This course is a graduate workshop designed for advanced poetry students who are working to develop and refine their personal voice and style and prepare poems to send to journals. Students will read a broad spectrum of contemporary poetry and articles by practicing poets about their poetics; write and revise ten or more new poems; and prepare an essay in which they express this personal poetics.
"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Anxiety of Influence" will explore the work of six theorists: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Foucault, Lacan, and Jameson. We will read each theorist in detail. We will also explore the ways in which each of the three later theorists (Foucault, Lacan, and Jameson) misreads and rewrites one of the original practitioners of the so-called Hermeneutics of Suspicion (Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, respectively). So in a sense we will be looking at three related binaries: Nietzsche/Foucault, Freud/Lacan, Marx/Jameson. This version of 630R will be the most intense I have ever taught--and hopefully the most interesting.
Our course will focus on literature written since the year 2000, with an eye toward discerning what literary history could be most usefully constructed to characterize the cultural work in which these texts find themselves engaged. Each of our course texts has won or been nominated for a major literary award (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, or some combination of these) and looks to garner critical attention from literary scholars, although you will be some of the first to write about these works in any depth. In order to aid you in your study and analysis of these texts, we will also study several different theoretical and critical issues related to contemporary American literature's continued fascination with history, nostalgia, and trauma in the aftermath of postmodernism. By the time you finish the course, I expect that you will be able to offer an explanation of why do these texts might indulge so liberally in a longing for historical examination and revision at the beginning of the new millennium. Also, inasmuch as we will also practice the process of advanced writing and scholarly research in contemporary American literature, I expect that you will be able to use your skills of reading and analysis along with library research and a successful writing process to produce an extended study in at least one of these novels and/or books of poetry.
This course will examine the full text of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, paying special attention to its literary, cultural, religious, and political contexts. It's the first English epic, looking backward both to the classical period and eventuating in Milton's Paradise Lost. No one ever reads the whole thing, because of its length, even though it's one of the Renaissance's major works, but we will. We'll spend the first two weeks contextualizing (looking at classical epic and epic theory, establishing politicial/historical/religious situation) and then spend 12 weeks on the poem itself, and its massive influence in contemporary and later literature.
This course will consider a variety of texts by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. One goal will be to trace developments in early Twentieth-Century English and Irish Literature through considering works of fiction, criticism, and drama by these two modern/postmodern writers. A close reading of several pivotal texts will provide ample possibilities for wide-ranging scholarly conversations, for critical/theoretical analyses, and for pure enjoyment. Woolf and Joyce occupy comparable positions in literary studies; their revolutionary work has inspired striking alterations in both the writing and reading of literature. The writing assignments for the course offer opportunities to apply various contemporary critical/theoretical approaches to Woolf's and Joyce's texts. Some are not simply modernist but are prototypical postmodern novels. By presenting a multiplicity of literary styles, by bending time and place and character, by stretching the meaning of words, by being preoccupied with political and social issues, they first recreated their own cultures and then redefined the literary process itself.
Texts for the semester include: Dubliners (Joyce) and The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf; The Critical Writings (Joyce) and A Room of One's Own (Woolf); books of criticism--The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce and The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf; and various works of fiction and drama--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) and The Voyage Out (Woolf), for example are first books by each writer. Ulysses will be the major Joyce text, where the class will read Orlando, The Waves, and Between the Acts by Woolf.
Recommended reading to prepare for the class: if you have not read Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) recently, please reread or review the text. It poses an important counterpoint to Joyce's Ulysses. Since Mrs. Dalloway is so familiar to most students, I have decided not to read it during the semester but simply refer to it. The first two books read this semester will be these writers first two novels begun while in their teens--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Voyage Out. Both will make good holiday reading. I want to start out quickly so recommend you start reading now. See you in January.
In addition to participating in an internship with an experienced teacher in an advanced writing course, students will study the theory and practice of advanced writing.
Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream; Ron Carlson Writes a Story; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird; Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer; Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences. I'll expect to discuss at least parts of these, and may also assign and discuss some readings on Reserve. I'll expect students to read 200+ pages of fiction in their genre by a living or recently dead writer, and to write a 7-10 page informal essay or set of notes on this reading. Half or more of the class sessions will be workshops. I'll expect students to write and revise 50+ pages of fiction and submit it in "finished" form in a portfolio at the end of the semester. The final exam will likely be a reading by each member of the class.
519R: This course is a graduate poetry workshop. Each student writes and revises original poetry, teaches a class session on a poetry book of his/her choosing, and writes a formal essay articulating his/her poetics. The goal in this course is not merely composition, but also the identification and synthesis of one's poetic project.
In the 19th century, the British struggled with two questions: What is the Origin of Man? What is the place of women? Evolution and the women question were debated in parliament, in the press, in the literary journals, and in the literature. While we often explore these areas as historical context, we don't take them serious as arguments. In this class, we will read some political, public and literary text.
We will read a selection of nonfiction texts: "Vindication of the Rights of Women," "The Subjugation of Women," "Origin of the Species." We will also read several novels: Jane Eyre, Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations, Hard Times and North and South.
Each student will select his or her readings based on the question the student most wants to pursue.
The texts are "Vindication of the Rights of Women," "The Subjugation of Women," "Origin of the Species," Hauser's Intro to Rhetoric, and The Norton Anthology of the Victorian Age (the larger Norton is alright too).
The required assignments will include the following:
This course is designed to give advanced creative writing students experience examining the theory of writing creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. As they read both theoretical and literary texts, students will pose questions about the purpose of each genre, examine the range of what has been achieved, locate themselves within the contemporary project, and determine what constitutes excellence in the type of creative writing they pursue. Practically, this course should help graduate students in the creative writing emphasis draft the critical introduction to their theses.
An increasingly important subfield of literary theory, biopolitics examines the ways in which (sovereign) power determines the very conditions of human existence by reducing us to a state of creaturely abjection, what Giorgio Agamben calls "bare life." This discourse affords startling new interpretations of a wide range of texts, from "Measure for Measure" to "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Trial and Beloved. Might literature provide us with a unique, even privileged, site for the working out of biopolitical concepts? That will be a question for the course. Topics will include state violence, terrorism, Nazism, imperialism, and the limits of the law. Readings will include texts by Schmitt, Benjamin, Deleuze, Foucault, Agamben, Hardt & Negri.
"The Origins and History of the Novel." Writing the history of the novel has become notoriously problematic for two reasons: 1. As a genre, the novel had from the start a voracious appetite for assimilating other genres--romance, epic, picaresque, poetry, biography, and travel narrative. Thus it is the genre that calls into question generic boundaries and tidy definitions. 2. The task of identifying origins and genealogies depends so heavily on how one defines the novel in the first place. These problems have led to ingenious accounts of what the novel is and isn't, when it began, and how it developed. We will consider:
In this course we will study a sampling of American religious practices from the standpoint of oratorical, public, and cultural criticism.