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This course is a blended or "Hybrid' course in which students meet their instructor face to face for 50% of the usual classroom time and do their course work online, using a rich WebCT site, for the other 50% of the time. That means students come to class only one day a week and are engaged in online course work for the other day. There are 2 separate sections, one meeting face to face on Tuesdays (Sect. #--), the other meeting face to face on Thursdays (Sect. # --). Although the sections are separate, both instructors, Prof. Lorraine Stock and Ms. Nimmi Jayathurai, will attend both sections, alternating the roles of "Discussion Leader" and "Discussion Facilitator." Learning Units will be constructed and led by either of the alternating instructors. Each instructor is responsible for the grading of one section, to maintain consistency of standards and to monitor individual progress and improvement.

The course focuses on the experience of both medieval and contemporary "pilgrimage," which is a journey to a "shrine" for the attainment of spiritual benefits or for fulfilling other possible personal motives. As a laboratory for investigating the topic of medieval pilgrimage, we use the Middle English text of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, focusing on his pilgrim taletellers and their stories, told as part of a "game" or "contest" to alleviate boredom while on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in Canterbury. However, telling their tales, they also reveal a great deal about themselves personally, about medieval life and attitudes, and the genres of medieval literature. The WebCT materials—including film clips taken from documentaries, podcasts, radio lectures, music and sound files, pictorial webpages, etc.—complement these textual materials. Recent film treatments of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are incorporated into the material of the course. Students are expected to explore these assigned online materials on the non-class days.

1. The Course as Pilgrimage

The work of the course--reading the text and doing extra-textual research--will be organized conceptually to replicate the experience of a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Content modules contained on the WebCT site for the class are linked to a map displaying the pilgrims' route from London to Canterbury, with towns along the way serving as milestones that inaugurate new learning modules that are completed after the student performs some assessment exercise--a quiz, a short writing project, an online writing assignment--allowing him/her to move on along the map toward arrival at the ultimate goal, the town of Canterbury—culminating in completion of Chaucer's text, the final project, the final exam, and the course.

2. The Course as Game

As Chaucer's text is organized around a "game," class activities will also involve game-playing or role-playing. Class members adopt the persona or avatar of one of Chaucer's pilgrims, as well as some other famous medieval figures, and role play by posting "postcards from the road," written in the style/voice of that pilgrim or character, on a discussion board in WebCT.

3. Other Writing and Research Projects:

• Annotation Exercise: To encourage close reading, each class member will electronically annotate a different short segment of Middle English text, using the online Middle English Dictionary.
• Close Reading Paper: Building on that skill, each class member will write a short critical analysis (3-4 pp.) of the language employed and its contribution to the meaning of another short Middle English passage from Chaucer's Tales.
• Final Project: In addition to the traditional critical paper (about 8-10 pp.) analyzing Chaucer's text, ancillary pilgrimage texts, or film adaptations, other creative exercises, such as digital stories, adapting Chaucer's tales into rap poetry etc., are permitted to fulfill the course's major project.
• Milestone Quizzes
• Online Midterm
• Essay Final Exam.
• Extra Credit: Given for memorizing and reciting the first 19 lines of the General Prologue in Middle English.

Required Texts:

• Jill Mann, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Penguin, 2005. If you already own another edition of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, (The Riverside Chaucer, or editions by J.H. Fisher or F.N. Robinson) you may use it after checking with the instructors.
• Helen Cooper. The Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford UP, any edition).

Work, pay, occupation, job transfers, bank accounts—our workaday lives differ from those in Shakespeare’s time, but he has a lot to say about economics. In this course, we will study Shakespeare’s writing from the earliest narrative poems to his last play (a romance) and include comedies and tragedies. As a point of entry into the early modern period we’ll take ideas of labor, property (and props), economics, and exchange to study how Shakespeare dramatizes such matters as domestic, national, personal, and marital property; the ownership of land; relationships among masters and servants; and the identities associated with various kinds of work, money, ownership, poverty, and social mobility. The course will emphasize writing and careful close reading. To complement our reading and discussion of the drama, we will read some literary criticism, social history, and some other materials.

Students are expected to read all the texts including introductions and notes and to do some video viewing outside of class. Honors and Women’s Studies credit available; see me. There is a WebCT component.

Required text

• Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: WW Norton, 1997 on order at the UC Bookstore, though any scholarly edition of the plays will do; e.g. Riverside. Be sure the text you use has decent footnotes and a useful introduction. Skim before you buy!
• If you do not get the Norton or other Collected Works, you will need the following poems and plays:
  • Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (often collected with the sonnets);
  • The Taming of the Shrew
  • The Merchant of Venice
  • Othello, King Lear
  • The Tempest.

Course components: Writing is a major component of this class. We will devote some class time to your formal papers-in-progress and to revision. I offer a research essay as an option and am always willing to talk with you about your writing. Two short papers, two exams, responses to reading focus questions posted on Webct.

“Shakespeare online? That sounds sacrilegious, heretical, perhaps even blasphemous! I thought the professor was supposed to stand before the classroom and impress students with long quotations from Hamlet, or nudge us along through the texts translating Shakespeare into modern English so we could understand what is going on in the plays!” It is true that online classes do require that students are able to work on their own, but this class is not simply read the plays and take a test. My online class has extensive notes on each of the assigned plays. There will also be regular communication between professor and students. (This is not a class that is just out there. Let me know when you are finished.) I try to make the online class similar to a classroom class in that we have regular discussion, weekly assignments, and review sessions before tests. How does it work? Registered students will go the UH WebCT site and follow the simple instructions for signing into the class. (You will probably be able to do this shortly before classes begin but certainly by the first class day.) On the English 3306 Homepage students will find a syllabus, calendar, lecture notes, assignments, weekly message, and dedicated email for communicating with the professor and/or other members of the class. There will be regular asynchronous discussion, which all students are expected to participate in. I also ask that you keep a weekly journal and submit the entry to me each Friday. Shortly before examinations, I will hold an online synchronous review sessions. Exams will be scheduled for specific days. You will be able to take the exam nearly anytime during the day; however, the length of time you may work on the exam is restricted. The exams are multiple choice, and you may use your book while taking the exam, but again, time is restricted and you may only go forward through the exam, you may not return to answered or even viewed questions.

Requirements

• There are no regular classroom meetings for lectures or discussion
• There will be a three exams and they are cumulative exams (on the final exam their will be questions over the full semester).
• Students must submit 3 critiques of the plays they view on video/film or in live performance. Each is to be approximately five hundred words in length. Specific instructions will appear on the Homepage.
• Students must participate fully in asynchronous discussion normally answering 3 questions per week or responding to other’s responses.
• Students must submit a weekly journal entry each Friday addressing the class or the material being read and studied at the time.
• Students must write a fifteen hundred word research paper based on a series of articles posted on the class Homepage.

Final notes

If you have not taken a fully on-line class before, do not be concerned. It is not difficult to catch on to the technology. You may work on the class from your home computer with internet access, a computer lab at the University including the Writing Center in Agnes Arnold Hall, a computer lab at one of the UH distance education sites, or at work (if the boss is not watching). You may do the class work at your convenience: early in the morning, late at night or anytime in between. However, you must follow the pace of the class. You will not be able to do all the work the first few weeks of class, nor can you wait until the last week or two to do all the work. The most important quality you can bring to the class is individual initiative. You must regularly and consistently sign on and do the work prescribed for this class. I have taught on-line classes for four years, and I think it is great fun, and I am convinced that you can learn as much about Shakespeare this way as in my classroom. I hope you will join me in late August for this new Shakespearean adventure.

Please visit my website to view a full syllabus for this class.

Freedom, Imagination, Nature, I (myself), the “East”: these are some concepts that dominate the literary historical era that we call “Romantic,” and thus will be some of the terms guiding our reading in this course. The Romantic era, often denoted as 1798-1832, was a time of intense social change and corresponding literary innovation. This course examines this relationship between art and historical experience by exploring the impact upon Romantic literature of democracy, industrialization, urbanization, and imperialism. Authors include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and others.

Requirements

Reading of primary and secondary texts; regular journal assignments; class participation; midterm and final.

This course serves as an introduction to a rich variety of Victorian texts and to the social and cultural contexts that produced them. Students will gain interpretive and analytical skills to enhance their understanding of novels and poetry written during one of the most complex and challenging periods in modern history. At the heart of the course lie several questions that were as critical for Victorian readers as they are for us today: in an industrial, consumerist society, what is the purpose of art and literature? How does literature offer writers and readers ways to understand and even critique their society? What kinds of (necessary?) escape does art offer? What purpose does fantasy serve? What kinds of truths can only be told through creative forms?

To explore these questions, we will be reading novels, short fiction, prose essays, and poetry that represent the major literary tendencies of the period: narrative realism, psychological and moral inquiry, social critique, and aestheticism. Key authors include: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and others.

Required Texts

• The Broadview Anthology of British Literature -- vol 5: The Victorian Era ISBN: 1-55111-613-8
• George Eliot, Middlemarch (Broadview Press) ISBN: 1-55111-233-7
  

This class is offered online, so there will be no classroom meetings on campus. It is essential that students have access to a reliable high speed internet connection.

This survey of English literature will begin with Geoffrey Chaucer and conclude with literature of the 18th century. We will read one full text novel, Robinson Crusoe. The class requires substantial reading both online and from printed texts. There will be approximately 4 tests and 3 papers of moderate length. Students are expected also to write and submit a weekly commentary on the readings assigned.

The class website is quite extensive with lecture notes on all the reading assignments. These notes are supplemented by short 7-10 minute mini-lectures which students may download to ipods or similar listening devices. (The mini-lectures may also be heard on a personal computer.) The class website also has other information and links to other helpful websites.

Individual initiative is very important for students to succeed in this completely online class. Students must be prepared to visit the class website regularly (a minimum of 3-4 times per week) and to participate in the class.

A full syllabus for the class will be posted on my website in early November.

This couse is designed to study black women’s novels and film adaptations.

The couse will include the following novels and film adaptations:

• Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
• A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich (Alice Childress)
• The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
• The Women of Brewster Place (Gloria Naylor)
• Beloved (Toni Morrison)
• The Wedding (Dorothy West)
• How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Terry McMillan)
• Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash).

The course will focus on healing rituals in the novels and film adaptations, particularly rituals linked to issues surrounding race, class, gender, sexuality, trauma, community, and spirituality. Additionally, the seminar examines the changes that occur as the novels are transformed into a different medium and analyzes what, if anything, those editorial changes mean socially, linguistically, culturally, and politically, particularly as related to the theme of healing and the wounds that necessitate healing.

The discussions will be guided by a series of questions:

• In what ways do the novels and the films critique issues linked to healing?
• Are there key scenes in the novels that are omitted or revised/reconceptualized in the films, and what is the impact on healing as a result of these omissions or revisions?
• Are there scenes in the films that do not appear in the novel and vice versa, and how do the additions or deletions enhance/focus or distort the vision expressed in the novel, particularly with regard to the theme of healing? How are the novels and the films in dialogue?
• Why are certain novels by black women been made into films and others have not?
• How have the film adaptations shaped literary production by black women writers?

T. S. Eliot did not understand the changing climate of the nation when he considered America to be a wasteland (1922). He thought that mass immigration from Eastern European countries was despoiling the nation. That immigration was, in fact, a mighty population of Jews leaving the pogroms of Poland and Russia to seek a new life in America only to strengthen America's cultural institutions. Jews, however, have been in America since the Dutch colonization of America in 1654, and their story is told in archival records, in narratives, and in poetry.

The course will study the colonial diaries of Mordecai Sheftall (1735-1797) and Rebecca Samuel (1790s). It will review the modern literature of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Leo Rosten's The Education of Hyman Kaplan, the poetry of Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro, the fiction of Cynthia Ozick and Norman Mailer, the richness of the literature Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Max Apple. Students will study the impact of modern Israel on American writing.

Texts: (Tentative)

• Jewish American Literature: An Anthology. Ed. Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbau, and Kathryn Hellerstein. N.Y.: W. W. Norton, Inc., 2001. [hardbound]
• Literature of Arrival, 1654-1880
• The Great Tide, 1881-1924
• Jewish Humor
• From Margin to Mainstream in Difficult Times, 1924-1945
• Achievement and Ambivalence, 1945-
• Wandering and Return: Literature since 1973
• The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. Ed. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [paperback]
• Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
• Imagining Judaism in America
• Of crucibles and grandfathers in East European immigrants
• Coney Island, USA: America in Yiddish literary imagination
• Hebrew literature in America
• Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
• Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
• Jewish American poetry
• Jewish American renaissance
• The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
• Jewish American women writers and race questions
• On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
• Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing

This course traces the development of the novel from the 1950s to contemporary times investigating the establishment of traditions and changes in the form over time. While the early novel was dominated by male writers since the 1980s women writers have dominated writing in the region. Critical reading and analysis will consider the particular historical and cultural contexts of the region in which the form developed. Consequently, questions of colonialism, post-colonialism, nationalisms with the contingent issues of race, ethnicity, class and gender will be paramount.

Requiered Novels

• C L R James – Minty Alley
• George Lamming – In the Castle of my Skin
• Roger Mais – Brother Man
• V S Naipaul – A House for Mr Biswas
• Earl Lovelace – The Dragon Can’t Dance
• Jamaica Kincaid – Annie John
• Rachel Manley – In My Father’s Shade
• Pauline Melville – The Ventriloquist’s Tale

This course will introduce students to some of the forms, tropes, and critical issues in a variety of recent examples of this increasingly popular form of creative non-fiction. Recurring issues will include the writers’ motivations for writing about their lives, the different ways they construct the self, and questions about authenticity and truth in publishing accounts of their personal experiences.

Assigned works

• Tobias Wolf, This Boy’s Life
• Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club
• J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar,
• Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America
• Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala
• Allison Smith, Name All the Animals
• Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
• Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird Years
• Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

Requirements

• Students will write 1-2 page response papers on each work that will provide the basis for the initial class discussion
• Students will write two 5-page critical essays on topics that reflect their developing interests in issues raised by the works.
• The final assignment is the traditional end-of-the-seminar essay in which the students will reflect on the characteristics of memoir as a genre and the cultural needs it fulfills.

We shall read and discuss literature from a Cultural Critical Studies perspective, which means that we examine literature not only as a critique of the culture(s) about which it is written but even more as a repository of the very cultural values, behaviors, etc. it critiques. Our focus in this course will be the way in which American literature, against a foreground and background of other cultural media, represents the automobile as a vehicle of personal, cultural, social, and economic mobility and identity and the experience of space/place. Unarguably, the automobile affected twentieth century life as the computer has already dramatically overhauled twenty-first century life. What is so interesting (and aggravating) is America’s conflicted attitude about the automobile, the love/hate relationship with the car that has existed from its introduction. What is this attitude’s genesis and progress? We shall look at the cultural representation of the car in terms of technology, gender, race, environment. There will be segments on “the road,” history, and auto racing.

Texts (Tentative)

• Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
• Cather, One of Ours
• Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
• Kerouac, On the Road
• King, Christine
• Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Selected Stories)
• Erdrich, Love Medicine (Selected Stories)
• Jennings, ed., Road Trips, Head Trips, and Other Car-Crazed Writings
• Clarke, Driving Women

Requirements

• There will be a midterm and final exam. There will also be required written assignments rich in research.
• The course will require extensive online (and some library) research

The field of literary criticism has now moved into the realm of sexuality and its implications to society and culture are now an important field of knowledge. The course will begin with recognizable foundational texts that begin much of the discussion of sexuality for continental western thought:

• Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (selections)
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol 1, An Introduction (This text provides one of the more persuasive discussions on the formation of the modern concept of homosexuality.)
• Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (provides a coherent and brief overview of the field of study)

Moving into the work of gay and lesbian studies that informs much of contemporary queer theory, selections from Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia's edited work, Queer Cultures, will provide the historical intellectual foundations of lesbian and gay studies. This will allow for the exposure of the ongoing debates and assumptions between those who would argue for a lesbian/gay studies field and those who would argue for queer studies. Selections from the work of Anglo-American lesbian feminists, like Lillian Faderman, Bonnie Zimmerman, and Adrienne Rich, gay historians like David Halperin, and the work of French Feminist will represent the majority of the readings. The edited collection and now classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, grounds the cultural and ethnic work in queer theory and will also introduce recognized authors like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, and Cherrie Moraga.

The work of two important thinkers in queer theory will be discussed. These authors have consistently been cited as some of the most important writers of queer theory: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Finally, one text that addresses many of the questions in queer theory in far more pragmatic form, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, introduced and discussed by Michel Foucault, explores the complexity of queer identity and exposes the assumptions within queer theory. This memoir is a creative articulation of the understanding of an individual identity and its relationship to sexuality.

This course is an outgrowth of ongoing research for my current book project, 1771: A Geography of Feeling, which analyzes the diverse genres of Anglophone writing produced during a single year in the British empire. For example, 1771 saw the publication of Smollett’s and Mackenzie’s Humphry Clinker and the Man of Feeling, Johnson’s Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting the Falkland Islands, Percy’s Hermit of Warkworth, the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Benezet’s Historical Account of Guinea, and Wheatley’s Elegiac Poem on the Death of Whitefield. My book attempts to answer two questions: first, how might we meaningfully relate these disparate authors, works, and genres to one another; and second, how might we use these relations to understand a distinct historical moment that we label, a little arbitrarily, “1771”?

To translate the book’s ongoing research agenda into a framework suitable for undergraduates, I have designed the course around a series of locations that will ground our semester’s discussions of particular authors and works published in and around the year 1771: these sites will include London, Edinburgh, Jamaica, and Philadelphia. These four locations will orient our readings in the year 1771 both geographically and historically. Moreover, students will supplement this year’s literary texts and contexts with readings in biographical and autobiographical texts involving such exemplary figures as John Wilkes, Henry Mackenzie, Benjamin Franklin, or Olaudah Equiano. Anchoring the class discussion around a particular city and a few closely-examined life stories should enable undergraduates to gain a more detailed and complex understanding of a cultural moment as it was experienced at different sites in the British empire. Nonetheless, I also expect students to go beyond their assigned readings by learning about this era from non-literary sources such as contemporary political pamphlets or newspapers, and by doing their own independent research into the historical background and secondary criticism.

Requirements

• Write 2 brief response-essays about the course-readings, to become responsible for the cultural and historical contexts of one of the cities covered, which they will develop and present as part of small research groups, in person and on the courseblog,
• Develop a final research project (ordinarily, a 12-15 pp. research essay) in consultation with the instructor

Prerequisites for a Research Intensive Course

• Because this research intensive course will have an important dimension of directed research- and writing-projects, it is designed to be taken at or near the end of the students’ time in the English major, after students have successfully completed their 3301 requirement or taken two 3000-level English literature courses.
• Because this research component demands close instructor/student interactions throughout the semester, enrollment has been capped at 20.
• Students meeting these criteria who wish to register for the course may do so either by emailing Prof. Mazella or by contacting the Undergrad Advisor, Ms. Kimberly Williams.

Tentative Course Readings

• London (4 wks)
  • Arthur Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty.
  • Samuel Johnson, The False Alarm and Transactions respecting the Falkland Islands
  • James Boswell, London Journal
  • Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker
  • Phillis Wheatley, sels. (from Basker, below)
• Edinburgh (4 wks)
  • James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind
  • Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling
  • Encyclopedia Britannica and Millar, Origin of Ranks in Society, sels.
  • Robert Fergusson and James Macpherson, sels.
• Jamaica (4 wks)
  • Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World
  • Richard Cumberland, The West Indian
  • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative
  • Vincent Carretta, Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man
  • James Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, sels.
• Philadelphia (2 wks)
  • Gary Nash, First City
  • Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea, with an Account of the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade
  • Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
  • Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, sels.
• Coda: 1776
  • Thomas Paine, Common Sense
  • Bernard Bailyn, “1776: A Year of Challenge—A World Transformed.”

The capacity to see has long been associated with knowledge, pleasure, and control. Similarly, the capacity to capture visual attention is commonly attributed to its immediacy, exhibitionism, and excess. This course in film studies explores the history, theory, and aesthetics of photographic and cinematographic media, in order to investigate the various ways in which vision exercises power. That is, vision is a power equally capable of destroying originality and oppressing individual liberties, as it is for exercising justice and facilitating artistic innovation and contemplation.

Requirements

This advanced-level course incorporates substantial reading. Required films are to be viewed independently by the student, outside of class time. Graded work includes midterm, final, and pop quizzes.

This course begins with Ferdinand de Saussure and his revolutionary developments and advancements in Modern Linguistics. These developments and advancements serve as the foundation of modern literary theories such as structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalytical theories, post-structural feminism, reader-response theory, and post-colonial criticism. The course aims to test the applicability of these theories to representative texts.

Three novels have been assigned for the first three (3) weeks of the semester. They include a traditional/realistic novel, a post-structural feminist novel, and a postmodern novel.

Beginning the fourth week, we will devote each session to an assigned critical work. As the course/semester develops we will set those works against each other to test their limitations and tacit assumptions about theory. We will attempt to discover the sorts of narrative to which they respond. During the second half of certain sessions, we will continue to discuss the week's theoretical reading, but these sessions will focus on practical applications: what the week's theory can and cannot illuminate in the works that we are reading.

The required theoretical books and novels are available in the bookstore. Other books/articles are on reserve in the library.

Requirements

Student is required to write a short paper (10 pages), which is due the seventh week of the semester. Student is also asked to write a long seminar paper (15-20 pages), due at the end of the semester. In addition, each student is required to participate in a group presentation, where the group, using one of the theories discussed in the course, offers a reading of one of the required texts.

Required Texts

• C. Brontes, Jane Eyre
• Carole Maso, AVA
• D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel
• Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies
• Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
• Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Selections from)
• Luce Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman
• Helen Cixous, The Newly Born Woman
• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
• Gayatri Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?" and Enrique Dussel, "Beyond Eurocentrism"
  

Student should come to class the first day prepared to discuss Jane Eyre. Student can also read the first chapter of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics and the introduction to Michael Lane's Structuralism, which will be on reserve in the library.

The seminar will approach folktale and myth as expressions of local knowledge rather than as universal archetypes. After two weeks during which some of the most widespread properties of oral narrative are discussed and some leading folkloric approaches to narrative study are outlined, the seminar will focus on the genres most familiar in contemporary Western experience: the märchen, known best as adapted by and from the Grimms' Fairy Tales, and the legend, known best through such oral manifestations as urban legends.

Working from our shared experience, we will then study oral artistry in traditional communities: Irish tales as rendered by Seanchais; the art of Hungarian marchen teller Zsuzsanna Palko, who could entertain an audience for twelve hours at a stretch; the animals tales of African Americans, Creoles, and Cajuns; and such Appalachian narratives as Jack Tales. Myth will be examined briefly and principally in relationship to Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving written story, as well as Native American (Ojibwa, Thompson, and Koasati), South Asian, Polynesian, and Melanesian cultures.

Requirements

One written midterm and a final oral (with written outline). There is extensive writing assignment with proposals and progress reports will be due at regular intervals. Each seminar participant will choose a narrative community or culture (e.g,, African Americans in Nova Scotia, Hungarian Szekely, Louisiana Cajuns, Palestinian märchen tellers) and study the narratives of that culture with the goal of understanding their meanings and functions on the tellers' own terms.

Only seminar participants who have previously taken ENGL 6316, ENGL 4316, and/or equivalent courses will be permitted to do fieldwork for the seminar. They may record and study the narratives of a living community.

Goals

Basic understanding of oral artistry's place in your personal experience; beginning understanding of folktale and myth as complex artistic and social statements within the performance contexts of traditional societies; introduction to the scholarship of folktale and myth, its premises, and its uses.

Texts

available at Rother's bookstore

• Dégh, Linda. Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palko. Jackson: UP of Miss, 1994.
• Dorson, Richard M., ed. Folktales Told Around the World. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1975.
• O'Sullivan, Sean. Folktales of Ireland. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.
  Roberts, Leonard. South from Hell-fer-Sartin. Lexington: UP of Kentucky,1989.
  Sandars, N.K. The Epic of Gilgamesh. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin, 1972.
  Zipes, Jack, trans. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. 2nd ed. NY: Bantam, 1987.
• [PLUS web readings from Lindahl, Carl, et al. Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997 and other texts and critical readings supplied electronically or by handout]

This class will address the 20th Century in American Literature, reading representative novels from each decade (beginning with Edith Wharton, ending with Phillip Roth). The class should interest fiction writers, in particular, because each book is written, set, and published in its decade; that is, the writer was working without the advantage of hindsight or restrospective viewpoint.

Text

• The House of Mirth
• The Great Gatsby
• White Noise
• Revolutionary Road
• Play It As It Lays
• Music for Torching
• The Human Stain
• The Member of the Wedding
• Others to be announced

This class is a workshop, the primary texts of which will be student fiction. To supplement craft discussion, we will read six other texts (novels and story collections), including work by writers visiting Houston in the spring semester.

This course will provide an overview of British Modernist literature and current criticism on the subject, exploring issues of (inter)nationality, gender and sexuality, colonialism, technology, and formal experiment, among others.

Texts

• James Joyce, Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts
• Conrad, Lord Jim
  WB Yeats, Selected Poems
• TS Eliot, The Waste Land
• Mina Loy, Selected Poems
• Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories
• EM Forster, Passage to India
• DH Lawrence, Women in Love

Using traditional literary divisions, this survey of American literature after 1865 reviews historically significant literary pieces to develop and comprehend the conceptions that make up our understanding of American literature. Along with an analysis of American literature, the focus of the course is to investigate the creation of an American identity within the parameters of literary canon formation. Critical conceptions will be included in order to be able to critically address these texts. The critical readings are examples of some of the current discussions in the field.

Learning Outcomes

The expected learning outcomes of this class include becoming familiar with the traditionally accepted literary historical divisions within American literature after 1865, the ability to recognize the characteristics of each literary historical division, and the ability to write comprehensively about authors within each of the divisions.

Required Texts

• Any American literature anthology post-1865
• Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
  Kate Chopin, The Awakening
• William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Genaro González, Rainbow's End
• Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
• R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam
• Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism
  María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It?
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
• Richard Wright, Native Son

Course Requirements

• Consistent attendance and class participation is expected (15%).
• One oral presentation (25%)
• In-class position papers (15%),
• One seminar paper (15-20 pages, 45%).

One of the basic questions that teachers in this department are faced with the first day they enter their class is, given the rich, complex, and dynamic cultural and social class diversity of our students, what, if any, difference does this make in our teaching? Some have argued that such cultural and class diversity is either tangential or irrelevant to our teaching. A few have argued that it can, in fact, be a hindrance for our students, that it makes taking on academic discourse and the values of the university, which are often at odds with their culture(s), more difficult if the student insists on retaining ties to the home cultures.

In contrast, this course starts from the opposite premise-that cultural and social class diversity is important, beneficial, and, potentially, provides the teacher and student of rhetoric and composition with their greatest resource.

This course investigates the relation of culture and class to writing. What difference does it make if we think about writing as a specific cultural practice? How does viewing culture and class diversity as a key resource, as a help to the teaching of literacies, suggest different teaching strategies? Different conceptions of curriculum? Different conceptions of writing? Why can culture and class diversity be a resource to learning other literacies including academic literacy? What is cultural rhetoric? How does cultural rhetoric help us to envision our work as writers and teachers? What are cultural literacies? What sort of cultural literacies are in contest in the lives of our students? These are few of the questions the course poses.

Starting with the insights of the work of the Yuri Lotman of Tartu semiotic school, and others, which argues that the greatest semiotic development occurs when the cultures with the widest differences are in contact and interact, this course explores the concepts of culture and social class. Rather than simply a survey of a few of the home cultures of our students, this course attempts to theorize culture and class, understand the ways these terms are overdetermined, and place these understandings in a critical or dialectical worldview which stresses change, power, and social relations.

In other words, while encouraging students to read up and learn more about particular cultures, the goal of the course is more about practice-writing practices, teaching practices, and research practices. This course asks students to envision new ways of studying cultures and classes, as well as new ways of teaching writing given these new visions and given the particular settings in which they work. When we turn to the research on literacy and multiculturalism, we find that most studies attend to either adults or to children in the public schools. As important as this work is, there have been far fewer studies of college age students. The University of Houston and surrounding colleges and schools provides the ideal site to study what in a decade or so will be the prevalent reality in higher education across the USA.

Anyone with a curiosity about these issues is welcome in this course. No specialized knowledge, training, or experience with these issues is necessary; the relevant knowledge needed to think about writing and its teaching as a cultural and class practice, is provided within the discussions and the readings. This course itself is a pilot of what may become a core course in the rhetoric and composition concentration. The approach will be that of the seminar with student participation and discussion key.

Writing Requirements

• Short paper around midterm
• In-class essay exam also around midterm
• Final paper project.

Tentative Texts

• P. Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness
• Ashton Warner, Teacher
• Gomez-Pena, Chagoya, and Rice, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol
• M. Young, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship
• K. Gilyard, Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence
  Dews and Law, This Fine Place So far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class
• W. DeGenaro (ed) Who Says? Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community
• C. Farris and C. Anson (eds) Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Reseach, and Practice

This course focuses on representations of women in cultural production in early modern England (roughly 1500-1700); that is women as writers, characters, subjects, and agents. We'll read across genres of literary and popular writings by men and women, including pamphlet and polemic, prose and verse romance, ballad and sermon, prescriptive and advice literature, poetry and drama. The secondary readings will include literary criticism; literary, social, and cultural history; and some feminist theory. I anticipate fruitful crossings over among and between disciplines, backgrounds, and interests. So, for example one unit, 'women, race, and nation' will focus on Aphra Behn's fictional narrative of Oroonoko; or The Royal Slave (an early modern 'novel'); some post-colonial scholarship on renaissance Europe (Ania Loomba, Daniel Vitkus); a two-part adventure drama about a London tavern maid's encounters at sea and with the King Of Fez (Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West); and feminist readings of Shakespeare's "dark lady sonnets" (Kim Hall). The syllabus will also address bodies, work, and public life.

Course is cross-listed for WOST credit.

Requirements

• Presentations on primary and secondary material; a short paper and a term paper
• Most of the readings will be available through webct, but some books are required.

Required Texts

• Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko; or The Royal Slave. Johanna Lipking, ed. New York: Norton, 1997.
• Heywood, Thomas, The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II. Robert K. Turner, ed. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P, 1976. (Regents Renaissance Drama).
• Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: a study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980.
• Shakespeare, William, The Taming of the Shrew. (any scholarly edition is fine)

Recommended

• Henderson, Katherine Usher and Barbara F. McManus, eds. Half Humankind, Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1985.
• Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8^th ed. vol. B The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century. 2006.

The seminar will focus on contemporary American memoir, the changing meaning of the concept (it is actually a much older term than autobiography, but it no longer means what it did historically), its various rhetorical forms (coming-of-age, confession, apologia, testimony, autopathography, family memoir, polemic, etc.), and the cultural needs it fulfills. The recurring critical issues that the seminar will explore include the cultural construction of the self; the role of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation in the creation of the self; place as an aspect of the self; the body as a site of identity; and artistic embellishment and the question of authenticity.

Requirements

• A two to three-page response paper on each memoir
• Two short (five-page) critical essays
• Final seminar paper.

Readings

• Frank Conroy, Stop-Time
• Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life
  Mary Karr, The Liar's Club
• J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar
• Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler
• Alison Smith, Name All the Animals
• Mark Doty, Firebird
• Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird Years
• Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face and Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty
• Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
• Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala

A survey of themes and questions stemming from the practices of poets from Sappho and the Psalms to the present day.

Required Text

• The Longman Anthology of Poetry, ed. Lynne MacMahon
• Averill Curdy. (This book will be supplemented by critical essays and additional poems to be distributed to the class.)

It seems almost axiomatic to put reason and emotion in some sort of opposition. Reason is frequently seen as disinterested, dispassionate, universal, and rule-governed. Emotion, on the other hand, is often considered to be unreflective, tied to the body somehow, possibly irrational, and deeply individual. But over the last 30 years or so, there has been a serious interest in the intellectual or reasonable nature of emotion. It is particularly interesting that, at some point, all of this recent work needs to return to Aristotle's discussion of emotion in book 2 of his Rhetoric. Rhetoric has been one of the most productive sites for the theorizing of emotion, and I would like to use rhetorical, philosophical, and literary texts to pursue this theorizing and to engage freshly the practice of persuasion. It might be helpful to think of this seminar as a preliminary move in a larger inquiry into the rethinking of mind. Often when I teach I have at least a sense of where the course will go, but that is not the case with this class. We will start with a collection of concerns that have occupied me and see if we can define a field of inquiry. We will need to do significant work and develop a tentative historical frame, dealing with such concerns as the vocabulary shift from passions to emotions and with such choices as which emotions or passions are considered paradigmatic. If pushed, I would say that I am interested in exploring how we attach to the world and the special role of language in either promoting or distorting that attachment.

Possible Texts

(I will narrow a final reading list from this group probably we will read 8-10 texts)

• Shakespeare, Othello
• Euripides, Medea
• Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book 2
• Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Books 3-4
• Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
• Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives
• Hobbes, Leviathan
• Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 2
• Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
• Jonathan Lear, Love and the Subject of Nature
• Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions
  Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotions
• Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests
  Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory
• Michel Meyer, Philosophy and the Passions
• Thomas Dixon, From Passion to Emotion
• Charles Taylor, "Self-Interpreting Animals," and selected essays

Requirements

Each student will produce a seminar project (equivalent in scope and seriousness to a seminar essay of 15-20 pages). The project needs to be approved in advance by the instructor.

Feminist literary criticism has long drawn upon Victorian literature in theorizing the significance of gender as it relates to literary form, aesthetics, and material production. In recent years, the study of Victorian poetry has been especially enriched by work in gender studies and by the historical recovery of numerous poets and texts previously absent from academic canons. In this seminar, we will be exploring the interrelationship of gender and genre by examining key Victorian poetic texts along with recent theoretical and historical studies, including materialist textual criticism and the recent neoformalist turn.

Major Works

• Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
• Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)
• Meredith, "Modern Love" (1862)
• C. Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
• D. Rossetti, "The House of Life" (1870/1881)
• Webster, Portraits (1870/1893)

"It was perhaps necessary to be a woman to attempt to take up that exorbitant wager of carrying the rational project to the outer borders of the signifying ventures of men."
Julia Kristeva

In the spirit of the significance of both the "single" writer and the female writer, we will devote our time and energies to the modernist American fiction writer, Willa Cather (1873-1947). Like her colleagues Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cather is considered to be as skilled a short fiction writer as a novelist. She also composed some intriguing essays. We will engage in discussions of representative works from each genre. (Her poetry ... well...)

My own emphases in critiquing Cather's fiction are feminist, and so we will address the matter of feminine/feminist narrative, especially in light of Cather's continual insistence that she was experimenting with narrative form. I am predisposed toward (but not confined to) the post-Lacanian, psycholinguistic theories of Julia Kristeva, which are contested by some feminist critics and celebrated by others. Kristeva does not specifically theorize a feminist and/or feminine narrative, but her implications allow certain inferences about the behavior of "the feminine," a maternal, non-linear, elusive, and yet necessarily aggressive force that semiotically challenges and counteracts the law of the father/symbolic order. The Master Signifier is perpetually challenged by the chora, a dynamic worked out as literature. Kristevan theory assists my practical query of Cather's successful methods of composing a text that "sells" to carefully defined public and reviewer audiences unready and unwilling to accept feminism (worshipers of the symbolic order) but that at the same time sharply disputes some traditional valuations. Cather's modernism comes into play in this discussion as well.

Seminar participants will be responsible for brilliant discussion and for knowledge of certain assigned theoretical material as well as the primary texts. There will be weekly short presentations divided up among the participants. Participants will also give an oral presentation that incites/excites discussion and submit a written essay responsive to one or more of the issues we claim as ours.

Primary Texts (Tentative)

• O Pioneers!
• The Song of the Lark
• My Antonia
• Sapphira and the Slave Girl
• One of Ours
• A Lost Lady Obscure Destinies
• The Professor's House
• On Writing

This course will approach American Romanticism primarily through the lens of the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

While each seminar meeting will be organized around a theme that has been associated with Romanticism, we will try not to reduce these writers and their works to illustrative ideas but consider the many dimensions of their fiction. Confining our attention to Hawthorne and Melville will allow us to investigate in more depth the social, political, and cultural contexts of their literature and of this literary movement. We will also be reading recent scholarship on these issues and questions.

The course will begin by establishing a set of common assumptions about British Romanticism, one of the traditions from which these writers drew, and about the American Romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, another important context for the fiction of this period. It will be relatively easy to identify a cluster of themes that have been associated with these two strains of Romanticism, ideas such as revolution and cultural crisis, individualism, a "return to nature," a new concept of imagination, an interest in myths of origin and other symptoms of nostalgia, and self-consciousness, but determining in what ways or to what degree the ideas, tropes, and critical issues associated with these romanticisms are relevant to the fiction of Hawthorne and Melville will complicate and deepen our understanding of these writers and of this literary movement.

Course requirements

• Two papers
  • The first approximately 10 pages
  • The second, 10-15 pages
• Oral presentations
• Participation in seminar discussion

Texts

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, selected essays in Emerson's Prose and Poetry (Norton)
• Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Norton)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches (Library of America, Penguin Paper)
• The Scarlet Letter (Bedford)
• The House of the Seven Gables (Norton)
• The Blithedale Romance (Bedford)
• The Marble Faun (Penguin)
• Herman Melville
  • Typee (World's Classics, Oxford University Press)   
  • Moby Dick (Signet)
• Pierre, or the Ambiguities (Penguin)
• Benito Cereno and "Bartleby the Scrivener" in Melville's Short Novels (Norton)