but since you will need to buy neither, the delay shouldn't matter).
My reason for including one of the Christie books in a course labeled ""nineteenth-century"" is that it's difficult to be pretentious in talking about books that are still genuinely popular. Christie books are obviously pleasure machines. Pride and Prejudice and the two Dickens books are too, but they have now been so long, so deep in so many kinds of pretentious interpretation that it is easy to think of them as thesis mines. We will begin the course with a Christie book because it is an uncluttered site from which to see what fictions do to pleasure readers. After that, it should be easy to look at Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend as the mere sources of casual delight that they are.
Justifying the presence of Pygmalion-which is neither nineteenth-century nor a novel--is not so easy. Suffice it to say that, by the time you've read both Our Mutual Friend and it, the presence of Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion on the reading list will be obvious. The same is true of Melville?s Bartleby the Scrivener-an 1856 novella that relates to Bleak House in much the way Pygmalion does to Our Mutual Friend.
(You can get Bartleby, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and The Secret Adversary free on the internet; go to www.gutenberg.net; put BARTLEBY [or either Christie title] into the title box; click on ""search,"" and download the complete text. I don't think you need buy hard copies of either Bartleby or the Christie novel I finally choose.
In fact, you can get the whole reading list from www.gutenberg, if you like. At the first class meeting, we can talk about the practicality of substituting free e-texts for expensive book store copies.)
I will also ask you to read Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV. I will want it fresh in your minds when we start on Our Mutual Friend.
I will assign three essays--each of a length determined by the amount you have to say and your skill in saying it economically. The third essay will take the place of a final examination.
I will give daily quizzes to make sure everyone keeps up with the reading. "
Bratton, Cook, Gledhill, eds.: Melodrama; Doane, M.: The Desire to Desire; Kaplan, E.: Motherhood & Representation; Gledhill, Ch., ed.: Home is Where the Heart Is
We will examine film melodramas from some early silent examples to 50?s & 60?s Hollywood classic realist/narratives. Melodrama has affiliations to a range of genres and invites interpretations from neo-Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist critiques. We will consider the appeal of melodrama to its audience, and canvas the dominant moods and themes from Griffith to Sirk.
Chomsky, N.: Language and Mind; Pinker, S.: The Language Instinct; Radford, A.: Transformational Grammar: A First Course
This course will focus on the structure of English. There will be a dual emphasis on a rich array of constructions and on the grammatical theories proposed to account for them. While the primary focus is on the grammar of spoken English, some attention will be given to the theory of universal grammar and to the relation between grammar and literary style.
"Di Cesare, Mario, ed., George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets; Donne, John, Complete English Poems; Maclean, Hugh, ed., Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets; Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge
Recommended: Bacon, Francis, Essays; Hill, Christopher, A Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 "
"Although I am putting a history book on the recommended list, this will be a course on works written in the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, not a course on the century itself.
I think I can teach you more about the seventeenth-century works I don't discuss in class by looking in detail at a few works than I could by scurrying through a handful of anthologies or by generalizing at length about either the particular qualities of particular authors or schools or by focusing on the particular qualities that characterize the culture that seventeenth-century literature reflects. I'm not good at categorizing, and I deeply mistrust categorization as an intellectual tool.
I will spend most of my time--probably all of it, in fact--on verse. That's mainly because verse was what the seventeenth century did best, but also because I don't have much that is worth listening to to say about much seventeenth-century prose. I may talk about one or two of Francis Bacon's essays, but the reading will otherwise be of verse by Donne, Jonson, Herrick, George Herbert, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Lovelace, and Marvell. I want particularly to talk about things that most English majors have dealt with before--notably the most often assigned poems of Donne and Herbert and, most notably, Paradise Lost. (I realize that Paradise Lost might put some people off taking the course. Such people have probably tried, or been asked to try, to read Paradise Lost as if it got the stock Sunday-school responses it sounds as if it's trying to get. Given a chance to read the poem as something other than a failed effort to versify its editors' footnotes, such people are likely to see how beautiful Paradise Lost is and to wish it longer.)
Three papers, each of a length determined by how much you have to say and how efficient you are in saying it. The third paper will take the place of a final examination and will be due in my box in 322 Wheeler Hall any time between the last class meeting and 3:30 p.m. on whatever day is assigned this course for a final exam. "
Any one of the following Complete Shakespeare editions: The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, Stephen Orgell and A.R. Braunmuller, eds.; The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, et al., eds.; The Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, ed.; The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, David Bevington, ed.
"We'll read six plays from the chronological first half of Shakespeare?s output, considered loosely to allow us to end with a reading of Hamlet. We?ll include some of the sonnets as well, which were written and re-written in this period. Our approach will be to consider Shakespeare writing within, that is, shaping and shaped by, a lively theatrical and poetic tradition, as well as some of the historical and social issues put into ""play"" in the plays. Further, we?ll be conscious of Shakespeare as a cultural icon, specifically our critical sense that the chronological order of his plays represent a progression away from the very plays and poems that we?ll spend most of the semester reading. Here is a tentative reading list: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Midsummer Night?s Eve, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet and the Sonnets. "
The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd edition)
This course is designed to give you a sense of the range of Shakespeare?s career. Lectures will focus on two related topics: first, how Shakespeare uses plot and character to think about literary, social, sexual, religious, political, and philosophical issues; and second, how Shakespeare justifies his life in the theater, when much of English society regarded the theater as a frivolous, debased, and vaguely criminal institution
Milton, J.: Paradise Lost, Complete Shorter Poems, Selected Prose; Course Reader
This course offers an introduction to the poetry and prose of one of the greatest writers and political radicals in English literature. We will learn to read Milton?s work closely, with attention to all of its rhetorical complexity. We will also study the social and political context of Milton?s work, with particular emphasis on the English revolution. Secondary readings in contemporary pamphlets, poetry, and political theory, as well as in modern literary theory and criticism.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edition, Volume I, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Selection; Wycherley, J.: The Country Wife; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Course reader
"The period from the ""Restoration"" of Charles II (1660) to the death of Alexander Pope (1744) produced the last poems of Milton, the first English pornography and feminist polemic, the most devastating satires ever written, some of the most influential novels, the most amusing comedies, and the most outrageous obscenity. London (already the largest city in the world) burned to the ground--we will begin the course by reading contemporary accounts of this catastrophe--but within a few generations had developed all the benefits of modern civilization: a stock market, a scientific revolution, an insurance industry, a colonial empire based on slavery. This course will try to convey not only the abundance and brilliance of this period, but its contrasts and contradictions. Canonical figures like Milton, Hobbes, Dryden, Congreve, Pope and Swift will be juxtaposed to scandalous and/or marginal authors: women writers like Aphra Behn, Mary Astell and Mary Wortley Montagu, Puritan outlaws like John Bunyan, and renegade aristocrats like the Earl of Rochester. This stylish but realistic literature tackles fundamental questions: How can a culture restore its self-confidence after a devastating civil war? Is the success of society incompatible with morality? Does reason help us to lead a better life, or is it a cruel delusion? How can men and women live together in a civilized world? What resources are available for those who are excluded from this ""civilization,"" especially the enslaved and the colonized? Is this ""the best of all possible worlds""? If not, are irony and humor absolutely necessary to make existence bearable? Are babies tastier roasted or boiled?
Most of our readings come from the Norton Anthology, with additional poems by Rochester and others, plus Wycherley's sex-farce The Country Wife and Defoe's world-famousRobinson Crusoe. "
Bennett, Arnold, The Old Wives? Tale; Butler, Samuel, Erewhon or The Way of All Flesh; Conrad, Joseph, Under Western Eyes or Nostromo; Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native; James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady; Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers or some early stories; Meredith, George, Diana of the Crossways or The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest
This course will consider the British novel between Late Victorianism and Modernism. The reading list will include some of the above.
Dickens, C.: Oliver Twist; Balzac, H. de: P?re Goriot; Dostoevsky, F.: Crime and Punishment; Austen, J.: Emma; Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary; Tolstoy, L.: Anna Karenina
Focusing on key texts from English, French, and Russian literatures, this course traces the development of the novel as a genre in 19th-century Europe. Our discussions will emphasize strategies of close reading and literary analysis and elements of the theory of the novel. The texts are grouped into two thematic units. First, as we read Oliver Twist, Old Goriot, and Crime and Punishment, we will examine the use of social discourse in narrative form; crime as a paradigm for a work of fiction; and the role of the city in structuring the modern novel. Second, as we read Emma, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina, we will examine the novel's involvement with family, marriage, and adultery; the representation of consciousness in narrative; and the construction of the self in a work of literature. In comparing novels from different national traditions, the course explores the interplay between genre and culture. All readings in English. Workload: Reading: 150-200 pages per week. Written work: short written assignments, take-home midterm paper (3-5 pages), final paper (5-8 pages), in-class final exam (textual explication).
Lauter, P., ed.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature (vol.1); Miller, P., ed.: The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry; Rowson, S.: Charlotte Temple; Brown, C. B.: Edgar Huntly; Photocopied Reader
"This course will offer a survey of the literature produced in North America before 1800: European accounts of ""discovery"" and exploration; competing Puritan versions of settlement; conversion, captivity, and slave narratives; diaries and journals; eighteenth-century poetry by women; Native American oratory; autobiography; letters, essays, political debate; and novels. Arching across this survey will be concerns linking literature and history, language and politics. What are the ""stories"" of America? What are their shapes, sounds, and trajectories? Who tells them, when, and why? Some of the crucial narrative junctures to be explored will be the ""discovery"" of America, the Antinomian Crisis, the Pequot War, the declaring of independence, and the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Two midterms and one final examination will be required. "
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; Charles Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition; Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life; Jos? Mart?, Selected Writings; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives; Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors; Edith Wharton, House of Mirth; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; There will also be a course reader of poetry, short stories, and journalism.
A survey in United States literature from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. The course pays special attention to matters of violence, urban life, and social reform as they were refracted within an increasingly stratified public sphere. There will be two midterms and one final exam.
Burroughs, W.S: Naked Lunch; Chin, Frank: Donald Duk; Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man; Kingston, M: The Woman Warrior; Pyncheon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Wright, Richard: Native Son; Burroughs, W.: Junky; a Course Reader, available at cost from Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way.
"This course will examine images, metaphors and strategies of visibility and invisibility in narrative literature produced by members of three American cultures--African American, Asian American and European American--taking note of the differences and similarities within the cultures studied as well as the similarities and differences between them. In this examination I hope that we will all learn more about how it is that what we see is deeply affected by our cultures. Our cultures also deeply influence whom we see, as well as how we feel about being seen by anyone defined as ""other,"" or about revealing to ""others"" any information that is felt ought to remain hidden. This examination should also afford us a chance to learn the various ways in which different cultures work to make this influence invisible, and to learn how writers may use material that their own cultures attempt to hide or suppress in establishing themselves or their characters as selves. The course will consist mostly of lecture, though I?ll try to accommodate as much discussion as time and class size will allow. "
Addams, J: Twenty Years at Hull House; Chesnutt, C: The Marrow of Tradition; Dixon, T: The Clansman; Lippman, W: Drift and Mastery; Porter, G: The Rise of Big Business; Sinclair, U: The Moneychangers; Taylor, F: The Scientific Principles of Management; Wharton, E: The House of Mirth; Wiebe, R: The Search for Order
This is an introduction to a number of cultural/political/economic/social issues from a transitional period of the United States between the rise of industrial capitalism (big corporate businesses and huge urban centers) in the late 19th-century and the beginnings of a modernist attempt to bring order to what was often felt to be the chaos of development. In addition to a variety of texts, there will be screenings of a number of films. Two mid-terms and a final exam.
See below
This course will focus on American literature and culture in the 1920?s. We will address the main features of this extraordinary decade through novels, memoirs, films, and cultural histories. We will devote substantial time to Americans in Paris, including both writers and jazz musicians. We will read texts by Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Louis Armstrong and Malcolm Cowley, among others. Requirements include one paper, one mid-term, and a final.
"Anzald'a, G: Borderlands/La frontera; S. Cisneros: Caramelo; Hinojosa, R.: Klail City; Martinez, R.: Crossing Over; Paredes, A.: Between Two Worlds; Folklore and Culture; George Washington G?mez; The Shadow; ""With His Pistol in His Hand"": A Border Ballad and Its Hero; Rechy, J.: The Miraculous Day of Amalia G?mez"
This course will explore the invention of a Chicano and Chicana sense of place, and with the sense of freedom and dystopia associated with ethno-racial structures of feeling tied to a geoculture and region. How do imaginative writers such as Am?rico Paredes, Gloria Anzald?a, John Rechy, Rolando Hinojosa, Rub?n Martinez, and Sandra Cisneros negotiate the tension between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas measuredly and by design? Exposure to postcontemporary works in cultural criticism, border thinking, and theory will also be part of the semester?s agenda.
A Course Reader will be available at cost from Copy Central.
This is an advanced workshop course in writing fiction, intended for students who are already pretty experienced with the basic skills of characterization, plotting, etc. This course has no prerequisites, but a knowledge of the critical vocabulary we use in analyzing and evaluating fiction will be helpful. Since the workshop is open to students in other disciplines, we may need to spend some time at the beginning of the term getting familiar with general procedures and terms. We will spend most of our class time analyzing stories written by class members. It will be my responsibility to make sure that these discussions are thorough, critical and supportive. Each student can expect to have two of his/her stories discussed by the entire class, and a third story critiqued by the instructor.
Jahan Ramazani, ed.: The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, 2 vols.; Course Reader
"In this course you will conduct a progressive series of experiments in which you will explore the fundamental options for writing poetry today--aperture, partition, closure; rhythmic sound patterning; sentence & line; stanza; short & long-lined poems; image & figure; graphics & textual space; cultural translation; poetic forms (haibun, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc.); the first, second, third, and no person (persona, address, drama, narrative, description); prose poetry. Our emphasis will be placed on recent possibilities, but with an eye & ear always to renovating traditions. I have no ""house style"" and only one precept: you can do anything, if you can do it. You will write a poem a week, and we?ll discuss six or so in rotation (I?ll respond to every poem you write). On alternate days, we?ll discuss pre-modern and modern exemplary poems drawn from the Norton Anthology and from our course reader. It will be delightful. "
Weingarten, R. and Higgerson, R. eds.: Poets of the New Century; Gioia, D., Mason, D., and Schoerke, M., eds.: Twentieth-Century American Poetics
This workshop is for those who love to read and write poetry and who wish to continue the serious study and practice of poetics. Although much of our time will be spent discussing student poems, we'll also analyze poetry and essays on poetics from two assigned anthologies. You?ll be asked to write a weekly poem, often in response to a specific catalyst; to write short responses to the assigned poems and essays; and to make responsible contributions to all discussions. Class attendance is an absolute must. You also might be asked to memorize and recite/perform a contemporary poem and/or to attend and comment upon a few designated poetry readings.
"Attridge, Derek, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction; Course Reader
Note: The required text will be available only through:
Cody's Books
2454 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
510.845.7852 "
The purpose of this class will be to produce a mobile, surprising, unfinished language in which to treat poetry. Writing poems will be a part of this task, but only a part. There will also be a modest amount of critical writing, short written commentaries on other students' work, a review of a poetry reading, and a semi-self-directed study of prosody; these efforts will all be gathered in a final portfolio of work to be handed in at semester's end. Class participation will include memorization and recitation of other writer's poems and discussion of material brought in by the instructor.
Lopate, P. ed.: The Art of the Personal Essay
"This class will concentrate on the art and craft of the personal essay. Students will complete three short writing assignments and two new essays. We will discuss the essays in the assigned anthology as well as students? work.
To be considered for admission in this course, please submit 10-12 double-spaced, photocopied pages of your creative nonfiction (no fiction, poetry, plays, or academic writing), along with an application form, to Professor Kleege?s mailbox in 322 Wheeler BY 4:00 P.M., TUESDAY, April 20, AT THE LATEST. "
A course reader
"This is a workshop for the translation of poetry. Translators are expected to share their work and to participate in the criticism of the work of others. Discussion will range from the larger problems of the possibility of translation to the particular problems of a specific text in a specific language. Our task is to produce translations, but en route we will consider whether the ""poetry"" translates along with the ""meaning""; the matter of music versus sense; the presence of the translator?s voice; intention; matters of form; the interplay of poet, translator, reader; and the like. Translators must work on poetry but may do so in any language. "
"BOOKS REQUIRED (all in paperback) (E = early in course; M = middle; L = late)
M - Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall. University of Exeter [England] Press (distributed in US by Northwestern U Press), 1994. 0-85989-429-0 [$16.95]
E - Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. M. Andrew and R. Waldron. University of Exeter [England] Press (distributed in US by Northwestern U Press), 1997. 0-85989-514-9 [$19.95]
E - Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parlement of the Thre Ages, ed. Warren Ginsberg. Medieval Institute Publications, 1992. 1-879288-26-5 [$7.00]
M - The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr. J. M. Dent, 1993. 0-460-87050-5 [$8.95]
L - King Arthur's Death: The Middle English The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster. Medieval Institute Publications, 1994. 1-879288-38-9 [$13.] "
"This seminar will read a substantial selection of the best alliterative poetry of the later 14C in England. These works represent an intensive cultivation, during a few decades, of a metrical preference with much deeper roots in earlier English verse, and a short ""afterlife."" We will examine the literary and cultural significance of this brief flourishing of alliterative verse--and the relations of the ""masterpieces"" of the form to antecedent and subsequent writings in this form--as it offers an unusual medieval case of the self-conscious clustering of explicit literary values and ideologies around a formal practice, and the nuanced articulation of relations between forms and cultural meanings.
Students will write a long (~15-18 pp) final research paper, reporting more briefly throughout the term on each of several steps in research and writing. There will also be a library reserve list, and a selection of photocopied material in a reader. "