Courses

ENGL 6480: Introduction to Critical Theory

Professor Kathryn Bond Stockton
Monday/Wednesday 3:00 – 4:20pm
LNCO 3870

Course Description:

 

Course enigmas:

“Why not simply say what one means and leave it? . . .  ‘The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’  Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.  ‘Upon my word,’ he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), ‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another.  Both are utterly false.’”

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously. . . .”

—Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

 

“The soul spends and is spent in the margins of capital.  In a strictly non-negotiable currency, an expenditure without accountability, in the resources of its loss.”

                                                                        --Luce Irigaray, “La Mysterique”

 

Falling into “theory,” we will fall into its range of complications—semiosis, blind fields, tamed richness, the wounding of punctum (vs. studium), spiritual materialism, cloth and skin wounds, and irreducible particularities, among other pleasures.  We will further ask: are critical orthodoxies helpfully undercut by tucking theories into fictions bound to trouble them?  Do they maintain, even as spoiled, a surprising utility to juice our literature?

 

Course objectives:

Semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, film theory, queer theory, issues of racialized gender, and various historicisms (especially surrounding the prison and sex) will serve next semester as our critical foci.  We will interrogate and fight with these theories even as we seek to comprehend them.  Nothing will be taken as obvious in this course.  Students are expected to take on every theory with intensity, but nothing is expected in terms of beliefs.

 

Specifically, we will have four goals:

1) to learn the fundamentals of critical theories deemed by our profession to enliven our reading of film and literature, answering the question: why must I suffer this course on theory?

2) to grasp the interlocking (and historically specific) nature of these theories, explaining how these theorists suffered each other

3) to develop ideas for how best to use these theories without clubbing texts over the head with them, showing that there are smart and subtle uses to be made of these materials

4) to figure out how best to teach these ideas to undergraduate students

 

We Shall Read (among other texts):

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

Jules Gill-Peterson, Trans Misogyny

Sadiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Quo-Li Driskill, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

 

ENGL 7030: Fiction Workshop

Professor Rone Shavers
Monday 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3875

Course Description:

Student material—short prose and excerpts from novels—will be the primary focus of this course. We will study characterization, plot, point of view, syntax, and other elements of craft, as well as analyze a wide range of literary texts in order to explore the aesthetics of creative writing. However, our approach to evaluating successful fiction will not be prescriptive. That is, we will not learn the “rules” of “good writing,” but instead our goal will be to recognize the different possibilities available when constructing a narrative, so that you may then be able to make informed choices when producing your own creative work.

 

 

ENGL 7040: Poetry Workshop

Professor Katharine Coles
Wednesday 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3875

Course Description:

This is a poetry workshop in which we will both explicate student work and examine aesthetic and theoretical issues raised by your poems and outside readings.  Outside readings will be drawn both from our Guest Writers Series poets and from other contemporary poets with distinctive voices and techniques, often operating in explicit relationship with self-defined poetic histories (think Monica Youn, Evie Shockley, Alice Oswald).  The purpose of the course is to help you increase your alertness to the ways in which poems (by you and others) are conceived, constructed, and revised within a larger literary context.  Through making close readings of the poems of others, and especially through observing others make close readings of your own poems, you will also become more aware of how the decisions you make in writing create opportunities both for to expand your range of expression and for readers to enter your poems and create their own experiences. 

 

ENGL 7060: James Joyce and Minority Discourse(s)

Professor Vincent Cheng
Tuesday/Thursday 2:00 – 3:20pm
LNCO 3870

Course Description: 

This will be a course on the works of James Joyce.  Since I am assuming that some class members will not have read either Ulysses and/or Finnegans Wake before, this will be primarily a course developing a thorough and deep understanding of the body of Joyce's works, including the earlier ones.  However, I would like to do so by pursuing a particular focus and angle of investigation: the competing minority discourses in Ireland which Joyce gives voice to (sometimes consciously, sometimes symptomatically, often problematically) in his works--discourses involving race, imperialism, gender, class, religion and nationalism in a poor, colonial, Irish-Catholic patriarchy ruled by the British empire and by the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy.  Thus, some of our critical readings will also have to do with issues/theories of cultural "hegemony" (in the Gramscian sense), colonial and postcolonial dynamics, racial typologies/constructions, gender dynamics, ethnic nationalisms, and the complex intersections of these issues--using Joyce's "Ireland" as our case study.

 

Course readings will of course include primarily Joyce's major works (with some attention to the less well-known ones, if we wish) and important critical essays/studies on each work.  But I will also assign and suggest, week to week, relevant readings on related cultural and literary theory.  Class meetings and assignments will focus on both careful textual analysis and key critical/theoretical issues concerning the readings in question.  Assignments will include possibly a short paper, a long paper, an oral report, and a weekly page (minimum) of ideas based on the assigned reading (a final exam is an option, but improbable).

Below is the list of books (N.B. designated editions) I am submitting to the bookstore; a number of essays will be assigned separately each week, along with suggested readings.

Required:

James Joyce, Dubliners (Penguin Classics)

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)

James Joyce, Ulysses (Vintage, The Corrected Text, ed. Gabler)

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Viking/Penguin)

Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge)

Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (California)

Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Johns Hopkins)

Recommended:

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso)

Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage)

Robert Young, White Mythologies (Routledge)

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, 1982 revised edition)

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (Vintage)

Campbell & Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (Viking)

Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge)

ENGL 7450: Narrative Theory and Practice

Professor Michael Mejia
Thursday 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3865

Course Description

…so why not return to the sentence? Listen to it? Feel its rhythms, the shape of it on the tongue, the lips?

In her well-known 2008 essay “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” Garielle Lutz treats this bit of language, delimited by punctuation, as a singular building block of prose, what she calls “the one true theater of endeavor…the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy.” What Lutz is after in her title is the terror of the sentence’s immense consequence, not just as a vehicle of information, it turns out—that aspect which a prose writer may lean most heavily on in order to get done with and escape the pressure of that environment, seeking solace, perhaps, in the intricacies and pleasures of plot—but also as a manifestation of style. “I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write,” Lutz goes on: “narratives in which the sentence is a complete portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.”

What we’ll be interested in here is the manner in which the stylistically involved sentence is, first, a true sensual and intellectual pleasure, and also, perhaps, revelatory in its capacity—through mechanics, acrobatics, mystery, refusal, process, medium, etc.—to define, or inspire, the entirety of a prose landscape. In addition to writings on the sentence, we’ll spend time slowly salivating over sentences by a variety of notable and idiosyncratic makers, including Melville—

Should we just stop there?

No, we’ll go on. Other readings may include work by Garielle Lutz, Diane Williams, Clarice Lispector, Carole Maso, Miranda Mellis, Don DeLillo, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Renee Gladman, Thomas Bernhard, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Ron Silliman, Roland Barthes, Fleur Jaeggy….

There may also be grammar.

And we’ll labor over our own sentences. Of course.

ENGL 7700: American Studies: American Literary Ethnography

Professor Crystal Rudds
Tuesday 4:35 – 7:25pm
LNCO 3865

Course Description:

This course will examine the contentious yet productive relationship between the fields of anthropology (and its descendants, sociology and ethnography), American literature, and theory-making over the “long” twentieth century. How does the porousness of disciplinary boundaries facilitate sociological fictions? What are the liberatory promises that become available through the attempt to understand “Culture,” and what are the pitfalls? How are writing and reading as methods complicated by the neoliberal positioning of the self? And how do late-century forms of narration address the issues endemic to representing the subject of “the other”? While the course will follow these threads particularly through the production of African American literature, we will read and discuss a range of classic ethnographies and criticism, fiction and poetry, including some ekphrastic texts, autofiction, autotheory, and autoethnography. In terms of outputs for the class, students can expect to submit critical and creative responses, one formal proposal for a professional conference or journal, and a working draft of an “ethnographic” project.

 

 

ENGL 7720: Prose Fiction: Carrier Bag Fictions

Professor Scott Black
Monday/Wednesday 1:25 – 2:45pm
LNCO 3875

Course Description:

This seminar is loosely organized around Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Le Guin’s essay, and her work more generally, explore alternate forms of narrative which arenot centered on heroes or conflict or even resolution but rather on sustaining processes. We’lllook at a variety of prose fictions, ancient and modern, about coming home or staying put and going nowhere. How do you tell a good story about the daily work of care, maintenance, and survival? How do such stories affect our thinking about selfhood and agency; fiction and literaryhistory; reading and interpretation; community, the good life, and living more quietly on a damaged planet?

Reading list:
Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Daniel Mendelsohn)

Apuleius, The Golden Ass (trans. P. G. Walsh)

Kenko, Essays in Idleness and Chomei, Hojoki (trans. Meredith McKinney)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them

Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

Kate Briggs, The Long Form