Fall 2010 Seminars and Workshops   ENGL 303 Graduate Fiction Workshop Topic:  TBD Nancy Reisman (Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) The central goal of this graduate fiction workshop is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. This is primarily a studio course: the participants’ work-in-progress will serve as key course texts. We’ll also read and discuss published works of fiction (novels as well as short stories) and craft essays. As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll consider artistic vision in relation to questions of form and structure, and the possibilities for invention and for reinvigorating tradition. We’ll explore the questions of perception, narrative stance, varieties of tension, dramatic and non-dramatic progression, voice, language, and other aspects of craft. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? Conceptualize character? How might we consider conflicting and/or echoing movements within a given piece? Which ‘rules’ might be most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? At the beginning of the semester, we’ll set up a schedule for presentation of fiction-in-progress, and throughout the term writers will also offer their written and oral responses to published works, and will meet with visiting writers.     ENGL 304 Graduate  Poetry Workshop Topic:  TBD Rick Hilles (Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) Description Forthcoming   ENGL 306-01 Seminar in 16th Century Literature Topic:  Early Modern Masculinity Lynn Enterline (Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) Designed as a proseminar to introduce first year students to an academic career of research and writing, the seminar will focus on the ideological, literary, rhetorical, affective, sexual, and institutional parameters of early modern masculinity.   Moving between sixteenth century, critical, and theoretical texts, we will consider throughout what a specifically literary perspective adds to the field of gender studies.  Texts and authors may include: Ovid, Shakespeare, John Webster, Andrew Marvell; Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu; and a range of contemporary investigations into the history of emotion and sexuality in the early modern period.   ENGL 307 Literature and the Craft of Writing Topic: Traditional Poetic Form and Modern Practice Mark Jarman (Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) We will study the prosody of a wide range of Modern and Contemporary poets, including Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, Maxine Kumin, and Sylvia Plath. Required work will include writing in the verse forms of these poets, plus extended analysis of their techniques. Texts will be Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms, and Derek Attridge’s Poetic Rhythm, an Introduction.   ENGL 318-01 Seminar in Victorian Literature Topic: Sensation and Sexuality in Victorian Britain  Carolyn Dever (Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)  Please note that reading assignments for this seminar are available on OAK with the first assignment to be completed by the first session. This course will address questions of embodiment, eroticism, and representation in Victorian “sensation fiction,” including novels that sample the tropes—thrills, chills, and mysteries—of sensationalism in the more conventional framework of mid-century realism.  Setting the stage for the semester’s inquiry is a pair of texts—Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and W.T. Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon—that establish sexual mystery as a form of narrative epistemology and also as a vexed material practice.  Additional primary readings for the course will include Emily Brontë’s WutheringHeights, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Trollope’s The Small House at Allington.  The semester’s conclusion will include Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Stoker’s Dracula, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, read in tandem with their near contemporary, Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.  I will assign additional historical, critical, and theoretical readings in order to underscore both the materiality of Victorian sexuality, and the elliptical narrative epistemologies that Victorian culture employs both to mark the body and to conceal it. ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature Topic:  Three African American Modernists:  James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and  Langston  Hughes Vera M. Kutzinski (Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) For most of the twentieth century, the ideology of modernism has defined African American writing as auto-ethnography and separated it from so-called high (white) modernism in the U.S.  In this seminar, we will explore the lives and works of three prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance to analyze how exactly the term “African American” relates to “modernism,” that is, how each term is transformed when brought into contact with the other. We will read comprehensively: poetry, fiction, autobiographies, letters, and translations (in Hughes’s case). Our goal will be to discern how each of the three authors figured his own self (or selves) in relation both to the literary/cultural establishment(s) and to the larger society. The main question for this seminar is how aesthetics and politics intersect in the imaginative work of literary representation and in critical and theoretical inquiry. Readings: Hughes, The Big Sea; I Wonder as I Wander; Collected Poems;Remember Me to Harlem (Letters); Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Collected Poems; God’s Trombones; Black Manhattan; Along this Way; Toomer, Cane; The Wayward and the Seeking; Complete Poems. Requirements: Weekly 500-word response papers; one oral presentation on relevant scholarship; one final paper (15-20 pages). Note: The first meeting is on August 26. I will email a syllabus to anyone who is pre-registered for the course a week prior to that date.   ENGL 321-01 Studies in Southern Literature Topic: “The New Southern Studies”  Michael Kreyling (Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)        First, it isn’t called “southern literature” any longer. It’s “The New Southern Studies.” Whether the name change signifies a real difference, a “turn” in the field, of not is the central question of the seminar. We have Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury to heed; she didn’t think changing the name Maury Compson to Benjamin would help: “Name aint going to help him. Hurt him, neither. Folks dont have no luck, changing names.”   What I plan to do is this: arrange a group of texts representing the canon in southern literature/NSS, and approach them in each meeting of the seminar from the ancient and the modern points of view. Some of these entries will take more than one meeting.   The seminar schedule will probably look something like this list:   William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee (or another of his antebellum historical romances). Discussion will circulate through basic theories of the historical novel (Lukacs) and nationalism (Benedict Anderson).   Thomas Dixon, The Clansman. The romance of Reconstruction. A primer in post-bellum politicized narrative. David Blight, Race and Reunion. Early theories in the “new” science of sociology (William Graham Sumner). Plessy v. Ferguson.   Booker T. Washington (Up From Slavery) and W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk). Uplift, activism, African American masculinity. Approaches by Houston Baker and Riché Richardson.   Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand. Regionalism.   William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses. The major figure as political piñata: Was Faulkner part of the Civil Rights movement?   William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! The greatest novel written by an American -- in the same year with Gone With the Wind – the most popular novel written by an American.   Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel and its 50th anniversary. And Katherine Stockett, The Help: the knock-off South. Memory, memorialization.   Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising. The global south.   The south on film: D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation; David Selznick, GWTW; Lars Von Trier, Manderlay; Kevin Wilmott, C.S.A.; and others.   Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina. Shelby Lee Adams, The True Meaning of Pictures. Trash, class, exploitation.   I suggest that, over the summer, anyone interested read some of the titles in the early weeks of the semester (The Yemassee, The Clansman, I’ll Take My Stand) and some of the titles I see as important but in the supporting cast: The Help, GWTW. The films too would make a good summer series.     ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature Topic: Early Cinema 1893-1920  Paul Young (Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)  Please contact Prof. Young directly about screenings and readings prior to first seminar session This seminar treats the period between the first projected film screenings in the United States (1895-1896) and the regularization of production, distribution, and exhibition in place in the US (as well as Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and India) by 1920. Our focus will oscillate between the medium itself during these formative years and the cultural concerns to which cinematic discourse spoke: mechanization, industry, and urban experience; the growing public presence of women; and the racial, ethnic, and regional differences that problematized "American identity" even as the cinema identified (nearly) all Americans as potential spectators. No prior knowledge of film is required, but participants should be prepared to read and view widely outside of class in order to gain proficiency in reading film styles and techniques more rapidly. Requirements will include weekly screenings and readings, student presentations, a midterm analysis exercise, and a final seminar paper.     HIST 344 A (Dual List with ENGL) Studies in Modern England Topic:  British Identities at Home and Away in the long 19th Century James Epstein (Thursdays, 12:10-3:00 p.m.)  Note Change of Meeting Day This course is designed to introduce graduate students to recent works of British social, political, cultural, and literary history, focussing on constructions of identities (national, imperial, gender, class, urban, rural, etc.) during the long 19th century.  Particular emphasis is placed on how collective identities were shaped through interchange between metropolitan and colonial sites.  The course also seeks to link secondary works to the reading and interpreting of contemporary works.  Readings include key works by historians such as Linda Colley, Catherine Hall, and Judith Walkowitz, by literary and cutltural critics such as Simon Gikandi and Raymond Williams, and works by writers such as Jane Austen, William Cobbett, Mary Seacole, and Thomas Carlyle.   HIST  343  (Dual List with ENGL) Studies in Early Modern English History Topic: Religion, culture and politics in post reformation England Peter Lake (Wednesday, 6:10-9:00 pm)   The course will examine the interaction between religious change and politics in the period after the reformation.  The focus will be on the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.  Emphasis will be given to questions of ‘political culture’; the ways in which the peculiar exigencies of the Elizabethan regime, in Collinson’s phrase ‘the Elizabethan exclusion crisis’, led to various experiments in the ways in which politics was conducted.  Central here will be the notion of the monarchical republic of Elizabeth 1 and the politics of popularity and the various monarchical reactions thereby provoked.  The doings of both Catholics and Puritans will be examined and a wide range of primary sources will be consulted.  Various literary texts will also be used.   Spring 2011 Seminars and Workshops ENGL 303-1 Graduate Fiction Workshop Tony Earley (Thursdays, 2:30-5:00 p.m.)   Description Forthcoming   ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop Kate Daniels (Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) This is an intensive workshop in poetry writing.  Students are expected to complete 10-12 new poems (or the equivalent) over the course of the semester, or to engage in extensive revision of the poems in the thesis.  Reading list:  Individual volumes of poetry by the poets who will visit campus as part of the Visiting Writers Series, including Frank Bidart, Jericho Brown, Ciaran Carson, Mark Jarman, and Bobby Rogers.  Several of these writers will visit class.  In addition, we will read several essays on relevant issues in contemporary poetry and poetics, as they arise from the work under examination in the workshop.  Extensive revision and regular conferencing with the instructor are expected. For National Poetry Month in April, students (working individually or together) will devise projects that are campus- or community-based.  Documentation of these projects will be part of the portfolio due at semester’s end.  Finally, collaborating with the Art Department, MFA poets will be asked to create brief texts for an on-campus art installation, that will be directed by Professor Mel Ziegler (see: www.vanderbilt.edu/myvu/news/2007/09/21/community-art-is-passion-of-new-studio-arts-chair-mel-ziegler.47322 )     ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop Peter Guralnick (Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) Limited enrollment. Admission to the workshop is by instructor permission, with re-enrollment by students who have previously taken the course subject to the same proviso. Interested students should register and contact the English Department about submitting a brief writing sample on an assigned topic, to be turned in before the December break. This is a workshop on Creative Nonfiction, which revolves around the writing of the participants, with additional readings in work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Jack Kerouac, Wil Haygood, Rosanne Cash, and Alice Munro. It will focus on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception, with special emphasis on the profile – in other words, how to make a real-life story come alive in the same way that fictional narrative can. This is a workshop in which we are all interdependent on each other's efforts. Three major pieces of 2500-3000 words will be required, along with the possibility of some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the other students' papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. Class participation is the second most important element of the class (after the writing itself), so attendance is of the highest importance. Most of all, the workshop is a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing (irrespective of the level of achievement) should make it engaging – and fun – for all. The only prerequisite is a commitment to effort and honest self-expression.       ENGL 307-01 Graduate Seminar Topic: Why Write: Perspectives on Literary Creativity Kate Daniels (Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)   In this seminar designed for graduate students in creative writing, we will consider why people write poems, novels, plays, and short stories. What is the ancient and cross-cultural urge to express oneself creatively in written language all about?  What is the function of the literary imagination in individual lives,  as well as in larger social and cultural contexts?  Finally, because this is a seminar for creative writers, we will ruminate on this question posed by Australian novelist Sue Woolfe:  “What are people who sit in rooms making up stories doing with their minds?”  We will essay responses by exploring three current approaches to understanding literary creativity: psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and (for lack of a better term at present) aesthetics. Reading for this part of the semester will include: Freud’s “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” and “On the Mystic Writing Pad,” Jung’s “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” Edmund Bergler’s “Unconscious Mechanisms in Writer’s Block,” The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice Flaherty, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience, by Sue Woolfe,  and several other essays and book excerpts..  During the second half of the semester, we will hear from writers themselves – George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, William Styron, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker et al –  about why they (think they) write,  and how they imagine the relationship of their “selves” to the texts they create. Of particular interest may be our inquiries into ideas about mental and physical illness and writing; addiction and writing; gender and writing; and confinement and writing.  We will end the semester by critiquing two films that feature writers as main characters as a way of talking about some of the common ideas and stereotypes of writers and artists perpetuated by mass media.     ENGL 314-01 Seminar: 1600-1800 Topic: Theatre and Empire  Bridget Orr (Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)   This course is focused on the role of theater in the development (and contestation) of English/British ideologies of nation and empire in the long eighteenth century.  We will be reading major dramatic works from Dryden to Inchbald, tracking the emergence and revision of late Stuart, Tory, Whig, Patriot, Walpolean, radical and Pittite defences and critiques of colonialism.  But rather than reading the texts solely as vehicles for particular Court/factional or party positions, we shall consider generic changes, including the rise and fall of heroic, pathetic and sentimental modes; the emergence of pantomime, ballad-opera and musical comedy; and what Michael Ragussis calls multi-ethnic spectacles, in the theatrical construction of national and imperial spectators.  Our inquiries will be informed by the ancient question as to why Georgian dramaturgy seems to fall away so sharply from the achievements of Restoration playwrights despite the cultural centrality of theatre throughout this period.   ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature Dana Nelson Topic: Democratic Frontiers (Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)   Where does democratic power originate? Where does it abide? What contains and guards it?   Who exercises it and by what right? Is its exercise inevitably through sovereignty, singular and unified through symbol, formal government or representative actor? Or can it be generated—not just effectively but maybe ethically—in plurality, collaboratively, as a commons? These are not just theoretical questions, addressed by theorists of democracy from Schmitt and Agamben to Derrida, Hardt and Negri; they are historical too. In this course, after touring through some recent interdisciplinary work that rethinks the history of sovereignty in the early years of nation, we’ll investigate how early US literature can help us animate historical questions about US democracy, and suggest how it fleshes out some recent theorizing about constituent power, or the power of the multitude, while challenging us to think beyond familiar categories.  We’ll pay especial attention to frontier literature, for what it has to tell us both about how more equalitarian practices were being represented as “pre-political” and “savage” in the early nation, and for how those practices continued showing up well into the nineteenth-century. And we’ll think about theories, histories and practices of communing and their relation to alternative democratic practices.    Fictional texts we’ll read probably include: Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, Cooper, Pioneers, Bird, Nick of the Woods, Kirkland A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, Ridge, Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, Delany Blake, or the Huts of America, and Davis,Waiting for the Verdict.   We’ll read history by Woody Holton, Terry Bouton, Christian Fritz, Reeve Huston, Laura Edwards and Ron Formisano; political theory by some of the above and Melissa Orlie, Suzette Hemberger and Sheldon Wolin, and assorted literary critics like Jennifer Greiman and Mark Rifkin. ENGL 337B-01 Introduction to Literary Theory Robert Barsky Topic: Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism (Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)   This course will survey central postcolonial theories as a way of thinking about some crucial issues relating to the postcolonial and multicultural experiences, and the issues raised by the integration of people into a host country subsequent to significant upheaval in their country of origin. Along the way, we will examine the implications of colonial encounter, and formation of idea "post-colonial" culture, particularly in a multicultural urban setting. Subjects include language, freedom and agency, gender roles, representation of space, relation between power and narrative. By comparing details of the legal procedure leading to immigrant or refugee status to the experiences recounted in the fictional texts, we will also have occasion to discuss the conflicting images that the society projects onto its ethnic groups, and the effects they have upon individuals attempting to find their way “home” in fiction and in life.   ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature Topic:  Cinema and the Thics of Desire: Love, the Other , and the Body in the Film Image Sam Girgus (Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)   Cinema and the Ethics of Desire: Love, the Other, and the Body in the Film Image   The relationship of ethics to love, sexuality, and the body in American and international cinema as seen through the writings and thought of leading modern thinkers including Freud, Kristeva, Irigaray, Ricoeur, and Levinas.* The course will consider the body on film as the condition of the ethical relationship to the other. The course will propose a systematic methodology based on psychoanalysis and modern ethics for studying film as a heterogeneous “cinetext,” meaning a complex art form of vision and sound. We will examine such interconnected themes as time and the feminine; the maternal body and the ideology of love; sex and redemption; subjectivity, the law, and the other; paternal power and the missing male. We will concentrate on studying the relationship between the art of the film image (cinematography, editing, sound etc.) and the themes of the body and ethics, often in the contexts of national social and cultural ideologies. The course will be geared for both beginning and advanced students. We will choose a workable number of films for study from a wide range of diverse films from different national cinemas and periods, potentially including for example, selections from the modernist works of Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Chereau, and Bunuel; classics by such American directors as Ford, Capra, Hawks, Scorsese, Allen, Lee, Lynch, and Eastwood; the innovative cinema of Almodovar, Oshima, Del Toro, Inarritu, among others; historic and current women directors such as Ida Lupino, Julia Dash, Agnes Varda, Debra Granik, and Lisa Cholodenko; and various adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. We also will consider studying films that test the increasingly porous line between the sexualized screen body and the soft pornography of American popular culture today.   *Suggested critical and theoretical readings will include writings by Kelly Oliver, Tina Chanter, Ewa Ziarek, and Richard Kearney, among others.     ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English and American Literature Hortense Spillers Topic:  Black Male Writers:  The Troika Plus One (Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)   “Black Male Writers: The Troika Plus One”: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin might arguably be thought of as the major African-American writers of the post-World War II period and as a result, the chief voices of a black post-modernism; the youngest member of this literary combination, David Bradley, writing in the wake of his “elders,” shows traces of that past, as well as strides toward new ground. This course is devoted to a study of these figures and the “anxieties of influence” that make it possible for us to read them as a kind of “visionary company.”   Spring 2010 Seminars and Workshops ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop Tony Earley (Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) Description Forthcoming   ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop Kate Daniels (Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) *This is an intensive workshop in poetry writing.  Students are expected to complete 10-12 new poems (or the equivalent) over the course of the semester.  We will use the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition, as a base text for the class.  In addition, we’ll read individual volumes of poetry by the poets who will visit campus as part of the Visiting Writers Series.  Extensive revision and regular conferencing with the instructor are expected.   ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop Peter Guralnick (Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with a particular emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, W.C. Heinz, Louis Menand, and Alice Munro. Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should lead to discussion that is as wide-ranging as it is lively and engaging.   ENGL 307-01 Literature and Craft of Writing Topic:  Frost and Stevens, Their Craft and Influence Mark Jarman (Thursdays, 2:10-5:00 p.m.) Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens are two of America’s greatest and most original poets and tower over their contemporaries in the twentieth century.  As individuals and artists they could not appear more different.  Frost presented himself to the world as a New England farmer, while Stevens was an executive with a major insurance agency in Hartford, Connecticut.  Frost held various posts in universities and gave frequent readings of his work, barding around, as he called it.  Stevens’ interaction with the American public was mainly as an insurance adjustor, one of his era’s best investigators of claims.  Their poetry differed markedly as well.  Frost’s poems reflect his persona as a Yankee agrarian, recording the voices and lives of country people in New Hampshire and Vermont.  In his poetry, Stevens departed entirely from the drab world of business to celebrate the wildly imaginative and exotic in his unique verses, often about fantastic characters.  Not only do they provide a contrast in their poetry, but in their professional careers. Yet both poets had much more in common than is apparent.  Both encountered the thought of William James and George Santayana at HarvardUniversity in the 1890's.  Both spent a long apprenticeship as poets before publishing their first books.  Both were masters of traditional English verse, especially the blank verse line, but Stevens was one of the great innovators in American free verse, a course Frost never followed.  Both were engaged by the modern dilemma of alienation.   Both saw poetry as an answer to the modern problem of religious belief. Our course will examine the work of these two poets side by side, with a special emphasis on their craft and innovations by both poets.  We will also consider poets who benefited from the example of one or the other.  In the case of Robert Frost, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney.  And Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, in the case of Wallace Stevens. You will be required to give a presentation to the class and to write a paper.  Our texts will be the Library of America Editions of Robert Frost’s Poetry and Prose and Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose.  There will also be supplemental readings of more contemporary poets.   ENGL 307-02 Literature and Craft of Writing Topic:  Where the Girls Are:  (Some) Contemporary Women Short Story Writers and their Influences Nancy Reisman (Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) This course will explore of the work of a range of late 20th and 21st century women story writers, their aesthetics, voices, and literary techniques; their generational and cultural moments; the sense of relationship, desire, and place within their work; their visions of the short story form; and their literary and non-literary influences. We’ll read work by Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Edna O’Brien, Angela Carter, Lorrie Moore, Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others.  Course projects will offer opportunities to engage with the art-making process are well as with various analytical considerations of these writers’ works.   ENGL 314-01 Seminar, 1660-1800 Topic:  Ideas of Fiction Jonathan Lamb (Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) Background:  There has been a further spate of theories of the novel in the last few years, with new books or essays by Catherine Gallagher, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Alex Woloch and Candace Vogler, to name a few.  One of the most interesting contributions was not directly concerned with the novel but with the nature of contract, specifically the original contract which, in the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (for example) forms the basis of civil society.  In her book, Wayward Contracts, Vicky Kahn explored the English Revolution as a collision between two radically different kinds of narrative:  the story of feudal obligation and the story of foundational consent.   When the latter supervened and became the basis of English history in the eighteenth century, a very close liaison was produced between politics and poetics, Kahn argues, because a fiction had managed to transfigure not only the nature of politics but also the nature of experience.  She is not the first person to suggest that the novel comes about not as an attempt to reflect the empirical actuality of life, but as an exercise in fictionality itself.  Gallagher and Lynch both argue that fiction is concerned with fiction, not with the real, and that it is its quality of being made up, not of being empirically accurate, which appeals to the reader.  But what if this were true not just of the novel, but of all the business of civil society?  Often in Robinson Crusoe we find the hero saying things such as, `As I imagined it, so it was,’ or dreaming the next phase of his life on the island before it actually happens.  Is it the law of imagination we ought to be invoking, and not the standard of empirical actuality?  Have we been reading novels the wrong way round? Aims:  Well if we have, how might we begin to reread novels?  The course will be divided in two parts.  The first will negotiate theories of fiction, from Samuel Johnson to Candace Vogler, with Kahn’s provisos in mind, to see if we can form an idea of the preposterous kind of novel, and what that would entail for the characters within it, as well as the readers of it.  This will require making some basic distinctions between fiction, history and romance; also between characters, persons and authors.  In the second half, I want each student to propose a novel that exhibits some of these preposterous characteristics, ranging for their examples between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries.   ENGL 325-01 Seminar in Modern British and American Literature Topic:  Comparative  Modernisms Mark Wollaeger (Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) The course aims to provide an introduction to modernism attentive to the recent global/transnational turn in modernist studies. As currently conceived, it should be titled Modernisms: Genealogical and Comparative. The genealogical axis will begin in two “origins”: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857), often described as the progenitors of modern fiction and modern poetry respectively. From these beginnings we will move forward through some major English-language works by Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot (The Good Soldier,Ulysses, early Eliot up through The Waste Land). Once into twentieth-century British modernism, we will push further out along the comparative axis (opened already by the movement from England to Ireland) by reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway alongside Ahmet Tanipar’s The Time Regulation Institute, a Turkish comic novel. We will also loop back to Ulysses via some Japanese experimental fiction, including Ito Sei’s “Streets of Fiendish Ghosts,” and possibly by some Indian Anglophone literature. We will also read significant theoretical work underpinning the global turn, from Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire (e.g., “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”) to more recent work by theorists of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and comparativity (e.g., Anthony Appiah, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Fredric Jameson, Jonathan Culler, Franco Moretti). Rather than require a long seminar paper at the end, this course will culminate in two shorter pieces (ten and five pages) designed as talks and seminar position papers for submission to the Modernist Studies Association Convention, which meets every fall, and will also require a variety of short papers and presentations during the semester    ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English and American Literature Topic: The Other Latino:  Contemporary Latino Literature Lorraine Lopez (Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) Latino literature consists of poetry and prose written by American authors of Hispanic heritage who have been inculcated by the U.S. experience, who write in English, and who self-identify as Latinos.  While seeking to honor the diversity within this diversity, this seminar focuses on the vibrant new writings by U.S. Latinos--Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican-Americans, whose work is an important component of mainstream American culture. Authors whose work we will investigate include Junot Diaz, Helena Maria Viramontes, Stephanie Elizondo-Griest, Daniel Chacon, Sergio Troncoso, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, and topics we will cover are cultural hybridity, post-Movement identity, borderlands theory, gender dynamics, and popular religiosity.   ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English and American Literature Topic:  Print Culture and Literary Production Dahlia Porter (Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) In the opening section of The Dunciad, Alexander Pope descries the endless stream of “Journals, Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines” issuing from Grub Street, home to publishers, booksellers, aspiring poets, and impoverished hack writers. Pope’s concern, like many of his generation, stemmed from the rapid expansion of the universe of print—an ever-expanding world in which authors and readers acquired new roles, literature became a business, and the locus of literary authority was continually up for grabs. If Pope responded to these new formations with satire (and a lawsuit again Curll for publishing his letters), by 1815 Wordsworth had come upon a different solution: every original author, he argued, “had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” The world of print might be used to an author’s advantage; the only trick was figuring out how. This course will examine the central questions raised by a new awareness (in authors, readers, editors, and publishers) of the power and potential of print in the 18th and 19th centuries. We will begin with a survey of recent criticism to establish the scholarly conversation and pinpoint some useful methodological approaches (book history, word and image studies, material culture, new historicism). We’ll then devote several weeks to a trio of significant eighteenth-century publishing projects: Pope’s Dunciad, Richardson’s Pamela, and Johnson’s Dictionary. After working through a matrix of conceptual and technical issues with these case studies, we’ll shift our attention to the formal and generic innovations of Romantic era. Coupling theory, criticism, and primary texts, we’ll consider topics ranging from ekphrasis (Blake as engraver and poet); paratexts (prefaces, illustrations, and interludes in Darwin and Smith); annotation (footnotes in Owenson’s novel The Wild Irish Girl and Southey’s oriental tale Thalaba the Destroyer); collection (museums, miscellanies, and Lyrical Ballads); celebrity (the wildly popular Lord Byron); periodicals and reviews (James Hogg and Blackwood’s magazine); and the death of the author (quite literally, in Shelley’s Adonais).   ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English and American Literature Topic: Cosmopolitanism Otherwise:  African American and Caribbean Women's Border Crossings Ifeoma Nwankwo (Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) This course will center on the ways Black women word artists have narrated, represented, and theorized transnational border crossing during three key eras in African Diaspora history: Pre-Emancipation; New Negro Renaissance; the Contemporary Period (1980-present). What do they identify as the drivers behind and the key positive or negative outcomes of these journeys? What language or terminology do these women use to talk about such movements? Do/Can we see recurring paradigms for enacting or discussing cross-national engagement? How do these conventions converge with or diverge from those foregrounded in contemporary scholarly discourse? Through in-depth examinations of the treatment of the international in autobiography, fiction, poetry, scholarly writing, and music lyrics by African American, Caribbean and Afro-Latin American women, we will consider the benefits and the drawbacks of employing cosmopolitanism as a way of reading and discussing Black women’s cross-border movements. We will explore questions such as: What is the history of cosmopolitanism as a concept? Who has used it and to what end? Why should we or should not use it to discuss/interpret Black women’s border crossings? What alternatives are there, and what are the benefits and limitations of these alternatives, especially as employed by scholars? Are there analytical maneuvers that the concepts of Diaspora, The Black Atlantic, Pan-Africanism, and Third World Feminism allow us to make that cosmopolitanism does not, or vice versa? The syllabus is divided into units. Each unit represents a particular category of transnational movement (e.g. migration) or destination (e.g. “Africa”). Each unit’s reading list includes at least one text from each of the following categories: literature, history, literary criticism, and literary theory. The course requirements, plainly stated, are: class participation, position papers, discussion leading, and final paper. All students are expected to come to each class with a brief (3-4 page) position paper on the day’s readings and be ready to use it as a basis for engaging in dialogue with classmates. In addition, for each class session, one student will be responsible for not just leading discussion, but rather for inspiring a vibrant discussion of the readings. Reading list includes: K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother Nancy Prince, The West Indies Nella Larsen, Quicksand Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory   Other Courses of Interest   FRENCH 395 Topic: “Crime, Punishment and Confession” Robert Barsky (Thursdays 3:10-5:30 p.m.) This course, to be taught in English, combines primary works of literature written in the 19th and 20th centuries with secondary critical works which address concerns of the law and literature movement from various perspectives. First, we will survey the field by examining some of the foundational texts used in the “field” of literature and law. We will then look to issues relating to the community that adjudicates in both literature and law, raising issues of interpretation, reader response, and pre-conceived notions about fields and disciplines. With some theoretical and literary material in hand, we will then look to issues raised in feminism as they relate to both the legal and the literary fields. Finally, we shall discuss the problem of ‘constructing a productive other’ as it applies to both author-hero relations in fiction, and individual-claimant relations in law. There will be some secondary themes developed throughout this course. First, we will discuss the process of narrative construction in literature and law, which essentially refers to the transformation of inner experience into narrative through relations with the other. Second, we will evaluate narrative strategies in literature and law with an aim to understanding the production and reproduction of legitimate language and the economy of linguistic exchange. Third, we will survey various approaches to 'outsider law' and its contemporary application. Fourth, we will have recourse to categories such as 'situatedness,' 'answerability,' and 'author-hero' relations as a means of discussing literatures of confession. Finally, we will discuss the implications of social discourse theory for the study of literature and law as a means of finding themes and concerns which are common to both domains 1. Theory texts: M. Angenot, «What Can Literature Do?” in Marc Angenot and the Scandal of History M.M. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination and Art and Answerability P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power J.-F. Lyotard, The différend Meyer, Michel Philosophy and the Passions Richard Posner, Literature and Law   2. Literary texts: Honoré de Balzac, selections from different novels and short stories Marquis de Sade, Dialogue between a Priest and a moribond Victor Hugo, The Last day of a Condemned Man Emile Zola, « J’accuse » and selections from novels from the Rougon-Macquart series Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea Albert Camus, The Stranger   Fall 2009 Seminars and Workshops ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop Nancy Reisman (Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) The central goal of this graduate fiction workshop is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. This is primarily a studio course; participants will also consider published works of fiction and discussions of craft.  As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll discuss artistic vision in relation to questions of form and structure, and the possibilities for invention and for reinvigorating tradition. Throughout the semester, we’ll discuss both short and longer forms of fiction, and we’ll consider varieties of perception, narrative stance, tension, dramatic and non-dramatic progression, voice, language, and other aspects of craft. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? Conceptualize character? How might we consider conflicting and/or echoing movements within a given piece?  Which ‘rules’ might be most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between fiction writing and other arts? Between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell?  Throughout the semester, graduate writers will be required to produce and present new original fiction, and to read and respond to published writing in class discussion and written discussions.   ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop Mark Jarman (Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants.  Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course.  Each class member will also choose a poet, in consultation with the workshop leader, for extensive study, resulting in a presentation to the class at the end of the semester.  There will also be weekly discussion of reading assignments from our texts:  Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, & Meg Schoerke and Twentieth Century American Poetics, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, & Meg Schoerke.   ENGL 307-01 Literature and  the Craft of Writing Topic:  Reading/"Reading" Vanderbilt Writers Kate Daniels (Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) Creative Writing has been a vital part of Vanderbilt University’s English Department for nearly a century. Much of the discourse around the history of writers and writing at Vanderbilt has been dominated by the controversial text known as I’ll Take My Stand:Twelve Southerners on the South and the Agrarian Tradition – an anthology of manifesto-like essays published in 1929. We will begin this MFA seminar by reading this small book that has evoked so much interest and that has come to be so prominently identified with the institution. Then we’ll try to read with fresh eyes selected works by many of the writers who studied and wrote at Vanderbilt under the influence of this text as undergraduate and graduate students, and as faculty members. We will consider the idea of a Vanderbilt “tradition” of creative writing, and whether that term is still relevant in any meaningful way. We will also look at Vanderbilt writers as teachers of writing – an old and important practice at Vanderbilt that began with Ransom’s famous class which he called “a practical course in writing various types of prose, including the short story.” Ransom’s most notable students included Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Peter Taylor. Other important writers who have studied at Vanderbilt include Roy Blount, Jr., James Dickey, Jesse Hill Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Caroline Gordon, Madison Jones, Jim Wayne Miller, James Patterson, Elizabeth Spencer, Max Steele, and Jesse Stuart. Younger writers who were once students at Vanderbilt include Diann Blakely, Elaine Fowler Palencia, Kevin Wilson, and Greg Williamson. Our semester will end with a panel discussion with members of the current MFA faculty. Please purchase (used) copies of books on Amazon. Selected poems means that I will make a selection of poems for you to read. Texts: I’ll Take My Stand:Twelve Southerners on the South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) Blount, Jr., Roy. Alphabet Juice (2008) Dickey, James. Buckdancer’s Choice, Deliverance, selections from journals Gilchrist, Ellen. Victory Over Japan (stories), selections from The Writing Life (essays) Gordon, Caroline. The Women on the Porch Jarrell, Randall. The Poet and the Age, and selected poems. Patterson, James. Choose one… Ransom, The World’s Body and selected poems. Elizabeth Spencer. The Stories of ES (1981) Tate, Allen. Selection of poems. Taylor, Peter. A Long Fourth & Other Stories (1948), A Summons to Memphis (1985) Warren: All the King’s Men, Audubon: A Vision, Brother to Dragons, Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren & Cleanth Brooks: Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction Younger contemporaries: Kevin Wilson & Leah Stewart Older contemporaries: MFA faculty   ENGL 312-01 Seminar in Seventeenth -Century Literature Topic:  Milton Leah Marcus (Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) John Milton was a well-known political radical, one of the English revolutionaries who signed the death warrant of King Charles I. As an artist, however, he was interestingly conservative in that he practiced literary forms that in their own era looked like throwbacks to a fairly distant past. This course offers students the opportunity to read (or reread) all of Milton’s major writings, with an emphasis on their cultural context at the time they were written and published, beginning in the Caroline period, spanning the tumult of the Civil War and Interregnum, and extending well into the Restoration. We will also survey recent Milton criticism, taking note of its strengths and attempting to interpret its blind spots, particularly its tendency to run twenty years behind the rest of the field of Early Modern studies.   ENGL 318-01 Seminar in Victorian Prose and Poetry Topic: Victorian Temporalities: Past, Present, Future Rachel Teukolsky (Thursdays,12:30-3:00 p.m.) Victorian writers are known for their powerful and often anguished sense of history. Some used nostalgia to adjust to the startling modernity of their own industrial age; others observed the falls of previous empires and arrived at a new relativistic understanding of their own place in the world timeline. This course will introduce Victorian literature using the rubric of temporality. Our readings will be divided into three loose groupings: past, present, and future. In the course’s first section, “Past,” topics will include Victorian medievalism, the historical novel, neo-Catholicism, Pre-Raphaelitism, the trope of contrast, and philosophies of history and history-writing. We will also begin to explore the role of historicism in the field of Victorian studies more broadly. Part two, “Present,” will look at some of the more synchronic and spatial modes that Victorian writers used to limn their new modernity, or “the spirit of the age.” Topics will include defining the modern, reality and realism, things, the Great Exhibition, London and the geographies of modernity, and modes of everyday life. An interlude will focus on Darwinian narratives of development. The final part of the course, “Future,” will examine late-Victorian visions of the world to come. We will consider aesthetic utopianism, dystopia and science fiction, decadence, and cultures of new media. The course will ideally conclude with a segment on steampunk, the modern-day romance with Victorian futurism. Authors will likely include: W. Thackeray, J. Ruskin, T. Carlyle, R. Browning, G. Eliot, C. Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, C. Dickens, E. B. Browning, K. Marx, C. Darwin, W. Morris, B. Stoker, and H.G. Wells, along with a selection of relevant contemporary theorists and critics. ENGL 320-01 Studies in American Literature Topic: Poe's Gothic:  The Antebellum Context Colin Dayan (Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.) In In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams debunks the idea of Poe as a morbid romantic transplanted onto American soil.  “Poe was not ‘a fault of nature,’ ‘a find for French eyes’ but a genius intimately shaped by his locality and time.  It is to save our faces that we’ve given him a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classic accuracies we have not known how else to escape.”  In this seminar, we will place Poe in his varying locales, dealing closely with his poetry, fiction, and criticism.  This attempt to make Poe local will depend on providing contexts for the study of his work: Newtonian mechanics, Calvinist predetermination, empirical philosophy, medical jurisprudence, and, most important, legal and natural histories of slavery.  Whether he writes from Virginia, New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, Poe addresses questions of property, slavery, superstition, and status—questions that put him in dialogue with the romance of the South and the realities of race. Some questions to be considered:  1) How was ghostliness reinvented through the language of property and persons that questioned the mental prerequisites of legal responsibility? 2) What are the grounds for a transnational gothic into which are seeded legal fictions, spiritual beliefs, and historical fragments? Primary readings include:  selected legal cases and sermons; the Bible (Leviticus, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Romans); Poe’s poetry, tales, essays, and reviews (including Eureka, his “Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe”); Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, George Balcombe; Lydia Maria Child, A Romance of the Republic; Robert Bird, Shepherd Lee; Richard Hildreth, Archy Moore, the White Slave; or Memoirs of a Fugitive. ENGL 337A-01 Introduction to Literary Theory Topic: Pro-seminar:  Practical Theory Mark Schoenfield (Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) How do our theoretical paradigms intersect with our current research methods?  Using this general question as a guide, we will explore the practical implications of theoretical perspectives  and consider how to deploy current (and older) technologies to establish research questions and solutions.   As the conduit between epistemology and literary production, literary theory explores questions of what is a text, a book, what are an author, what's up with grammar anyway?  In this course, we will consider certain paradigms—structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, among them—in the context of three concrete literary situations.  We will use 19th-century periodicals to explore questions of authorship, textuality, and narrative.  We will consider the pressures of consumption and economics on the formation of literary culture, roles, and identities.  Finally, we will look at interdisciplinary research by considering the field of Law and Literature. Students will do projects, presentations, and papers, with an emphasis on collaboration.   ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature Topic: The Black Atlantic:  Literature, Cultures, and Histories of 'Crossing' Houston Baker (Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.) A caveat: this is not a course for the faint of heart or the un-theoretically grounded, or, for those unwilling to read ‘til their eyes have grown weary with the grace of theoretical knowledge.  This is not an introductory, or, a lecture course. This is not a course in any way lax in its requirements for the following: one-hundred percent class attendance, enlightened contributions to class discussion, originality of thought, and demonstrated ability to synthesize ranging concerns of expressive cultural, socio-historical, post-colonial, post-modernist, post-colonial feminist critique currently informing Diaspora Studies into a rich mixture of scholarly results.  But … this course is also formally intended as a space of discussion, a site of learning, and a forum for a rich array of criticism and theorizing of Black Diaspora texts -- written, video, autobiographical, documentary, theoretical, fictional, poetic, historical, and sociological. Commencing with multiple contours of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, this course will endeavor rigorously to provide a sighting and intellectual grasp of Black Diaspora critical, narratological, and theoretical models in combination with fiercely compelling and enjoyable readings of Diaspora expressive cultural texts (e.g., Earl Lovelace’s Salt).  Anchoring the course are: Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, and Heather Russell’s Legba’s Crossing (Due from University of Georgia Press, November 2009).  Theoretical necessities include some knowledge (Cf. GOOGLE) of Foucault, C.L.R. James, Simmel, De Certeau, Parks, Du Bois, and others. Additional de rigueur texts on our syllabus include: Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey, Edward Glissant and George Lamming, Richard Wright and Colson Whitehead, Kamau Brathwaite, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and others. Compiling a bibliography of the Diaspora, as well as local fieldwork, are included in course requirements. The “returns” of the course (the course well and successfully pursued, that is) include being adequately prepared for a future job interview at MLA.

Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 Seminars and Workshops

Fall 2008 Seminars and Workshops

ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop
Nancy Reisman
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The central goal of this graduate fiction workshop is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. This is primarily a studio course; participants will also consider published works of fiction and discussions of craft. As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll discuss artistic vision in relation to questions of form and structure, and the possibilities for invention and for reinvigorating tradition. We’ll consider the questions of perception, narrative stance, varieties of tension, dramatic and non-dramatic progression, voice, language, and other aspects of craft. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? Conceptualize character? To what extent is secular epiphany central, marginal, false? How might we consider conflicting and/or echoing movements within a given piece? Which ‘rules’ might be most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between fiction writing and other arts? Between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? Throughout the semester, graduate writers will be required to produce and present new original fiction, to read and respond to published writing in class discussion and written discussions.


ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Kate Daniels
(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This an intensive graduate workshop in writing poetry. We will read various volumes of contemporary poetry in conjunction with the Visiting Writers series. Students will be expected to produce a significant portfolio of poems by semester's end; attend regular conferences with the instructor; and participate intensely in class by preparing advance written responses to the week's offerings.


ENGL 307-01 Literature and Craft of Writing
Topic: Reading Emily Dickinson
Kate Daniels
(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate seminar designed for MFA students. Our focus will be on the syntax, grammar, parts of speech, diction, and punctuation preferred by Dickinson in both her poems and her prose. Our goal will be to develop some ideas about how those choices accounted for her startlingly unconventional, pre-Modern, pre-psychoanalytic literary voice. We will examine Dickinson’s language through close readings of many poems and letters. There will be some comparison of her unique utterances with more conventional examples from the period (Longfellow, for example), but for the most part, we will spend our time getting our hands dirty in the guts of the poems to discover how they work. Over the summer, please read The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Thomas Johnson, ed.) and one of the biographies. You will also need to familiarize yourself with Dickinson’s preferred metrical form, common (or hymn) meter. Additional readings during the semester will include letters and manuscript versions of many poems. In a final writing project, students will address aspects of Dickinson’s praxis within the context of the aesthetics and formal practices of their own creative work. Grading: 1/3 each for class participation; seminar presentation; writing project.


ENGL 310-01 Seminar in Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare and Sexual Ideologies
Kathryn Schwarz
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)


The works of Shakespeare have often provided a symptomatic focus for theories of gender and sexuality. From the rise of academic feminism, through the debates between feminists and new historicists, to the evolution of psychoanalytic, queer and performativity theories, Shakespearean criticism both reflects and contributes to the emergence of new methodologies in literary critical discourse. Assumptions concerning the canonicity of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean work as a kind of Trojan horse, authorizing approaches that might, at least initially, be resisted as marginal, “too political,” or otherwise threatening to disciplinary conventions. At the same time, those approaches put in question the processes through which orthodoxies—of literary works, and of literary critical practices—takes shape. The particular ways in which this happens raise a number of provocative questions. How do the “transgressions” of feminine characters, ranging from transvestism to illicit sexuality to inappropriate authority to acts of political and domestic violence, authorize feminist readings that challenge misogyny on its own grounds? How do the history plays, traditionally regarded as articulations of exclusively masculine preoccupations, enable the development of feminist historicism? In what ways do responses to the Sonnets reveal both intersections and conflicts between gay studies and queer theory? Why is Shakespeare so central to the current tensions between historicist and presentist approaches to sexual and gendered identity?

In this course we will look at a range of Shakespeare’s works in relation to the ideological discourses surrounding gender and sexuality. We will read these works in the context of significant critical interventions, and the theoretical methodologies on which those interventions draw. Our goal is not only to consider the sexual politics of the Shakespearean, but to use that issue as a focal point for questions about the larger implications of critical practice.


ENGL 320-02 Studies in American Literature
Topic: Antebellum U.S. Print Culture
Teresa Goddu
(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This course will focus on the emergence of a national literary marketplace in the U.S. antebellum period by examining how the market revolution structured the trade in print.

By examining print as a cultural as well as marketable commodity, the course will situate texts within a variety of distributional, technological, consumerist as well as discursive networks of meaning. It will examine a range of popular print forms—from almanacs and gift books to periodicals and pamphlets—in conjunction with the canonical literature of the period. For instance, we will read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in relationship to the gift book, The Pearl, in order to understand how Hawthorne deployed popular print forms to write a bestseller. The course will introduce students to archival research as well as to the interdisciplinary methodology of the history of the book which maps the relationships between the materiality of the text (its publication history or status as a commercial commodity) and its meaning. The course will draw on a number of fields—including material and literary culture, economic and social history, and technology—in order to map the intersections between cultural and commercial history. Several short papers and a final 20-25 pp. paper.

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "Literary Geographies"
Allison Schachter
(Thursdays 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This seminar will investigate the relationship between literature and geography: how literature, particularly the novel, both imagines and represents political territory, and how literary historians and critics narrate this relationship. We will focus on the circulation of literature, literary communities, and languages beyond national borders, interrogating such terms as "international," "transnational," "global," and "diasporic." The class will be divided into two sections. The first section will explore key theoretical models of literary geography, Weltliteratur, “Third-World Literature,” and imagined communities. The second section of the class will examine two geographically motivated models of literary history: The Black Atlantic and the Jewish Diaspora. Both these models harness the power of regional and diasporic geographies to challenge national literary narratives and to make visible obscured cultural formations. Students in the class will be given an opportunity to develop and explore their own alternative literary geographies. Readings include literary works by Junot Diaz, José Rizal, Derek Walcott, Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, and Jacqueline Kahanoff. Critical works include texts by Aijaz Ahmand, Benedict Anderson, Rey Chow, Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford, and Daniel Boyarin.


ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "The Idea of Black Culture"
Hortense Spillers
(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course will attempt to lay out a theory of black culture in its local and diasporic instances by looking at some of the work of W.E.B.DuBois over and against some of the writings of the Frankfurt School, notably Herbert Marcuse.


ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English/American Literature
Topic: 'Out of Ireland we have come:' Big House Fiction and Anglo-Irish Identity
Michael Neill
(Wednesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen, wrote of her family home: 'It is the negation of mystical Ireland: its bald walls rebut the surrounding, disturbing light. Imposed on seized land, built in the rulers' ruling tradition, the house is, all the same, of the local rock, and sheds the same grey gleam you see over the countryside.' This course will use a range of fictions centred on the so-called 'big houses' of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy as a means of exploring the fertile, but ultimately self-destructive contradictions of a hybrid settler culture.

Maria Edgeworth,

• Castle Rackrent
• The Absentee

Anthony Trollope,

• The Kellys and the O'Kellys
• The Landleaguers

Somerville and Ross,

• The Real Charlotte
• The Big House at Inver

Elizabeth Bowen,

• The Last September
• Bowen's Court

Molly Keane,

• Two Days in Aragon
• Good Behaviour

William Trevor,

• Fools of Fortune
• The Story of Lucy Gault

J.G. Farrell,

• Troubles

Brian Friel,

• Aristocrats
• The Home Place

W.B. Yeats

• Collected Poems

ENGL 303-01. Graduate Fiction Workshop
Lorraine Lopez
(Mondays 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This workshop/studio course focuses on the development of fictive works-in-progress in connection to investigation and discussion of elements of craft. Graduate writers will be required to present a minimum of three pieces of new and original fiction composed during the semester, to provide substantive reviews of work by peers on a regular basis, to compose a publishable book review, and to lead a workshop discussion on craft in conjunction with a selected short story that will be appropriate for presenting in an undergraduate workshop. Finally, this workshop will investigate the novella form and how it works in relationship to the short story and the novel. Toward this end, workshop.


ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Rick Hilles
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The primary focus of this graduate poetry workshop will be a discussion of your work-in-progress. Since all of you are in the process of compiling your own collections, we will supplement our reading with a selection of notable contemporary poetry books—some first and second books, others by poets well into careers—including:

Larry Levis, Elegy

Brian Turner, Here, Bullet

Tracy K. Smith, Duende

Andrew Feld, Citizen

Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors

Afaa Michael Weaver, The Plum Flower Dance

A Van Jordan, Macnolia

Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome

In addition to writing your own work and providing commentary on the work of your peers, you will also be asked to give one presentation (on one additional poetry collection, of our choosing).


ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop
Peter Guralnick
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with a particular emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, and Louis Menand . Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should lead to discussion that is as wide-ranging as it is lively and engaging.


ENGL 321-01 Studies in Southern Literature
Michael Kreyling
(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This seminar is organized on the belief that all you have to know about Southern Lit is embedded in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Each chapter contains the trace, or an even stronger mark, of another genre or topic or theme crucial to understanding the field. In the first chapter, for example, Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin Compson (poor Quentin) that he might aspire to be a writer and she has the material appropriate for the Southern Writer: Old South fustian such as Thomas Nelson Page produced by the bale. Sutpen’s adventures in the West Indies – another example -- connect with the current attention to the Caribbean South, an aspect of the “new southern studies.” The seminar will proceed accordingly, chapter-by-chapter through Absalom with excursions suggested by each.

A sample of accompanying reading:

Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls Rising.

Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road.

Lars Von Trier, Manderlay (DVD).

Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding and The Bride of the Innisfallen.

Octavia Butler, Kindred.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.


ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "Histories of Narrative Cinema"
Paul Young
(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course begins with the contention that the history of narrative cinema, already the target of revisionist historians in recent years, is in dire need of further revisionist research and theorization. Where once critics characterized the first films (especially before 1907) as slipshod affairs in search of the narrative sophistication that characterizes later Hollywood productions, the excavation of pre-1915 American cinema that began in the late 1970s helped catalyze the claim that the early cinema had a full-blown aesthetic of its own, which André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning dubbed ³the cinema of attractions.² Recent scholarly work on the ³transitional era² between the cinema of attractions and "classical" Hollywood narrative, however, seems to have edged the field back toward its previous teleological bent, as if all roads of narrative experimentation necessarily led to the seamless illusionism of classical narrative technique. To prepare us to make our own discoveries about narrative cinema's diversity of form, style, and technique, we will read key theorists of narrative in general (the Russian formalists, Genette, Barthes, Jameson, Brooks) and cinematic narrative in particular (Bordwell, Thompson, Branigan, Chatman, the "political modernists" of the 1960s and 70s, Gunning) and view a wide range of film genres that range from the 1890s to the 1930s. Presentations and seminar papers will focus on trends, experiments, dead ends, and "forgotten futures"

of the fiction film, pursued via research into (for example) individual films, genres, production companies, directors, screenwriters, histories of distribution and/or exhibition practices, and trade and fan publications (including contemporary screenwriting manuals).


ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: Biotechnology and Culture: Victorian Eugenics to Contemporary Genomics
Jay Clayton
(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 P.M.)

In the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory was as much a cultural as a scientific concern. Questions about evolution’s impact on religion, social theory, racial science, degeneration, and eugenics were debated among scientists, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, poets, and novelists. Today, the revolution in genomics has had an equal impact on contemporary culture. Novels, films, visual arts, and popular culture explore topics such as cloning and stem-cell research; genes for violence, homosexuality, and long life; ecological protests against manipulating the genetic code; religious objections to evolution; genetic privacy; the patenting of genes; DNA evidence in criminal cases; and bioterrorism

This course will look at new models of interdisciplinary work in the humanities by focusing on the changing relationship of biotechnology and culture from the mid-nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. We will discuss texts from a number of different genres, including science writing, Victorian fiction, postmodern fiction, science fiction novels and films, autobiography, and critical essays on science theory and biotechnology.

Readings will be evenly divided between the nineteenth and the twentieth/twenty-first centuries, and will include many of the following texts: Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Origin of the Species (1859), Francis Galton’s “Hereditary Talent and Character” (1865), Thomas H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” (1893), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain (1889), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), J.B.S. Haldane “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future” (1923), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), James Watson’s The Double Helix (1968), Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1992), Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever (1996), Zadi Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2003), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). Films will include Island of Lost Souls (1932), Blade Runner (1982), and Gattaca (1997).


ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "Poetry & Place: The Epic of the Americas"
Vera Kutzinski
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Is there such a thing as an epic of the Americas? One might argue that there are many examples of the epic that take the shape of the novel, but what about poetry? How has this particular actual and symbolic geography inflected poetry? What has happened to the traditional project of epic poetry in the twentieth-century Americas? In this course, we will focus on examples of the long poem, all of which concern themselves with different places (“residences,” as Neruda might have it) in the Americas. With one important exception, our readings are from across the twentieth century. Readings: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Pablo Neruda, Canto General (trans. Jack Schmitt), Jay Wright, Dimensions of History, Fred D’Aguiar, Bill of Rights, Frederick Turner, The New World, Hart Crane, The Bridge, Derek Walcott, Omeros, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants, Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama (1961); Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C.”

ENGL 355-04 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "The Ends of Empire"
Lynn Enterline
Cecelia Tichi
(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This team-taught seminar follows the literature of empire from Rome to London to the United States. We hope, at the same time, to explore the many possible intersections between the literary, methodological, and theoretical pursuits of European and American studies. Beginning with
the generic and rhetorical experiments of the classical epic and the “translations of empire,” we will conclude with American novels and Julie Taymor’s Shakespearean critique of the Hollywood Rome movie. Topics will include: the formal and political aspects of epic and narrative teleology; "the tears of things": aesthetics and violence in the ekphrastic tradition; empire and the discourse of masculinity; epic sexualities; patronage, prophetic visions, and critique; memory and traumatic repetition; translations of empire in the institutions of education.

Possible texts include: Negri and Hardt, Empire; selections from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; John Heywood, Oenone and Paris; Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; John Barlow, The Columbiad; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Henry James, The American ; Julie Taymor, Titus.

Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 Seminars and Workshops

Fall 2007 Seminars and Workshops

ENGL 303.  Graduate Fiction Workshop
Lorraine Lopez
(Tuesdays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

This workshop/studio course focuses on the development of fictive works-in-progress in connection to investigation and discussion of elements of craft.  Graduate writers will be required to present a minimum of three pieces of new and original fiction composed during the semester, to provide substantive reviews of work by peers on a regular basis, to compose a nonfiction essay on an element of craft, and to lead a workshop discussion on craft in conjunction with a selected short story that will be appropriate for presenting in an undergraduate workshop.  Toward this end, workshop participants will read and discuss Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway; Best American Short Stories 2006, edited by Ann Patchett; and Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose.


ENGL 304.  Graduate Poetry Workshop
Mark Jarman
(Mondays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants.  Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course.  Each class member will also write a statement of poetics, due at the end of the semester, modeled on any one of those we read and discuss in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.   Our texts will be Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics.

ENGL 307.  Literature and the Craft of Writing
Topic:  Romantic Novels, Novel Romance
Mark Schoenfield
(Tuesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.) 

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants.  Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course.  Each class member will also write a statement of poetics, due at the end of the semester, modeled on any one of those we read and discuss in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.   Our texts will be Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics.

The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants.  Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course.  Each class member will also write a statement of poetics, due at the end of the semester, modeled on any one of those we read and discuss in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.   Our texts will be Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics.

Designed primarily for Creative Writers with an interest in narrative structures, this course will center around novels of the Romantic Period, ranging from those paranoid Jacobin works such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams that emerge in the midst of the British reaction to the French Revolution to those novels of manners produced on the thinnest, most delicate of plots by Jane Austen.  We will consider how aesthetic issues, characterization, setting, and other literary concerns are shaped within the genres of the period, but also how novels expand and transform those genres.  We will also explore some narratives that appear outside the usual domain of the novel, such as Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English-Opium Eater and some of the narrative poems and periodical pieces of the period.  Writing assignments will be individually tailored.
 
ENGL 318.  Seminar in Victorian Prose & Poetry
Topic:  Fictions of the "Victorian"
Carolyn Dever
(Wednesdays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

Taking as a case-study work of the late-Victorian poet Michael Field, this seminar will investigate three contexts in which nineteenth-century British literary writers conceived of themselves, for better or for worse, as "Victorians": through their shifting investments in the novel as a marker of cultural status in the aesthetic marketplace; through the volatile politics of gender and sexual identity that both drove and reflected the evolution of literary forms; and through the emergence of Aestheticism late in the century as an ambivalent address to modernity.  In addition to the journals and poetry of Michael Field, primary reading assignments will include fiction, poetry, and prose from Robert Browning, Conrad, Dickens, George Eliot, Gilbert and Sullivan, James, Meredith, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson, Wilde, and other authors.  Course requirements will include several papers and at least one research presentation.

Fictions of the "Victorian" will serve as the English Department Proseminar for first-year graduate students.  This seminar is offered in conjunction with Professor Mark Wollaeger's Spring 2008 course, Fictions of the "Modernist," which is designed to follow from this course without depending on it.


ENGL 320-01  Studies in American Literature
Topic:  Black Writers and Their Work in the New World
Houston Baker
(Mondays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

This seminar will analyze expressive cultural, economic, psychological, geographical, demographic, transnational, and geopolitical outcomes and consequences of that “rupture of modernity” constituted by the Transatlantic Slave Trade.  Through reading, interpretation, and discussion of poetry, film, novels, and other expressive modes from Black America, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the course will trace diasporic commonalities and differences in conceptual fields marked by such terms as: “liberation,” “freedom,” “citizenship,” “nation,” “race,” “class,” “violence,” “incarceration,” and “revolution.”  The greatest concentration of our reading will derive from Black America and the Caribbean as we work to speculate upon and build interpretive “models.”  We shall, however, see these models both qualified and expanded by attention to Latin American expressive cultural traditions.

During the semester, we shall benefit from the wisdom of guest lecturers and from viewing films and videos devoted to  categories of understanding we seek to elaborate, such as, “independence” and “globalization.”  There will be two to three brief papers (2-3 pages) assigned.  In addition, there will be a short paper (6-8 pages) due shortly after mid-term.  A long paper (15-20 pages) will be due on the final day of class.   

ENGL 330.  Seminar in the Enlightenment and Its Literary Connections
Jonathan Lamb
Topic:  Sympathy and the Passions
(Wednesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

This course will attempt a history of sympathy, starting with epic and briefly glancing at romance, then concentrating on the eighteenth century and beyond (Shaftesbuy, Hutcheson, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Darwin).  Is it within our grasp to feel what someone else is feeling?  What are the implications for personal identity?  Does sympathy extend beyond humans to animals, and can we know what it is like to be a bat?  Whatever happened to charity?  The passions will be a major ancillary concern, raising the question of their relation to reason (Locke and Hume) together with the urgent question of these days, whether there is a possibility of affective knowledge.  We shall study in detail Tristram Shandy and Sense and Sensibility.  We shall study some of the recent scholarly works on these topics, such as Susan James, Passion and Action and Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion.


ENGL 337B  Special Topics in Literary Theory
Topic:  Postcolonial Theory
Jaya Kasibhatla
(Mondays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

The course is divided into four thematic sections. The first section, Subjectivity and Power, focuses on the particular contributions that postcolonial theorists have made in debates about subjectivity as a category of analysis through figures such as the native informant, and the subaltern. The second section, entitled Race, Language and Psychoanalysis, explores how critics have employed psychoanalytic approaches to theorize the construction of race and to consider how race complicates the Lacanian account of the subject's accession to language.  In the third section of the course, Community and Solidarity, we will study the interactions between postcolonial theory and related knowledge projects such as Black British cultural studies.  We will historicize these encounters and consider how contemporary U.S./Black British theories of race and politics converge with or diverge from ideas of hybridity and solidarity advanced by postcolonial theorists.  The fourth and final section deals explicitly with the status of ethics in postcolonial studies, tracing the influence of such figures as Immanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben on postcolonial scholarship and questioning the demand that the work of minority critics be legibly ethical.

 

Spring 2008 Seminars and Workshops   

ENGL 303.  Graduate Fiction Workshop
Tony Earley

Description Forthcoming

ENGL 304.  Graduate Poetry Workshop
Kate Daniels

Description Forthcoming

ENGL 310.  Seminar in Shakespeare
Topic:  Shakespeare and Sexual Ideologies
Kathryn Schwarz
(Thursdays, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)

The works of Shakespeare have often provided a symptomatic focus for theories of gender and sexuality.  From the rise of academic feminism, through the debates between feminists and new historicists, to the evolution of psychoanalytic, queer and performativity theories, Shakespearean criticism both reflects and contributes to the emergence of new methodologies in literary critical discourse.  Assumptions concerning the canonicity of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean work as a kind of Trojan horse, authorizing approaches that might, at least initially, be resisted as marginal, “too political,” or otherwise threatening to disciplinary conventions.  At the same time, those approaches put in question the processes through which orthodoxies—of literary works, and of literary critical practices—takes shape.  The particular ways in which this happens raise a number of provocative questions.  How do the “transgressions” of feminine characters, ranging from transvestism to illicit sexuality to inappropriate authority to acts of political and domestic violence, authorize feminist readings that challenge misogyny on its own grounds?  How do the history plays, traditionally regarded as articulations of exclusively masculine preoccupations, enable the development of feminist historicism?  In what ways do responses to the Sonnets reveal both intersections and conflicts between gay studies and queer theory?  Why is Shakespeare so central to the current tensions between historicist and presentist approaches to sexual and gendered identity?   

In this course we will look at a range of Shakespeare’s works in relation to the ideological discourses surrounding gender and sexuality.  We will read these works in the context of significant critical interventions, and the theoretical methodologies on which those interventions draw.  Our goal is not only to consider the sexual politics of the Shakespearean, but to use that issue as a focal point for questions about the larger implications of critical practice.

 
ENGL 314.  Seminar, 1660-1800
Topic:  The Long Eighteenth Century
Bridget Orr
(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)


This course tracks the relations of literary and theatrical culture in England to the emergence and partial dissolution of England's (later Britain's) first empire. Thus we shall focus on the discursive and institutional contexts in which a newly self-conscious national literature was being created in competition with antecedent and rival imperial powers; and examine claims that the period's emergent and successful genres and modes (the novel, sentimentality, georgic, the sublime) owed their success to their facility in representing colonial processes. Readings will include primary texts by Dryden, Behn, Addison and Steele, Defoe, Wortley Montagu, Pope, Swift, Lillo, Foote, Sheridan, Johnson, MacKenzie, Gray, Cumberland, Burke, Egdeworth and Seward.



ENGL 325.  Seminar in Modern British & American Literature
Topic:  Fictions of the "Modernist"
Mark Wollaeger
(Tuesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)


Designed to follow from but not depend on Professor Carolyn Dever’s Fall 2007 course, Fictions of the Victorian, Fiction of the Modernist will investigate how self-consciously “modern” writers (“modernist” not becoming a common term before the end of the period now known as modernism) tried to persuade themselves and others that everything done by the Victorians was wrong, inadequate, or antiquated. Part of our concern will be with the relative success of this propaganda campaign, which is to say that by examining continuities that modernists preferred to ignore we will also aim to bring into focus genuine discontinuities. Using Aestheticism as our hinge into modernism, likely we will focus on authors whose work and reception enter into productive dialogue with their Victorian predecessors around issues (picking up from Professor Dever’s course) of identity and the cultural status of literature. We will devote some attention to methodology, with particular emphasis on historicist approaches to modernism. Readings will include Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; E. M. Forster, Howards End; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets; a novel by Storm Jameson (not one of your usual suspects) yet to be determined; Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier. We will also be reading from contemporary modern journals, such as the New Age, that are now available online. Assignments will include one relatively short essay focusing on allusion to Victorian texts; a longer culminating assignment, a version of which will be due before the end of the semester and then revised; and an oral presentation or discussion-leading. Ideally, class members will produce work that will allow them to participate in the Fall 2008 Modernist Studies Association Convention, to be held here at Vanderbilt next November.


ENGL 355-01  Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic:  From the Plantation to the Penitentiary:  Interpretation, Literature, and the Law
Colin Dayan
(Tuesdays,  3:30 - 6:00 p.m.)


This seminar explores the redefinition of civil life in nineteenth-century America by concentrating on how punishment, prisons, and incapacitation not only became critical to the ideology of democracy and freedom, but also shaped a genealogy of property and possession essential to what Thomas L. Dumm in Democracy and Punishment has called "the American project." We will be expanding our understanding of what constitutes this exclusive locale throughout the semester.

Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been announced in December 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude "except as punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The legal exception became the means for terminological slippage: those who were once slaves were no criminals. Such an amendment literally amounted to nothing less than an escape clause, a corrective that left the vestige of enslavement intact. Some of the questions crucial to our investigation of the continuity between slavery and incarceration follow: How do narratives of the past get told by law? How does the mobilization of history trump arguments about justice? What are the legitimate rights of the state over the liberty interests of the incarcerated? What is the relation between the status of criminal as "slave of the state" and slave as property or thing? What are the conditions sufficient for attaining the status of "citizen"?

Through an examination of legal, philosophical and historical texts, as well as fictional and film re-enactments of incarceration and criminality, the seminar will examine the varying controversies about personal identity, servitude, and finally, the legacy of such legal fictions as "civil death" or being "dead in law." Using primary and secondary historical materials, the course will attempt to make sense of the diverse and contradictory images of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment and exclusion: chain gangs, special management, treatment, or control units, and capital punishment.



ENGL 355-02  Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic:  " The Odysseys":  (Homer, Kazantzakis, Joyce, Wolcott)
Hortense Spillers
(Wednesdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)


This course is devoted to a reading of selective literary works that take their inspiration, one way or another, from The Odyssey; starting with Homer's classical work, we will proceed to examine modern and modernist instances of odyssean transformations, revisions and corrections, in James Joyce's Ulysses, Nikos Kazantzakis' Modern Sequel, and Derek Walcott's Omeros; these three radically disparate instances of genre, history, time, space, and biography as embodied in these writers, take us from Homer and the ancient world, to modern Europe, and finally, the African Diaspora of the new world. We hope to examine such an outcome by a careful reading of the literary instances before us.


American Studies
AMST 300-1 Graduate Workshop in American Studies 
Topic:  Democracy in Action
Dana D. Nelson
(Thursdays, 12:30 - 3:00 p.m.)

 

 

This course is designed for graduate students who are committed to using what they learn about democracy to make a difference in their communities, both in their role as experts and as citizens. This course will introduce you to an interdisciplinary approach to democracy theory, policy and practice, and to the cultural knowledge and strategies you need to make an impact in our increasingly diverse communities and workplaces—and to be open to their productive impacts on you and your own work. We will study and theorize democracy, activism, volunteerism and the policy process, think about participatory research models, consider community perspectives on building partnerships between universities and communities, and consult with numerous organizers and activists in the Nashville and Middle-Tennessee community.

• democracy and citizenship theory
• empirical studies of political and civic attitudes and participation
• productive models for intellectuals and experts to engage the general public, local democratic processes and policy communities
• participatory research versus service learning local/global versus city, state and national political engagement

Please contact Professor for more information.

Spring 2006 Seminars

ENGL 306.  Seminar in 16th-Century Literature
(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)
Lynn Enterline
Topic:  Ovid & the Renaissance

The seminar will examine Ovid’s enormous influence on early modern representations of subjectivity, sexuality, and the body.  We will explore the host of Ovidian characters – Medusa, Actaeon, Orpheus, Pygmalion, the Bacchae, Prosperina, Apollo, Daphne, Philomela, Hecuba – who continually surface in the period as figures for the complex affective textures of embodied experience.  Topics include: autobiography and the history of rhetoric; the Latin grammar school, transvestism, discipline, and masculinity; rape and representation; Ovid and pornography; love elegy and the idea of a literary career; the poetic history of transgendered cross-voicing; classicism and the emergence of secular aesthetics.  Texts include: The Metamorphoses, Heroides, and Amores; Petrarch’s Rime sparse; erotic epyllia from the 1590’s (e.g., Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, Paris and Oenone, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image); The Rape of Lucrece; selected sonnets from Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser; Donne’s “lesbian poem;” Lyly’s Galathea; Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Athens; Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest.

ENGL 310.  Seminar in Shakespeare
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)
Kathryn Schwarz
Topic:  Textual Effects and Cultural Imaginations 

This course will consider a selection of Shakespeare’s works in relation to the sources on which they draw and the traces they have left behind.  These works illuminate their own cultural context, reflecting preoccupations with both classical traditions and emerging forms; their gestures toward such genres as prose romance, revenge tragedy, and sonnet sequence at once synthesize a range of familiar materials and play with the desire for novelty.  Still more suggestive, perhaps, is the trail of adaptation, revision, imitation, interpretation, parody, critique, disavowal, and theft that follows these plays from their period to our own.  From early modern conduct manuals to postmodern films, Shakespearean invocations have a peculiarly stubborn and symptomatic shelf life.  Each of the texts we examine is surrounded by proliferations of anticipation and response; our task for the semester will be the recovery and juxtaposition of those contexts.  We will, in short, build archives.  That project brings together historical, critical, and theoretical modes of inquiry; Macbeth, for example, leads simultaneously to Holinshed’s chronicle, Lacan’s phallus, and Polanski’s film.  Our concern throughout will be an inquiry not only into the workings of these plays and poems, but into the methodologies through which we, as inquisitive and implicated audience, make sense.

ENGL 318.  Seminar in Victorian Prose and Poetry
(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)
Jay Clayton
Topic:  Literature, Science and the Professions

     This course explores a time when neither the professional nor the disciplinary boundaries separating literature, science, medicine, and technology had solidified into their modern form. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, science and technology were very much a part of culture, an aspect of the larger intellectual life of the upper classes, not a separate sphere reserved for specialists. Quarterlies carried scientific papers side by side with political articles, poetry, and criticism, while novelists, politicians, and natural philosophers mingled together at the same clubs, attended the same lectures, and read the same books. Although disciplinary distinctions began to emerge during the second half of the century, the split between what C. P. Snow called the "two cultures" did not become an unbridgeable gulf until well into the twentieth century.
     In this seminar we shall use the methods of cultural studies and cultural history to analyze the complex relations between novels and natural philosophy in the Victorian era. Each week a literary text will be set in the context not only of scientific and medical developments but also of Victorian engineering triumphs (railroads, steams ships, bridges, tunnels), emerging communications networks (the postal system and telegraph), consumer architecture (the Crystal Palace, department stores, shopping arcades), and new media (the stereoscope, photography, and phonograph).
     Readings in the fiction of the period will be clustered around the first and middle thirds of the nineteenth century, two periods that strikingly illustrate the development of the professions and the growth of disciplinarity. Texts will include Jane Austen’s Persuasion; Charlotte Bronte's The Professor; Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; Dickens's "Mudfog Papers" and The Pickwick Papers; George Eliot's Middlemarch; Gaskell's "Cousin Phyllis" and Wives and Daughters; Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle; and Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Thorne. Students will also read excerpts from scientific texts by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, and William Whewell; study the engineering achievements of George Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Paxton; and give reports on literary criticism and history of science.  
     Please order the texts online before the start of the semester at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/ans/english/clayton/318-S06.htm and read Persuasion for the first class.

 ENGL 320-01    Studies in American Literature
(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)
Shawn Salvant
Topic:  American Literature and Racial Science

This is a course on projects of "reading race" as illuminated through a comparative study of racialization in scientific and literary discourse.  Analyzing such projects, we will try to delineate some of the shared premises and divergent methods of the literary and the scientific.  Working within and around methodological problems in the field of literature and science, we will explore the "influence" of racial science on literary representations of race in selected works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature as well as the literary problems within the discourse of racial science. 

Course material will include literary and scientific texts that perform, represent, or analyze racialization in various fields and practices (legal, social, psychological, phenomenological, taxonomic).  We will read the material with special attention to how racialized bodies appear and disappear, get dissected and reassembled, move and behave, become felt or abject.  Readings from Douglass, Schuyler, Faulkner, Hopkins, Wright, Twain, Baldwin, Howells, Galton, Gould, Haraway, Fanon, DuBois, Chase-Riboud, Benn Michaels, Omi and Winant, Appiah.

ENGL 320-02  Studies in American Literature 
(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)
Dana Nelson
Topic:  Representative/Democracy

People are not born knowing how to be representative any more than they are born knowing how to be democratic.  It is worth insisting that representivity does not come naturally--for individuals or nations--and then thinking about what political and cultural practices of representation mean for practices of democracy.  This is a course that asks a complex of interlocking and countervailing questions: how do people ("The People") learn to be represented, and representive?  How can we represent democracy?  When is representation democratic?  How do different practices of representation impact the democratic imaginary?  What would a democratic (as opposed to a representative) aesthetic look like?  Where have democratic practices registered outside of the discipline or aesthetic of representivity?

Representative/Democracy will glance back to the early British colonies, and then concentrate on the eighteenth century for the bulk of the course (with some reading in the early nineteenth century at the very end).  We will be reading primary and secondary literary materials, as well as political and cultural theory, and American/United States history.  At the end, you should know a good deal more about eighteenth-century American and early literature, from belles-lettres, to political treatises to early novels.  You will know more about political and social history, and you will become familiar with important topics in literary, political, economic and cultural theory debates over the public sphere and democracy.

Research skills, analytic comprehension and argument comparison and formulation will be the skills we look to develop in this class.  You will participate in study cohorts as well as writing groups, will participate in a group project and will write an article-length paper as your final requirement.

ENGL 355-01    Special Topics in English and American Literature
(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)
Sam Girgus
Topic:  Modernism and the Documentary:  Ethics and Reality

Documentary and film provide a history and record of modernism, while at the same time helping to forge modern consciousness.  Every film to some degree becomes a documentary in which image, sound, and action record reality and experience.  Such documentary sensibility has been part of the modernism of cinema and the modern experience.  Documentary, therefore, as practice, art, and production raises questions about documentary’s influence upon history, culture, and reality.  The philosophy of documentary also explores the relationship of film as art form and cultural product to ethics, knowledge, and being.  Accordingly, the course will use documentary to develop a critique of both modernism and film.

As a complex art of visual and sound signs, documentary incorporates all the elements of classic film form—mise-en-scene, montage, editing, narration.  However, as a record of human history and culture, documentary raises special issues concerning reality, ethics, and responsibility.  Documentary’s search for information, knowledge, and truth grows more complicated as it engages questions of change, reform, and the good.

In addition to these broad themes and issues of culture, history, and philosophy, students will examine the specific history, elements, and art that comprise documentary.   In the course, we will view and study a variety of historical and contemporary documentaries in the light of interdisciplinary readings on film, culture, history, and philosophy.  Before engaging broader issues, students will learn about the history and nature of documentary as a film form and social record.  Final papers and film projects will involve in-depth studies of particular aspects of documentary studies, such as specific films, subjects, forms, directors or examinations of foundational issues in documentary of knowledge, meaning, significance, ontology, and ethics.

FALL 2005

ENGL 318 - Seminar in Victorian Prose and Poetry
Topic:  Race, Affect, and Sexual Selection in Victorian Fiction
Carolyn Dever  - W, 3:30-6:00 p.m. 

This seminar takes as its centerpiece two texts by Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).  While in the Origin Darwin accounts for the evolution of species through such mechanisms as natural selection, in the Descent he addresses human evolution through case-studies in sexual selection.

Victorian novels are themselves case-studies in sexual selection, representing social progress (or regress) through choices motivated by all sorts of affective attachments, including economic expediency and erotic desire. Working from templates Darwin provides, we will consider Victorian novelists’ employment of natural and sexual selection--and thus the production of categories such as race--as problems of human emotion.

Primary texts will include Brontë, Jane Eyre; Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Collins, The Moonstone; Haggard, She; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Stoker, Dracula, as well as secondary and contextualizing material to be assigned on the syllabus.

ENGL 320-01 - Studies in American Literature
Topic:  New Century, New Critical Realism
Cecelia Tichi - T, 3:30-6:00 p.m. 

The seminar will engage U. S. fictional and nonfiction narrative at this moment when the insights of a quarter-century of "theory" have been assimilated and sociopolitical narrative and critique are on the ascendance in a context of changed material conditions, social crisis, and ideological conflict in the U. S. and abroad.  We will examine the terms of critique offered by such narrativists as Barbara Kingsolver, Barry Lopez, Eric Schlosser, Ann Patchett, and Andre Dubus III and do so through the critics whose work helps us develop a "new critical realism" in the opening years of this century: Michael Denning, Noam Chomsky, Peter Brooks.  We will, in addition, work toward a practical criticism that is functional in the reinterpretation of the traditional U. S. canons over two centuries.

ENGL 320-03 - Studies in American Literature
Topic:  Postmodern Novel in America
Deak Nabers - R, 12:30-3:00 p.m. 

This course will examine the emergence and flowering of the postmodern novel in America from the early 1950s through the 1970s.  We will situate our readings of prominent novels in the context of a variety of theories of the postmodern (Jameson, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Fried, Venturi, Greenberg, Appiah) and a series of fundamental post-war intellectual milestones (Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mills's The Power Elite, Drucker's The Practice of Management, Bell's The End of Ideology, Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, Schlessinger's The Vital Center, Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, The Moynihan Report, Wills's Nixon Agonistes, and Sontag's Against Interpretation).  Novelists to be considered include Bellow, Ellison, Baldwin, Doctorow, Mailer, Morrison, Dick, Didion, Le Guin, Delillo, and Roth. Requirements will include two presentations, two brief presentation papers, and one longer term paper.

ENGL 325 - Seminar in Modern British and American Literature
Topic: Professional Discourse and the Ways of Reading: The Example of Yeats
Vereen Bell - W, 12:30-3:00 p.m. 

The point of this seminar, with Yeats as the main text, will be to acquaint graduate students with the nature of professional discourse and with how readings of Yeats are affected by the exchanges among scholars who would assume that they are addressing professional readers like themselves. In this respect the course will be as much an introduction to the process of professionalization as to Yeats's work itself.

My plan is to begin with perhaps three weeks' worth of introduction to the Yeats aspect of the subject matter in order to get everyone on more or less the same page and in order to refresh and practice our poetry reading skills. This segment would also include consideration of how Yeats fits in among the various modernist ideologies.

From there we will move to the ways in which the political environment in Ireland, both then and now, affect the criticism of Yeats's work and with the ways in which ideological differences come into play. Overlapping with this segment or immediately following it will be a segment on how postcolonial discourses have been applied to Yeats. These two segments will entail readings in modern Irish history and in the logic of postcolonial theory.

There will then be a segment on how detailed biographical history, most of which for Yeats has only recently come to light, has begun to affect the interpretation of Yeats's work. True biographical criticism is a relatively new field in Yeats studies. A short part of this segment will be devoted to the ways in which Yeats's mystical writings have been appropriated (and misappropriated) for the reading of his poems.

The last segment will be an introduction to the intriguing ways in which recent editorial and textual theory (including material history of the book) has expanded the ways of understanding Yeats's projects.

Along the way, over the course of the term, we will examine and evaluate different theoretical approaches to Yeats's poems in a more conventional sense--deconstructionist, Marxist, feminist, etc., and by that means achieve a slightly different form of the introduction to literary theory. For the seminar paper, students will have the option of applying one of the relevant methodologies to a modern writer of their own choosing or of continuing with the study of Yeats's work applying a specific methodology. At the end, students will present to each other a conference-sized paper which will be a condensed version of the larger-essay project. For these conference-style papers, we will want to be stressing logical argumentation, professional command of the subject matter, and clarity of presentation.

ENGL 330/CLT 330 - The European Enlightenment and Its Legacies
John McCarthy - T, 12:30-3:00 p.m. 

The European Enlightenment was a watershed event of reform and renewal in the long eighteenth-century (1680-1815) that permeated all facets of religious, intellectual, cultural, and literary life. This fact is best represented in the monumental project of the Encyclopédie. Philosophically the rethinking of the past and present begins with René Descartes and John Locke and ranges through Shaftesbury and Rousseau to Immanuel Kant. The philosophical innovation had distinct repercussions for the reconsideration of aesthetics and of literary practice itself. New forms such as the novel and the bourgeois drame emerged in the course of the century. Thus, this course will be organized around three main foci: the philosophical, the aesthetic, and literary practice. Using Norman Hampson, Peter Gay, Elizabeth Hull, Werner Schneiders and others, we will first sketch the broad contours of the epoch before examining certain aspects of the intellectual underpinnings of the movement (Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant) and sampling seminal renderings of the new thinking. Given the breadth and depth of the European Enlightenment, it will not be possible to render its multiple thrusts in an encompassing fashion. Rather, a selective approach will be pursued in individual and group projects on such topics as tolerance, cultural diversity, nature as process, benevolence, the public sphere, the role of women, and the ideal of individual autonomy. For example, we will read selections from Locke’s On Human Understanding, Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, and Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” Yet, the bulk of our attention will be devoted to analyzing the Enlightenment element in such works as Swift’s Gullivers Travels, Richardson’s Pamela, Voltaire’s Candide, de Laclos’s Les Liaison Dangereuses, Goethe’s Werther, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Diderot’s le Père de famille, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Differences in tenor of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany will be noted. The reading list will be drawn selectively from the above. All readings and discussions will be conducted in English. However, students are encouraged to read works in the original when possible.

A point of departure is the legacy of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century (Adorno, Horkheimer, Amery, Foucault, Habermas). Emphasis will be placed on the philosophical/anthropological reconceptualization of what it means to be human (Locke, Hume, Shaftsbury, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Thomasius, Kant). Of importance is the origin of contemporary reception aesthetics and its realization in literary works of the era. The seminal roles of Swift, Diderot, Richardson, Voltaire, and Lessing will be included. The actual problem of dealing with the European Enlightenment is the vastness of the project itself: it is simply not possible to deal with the epoch in as much detail as is deserving. For this reason, I have elected to focus attention on sensibility, a dimension of the Enlightenment which had long been relegated to a minor role because of a traditional focus on rationalism and reason as the dominant forces within the Age of Enlightenment. Consequently, we will have ample opportunity to contextualize reason and emotion (ratio et emotio) in our deliberations.  My hope is to demonstrate how closely related both sense and sensibility were (are) related within the overall project of Enlightenment. The selection of primary works for analysis and discussion can be adjusted to accommodate the class participants.

The course will be a combination of lecture and discussion. Each participant will be responsible for reviewing two works of secondary literature for presentation to the entire group. The presentation should not exceed ca. 15 minutes, and should be accompanied by a one-page handout (a copy for each participant). Additionally, each student will offer an analysis of an aspect of one of the literary or philosophical works. This talk should last no longer than 20-25 minutes (an eight-page paper; i.e., the length of an MLA talk) to allow for ample discussion. Finally, each student will write a term paper of ca.15 pages on a substantial aspect of the course; it should deal with both the philosophical/aesthetic and literary dimensions of our deliberations.

ENGL 337A - Introduction to Literary Theory
Robert Barsky - R, 4:00-6:30 p.m. 

This course will offer a wide-ranging survey of literary and language theories, with special emphasis upon the period post-Saussure. We will examine the principle theoretical approaches--formalism, dialogism, structuralism, narratology, semiotics, deconstruction, Freudianism, reception theory, Marxism, feminisms, postcolonial language theory--but we will also look into some of the exciting language research which have been undertaken outside of the literary realm as a way of situating the project of literary theory within a properly historical and political framework. To ensure that the “literary” is not separated from the “theory,” there will be ample discussion of literary examples, if only to demonstrate that the theory often grows out of questions posed in the literature we so enjoy reading.

ENGL 355-01 - Special Topic in English and American Literature
Topic: Fame: Romantic and Otherwise (Proseminar)
Mark Schoenfield - M, 12:30-3:00 p.m. 

The configuration of literary identity is both historically specific (dependant on available technologies, on cultural and political conditions, and on biographical accidents) as well as accretive, with each new generation of writers inventing forms of fame that emerge from prior ones. In this course, we will investigate the phenomenon or fame at a variety of levels--including its connections to gender, class, and print culture. The first part of the course will focus on notions of celebrity during the romantic period, and our reading will include Lord Byron, who claims one morning to have awoke and found himself famous; Hazlitt, De Quincey, and other essayistic theorists of fame; and various pop-cultural formations by which fame was promulgated. Our reading will include, in addition to primary texts, critics and theorists who engage the concept of fame. In the second part of the course, students will investigate an aspect of fame relevant to their own periods of interests. They will design a class, including assigning reading, and produce a final paper that draws on both primary and secondary materials.