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English 520: Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Professor Deborah Mutnick
This course is a nonfiction writing workshop that gives students
the opportunity to develop, share, and get feedback on their own
writing in a workshop format. The focus this semester will be on
the personal and informal essay, titlehough students interested in
pursuing other forms of nonfiction writing will be able to do so.
The course is intended to provide writers with new approaches to
nonfiction writing, such as the use of autobiography to anchor criticism
and of literary techniques like dialogue and point of view to write
about real places, people, and events. Students will benefit from
a group of readers with different perspectives, close readings of
their work, and constructive criticism.
At the beginning of the semester, we will read
a variety of personal, informal, and autocritical writing. A tentative
reading list includes essays by Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf,
George Orwell, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Sara Suleri, Richard
Rodriguez, Adrienne Rich, Phillip Lopate, Vivian Gornick, Alice
Walker, Peggy Phelan, Michael Dorris, and Barbara Kingsolver. The
emphasis, however, will be on students' own writing, which will
be discussed each week in workshops. Students will keep a course
journal on the readings and their own writing process, and produce
three short (4-6 page) essays and one longer (15-20 page) essay
or the equivalent.
English
524: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
This workshop explores both the art and the craft of fiction
writing. Frequent writing assignments and exercises will concentrate
on the conventions of fiction—description, dialogue, and characterization—as
well as more experimental possibilities such as fragmentation and
shifting point of view. Focus will be on the ways autobiography
overlaps with fiction and how the past is fictionalized as a way
of keeping it alive. Among the models we will look at are the stories
and novels by Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis and James
Ellroy. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing
student work.
English
579: Jane Austen Seminar
Professor David Toise
This course will focus on one of the most popular figures in the
English literary canon, Jane Austen. Her audiences have taken pleasure
in prose such as the opening sentence of Pride
and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged,
that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want
of wife." As this sentence suggests, readers are attracted
to Austen both for likeable heroines who make happy marriages and
because of a strategic humor that asks us to question the seemingly
conventional pleasures that her novels provide. The course will
focus on Lady Susan, Pride
and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion
but may include some of Austen's other writings. In addition, we
will screen film adaptations of Austen's works, from Clueless,
an updated version of Emma
set in a Beverly Hills High School, to Persuasion,
a faithful rendering of the original novel set in its original period.
As we read, we will also examine our own responses and a diverse
set of questions raised by Austen scholars addressing Austen's relation
to: politics and colonialism; contemporary feminism; sexuality;
irony and wit; social class and the role of money; and the history
of the novel.
English
620: Theories of Teaching Writing/Rhetorical Theory
Professor David Tietge
Throughout the course of the twentieth century, rhetoric has
undergone some sweeping and pioneering changes. Whereas the traditional
view of rhetoric was based primarily on the writings of figures
like Aristotle and Cicero, who both saw rhetoric as a technique
for public persuasion and ethical discourse in the larger framework
of the city-state---the "good man speaking well"---modern
rhetorical theorists realized that rhetoric was far more encompassing
as a descriptive apparatus in all spheres of human communication. As a field of metadiscourse (language used to talk about language),
modern rhetoric acknowledges that we are, in the words of Kenneth
Burke, "symbol using and misusing animals," which raises
this question: When are we, as communicative beings, using rhetoric?
What assumptions, preconditions, and expectations does our rhetoric
reflect? What are the connections between rhetoric, power, and influence?
When is language a-rhetorical?
Can it be? These are questions we will explore in this course
using rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards, and Claim
Perelman, to name a few.
We will also explore how barriers between spoken
and written forms of rhetoric have been largely broken down. Whereas
rhetoric was once viewed as a function of verbal interchange, we
now extend many of its lessons to the written word. We will be especially
interested in studying and applying contemporary rhetorical theories
to composition classrooms so that students might gain a deeper understanding
of the richness and dangers of language in their own written expression.
English
634: Modern Drama
Professor Joan Templeton
This course studies major playwrights of modern drama, including
Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Williams, and Beckett. Videos, performance
and production of the texts will be emphasized as well as the texts
themselves.
English
636: Postcolonial Literature & Theory
Professor Huma Ibrahim
This seminar on postcolonial literature and theory will be an
examination of the crucial years of the changes that took place
on the imperialistic map of Africa and Asia and the issues that
related to this dynamic change. These changes occurred because
of nationalist movements that demanded the ouster of imperialist
governments, mainly British and French, but also some Portuguese,
Italian and Spanish. The people and the movements that represented
them wanted autonomy and self-government in these geographical areas.
In large part they were successful in this endeavor. However with
the new sorts of world economics, Africa and Asia continued to be,
as Wtitleer Rodney would say, "underdeveloped."
The literature and theory we are going to read
roughly covers the last fifty years of the last century. This course
will deal with theories that postcolonial scholars have fostered
and developed in order to understand the whole experience of colonialism
and its aftermath as well as the literature that engages with those
problems. We will read literature specifically from Africa, Western
and Southern Africa in particular, as well as literature from Pakistan,
India, and Sri Lanka and simultaneously look at the theory that
engages with that literature as well as larger problems of the developing
world. For the theory I will probably assign one of a few postcolonial
readers in existence and the literature will cover the geographic
areas already mentioned.
English 650: Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature
Professor Sealy Gilles
This seminar explores the formation of masculine
and feminine identities in the literature of the Middle Ages. The
focus is on Western Europe and England, with brief forays into the
Arabic tradition. All texts will be read in modern translations;
the course is designed for the non-specialist. Medieval romances,
folk tales, and love lyrics have shaped our ideas of what it is
to be a man or a woman and our attitudes towards sexuality. The
course examines those notions about who we are and how we relate
to others as they are embodied in texts from the twelfth through
the fourteenth centuries. We shall look closely at bonds between
men (brotherhood, king and vassal, father and son) and between women
(sisterhood, mother and daughter, the hag and the young woman),
as well as at the nature of love and sexual passion. The cultural
construction of male heroism and of the lady will be particular
topics of concern, but we will also be reading texts in which men
are the objects of desire and women the aggressors, as well as poems
that express same-sex desire. Texts include Tristan
and Isolde, the lais of
Marie de France, Dante's Vita
nuova, the Romance of
the Rose (excerpts), Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales (excerpts), and a wide selection of lyric poetry.
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