Spring 2002 Graduate Courses
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- 503: English Language
- 524/724: Shakespeare: The Age of Branagh
- 537: History of Criticism: Transnational/Postcolonial Anatomies
- 570L/773C: Major Victorian Poets
- 570Q/775C: African American Literature: The Trickster Tradition in African American Literature
- 692: Creative Writing Workshop: Non Fiction
- 692: Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
- 765: Form and Theory of Poetry/The Craft of Poetry
- 777: Doctoral Colloquium
- 791: Professional Issues
- 792F History of the Rhetoric/Composition Discipline
503: English Language
Instructor: Josephine Bloomfield>
Description:
This seminar focuses in particular on the development of the English language from Old English to Early Modern English, though it also looks at the Indo-European roots of English and at the most contemporary approaches to understanding the language. Subjects for class exploration will include both the language's outer history (Germanic invasions, arrival of Roman Christianity, Norman Invasion, etc.) and inner history (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax), and will also include geography, politics, and the development of linguistic science and practice, with special attention on the printing press, lexicography, dialects, structuralism, transformational grammar, and colonial Englishes. All students will be required to learn the phonetic alphabet and sound laws and to explore the sounds and grammars of Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English.
Readings:
C. M. Millward, A Biography of the English Language; Coursepack: Available at the Duplication Station.
Exams/Papers:
Quizzes, occasional library and internet homework projects, report, final exam/project.
524/724: Shakespeare: The Age of Branagh
Instructor: Samuel Crowl
Descriptions:
This seminar will examine the recent renaissance of Shakespeare as material for film. The past decade has produced the greatest number of sound filmed Shakespeares in the one hundred year history of the genre. The seminar will focus on recent films of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and Titus by directors as diverse as Kenneth Branagh, Michael Almereyda, Michael Hoffman, Trevor Nunn, and Julie Taymor.
Assignments:
Seminar participants will be responsible for writing one short paper (3-4 pages) early in the term, leading (with others) one of the seminar sessions, and producing a final essay (10-12 pages).
537: History of Criticism: Transnational/ Postcolonial Anatomies
Instructor: Kasia Marciniak
Description:
In the January 2001 edition of PMLA, entirely devoted to the topic of "Globalizing Literary Studies," David Chioni Moore writes: "As many readers may know, the term "postcolonial"—beginning in the 1980s, with massive growth by the middle 1990s—has come to be the principal designator for a range of activities formerly known as the study of Third World, non-Western, world, emergent, or minority literatures." The realm of the postcolonial studies is usually understood in two intertwined ways: one which refers to the cultures that have been de-formed by the imposed power of European colonialism; and one which conceives it as a set of discursive practices involving resistance to colonialist logics and legacies. In terms of the classification of literary texts, editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader characterize postcolonial literature as texts written in English in formerly colonized societies. Such understandings of the postcolonial obviously raise many questions: Who and what counts as postcolonial? When is the postcolonial? What is the relation of postcolonialism to transnationalism? Is the U.S. postcolonial? Indeed, the field of postcolonial studies has been autocritical and self-interrogatory. A number of scholars such as Ella Shohat, Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, and Stephen Slemon have questioned the validity and political agency of the term itself. While McClintock critiques the term for being "prematurely celebratory," for privileging European, prepositional, time and for relying on the notion of linear "progress," Shohat questions its "ahistorical and universalizing deployments." Hall, while questioning McClintock's and Shohat's arguments, believes that the postcolonial is both "a sign of desire" and "a signifier of danger." Grounding our reflections in these critiques, this seminar will explore the terrain of postcolonial and transnational studies—theory, literature, film—to focus on such notions as hybridity, liminality, nationhood, strangerhood, exilic subjectivity, and cultural belonging.
Readings:
Zygmunt Bauman, Homi Bhabha, Arif Dirlik, Stuart Hall, Bell Hooks, Julia Kristeva, Anne McClintock, Trinh Minh-ha, Chandra Mohanty, Hamid Naficy, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Ella Shohat.
Assignments:
Several explication responses, one formal project.
570L/773C: Major Victorian Poets
Instructor: Kenneth Daley
Description:
This course explores competing theories of beauty in Victorian poetry, painting, aesthetics, and art criticism. Throughout the class we'll address a range of issues associated with British aestheticism—the embrace of contradiction, the concern with history and temporality, the tendency toward ekphrasis, the representation of femininity, the relation of art and life, the place of art in a consumerist society. In addition, we'll periodically address these nineteenth-century issues from the perspective of contemporary American culture and the debates over national funding for the arts.
Readings:
John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, D.G. Rossetti, A.C. Swinburne, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Immanuel Kant, along with selected scholarly and theoretical readings. Throughout the quarter we will look at paintings and drawings by D.G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Elizabeth Siddall, James M. Whistler, Leonardo da Vinci, and Fra Angelico, among others.
570Q/775C: African American Literature: The Trickster Tradition in African American Literature
Instructor: Crystal Anderson
Description:
The figure of the trickster inhabited the creative landscape of the black imagination long before the arrival of the first Africans to America. Since then, this figure and its strategies have been adapted by a long series of writers. While the figure has the ability to transform itself to fit the occasion, it also shows up at the site of interpretation, sometimes to make meaning and sometimes to disrupt it. Using the mythic manifestations of the trickster in the oral tradition as a foundation, this seminar will explore the trickster as well as trickster strategies in novels and short stories from the turn of the century to the present. Students will endeavor to interrogate the nature of the trickster and its behavior, determine the differences between mythic and literary tricksters, examine the different types of trickster approaches to interpretation employed by writers and determine the role trickster strategies play in contemporary culture.
Readings:
- Chesnutt, Charles. The Conjure Woman
- Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man
- Johnson, Charles. The Oxherding Tale
- Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon
- Reed, Ishmael. Japanese by Spring
- Xerox packet with folktales and critical articles
Possible films may include:Devil in a Blue Dress, Beloved, or Six Degrees of Separation.
Assignments:
Requirements will include one seminar paper (10-15 pages), direction of two class discussion sessions, a presentation of work in progress toward the final paper and regular participation in class discussion.
692: Creative Writing Seminar Workshop: Non Fiction
Instructor: David Lazar
Description:
This workshop will focus on the writing of personal essays. We'll read the form in depth, as well, and try to figure out what "personal" means, and how we can essay the world through the prisms of self.
692: Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
Instructor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
English 692 will be a fiction writing workshop; it will be traditional in the sense that, as a group of writers, we will critique the fiction you write during the quarter. However, I will also ask you to read and discuss some critical and theoretical articles and some published fiction so that we might find some fresh and helpful ways of talking about fiction. The emphasis of the course will be on technique, on the how of fiction, not on its interpretation.
Readings:
Your fiction and individual published stories and critical articles.
Assignments:
Minimum of fifty pages of fiction.
765: Form and Theory of Poetry/The Craft of Poetry
Instructor: Erin Belieu
Description:
In this class we will examine the elements of craft that go into the construction of various forms of poetry. Through lectures (focusing on the historical dimensions of form) and workshopping (in which we will try our hand at writing exercises in the forms discussed), we will encounter theories of meter, rhyme, line integrity, stanzaic structures and free and received verse. The latter will include the Petrarchan, Elizabethan and "curtal" sonnet, the villanelle, several Welsh syllabic forms and repeating structures such as the pantoum and the sestina. We will also invent our own "nonce" forms as a final project.
Texts:
Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Lewis Turco's The Handbook of Poetic Forms
777: Doctoral Colloquium
Instructor: Josephine Bloomfield
Description:
This colloquium prepares doctoral students in English for the profession of college teaching and research. It discusses professional matters which are not usually addressed in more traditional, subject-matter centered courses. These concerns may be practical or theoretical. Specific topics will be suggested by contemporary conditions within the profession and they will vary from year to year.
791: Professional Issues
Instructor: Betty Pytlik
Description:
Colloquium for apprentice teachers designed to explore alternative approaches to classroom planning and presentation and to discuss professional issues in the discipline.
792F: History of the Rhetoric/Composition Discipline
Instructor: Betty Pytlik
Description:
In this course, we will study the history of the relatively new discipline of Composition (usually the 1960s are identified as the beginning of the discipline) by examining essays in popular and professional journals, textbooks, memoirs of early composition teachers and biographical accounts of contemporary composition teachers, and collections of essays from historians of the discipline published through the 1900s. To identify the roots of our discipline, we will seek answers to these and other questions: What is English Studies and where does composition fit into the tradition of English Studies? What has been the relationship between the teaching of literature and the teaching of composition? Where did freshman composition come from? How—and why—has it changed since the 1870s? How have textbooks influenced the composition curriculum? What has research in composition focused on? How have movements like the Efficiency, Progressive, General Education, and Communication Movements, social upheavals like World War 11, and technological advances like television and computers changed the teaching of composition? How have graduate students been prepared to teach composition?
Assignments:
Class activities will include lectures, class discussions, reports on primary and secondary texts, the preparation of an annotated bibliography of an area of interest in the history of teaching composition, and a final paper that traces the history of one aspect of the teaching of composition, such as placement testing, advanced composition, articulation between high schools and colleges.
Texts:
- Turn-of-the-century memoirs on reserve
- coursepack of journal articles
- Robin Varnum's Fencing with Words: A History of Writing Instruction at Amherst College during the Era of Theodore Baird, 1938-1966
- Robert Connors' Composition-Rhetoric: Background, Theory, and Pedagogy
- excerpts from Mariolina Salvatori's Pedagogy: Disturbing History, 1819-1929.