Courses

Fall 2008

Spring 2009

  • English 95: Faulkner and Morrison :: Syllabus
  • English 13: Reading Popular Culture: Screening Africa

Descriptions

English 1. Foundations of African American Literary Study
The focus of this introduction to African American literature is the complex intertextuality at the heart of the African American literary tradition. Tracing the tradition’s major formal and thematic concerns means looking for the rhythms and riffs that link different kinds of texts: literature, film, music, and the spoken word—with particular attention to recurring themes of liberation and selfhood. As close and careful readers, we will look to these narratives not only for the sake of the tales themselves, but also for the how and why of their telling, which will help us see even familiar texts in entirely new ways. What do these stories tell? Really?

English 3. Reading and Experience :: Syllabus
This introduction to literary theory will offer an interrogation of some of the assumed tensions between experiences generally described as real and those described as imaginary. Over the course of the semester we will consider the ways literature enlarges personal experience, even as we will also attend to what happens when art approaches the limits of representation. Some of our particular concerns will include learning how to draw relationships between texts and their social and historical moments; questioning our own acts of learning about others through books; and exploring the relationship between identity and literacy. This class will also include a service component in which some of the class’ theory will come into practice, with students in this course working as reading partners to high school students engaged with the same texts and questions in American urban, rural, and reservation schools. Priority will be given to students already involved with teaching and literacy programs.

English 13. Reading Popular Culture : “Girl Power” :: Syllabus
This semester’s focus will be on girl-power, the pop-culture term for what has also been referred to as “postfeminism.” The 1990s saw a dramatic transformation in the representation of women’s relationships to their own sense of power. But has this rising phenomenon of “women who kick ass” come at a cost? Are these representations simply appropriations of what has been generally understood as male power, or are they genuine reassessments of the relationship between gender, power, and the individual? This class will train students to use theoretical and primary texts to assess and critique contemporary popular culture: movies, television, radio and the media.

English 13. Reading Popular Culture : “Screening Africa”
Against a backdrop that moves from Heart of Darkness to (PRODUCT)RED™, this semester we will focus on the current proliferation of “Africa” in the western imaginary. Such surges in interest about the continent are not new, and we will trace this literary and cultural phenomenon across the twentieth century, coming to settle mainly on contemporary American films. We will read our films as films, but also as cultural texts. We must wonder: why these films now? Are there certain conditions under which the West turns to its imagination of Africa? And how might we account for the repetition of such turns over time? We will end the course in a consideration of cultural appropriation and what it means for expressive traditions. To get at this question, however, we will also look to some of the ways African filmmakers have responded to and have themselves appropriated elements of texts similar to those with which we began the semester. (Also Black Studies 15.)

English 37. The English Novel and Colonialism
This course will focus on how English novelists have represented colonialism in India, Africa, and the Caribbean, and how colonialism has, in turn, shaped the novel form. We will also give attention to how contemporary authors represent those same colonial projects today. The question to which we will continually return: How can we continue to find pleasure in works whose very production is tied into regimes of domination and oppression? Authors we may consider include Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Coetzee and Edward Said. Co-taught with Professor Frank

English 51. Science Fiction
Surveying a range of classic and contemporary texts in the genre of science fiction, this course will explore the relation between the politics of world-making and future technologies of representation. Special emphasis will be place on the discourses of difference (racial, sexual, and class, as well as spatial and temporal) in the elaboration of fictional worlds. Co-taught with Prof. Parker

English 66. The Weary Blues: Mourning in African American Literature and Culture :: Blog :: Syllabus :: Music
As a population generally familiar with the facts of living too hard and dying too soon, how have African Americans used their literary and cultural traditions to memorialize—to articulate and often to work through conditions of pain and loss? Using a variety of literary and cultural texts, including RIP murals, poetry, and music, this semester’s topic examines the various ways African Americans express and aestheticize loss; how mourning often works as a foundation for militancy; and, most importantly, how loss is often recuperated through ideologies of art, love, and memory.

English 71. Written in English: An Introduction to Postcolonial Literature
This class mainly focuses on texts by former colonies of the British Empire, on literary works that, despite originating in very different geographies, nonetheless share a language. Beginning with the idea that texts written in English can come from many planes in the world, we will then look for other kinds of similarities, namely questions of power, identity, and loss. We will also pay particular attention to the kinds of literary and cultural representations of history and its futures characteristic of many postcolonial texts. Some of the texts we may encounter this semester include novels Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy (Nigeria), Armah’s The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born (Ghana), and Sidhwa’s Cracking India (Pakistan); films like Gibson’s Braveheart (U.S./Scotland) and Law’s The Floating Life (Hong Kong/Australia); and Friel’s short play, Transitions (Ireland).

English 95. Seminar in English Studies : Faulkner and Morrison :: Blog :: Syllabus
William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are generally understood as two of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and indeed, the work of each is integral to American literature. But why are Morrison and Faulkner so often mentioned in the same breath—he, born in the South, white and wealthy, she, the daughter of a working-class black family in the Midwest? Perhaps it is because in a country that works hard to live without a racial past, both Morrison’s and Faulkner’s work bring deep articulation to the often unseen, and more commonly—the unspeakable. This class will explore the breadth of each author’s work, looking for where their texts converge and diverge. As we will learn how to talk and write about the visions, dreams, and nightmares—all represented as daily life—that these authors offer. (Also Black Studies 56.)

English 95. Seminar in English Studies : Literature of Racial Passing
Is race “natural” or “cultural”? This question has persisted through centuries of American writing, and often finds its most interesting meditations in books and films that deal with racial passing. Texts about people who can successfully “pass themselves off as” of a different race form an important subgenre of American culture because they force us to question what really is at the heart of the thing we call race. If race signifies a “real” difference, how could there be such a thing as passing? But at the same time, if race is “only” a social construction, why, as many of the texts we will examine show, is passing so often characterized as a certain kind of crime, if not a crime against nature itself? Passing texts reveal a fundamental ambivalence about race in America, and it is in the interest of understanding this ambivalence that we will explore a range of literary and cultural texts, including novels by Charles Chesnutt, Jessie Fauset, and William Faulkner, Sirk’s film version of Imitation of Life and Eddie Murphy’s Saturday Night Live skit, “White Like Me,” and Danny Hoch’s Whiteboyz.

English 95. Seminar in English Studies : Memory, Haunting, and Migration in Contemporary American Novels by Women :: Syllabus
This semester we will consider the many ways American female authors have written about memory—memories of the past as well as of other places, about memories that refuse to be surfaced and memories that are at times not even of their protagonists’ own lives. How, for instance, do writers portray the ways painful pasts have influenced their characters’ identities? What does it mean to suffer for a past whose details one does not even know? Is the “truth” freeing, or does overcoming the hidden and silent increase memory’s burdens? What are some of the possibilities and limitations of portraying what are often traumatic experiences in the novel form? And can “trauma” even mean the same thing across ethnic experiences? With such questions in mind, we will look specifically at novels concerned with two of the foundational experiences of American civilization, slavery and migration, and at the pervasive problems of longing, disjuncture, and displacement endemic to such experiences.

English 95. Seminar in English Studies : Rotten English :: Syllabus
As Dohra Ahmad has pointed out, a full half of the Man Booker awards in the last twelve years have gone to novels written in non-standard English: “What would once have been derogatorily termed ‘dialect literature’ has come into its own in a language known variously as slang, creole, patois, pidgin, or, in the words of Nigerian novelist Ken Saro-Wiwa, ‘rotten English.’” With a particular focus on texts written in the wake of English and American colonialism, this advanced seminar in language and literature will offer a survey of texts written in English from around the globe, not only looking to the many ways social and historical realities transform language, but also at how linguistic shifts shape literary concerns. What, for instance, might it mean that texts written in the language of the marginalized have come to be appreciated as most representative of the contemporary metropole? How do such changes impact our sense of “the literary,” or of what “counts” as culture more generally? (Also Black Studies 66.)

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