last modified:2009-09-27 15:35:37
Graduate Course Descriptions
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Graduate Classes| Fall 2009
ENGLISH 6480| INTRODUCTION TO Literary theory
all 2009 Professor Matthew Potolsky 3617 LNCO; X: 1-5245
Monday & Wednesday 11:50 am – 1:10 pm LNCO 3850
Literary Theory--Overview
This course will provide an intensive introduction to the history, practice, and major works of literary and critical theory. Rather than proceeding chronologically or by critical "schools," we will study four key topics that are or have been of central interest to contemporary reading practices.
The first half of the course will focus on two influential ways of defining art and literature. Looking first at pivotal texts by Plato, Aristotle, and Sidney, we will examine the concept of mimesis (imitation), which posits art as a reflection of the world. Beginning with the linguistic theory of Saussure, the next section of the class will consider the notion of signification, which characterizes art as one among many cultural codes. In addition to Saussure, we will read works by Lacan, Derrida, Jakobson, and Barthes. The second half of the course will turn to theories that focus on the experience of the reader or beholder, and on the relationship between work and audience. We will turn first to the German discourse of the aesthetic in texts by Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. We will then look into the history and theory of literary interpretation. Here we will read works by Fish, Foucault, Gadamer, Kermode, Bourdieu, and others.
The overall aim of the course will be to give you a solid grounding in the philosophical texts and theoretical questions that inform debates about the nature and effects of art and literature. We will also pay close attention to the ways in which theoretical insights gained from the study of art and literature shape the analysis of culture, politics, sexuality, and education.
Assignments will include two short papers, and a longer research assignment analyzing several approaches to a single literary work of your choosing. Students will also be required to give one brief class presentation on the topic of their final paper at the end of the course.
Required Readings (available at the Campus Bookstore):
Aristotle, Poetics (Hill and Wang)
Roland Barthes, S/Z (Farrar)
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Hackett)
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Cambridge)
Plato, Republic (Hackett)
Other texts available on electronic reserve at Marriott Library or by WebCT
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ENGLISH 6610| Medieval english literature
Fall 2009 Professor Tom Stillinger 3424 LNCO; X: 1-7132
Tuesday & Thursday 2:00 pm – 3:20 pm LNCO 3850
Sex and Romances
Course Description:
The course will explore medieval forms of narrative, with special attention to the chivalric romance. Discussion will focus on issues of gender, representation, and literary form; more specific continuing topics will arise from the texts. The medieval texts come from French-speaking England, then French-speaking France, and finally Middle-English-speaking England; we will read the French texts and the difficult Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in translation. (We will read Chaucer and two romances in Middle English, but no previous experience with Middle English is expected.) Some contemporary criticism and theory will also be assigned.
Primary texts:
Marie de France, The Lais
Chretien de Troyes, Yvain and Lancelot
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose
Heldris of Cornwall, The Romance of Silence
Sir Orfeo
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess
-----, The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, the Knight’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, possibly a little more.
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ENGLISH 6630| restoration and 18th century british literature
Fall 2009 Professor Andrew Franta 3611 LNCO; X: 1-7850
Tuesday & Thursday 12:25 pm – 1:45 pm LNCO 3820
Sentiment and Sociability from Johnson to Austen
Course Description:
Samuel Johnson’s Rambler No. 60 begins with the following claim: "All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of the imagination, that realizes the event, however fictitious, or approximates it, however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves." Johnson’s subject is biography, but the kind of sympathetic identification he describes is central to other narrative forms as well—including, as Johnson notes, fiction. In this course, we will examine various ways in which prose narratives of various types—from biography and travel writing to political tracts and especially novels—conceptualize and work to refashion the relationship between individual feeling and a social world that over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth was imagined to be increasingly fragmented. We will pay particular attention to how vagaries of time and place and the status of fictional narrative itself become the means by which various late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors reimagine the foundations of social affiliation. Topics to be considered include the sentimental novel, the development of English nationalism, English responses to the French Revolution, the historical novel, and the novel of everyday life.
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ENGLISH 6670| american literature, 1840 - 1910
Fall 2009 Professor Howard Horwitz LNCO 3619; x7353
Monday & Wednesday 1:25 pm -2:45 pm LNCO 3820
American Literature Before the Civil War
Course Description:
We will examine how important figures writing before the Civil War envisioned problems of freedom and one’s relation to home and nation.
The length alone of Moby-Dick makes it the centerpiece of the course. The novel involves more than the final chase scene, and so please begin to read it soon. This way you can be read as intended, slowly, as if on a long voyage. We will spend 2 ½ weeks on this novel, and you should have largely finished it by the time we begin it about half-way through the quarter. Use the Norton Edition of the novel.
Download excerpts from Tocqueville from e-reserve and WEBCT before the first class and prepare to discuss this material at the first meeting.
We will generally read some criticism or historical documents along with assigned texts (for the time being largely criticism is listed on the syllabus). The criticism and other documents will often be the subject of the oral reports, which will address a a very specific question.
Writing assignments: one oral report, two short papers, and one seminar length paper.
Texts on order in University Book Store:
Emerson, Selected Essays (Penguin)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass (Penguin)
Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (Penguin, 0140189521)
Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables (Penguin)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton)
Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Thoreau, Walden (Penguin)
Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Penguin)
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ENGLISH 7010| Non-fiction Workshop
Fall 2009 Professor Francois Camoin 3411 LNCO; X: 1-5687
Tuesday 7:15 pm – 10:00 pm LNCO 3850
Course Description:
Negative definitions are seldom helpful—clearly many things which are not fiction are not non-fiction. Even if we restrict ourselves to texts, many writings—scriptural, scientific, philosophical, educational, political—are neither fiction nor non-fiction—unless of course we choose to make them so. Part of our semester will be devoted to finding a satisfying, if provisional, definition of the genre. Non-fiction, for example, could be thought of as particular manner of reading, a search for certain pleasures of the text not found in fiction.
We’ll do some outside reading – not yet chosen – but we will for the most part concentrate on your own writing. This will, in other words, be a reasonably traditional workshop in which theory will for the most part arise from practice.
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ENGLISH 7030| fiction Workshop - experimental forms
Fall 2009 Professor Lance Olsen 3415 LNCO; X: 1-3199
Monday 4:35 pm – 7:30 pm LNCO 3820
Narratological Amphibiousness
Description:
This semester we shall investigate the possibility space I think of as narratological amphibiousness to see how fiction/poetry/nonfiction may become richer by living commensally alongside, in, and/or among several art forms and genres at once. What might happen, for instance, at the intersection(s) of fiction/poetry/nonfiction and photography, collage, music, architecture, painting, literary theory, new-media writing, critifiction, the lyric essay? Or, on a more local scale, at the intersection of conventional mimesis, say, and science fiction, mystery, magical realism, metafiction, docufiction, Oulipo constraint writing, surrealist games, etc.? In other words, our goal will be to explore in-between narrative spaces here, hybridization, pla(y)giarism, the permeability of formal and generic boundaries that might give rise to interesting and illuminating configurations. Along the way, I shall invite us to resist, rethink, and/or expand such notions as “the workshop” and “the workshop critique”; “narration” and “narrativity”; writing’s past, present, and future; and the practicalities of the current literary marketplace—all in order to bring into greater focus why and how we do what we do.
Recommended prerequisites:
An undergraduate degree in creative writing; familiarity with recent conversations in contemporary fiction; some background in the major movements of critical theory; a nodding acquaintance with at least one art form other than fiction/poetry/nonfiction.
Required texts:
Donald Barthelme, Snow White; R. M. Berry (editor), Forms at War: FC2 1999-2009; Susan Howe, The Midnight; Maleeka Ingram, Stuart Moulthrop, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland (editors), Electronic Literature Organization, V.2; Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, The Watchmen; Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars; Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew; Stephanie Strickland, Zero Zone; Steve Tomasula, TOC: A Digital Novel; Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation; Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s.
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ENGLISH 7040| poetry workshop
Fall 2009 Professor Jacqueline Osherow 3401 LNCO; X: 1-7947
Tuesday 4:35 pm – 7:30 pm LNCO 3820
Course Description:
Each workshop will have a reading component and a writing component.
Reading Component:
I’ve always wanted to teach a course based on WH Auden’s advice to get a “dead master,” read everything the dead master has written and learn from said master from the inside out. This will be it! Each student each acquire such a master, read everything available by the dead master, choose a selection of writings (poems, letter, journal essays, etc.) from said master for the rest of the class to read and will write short position papers presenting their interest in their master’s work.
I will begin by presenting MY dead masters: we’ll spend a few weeks on Biblical Poetry (Psalms, Song of Songs, Selections from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Job) and Emily Dickinson. Then we’ll start looking at students’ dead masters. (In other words, the majority of our reading list will be determined by the students’ interests – we’ll count on Amazon to get books to us quickly!)
The last few weeks our reading will be one another’s collections, which may be as modest as the collected works produced for this class OR a collection on which the student has been working for some time.
Writing Component:
Students will turn in poems even week. Every other week, the poem will be written out of an assignment (all assignments may be interpreted broadly, but must be completed. Some will be thematic, a few will be formal). Toward the end of the semester, one assignment will be a poetic interaction with the student’s “dead master.”
Students will hand in rewrites of at least five poems written for class at the end of the semester.
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ENGLISH 7450| narrative theory and practice
Fall 2009 Professor Karen Brennan 3625 LNCO; X: 1-7992
Wednesday 7:15 pm – 10:00 pm LNCO 3820
The Collage
This class will study the extraordinary influence of “assemblage” on modern and contemporary narrative (and sensibility). Beginning with the early 20th century “modernist” experiments of, say, Picasso, Stein and Woolf, we will move, by semester’s end, to considerations of hybrid texts, graphic novels and other permutations of image/text production of the late 20th and early 21st century. Though the reading list will be hefty, the class will privilege narrative practice. To this end, students will complete a number of creative challenges which will be designed to expand their repertoire of narrative skills.
Readings will include selections (books, stories, poems) from Stein, Woolf, Beckett, Apollinaire, the Ouilipo, the 70s American metafictionalists, Acker, Lydia Davis and others—as well as written selections (essays, interviews) from visual artists such as Ducahmp, Warhol, Francis Bacon and others. Specific readings TBA.
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ENGLISH 7760| seminar: rhetoric/composition/discourse
(Cross-listed with WRTG 7760)
Fall 2009 Visiting Professor Gary Clark – BYU
Wednesday 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm OSH 130
Course Description:
Varieties of Rhetorical Experience
This course in rhetoric and rhetorical theory will focus on the resonance of Kenneth Burke’s proposal that the rhetorical be understood broadly as a prompt to identification rather than more narrowly as persuasion. In this understanding, persuasion is but one kind of rhetorical experience.
The course will begin with a study of the work of Kenneth Burke that illuminates this revision of definitions of the rhetorical, and then will examine important texts in classical atwentieth century rhetorical theory in those terms. Reading will include canonical texts in the history of rhetoric as well as influential texts from American ogether, can help us understand some of the developmencontemporary rhetorical studies.
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ENGLISH 7770| seminar in english literature - shakespeare
Fall 2009 Professor Barry Weller 3419 LNCO; X: 1-6743
Monday & Wednesday 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm LNCO 3820
Course Description:
This seminar will focus on Shakespeare's later plays, including all of the late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens), the romances and one of Shakespeare’s collaborative plays, which also happens to be his final history. Two of the so-called romances appear in the First Folio as comedies and one as a tragedy; a fourth, Pericles, does not appear and was printed only in a quarto text, and I propose that Henry VIII is also rightfully grouped with these plays, rather than with the earlier histories. “Romance” is a generic category first advanced in the late nineteenth century, and we will consider what prompted this addition of a fourth dramatic genre to the Shakespearean canon and how these final works extend the dramatic impulses of the (mostly tragic) works that immediately precede them. All these plays involve a sustained interrogation of theatrical representation (in both its historical particularity and its more general phenomenology-), of the possibilities of dramatic poetry, and, particularly in the romances, of storytelling in general.
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Graduate Classes| Spring 2010
ENGLISH 6620| British Literature of the Renaissance
Spring 2010 Professor Richard Preiss 3626 LNCO; X: 1-6480
Monday & Wednesday 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm
There is no course description for this class yet; for any information on the course please contact the professor directly.
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ENGLISH 6640| 19th Century British Literature
Spring 2010 Professor Jessica Straley 3426 LNCO; X: 1-3126
Tuesday & Thursday 12:25 pm – 1:45 pm TBA
Experiments in Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction
Course Description:
This course examines some of the most intriguing, enduring, and bizarre literary experiments of the nineteenth-century. Victorians claimed that recent scientific and technological advances had so altered the modern world that each new generation lived a life absolutely unrecognizable to the previous one. Innovations in chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, and mathematics generated not only new stories to tell but new ways to tell them, new ways to organize knowledge, and new ways to imagine the operations of the human mind and the worth of a human life. We will explore both canonical works in science fiction, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, as well as more unfamiliar experiments, such as Edwin Abbott’s geometric satire Flatland and M.P. Shiel’s apocalyptic horror story The Purple Cloud. We will seek to understand the scientific theories behind the fictions we read and to analyze the challenges to literary form these theories posed, the revolutions they caused, and the dialogue between literature and science about the content and meaning of human experience.
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ENGLISH 6680| 20th Century American literature
Spring 2010 Professor Craig Dworkin 3613 LNCO; X: 1-3022
Monday & Wednesday 1:25 pm – 2:45 pm TBA
Graduate Seminar - Poetry
Course Description:
The familiar distinction between the genres of "fiction" and "poetry" (a discrimination
codified in the bureaucracy of our own graduate program) often elides a formal distinction between "prose" and "verse." This seminar will investigate the dynamic interactions of genre and form by studying the 20th- and 21st-Century traditions of prose written as (or received as) poetry. In the comparative context of models from France and Russia, we will move from early Modernist experiments (by Gertrude Stein and W. C. Williams) to later works by Joyce and Beckett, Beat and Language modes, the contemporary practice of Conceptual Writing, and a number of avant-garde experiments and goofs along the way. Specific topics will include the visual prosody of the prose block page; the legacy of the "prose poem"; the device of the "new sentence"; and the limits of experimental fiction. No prerequisites.
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ENGLISH 6770| studies in discourse analysis
Spring 2010 Professor Tom Huckin (WP) 3706 LNCO; X: 5-7336
Time and location are still to be announced
Course Description:
Discourse analysis is the study of patterned language use in everyday communication. It spans a broad range of contexts, including for example ordinary conversation, journalism, political speech, medical interviews, blogs, and academic textbooks. The purpose of this course is threefold: (1) to familiarize students with the broad field of discourse analysis, (2) to focus on those varieties of DA that link language, social context, and power, especially the variety known as Critical Discourse Analysis, and (3) to acquaint students with tools that could be of use in their academic research.
The course pays special attention to types of public discourse that play a formative role in the development of societal attitudes and beliefs, e.g., news reportage, editorials/opinion columns, television discourse, and advertising. We will study and learn to use diverse analytic techniques, emphasizing those that combine fine-grained text analysis and broad-scope cultural/ rhetorical critique. Major concepts to be discussed include genre, textual silences, framing, metaphor, rich features, linguistic pragmatics, staging, information structure, and cultural models and myths.
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ENGLISH 7020| Novel writing workshop
Spring 2010 Professor Melanie Thon 3615 LNCO; X: 1-7651
Tuesday 4:35 pm to 7:30 pm
Graduate Fiction Workshop (the “Novel”?):
Sustaining Narrative ~ The Long (Lonesome?) Mysterious Journey
Course Description:
(No) Goals of the Course: I have deep faith in the process of storytelling as a path to understanding and compassion. My wish is to help you discover and explore joyful, explosive, liberating approaches to your writing. We'll try many experiments. I encourage you to take risks, to release yourself from notions of “success” and “failure,” and to focus instead on making work that is important and interesting and healing for you.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.
~ Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past
We will be reading and viewing a variety of texts in diverse genres in order to gain a deeper appreciation of dramatic structure and the astonishing range and flexibility of longer works.
All opinions are shattered by actual experience.
~ George Saunders
This class is open to any graduate student who wishes to explore the territory of a longer project. Students in the MFA and PhD programs in Creative Writing will be given priority, but others may join the class as space allows.
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ENGLISH 7460| theory and practice of poetry
Spring 2010 Professor Paisley Rekdal 3403 LNCO; X: 1-7350
Monday 7:15 pm – 10:00 pm
The Long Poem: Go Big or Go Home
This class will be an exploration of the poetics and praxis of the 20th Century long poem. We’ll be discussing a variety of texts, from the documentary poetics of Muriel Rukeyser, Claudia Rankine, Julianna Spahr and Mark Nowak, through the collage poetics of writers like T.S. Eliot and Basil Bunting, the montage poem-cycle of Langston Hughes, lyric sequences by Louise Gluck and H.D., and post-confessional narratives by Frank Bidart, Quan Barrry and Noelle Kocot, among others. Students will write three short papers and a long poem (12 pages or more) over the course of the semester. Student poems will be workshopped in class.
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ENGLISH 7720| seminar in prose fiction
Spring 2010 Professor Scott Black 3409 LNCO; X: 1-5137
Monday & Wednesday 11:50 pm – 1:10 pm
Loops, Lines, and Webs
Course Description:
This seminar will explore three traditions of prose fiction (or narrative, or novel, or romance) that stretch from the late classical Mediterranean world through early modern Europe. Rather than seeking a straightforward chronology, we’ll take three routes through the history of European prose fiction and consider three intertwined trajectories that each foreground different mimetic possibilities and narrative structures—loops, lines, and webs. We’ll measure our readings against influential accounts of the theory of the novel (from Bakhtin, Auerbach, and Frye through recent historicist and post-modernist critics such as Jameson, Moretti, Ryan). And we’ll ask about the relationship between genre and history, both of which may be grasped best as various ways of layering the strands that make up any story of transmission and transformation, adoption and adaptation.
Texts (all works in English translation):
Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story (in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. Reardon)
Lafayette, Zayde
Manzoni, The Betrothed
Apuleius, The Golden Ass
Lazarillo de Tormes
Quevedo, The Swindler
Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Boccaccio, The Decameron
The Arabian Nights
Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
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ENGLISH 7770| canonical perversions
Spring 2010 Professor Kathryn Stockton 3515 LNCO; X: 1-5286
Tuesday & Thursday 2:00 pm – 3:20 pm
Required texts:
Jean Genet, Querelle
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Charlotte Bronte, Villette
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty
Henry James, The Pupil
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Toni Morrison, Sula
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Course enigmas and objectives:
“The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart out of its wonted orbit; the sunflower turned from the south to a fierce light, not solar--a rushing, red, cometary light--hot on vision and to sensation.”--Charlotte Bronte, Villette
Narratives, by nature, lead us astray. They corrupt expectations, forcing contracts we could not foresee with the letters of their laws. Reading, however, is itself perverse. Supplying a context, we lead the text beside itself, ensuring that in readings it is never the same. Leading canonical texts astray (taking their lead?), we will unfold their views of perversion.
Genet (with Bataille) will present one view of novel narration as fabrication: the divine humiliation of devotion to . . . fabric. Austen and Bronte will offer foreign glimpses of autoeroticism forged by a love of looking on loss. In a masterful turn of the screw, Henry James, in the context of nineteenth-century masochism (Venus in Furs; Krafft-Ebing’s case studies) and twentieth-century man/boy love, will shed new light on pedagogic devotions. Wilde’s pedagogy will school us in the thought that art is not about us, even as his novel, with its hints of pedophilia, trades on the dangerous wonders of an influence. Nabokov, though he turns directly towards the pedophile, will track the motions and motives of a child, by wedding what is “animal” to the “mechanical.” With a hint of animal, Barnes will interrogate whether a desire to be a mother triggers a sudden desire to sleep with one. Lesbian lovers as mother and child, in the hands of Barn
es, will become an intricate metaphorical skein, one to be unraveled by a lover’s dog and by relations around “bowing down.” Morrison, finally, will make us explore how the bias against queer anality (and against its pleasures) oddly speaks to the stigma of people who live at the bottom of an economic scale, in a place called “the Bottom.”
Wending our way along a chain of concepts yoked together by narrative pressures and reconfigured by historical change, we will encounter (with and against other writings) fictions written from 1811 to 1999. All contexts will be treated heuristically--that is, as occasions for asking questions--and have been chosen to provide a balanced inquiry into historical, literary, and theoretical dimensions of our fictions. This, of course, is where balance will end.
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