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Graduate Studies
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ENGL 751 History and Theory of Criticism
SUMMER 2004 SESSION I Course Details and Description
ENGL 751 History and Theory of Criticism 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 U.S. Students can expect to emerge with a sense of the many ways that history, theory, and teaching impact on each other. This summer we are planning to have a 1-day symposium on the “Information University: Rise of the Education Management University,” and this event is coordinated so as to relate directly to our course work, especially with respect to Cultural Turn 3. This symposium is based on the most recent issue of the journal I edit, Works and Days, and two of the featured speakers will be contributors to this issue. 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, the recent Works and Days issue, and selected essays to be put on reserve or reproduced on xerox.
ENGL 760 Teaching College Literature M-F 1:00-3:00 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 experienced teachers should take, as it is designed specifically for you; students looking for experience teaching college literature should take the course during the fall semester instead, as that version of the course is designed specifically for those who need teaching experience. If you enroll for this summer course, please bring with you any and all syllabi, lesson plans, handouts, books, course folders, and such that you have used in the past when teaching literature; they will become key resources and parts of our discussion. If you have (or could create) any videotape of your own teaching, please bring that along too! 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 ask you to write a paper reflecting on your past teaching and making plans for your future teaching as based on and inspired by our readings and discussions. 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. This course satisfies three credits of the Research Skills requirement.
ENGL 761 Topics in American Literature before 1870: From Colony to Republic: Three Threads M-F 8:00-10:00 Dr. Michael Vella Students will be asked to trace three discursive threads in the development from colony to Republic. These “threads” trace the discourses of race, of landscape, and of gender. At the outset, I will offer provisional definitions of “discourses,” and then plan the course chronologically, with readings interweaving the three discursive strands of race, landscape, and gender. Depending on enrollments, this course may be structured as tutorials or as a seminar, but in either case I intend to meet one-on-one with students a number of times, particularly as they write their papers. For this course, each student will have to write one synthesis paper that traces the evolution and permutations of a discourse (of race, of gender, or of landscape) across a number of early American literary texts spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, I will be handing out, or more likely, making available to students via email and new digital technologies, rare seventeenth century primary source documents. We will also explore digitalized primary source archives now available on-line. Since many students will teach out of anthologies, I am using the Heath so as to familiarize students with the selections in it. I may supplement the anthology with integral texts later. The texts identified below are my tentative selections; if any given text is out of print or otherwise unavailable, I may have to make changes prior to the session. Texts: Lauter, The Heath Anthology of American Literature Volume I 2nd edition (HM College 066932972-X); Lauter, Canons and Contexts (Oxford UP 0195068327).
ENGL 762: Topics in American Literature since 1870: Southern Women Writers M-F 1:00-3:00 Dr. Ron Emerick This class will explore the rich tradition of twentieth-century southern women writers. Women played a central role in the blossoming of southern literature labeled the Southern Literary Renascence, and they continue to compete successfully with men in southern letters and literary achievements. We will try to discover why women have occupied such a significant position in southern writing. We will also attempt to answer the following questions: To what extent do women writers explore the typical concerns of male writers of the Southern Literary Renascence? To what degree do second (and third?) generation southern women writers reflect the concerns of first generation southern women writers? In what ways do the concerns of the feminist movement intersect with the concerns of southern women writers? Students will be required to participate in class discussion, teach a short story from the Gibson anthology (25% of grade), submit weekly responses about the reading (25%), and compose a critical research paper of approximately 3000-3500 words (50%). Required texts:
Margaret Edson, Wit
ENGL 764 Topics in British Literature since 1660: Modern and Contemporary Irish Poetry M-F 10:15-12:15 Dr. Jim Cahalan Come relish beautiful, short Irish poems suited to the season—sweet summer in Indiana! Here's a chance to study the important contributions of a rich literary genre. This course will feature the lyric poems of Nobel Prize winners William Butler Yeats (1923) and Seamus Heaney (1995) as well as Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. We’ll take advantage of the second volume of Roy Foster’s big biography of Yeats, just out, which I will have read shortly before the beginning of this course. As in all my courses on Irish literature, I’ll help contextualize what we read as intertwined with Irish history, politics, gender issues, mythology, folklore, languages (Irish Gaelic and Irish English), and much more. We’ll prove that one can be a cultural critic and read poems closely at the same time. There will be plenty of discussion and one paper, with an option (but not requirement) to aim it at a particular conference or journal. Anyone wanting to shop and read ahead could order Kavanagh’s Collected Poems (ISBN 0393006948).
ENGL 773 Topics in Minority Literature: The Black Arts Movement M-F 8:00-10:00 Dr. Mike Sell Though it is now receiving a fair amount of scholarly attention and serious critical appraisal, the Black Arts Movement continues to hold the dubious distinction as the most historically and culturally significant yet misunderstood vanguard cultural trend of the twentieth century. This is not surprising; the BAM was a radical, cultural nationalist movement that aimed to destroy and recreate the cultural, political, and ethical foundations of Western society. It is the goal of this course to introduce you to the major concepts, players, and moments of this movement and enable you to pursue serious, possibly innovative and significant scholarly research in this subject.
Amiri Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. W.J. Harris
ENGL 783 Seminar in American Literature: Dickinson M-R 6:00-8:30 p.m. Dr. Karen Dandurand (Ph.D. students only) We will look at Dickinson’s work and her life, examining her poetry and her letters from various theoretical perspectives. The course will emphasize her nineteenth-century context as well as her significance as a founder of modern American poetry. Although we will not attempt to read all of her poems, we will go far beyond the few dozen most often anthologized. In an attempt to see Dickinson’s creative process and to understand the unique problems of editing her poems, we will consider not only the edited texts (in Johnson’s and Franklin’s one-volume editions) but also the variants (in Thomas H. Johnson’s and R.W. Franklin’s three-volume variorum editions) and the manuscript poems in the fascicles (reproduced in Manuscript Books, edited by Franklin). Once we have familiarized ourselves with some of the poems and letters and with textual issues, we will look at criticism examining Dickinson’s work from a variety of perspectives. Students will give at least two or three reports (depending on class size) on critical and theoretical materials. Everyone will, of course, be expected to prepare for and actively participate in seminar discussions. You will write three short critical papers due after the second, third, and fourth weeks (about 1,000 words each), drawing on the theoretical approaches explored during the previous week. The final project will be a conference-type paper (2,000-2,500 words) which you will present during the final week and hand in at the end of the session.
Texts that you will need are the following:
The following will be available on reserve; you will need to consult them frequently:
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