497/8aA (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
Heroes and the Women Who Scare Them: Gender and Myth, and Myths about Gender. This course concerns mythologies of gender, specifically notions of male and female power as depicted in myth. Two recurrent mythological figures that embody concepts of male and female power respectively are the hero and the witch. In some stories, these figures conflict, in others they depend on each other -- occasionally they're the same person. We'll begin the course with a selection of literature from various cultures (epics, folktales, poems) that present heroic male and threatening female figures, discuss the gender ideologies these tales express, and also ways they complicate or undermine these ideologies. From there, we'll move on to an exploration of various critical approaches by which the gender depictions in these texts can be usefully discussed, and then to development of individual student projects. Students should be interested in the intersections of literature and myth, familiar with the mythology of at least one culture, and have some familiarity with literary or anthropological critical theory. Students will engage in their own research projects during the quarter, on any text that fits the theme from any period that interests them, and turn in a 20-page paper at the end of the quarter.
497/8aB (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
Ravishing Reads—“Difficult Pleasures” and Reading Practices in Our Time.
“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure.” –Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
In this intensive 5-week, multimedia course, we will investigate what it means to read traditional—and nontraditional—texts in the 21st century to experience “difficult pleasure”—however different that meaning might be from what Harold Bloom intended. Some of what we read will be pleasurable, some frustrating, some even painful. We will read certain texts in traditional hard copy, but much of our reading will be online, and we will use technology to experiment with ways we might “read” poetry, fiction, and drama in multi-sensory fashion, however unconventional that proves to be. We will, for example, listen to texts almost as much as we look at them, and we will test standard reading practices against nonstandard reading experiments, some solo and others communal. In essence ours will be a class that critiques ways of reading and textual engagement in the 21st century—intellectual, imaginative, sensual. Course methods include reading and discussing reading practices critically, as well as conducting primary and secondary research about reading practices, both online and off, together as a class and individually in non-classroom locales. Writing online journals and regular class attendance is a must: this is not a distance-learning course, despite its in-class experimentation with computer technology. 497: Honors English majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: senior English majors only. Texts: Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age; Birkerts, ed., Tolstoy’s Dictaphone; Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
497/8C (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
Subjectivity and Personhood in the Age of Trusts. The period between the Civil War and World War I is often referred to as the Age of Trusts-those great concentrations of capital that were the forerunners of the modern corporation. This period saw, among other things, the most intense social upheaval, after the Civil War, the United States has ever known, which one historian has called the closest America has come to a socialist revolution. It was also during this period that the Supreme Court declared corporations to be "persons" for the purposes of Constitutional law, entitled to the same rights and protections as "natural" persons. The controversies of that time often eerily echo our present-day arguments about globalization and corporate power, as we continue to debate the ongoing changes that began, or achieved critical mass, during this time. How did these profound and far-reaching developments affect the way that individuals understood themselves, their inner lives and personal identities? Did thinking of corporations as "persons" change the way that "natural" persons saw themselves? How did the intense controversies over and changes in the economy impinge upon the subjective experience of ordinary people? In this course we will read some contemporary texts dealing with "the trust problem" and some theorists of subjectivity who interrogate the relationship between the social and the "personal." Then we'll read some literary texts for evidence of such effects in their representations of subjectivity. We will be primarily concerned with literary-historical questions, but informing our inquiry will be the larger, continuing question of how the disparate realms of economics and of inner experience, each profoundly important yet usually treated as separate and incompatible, interact and mutually shape each other. Requirements: One long final paper, in-class presentations, regular participation, lots of reading. 497: Honors English majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: senior English majors only. Texts: Wharton, Ethan Frome; Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware; Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; Zitkala Sa, American Indian Stories; Dreiser, The Financier; photocopied course pack including various writers on trusts and corporations; Althusser, Butler, Foucault, R. Williams (on subjectivity); Crane.
Self-Help and Inheritance. “Self-Help” is the title of a best-selling book from 1859 by Samuel Smiles. It serves in the title for a course exploring literature in English from the 19th – 20th C., a period that has sharply promoted self-making through “self-help.” But with this has also come a complication in thinking about inheritance. Inheritance fills out the title and sets questions for the course about the extent to which we are “made” by what has gone before, whether through family, gender, race, class, national/imperial legacy, or cultural/literary tradition. The class is designed as an appropriate capstone for seniors completing an English major given its theme and its seminar format. It provides a forum for reflection on your own educational experience as an interplay between self-help and inheritance. Primary readings drawn from: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion (with recent BBC production or film), J. S. Mill, ch. “Of Individuality” from “On Liberty,” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (with recent film), Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own,” V. S. Naipaul (recent Nobel winner), A House for Mr. Biswas, selection of fictional re-imagining of material (short selections, not read by all) covered by presentations, drawn from: Samuel Smiles, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, critical survey of Naipaul’s controversial reputation, Frederick Jameson on post-modernism, more from Peter Ackroyd, English Music. Requirements: on-going seminar discussion plus two presentations (whether leading discussion of a primary text or reporting on a secondary text); 4-5 pp. paper; 8-10 pp. paper treating more than a single text. If you choose, these can be related, so that the second paper revises and expands on the first. The above requirements count 25%, 25%, 50%. No final. I am open to adapt assignments to yoru purposes as you conclude your undergraduate work. Research, discussion, oral presentation, critical writing (in tight focus and more synthesizing formats) are practical skills you can enhance and lay claim to via this course. Past senior seminars of mine have proved helpful to students for providing the basis of letters of recommendation and writing samples, for purposes of graduate school or other training, or employment.
The Novels of Roddy Doyle. Roddy Doyle (b. 1958) is a contemporary Irish writer whose novels of Dublin life have established themselves internationally for their brilliant gifts of language, artistic range, and humanity. Doyle taught high school in North Dublin for fourteen years before writing his first novel, The Commitments (1991), about a ratty and slightly ridiculous group of local kids who form a band to copy American soul music into the ears of Dublin. Then came two more novels about the same working-class world, The Snapper and The Van. With his fourth novel Doyle made a startlingly experimental shift to an intensely immediate and disorienting first-person narrative reproducing the consciousness of a ten-year-old boy in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker Prize. His next novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, belongs in an equally surprising way to a completely different kind of character. Doyle’s most recent work, A Star Called Henry, is a consciously “big” novel about modern Irish history, pitched on a panoramic scale. This course will be a close reading of these novels.
Doyle has an ear for language and speech, and a gift for making an expansive world out of a restrictive Dublin, which have led many to see him as the natural successor of Joyce. He made his reputation first with a loopy kind of urban comedy but in later work shows an equally powerful talent for storytelling from a darker side of experience. In this course we will have the somewhat unusual opportunity to read and reflect on the whole of an important novelist’s work and career while still very much in progress. Doyle also has a Dickensian knack for writing novels which are accessible and popular while also artistically challenging and sometimes risky. That combination of characteristics will be one focus of study in the course. We will also screen Alan Parker’s film of The Commitments, with a script by Doyle in collaboration, one of the great small-scale music movies ever made. Texts: Doyle, The Barrytown Trilogy; Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha; The Woman Who Walked into Doors; A Star Called Henry.
Race and America. Here we explore race as a central fact of American life and its literary expression. Readings range from the 19th-century Huckleberry Finn to the contemporary Meena Alexander. We will look at the controversies surrounding Twain’s classic, race and the color line as seen by DuBois at the beginning of the last century, and briefly how those problems have played out down to the present. You will be encouraged to bring your own experience of life to bear on the topic as we trace the often tenuous-seeming links between “literature” and “life.” Two papers and one class presentation. Texts: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; W.E.B. DuBois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, Essays, Articles from the Crisis; Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart; Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience; Manhattan Music.
Transgression. This seminar will examine transgression from a literary, philosophical, and religious perspective. The protagonist(s) of Nabokov's "Lolita" and Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" violate ethical prohibitions as a means to experience divinity -- with predictably disastrous results. We will look at the nature of their bad faith from the standpoint of a large theoretical tradition: Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, Girard, Foucault, Derrida, and Walter Burkert. We will also explore the relative merits of poetry's and philosophy's ability to represent experiences which exceed the limits of ethics and rationality. Course requirements include a number of short papers, a class presentation, and one long paper.
Environmental Imaginations: American Modernism and Nature. This course will explore encounters with nature in the work of American modernism writers, beginning with Willa Cather’s novel, The Professor’s House, and moving on to look at other modernist poetry and fiction, including William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and selections from Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, as well as related critical and historical materials. Questions we’ll consider include: What is the relationship between nature and art in a rapidly modernizing world? How are modern encounters with nature shaped by science and technology, and by the social relations of gender, race, and class? Can we go “back to nature,” and why would we want to? What kinds of encounters with nature were modernist writers interested in, and how and why do they use experimental literary forms to represent those encounters? These texts are challenging, and reading them will require time, effort and curiosity on your part. Some background in studying poetry will be helpful; genuine interest in the topic and in modernist literature is essential. Expect to be daunted, mystified, and (hopefully) delighted. Requirements: lost of discussion, a class presentation, response papers, and a longer seminar paper.
James Joyce’s Ulysses. This seminar focuses on James Joyce’s Ulysses as the summit of literary modernism. To dispel fear of Ulysses, we’ll read the book one episode at a time, familiarizing ourselves with its Irish and European contexts and extensions, tracking the progressive making and unmaking of sense, and reveling in Joyce’s comic transvaluation of all novelistic values (narrative devices, generic conventions, topics, perspectives, styles and humors). Desiderata: inklings of Joyce’s early work, intimacy with Homer’s Odyssey, interest in sly uses of language. A portion of each meeting is devoted to the musical “subtext” in Ulysses (Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Irish street ballads and turn-of-the-century music-hall favorites). Students interested in Joyce’s continental influences (Flaubert, Mallarmé, Ibsen, Wagner) are encouraged to enroll in ENGL 313. Requirements: weekly page-long assignments and a course project involving some independent research and resulting in a longer final paper (15 pages). Text: Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (ed. Gabler).
Electronic Essays: Writing with Images on the Web. A great deal of the course reading will be viewing Web sites that address personal and social issues such as ethnicity and sexual orientation, gender identity, immigration, nuclear arms, pollution/preservation, homelessness, and others which may come to our attention. We will analyze these sites for technique and critique them for effectiveness. We will especially be keeping track of how images are used and how linear/nonlinear the site are. Final projects will be a Web site taking a position on an issue. Necessary support for writing the HTML will be provided, but it is probably not a good idea to take this course if you have never written a line of HTML.
Imagining the Mediterranean in Early Modern England. This course will examine English representations of the Mediterranean -- that place in between Europe and Africa, Christianity and Islam, East and West -- in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Central questions we will address include: How is England's identity negotiated in relation to Italy, Spain, and Africa? What is the relationship between literature and empire? How does early modern England think about "race"? What is the place of gender in representations of the exotic, on the one hand, and the domestic, on the other? Strongly recommended: At least one class in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century literature. Texts: Virgil, The Aeneid; Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Jew of Malta; Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; Shakespeare, Othello; Anthony and Cleopatra; The Tempest; Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West; Massinger, The Renegade.
Comics Literature. Comics have long been considered a low cultural art form. In this course, students consider comics as a genre worthy of academic attention. The course offers a whirlwind history of comics: early forms of writing in ancient times, medieval illuminated manuscripts, political satire and caricature, and contemporary comic strips and graphic novels. The ways in which the interaction of pictures and words produces effects special to this genre will shape student investigations. Students engage in focused study of a relative explosion of late twentieth-century graphic novels. Questions of race, class, and gender inform this exploration of a genre that is popularly classified as being a white-boy thing. Though the texts are in English, Japanese-style comics will be considered by comparison. Readings include both literary and critical texts. Assignments include response papers, a creative project and presentation, and a literary research paper. Texts: McCloud, Understanding Comics; Sacco, Palestine; Spiegelman, Maus I & II; Barry, Cruddy; Dimassa, Complete Hothead Paison; Kelso, Queen of the Black Black; Horrocks, Hicksville; Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Knight, Dances With Sheep: A K Chronicles Compendium; optional: Robbins, From Girls to Grrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines; Varnum, & Gibbons, eds., The Language of Comics: Word and Image.
TTh 7-8:50 pm
The Aesthetics of Multiculturalism. The advent of a politics of multiculturalism in Canada and the United States over the past few decades has brought overdue attention to literary works by authors outside of the white, anglophone dominant group. Just as these works unsettle any complacent notions about what it means to be North American, they challenge the universality of aesthetic standards. In some cases, efforts have been made to develop more appropriate critical frameworks for the reception (and indeed the production) of works by minority authors. Occasionally, these efforts have involved guidelines that prescribe a certain content or form to authors based on their ethnic heritage: for example, white authors who treat minority themes have been maligned for cultural appropriation, whereas minority authors who do not foreground ethnicity and/or oppression have been seen as co-opted. The (real or perceived) prescriptiveness of multicultural aesthetics has in turn contributed to a backlash against “political correctness.” Multiculturalism has also received criticism for underestimating the depth of diversity and for perpetuating the centre/margin model of ethnicity. Whether or not the concept of multiculturalism can support the emergence of more radical or autonomous forms of difference remains to be seen. Recently, renewed attempts to define aesthetics in a multicultural age have involved a re-engagement with questions of beauty, universality and pluralism. This course will trace these critical and political developments, exploring both the utility and the limits of multiculturalism for teh study of North American literature. The reading list will include short stories and poetry, with an emphasis on contemporary work and on the novel. The discussion-based seminar will rely on active student participation. In addition to the texts listed, there will be a course packet. Texts: Mary Frosch, ed., Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural Anthology; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee; Jeannette Slash Armstrong, Theytus; Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion; photocopied course packet.
Reading Literature, Thinking the Politics of Feeling. How can the question of what it is to read literature be a window to investigate the politics of feeling and its role in the reproduction of social institutions, practices and norms? The course begins with the recognition that the politics of literature in the U.S. (even when the politics is that literature has no politics) have often been understood to be identical with literature’s influence over how a putative heterosexual white middle class majority thinks and feels. Along these lines, reading literature has been thought to raise consciousness, to produce sympathy, to teach good citizenship, and to catalyze psychic liberation from conformity. On the other hand, another understanding of the politics of literature in the U.S. decenters the idea of raising the consciousness of white middle class readers and unravels conventional notions of identity, nation and reform. Loosely, it theorizes a place for literature within what Chela Sandoval has called “the methodology of the oppressed”; for example, literature has been seen to revise the past or to make visible censored experience, with political implications. The reading list will include the work of Adam Smith, Arthur, Karl Marx, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. In addition, we will read novels and short stories for their investigations of the politics of feeling in particular locations and at specific historical moments. Texts: Chester Himes, End of a Primitive; John Okada, No-No Boy; R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R's; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; photocopied course packet.
Contracts of the Heart: Sacrifice, Gift Economy and Literary Exchange in Coleridge and Wordsworth. In this seminar we will study the literary relationship of Coleridge and Wordsworth who, as one critic remarked, “not only pervasively influenced one another, but did so in a way that challenges ordinary methods of assessments.” We will explore the possibility of deriving from theories of gift exchange and sacrifice a new model of literary influence that would shed light on this remarkably intimate and deeply conflicted relationship.
We will spend the first four weeks of the quarter studying theories of gift exchange and sacrifice as proposed, among others, by Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, Georg Simmel, Lewis Hyde and Pierre Bourdieu (on the gift); and by Sigmund Freud, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, René Girard and Georges Bataille (on sacrifice). The next six weeks will be devoted to the study of major poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth in chronological order, showing how the two poets, while desiring to imitate each other, find themselves competing for the same themes and appropriating each other’s subjects. Thus, while early Coleridge wrote successful nature poetry and Wordsworth portrayed moving stories of human suffering in a supernatural setting, after their collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth turned to the philosophy of the mind’s relationship with nature, while Coleridge started to explore the effects of supernaturalism on the psyche.
Such moments of merging and separation can be profitably viewed through the lens of gift exchange and sacrifice. The gift, for example, generates a number of paradoxes that are relevant to the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, being at once an altruistic model of social interaction, placing value on human bonds above economic or private interests, while at the same time remaining embedded in a self-interested power structure. Gift exchange often secures the privileged position of the donor at the expense of receivers and yet, as Mauss showed, receivers seem to retain “a sort of proprietary right” over everything that belongs to the donor. The gift thus generates the obfuscation of ownership rights and an erasure of the differences between donors and beneficiaries. We will see how Wordsworth and Coleridge, while collaborating early on a single unauthored volume (Lyrical Ballads) and wanting to write the same poem (“The Wanderings of Cain,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), found themselves increasingly asserting “proprietary rights” over the stock of inventions which they initially passed on to each other according to the law of the gift. Wordsworth continued to use Coleridge’s ideas but tried hard to displace Coleridge as a gift-giving source, turning to nature or his private fund of “possessions,” to “Something within, which yet is shared by none” (“Home at Grasmere”). Assignments: A long paper (10-16 pp.), written in two stages and subject to revision; bi-weekly comments on assigned readings; a final exam. Texts: Marcel Mauss, The Gift; Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; S. T. Coleridge, Selected Poetry (ed. Beer); Wordsworth, Selected Poetry.
Medieval to Renaissance English Literature: From Script to Print, from Orality to Literacy. In this class we will be examining English literature as it evolves out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and focusing on two main cultural events: first, the invention of printing as an important material consideration; second, the concomitant shift from orality to literacy. Early English literary invention is to an extraordinary degree both a witness and a child of its own age, and as it moves from a manuscript culture to a print culture, the ground rules of textual production, dissemination, and consumption themselves change. Coursework: Three quizzes (10% each), two Summary Evaluations of critical articles or chapters from secondary reading (10% each), class discussion (10%), a class presentation (15%), and a 7-10 page paper (25%). Readings will include the following and perhaps others: Primary: The Battle of Maldon; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale; Malory’s Morte Darthur; various Sonnets from Petrarch to Shakespeare; The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play; The York Play of the Crucifixion; Everyman; Dr. Faustus. Secondary: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe;. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge.
American Empire, American Imperialism? Conservative intellectuals have recently argued that America is an empoire and that American imperialism is a good thing, that our imperialism is benign and benevolent. One of the growth industries in the study of American culture, on the other hand, is the critique of America as an empire, a left-oriented criticism that in American Studies circles has become increasingly influential over the last decade. We will read representative selections from both sides. What is the history of the left critique of imperialism? Of the conservative celebration? As we try to develop a balanced view of America from the 19th century through the post-World War II period into the immediate present, are we obliged to accept American imperialism as a central reality in our political culture? Has imperialism been persistent or fluctuating -- or is the concern with empire and imperialism an unwarranted distortion of our past and present? If it is a distortion, how do we deal with the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the War in Vietnam, and the current Iraq war (or threat of war)? In the course we will pay special attention to the Spanish-American War, to the origins of the Cold War in the immediate post-World War II period, to the U.S. in Central America during the 1980s, and especially to the current Iraq war (or threat of war). Is there a connection between American racism and American imperialism -- or again, is asserting the relation a libel on America? What light do our writers have to shed on the issues of empire and imperialism? What light do the issues of empire and imperialism have to shed on the war with Iraq, to bring matters up to the present?
We will read Melville's Typee, Whitman's "Passage to India," Twain's Connecticut Yankee and "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," Joan Didion's Salvador, Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us (selections), Wallace Shawn's play, The Fever, and Gore Vidal's essay, "The Last Empire." For the left critique of empire we'll read selections from Cultures of American Imperialism, from John Carlos Rowe's Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, and Lenin's Imperialism. We'll sample historical studies of American imperialism (Walter LaFeber, William Appleman Williams, Reginald Horsman). We'll read selections from William Kristol, Max Boot, Michael Hardt, and perhaps other conservative proponents of America as an empire. Under the pressure of reality I'll probably have to scale back the reading but material we can't cover together will be available for papers. Texts: Melville, Typee; Twain, Connecticut Yankee; Didion, Salvador; Forche, The Country Between Us; Shawn, The Fever; photocopied course packet.
Bodies and Spaces. The relationship between our bodies and the spaces around them is taken for granted as we go about our daily business. The act of moving from Point A to Point B would seem simple, and the means by which we understand the positioning of our bodies within the space that surrounds them would seem a basic building block of consciousness, one that does not require investigation. Yet the relationship between bodies and spaces has become increasingly the location of theoretical and artistic investigation, particularly as technology continues to break down the boundaries between our physical selves and the world around us. This course investigates the concepts of bodies and spaces, drawing upon numerous theoretical approaches to the topic. It also looks at several literary and filmic examples of body/space dialectics. Note: This course requires intensive reading of numerous complicated theoretical texts. A basic background in critical theory is useful, if not required. Grading will be based on response papers, an in-class presentation, and one 15-20 page paper. Texts: Nicholson Baker, Room Temperature; photocopied course packet including excerpts from Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel de Certeau; several films including The Draughtsman's Contract, Prospero's Books, Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, Time Code, The Celebration
Literary Transformations. What is lost or gained in translating text to film, painting of sculpture to poetry, or comics to live-action? Translation -- texts from one language to another -- is a fraught and fascinating process. In the translation of poetry, for example, does the translator focus on formal aspects, or on semantics? What about sound effects? Is the translator a technician or an artist? This course explores such questions of translation, but as applied to translations between artistic mediums rather than languages -- more properly, transformations. Is a picture really worth a thousand words? Can a word be worth a thousand pictures? We will also consider partial transformations, the increasing phenomena of "mixed mediums." We will read and view a variety of literary transformations and students will be expected to do significant research, writing and creative presentation in a focused area of this broad field. In-class time will be supplemented with several field trips to museums and the UW book arts collection.
Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Women’s Writing. Constructions of madness as a “female malady” (Elaine Showalter) in 19th and 20th-century women’s writing. Women’s continuing interest in insanity and mental illness derives from their insight into cultural associations of femininity with irrationality in Western thought. The course traces the shift of the figure of the madwoman from the margins to the center of women’s narratives: from the 19th-century formation of “the madwoman in the attic,” the duality of the sane Victorian heroine and her “mad double” (Jane Eyre) through modernism (Mrs. Dalloway) to “madwomen protagonists” in confessional and experiential narratives of the 60s and beyond (Plath, Rhys, Morrison) and to new developments towards “visionary madness” and the reinterpretation of madness as “spiritual quest” (not breakdown, but renewal) (Atwood, Head). Texts: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Margaret Atwood, Surfacing; Bessie Head, A Question of Power.
Politics of Multiculturalism in North America. The advent of a politics of multiculturalism in Canada and the United States over the past few decades has brought overdue attention to literary works by authors who identify with minority communities of many kinds. Just as these works unsettle any complacent notions about what it means to be North American, they challenge the universality of aesthetic standards. In many cases, critics have made efforts to develop more appropriate frameworks for the reception (and indeed the production) of works by minority authors. Occasionally, these critical frameworks have involved guidelines that prescribe a certain content or form to authors based on their ethnic heritage: for example, white authors who treat minority themes have been maligned for cultural appropriation, whereas minority authors who do not foreground oppression have been seen as co-opted. The (real or perceived) prescriptiveness of multicultural aesthetics has in turn contributed to a backlash against "political correctness." Whether or not the concept of multiculturalism can support the emergence of more radical or autonomous forms of difference remains to be seen. Recently, renewed attempts to define aesthetics in a multicultural age have involved a re-engagement with questions of beauty, universality and pluralism. This course will trace some of these literary and critical developments, exploring both the utility and the limitations of multiculturalism in the conjunction with the study of North American short stories, poems and novels (most of them contemporary). In our first unit, we will study three multicultural anthologies and consider their role in disseminating the concept6 of "multiculturalism." Turning to individual novels and their critical contexts for the remainder of the course, we will explore the relationship between narrative aesthetics and multicultural politics. The discussion-based seminar will rely on active student participation. Texts: Mary Frosch, ed., Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural Anthology; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Jeannette Armstrong, Whispering in Shadows.
Ravishing Reads: Textual Pleasures, Pains, and Reading Practices in Our Time.
The way we read now, when we are alone with ourselves, retains considerable continuity with the past, however it is performed in the academies.... To read human sentiments in human language, you must be able to read humanly, with all of you. --Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
In this class, you will investigate what Harold Bloom means by "all of you," academically as well as non-academically, professionally as well as personally. Throughout your research, you will decide whether you agree with him and whether you believe that the "you" of our time is in fact different from the "you" of past times--before the digital revolution. Ours is a class that will explore ways of reading as well as the pleasures and pains of the reading experience -- intellectual, imaginative, and sensual. Why? Because some assume that the act of reading refers to eyes scanning hard copy print, with little regard to the larger realm of the senses and aspects of the self. Others believe that the notion of isolated reading is erroneous, too narrow a reading regiment that eliminates community, restricts the imagination, and ignores altogether readers' multi-sensory perceptions and potential pleasures of textual engagement. In our course we will analyze these academic and popular notions of reading, as well as Bloom's and other scholars' theories of reading. We will measure them against our readings, in and outside of the academic classroom. Course text include conventionally bound books, audio and videotapes, and hyperlinked literature. Course methods include summarizing and investigating our findings. We will conduct many of our discussions and much of our research not just alone and in print, but face to face and online. Course requirements include an interest in reading and theorizing about reading practices, exploring your own and others' reading practices and preferences; writing about reading; questioning theories of reading of reading (your own as well as others', past and present); reflecting upon your reading habits and prejudices; and diving deeply into the Internet. Please note: although a good deal of our class time will be spend online, this is not a distance-learning course: you need to be able to attend class regularly in the English Department's computer-integrated classrooms in Mary Gates Hall, where much of the human as well as computer interaction of our studies will take place. Texts: Sven Birkirts, The Gutenberg Elegies; Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler; Sven Birkirts, ed., Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse; David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age; photocopied course packet of critical and theoretical articles, and other creative writings.
Stereotype and Complexity: Visions of 19th-Century American Culture. We’ll begin by studying efforts to create mainstream middle-class models of nineteenth-century American life; safely stereotypic visions of national culture and experience promoted through popular “fireside poetry,” Currier and Ives engravings, and other art forms. Then we’ll explore, in dramatic contrast, a series of literary texts in which the meaning of America is hazarded into an agitated interplay of perspectives, in which voices excluded from the official cultural mainstream are attended to, and in which otherwise neglected aspects of the historical moment are granted visibility. We’ll be studying the battle between stereotype and underlying social complexity, between the official cultural mainstream and what it would exile to its margins, as this battle is fought in novels and biographies, poems and tales. Readings in Douglass, Fuller, Whittier, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Chopin, and Crane. Texts: Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes; Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; Henry Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories; Kate Chopin, The Awakeing and Selected Stories; Stephen Crane, The Portable Stephen Crane; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne.
Colonial and Post Colonial Writers and Writing from the Archipelago and the Continent. This course will look at Philippine writing under colonialism (Spain, United States) and after with side trips to the cosmopolitan center with Philippine-American writers. Texts: Jose Rizal, Noli me tangere; N. V. M. Gonzalez, A Season of Grace; Work on the Mountain; Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart; F. Sionil Jose, Dusk; Jessica Haggedorn, Dogeaters; Peter Bacho, Cebu.
I am constantly aware of the subjectivity of this or that of my thoughts and opinions, constantly aware of the relativity--that is, universality--of my preferences. All around me, all around us--a few hour’s journey to the east, west, north, or south--there are thousands of writers bending over pages full of words and caressing or reviling “the most beautiful, the most proud, the most modest, the most bold, the most touching, the most voluptuous, the most chaste, the most noble. the most intimate, the most mad and most wise” language on earth . . . ( Danilo Kis, “The Gingerbread Heart, or Nationalism.”).
The fact is that each writer has a mythical family tree of ancient and noble lineage, and his coat of arms leaves a proud mark on his manuscript, on his palimpset. It is like the watermark on the paper he uses, a visible sign of his origins. And when a writer begins tabula rasa, when his paper lacks a watermark, he has no choice but to cite historical tradition and create his pseudo-family tree on the basis of a historical heritage, a heritage of local mythology, rather than the literary or (cultural) heritage (Danilo Kis, “Individuality”).
Central European Writing Since 1960. This course
focuses on Central European writing since the 1960’s and on the role its
writers played in recalling and reconstructing fractured European identities.
The holocaust, ethnic persecutions and resettlements conducted in the aftermath
of World War II and the partitioning of Europe created two distinct Germanies,
an augmented and ethnically cleansed Poland, a subject Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia, a Czechoslovakia tilting away from historic ties to Vienna and
Berlin towards remote Moscow, an independent, multinational and communist
Yugoslavia under Marshal Tito. The postwar map of Europe also created
black holes in European culture and memory. The contributions of Central
European Jewry and the linguistic tapestry formed by Central Europe’s diverse
small nations had contributed between the wars to a truly pan-European modernist
culture. After the ravages of the war proper, the region was partitioned
between the West and the East with the greater portion of the region subsumed
beneath the cultural policing of Soviet internationalism.
In the West preoccupation with reconstruction and later with the “economic miracle” constituted a kind of systematic “forgetting,” a perception of a radical discontinuity between war time totalitarianism and the prosperous and democratic present. In the East doctrinaire “antifascism” and Communist Party cultural indoctrination placed a great burden on public attempts to revisit and process the traumas which both sanitized and polarized the New Europe. Nonetheless, the imaginative recall and questioning of the thread that joined past and present was taken up by the writers of the region. Whether exercising dissident or minority points of view, or simply trying to reconcile the lived experience of actuality with “official” History, these writers represented the holocaust, the ethnic and pre-industrial cultures “time has forgotten,” as well as the wartime and Stalin era reigns of terror, while posing questions about the sources of the “economic miracle” in the West and the “soft totalitarianism” and stagnation of the East. Texts: Gunter Grass, Cat and Mouse; Czeslaw Milosz, Captive Mind; Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Vaclav Havel, The Garden Party and Other Plays; Danilo Kis, “Encyclopaedia of the Dead,” Peter Handke, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Tadeusz Konwicki, Moonrise, Moonset; Christa Wolf, Cassandra; Dubravka Ugresic, Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Selected poetry, essays and criticism.
Feminism and Science Fiction. Beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and ending with Nalo Hopkinson’s Caribbean cyberpunk novel Midnight Robber, we will explore feminism and science fiction through nearly 200 years of women’s work in the genre. We will read SF that is both literary and pulpy, philosophical and sexy. This is a senior seminar, so come prepared to do a lot of reading, and good hard thinking. Assignments will include weekly response papers/questions, a creative exercise, and a final project in which each course member frames and rigorously explores a significant question of his/her own choosing related to the course theme. While novels and a few short stories form the required reading for the course, topics for final projects may address feminism through other genres of science fiction (comics, film, music, etc.) and/or SF work by men. Please read Frankenstein before the first class. Texts: Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text Contexts, 19th-century Responses, Modern Criticism; Charlotte Perkisn Gilman, Herland; Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Joanna Russ, The Female Man; Suzy McKee Charnas, The Slave and the Free; Walk to the End of the World; Motherlines; Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower; Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber.
US Global Politics in the Late Twentieth-Century Novel. In this course, which is a study of both the aesthetic and political transformations evidenced in the novel, we will read a range of novels by US-based authors interested in exploring the sometimes catastrophic, sometimes revolutionary effects of US global politics and culture in the last half of the twentieth century. In the cold war era that followed the end of World War II, these influential novelists, writing with a pronounced sense of anxiety about the future of US culture and global politics, tried to account for the cultural and political developments of that ear. Their focus was principally: the sudden and horrific destruction precipitated by the dropping of the atomic bomb; the legacy of the Jewish holocaust in Europe; the strategic importance of the Pacific Rim and Asia; the entrenchment of anti-communist narratives and rhetoric; a wave of postcolonial revolutions and nationalisms; the growth of new global media and cultures; and debates about scientific and reproductive technologies.
Through an engagement with these complex issues and
the sometimes violent debates they provoked, our materials offer a sampling
of how artists and intellectuals attempted to record and bear witness
to wartime traumas and postwar revolutions, as well as how they sometimes
reflected and reinforced the effects of new forms of a globalization and
cold war nationalisms. As graduating seniors, student in the course
will be expected to participate vigorously and daily in class discussions;
they should also expect weekly writing assignments and a final long paper
(12-15 pages). For more information, contact Professor Simpson.
497: Senior English honors students only; add codes in English
Advising office, A-2-B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: James
Michener, Tales of the South Pacific; Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's
Cradle; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything
is Illumintted; Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats.
Passing. Many scholars, such as Juda C. Bennet, suggest that the passing figure is distinctly American and is crucial to our understandings of race. In this course, though, we will seek ways to extend the concept of “passing.” As we might discover, every conscious effort to achieve or appear to achieve a specific and/or recognizable identity is an instance of active “passing” because it changes the way others view and experience us and the ways we view and experience ourselves. We will consider the concept of “passing” in order to explore the motivation behind a person’s decision either to adopt a specific racial/gendered/ethnic guise or to conceal one. Because this is your Senior Seminar, a capstone course to your undergraduate career, our primary goal this quarter will be to make the most of all of the opportunities for scholarship at our disposal, which includes the small-class size. Attaining this goal rests on all of us as a community of scholars, but primarily on you as individuals and the individual commitments you are willing to bring to the course. Texts: Diana Fuss, Identification Papers; Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre; Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; Ruthann Robson, A/K/A; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body; Mayra Santos-Febres, Sirena, Selena; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room.
Introduction to Australian Literature and Film. In this seminar we will read and discuss a selection of modern and contemporary Australian novels, short stories, and poetry; we will also view an example of the recent and significant revival in Australian film. The aim of the seminar will be to acquaint ourselves with major themes in Australian literature and film, and to situate these themes with regard to their historical, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. These themes will include: indigenous storytelling/writing and first contact; European homesickness; colonial ballads; the ‘yarn,’ tall stories, and hoaxes; writing and the idea of a nation; women’s writing and writing for/about women; history and myth; exile and expatriation; the pastoral and anti-pastoral; iconoclasm, rebellion, and disrespect. No prior knowledge of the literature or the cultural landscape of Australia is required, although a keen spirit of inquiry would be an advantage. Relevant contextual material will be provided in a course reader and will be developed in class during the quarter. Course participants will be welcome to make links between the course material and indigenous and New World experiences in North American (certain links will become clear rather quickly, as will some fundamental differences between Australian and North American contexts). Most classes will follow a seminar format. Assessment: Class participation 15%; seminar presentation 15%; short research assignment 20%; mid-term paper (5 pages) 20%; final paper (10 pages) 30%. (Mark Byron is a visiting professor from the University of Sydney, Australia.) Texts: Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career; Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang; Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish; Les A. Murray, ed., The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse; Jack Davis, Mudrooroo Narogin, and Stephen Muecke, eds., Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings; photocopied course packet; films: Stephan Elliot, dir., The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994); Phil Noyce, dir., Rabbit-Proof Fence (2001).
Politics of Multiculturalism in North America. The advent of a politics of multiculturalism in Canada and the United States over the past few decades has brought overdue attention to literary works by authors who identify with minority communities of many kinds. Just as these works unsettle any complacent notions about what it means to be North American, they challenge the universality of aesthetic standards. In many cases, critics have made efforts to develop more appropriate frameworks for the reception (and indeed the production) of works by minority authors. Occasionally, these critical frameworks have involved guidelines that prescribe a certain content or form to authors based on their ethnic heritage: for example, white authors who treat minority themes have been maligned for cultural appropriation, whereas minority authors who do not foreground oppression have been seen as co-opted. The (real or perceived) prescriptiveness of multicultural aesthetics has in turn contributed to a backlash against "political correctness." Whether or not the concept of multiculturalism can support the emergence of more radical or autonomous forms of difference remains to be seen. Recently, renewed attempts to define aesthetics in a multicultural age have involved a re-engagement with questions of beauty, universality and pluralism.
This course will trace some of these literary and critical developments, exploring both the utility and the limitations of multiculturalism in the conjunction with the study of North American short stories, poems and novels (most of them contemporary). In our first unit, we will study three multicultural anthologies and consider their role in disseminating the concept6 of "multiculturalism." Turning to individual novels and their critical contexts for the remainder of the course, we will explore the relationship between narrative aesthetics and multicultural politics. The discussion-based seminar will rely on active student participation. 497: Honors senior majors only, add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: senior majors only. Texts: Mary Frosch, ed., Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural Anthology; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Jeannette Armstrong, Whispering in Shadows.
British Literary Periodicals. This course will investigate the 18th-century English essay periodical, a popular genre in its time, but one that is now nearly forgotten except for three major examples: Richard Steele’s and Joseph Addison’s Tatler (1709-1711), and Spectator (1711-1712), and Samuel Johnson’s Rambler. After having fallen from the canon in the 20th century, these journals are now beginning to receive renewed critical attention: discussing why, and thinking about what the possibilities and limitations of these new critical approaches are, will be an important part of this course. Hence, this course is as much about methodology and historicism as it is about these early journals.
We will read selections from both major and minor, even obscure essay periodicals in order to gain a broad overview of the genre, and students will be responsible for both reading and leading class discussion on a number of critical works representative of the new work in the field. Writing assignments will require primary research and archival work in the Special Collections and Microfilm rooms at Suzzallo library, and we will also discuss the particular challenges and excitement of this kind of research.
Our primary concerns will be (1) to gain an understanding of the essay periodical’s generic conventions; (2) to consider these journals as both literary texts and historic documents; (3) to begin to understand the distinctions and continuities between “literary” and “historic” analytic methods; (4) to grapple with the genre’s peculiar contingency – that is, to attempt to understand why the English essay periodical was both popular in its day and short-lived, not really surviving into the 19th century; (5) to learn about primary and archival research methods and techniques. Texts: Downie & Corns, Telling People What to Think; Haywood/Spackes, Selections from the Female Spectator; Johnson/Bate, Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler; Morgan, The Female Tatler; Steel, Addison/Mackie, Commerce of Everyday Life.
Literary Violence and Political Fictions: The Art of Protest in Contemporary America. In his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin outlines what has become a central critique of protest fiction in the late twentieth century United States. As Baldwin complains, “the avowed aim of the American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever excessive demands they make of credibility.” By suggesting that the aims of protest and fiction might be antithetical, Baldwin introduces some of the key questions will we explore in this course: how do we know the difference between literature and politics? What makes certain kinds of language “literary” and others “political,” and how do these two categories continually overlap and redefine one other? In this class we will read a range of writing that explores the relationship between literature and politics in the post-1945 United States, asking how this relationship has been shaped by changing geographic and historical contexts. In particular, we will explore how changing definitions of violence – social, political, disciplinary, economic, symbolic – shape our understanding of protest at the end of the twentieth century. What might it mean in Baldwin’s terms to “do violence to language”? Does language itself perform certain kinds of violence, or do people use language for violent ends? What is the relation between the violence of language, of bodies, of states, of economies? To begin answering these questions, we will read a series of novels, poems, and films alongside critical writings about sentimentalism, politics and aesthetics, national and transnational social movements, and postmodern literary form, exploring together the specific historical conditions that shape what Baldwin terms the “credibility” of protest in the contemporary era. Final book list TBA, with possible selections from: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Leslie Marmon Silko, John Okada, Audre Lorde, Don Dellilo, Adrienne Rich, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Harryette Mullen, Cherrie Moraga, Jessica Hagedorn.
Landscapes of the Interior: Adventures in Autobiography. In this course, we’ll read modern and contemporary fictions of the self – mostly autobiographies and memoirs – to see how their authors write about their own psychic spaces. How does memory work in rethinking one’s childhood? Is nostalgia to be cherished or feared? Do readers want to hear the life-story of someone they’ve never met? If so, why? Does writing a memoir create a way out of pain/ Can personal joy be captured on paper? We’ll also read some essays about autobiography as an idea. Students will write either 2 shorter of one longer seminar paper, and give a class presentation. We’ll do some of our own autobiographical writing, but the seminar paper(s) may be an adventure either in autobiography or in critical analysis. Come prepared with an interest in fictions of the self and look forward to lively exchanges of ideas in the discussions and an interest in the topic. Texts: Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty; Alice Sebold, Lucky; Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude; Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish; Jimmy Baca, A Place to Stand; Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being.
Women Writers Across Cultures. In this seminar we will explore dialogues of women writers within and across cultures. Through a reading of sample pairs of writers the class will pay particular attention to the issues of women's authority, identity, and community. Writers will include: Virginia Woolf; Marie de France-Susan Glaspell; Helene Cixous-Clarice Lispector; Charlotte Bronte-Jean Rhys; Zora Neale Hurston-Alice Walker. A small seminar setting (15 max.) encourages participation of groups members from diverse backgrounds. Literature and non-literature majors in the Honors Program and those with special interest in the topic are encouraged to register. Grades based on participation (class discussion, journals) and two papers (one 5-page and one 10-page). Offered jointly with C LIT 493.
TTh 7-8:50 pm
Gender and Consumption. This course will exmaine a variety of literary, social scientific and theoretical texts that examine the social role of women as consumers and shapers of consumer culture. It will consider how modern femininity has been conceived of as a consumer practice, and how consumption emerges as a constitutively gendered and raced activity. In particular it will focus on the so-called "modern girl," a figure who emerged around the world in the early to mid twentieth century, who was defined in large part by her consumption of specific commodities and leisure activities, her sartorial style, and her explicit eroticism. It will consider how this new modern identity expanded notions of consumption by rendering it a practice that had as much to do with shopping as with self-creation. The course will conclude by bringing the historical concerns that it treats into the present moment through an examination of gndered consumption and the production of contemporary "girl culture." Some background in women's studies, feminist studies or feminist theory a plus.