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Winter 2006 Courses
10100 Critical Perspectives - Sec. 1
Dahn, Eurie
MW 3:00-4:20
10100 Critical Perspectives - Sec. 2
Murray, Stephanie
TuTh 3:00-4:20
Critical Perspectives: Poetry of the Wasteland. This course will approach King Lear, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and The Wasteland through various critical lenses, including Formalism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New Historicism, Marxism, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism/Deconstruction, while considering the interrelation of the primary texts and investigating the critical texts as works worth examining in the same mode.
10400 Introduction to Poetry
von Hallberg, Robert
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course involves intensive readings in both contemporary and traditional poetry. Early on, the course emphasizes various aspects of poetic craft and technique, setting terminology and providing extensive experience in verbal analysis. Later, emphasis is on contextual issues: referentiality, philosophical and ideological assumptions, and historical considerations.
11300 Criticism and Ideology
Kruger, Loren
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course will examine the contributions of Marxism to the theory and practice of literary and cultural criticism. We will use the concept of ideology as formulated by Marx, Lenin, Williams, Eagleton, Macherey and others as the point of departure for an investigation of the relationships among literary texts, social life, and power. We will start by reading fundamental texts by Marx, such as The German Ideology, and go on to compare analyses of Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina by Lenin, Lukács, and Macherey. Subsequent readings will include drama and prose fiction as well as Marxist theorists reading novels (Lukacs, Jameson) as well as drama (Brecht, Benjamin).
Intensive tutorials for close readings of original texts will be required for all students regardless of skills level in either French or German Discussions will take place in English and will involve comparisons between original and translation so as to analyze the relative weight of key theoretical terms.
PQ: This course is most suitable for juniors and seniors; sophomores will be admitted on a case by case basis. This course is not suitable for freshmen.
11900 The Literature of Trauma
Berlant, Lauren
TuTh 10:30-11:50
This course will introduce students to advanced trauma theory and survey classics in the field, like Maus, Dispatches, Ariel, War Journalism, and relevant psychoanalytic and social scientific theoretical works from Freud onward through critical social theory related to holocausts, genocides, illness and accident, and torture. Special attention will be given to the relation of the "historic" scenes of obliteration to modes of negativity in everyday life. While primary texts will come from the U.S., theoretical and historical works will derive their arguments from a variety of geopolitical scenes.
12800 Theories of Media
Mitchell, W.J.T.; Hansen, Mark
MW 1:30-2:50
This course will explore the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices, and a habitat" in which images proliferate and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and modern texts such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. We will explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate sensory experiences? What sense can we make of concepts such as the "unmediated" or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the
form of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become "mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at recent films such as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world of total mediation and hyperreality. Students will be expected to do one "show and tell" presentation introducing a specific medium. There will also be several short writing exercises, and a final paper. PQ: Any 100-level ARTH or COVA course, or consent of instructor.
13000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney,Larry; Cochran,Kathryn; Weiner, Tracy
TuTh
3:00-4:20
Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse) This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coherent expository prose and to edit the writing of others. The course consists of weekly lectures on Thursdays, immediately followed by tutorials addressing the issues in the lecture. On Tuesdays, students discuss short weekly papers in two-hour tutorials consisting of seven students and a tutor. Students may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the consent of relevant faculty, write it in conjunction with another class or as part of the senior project. Materials fee $25
13900 History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David; Rudall, Nick
TuTh 12:00-1:20
A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden. The course features voluntary but highly recommended end-of-week workshops in which individual scenes will be read aloud dramatically and discussed. Assignments at mid-quarter and at the end of the quarter will give the option of two substantial essays, or (in place of either or both) the putting on of a short scene in cooperation with some other members of the class. Acting skill is not required; the point is to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report.
15104 Newberry Library: Law and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England
Schulman, Jana
Law and literature are both narratives that reveal much about the community that produces them. This seminar will explore legal issues such as feud, marriage and status of women, and theft. We will read and translate the legal texts that discuss these issues and then see how literary texts incorporate legal elements to create tension and drive the narrative. Some texts include laws from Aethelberht, Alfred, Edmund, and Cnut, as well as selections from Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Juliana, and the Wife's Lament.
15500 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
von Nolcken, Christina
TuTh 3:00-4:20
We examine Chaucer's art as revealed in selections from The CanterburyTales. Our primary emphasis is on a close reading of individual tales, although we also pay attention to Chaucer's sources and to other medieval works providing relevant background.
15801 Medieval Vernacular Literature in the British Isles
Murrin, Michael
MW 1:30-2:50
This course will cover the Celtic tradition, Old an Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and a late text from Scotland. Texts will include: from Old English, Beowulf; from Irish, The Battle of Moytura (a battle between gods and giants), the Tain, and two of the immrana or voyages, those concerning Bran Son of Ferbal and Mael Duin (the latter being the likely source for the Voyage of St. Brendan, which had such an effect on old speculations about the Atlantic); from Anglo-Norman French, the Lays of Marie de France; from Welsh, the Four Branches from the Mabinogion; from Middle English, selections from The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and from Scotland, Dunbar, who fittingly closes the course, since he wrote in English at a time when the Tudors tried to suppress Celtic writing in Wales. A paper will be required and perhaps an oral examination.
16202 Spenser
Murrin, Michael
TuTh 12:00-1:20
The class reads all of The Faerie Queene, plus The Shepheardes Calendar, the Amoretti, Epithalamion, and Prothalamion. Requirements are a final essay and perhaps an oral examination.
16500 Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies
Bevington, David
TuTh 1:30-2:50
An exploration of Shakespeare's major plays in the genres of history play and romantic comedy, from the first half (roughly speaking) of his professional career: Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Troilus and Cressida.
17500 English Poetry from Wyatt to Milton
Cormack, Bradin
TuTh 1:30-2:50
This course is an introduction both to renaissance poetry and to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture more generally. Although we will focus on the lyric in such writers as Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton, the readings will also include historical poetry and some examples of early rhetorical and literary criticism.
18104 Fragments and Ruins 1760-1820
Britton, Jeanne
MW 3:00-4:20
The Romantic period was marked by an obsession with both architectural ruins and textual fragments. In this course, we will consider the congruence between the ruin and the fragment in the period 1760-1830 by reading texts that take ruins as their subject and texts that are themselves fragments - either poems left unfinished or prose episodes extracted from longer works. We will begin with texts by German Romantics (Schlegel, Hölderlin), then examine poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Hugo. We'll also read the literary forgeries of Macpherson (Ossian) and Chatterton as well as passages from sentimental novels that were excerpted and anthologized (Sterne, Mackenzie, and Chateaubriand). All readings will be in English, but students comfortable with reading French and German will be encouraged to read texts in the original.
21100 Victorian Wives, Mothers, & Daughters
Hadley, Elaine
TuTh 10:30-11:50
This introduction to modern theoretical debates concerns the role of gender in Victorian society with a focus on the female gender in history, as well as instructive and medical texts. We begin with readings by Armstrong, Poovey, and Langland. We then concentrate on several contested and much-studied modes of identity: marriage, motherhood, the role of daughters, and related categories such as leisure and labor, reading Eliot, Wood, and Gaskell, among others.
25305 American Revolution
Slauter, Eric
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course explores the causes and consequences of independence and the creation of national identity. Readings include texts by Abigail and John Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine, as well as recent histories describing the contributions of ordinary people, free and unfree, and the meaning of the Revolution for later generations.
25903 Failures of Feeling
Jernigan, Adam
TuTh 4:30-5:50
This course will explore the work that emotions do in mid-20th century American fiction. We will begin by surveying some of the aberrations that theorists have diagnosed as endemic to emotional experience in the 20th century: for example, the placidity that goes by the name of "cool" (Stearns), the enlightened indifference called "cybical reason" (Sloterdijk), and the failure of response dubbed "cultural anesthesia" (Buck-Morss, Feldman). But we will focus primarily on how mid-century novelists measured the country's emotional climate, as well as on how those novelists took up the project of educating the affective faculties - and motivating the agency - of readers. Fictionists may include: Nella Larson, Richard Wright, John Hersey, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Michael Herr, Joan Didion, Dorothy Allison. Theorists may include: Susan Sontag, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Patricia Williams, Cathy Caruth, Kirby Farrell, Lauren Berlant, Adam Phillips.
25905 Postmodern American Ficiton
Evans, Nathan
MW 4:30-5:50
This course will explore how the postmodern novel uses depictions of the past and future as a device for commenting on the present. Possible works include the historical fiction of Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, as well as the science fiction of Phillip Dick and Octavia Butler.
29818 The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Reddy, Srikanth
Th 3:00-5:50
This course will introduce students to the Cantos of Ezra Pound - one of the most complex, ambitious, and problematic literary enterprises of the 20th Century. We will read the Cantos in their entirety (along with critical commentary) in order to familiarize ourselves with the philosophy, poetics, and politics of Pound's Modernist vision. Topics will include the aesthetics of history and historiography, classicism and modernity, the interdisciplinary epic, poetry and economic theory, the debates surrounding Pound's anti-Semitism, and the relationship between formal innovation and cultural conservatism.
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