Undergraduate Topics Course Descriptions for J-Term 2010: January 4 - 28, 2010

ENGL 295-01 Topics: Literature Looks at Science (2 credits, CRN# 10052)
Instructor: Dr. Barbara Olson
Tuesday/Thursday 9:00am - 12:00pm

Attention all science buffs and aspiring healthcare professionals! Take a literary look at science! The focus on this course will not be on literary tactics and topic so much as on the commentaries writers have made on science through literary means. We will read non-fiction, a fiction, and drama, view film, and look at assorted relevant poetry and essays. Expect surprise, wonder, puzzlement, insight, not to mention controversy. Possible texts/films include Proof, A Beautiful Mind, Inherit the Wind, Galileo, Copenhagen, Awakenings, Wit, and First You Build a Cloud. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190. Please note that this is a 2-credit course.

ENGL 295-02 Topics: Narratives from the Iraq War (2 credits, CRN# 10053)
Instructor: Dr. Abigail Davis
Tuesday/Thursday 1:00pm - 4:00pm
The Iraq War continues to be an emerging narrative. This course will explore diverse literary genres and textual mediums, including personal narratives and nonfiction (My War:Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell; The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell by John Crawford; On Call In Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story by Cdr. Richard Jadnick); journalism (Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq); poetry (Here, Bullet by Brian Turner); blogs of soldiers on the ground in Iraq (Buzzell and others); photography; and film (Hurt Locker). We will consider whether this unique and developing body of literature signals a change in the way Americans construct national identity. In what ways does literature from the Iraq War differ from texts which have emerged from other American conflicts? Has the internet changed the method of communication and the content of the stories that are told? In other words, has it changed the writers as well as the audience? Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190. Please note that this is a 2-credit course.

ENGL 337-01 Arab Film (4 credits, CRN# 10233)
Dr. Pamela Nice
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 1:00pm - 4:00pm

This course focuses on films about Arab lives, stories and socio-political situations.  We will compare fiction and documentary films from three directorial perspectives: that of Arabs living in Arab countries; Arabs in the diaspora around the world, including Arab Americans; and non-Arabs living outside of Arab countries. We will explore issues of representation, self-representation and the politics of identity; the challenges of cross-cultural communication through film; spectatorship; and different ways of reading a film.  We will view at least one film a day—some of them rather short—from a variety of Arab and non-Arab countries, produced since the 1960’s, around such themes as colonial struggles for independence; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; social life in Arab countries; veiling; and Islamic extremism. Throughout the course, we will examine the act of making and viewing films about Arabs in the current U.S. and international context. This course fulfills the Human Diversity requirement of the core curriculum and the Diversity Literature requirement for English majors. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190.

Undergraduate Topics Course Descriptions for Spring 2010: February 1 - May 21, 2010

ENGL 297-61 Native American Literature (4 credits, CRN# 22502)
Dr. Elizabeth Wilkinson
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 9:35am - 10:40am

From first contact, non-indigenous peoples being  about indigenous peoples. Those first recorded impressions, naturally, came from what they saw. However, what they saw was filtered through their European world views. Because indigenous peoples had no voice in these early depictions, Native identity was largely a European creation, at least as it was delivered to the non-Native general public. Losing control of one's identity, especially to a colonizing force, has dire consequences. It can be used to justify forced religious conversions, forced re-education in boarding schools, loss of land, and attempted erasure of culture. And, so, indigenous peoples, when they learned the language being used to make them the object of gaze, fought back using that very weapon. As Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna/Sioux) tells us, Native Americans reinvented the enemy's language. We will investigate Native literature produced during the seven eras of U.S.-Native relations and will investigate the relevant historical context. Texts will include, among others, American Indian Stories by Dakota author Zitkala-Sa, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins' Life Among the Piutes, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguana Pueblo), and Turtle Mountain Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich's Tracks.  Please note that this class will require extensive reading and discussion, four short essays, a midterm essay exam, and a final essay exam. This course fulfills the Diversity Literature distribution requirement for English majors. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190.

ENGL 326-01 Topics in Writing Literary Nonfiction: Representations of Consciousness
(4 credits, CRN# 21383)
Dr. Matthew Batt
Tuesday 6:00pm - 9:15pm

Adequately representing the ways the mind works in prose has long been a challenge for writers.  We often diagnose stream of consciousness writing as the only way this is achieved, but texts we'll read argue that, sometimes, consciousness is more like a lake, sometimes a puddle, and occasionally a desert.  This semester we'll focus on some of the hallmark and recent works which have sought directly to story the lives of the mind, including possible texts from James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Milan Kundera, Lauren Slater, Dave Eggers, Oliver Sacks, and David Foster Wallace. The class will spend half its time discussing published work and the other half workshopping essays you have written this semester. You will be asked to write one essay from an interior perspective (eg. memoir) as well as one from an exterior perspective (eg. immersion journalism). Also, this class will likely include a significant service learning component with the objective of gaining experience by helping other people tell their own stories. Possibilities include creative writing tutoring with school kids, memoir mentoring with seniors, or even therapeutic guided writing with people with Autism or stroke victims. The objective is to gain as much experience as possible through literature, class discussions, your own writing and community interaction to help understand how we write about what we think. This course fulfills the Writing distribution requirement for English majors and counts as a writing course for English with a Writing Emphasis majors. Prerequisite: ENGL 252, 253, or permission of the instructor.

ENGL 337-01 African Film: Theory and Practice (4 credits, CRN# 21025)
Dr. Carmela Garritano
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10:55am - 12:00pm

This course will be focused on the film and video from Africa and North Africa, with particular attention to such issues as urban settings, globalization and political engagement. We will view a number of visual texts that present the current historical moment as experiencing varying degrees of crisis as seen in the worlds that children come to inhabit, the illegal immigration flows, and especially the consequences of a world order that has left African societies in difficulty. Not all the films and videos deal with crises, but the settings are urban and as such set the stage for issues involving the passage into modernity, the failures of the state, the day-to-day scramble for living for many, and ultimately the drama of children who live on the edge, in the street, often on their own. Titles will include Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (Mali,,2006); Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (South Africa, 2005); Newton Aduaka’s  Ezra (Nigeria, 2007); Djibril Diop Mambety’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (Senegal, 1999); Jo Ramako’s Karmen Geï (Senegal, 2001), and Socrare Safo’s Amsterdam Diary (Ghana, 2005).

In order to develop a conceptual and critical vocabulary appropriate to the analysis of screen media and to formulate sophisticated readings of the films and videos under investigation, we will read extensively from film and media criticism and theory, with special attention to writing most relevant to African screen media. 

In addition to attending class sessions, students will be required to attend weekly film and video screenings, which will be scheduled in the JRC 126 auditorium on Mondays from 3:00-5:00pm (feel free to bring snacks). Viewing films and videos as they were originally intended to be viewed—in a shared, public space and on a large screen with good sound – is crucial to our understanding of the viewing experience and to our ability to see the wealth of detail available in the original mise-en-scene.

This course fulfills the Human Diversity requirement of the core curriculum and the Diversity distribution requirement for English majors. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190. 

ENGL 365-01 The Romantic Age in Britain (4 credits, CRN# 22503)
Dr. Young-ok An
Monday/Wednesday 2:55pm - 4:35pm

The Romantic period produced one of the most productive and innovative literary movements, bringing with it a revolutionary change in poetic language, a new definition of the poet, the first science fiction, the thrilling saga of the Byronic hero, engrossing odes, and provocative "illuminated" works that combine poetry and design, just to name a few. The themes, issues, and literary figures that dominated the literary works of the Romantic period range from law-breaking outcasts and loners fighting for a just cause, to passionate heroes and heroines, suffering genius-artists, monsters, femme-fatales, and mad men (and women). Last but not least, a book about the growth of one poet's mind became one of the most influential poems in literary history.

In this course, we will examine various and fascinating Romantic texts by such authors as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon, putting them in the context of the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, scientific innovations, and debates on gender roles in society. We will discuss how Romantic texts incorporate tradition and changes in literary language and art forms, and how the writings of this period have shaped our own expectations about literature.  This course fulfills the British Literature distribution requirement for English majors. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190.

ENGL 390-31 Major Literary Figures: Jane Austen in Her Time (4 credits, CRN# 22504)
Dr. Joan Piorkowski
Tuesday/Thursday 9:55am - 11:35am

Austen’s popularity today is indisputable, even if we judge only by the ongoing movie and TV adaptations of her novels.  Why does her work continue to hold our interest?  We will read and discuss Austen’s novels in the context of her era, a revolutionary period where issues such as the rights and roles of men and women, the injustice of slavery, and the possibilities and terrors of radical political change were hotly debated. The fiction of Austen’s time explored these and other “new” ideas, while also experimenting with the form of the novel itself.  We will read the major novels including Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion and consider works by Austen’s contemporaries such as Wollstonecraft, Bage, and Radcliffe. Our goal is to understand Austen’s artistic originality and relevance for her own time, as well for our own, as fully as we can. This course fulfills the British Literature distribution requirement for English majors. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190.

ENGL 395-61 Issues in Literature and Culture: Badman in African American Literature
(4 credits, CRN# 22505)
Dr. Todd Lawrence
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 1:35pm - 2:40pm

Violence is not unique to the African American experience, but it is hard to ignore the prevalence of representations of violent men in the African American expressive tradition. From Stagolee, to Railroad Bill, to Nat Turner, to Bigger Thomas, to Raymond “Mouse” Alexander – these figures have captured the tension between reacting decisively and without fear to racist white oppression and endangering self and community in the process. Black artists have used these figures to display both the fearsome and resilient sides of African American resistance. As scholar Jerry Bryant has written, these violent men, or Badmen, as they are often referred to in African American folklore, are “as natural and common a part of [black folk] experience as thunder or lightning, rainstorms, floods, or fires,” and like those elements of nature, the Badman can devastate the social landscape, threatening both black and white people alike. And yet, perhaps he may also burn, clear, and wash away the sometimes debilitating collective rage of black folk, providing a fertile space in which productive and creative social resistance can flourish.
 
In this course, we will explore the complex terrain of the Badman in twentieth century black expressive culture, following him from the ballads and blues lyrics of the 1920s and 30s through the crime novels and pimpnographies of the mid century to the profane and resistant boasts of gangster rap in 80s and 90s. Authors will include Sterling Brown, Rudolph Fisher, Cecil Brown, Walter Mosley, and Toni Morrison, but we will also consider other artists and figures who are part of the larger body of African American expressive culture within which these authors’ texts are situated. This course fulfills Diversity Literature distribution requirement for English majors. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 111 and 112 or ENGL 190.

ENGL 481-01 Seminar: The Language of Literature (4 credits, CRN# 20246)
Dr. Juan Li
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 9:35am - 10:40am

In literary studies, we use language – reading and writing to construct and communicate our understanding of texts. Yet we rarely step back to analyze the role of language in helping us make sense of what we read and write. This course aims to sharpen our awareness of how language works in literature by examining the structure and use of language in literary texts. Doing this will involve close analysis of texts and some use of linguistic terms and concepts. While we won't resort to technical description of language in literature any more than necessary, we will consider how appropriate linguistic terms and descriptions can articulate an inward understanding of the workings of language in literature, and can help us construct sophisticated perspectives and arguments about literary texts.

The focus of our examination will be on literary texts – poems, short stories, extracts from novels, and plays. We will treat these texts as brilliant achievements, trying to understand and explain how those achievements work and to see where the brilliance lies, assisted by linguistic terms and ideas and an increased awareness of language resources and language structure. The basic procedure of the course will be to explain, briefly, a given topic in the language structuring of texts, and then to apply that topic in analyzing particular texts. In the process, we will consider how linguistic terms offer specific and substantiated insights into the structure and meaning of literary texts. For example, we may undertake a systematic study of the naming practices in a novel. We could look at whether protagonists are named via a pronoun (e.g., she), or by a proper name (Clarissa Dalloway) or by various definite descriptions (the woman; the fluttering sparrow; the elegantly dressed matron), and how these different ways of naming can reveal authorial attitudes and intentions. Other examples of analyses in this course include how changing a word from one word class to another can create special effects in poetry; how the use of dialects and other non-standard forms of English is motivated by the author’s or the character’s social and political point of view; and how the length and structure of speech in dramatic dialogues can help us understand the character relations in plays. Examples of texts we will be studying include “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats, “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, extracts from The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, and so on. Please note that students are not expected to have previous experience with language study.

Prerequisites: Completion of five English courses beyond the 100-level, including ENGL 380; or, for non-majors, permission of the instructor and the department chair.
 

ENGL 481-61 Seminar: Discontiguous States of America (4 credits, CRN# 21027)
Prof. Paul Lai
Monday/Wednesday/Friday 1:35pm - 2:40pm

This course examines ideas and examples of American literature in light of territories outside the forty-eight contiguous states. We will begin by considering more typical accounts of American literary history that rely on the relationships between geography, region, and cultural contact in creating a sense of American identity and literary production. Moving from historian Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis of American character through westward continental expansion, we will consider writing by authors such as Willa Cather and Zitkala Sa that sketch out visions of an expanding America from the perspective of settlers as well as displaced indigenous peoples. We will then turn to explorations of American imperialism that leads to the incorporation of Alaska, Hawai'i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico through the literary imaginations of writers like Jack London, Haunani-Kay Trask, Craig Santos Perez, Jose Garcia Villa, and the Nuyorican Cafe poets.

In addition to reading literature about and from these spaces that lie outside the contiguous United States, we will study legal and cultural claims to the peculiar status of these lands and peoples to the American landscape and body politic. While these places are often effaced and the inhabitants forgotten in the national imaginary, their incorporation into the country has led the US Supreme Court to define some of these areas in a series of early twentieth-century rulings called the "Insular Cases" that turn on the question of whether citizenship and the protections of the Constitution necessarily follow the reach of American military might. We will read these legal discussions along with literary renderings of the complicated status of such people and places. This course fulfills the Diversity Literature distribution requirement for English majors. Prerequisites: Completion of five English courses beyond the 100-level, including ENGL 380; or, for non-majors, permission of the instructor and the department chair.