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Graduate Studies
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ENGL 676 Critical Approaches to Literature
SPRING 2004 Course Details and Description
ENGL 676 Critical Approaches to Literature There are some major agendas for this course:
1. An understanding of each major area of critical theory, including a knowledge of its strengths and weaknesses measured against other theories. By the end of the course, you will be able to think and talk like a critical theorist. Your friends outside of the profession won’t even recognize you, let alone understand you, perhaps, but you will know what you are talking about. The text is Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology. It’s got a lot of words, but we won’t read all of them. There will be two papers (6 to 10 pages each): one in which you theorize and one in which you apply some theory (40% of the grade each). We will have some shorter assignments along the way that will help to sharpen your critical skills as well as provide you with great pleasure (20% of the grade).
ENGL 752 Literary Theory for the Teacher and Scholarly Writer Tuesday 6:00-9:00 p.m Dr. Lingyan Yang (Ph.D. students only) This course examines the diverse and extraordinary intellectual traditions of twentieth-century critical cultural theories and literary criticism, such as feminism, Marxism, cultural studies, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, colonial discourse, and postcolonial theory, Asian American and Asian diasporic cultural criticism, and African American cultural criticism. Mediating between theory, language, epistemology, gender, literature, and culture, we will close-read some of the most influential theoretical texts that have shaped each school of thought while situating the production of such knowledges in specific historical, social, cultural, and sexual contexts. We will analyze a few literary texts (novel, poetry, and autobiography), especially by women, postcolonial, Asian American, and African American writers and artists, so that these theories can be actively applied to students’ research and teaching. Requirements include active participation, weekly 1-page informal Reading Responses, one oral presentation, and one 12-15 page final research paper. If you have questions, please email lingyan@iup.edu.
Tentative Readings: Single texts:
ENGL 761 Topics in American Literature before 1870: Literature of Abolition and Women’s Rights Wednesday 6:00-9:00 p.m Dr. Karen Dandurand We will read works written from the 1830s through the 1870s, with some emphasis on the 1850s—the decade following the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. We will consider works in several genres—novels, short stories, non-fiction prose narratives, essays, sketches, letters, and poems—by both canonical authors and authors whose works have been excluded from the canon. We will look at how these authors treat issues of race and gender, and we will consider their writings in relation to the social and political context of mid-nineteenth-century America. Each student will write a 15-20 page critical paper and will prepare and deliver a presentation on the same subject, both due during the last week of the semester. In addition, each student will be asked to give a report on a topic or on a specific text that will give us useful historical context and a report on a nineteenth-century periodical dedicated in whole or in part to abolition or women’s rights; a one- to two-page class handout should be prepared to accompany each presentation.
I’m planning to order the following books: Copies of other readings will be available during the semester in two or three packets at Copies Now, and will include the following:
ENGL 762 Topics in American Literature after 1870: Oral/Aural Poetics Monday 6:00-9:00 p.m Dr. Kenneth Sherwood Beginning with Whitman's privileging of the spoken vernacular in his 1856 celebration of "an American rude tongue," the important movements in American poetry have invariably involved the articulation of a poetics in relation to: vernacular speech, orality, music, performance, audio recording, and the expressive materiality of language. Growing recognition of the centrality of oral/aural issues to twentieth-century poetics has inspired a number of recent critical collections that will inform this course, including: Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, Morris; Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, Bernstein; Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, Davidson; and Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Stewart. This course will introduce students to the theory and practice surrounding sound in modern and postmodern American poetries. Guided by recent theory and criticism, we will explore a range of poets, sampling their poetry (on the page and through available recordings) and their own aesthetic statements. Students may be exposed to writers such as Pound, Williams, Eliot, Loy, H.D., Stein, Zukofsky (Modernism); Hughes, Brown, and Johnson (Harlem Renaissance); Creeley, Kaufman, McLure, Adams, Ginsberg, Kerouac (Beat/Black Mt.); Rothenberg, Antin, Waldman, Schwerner (Ethnopoetics); MacLow, Cage, Baraka, Grenier, Howe, Bernstein, Mackey, and Vicuña. The course will incorporate a web-ct discussion and class presentations; the critical essay will ask students to more deeply explore the work of one of the poets, engaging in research and producing an analysis that draws upon an audio recording or performance document.
ENGL 763 Topics in British Literature before 1660: Milton and the Epic Tradition Thursday 6:00-9:00 p.m Dr. Ron Shafer This course will place Milton’s immortal epic Paradise Lost, described by many critics as the “single greatest poem in the West,” in the context of the epic tradition. We will begin the opening weeks of the course by reading two of the classic epics—Virgil’s The Aeneid and Dante’s The Inferno. For the latter, we will use Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s award-winning translation and also incorporate the IUP-produced definitive documentary film on Pinsky and Dante (British film star Michael York, in reviewing this film, describes Pinsky as “the quintessence of eloquence”). With that as a base, we will turn our attention to Paradise Lost where we will spend most of our time in the course and then on to Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. The primary intent is to examine Milton’s contribution to and departure from the epic tradition: what are his idiosyncratic additions to the classical poem genre, and how are those accretions informed by—and indeed how do they help shape—the fomenting events of the “century of revolution” in which they are set? Assignments will include brief response papers on each of the five selections, one long essay, and a report on a Milton prose work. The course, which will survey Milton’s dominant themes including his passion for freedom and liberty, should prove valuable to those who wish to learn more about “the culminating genius of the English Renaissance.”
ENGL 765 Topics in Literature as Genre: The Pathology of Genre Wednesday 6:00-9:00 p.m Dr. Martha Bower This will be a mixed genre course with a focus on the deviant, the neurotic and the pathological nature of characters and authors in American Literature. We will examine what is indigenous to the American culture and the American imagination that causes authors, characters and even audiences to be inscribed with a pervasive neurosis: "An American Nervousness." We will also explore how the medical pro-fession seems to be involved as an influence and we will foreground the above against a backdrop of modern and postmodern psychoanalytic theory. The syllabus will be historically based, so we will start with early works, such as The Scarlet Letter and Poe stories, then move to James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and readings from Toomer, Ellison, Dubois, and Hurston. Later works, such as Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates, and a work by Stephen King will be factored in. We will read some plays and poetry as well: Williams's Summer and Smoke and Suddenly Last Summer, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey, and McNally's Lips Together Teeth Apart, and one British work, Equus. We will also read Plath's and Sexton's poetry. Theoretical readings will include Foucault's Birth of the clinic, and excerpts from Freud, Lacan, and Irigaray. There may be some changes in the above. Please read The Scarlet Letter for the first class. There will be weekly written responses, oral presentations (long and short), and creativity will be encouraged. There will be a seminar paper at the end of the course, about 15 pages long.
ENGL 766 Topics in Comparative Literature: Postcolonial Theory and Literature Tuesday/Thursday 3:30-5:00 p.m Dr. Susan Comfort In this course, we will be reading selected theory and literature within historical contexts of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism, while we also consider emerging representations of contemporary globalization, capitalism and imperialism. Our focus will be on literary and cultural works produced in areas within formerly colonized regions, with an emphasis on areas in Africa and South Asia. An integral part of our effort will be the study of historical and contemporary debates over issues related to modernity, postmodernism, development, human rights and women's rights. As we explore the literature, we will also explore paradigms of postcolonial critique that draw from anti-colonial Marxism, feminism and poststructuralism. The reading/viewing list will likely include the following:
Literature:
Film:
Theory/Cultural Studies:
ENGL 771 Topics in Postmodern Literature: Postmodernity, Literary Postmodernism, and Culture Thursday 6:00-9:00 p.m Dr. Michael Vella This course will be somewhat experimental and innovative. I want to approach postmodernism differently this semester. Roughly dividing the semester into thirds, I intend to begin the course, in its first third, with Claude Levi-Strauss's autobiographical Tristes Tropiques, focusing on "culture," "saving mind," "structure," and "civilization." Formulating an approach to postmodernity built around cultural relations, conflict, and appropriation, we will continue the focus on European theorizations of the postmodern and look at Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, and selected texts of Baudrillard, setting our readings of these two theorists in the postmodern context by using Best and Kellner's The Postmodern Turn. The second third of the course focuses on reading a small but significant set of canonical postmodernist novels (these are delineated below), at which time we will review more conventional ways of understanding the postmodern, without abandoning our cultural approach. The last third of the course makes a cultural turn by looking East, with a study of select postmodern Asian texts—Gao Xingjian’s (who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000) Soul Mountain, H. Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, and several films—most likely, "Zhou Zhou River," "Postman Blues," and perhaps "Of Time and Tide." Students will write one major research paper by analyzing three texts—only one of which is to be literary, and one of which must be from a culture other than British or American. In other words, a student might write a paper dealing with a work of architecture, a novel in translation from Spanish, and a work of the plastic or musical arts. In other words this research paper will oblige students to work across different kinds of texts, which emerge from at least two cultures. Students will be concentrating on this research and writing between the midterm and the final, that is, while they are reading Murakami and Xingjian and seeing the films. The "Eastern" component will be handled in a final exam, most likely a shorter take home essay whose topic (or topics) is determined by the class in some negotiated consensual manner.
Acker, Don Quixote (Grove 0-8021-3192-1)
ENGL 785 Seminar in Comparative Literature: Fiction and Fact, History and Biography Monday 6:00-9:00 p.m Dr. Jim Cahalan (Ph.D. students only) My first book was about Irish historical novels; my seventh book was a biography of an American writer who constantly intertwined fact and fiction in his books and his life. Generally for the past thirty years, I’ve continually been working, in one way or another, with the relationships among history and literature, fact and fiction, reality and myth, and biography and writing. Biography, in fact, is a conjunction of history and literature; literary biographies are histories of writers. And, of course, historical novels are literary representations of history. In this course I’ll share what I’ve learned, and I’ll give you an opportunity to work on an author (or authors) of interest to you, whatever their period, nationality, and gender might be. This course can provide for you excellent preparation, or even a jump-start, on part of your future comprehensive exams and dissertation. I've now settled on readings in addition to those listed in the fall Graduate Literature newsletter, adding James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and Annie Dillard's An American Childhood to the books listed earlier by James Plunkett (Strumpet City) and Edward Abbey (The Fool's Progress and my biography). In addition to focusing comparatively on two pairs of Irish and American (western Pa. native) authors, we'll also be able to explore the course's theme in an autobiography (Dillard's), two autobiographical novels (Abbey's, and Joyce's Portrait), a biography (mine of Abbey), and the fullest fictional treatment of one day in history: Joyce's Ulysses. In addition to the fact that the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday (16 June 1904) falls just one month after the end of this course, attending David Norris's one-man Joyce show this October inspired me to teach Ulysses for the first time in a few years. It's a hilarious masterpiece, highly readable though many readers are unnecessarily too scared to read it. You'll love it. Anyone wanting a headstart could order Abbey's The Fool's Progress (ISBN: 0805057919) and Joyce's Portrait, with which we'll start (ISBN: 0312061706), but hold off on ordering anything else because I'm still deciding on editions and arranging price-saving deals for you. I'll probably also add another book or two by Abbey (including The Monkey Wrench Gang, I hope) and a modest Copies Now packet of biographical and theoretical selections. We'll take an Abbey field trip. And our last couple weeks will be devoted to your presentations on other authors. As I emphasized in the newsletter, you'll be able and encouraged to work on an author (or authors) of interest to you, whatever their period, nationality, and gender might be. See the newsletter for more about course requirements and philosophy, and feel free to Email me at JCahalan@iup.edu or Jim.Cahalan@iup.edu. Major course requirements will include active participation, including starting discussion on at least one reading, a précis on a theoretical reading, and two papers—a shorter one around midterm and a longer one, the culmination of your own project, at the end.
ENGL 797 Independent Seminar (meeting times to be arranged by individual students and faculty) Dr. Ron Emerick, Dr. Susan Gatti, Dr. Malcolm Hayward 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. In addition to registering for the Independent Seminar as for any other course, students wishing to take an Independent Seminar in Spring 2004 must file a completed application in the Graduate English office by December 9. (The form is available in the office.) Before it is submitted, the application must be approved by one of the faculty members listed below. Suggested areas for each faculty member are indicated below the name and email address.
Dr. Ron Emerick, jvvc@iup.edu
Dr. Susan Gatti, sigatti@iup.edu
Dr. Malcolm Hayward, mhayward@iup.edu
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