Spring 2008

CREATIVE WRITING (ENCR)

210A–3crs–Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction

Section 1–TR–11:10-12:30p–Webber Section 2–TR–12:40-2:00p-Robert Stubblefield Section 3–MWF–12:10-1:00p–Staff Section 4–MWF–9:10-10:00a–Staff

211A–3crs–Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry

Section 1–TR–9:40-11:00a–Staff Section 2–TR–11:10-12:30p–Chris Dombrowski
This course will begin under the tutelage of the three great haiku masters, Basho, Buson, and Issa, as we study how images, compression, objectivity and perception work within the haiku. We’ll look briefly at contemporary variations of the form (as Merwin reportedly said, “a haiku is a 17-syllable poem written in Japanese”) before moving on to the haibun via Basho’s classic linked-verse travel journal, Narrow Road to the Deep North and Issa’s The Year of My Life. A respected but often ignored modern day form, the haibun will serve as our launching point into discussion of other hard-to-pin-down, multi-genre and edge-of-genre works (see list below) that juxtapose prose and verse and/or narrative and lyric impulses, such as CD Wright’s mesmerizing book-length poem, Deepstep Come Shining. Students will be asked to: participate actively in technique-based discussion; complete various formal and informal critical and creative writing assignments; write one critical/technical-study paper; and compile a creative/imitation based portfolio. Readings will be selected from the following list: The haiku of Basho, Buson, and Issa (various translations); Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho; The Year of My Life, Issa; Deepstep Come Shining, CD Wright; Resurrection Update and The Meadow, James Galvin; selections from Rimbaud, Rilke, Melville, Williams, Oppen, Milosz, Takahashi, Merwin, Robert Hass, Fanny Howe, Leslie Silko, Brigit Kelly, Sherman Alexie, Greg Glazner, and many other contemporary writers; Days of Heaven, a film by Terrence Malick.
Section 3–TR–2:10-3:30p–Greg Pape Section 4–MWF-2:10-3:00p–Staff

310A–3crs–Creative Writing: Fiction - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–TR–12:40-2:00p–Deirdre McNamer
An upper-division fiction-writing course for students who have the instructor’s permission to take the course. Preference is given to English majors with a creative-writing emphasis who have successfully completed ENCR 210. During the semester, students will write two stories and revise one. They will also write critiques of the work of their fellow students, and engage in craft-honing exercises, both in and out of the classroom.
Section 2–TR–2:10-3:30p–Kevin Canty
An upper-division fiction-writing course for students who have the instructor’s permission to take the course. Preference is given to English majors with a creative-writing emphasis who have successfully completed ENCR 210. During the semester, students will write two stories and revise one. They will also write critiques of the work of their fellow students, and engage in craft-honing exercises, both in and out of the classroom.

311A–3crs–Creative Writing: Poetry - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–T–3:40-6:30p–Joanna Klink
This is an intermediate poetry workshop involving critical analysis of student work as well as reading and discussion of poems by established poets. On a weekly basis we will examine student poems and the practical issues in poetics (descriptive language, syntax, diction, etc.) they bring to light. Be prepared to do imitations; some memorization may also be required. Required Texts: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, eds. Ramazani, Ellman & O’Clair.
Section 2–TR–12:40-2:00p–Greg Pape

395–3crs–Special Topics: Creative Writing - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–TR–2:10-3:30p–Robert Stubblefield
This special topics course will be open to upper level undergraduates. Admission is on the basis of a writing sample and statement of purpose submitted to the instructor. We will focus on the craft of editing fiction as applied by writers and editors. We will study and practice editing at the language level and larger elements of narrative and plot. We will read, study, and discuss contemporary, classic, and student short fiction selected and presented for critique by the instructor and students. Book-length texts include Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. There will also be required weekly readings from sources such as The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Believer and other daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly publications. This course is geared toward writers who have already generated a substantial amount of material and are interested in sharpening revising and editing skills and those students interested in acquiring, applying, and practicing the skills required for editing literary fiction for a variety of publications. Students will develop and articulate informed oral and written arguments presented in the form of class presentations, manuscript evaluations, and book reviews.

410–3crs–Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–TR–12:10-1:30p–Stephen Amidon
Admission by consent of instructor. An advanced workshop in which student fiction will be discussed by fellow participants and the instructor. Work will consist primarily of short stories, though limited sections of longer texts will be allowed by arrangement with the instructor. Rewriting of stories begun in ENCR 310 classes is permitted, though new work is encouraged.

411–3crs–Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–T–3:40-6:30p–Karen Volkman
This advanced workshop features extensive reading and writing, and preliminary attempts by each student to place his or her work in the ongoing dialogue of tradition and innovation. We will start by reading T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and begin to frame our own definitions of broad terms such as tradition and influence. Our reading will pair predecessor poets with a later figure, considering them in terms of legacy and cultural inheritance. Whitman/Ginsberg, Dickinson/Plath, Stevens/Ashbery, Stein/Hejinian, and Hughes/Thomas Sayers Ellis are the main pairs; we will also have a session in which Hugo Visiting Poet Linh Dinh discusses influences on his work. Students will write new poems each week, prepare a final portfolio of revised work, and explore influences on their writing in a short paper introducing the final portfolio.

412–3crs–Creative Non-Fiction - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–TR–12:40-2:00p–Judy Blunt
The focus of the workshop will be to assist in revision with an eye toward creating publishable works. Writers scheduled to workshop will provide the class copies of their essay one class period in advance. Classmates will provide written comments at the time of the workshop. Student writers are expected to complete reading and writing assignments on time; contribute to classroom discussions and workshops with respectful, honest, well-reasoned comments; and complete a final portfolio of written work that reflects an advanced understanding of nonfiction craft and style. Required Texts: Owning It All, William Kittredge; Indian Creek Chronicles, Pete Fromm; Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi; The Liar’s Club, Mary Karr. We will study the art and craft of nonfiction, as readers, as well as writers. To complete this course, students will write 30 pages of nonfiction, at least two segments of which will be offered for review in workshop. At least one of these workshop entries must be significantly revised or expanded by the end of the course. In addition to the writing assignments, students are required to obtain and read four books of nonfiction and various handout reading assignments.

495–3crs–Special Topics: Poetry - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–MW–9: 0-11:00a–Linh Dinh (Hugo Visiting Writer)
If you have something very urgent to say, you'll find a way to say it. In this poetry writing workshop, we'll examine the real state of our union, at variance with the official one. Informed and provoked by the essays of James Howard Kunstler, Joe Bargeant and Susan Sontag, etc., we’ll arrive, hopefully, at a deeper understanding of the many crises confronting America. Looking past the spins and jives, seeing behind what's behind, we’ll deconstruct America. There will be a writing assignment each week, with ensuing class discussions. By the end, each student will have a body of poems that reflects his or her state of the union.

510–3crs–Fiction Workshop - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–W–3:40-6:30p-Stephen Amidon
This fiction workshop will focus on short stories and limited sections of longer works.
Section 2–R–3:40-6:30p–Deirdre McNamer
A fiction-writing workshop for students in the MFA program. Students will be expected to generate at least two stories for class discussion, and to do a substantial revision of one of them.

511–3crs–Graduate Poetry Workshop - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–M–3:10-6:00p– Karen Volkman
Section 2–W–3:10-6:00p–Linh Dinh (Hugo Visiting Writer)

512–3crs–Non-fiction Workshop - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–M–3:40-6:30p–Judy Blunt

514–3crs–Techniques of Modern Fiction - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–T–3:40-6:30p-Kevin Canty

The basic plan here is to read a story collection a week (longer for longer collections) and try to figure out useful approaches to writing stories ourselves. What makes great stories great? Clarity, speed, language, what else? Written responses will be in the form of parodies / imitations, which we will workshop in class. Here’s a preliminary reading list, some old, some new, a few classics and a couple that the jury is still out on: Honored Guest, Joy Williams; Birds of America, Lorrie Moore; Stories, Anton Chekhov (Pevear / Volokhonsky translation); Bear and His Daughter, Robert Stone; Typical, Padgett Powell; Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme; Because They Wanted To, Mary Gaitskill; I Dream of Microwaves, Imad Rahman; The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever; Human Resources, Josh Goldfaden; Collected Stories, Grace Paley; First Love and Other Sorrows, Harold Brodkey.

516–3crs–Topics in Creative Writing - (Consent of Instructor Required)

Section 1–R–12:10-3:00p– Joanna Klink

EXPOSITORY WRITING (ENEX)

NOTE: During the autumn semester, ENEX 101 is restricted to students whose last name begins with the letters A-L. During the spring semester, ENEX 101 is restricted to students whose last name begins with the letters M-Z.

100–3crs–Basic Composition (Prereq: minus score on Writing Placement Exam or referral by ENEX 101 instructors.)

Section 1–TR–8:10-9:30a–Staff
Section 2–MWF–8:10-9:00–Staff
Section 3–MWF–10:10-11:00a–Staff
Section 4–MWF–9:10-10:00a–Staff
Section 5–TR–3:40-5:00p–Staff
Section 6–TR–8:10-9:30a–Staff
Section 7–MWF–2:10-3:00p–Staff
Section 9–MW–8:40-10:00a–Staff
Section 10–MW–11:10-12:30p–Staff

101–3crs–English Composition (Prereq: ENEX 100 or proof of passing scores on Writing Placement Exam, or referral by ENEX 100 instructor.)
Section 1–MWF–8:10-9:00a–Staff
Section 2–MWF–9:10-10:00a–Staff
Section 3–MWF–9:10-10:00a–Staff
Section 4–MWF–10:10-11:00a–Staff
Section 5–MWF–10:10-11:00a–Staff
Section 6–MWF–10:10-11:00a–Staff
Section 7–MWF–11:10-12:00a–Staff
Section 8–MWF–11:10-12:00p–Stubblefield
Section 9–MWF–12:10-1:00p–Staff
Section 10–MWF–1:10-2:00p–Staff
Section 11–MWF–1:10-2:00p–Staff
Section 12–MWF–2:10-3:00p–Staff
Section 13–MWF–2:10-3:00p–Staff
Section 14–MWF–2:10-3:00p–Staff
Section 15–MW–7:10-8:30p–Staff
Section 16–TR–8:10-9:30p–Staff
Section 17–TR–2:10-3:30p–Staff
Section 18–MWF–9:10-10:00aStaff
Section 19–TR–9:40-11:00a–Staff
Section 20–MWF–2:10-3:00a–Staff
Section 21–TR–11:10-12:30p–Staff
Section 22–MWF–12:10-1:00p-–Staff
Section 23–TR 11:10-12:30p--Staff
Section 24–TR–12:40-2:00p–Staff
Section 25–TR–12:40-2:00p–Staff
Section 26–TR–2:10-3:30p–Staff
Section 27–TR–2:10-3:00p–Staff
Section 28–TR–3:40-5:00p–Staff
Section 29–MWF–12:10-1:00a–Staff
Section 30–MWF–9:10-10:00a–Staff
Section 31–MWF–12:10-1:00p–Staff
Section 32–MWF–9:10-10:00a-Staff
Section 33–MWF-2:10-3:00p-Staff
Section 34–MWF–1:10-2:00p–Staff
Section 35–MWF–12:10-1:00p–Staff
Section 80-MWF-4:10-5:00p–Staff (HONORS) (Consent of Honors College Required)

200–3crs–Advanced Composition (Prereq., ENEX 101)
Section 1–TR-12:40-2:00p–Staff (Natural Sciences)
Section 2–MWF-9:10-10:00a-Staff (Art of Essay)
Section 3–TR-2:10-3:30p-Staff (Health & Society)
Section 4–MWF-9:10-10:00a-Staff (Humanities)

LITERATURE (ENLT)

120 L–3crs–Introductions to Critical Interpretation

Section 1–MWF–11:10-12:00p-Jocelyn Siler
Section 2–MWF–12:10-1:00p-Staff

121 L–3crs–Introductions to Poetry
Section 1–MWF–2:10-3:00p-Jocelyn Siler
Section 2–TR–8:10-9:30a-Staff

195-3crs-Special Topics Variable

Section 1-Introduction to Literature Studies-MWF-10:10-11:00-Eric Reimer
What is literature? Why do/should we read and study literature? How do/should we read and study literature? What literature should we study? In attending to such big questions, this course will find you considering the role and possibilities of literary studies in the academy and in your own lives. As you encounter a wide range of literature drawn from the various genres (short stories, poems, novels, drama, film, etc.), you will (1) consolidate your understanding of fundamental literary concepts; (2) become familiar with periodization and literary history; (3) perceive how literary theory has transformed, complicated, and deepened the study of literature; (4) consider the relationship between art and life, story and history, image and word, etc.; and (5) develop the alacrity and critical skills necessary for reading, thinking and writing about literature. Most importantly, perhaps, our inquiry and discussions will help us realize things that “in all their different ways,” as Mary Gordon has written, “point to something we find difficult to name and yet know as our treasure.” Possible texts include Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, James Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version, as well as assorted poems and film selections.
NOTE: This course will serve as a substitute for one of the required four survey courses for English majors; in other words, if an English major completes this course he/she will only be required to complete three survey courses.

222L–3crs–British Literature through the 18th Century

Section 1–MWF–10:10-11:00a– John Hunt
Section 80–MWF 11:10-12:00p–John Hunt-Honors (Consent of Honors College Required)

223L–3crs–British Literature in the 19th and 20th

Section 2–MWF-11:10-12:00-Eric Reimer
Section 80-MWF-2:10-3:00p-Eric Reimer-Honors (Consent of Honors College Required)
As an introduction to British literature and a gateway to more specialized study within this field, this course will survey a dizzying range of poets, novelists, dramatists, and essayists; as it does so, students will become acquainted with the significant characteristics of some of the major British literary-historical periods (Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Contemporary). Thus, in addition to practicing close reading of individual texts, we will discuss the social, historical, and political contexts of the authors and their works, as well as attend to matters of genre, form, and literary tradition. There is no thematic organization for the course, but we will throughout the semester be considering the changing notions of self, language, and nation, especially as they are pressured by nature, religion, science, and historical trauma. In this course students will write critical essays, work closely with poetic form, sharpen research skills, and sample contemporary literary theory, but everything will begin with (and depend upon) committed and energetic reading of the assigned texts, which will be drawn from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (eighth edition) and such additional readings as Walter Scott’s short story “The Two Drovers” and Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse.
NOTE: English majors may substitute this course for one of the four required survey courses; in other words, an English major who completes this course will only be required to complete three survey courses as part of the requirements for the major.

224 L–3crs–American Literatures to 1865

Section 2–MWF-11:10-12:00p- Christopher Knight
Section 80–MWF-10:10-11:00a-Christopher Knight-Honors (Consent of Honors College Required)

225 L–3crs–American Literatures Since 1865

Section 1–MWF–11:10-12:00p–David Witzling
Section 2–MWF-9:10-10:00a-Pascal Bardet
ENLT 225 covers literature from the Civil War through the twentieth century. We will build up our understanding of literature from this time period by learning about the historical and cultural contexts in which they were published. Therefore, we’ll have to explore such major movements as realism, regionalism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism and see how they highlight our interpretation of these literary texts.
Section 80–TR-8:10-9:30a-David Witzling-Honors (Consent of Honors College Required)
This course will examine a broad spectrum of important literary texts by U.S. writers after 1865. We will look at how these novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists use literature to reflect and rework their contemporary historical and literary contexts. The course introduces students to reading the principal forms of literature (poetry, prose, fiction, and drama) analytically. Strengthening knowledge of literary interpretation and analysis, this course will encourage students to examine what writers convey through their fictional works and how to analyze the ramifications and influence of these literary texts on their critical thinking.

227 L-3crs-Films as Lit/Lit as Film

Section 1-TR-3:40-6:00p-Phil Fandozzi
In this course we will study the relationship between literature and its filmic adaptations. We will discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses in terms of character development, narrative techniques, cognitive and emotional impact. Readings will include a short text on literature and film writing/reading approaches, and a number of novels/short stories which have been adapted into film.

301–3crs–Applied Literary Criticism

Section 1–MWF-10:10-11:00a-David Gilcrest
Section 2–TR–12:40-2:00p–David Gilcrest
Section 3–TR–9:40-11:00a–Ashby Kinch
The major goal of this course is to inspire students to deepen and broaden their reflection on literature by considering some of the major critical and theoretical concepts that have animated literary study in the modern era. This course will take as its starting point an inquiry into reading itself, the core of all literary study. We will engage critics who have written perceptively on the complex cultural and mental processes that inform our reading. Through reading and discussion, we will seek to expand and refine the questions we, as individual readers and as an interpretive community, ask of a literary text. We will construct an inventory of critical questions through our own collective reading of three major literary texts: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony; William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” from Lyrical Ballads; and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” (from The Canterbury Tales). This course aims to facilitate each student’s integration into a broader community of readers with common points of reference, so we will then examine some major schools of critical theory (as well as their mutual relations) including: structuralism/post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, new historicism, feminism, and post-colonialism. The culminating work of the course will be critical projects that students launch from the positions they take on a literary text and the theoretical ideas that most fire their curiosity.

320–3crs–Shakespeare

Section 1–TR-9:40-11:00a-Robert Browning
Section80-TR-2:10-3:30-Robert Browning-Honors (Consent of Honors College Required)
To readers, theater-goers, and movie-goers today, Shakespeare’s plays have the unusual distinction of seeming culturally distant (indeed, four-centuries distant) yet also familiar. As we read examples of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and plays that do not quite fit into any single one of these categories we will attend to both what is strange and what’s familiar as we strive to make sense of these works within the cultural context of the Bard’s own time as well as in our own. The plays will lead us into discussion of issues as varied as the nature of the imagination, the presence or absence of the metaphysical, the relation of theatricality to “truth”, the strategies of leadership, the institution of marriage, the significance of ritual, the ramifications of war, and the politics of partying. One of the guiding principles of the course is that each play we read can help teach us how to read the next one a little better. Beyond thinking about the texts comparatively we shall study a selection of important readings posed by literary critics and theorists during the last two centuries. We will probably read The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, and The Tempest. For Hamlet and Othello we will study several interpretations or adaptations of each play in film.

322–3crs–Studies in Literary History

Section 1–Literary Exiles-MWF-12:10-2:00p-Pascal Bardet
In Paris, France (1940), Gertrude Stein wrote that "everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really." Living in another country, according to Stein, facilitates self-discovery and self-expression. This course will explore how living abroad, especially in France, enabled American expatriate writers to engage and confront conventional notions of identity. We will explore the literature of displacement by reading 19th century writers like Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson and then move on to the 20th century with works by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein.
Section 2-Modernism: Fiction & Poetry-TR-12:40-2:00p-Robert Baker
This course will be an introductory study of modernist literature. We will read both poems and novels, trying to clarify the pressures and ambitions at stake in the unfamiliar forms and recurrent thematic preoccupations of the literature of this period. We will concentrate on the works themselves, yet we will keep our minds turned as well to the occasionally promising, largely chaotic, at times catastrophic historical circumstances in which these works were written: circumstances of great technological change, altered frames of knowledge and subjectivity, two world wars, a quickly betrayed communist revolution, economic collapse on a global scale, the culminating phase and the beginning of the end of European colonialism, and the rise to power of fascist movements of nearly inconceivable destructiveness. Amid all this there occurred an extraordinary renewal or transformation in the arts that would shape (if only as that which had to be rejected) many of the practices, values, and debates of our culture down to the present. There is no simple definition of the “period” generally designated as modernist. We will address the complexity of this term, the different ways in which it tends to be understood in different national traditions and in different arts, and the relationship between definitions of “modernism” and definitions of “the avantgarde.” Our readings will be drawn from the period typically taken as the modernist period in English-language literary culture: the first half of the twentieth century. Beckett and Celan, two writers we will read near the end of the course, are in this sense among “the last modernists.” For the most part we will read European writers, though we will read two or three American writers as well. Modernism was a cosmopolitan cultural field animated by multiple “inter-national” or “cross-national” connections.
Provisional Reading List: Guillaume Apollinaire,Selected Writings; Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems; André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism and Nadja; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents; Franz Kafka, The Castle; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; Samuel Beckett, Molloy; Paul Celan, Poems; Christopher Butler, Early Modernism.

323–3crs–Studies in Literary Forms

Section 1A–Renaissance Poetry-MW-2:10-3:30p-John Hunt
A study of English poetry of the later 16th and early 17th centuries. These one hundred years (or so) were one of the great periods of experimentation and high accomplishment in the writing of poetry, producing a Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (as one anthology in the period was titled). We will focus on lyrics (shorter verses), and pay only brief attention to William Shakespeare and John Milton, who have their own courses. Significant amounts of time will be devoted to love poetry of the Petrarchan tradition, particularly that written by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, and Lady Mary Wroth; song lyrics written by Edmund Campion and others; epyllia ("short epics" concerned with erotic subject matter) by Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and others; the "metaphysical" verse (much of it religious) of John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and others; and the "plain style" poetry (much of it concerned with social matters) of Ben Jonson and others. If there is time we will read a little of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene. So although individual poems will mostly be fairly short, the reading will be quite varied, and it should prove demanding as well. There will be two papers and a final exam, and I will expect active participation in class discussions as well.
Section 2A-Tragedy-TR-9:40-11:00a-Phil Fandozzi
This course will explore the genre of tragedy by studying some of the classics from ancient Greece, a Shakespeare play, and a contemporary drama. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Walter Kaufmann’s Tragedy and Philosophy will provide two important interpretive perspectives on the genre. Its objective is to give you an understanding and critical appreciation of the significance of tragedy, not only historically, but for our own times. This objective will be measured by your ability to determine and analyze pertinent themes/issues in these texts, and when appropriate, to explore similarities and differences. This objective will be realized only through your full participation.
Section 3A–Contemporary Women Fiction Writers-MWF-1:10-2:00p-Christpher Knight
“Contemporary Women Fiction Writers” is a course that will focus on five authors: Penelope Fitzgerald, Marilynne Robinson, Lydia Davis, Kathryn Davis and Lorrie Moore. We will read two or three books by each author, including The Beginning of Spring, The Gates of Angels, The Blue Flower, Housekeeping, Gilead, The End of the Story, The Thin Place, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and Birds of America.
Section 80-Short Shories-TR-11:10-12:30p-Bob Pack-Honors (Consent of Honors College Required)
This course will consist of close readings of great works in the American, English, and European traditions, with particular focus on the theme of truth and illusion. Some of the authors to be considered are: Melville, Cheever, Bellow, Wells, Joyce, James, Mann, Gogol, Chekov, and Tolstoy. Students will be expected to participate actively in analytic and speculative discussions.

325–3crs–Studies in Literature and Other Disciplines

Section 1–TR-11:10-12:30p-Staff

338-3crs-Montana Writers

Section 1-Montana Literature-MWF-11:10-12:00p-David Moore
We will look at writing about Montana by Montanans of one sort or another, as we examine how Montana looks from the perspectives of genre, time, race, class, gender, and other markers of identity. What does a body of literature look like when viewed from the perspective of state identity? What does a regional literature look like? What historical, environmental, social, economic and political issues emerge as important to Montanans? How does genre change or inflect such issues? We’ll briefly survey Montana’s literary heritage and then focus on 20th-century texts. Authors may include Welch, Doig, Smith, Howard, Johnson, but you can expect a variety and a few surprises. Be prepared to read extensively and intensively, to write frequently and to question what everybody knows to be authentically Montanan. Oh, and we’ll read some humorous pieces, too. Experience with livestock not required.

349-3crs-Medieval Literature

Section 1-Studies in Medieval Literature-TR-3:40-5:00p-Ashby Kinch
Harry Bailey, the Host in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, frames the tale-telling competition he proposes by describing the putative winner as the one who will tell “tales of best sentence and most solaas,” suggesting that the best stories are those that wed meaning with pleasure. In this course, we will read a wide range of medieval stories from a variety of literary genres (romances, fables, lays, ghost stories, and saints’ lives, among others) in an effort to explore the range of social and literary values underlying the practices of medieval storytelling. We will read for pleasure, as well as keeping our eye on the literary artistry that evokes that pleasure. We will also analyze these stories for the way they attest to the vital role stories play in the social life of human culture, crystallizing problems, contesting values, and shaping debate about central common issues. We will discuss, among other things: the infusion of folklore and popular belief in high literary art; the dissemination of stories in a wide range of variant forms and styles, including the cross-pollination of verbal and visual art; and the social tensions that develop around storytelling as a practice that facilitates the construction of an alternative social reality.

370-3crs-Science Fiction

Section 1-TR-2:10-3:30p-Michael McClintock
From its tangled roots (Frankenstein and Poe, for instance) to its weedy contemporary flourishing (Star Wars and Star Trek, for instance–but seldom, if ever, Stephen King), science fiction has been edgy, usually marginal, and often uncomfortable (for its non-readers even more than for its readers). Its irregular popularity has arisen at times when enough people have been sufficiently charmed by its characteristic special effects to miss–or to misunderstand–most of what, as a genre, it says. In this course, we shall do our best to see it as, at its best, it has always tried to see the universe: as it is. By the conclusion of the course you should have an understanding of the characteristic narrative features of science fiction, a sense of its relationships to history as well as to science, and, of course, an enhanced ability to discuss it cogently. Two in-class essays and a final examination; attendance recorded.

372-3crs-Gay and Lesbian Studies

Section 1A-Gay and Lesbian Literature-TR-12:40-2:00p-Casey Charles
This course looks at representative contemporary novels, stories, plays, poetry, and film from the burgeoning queer culture, primarily in American, British, and Irish venues. Our readings will be informed by theoretical overviews provided by Edelman, Butler, Sedgwick, and Halberstam—overviews that think about how same-sex and trans desire provides a critique of mainstream social and political paradigms. Most of these books struggle with benefits and burdens of identity politics; they carve out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex positions within a social structure that continues to discriminate against them on various cultural and legal planes. This course studies that intersection, focusing on the impact of GLBTIQ culture on the fabric of the 21st century. Students will take quizzes and write two essays during the semester. TEXTS: Bechdel, Fun House; Dietz, Lonely Planet; Eugenides, Middlesex; O’Neill, At Swim, Two Boys; Revoyr, Southland; Schulman, The Child; Cunningham, Flesh and Blood; Mann, The Execution of Justice (in Testimonies); Stories by Alexie (“Toughest Indian”), Proulx (“Brokeback Mountain”) and Tóibín “Water”); Poetry by D.A. Powell, Jane Miller, Mark Wunderlich, and Olga Broumas

395-3crs-Special Topics Variable

Section 1-Intro to Irish Gaelic Literature-TR-12:40-2:00p-Terry O’Riordain
‘Irish has the oldest vernacular literature of Europe; our earliest monuments go back to the sixth century.’ This observation by Professor Calvert Watkins of Harvard University highlights the unique and ancient literary tradition of the Irish. This course will introduce students to the riches and delights of the literary tradition of Gaelic Ireland from the earliest times down to the Great Famine. Consulting texts in translation, students will read stories from the Heroic Literature of Ireland; they will learn of the impact of Christianity, the Viking Raids, the Norman invasion and the Tudor conquest on the canons of Irish literature. It is against this background of upheaval that students will come to know the role of Ireland’s literary aristocracy; that caste of learned men who regulated the Irish tradition, rejected any unlicensed innovation and conformed new genres to age-old literary conventions. Known as the Bards, these custodians of Gaelic civilization were no mere poets; their compositions were designed to maintain the ideological framework which legitimized the political hierarchy, preserved societal harmony, and ensured the survival of Gaelic civilization. Students will read a selection of bardic poetry with particular emphasis on compositions dealing with the Tudor Conquest and destruction of Irish Gaelic civilization from the beginning of the 17th century. The end of the Gaelic world heralds a new era for Irish literature and a new and more challenging role for those who inherit from their bardic forefathers the custody of Gaelic Ireland’s literary tradition. The struggle is now one of cultural survival, and students will learn of the centrality of literature in this struggle as they read the works of Geoffrey Keating, Daibhi Ua Bruadair, Aodhgán Ó Rathaille and the Aisling poets. Taken as a whole, this course will impart to the student an appreciation of the muscular vitality of the Irish literary tradition along with a greater understanding of the centrality of literature and the literati to the politics and culture of Ireland.

421-3crs-Topics in Critical Theory

Section 1A-MWF-12:10-1:00p-David Witzling
Globalization may be defined as the process by which states, economies, and cultures bind themselves to one another in a single “world-system.” Students in this course will study the representation of globalization in central works by two contemporary U.S. novelists: Thomas Pynchon and Leslie Marmon Silko. Students will also be introduced to various theories on the globalization of culture, attempting to understand how the “world-system” works, how it has evolved, and how local communities are influenced by it and also make it their own. We will investigate the forms of storytelling and representation globalization has suggested to these novelists and how they have evaluated the process. We will ask, more broadly, how a vision of culture as part of a world-system alters the way we understand and evaluate literary history.

495–3crs–Special Topics

Section 1A–Multicultural Lit. In Contemporary Germany-MWF-2:10-3:00p-Hiltrudis Arens
In recent decades Germany has been emerging as a multicultural society, even though a legal, political and social awareness has not fully developed yet. De facto, the Federal Republic has become a country of immigration. The socio-political reality of about 8 million immigrants and other minorities such as Jews and Afro-Germans cannot be neglected any longer. This course offers critical insights into the contradictions between the official line of thought (which has undergone a positive turn in the late 1990's) and contemporary reality through examining the literature created by minority writers. Students will receive an overview of the political context of post-war immigration to Germany. As an introduction, they will read critical essays on the (im)migrant and minority experience by authors from various ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds. Gender dimensions will be examined in these essays as well as in the primary works. The main focus of the course will be on selected works of fiction by male and female writers in English translation from a variety of (national, religious, linguistic, and ethnic) backgrounds. Students will obtain a new and nuanced perspective on Germany, its recent history and its growing multi-cultural identity. The analysis of a diverse cultural life in Germany will also resonate with corresponding challenges in the U.S. and will give the students a greater understanding of the human dimensions of socioeconomic globalization and cross-cultural as well as transnational interactions.

520–3crs–Seminar in British Literature

Section 1–Darwin & the Novel: Victorian to Post-Modern-M-7:00-10:00p-John Glendening
Victorian to Postmodern, ENLT 520-1, concerns how Darwin and evolutionary theory interacted with late-Victorian fiction and how they manifest themselves in postmodern British novels that draw upon late-Victorian ones. Consequently, this course investigates a sub-genre of a sub-genre: Darwinism in the “neo-“ or “retro-Victorian novel.” This latter category, having developed in Britain during the past thirty years, variously imitates, revises, and extends Victorian novels in a manner by turns admiring and critical, playful and serious, realistic and fantastic. We will study late Victorian culture, Darwin’s writings, Darwin-imbued Victorian fiction, British literary postmodernism, evolution-focused neo-Victorian novels, and relevant critical materials. A major idea behind this seminar is that contemporary British literature, for reasons we will discuss, has given much attention to its Victorian past and, in doing so, often has focused on Darwinism and its legacy. The course will require a seminar paper, with various stages of its composition reflected in written assignments and class presentations. Along with critical writings, readings will probably include the following: excerpts from Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes; H. G. Wells, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau; W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions; John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman; A. S. Byatt, Possession; Graham Swift, Ever After; Ian McEwan, Enduring Love; and Alasdair Gray, Poor Things. There may be additions to this list.
Section 2-Medieval Theories of Love-W-6:40-9:30p-Ashby Kinch
Slavoj Zizek has written that “the impression that courtly love is out of date, long superseded by modern manners, is a lure blinding us to how the logic of courtly love still defines the parameters within which the two sexes relate to each other.” Zizek’s claim, emanating from his reading of Lacan, situates courtly love at the center of a modern theoretical discourse of the self. This course will thoroughly examine this claim, posing a set of related questions concerning the historical and cultural status of love in the medieval period (and not just of the so-called “courtly” variety). We will read influential accounts of love by modern theorists (including C.S. Lewis, Denis de Rougement, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Luc Nancy) and measure their theories against close readings of texts from the medieval period in a variety of genres. Because of the centrality of troubadour poetry in the modern discourse of courtly love, we will read several major troubadour poets (including William IX, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Marcabrun). But we will also look for breadth and variety of ideas about love in Chretien de Troyes’ romances, Marie de France’s Lais, as well as theological and philosophical texts that explore love’s debilitating and uplifting effects. The first half of the class will be dedicated to establishing a common vocabulary and conceptual structure for understanding medieval theories of love, while in the second half, we will explore these ideas in relationship to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, his major work of court poetry.

521–3crs–Seminar in American Literature

Section 1–Poetics of Peace-T-6:40-9:30p-David Moore
This course will be a process together of unfolding and articulating a poetics of peace, following at least four tracks: language theory or philosophies of language; peace studies or theories and practices of peacemaking; poetics in general and rhetorics of peace in particular; primary texts in poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, and music. In each of these areas, students will be welcome to introduce additional texts and voices. The goal will be to weave together a conceptual and pragmatic view of language and varied forms of symbolic expression as potential for communication in a world of war and domination. Language theory will engage philosophies of language and communication via the contributions of critics such as Abram, Ong, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Habermas. We will use Robert Baker’s The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy as an entry into some of those conversations. Peace studies will engage works of such figures as Deganawida and the White Roots of Peace, William Apess, Thoreau, Einstein, Gandhi, King, Jeanette Rankin, A. J. Muste, Reinhold Neibuhr, Thomas Merton, Carl Rogers, Marshall Rosenberg, Arny Mindell, and the Conscientious Objectors movements. Poetics will engage aesthetics and theories of poetry and narrative from such analysts as Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, and Hayden White, and from Aristotle through Coleridge to Baker. Primary texts will engage poets from Wilfred Owen to Sam Hammill, from Aristophanes (Lysistrata) to Rumi, to Emily Dickinson, Grace Paley, the Beats, Robert Lowell, Robert Hayden, Carolyn Forche, Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Lance Henson, Kenneth Koch, Seamus Henry, and other writers suggested by the students in the course. Participants will be responsible for discussions, questions, response papers, a class presentation, a research paper or creative project, and other responses to the material as the conversation evolves.

522–3crs–Seminar in Comparative Literature

Section 1A-Modern Poetry-R-7:10-10:00p-Robert Baker
A subtitle for the course: “Poetry, History, Metaphysics.” Poetry. We will read four major modernist poets: Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), René Char (1907-88), George Oppen (1908-84), and Paul Celan (1920-70). All of these poets, in particular the last three, are “late modernists” or among the “last modernists.” They are all writers of great force and distinctiveness. Because I do not know German, we will not spend more than a couple of weeks on Celan, unless someone in the class knows German and can help us through the translations, which would be fortunate for everyone. But Celan is the greatest European poet of the last century, so we will do our best, in any case. History. All four of these poets belong to a modernist cultural field not least owing to their substantive engagements with the social and political upheavals of the thirties, the disasters of the Second World War, or both. Montale, an old-fashioned and rather mandarin liberal, was a powerful voice of resistance to Italian fascism. Char, a sort of spontaneous anarchist, served as a commander in the French Resistance during the war. Oppen quit writing poetry for twenty-five years between the early thirties and the late fifties: in the thirties he worked with the Communist Party to organize workers and provide relief for the poor, during the war he served as a soldier in the American army fighting the German army, and in the fifties he and his wife chose to live with their daughter in exile, in Mexico, rather than testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Celan, a Romanian Jew who grew up speaking German at home and later wrote in German, was not at home the night in 1942 on which the Nazis deported his parents, both of whom died in concentration camps. His poetry is an anguished, searching meditation on what remains of human hope, or what remains of human being, in the aftermath of this hell. Historical, political, and ethical questions form a fundamental part of the work of all four of these poets. Metaphysics. Two meanings of metaphysics are not especially relevant here. One is the idea that metaphysics involves a search for a transcendent, eternal world beyond the immanent, temporal world. Nietzsche is an influential philosopher who defines metaphysics in this way in order to debunk it. Another is the idea that metaphysics involves a search for an unconditioned ground or foundation from which all else, or everything conditioned, derives. This is a traditional definition of metaphysics. Heidegger, Derrida, and Rorty are among the well-known philosophers who adopt this definition in order to debunk it or at least show its impossibility. In this course I will suggest that we think of metaphysics, instead, as one dimension of a larger philosophical search (as this search emerges near the origins of philosophy): a search for an account of the whole, an account of the soul, and an account of the good life. In order to provide an account of something, one has to have seen, or glimpsed, or, as the biblical tradition has it, heard the thing that one is trying to provide an account of. As Stanley Rosen likes to underline, it is not easy to see with clarity the whole, or the soul (or, as we say today, the subject), or the good: so a measure of surmise, or guess, will be inevitable. We live and think in a space of conjecture. Here poetry and philosophy cross through one another. If poetry doesn’t come to life without an ear for the hidden turns, depths, and reaches of language, neither poetry nor philosophy comes to life without some sort of vision.
New sorts of philosophical questions enter poetry in the age of the romantic revolution in modern culture, in part owing to the way romantic poetries tend to recast, in secular terms, older religious concerns. A range of modernist poetries, for all their transformations in form and substance, still move within this romantic horizon. The poets we will be reading in this course wish to say something, not only about the hopes and the ruins of the historical worlds they live through, but also about the relationship between the self and dimensions of reality that are irreducible to the social, however much our access to them is of course mediated by the social.

Provisional Primary Texts: Eugenio Montale, the Collected Poems, trans. Jonathan Galassi; René Char, Selected Poems, ed. Mary Ann Caws; George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson; Paul Celan, Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger; Other Texts: Eugenio Montale, The Second Life of Art; Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations / A Season in Hell; William Carlos Williams, Spring and All; César Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry; Paul Celan, Collected Prose; Martin Buber, I and Thou; Christopher Butler, Early Modernism; *René Char, Hypnos Waking, ed. and translated by Jackson Matthews (if you can find it)
Section 2A-Caribbean Literature-M-6:10-8:30p-Benedicte Boisseron

596-1-9crs-Graduate Independent Study (Prereq: Consent of Instructor and Chair)

598-1-9crs-Cooperative Education Experience (Prereq: Consent of Department)

599-1-6crs--Thesis

ENGLISH TEACHING (ENT)

440-3crs-Teaching Writing

Section 1-M-4:10-7:00p-Beverly Chin
Emphasis on teaching writing and reading in grades 5-12. Research about development and maturity of readers/writers, strategies for teaching writing and reading in all content areas, criteria for evaluating writing/reading, peer-coaching methods, writing/reading workshops, assignment characteristics, and grading practices. Required of students pursuing secondary teaching certificates.

442-3crs-Teaching Oral Language & Media Literacy

Section 1-T-4:10-7:00p-Beverly Chin
This course is designed for individuals who are interested in teaching the language arts of speaking, listening, and viewing. The course focuses on the theory, research, and pedagogy of oral language and media literacy as well as lesson design and curriculum issues in the English language arts. Using best classroom practices and recent research from professional associations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, beginning teachers learn to teach oral language (speaking and listening skills) and media literacy in grades 5-12. Students experience the language arts through workshop activities, readers’ theater, creative drama, cooperative learning groups, role playing, media, technology, and other speaking/listening/viewing methods. ENLI 465/LING 465 Structure and History of English for Teachers is a pre-requisite for this course.

545-3crs-Theories and Pedagogies in Literacy

Section 1-W-5:10-8:00p-Heather Bruce
The central premise of this course is that what we learn and know about a subject is revealed in language, whether verbal or symbolic. Language is always already embedded in a cultural context. Therefore, to be able to understand complex uses of language, we must also understand the context in which language is used. Becoming literate in an academic context requires an understanding of the complex embeddedness of language use in all its global and local contexts, which include, but are not limited to the cultural contexts of the society, of the school, of the discipline, and of the classroom. To teach literate practices to students in the secondary school, literacy must be understood within all its cultural contexts. The central question at issue for this course, then, concerns the relations among culture, language, literacy, teaching, and learning across the disciplinary curriculum of the secondary school. It is assumed that facility with the language of a discipline is central to knowing a discipline. Therefore, all teachers, regardless of their subject matter, are teachers of language and literacy. Therefore, developing literate practices among our students becomes the primary focus of disciplinary teaching.

FILM OPTION (ENFM)

227L-3crs-Film as Literature, Literature as Film

Section 1-TR-3:40-6:00p-Phil Fandozzi
In this course we will study the relationship between literature and its filmic adaptations. We will discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses in terms of character development, narrative techniques, cognitive and emotional impact. Readings will include a short text on literature and film writing/reading approaches, and a number of novels/short stories which have been adapted into film.

381-3crs-Studies in the Film

Section 1-Screen Kiss-TR-2:10-4:30p-Nancy Cook
Screen Kiss: Sex and Romance in American Film Genres. This course examines the collective dream life of Americans in terms of the origins, nature, design, and development of one of the most durable forms of representation on film. We will use genre studies to analyze how a film organizes both the story of sexual attraction and/or romance as well as audience expectations. Although genre films replicate character types and situations from film to film, they also adapt to changing cultural phenomena. What is it that these films, with their parades of lovers, tell us about ourselves? Along the way we will survey the role of sexual attraction and/or romance through the history of American narrative cinema and relevant antecedents outside film history. Genres under scrutiny include melodrama, the gangster film, film noir, romantic comedy, science fiction film, the western, and the action film. Students should be prepared for extensive viewing, some reading, a series of short assignments, quizzes, an exam, and one longer paper. In addition, students will keep a viewing journal. Please be advised that screening include some “R” rated content and that assumptions about normative sexual pairings will be challenged in this course.

427-3crs-Film Theory

Section 1-MW-8:10-10:30a-Sean O’Brien
This class will examine various approaches to film theory and criticism, while highlighting the theoretical roots of each. We will draw from aesthetics, political theory, feminism and the psychoanalytic tradition in assessing a collection of key films and their critics.

IRISH STUDIES (ENIR)

102-3crs-Elemenatary Irish Language II

Section 1-TR-4:10-5:30p-Terry O’Riordain

102-3crs-Elemenatary Irish Language III

Section 1-TR-2:10-3:30p-Terry O’Riordain

LINGUISTICS (ENLI)

465-Structures and History of English for Teachers

Section 1-R-6:10-9:00p-Steven Tull