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.