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Graduate Studies
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ENGL 674 Bibliographical Methods
FALL 2004 Course Details and Description
ENGL 674 Bibliographical Methods Students will concentrate on two projects: one will be an individualized topic chosen freely by the student; the other will center on either of two case studies. Master’s students will be encouraged to devise topics and projects suitable to their specific needs. For example, in the past, high school teachers have devised in-classroom or high school curriculum research projects, etc. Doctoral students also will be encouraged to pursue research appropriate to their interests and possible dissertation work. In short, the course will allow students flexibility to work on their specific research needs. The class will also have a choice of doing one of two case studies: One will focus on Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End. This case study may include a visit to The Cleveland Fine Arts Museum to view the Chinese landscape scroll that figures importantly in the Snyder collection of poems. This case study will also read Dogen, the father of Japanese literature, also an important source of Snyder’s poetry in Mountains and Rivers. The second case study will focus on Djuna Barnes’s novel, Nightwood. This case study will contextualize Barnes’s writing by reading Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank, about female expatriates living in Paris, a fascinating crowd. This case study may include a trip to the University of Maryland in College Park, to conduct research in Djuna Barnes’s personal papers, manuscripts, drawings etc. all of which is archived there. Regularly scheduled individual meetings with the instructor will enable students to formulate individual research projects and to self select work on one of the two case studies. All students will do one research paper, and submit one brief research portfolio. Texts: Snyder, Rivers and Moutains without End (Counterpoint 1887178570); Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop (Point Press 086547186 X); Barnes, Nightwood (New Directions 0811200051); Barnes, Nightwood: Original Version (Dalkey Pr 1564780805); Benstock, Women of the Left Bank (U of Texas Pr 0292790295).
ENGL 751 History and Theory of Criticism Tuesday 6:00-9:00 Dr. David Downing (Ph.D. students only) This course will be not so much a history of ideas as an exploration of those significant cultural conflicts which have produced the society, the disciplines, and the vocabulary with which we describe ourselves and our literature. After a brief look at some recent contributions to the status of history and theory in literature departments, we will turn to Plato and ancient Greece. My assumption is that the cultural revolution inaugurated by the shift from oral to literate culture shaped what we call "Western metaphysics," and that this catch-all phrase suggests the extent to which the issues of representation, mimesis, reason, rhetoric, imagination, objective and subjective still have a bearing on the way we read and interpret the world. We will then shift to the cultural revolution that took place during the Romantic period leading up to Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin. We will then turn to what I call Cultural Turn 3, the contemporary moment, where students will then have the opportunity to explore the impact of the course on the contemporary teaching, research, and working conditions in English departments in the United States. Students can expect to emerge with a sense of the many ways that history, theory, and teaching impact on each other. Students will be given a variety of options for writing assignments; collaborative projects, group work, and study groups will also be encouraged. We will also be using online computer conferences to exchange ideas and announcements. Class participation will, of course, be a vital part of the seminar. Texts to be used include: The Republic and Phaedrus, by Plato, the Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, Selected Writings by Karl Marx, The Portable Nietzsche, The University in Ruins, by Bill Readings, The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes, Beyond English, Inc., edited by Claude M. Hurlbert, Paula Mathieu, and myself, and selected essays to be put on reserve or reproduced on xerox.
ENGL 760 Teaching College Literature Tuesday/Thursday 1:15-2:45 Dr. Jim Cahalan This is a seminar and workshop course in which we'll focus as pragmatically as possible on current approaches to teaching introductory courses in literature--as informed by recent theory as well as the real constraints of the classroom, the institutional setting, and the needs of our students and ourselves. This is the version of this course that students in need of experience teaching college literature should take, as this one is designed for you; experienced teachers of college literature should take the course during the first summer 2004 session if at all possible, as that version of the course is designed specifically for experienced teachers. We'll look at some videotapes of IUP English teachers at work in ENGL 121 Humanities Literature, the course for non-majors required of every IUP student. I'll help facilitate both your observations of faculty teaching ENGL 121 and a brief guest-teaching appearance by you in ENGL 121 or another appropriate course—in the presence of the faculty member teaching that course, and with my mentoring. You’ll write a paper about your observations of two faculty members, a paper about your own guest-teaching, and an ENGL 121 course syllabus. Our readings will include selections from my collection of essays (coedited with David Downing) Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses (NCTE, 1991, ISBN 0-8141-3653-2), which I mention here in case anyone wants to get a head-start.
Topics in American Literature since 1870: Contemporary American Fiction Wednesday 6:00-9:00 Dr. Ron Emerick We will survey American fiction, both novels and novellas, from 1945 to the present. Since much of the writing of this period can be classified as either naturalistic or existential or postmodern, we will examine how writers confront the dilemma of existence in a confusing, hostile, or absurd universe. Because of the wide range of styles and themes in this period, there will be no central focus to the course. Particular attention will be paid to women and minority writers (black, Jewish, gay, Asian American). Students will be required to participate in class discussion, teach a story from the Angus anthology (25% of grade), submit weekly responses about the reading (25%), and compose a critical research paper of approximately 3000-4000 words (50%). These texts are fairly certain:
Angus and Angus, Contemporary American Short Stories I'll probably include at least one of the following:
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing or Alias Grace
ENGL 763 An Introduction to Middle English Literature Monday/Friday 3:30-5:00 Dr. Gail Berlin After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English, as the language of the conquered, fell out of use for written record and for literature. English emerges again, greatly changed—augmented by French vocabulary and splendid in its lack of any standard system of spelling—in about 1150. This course will trace the development of Middle English language and literature from 1150 to 1500, excluding Chaucer. We will take time to learn the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of Middle English and will read texts in the original language. By the end of the course, you will be able to read Middle English with ease. We will also learn about the varieties of Middle English dialects and how to distinguish them. Middle English literature is rich in genres, and we will dip into such literary types as the Breton lai, the fabliau, romance, lyric, beast fable, debate poetry, allegorical verse, and drama, among others. Some writing in Middle English by women will be included as well. We will also take time to learn about history and cultural context of the works we study, particularly manuscript culture. I have not settled upon a text yet, but two likely anthologies are Thomas Garbaty’s Middle English Literature or J. A. Burrow’s A Book of Middle English. These anthologies of excerpts may be supplemented with enfacing translations of such works as Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Piers Plowman. If there is sufficient interest, we may try to squeeze in a bit of Mallory as well. Precise assignments have not yet been determined, but I am considering brief oral presentations of historical and cultural backgrounds, ungraded quizzes to help master material, two or three graded translation quizzes, and two brief papers. The first will allow students to review criticism written on a particular Middle English work. The second will allow students to create their own edition of a passage of Middle English, perhaps from manuscript facsimile.
ENGL 765 Topics in Literature as Genre: Classical American Cinema Thursday 6:00-9:00 Dr. Tom Slater Understanding American cinema of the Studio Era, roughly 1930-1960, provides numerous benefits. It provides an understanding of how filmmakers were able to work through the standard elements of Hollywood narrative and style, and the studio system, to produce their own visions. It allows us to develop ideas about how the most widely experienced texts of the times responded to American culture and to get past our preconceived notions about the values or shortcomings of those texts. Finally, it helps us to understand the basis for contemporary film, both nationally and internationally, and the frequent references to classic film often made within recent films. In Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan, Sam Girgus writes, “To begin, we probably should note that the significance of these filmmakers to American culture as a whole, let alone to the history of international and American film, probably still deserves greater recognition. Some of these directors were not only taken for granted during their years of unprecedented production, but were also often subsequently forgotten or denigrated as tastes and styles changed. They produced so much so quickly, and are so strongly identified with both the positive and negative aspects of Hollywood, that we can better appreciate their significance as artists through a perspective that considers their overall achievements in the context of their times and surroundings.” With the help of Girgus’s book, Bordwell and Thompon’s Film Art: An Introduction, vol. 7, and Hill and Gibson’s American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches, understanding these artists through the contexts of their times and circumstances is exactly what we will do. Students will be required to write two or three short essays, make a class presentation, and write a major research paper.
ENGL 766 Topics in Comparative Literature: Modernity and the Making of Modern Drama Tuesday/Thursday 3:30-5:00 Dr. Mike Sell Modernity is a peculiarly dramatic condition characterized by a number of fundamental intellectual, aesthetic, and social problems, among these the search for transcendent philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic verities in a world in which, to quote Marx, "all that is solid melts into air." Over the course of our semester together, we'll explore some of the major genres, movements, artists, and problems of the first fifty or so years of modern drama, dated from the advent of Ibsen's "social problem" plays of the 1860s. No longer bound to the retrospective, mythical glance of the romantic history play or the rigid constraints of neo-classicism, those attempting to engage the forces of modernity through dramatic text, theatrical spectacle, and performance roamed widely, exploring linguistic theory, mathematics, mysticism, Satanism, feminism, music theory, philology, etc. The results were one of the most creative—and troubling—periods in dramatic history. We'll look at these results in a historicist, theoretically complex, and institutionally self-conscious fashion, especially the question of modern drama's uncertain status in the literary canons of past and present. Among other pertinent issues that will be engaged are globalism, the impact of translation and intercultural collaboration on the meaning of modernity, the im/materiality of text, the rise of performance as an autonomous aesthetic and critical mode, and the history of theater as entertainment and institution.
Textbooks:
Modern Drama by Women: 1800-1920, ed. Katherine E. Kelly
ENGL 771 Postmodern Literature: Ritual and Rebellion Wednesday 6:00-9:00 Dr. Martha Bower This course will be an exploration of the genre of Postmodernism as it pertains to the drama written after WWII. As we move along in history after 1945, we will examine the conventions of realism, absurdism, modernism and postmodernism--how they are separated and how they overlap. We will also be concerned with the cultural, social, political, and historical perspectives and their influences on the drama. How do the space age, Vietnam War, rock and roll, computers and MTV, AIDS, the Internet, and Sept. 11 impact the plays and vice-versa. We will also address issues like Verbal Violence and its place in the scheme of things. We will factor in theoretical and critical elements as well. I hope this will also be a process of discovery and invention, for me as well as you. Students will write short weekly responses, will do one long "teaching" report, one short oral review of an article, and write a 15 (approx) page paper at the end of the semester. Texts by Men and Women: O'Neill's Iceman Cometh and Hughie, Ionesco's The Lesson and Bald Soprano, Pinter's The Birthday Party and Homecoming, Albee's Zoo Story and Three Tall Women, works by Mamet, Shepard, Wendy Wasserstein, Maria Fornes, John Guare, Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Suzan Parks, David Rabe, Terrence McNally, Christopher Durang, and Eric Bogosian and numerous theoretical handouts. This list is not carved in stone, but gives you a sense of the content of the course.
ENGL 783 Seminar in American Literature: Modernism and Cultural Poetics Tuesday 6:00-9:00 Dr. Kenneth Sherwood (Ph.D. students only) At once one of the most read and widely misread of canonic American poets, William Carlos Williams will be the central figure in this seminar. Our engagement with his work will proceed though a series of concentric reframings. Beginning for instance with the famed short lyrics so familiar from anthologies (e.g. “So much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow...” or “I have eaten/ the plums/ that were in/ the icebox”), we will place our readings into the context of the original magazine appearances and the Dadaist volume Spring and All, which we may then find encircled by the tensions between a vernacular aesthetics and the developing of an international high modernism. I anticipate that subjectivity, ideology and poetic form, canon formation, gender and ethnicity will emerge as significant themes. With respect to research projects, the course should help students move towards what Duplessis calls “culturalist readings--that is, readings alert to the material world, politics, society, and history” but which also attend to “the poetic assumptions and textual choices that animate” Williams’ work. Students will be free to look beyond Williams’ lyrics to his work in other genres (which includes: the epic poem Paterson, short fiction, an autobiography, novels, drama, critical essays, an educational treatise and a mythologizing revision of American history). Brief readings from Mikhail Bakhtin will augment the complement of theory students bring to the class.
ENGL 797 Independent Seminar (meeting times to be arranged by individual students and faculty) Dr. Jim Cahalan, Dr. Karen Dandurand, Dr. Mike Vella Independent seminar provides an opportunity to pursue interests not accommodated by course offerings. It is not recommended during a student's first semester of course work. Students wishing to take an Independent Seminar in Fall 2004 must file a completed application in the Graduate English office by August 10. (The form is available in the office.) Before it is submitted, the application must be approved by one of the faculty members listed. Suggested areas for each faculty member are indicated below the name and email address. The course is listed on URSA as a “closed section.” When your application has been approved, a space in the closed section will be opened for you.
Dr. Jim Cahalan, JCahalan@iup.edu
Dr. Karen Dandurand, karenddd@iup.edu
Dr. Dr. Mike Vella, VellaMW@iup.edu
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