Spring 2002 Undergraduate Courses
Return to the archived courses or to the current course search page.
Note that the courses listed here represent many but not all the courses taught during this particular quarter. Those courses taught by graduate students and part-time instructors are not listed.
Eng 202: Critical Approaches to Poetry
Professor: Beth Quitslund
Description:
The goal of this course is to develop the analytical tools necessary for understanding poetry. These include paraphrasing, recognizing formal structures, and nurturing an ear for the sound of words, and should, ideally, lead to close reading. Though the class is not a survey, we will read poems from a variety of schools, styles, and historical periods to explore how each privileges different aspects of poetic statement and expects different skills from its audience.
Readings:
The Making of a Poem, Strand and Boland (Norton, 2000) plus a course packet available to copy at the Duplication Station.
Exams/Papers:
Literal paraphrase, an imitative poem, close reading exercises, a formal essay, frequent quizzes, and a midterm exam.
Eng 203: Critical Approaches to Drama
Professor: John Matthews
Description:
This course will focus on the reading of plays as texts, keeping in mind their ostensible destination, the stage. There are, of course, two sorts of stage: those actual physical structures upon which Hamlet is acted, again and again, and that interior, metaphorical stage of our imaginations, created by our interaction with the text while reading. There is a special intimacy in reading a play, for we are engaged in a direct, though tacit, collaboration with the playwright, exemplifying the principle that every text is a game that an author plays which enables a reader to play it afterwards.
Readings:
To be selected.
Exams/Papers:
Both, representing plenty of work.
Eng 203A: Interpretation of Drama (Film)
Professor: Robert Miklitsch
Description:
This course will examine the intimate but not exact relation between film and literature or, more properly, between filmic and literary texts. The aim of the class will be to not only deconstruct the "classic"—and, yes, cliched—opposition between film and literature (i.e., the "book" is always better than the "movie") but to explore the way cinematic texts express or rearticulate particular literary texts in their own idiomatic, medium-specific "language" (framing, editing, sound, etc.) and, in the process, re-frame or re-constellate the "original," so much so, in fact, that sometimes the "movie" displaces the "book." To wit: A helluva lot of people have seen Forrest Gump but very few, relatively speaking, have read the Groom novel on which it is based.
Readings:
Provisional film/texts: Picnic, Eyes Wide Shut, Bridget Jones' Diary, The Birds, etc.
Exams/Papers:
In addition to regular quizzes on the reading, there will be three papers: two short ones (3-5 pp.), which will be due during the course of the quarter, and a final longer one, which will be due at the end of the quarter (7-10 pp.). Attendance and participation are, as per usual, mandatory.
Eng 206: Introduction to International Literature
Professor: Patrick Madden
Description:
"In Latin America a literature is taking shape and acquiring strength, a literature that does not lull its readers to sleep, but rather awakens them; that does not propose to bury our dead, but to immortalize them; that refuses to stir the ashes but rather attempts to light the fire." Eduardo Galeano, "In Defense of the Word"
In this class we will focus on the writings of authors whose words are intimately and intricately tied to their political struggles and causes as Latin Americans surrounded by poverty and injustice. We will especially focus on literature from the 1960s and '70s. Eduardo Galeano's literary survey of twentieth-century events in the Western Hemisphere, Century of the Wind, will serve as our historical background, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude will give the class a taste of the powerful and magically complex writing that has come from this region of the world. We will discuss the issues raised by these and many other writers who often were risking their lives to write as they did, who were some of them imprisoned and exiled for their beliefs, and whose views and arguments will often make us uncomfortable and will always cause us to think deeply. This course may especially interest students in Spanish or International Studies.
Readings:
Books: Eduardoo Galeano, Memory of Fire vol.III: Century of the Wind; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Films: The House of the Spirits (from Isabel Allende's book), Kiss of the Spider Woman (from Manuel Puig's book), and documentaries (Enemies of War on El Salvador; A Force More Powerful on Chile) Poetry & Short Fiction (subject to revision): Selection of works by: Cesar Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Pablo Neruda, Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortazar, Laura Esquivel, Octavio Paz, Jose Donoso, Isabel Allende.
Exams/Papers:
Short response papers each week. The entire class will make a Web site of extrapolation, personal response, and interpretation for a final project (see siteofembraces.com and sightofgrace.com for examples of sites made by my classes in the past).
Eng 210: Critical Approach to Popular Literature
Professor: Robert Miklitsch
Description:
In this course, we will engage a number of popular American fictions. The aim will be to develop critical strategies that enable us to attend to the specificities of a particular text, those codes it mobilizes to realize itself as a novel or short story. In addition to this formal or textual emphasis, we will also be concerned—as much as possible—to situate the text in question within its historical and socio-cultural context. Finally, we will examine how the various texts articulate, or disarticulate, issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, etc.
Readings:
There will be a number of short stories and three or four novels, including Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, and Harris' Silence of the Lambs.
Exams/Papers:
As the above description perhaps suggests, there will be quite a bit of reading. In addition to regular quizzes on said reading, there will be three papers: two short one (3-5 pp.), and a longer one, which will be due at the end of the quarter (7-10 pp.). Attendance and participation are, as per usual, mandatory.
Eng 299T: English Tutorial
Professor: Linda Zionkowski
Description:
Through a combination of tutorials, group meetings, and seminars, students will examine and analyze the poetry, fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction of the long eighteenth century (1660-1800). Our approach to this literature will entail a great deal of cultural history, and we will incorporate readings in current scholarship to illuminate significant aspects of the primary texts.
Readings:
The Longman Anthology of British Literature (The Restoration and Eighteenth Century); selected novels and plays to be announced.
Exams/Papers:
Weekly tutorial essays are required, along with a 20-minute oral report; two 6-7 page analytical essays; and a longer (10 page) research essay.
Eng 302: Shakespeare's Comedies
Professor: Barry Roth
Description:
Reading/Studying/Exploring/Analyzing/Discussing Shakespeare�s Comedies.
Readings:
The class begins with A Midsummer Night's Dream, skips to As You Like It, and goes straight on from there, seeing how close the class can come to The Tempest.
Eng 303: Shakespeare's Tragedies
Professor: Loreen Giese
Description:
"The Pleasures of Perversion." This course will examine four Shakespeare tragedies: Titus Andonicus, Hamlet, Lear, and Coriolanus. We will analyze these plays in terms of their structure, characterization, language, action, and the like, paying special attention to the construction of gender and sexuality and the ideologies behind definitions of perversion in early modern London and in the plays.
Exams/Papers:
Two short and one long paper.
Eng 305J: Technical Writing (For Physical Science students only)
Professor: Christine Freeman
Description:
The primary purpose of this course is to provide students in the sciences with an opportunity to practice writing within their majors. Students are expected to have a knowledge base within the physical sciences, since most examples used in class require more than a layperson's understanding of the field. The course focuses on how to review prior research, how to propose research projects, how to incorporate research results into final reports, and how to write clearly and concisely.
Readings:
Martha Davis, Scientific Papers and Presentations; The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, the National Academy of Sciences; On Being a Scientist, as well as several research articles within the student's field.
Exams/Papers:
Usage exams. Writing projects: abstracts, research proposal, literature review, poster presentation. Reading quizzes.
Eng 306J: Women & Writing
Professor: Janis Butler Holm
Description:
This course, a junior advanced composition course focusing on women and writing, is intended to satisfy the upper-level undergraduate writing requirement while providing students an opportunity to focus on gender issues. We will investigate the phenomenon of writing as women in a male-dominated culture, examining the implicit and explicit assumptions that direct our thinking and reading and writing.
Readings:
Diana Hacker, A Writer's Reference (3rd ed.); Exercises to Accompany A Writer's Reference; Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Sark, Succulent Wild Women.
Exams/Papers:
3 formal papers (70%); Weekly quizzes (20%); Journal, due as the final exam (50 pp. required); Informal papers, homework, attendance (10%).
Eng 307J: Writing Research in English Studies
Professor: Carey Snyder
Description:
This course is designed to familiarize you with methods of interpreting, discussing, and writing about literature. Assignments will include writing analytical essays without outside research, analyzing secondary sources, and integrating primary and secondary sources in a final research project.
Readings:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; MLA Handbook for Writer's of Research Papers.
Exams/Papers:
Research assignments including annotated bibliography; several substantial papers.
Eng 313: English Literature 1660-1800
Professor: Barry Roth
Description:
Close study/class discussion/interactive.
Readings:
Probably drama and novels of the period 1660-1800 and maybe poetry too!
Exams/Papers:
Exams, papers, and quizzes.
Eng 315: English Literature 1900-Present
Professor: Arthur Woolley
Description:
"My reality just isn't your reality." Such a statement is intelligible to you because you live after twentieth century writers made their impact on your culture. This course studies the major literary developments and intellectual contexts of twentieth century British literature by spotlighting the work of a number of prominent British authors. It starts with Conrad and his 1898 book that inspired the film Apocalypse Now. It reviews some poets (Yeats, war poets) who dealt with the vaporization of Edwardian tradition and elegance culminating in The Great War and others who took the fragmentation and disillusion that followed into a burst of artistic innovation known as modernism (Joyce, Eliot, Woolf). From the period after World War II, the course will ricochet among several authors, primarily novelists (Graham Swift and Jeannette Winterson), who are searching out ways to deal with a philosophically, morally and socially unsettled condition reflective of contemporary crossing of cultures (Achebe, Beckett, Gordimer, Rushdie, Heaney, Walcott).
Readings:
Stallworthy, et al, Norton Anthology Of English Literature, 7th ed., either volume II (if you have it) or volume 2C: The Twentieth Century (at bookstore), Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Graham Swift, Waterland; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body.
Exams/Papers:
Two exams and one paper/oral report.
Eng 322: American Literature 1865-1918
Professor: Susan Crowl
Description:
The novel and novella are dominant in this period of the flowering of American realism. Starting with the vernacular realism of Huckleberry Finn, we will read novels, novellas, and stories by five authors, and consider their differing expressions of literary realism, its roots in earlier American thought and literature, its shifts of emphasis in the post-Civil War period, its projections of 20th-century writing.
Readings:
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage and Stories; Henry James, Daisy Miller and Stories; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth.
Exams/Papers:
One exam, two papers, and two presentations.
Eng 323: American Literature 1918-Present
Professor: George Hartley
Description:
In this course we will become familiar with major authors, texts, movements, and contexts in American literature from the end of World War I to the present in fiction, poetry, and drama. Authors include Frost, Stein, Hughes, Ginsberg, Baraka, Silko, and more.
Readings:
Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol.2, 5th Ed. Ceremony, Silko.
Online Texts (see class website) http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~hartleyg/323/
Exams/Papers:
Exam 1 30%; Paper 30%; Exam 2 30%; attendance, participation, & quizzes 10%.
Eng 327: African American Literature: Fiction Gender, Terror, and Trauma in African American Fiction
Professor: Kristin Elliot Hood
Description:
This course will explore different representations of violence in African American literature, with special consideration given to depictions of rape and lynching. After examining the historical function of racial violence within the United States, students will perform a comparative analysis of texts authored by African American women and men. Class discussions will attempt to establish the relationship between anatomies, violence, representation, and power; recent media events like the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, and the videotaped beating of Rodney King will also be addressed.
Readings:
(To be read in part, or in their entirety) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) David Bryant Fulton, Hanover (1900) Jean Toomer, Cane (1923) Georgia Douglas Johnson, Blue Blood (1927) Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children (1938) James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975) Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979) Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) (Films, audio recordings, and theoretical articles TBA)
Eng 350: Traditional Grammar, Mechanics, & Usage
Professor: Arthur Woolley
Description:
Language is a medium of communication. Trillions of distinct instances of language communication occur daily all over this globe. Humans use a variety of languages. English is a language you and I speak, write and think in over and over again daily. It's fluid. Grammar is the analytical description, more or less static, using fixed category definitions and relationship descriptions, of the recognized patterns in a language when it succeeds in communicating. English has been described with several grammars. The game of grammar is to keep the categories and pattern descriptions as simple as possible but still be able, using them, to describe accurately any of the trillions of acceptable acts of "sentence" construction. Language is fun; the game of grammar can be fun -- if you like a challenge. This course will cause you to learn the rudiments of the current English grammar based on phrase structure analysis. We will relate this grammar to traditional grammar as we go. You should end up with a better understanding of the relationship of grammar to language and a better understanding of the patterns of English that cause words to be spelled (is/are, he/him) or placed (John loves Mary/John Mary loves) in a particular way for communication. In addition, the course will pay supplementary attention to mechanics (spelling, punctuation, capitalization) and usage (narrowly defined as appropriate word choice: accept/except, less/few, interested/interesting).
Readings:
Anne Lobeck, Discovering Grammar; Mark Davidson, Watchwords (optional).
Exams/Papers:
Three hourly exams and a final, no paper.
Eng 352: The Development of American English
Professor: David Bergdahl
Description:
An introduction to the varieties of American English, especially the regional and social varieties and the linguistics needed to understand them. Phonetics (IPA) will be taught.
Readings:
Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes, American English (1998).
Exams/Papers:
There will be a midterm and a final exam, a 5-10 pp. paper, and participation in the class's forum (an "electronic journal"). For more info: check out my web page http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl/352/
Eng 356: Young Adult Literature
Professor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the genre of adolescent literature. We will examine the characteristics of these various types of literature and give some attention to current issues of and trends in the field of young adult literature. A particular focus of the course will be social justice issues in young adult literature.
Readings:
Common reading: Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse and the text, Literature for Today's Young Adults, 6th ed., by Nilsen and Donelson. Students will choose other honor books to read to meet course requirements.
Exams/Papers:
Students will keep a reader response log and do a class project.
Eng 362: Creative Writing: Poetry
Professor: Robert DeMott
Description:
Please note that this class meets on Tuesday, not on Thursday as previously listed. Also please note that you should not sign up for this class if you have not completed Eng 200 or preferably 202. Prerequisites are enforced. This class is a workshop approach to the beginning poetry writing course. Art, Henry James has said, feeds upon discussion, and so in this course there will be a combination of background reading on practice and theory of poetry, readings in contemporary poetry, and hands-on, nuts-and-bolts workshop critique sessions involving the whole class. Poetry as expression and discourse, urge and discipline, emotion and cerebration.
Readings:
A poetry writing text/manual such as Steve Kowits, In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poets Portable Handbook, a poetry anthology, and selections by poets who will be appearing at OU's Literary Festival in May (Steve Dunn, Jim Harrison, Eleanor Widner).
Exams/Papers:
Final project will be a portfolio of six poems with an introductory craft essay. Before that there will be one poem a week required, a short paper on a literary magazine, some presentations on contemporary poets, a response to the literary festival, etc. Also, there will be several conferences with the instructor.
Eng 377T: Creative Writing: Nonfiction
Professor: Linda Zionkowski
Description:
Through a combination of tutorials, group meetings, and seminars, students will examine and analyze the poetry, fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction of the long eighteenth century (1660-1800). Our approach to this literature will entail a great deal of cultural history, and we will incorporate readings in current scholarship to illuminate significant aspects of the primary texts.
Readings:
The Longman Anthology of British Literature (The Restoration and Eighteenth Century); selected novels and plays to be announced.
Exams/Papers:
Weekly tutorial essays are required, along with a 20-minute oral report; two 6-7 page analytical essays; and a longer (10 page) research essay.
Eng 393: Creative Writing Workshop: Short Story
Professor: Joan Connor
Description:
Using exercises, published stories, and student work, we will focus on developing as authors and critics. The emphasis is on student participation. We will pay close attention to the co-active elements of fiction -- setting, plot, character, theme, mood/tone, and, particularly, point-of-view.
Readings:
Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway; The Granta Book of the American Short Story, ed. Richard Ford.
Exams/Papers:
Two stories, one revision, one short-story, writing exercises, and a final portfolio.
Eng 399: Literary Theory
Professor: David Bergdahl
Description:
After quickly reading Jonathan Culler's book we will read specific essays from the anthology. Our goal is to understand what theory is and how it is done.
Readings:
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (NY: Oxford, 1997), Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Black wall, 1998).
Exams/Papers:
TBA but certain to include participation in our class's newsgroup ("the electronic journal"): for details, see my web page at http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl/399/
Eng 447: Studies in Criticism: Contemporary Feminist Theory
Professor: Kasia Marciniak
Description:
In 1975, Helene Cixous, an influential French feminist theoretician, claimed in The Newly Born Woman that "we are living in an age where the conceptual foundation of an ancient culture is in the process of being undermined." Cixous's writing brings into the contemporary philosophical discussions a unique argument about gendered identity, discursive transgressions, rebellions and resistance; about the place of women's writing in the patriarchal, sexual, social, and linguistic order; and, ultimately, about the need to dispute Western phallogocentric discourse that has historically excluded the female subject from discursive productions. Asking poignantly about the place of women within philosophical and literary history, "Where is she?" Cixous claims, "Either woman is passive or she does not exist. What is left of her is unthinkable, unthought." And later on, she adds, "Philosophy is constructed on the premise of woman's abasement." Cixous's project, thus, points to the violence of hierarchical, binaristic oppositions that historically construct and bind ways of Western thought—that is, dismantling the privileged logical system that denies women's agency and the possibility of self-representation in diverse ways. Guided by Cixous's question, "Where is she?" this senior seminar examines the realm of contemporary feminist theory in a global context. The course is framed in terms of the questions involving language, human subject, the politics of representation, and ideology. Some of the concerns that will guide our discussions are: What is the connection between language, gendered identity and feminist politics? Is meaning ideologically motivated? What might be a feminist politics of representation? What are the strategies of resistance that women writers, philosophers, and filmmakers have historically pursued to interrogate patriarchal violence, homophobic interpellation, and racist logic? What does it mean to claim the space of feminist aesthetics and politics? The course has an interdisciplinary intent: 1) to expose students to the discourse of contemporary feminist theory (specifically postmodern, transnational, and postcolonial theory) in a larger context of current feminist politics and aesthetics; 2) to explore the ways in which the study of feminist "theory" helps us not only read specific literary and cinematic texts, but also interpret the culture around us; and 3) to practice strategies for successful critical, argumentative writing about literature and films as cultural texts.
Readings:
Literary and Cinematic Texts: Julia Alvares, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Sadie Benning, It Wasn't Love; Edwidge Danticat, Children of the Sea; Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage; Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller; Susan Streitfeld, Female Perversions.
Readings:
Gloria Anzaldua, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Teresa de Lauretis, Chandra Mohanty, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Trinh Minh-ha, Monique Wittig.
Exams/Papers:
Explication Papers, Midterm Exam, Independent Project.
Eng 452: Teaching Literature
Professor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
Students will learn student-centered, developmental strategies for teaching literature in the middle school and high school English/Language Arts classrooms.
Readings:
Using Young Adult Literature: Thematic Activities Based on Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. Choice of Wit, A Lesson Before Dying, Dead Man Walking, or Tuesdays with Mori.
Exams/Papers:
Multigenre Research Paper, Thematic Unit. Students who enroll for English 452 must also enroll in English 452L
Eng 452L: Field Exp in Secondary English/Lit
Professor: Jackie Glasgow
Description:
Students will spend 20 hours in local schools teaching Thematic Units to small groups of students.
Eng 460: Literary Topics: "The Literature of Fly Fishing"
Professor: Robert DeMott
Description:
Robert Redford's film version of Norman Maclean's 1976 novella A River Runs Though It brought fly fishing to a wide popular audience. Most viewers think of Maclean's work as a one-of-a-kind venture or the only exposure they will ever have to the world of fishing. But in fact as sporting literature goes, the literature of fly fishing (primarily for trout) is not only among the world's oldest (dating from Dame Juliana Berners' 15th century Treatise of Fly Fishing with an Angle), but is also among the most prolific, and boasts a very rich 500 year old artistic tradition. This Literary Topics course will be a fairly specialized (and somewhat experimental) endeavor, devoted to reading, analyzing, and discussing the material and metaphoric presence of fly fishing in selected Twentieth Century American texts of fiction, poetry, essays, creative non fiction, and selected films. Besides considering issues of technique, language, and style (fly fishing, a skilled and contemplative art, has long been considered a trope for aspects of the writing life), current critical theories regarding cultural/personal memory, environmental/ nature writing, eco-criticism, landscape/regional place, and class and gender will be brought to bear. Prior knowledge of fly fishing helpful but not absolutely necessary. There will be background lectures and hands-on demonstrations to clarify textual concerns, allusions, and references.
Readings:
Complete final selection not yet made, but at least these texts will be utilized: Mark Browning, Haunted By Waters: Fly Fishing in North American Literature; Christopher Camuto's essays, A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge; Norman Maclean's novella, A River Runs Through It; James David Duncan's novel The River Why; and Jan Zita Grover's essays, Northern Waters. Other contemporary writers who will be considered are Ernest Hemingway, Lorianne Hemingway, William Humphrey, Nick Lyons, Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Le Anne Schreiber, Holly Morris, Craig Nova, John Engels, Greg Keeler.
Exams/Papers:
A couple of short essays, a mid term, and a take home final project. Several group in-class projects and short presentations.
Eng 465: Major American Authors
Professor: Darrell Spencer
Description:
This course will focus on several contemporary American masters of what has been defined as minimalist fiction. We will read and discuss short stories and novels written by Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, and Francois Camoin. Our goal will be to determine the place of minimalism in American literature.
Readings:
Novels and short stories (texts yet to be determined).
Exams/Papers:
Study responses; mid-term and final exam; one term paper.
Eng 481: Form and Theory: Fiction, The Fairy Tale
Professor: Joan Connor
Description:
We will be examining the fairy tale from: historical, Freudian, structuralist, and feminist perspectives, reading criticism, fairy tales, and contemporary adaptations of them. Time permitting, we will watch some movie adaptations of fairy tales as well. The class will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and student presentations.
Readings:
(These are tentative and may change.) The Classic Fairy Tales, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, The Bloody Chamber, Confessions of An Ugly Stepsister, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Pricksongs and Descants.
Exams/Papers:
Student presentations, at least two papers (critical/creative), exam.
T308 407B: The Autobiographical Quest
Professor: Susan Crowl
Description:
For the purposes of this course "the autobiographical quest" means the study of several "model" lives, and of the intersections between self and world narrativized in each of them. We will focus on the ways that differing perspectives are represented and integrated in the writing and reading of personal and cultural history, fiction, philosophy, and science, and we will invite and explore the interplay and synthesis represented in the variety of individual and disciplinary perspectives in the class.
Readings:
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.
Exams/Papers:
In-class response exercises; final paper and final exam.
T308 407E: American Indian Culture
Professor: Peter Kousaleos
Description:
The phenomenon of discovery and conquest of the North American continent is replete with a literature, history, and culture hardly known or acknowledged by the average American either in its historical circumstance or in its cultural diversity. True, myths and legends abound, but most of these have arisen as strategies of avoidance of the indigenous reality; the course, therefore, will offer the student an opportunity to explore this five hundred year history from the perspective of Native American Indian scholars as well as from traditional historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars. As each segment of the reading is completed, the class will discuss the major themes, historical facts, or cultural differences presented. The discussions will allow the class to either emphasize a tradition, modify a misconception, or reach a new conclusion while synthesizing the information. A goal of the course is to present the Native Americans in as much of their diversity as is possible in ten weeks. To attain more depth on a particular tribe, clan, nation, or major event, each student will be asked to establish a topic of interest to research based on the student's major area of concentration. An in-depth research project of this kind will allow students to apply skills from their major field of study to Native American.
Readings:
Love Medicine, Daughters of the Earth, Ceremony, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, Fools Crow.
Exams/Papers:
One to two page evaluation of each reading and a ten to twelve page research paper based on the student's major area of study. Mid-term and final essay exams.