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Winter 2008 Undergraduate Courses
11100 (two sections) Critical Perspectives
Barton, Melissa Section 01: MW 3:00-4:20
Haslanger, Andrea Section 02: TuTh 3:00-4:20
12800
Theories of Media
Mitchell, W.J.T.
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.
12802 Aesthetics of Video Gaming
Hansen, Mark
MW 4:30-5:50
Course will explore video games and gaming with an eye toward discovering both what is singular about this popular cultural form and what ties it to previous media including cinema and literature. Topics to be studied include: history of play, game theory, the history of the video game, the role of fictionality in gaming, gaming versus narration as models for organizing information, gaming and cinema, gaming as an algorithmic practice, embodiment and the contrast of platforms (Xbox, Playstation III, wi), massive multiplayer gaming, hacking and countergaming, and the ethics of gaming. One overriding interest of the course will be to explore if and in what ways gaming might be a "new media" in our world today, something comparable to cinema in (say) 1910, and what such an assertion might entail. Authors and artists to be studied may include: Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, John von Neuman, Jesper Juul, Henry Jenkins, Espen Aarseth, Alexander Galloway, Lev Manovich, Markku Eskelinen, Mary Flanagan, Jodi, and Cory Archangel. Games to be played may include: Civilization III, America's Army, Final Fantasy X, Special Force, Under Ash, Halflife, Sims Online, Ico, Shenmue and World of Warcraft.
13900
History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David; Coleman, Heidi
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.
15200 (two sections) Beowulf
von Nolcken, Christina
Section 01: Mon 3:00-5:50
Section 02 (at the Newberry Library): Fri 1:30-4:20
This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the text primarily as edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); we will also draw on the Newberry Library's rich collection of early printed and facsimile editions when discussing textual and paleographical matters. Once students have defined their particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. Prerequisite: Eng 149/349 or equivalent.
15802 Food and Culture in Medieval England
Wolfe, Alexander
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course will use the representation of food and drink to create an interdisciplinary approach to the culture of medieval England, which was itself an intersection of several cultures and languages. Some important themes will include the religious aspects of eating and drinking, hunting and the imposition of forest law, and the influence of commerce and long-distance trade on food production and practices. The expensive royal and aristocratic feasts are well represented in medieval literature, but we will also seek out moments when food became a site of tension, whether between lords and peasants, men and women, or religious and lay people.
We will survey the full span of medieval English culture, from the early Anglo-Saxon period to the 15th century, but especially the 12th-14th centuries, while reading both literary texts and other materials such as chronicles, letters, and medical treatises. All material from Anglo-Norman and Latin sources will be read in English translation, but students are encouraged to bring expertise from other languages and fields to their paper writing. Texts will include some selections from Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, travel accounts, medical texts and historical accounts, including Crusade narratives.
16500
Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies
Strier, Richard
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.
16704 The Young Shakespeare and the Drama That He Knew
Bevington, David
TuTh 10:30-11:50
We will explore some early Shakespeare plays, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard II, in the context of the drama that Shakespeare must (for the most part) have known and seen on stage in London in the 1590s or earlier in his youth in Stratford: the medieval cycle plays, Everyman, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Ariosto's 'I Suppositi' in a lively English translation by George Gascoigne, and three plays by Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II.
17802 Eighteenth-Century Literature: Discoveries and Explorations
Wall, Cynthia
MW 1:30-2:50
Eighteenth-century Britain was a time and place of invention and exploration, developing new genres to accommodate new modes of travel and new boundaries of empire. We will explore the rhetorics of discovery in letters, diaries, journals, biographies, travel narratives, country house guides, ship’s logs, poems, plays, and novels, reading works by James Boswell, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Humphry Repton, William Cowper, Gilbert White, Samuel Johnson, Olaudah Equiano, Lord Chesterfield, Matthew Lewis, William Bligh, and Captain Cook.
20703 Twentieth-Century Irish Poetry
Ludwig, Jenny
MW 3:00-4:20
A course in Anglo-Irish literature of the twentieth century. We will read major Irish poets in a number or historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts, examining poems from the modernist period (the Celtic Revival, the Revolution) and the critiques of later generations (the Belfast group, feminist and Marxist critiques, responses to sectarian Ireland). Poets include: WB Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, John Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Mebdh Mcguckian, Eavan Boland, Eilean Ni Chulleanain.
20900 Fantasy and Science Fiction
Murrin, Michael
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This course will concentrate on works of the "classic" period (1930s-60s). It will, however, begin with representative authors from the nineteenth century like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, as well as some from the early twentieth century like David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus and H. P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness. Worth special attention will be authors like C. S. Lewis and Ursula LeGuin who worked in both genres at a time when they were often contrasted. The two major texts which will be discussed will be one from each genre, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Herbert's Dune. Theory will be historical, that held by the authors or applied to their stories within the period. Most of the texts we will read come from the Anglo-American tradition with some significant exceptions like short works by Kafka and Borges. Requirements include a course paper and perhaps an oral examination.
21401 (GNDR 21400) Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender
Berlant, Lauren
MW 3:00-4:20
Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender: Orientation and Disorientation. This year this interdisciplinary introductory course will focus on conceptualizations of sex/gender formation derived from embodied practices and mediated fantasies that both ground and unground identity and normative worlds. Beginning with Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick, we turn to theoretical and practice-based formulations from psychoanalysis, Deleuzian epistemology, literary theory, and historical ethnomusicology, as they intersect with queer and feminist theory. Cases include: novels from Antigua and post-Apartheid South Africa, films like Scorpio Rising, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Me and You and Everyone We Know; queer autobiography, club/youth cultures, and postcolonial conceptions of emotional and economic labor. Theorists include: Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Elspeth Probyn, John Paul Ricco, Sara Ahmed, Patricia Williams, Zachie Achmat, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner, Renata Salecl. MAPH and English students given preference. PQ: The registrar holds a few spots for undergraduates: but for them consent of instructors is required and GNDR 10100-10200 recommended.
21906 (MAPH 34152) Victorian Obligation
Frederickson, Kathleen
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This course will examine the Victorian ethics of "obligation" and "duty" in fiction by Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, and Joseph Conrad. We will look at how these Victorian texts adapt and revise Enlightenment legacies around social and moral obligation, examining how they conceptualise and deploy the ideology of obligation differently in relation to the organization of domesticity and kinship and the governance of empire and metropolitan poverty.
23403 D. H. Lawrence
Savitz, Michael
MW 3:00-4:20
In this course we will read some of the major literary and critical writings of D.H. Lawrence. We will center our study on Lawrence's three best novels: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Besides being a prolific writer of novels and stories, Lawrence was also—and likewise voluminously—a poet, critic, essayist, and travel writer. We will punctuate our reading of his major novels with relevant readings from these other modes.
24304 India in English
Gandhi, Leela
Mon 3:00-5:50
This course examines the emergence of India as a theme in twentieth-century English fiction. We will consider a representative sample of texts, both fictional and non fictional, written about India by Indian and non-Indian writers. The subject will examine the historical contexts for the India-England connection, especially the impact of British imperialism. Elements of postcolonial theory will be brought to bear upon specific textual study. (Click here to view a provisional course outline.)
25004 (YDDH 27800) Jewish American Literature Since 1945
Schwarz, Jan
MW 1:30-2:50
The goal of the course is to expand the conception of the field of Jewish American literature from English-only to English-plus. The course will examine how Yiddish literary models and styles influenced the resurgence of Jewish American literature since 1945, and discuss how recent Jewish American novels have renewed the engagement with the Yiddish literary tradition. Readings are by I.B.Singer, Chaim Grade, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Jonathan Safran Foer, Pearl Abraham and Dara Horn.
25403 American West
Knight, Janice
TuTh 3:00-4:20
Beginning with Turner's famous mythologizing of the frontier, this course would consider the power of the west as an ideologically charged, prophetic "direction" in American cultural production. Beginning with Elizabethan dreams of wealth and haven, as well as Revolutionary and Jeffersonian articulations of America's redemptive role in world politics, we would turn primarily to 19th novels and paintings of westwarding—including Cooper, Melville's travel writing, Parkman, Fuller, paintings by Heade, Cole, Bierstadt, and others. Finally, we turn to the marketing of the west in dime novels, the Wild West Show, and Hollywood films. Our last work, I think, would be Nathaniel West's searing critique in Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust.
25917 Male Fantasy Sports
de sa Pereira, Moacir
TuTh 4:30-5:50
Sports and nationalism have been intertwined for their entire histories. This class seeks to investigate the relationship more fully, using as additional touchpoints concepts of masculinity and sexuality. How does the ideal of the nuclear family link novels about baseball with being a complete American? How does the ideal of being a tough, proud Englishman express itself in novels and memoirs about football hooligans? After reading theoretical works about sports, nationalism, masculinity, and sexuality, we will reach the center of the course: six literary objects: three about baseball, and three about football (soccer). The course will close with attempt to draw conclusions about the role of sport in our more post-national and potentially post-masculine world.
27005 (CRPC 26250) Black Power and the Black Arts Movement
McDonald, Summer
TuTh 12:00-1:20
TBA
27600
Cinema in Africa
Kruger, Loren
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course examines cinema in Africa as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in SubSaharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), ground-breaking film by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, The Magic Garden (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine cinematic representations of tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the different implications of these tensions for men and women, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and ethnographic film.
27800 American Poetry from 1945 to Present
Izenberg, Oren
TuTh 10:30-11:50
The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns-Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens. After the devastations of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. "After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, "what forgiveness?"
This course has two goals. The first is to introduce you to a representative sampling of important work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Allen Grossman, Frank Bidart and others. Our close attention to the forms, modes and themes of American poetry in the last half-century will enable us to see the poetry of the present, in all its volume and variety, for all its originality and innovation, as deeply continuous with the poetry of the past.
The second goal will be to pose to the poetry of the present two recurrent and related questions. The first: Can there be a poetry of the present? Not just, that is, a poetry being written in the present, but one that responds to or represents the fleeting urgency of the lived moment without either refusing the unfinished present by taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or skipping over the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future. And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that they are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind?
28807 Forensic Character and American Literature of Evidence
Watson, Rachel
MW 1:30-2:50
In this course we will look carefully at early to mid-20th century American detective/crime stories, examining how the genre is used by a variety of writers to tell stories of race, identity, power, and selfhood. We will also discuss how advances in forensic science during these years affected this story-telling, influencing the ways we (and these writers) think not only about evidence of crime, but also about fictional characters and the determination of “individuality” itself. Writers to be considered include: James Cain, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Michel Foucault, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, Mark Twain, and Richard Wright.
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