UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER ‐ FALL 2016 ENGLISH GRADUATE LITERATURE COURSES & DESCRIPTIONS
ENGL 5019 SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY LITERARY & CULTURAL THEORY
RESTRICTED TO ENGLISH MA GRADUATE STUDENTS.
5019‐001
M
4:30‐7:00PM
Youngquist, Paul
12
5019‐002
W
4:00‐6:30PM
Youngquist, Paul
12
Little, Katie
12
Introduces a variety of critical and theoretical practices informing contemporary literary and cultural studies.
ENGL 5029 BRIT LIT & CULT BEFORE 1800
Chaucer 5029‐001
T
9:45‐12:15PM
Chaucer’s poetry has long been considered one of the cornerstones of English literature: as the “father of English poetry,” he was canonical before there was a canon. There are good reasons for considering Chaucer a great poet even while we acknowledge the arbitrariness and contingencies of canon formation, and this course will be devoted to exploring the richness and complexity of his work: his dream visions, The Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Criseyde.
No previous knowledge of Chaucer or of Middle English is required or expected. We will, therefore, be spending some time at the beginning of the semester familiarizing ourselves with the language of Middle English as well as learning how to read and interpret Middle English poetry. When we are comfortable with the language and with reading poetry, we will take up some of the topics that have long been identified as “Chaucerian:” the social world, religious controversy and belief, gender, the process of writing, and the self. At the same time, particularly in the assignments, we will be busy with the practical aspects of literary criticism: how to do close readings, how to incorporate secondary work, how to theorize and historicize Chaucer’s poetry.
ENGL 5029 BRIT LIT & CULT BEFORE 1800
Surveying the Long Eighteenth Century 5029‐002
TH
1:00‐3:30PM
Wright, Nicole
12
How should a survey course “be” (to adapt the title of Sheila Heti’s 2012 novel How Should a Person Be? )? English 5029 is a graduate‐level survey course of British literature of the so‐called “long eighteenth century” (1660–1830). Students will explore poetry, drama, novels, economic texts, graphic literature, and more from the Restoration through the Romantic era. It is also a meta‐survey course, in which students will consider the limitations and opportunities afforded by the survey course approach, periodization, and boundaries between and among genres.
ENGL 5109 LIT/CULT OF THE U.S.
America Otherwise: Alternative Foundational Narratives 5109‐001
T
2:00‐4:30PM
Windell, Maria
12
Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Rodriguez’s Machete. The smash Broadway hit Hamilton. Mojica’s play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots. In studying these narratives, this class looks at the mythic, legendary, and forgotten narratives from the nation’s past that provide their foundations—stories of colonial contact, slave revolt, and border conflict. We will explore how these early American stories are told and retold in novels, short stories, poems, slave narratives, newspaper accounts, letters, and documentaries.
As it tells of the nation’s founding as an immigrant narrative, Hamilton asks, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” John Smith, of course, is the first to tell Pocahontas’ story, and Disney has perhaps told it most loudly. Yet we will read of the Spanish pre‐settlement of Jamestown, a strange Pocahontas‐Robinson Crusoe novel, and a play connecting Pocahontas with a series of historical indigenous heroines. Django Unchained, we will see, finds its roots not only in the spaghetti western but also in the Haitian Revolution and subsequent accounts of US slave revolt—both historical and fictionalized. Similarly, Rodriguez’s Machete loosely retells the legend of nineteenth‐century border bandit/hero Joaquín Murrieta, whose story continually recurs within Chicano culture (including as Zorro—hello again, Disney). These stories and their popularity today allow us to consider alternative founding narratives for the nation.
Possible texts include: The Female American, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, Benito Cereno, The Heroic Slave, The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, “I am Joaquín,” Jicoténcatl, and, of course, Hamilton, Django Unchained, Machete, and Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots.
ENGL 5139 GLOBAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE
The Global Eighteenth Century 5139‐001
M
1:00‐3:30PM
Labio, Catherine
12
This course focuses on the roles played by commerce and culture in the creation of a global imaginary in the long eighteenth century. In particular, we shall study the feedback loop that obtained between financial capitalism and joint‐stock companies like the South Sea, Mississippi, and East India Companies on the one hand and worldwide movements of people, things, and discursive and visual practices on the other.
We shall analyze a broad range of texts and objects, including prose narratives, poems, plays, essays, letters, paintings, prints, places, and things associated with the movements of people and goods within Britain and between Britain, other European countries, the Ottoman Empire, the Americas, Africa, the Indian Ocean, India, China, and the South Pacific.
Sub‐topics include:
The role played by joint‐stock companies in turning the British and European eighteenth century into a global era marked by European expansion and multi‐
directional encounters;
The construction of Britishness through competition with other European powers in and outside Europe;
The ever increasing role played by colonialism and the enslavement of people in the creation of Britain’s self‐definition as a free, polite, and commercial people;
The impact of globalization on taste, aesthetics, and the culture of sensibility and sentiment;
The gendering of the economy, credit, and colonial power;
Proto‐environmental concerns in depictions of the natural world and domesticated landscapes;
Eighteenth‐century objects and global thing theory;
Globalism versus universalism (or global commerce and universal rights);
Progress and disaster in the Enlightenment.
Interested students are invited to contact Professor Catherine Labio ([email protected]) for further information. ENGL 5169 MULTICULTURAL/POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
Queer Latina/o Studies 5169‐001
TH
5:00‐7:30PM
Guzmán, Joshua
12
This course will examine the production of Latina/o identity and its limitations as it emerges within contemporary literature, music, film, and performance art. We will engage with texts that posit a queer analytical approach to study how Latinidad is informed by modes of desire and identification that fall out of dominant notions of “the Latino” in popular culture.
We will ask: How do race, gender and sexuality produce alternative configurations of Latina/o identity; in what ways does Latiniadad shape the way we think of space and place; what does Latinidad look and sound like; how does it feel to be Latina/o? These questions open up Latinidad into a much fuller and capacious notion of identity formation that cut across race /ethnicity, languages and national identity.
The theoretical goal of the class is to critically engage the limits of knowledge production around Latina/o identity in order to develop new analytics that abide by the question of Latinidad rather than posit an answer or solution to its political consequences in contemporary U.S. culture.
ENGL 5529 STUDIES IN SPECIAL TOPICS 1
Literature and Environment 5529‐001
W
1:00‐3:30PM
Jacobs, Karen & Winkiel, Laura
12
While no longer in its infancy, Environmental Literary Studies is very much a young field, the parameters of which are still in formation. Environmental literature has sometimes been confined to the tradition of nature writing, but more recently has expanded to include representations of environments (more widely construed) across the entire spectrum of literary history and representation. This course will reflect that broader understanding of environmental representations as it interweaves ecological theories and discourses with literary texts. Beginning in the 1850s with Marxist environmental theory, we will then consider an overview of ecocritical concepts and topics as they intersect with literary texts and non‐fiction essays. We will define key terms: land, nature, wilderness, environment, habitat, earth, biosphere; and we will survey the field’s defining debates: how environmentalism differs from deep ecology or green theory; the politics of anthropocentrism; the philosophical roots of instrumentalist conceptions of nature and its alternatives; the coinage of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch; questions of resources, sustainability, and bioregionalism; issues of eco‐cosmopolitanism, ecosystems theory, and historical materialism; environmental aesthetics, environmental justice and global impact; and the concepts of “posthuman” and “postnature.” The course will intersperse these topics and debates with historically influential as well as recent literary texts, non‐fiction essays, and literary case studies on “nature” and “the environment,” with an emphasis on modernist and postmodernist texts. Students will write weekly responses, give an oral presentation, and write two conference‐length (10 page) papers. ENGL 5529 STUDIES IN SPECIAL TOPICS 1
Teaching English 5529‐002
TTH
11:00‐12:15PM
Bickman, Marty
12
This course will explore teaching through readings in literary theory, psychology, philosophy, and education in the course of teaching an undergraduate laboratory course together, Masterpieces of American Literature . Please excuse the length of this course description—it is a complex and experimental enterprise, and I want any potential students to be as well informed as possible. I’ve also written a narrative description of previous experiences that I would be glad to send you; write me at [email protected].
To answer Stanley Fish, there is a text in this class, and this text is another class, namely a section of “Masterpieces of American Literature,” that we will all teach together, preceding the sessions of our own graduate class. I hope to get us to analyze this text with the same kinds of passionate attention and theoretical astuteness that we expect in our best readings of literary texts. The main impetus for this course is the gap between our theories (almost all of them) and our practice, a gap that Jim Sosnoski has explored in a recent book titled Modern Skeletons in Postmodern Closets. While we recognize that the literary text generates a number of divergent responses, we often work in the classroom towards closure and consensus. Further, we know that literature speaks to our whole being, to our emotions and senses as well as to our intellects, but the kinds of responses we encourage are often abstract, generalized, cognitive ones. Too often process–the pluralistic, the erring, the mysterious–is ignored, suppressed, or finessed to get to some kind of product on schedule. Even in classrooms where the most radical lines of social defiance are presented, the structures of authority and patterns of interaction remain as rigid and unimaginative as ever.
We will not try to reinvent the wheel, but will study what has been done already to help us conceptualize what we see. When I first taught a version of this course 17 years ago, there were few publications relating theory to pedagogy. Now I find the opposite problem; a minor industry has arisen, although unfortunately too little of it really does address the human, concrete realities of the classroom. Two strands of theory most relevant for our work will be the varieties of reader‐response criticism and the revival of interest in pragmatism. We will be reading, then, among others, Louise Rosenblatt, Norman Holland, Jane Tompkins, David Bleich, Robert Crosman, Stanley Fish, Richard Poirier, and Richard Rorty. I will also try to skim off the best writings about education in general from teachers, philosophers, and psychologists such as John Dewey, John Holt, and Jerome Bruner. As will be pointed out in one of the first readings you do for this course, Janet Emig’s “Our Missing Theory,” almost no one has tried to—or even wanted to— integrate these two bodies of writings, literary theory with pedagogical and learning theory. So we should be in a position to do some really cutting edge work.
Readings will include Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature, Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, as well as selected articles from Pedagogy, College English, Reader, Chronicle of Higher Education, etc.
THE KEY ISSUE IN SCHEDULING THIS COURSE IS THAT YOU HAVE TO MAKE TIME FOR THE UNDERGRADUATE CLASS THAT WE TEACH IMMEDIATELY BEFORE IT: ENGL 1600‐001: Masterpieces of American Literature TR 1100AM‐1215PM (Meun E 423)
Students interested in the course are encouraged to discuss it with me at 303 492 8945, or drop by my office, Hellems 146. Those who have signed up for the course should see me before the first class session, since we’ll meet the undergraduate class before our own, and will all be involved in the teaching of it that first day.
ENGL 5529 STUDIES IN SPECIAL TOPICS 1
ENGL 5529‐004 MEETS W/ COML 6040‐004. CONTACT COMP LIT W/ QUESTIONS. Politics and Aesthetics 5529‐004
W
3:00‐5:30PM
Ferris, David
6
This course will examine the relationship of politics to aesthetics in the wake of 1968. The year is significant not just because of the student revolts in Germany and France but because it repudiates a model of politics and aesthetics that had dominated left wing thought through much of the 20th century—a model that reached its most extreme and negative point of development in Adorno’s dialectical account of the social and political significance of the aesthetic. Perhaps not coincidentally, Adorno’s development of such an account of the political occurs in the years surrounding the events of 1968—as if, with this year, a whole tradition of relating politics to the aesthetic had come to a close.
To establish the historical context out of which another way of thinking the political emerges after 1968, the seminar will return to the problems posed, first, by the relation of ideology and the aesthetic in Marx (The German Ideology), second, the challenge to liberal enlightenment developed by Carl Schmitt (Political Romanticism, The Concept of the Political, and Political Theology), and third, Adorno’s negative account of the political through aesthetic autonomy. The following works will then be examined as attempts to forgo a concept of the political no longer grounded in either post‐enlightenment modernity, the conservative critique of liberalism, or the aesthetic tradition that stretches back to Plato: Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics; Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society; Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations; Chantal Mouffe, On the Political; Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics; Alain Badiou, Metapolitics; Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community; Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene; Jean‐Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community.
ENGL 5549 STUDIES IN SPECIAL TOPICS 2
20th Century Poetry 5549‐001
M
10:00‐12:30PM
Green, Jeremy
12
What is a poetic movement? Why have some poets chosen to work in concert to establish a strong position within the literary field? How does a poetic movement constitute itself? And why do movements often deny that they are in fact movements?
This class has two principal goals:
We will survey some of the major—and one or two minor—poetic movements established during the American and British twentieth century, from the imagists of early modernism to the Language Poets of the postmodernist era.
We will also explore the politics of group formation, consolidation, influence, and disintegration.
The movements of the twentieth century cover a wide spectrum of aesthetic and political positions, and they emerge from distinct cultural and historical situations. A tentative roll call, subject to revision: imagism (with special focus on H.D., Pound, and Hulme); objectivism (Zukosfsky and Oppen); Harlem Renaissance (the poets associated with Alain Locke’s seminal anthology); the Southern Agrarians (I’ll Take My Stand, and the role of Tate, Ransom, including the formation of New Criticism); the New Apocalypse movement (a short‐lived British movement in poetry and the other arts); the Movement (combative successors to New Apocalypse, including Larkin, Amis, and Davie); the Beats (Ginsberg, Lamantia, Whalen et al.); Language Poetry (theory and poetics in Hejinian, Watten, Silliman, et al.); and the Cambridge School (a fraction of the so‐called British Poetry Revival, with particular reference to Prynne, Oliver, and some successors).
Workload: weekly responses, a presentation, a term paper.
ENGL 7019 ADVANCED BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE TO 1800
Romanticism and Thing Theory 7019‐001
T
1:00‐3:30PM
Heydt‐Stevenson, Jillian
12
In this course, we will explore the role of objects—of things—in literature during the Romantic period (that is works published during the late 18th and early 19th centuries in both England and France). Potential authors include Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Bernardin de Saint‐Pierre, Maria Edgeworth and Mme de Staël. In such novels we will explore the role of things in travel (for example looking at ruins) in love (things lovers give each other), and in nature (how we co‐exist ecologically—or not—with the things of nature).
To provide a theoretical framework for our investigations, we will read philosophical and theoretical investigations of why things matter. Potential authors include Bruno Latour, Bill Brown, and Jane Bennett. The questions we will explore include: What makes Romantic objects Romantic? How do things embody history in a way that characters or events do not? Can things be part of the history of high culture or, by virtue of their materialism, are they necessarily part of popular, or low culture? What has been called the “New Materialism” asks us to examine the relationship between literature and materiality: how do literature and its things constitute each other? Constitute history? How does writing about the things in history and literature alter, agitate, and refresh our reading practices and apprehension of the past? How is culture something that we create in the midst of consumption? Further, how do things reintegrate the extraordinary into everyday life? How might things allow for the disappearance of the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary?
Subtopics will include the role of things in travel (for example looking at ruins) in love (things lovers give each other), and in nature (how we co‐exist ecologically—or not—with the things of nature).
ENGL 7489 ADVANCED SPECIAL TOPICS
"Phantasmagoria" and the Psychic Life of the City 7489‐001
W
10:00‐12:30PM
White, E
12
“Phantasmagoria” originally named an early nineteenth‐century magic‐lantern show involving optical illusions of a flux‐like, apparitional sort. The word thus designated a succession of rapidly changing visual effects produced by a technological apparatus that can be thought of as an early avatar of the cinema.
Within a few years of its coining, however, “phantasmagoria” had been metaphorically applied, Terry Castle says, to “something wholly internal or subjective: the phantasmic imagery of the mind.” But even as it became “the perfect emblem…of the nineteenth‐century poetic imagination,” the term was extended in quite another direction to suggest the felt quality of objective social experience.
As Walter Benjamin puts it, the teeming street‐life of the nineteenth‐century metropolis transformed the city for the flâneur into “phantasmagoria.” From early on in its development, then, the visual technology that has since become so ubiquitous a feature of contemporary society provided privileged metaphors both for imaginative experience and for cultural life in general.
The present seminar will, first of all, explore this extension of the semantic scope of “phantasmagoria” across the 19th and into the 20th century. At the same time, cognate conceptual developments will also be considered including the “psychic automatism” the Surrealists attributed to unconscious mental processes and what both Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze have referred to as the “simulacral” character of contemporary cultural production. We will thus trace what may be described as a genealogy of the imagination as that faculty has evolved in the midst of the technocultural context of urban “modernity.”
The course reading list will likely include texts by Louis Aragon, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Susan Buck‐Morss, Roger Caillois, Angela Carter, Terry Castle, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Martin Jay, Victor Pelevin, Edgar Allen Poe, Georg Simmel, Ben Singer, and Oscar Wilde.