Current & Upcoming Course Descriptions

SPRING 2010
SUMMER 2010
FALL 2010

   SPRING TERM 2010:  FEBRUARY 1-MAY 21, 2010 

GENG 521-01:  J.R.R. Tolkien:  From the Middle Ages to Middle Earth (3 credits, CRN 22628)
Monday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Martin Warren                  
Note:  This course satisfies the pre-1800 British Lit requirement
J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works that have been popular since they were first published. As an Oxford Professor and eminent medievalist, he wrote out of what he knew about Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English literature. He was a ground-breaking medieval scholar who loved his work so much that he created fictional works rooted in the language and traditions of the Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Gothic, and Celtic cultures that he studied. This class is for those who wish to journey through these cultures, traditions, and languages with other like-minded student-scholars to examine those wonders that make J.R.R. Tolkien's writings so fascinating for so many modern readers. Recent attention has focused largely on Tolkien's most popular works, his work in medieval scholarship, and medieval sources that influenced his thought. Students already familiar with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will be able to explore his works in an academic context and come to better understand the immensity of this writer’s impact on contemporary popular culture and the genre of imaginative fiction. This course explores Tolkien’s work as rooted in ancient and medieval legends, mythologies, and literary genres and practices. We will seek to understand Tolkien’s achievement both in its own right and as the continuation of the classical and medieval narrative traditions it both springs from and renews. This is not a course for beginners new to the works of Tolkien or for those who have seen only Peter Jackson’s movie versions. Prior knowledge of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will provide the foundation for much of our analysis.

GENG 561-01:  Survey of Mexican American Literature (3 credits, CRN 22629)
Wednesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Olga Herrera                                  
Note:  This course satisfies the Multicultural Lit requirement
This course examines Mexican American literary texts within the context of struggle for rights, territory, and citizenship that dates back to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Starting with the first known Mexican American novelist, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and ending with such contemporary writers as Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Luis Alberto Urrea, we will consider a range of novels, poetry, films, and visual texts that engage with and make interventions in a discourse of American identity and belonging. We will approach these texts with a critical framework that will include work by literary critics and theorists such as Américo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldúa, José E Limón, Ramón Saldívar, Cherríe Moraga, Chela Sandoval, and others. Topics include cultural hybridity in the borderlands, empowerment through political action, and the Chicano movement of the 1960s within the context of the Civil Rights era, feminist and queer critiques of power and sexuality, and claims to post-identity stances.

GENG 572-01:  Topic--Writers in Exile (3 credits, CRN 22630)
Tuesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Cathy Craft-Fairchild                                             
Note:  This course counts as elective credit
The idea for this course, "Writers in Exile," came from the subtitle of the poetry anthology put together by Minnesota poets Deborah Keenan and Roseann Lloyd (Looking for Home: Women Writing about Exile). In their preface, Keenan and Lloyd mention that they chose to include poems from women who have experienced "chosen exile, forced exile, immigration, emigration, as well as the idea of exile within the dominant culture...men who see themselves as living in exile within dominant white-male culture." Such an inclusive definition might almost embrace every artist, female and male both, for those who express themselves in poetry, film, novels, or plays typically see themselves as, in some ways, outcasts observing culture from an outsider perspective. The theme of exile, however, seems particularly important to the present, in a country where many women and men, both native and immigrant, feel that they don't quite happily dissolve into the melting pot. This course will study contemporary writers and filmmakers who attempt to express feelings of alientation by making the theme of exile a topic of their contemplation and creativity; authors studied will include Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Julie Dash, Khaled Hosseini, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Eytan Fox.

GENG 635-01:  Seminar: The Victorial Sensation Novel (3 credits, CRN 22631)
Thursday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Alexis Easley                 
Note:  This elective course satisfies one of the 600-level seminar requirements
Bigamy, jewel heists, revenge murders, hysteria, and disinherited children. The sensation novel was a product of mid-Victorian anxieties about the "hidden crimes" of the upper classes. Whereas in the early part of the century crime was viewed as a threat posed by the lower orders, by the 1860s, criminal behavior was seen as the "dark secret" hidden beneath the façade of the seemingly perfect upper-class home. In this course, we will investigate the development of the sensation novel from the 1860s to the 1880s, including novels by writers such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood, and Thomas Hardy. We will also explore how the sensation novel emerged from the periodical press – reportage of actual crimes that shocked a nation. In addition, we will examine the ways sensation novels were adapted to the stage in wildly popular melodramas of the period.

GENG 668-01:  Seminar: Postcolonial Cinema (3 credits, CRN 22632)
Wednesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Kanishka Chowdhury        
Note:  This course satisfies the Multicultural Lit requirement & one 600-level seminar requirement
Postcolonial Cinema will introduce students to a range of questions and concerns that emerged from the decolonization movements beginning in the 1960s. We will study various filmmakers’ attempts to devise a cinematic language that was not merely imitative of western film form. All along, we will interrogate these filmmakers’ works and place them within the context of issues of race, gender, empire, and decolonization. Our discussions will be informed by the political and cultural writings of critics such as Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon, as well as theorists of film like Sergei Eisenstein, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembene, Glauber Rocha, and Fernando Solinas. We will also consider the continuing evolution of postcolonial film in specific contexts: gender, nation, class, migration, and globalization. These issues will be contextualized by the works of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Manthia Diawara, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Hamid Naficy, Ella Shohat, and others. We will base our discussions on the following films: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment, Shyam Benegal’s Manthan, Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance, Flora Gomes’s Mortu Nega, Tracy Moffat’s Bedevil, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Satyajit Ray’s Devi, Ousmane Sembene’s Xala, Abderrahamane Sissako’s Life on Earth, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces, Trinh-T Minh-ha’s Reassemblage, and Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace. Students will write a mid-term paper and a final seminar paper, and will be responsible for a substantial presentation, as well as weekly web postings on Blackboard.

   SUMMER TERM 2010:  MAY 26-JULY 8, 2010

GENG 514-01:  Contemporary American Drama (3 credits, CRN 30656)
Mondays & Wednesdays, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Amelia Kritzer
Note:  This course counts as an elective

The class will focus on plays and playwrights of the American theater from 1960 to the present. Works studied will be placed within the context of artistic movements within American theater, as well as developments in American society. The focus will include currently active playwrights, such as Lynne Nottage, Migdalia Cruz, Tony Kushner, and J. T. Rogers.

GENG 641-01:  Seminar: British Modernism: 1900-1950 (3 credits, CRN 30670)
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Tom Redshaw
Note:  This elective course satisfies one of the 600-level seminar requirements
This seminar will examine the several cultures of modern Britain from the Edwardian period (1901—1911) through to the end of “Austerity” Britain with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. Two “high” literary cultures—Edwardian and Modernist—will be counterpoised with the several minority cultures of Britain: the Left, the Bloomsbury Group, the Celtic “fringe.” Core texts will be The Long Weekend, by Robert Graves, Early 20th Century Britain, and volume F of The Norton Anthology: The Twentieth Century and After. The seminar will focus on a limited range of writing: poetry by Yeats, Auden, MacNeice; drama by Shaw, Eliot Coward, O’Casey; fiction by Conrad, Bowen, Waugh, Orwell; and critical prose by Woolf, Orwell, Eliot, and Caudwell. Some readings will be placed on Blackboard reserve or in the library. Discussions will be based on weekly one-page papers. The final 12—15 page essay will focus on the questions and controversies of the course and not on new reading or research. The final portfolio will consist of: the discussion papers, the final essay, and a self-assessment.

   FALL TERM 2010:  SEPTEMBER 8-DECEMBER 17, 2010

GENG 513-01:  Issues in Criticism (3 credits, CRN 40356) 
Mondays, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Martin Warren
Note:  This required course must be taken as one of the first three courses in the program. Beginning in Fall 2010, GENG 513 will be a required prerequisite for all 600-level seminars.
Issues in Criticism is an introduction to critical frameworks used in the past and the present to theorize and/or critique literature. The term "theory" encompasses widely diverging definitions. The goal of the class is to give students a foundation in theory’s terminologies, the different methodologies used in literary and cultural analysis, and a sense of the various schools of criticism that have developed most especially in the post-World War II  period. Underlying all this are basic questions such as: What should we read? How should we read? Is it possible to arrive at a single correct interpretation? How are texts related to other texts? How are texts related to their historical contexts? Why is there so much controversy around the issues of literary criticism and theory?

GENG 528-01:  British Radicals of the 1790's (3 credits, CRN 42593) 
Tuesdays, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Cathy Craft-Fairchild
Note:  This course satisfies the Early British requirement
The 1790s were turbulent years in England.  Events in France demanded a reaction, and the British response was complex. Radicals, like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays saw in the revolution in France ideals that could be developed in England to bring about reforms that would benefit women and the poor, in particular. With the threats of French invasion after 1793 and England's subsequent declaration of war, voices of reactionaries began to prevail and, as one historian, Eleanor Ty puts it, "the end of the century saw a strengthening of conservatism, anti-republicanism, and anti-feminism." The ideological battles were fought through words and actions, as the political essays and fiction of the period influenced public opinion and policy. Radicals and conservatives put forth arguments and counterarguments, the first to promote change, the latter to urge caution. Each camp influenced the other, producing some of the richest and most interconnected work of any period. This is the material to be explored and discussed within the course; writers to be studied will include Edmund Burke, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen.

GENG 529-01:  Romantic Hellenism (3 credits, CRN 42594)  
Wednesdays, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Amy Muse
Note:  This course counts as elective credit
The excavation of Pompeii in the mid eighteenth century is usually considered the birth of modern Hellenism, when British tastes turned from emulating Rome to worshipping ancient Greece: an enthusiasm manifested in the popularity of Greek Revival architecture and home décor (such as Wedgwood china), toga-influenced fashion, the construction of faux classical ruins in one’s backyard, and the collection of antiquities on scales both small and large (think Elgin Marbles). In the early nineteenth century, an era of revolutions around the globe, the presence of Greece in a literary text signified that the author’s theme was liberty and his or her politics probably radical. As we will discuss, tensions between the aesthetics of neoclassical Hellenism and the politics of Romantic philhellenism are the ancestors to today’s culture wars between conservative and liberal thinkers over the purpose of a liberal arts education.

The course is organized around three units: Travel, in which we read travelers’ narratives and philosophical essays on the sublime and the picturesque, Homer, and ruins; Revolution, in which we read epic and lyric poetry and drama inspired by the Greek War of Independence, Aeschylus, and Orientalism; and a case study on a novel by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), an intriguing romantic tale that merges Hellenic and philhellenic. It has long been out of print, and together we will create a modern edition with critical commentary.

GENG 561-01:  Discontiguous States of America (3 credits, CRN 42412) 
Tuesdays, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Paul Lai
Note:  This course satisfies the Multicultural Literature requirement
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 such authors 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 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, Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, and Esmeralda Santiago. We will pay particular attention to writings by Filipino Americans that explore the complicated, often overlooked status of the Philippines as a territory of the United States for the first half of the twentieth century and the legacy such a territorial status has had on Filipino American culture.

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 peoples and places.

GENG 655-01:  Seminar: The Political Imagination of the American Novel, 1850-1900
(3 credits, CRN 42414) 
Thursdays, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Andy Scheiber
Note:  This course satisfies the American Literature requirement and one of the 600-level seminar requirements.
Utopianism, abolitionism, feminism, states’ rights, Darwinism, laissez-faire capitalism, Manifest Destiny: America in the last half of the 19th Century was the site of furious battles—both ideological and literal—over issues that went to fundamental questions of individual and national identity. Add to this two protracted and bloody wars—the Civil War and the war between the United States and the Indian nations that stood in the path of westward colonization by the Federal government—and you have an American story that is problematical, complex, and conflicted. The American novel emerges in this period as what Bakhtin might call a “dialogical space”—a place where the various voices in these conflicts arise and contend with one another in artistically imagined form. In this course we’ll consider a selection of works that in various ways open such a dialogical space, one in which we find an artistically rendered image of the nation itself, by turns multiform, broken, and restlessly, greedily expanding. Probable primary readings:  Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; William Wells Brown, Clotel; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills, Margret Howth; Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Rodman the Keeper” and “King David;” Henry Adams, Democracy; Henry James, The Bostonians; Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona; Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson; and Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition. Prerequisite: GENG 513 Issues in Criticism

NOTE ABOUT SPECIAL COURSES

Registration for the following courses is not possible through the MURPHY online system:

          GENG 598/599    Undergraduate Course (300-level or Higher) taken for graduate credit 

          GENG 698          Independent Study

          GENG 699          Master's Essay

          Instructor and/or Graduate Program Director permissions and special registration forms are
          required for enrollment in these classes. Please contact the graduate program coordinator
          at (651) 962-5628 or gradenglish@stthomas.edu for assistance.