English 495: Winter 2010

Dr. Paul Westover, "Romantic Fiction: The Novels of Austen and Scott"

Over the last fifteen years or so, Romanticists have come to recognize, belatedly, that students of this period have novels as well as poems to read. This course on Romantic fiction takes its cue from three premises that have proven crucial to this epiphany. We will assume, first, that the "rise of the novel"—that is, the novel's consolidation as a genre and its acquisition of a canon, a tradition, and authority in the literary field—occurred in the Romantic Period. The rise from disreputable beginnings to respectability is also a sequence that novels themselves narrate retroactively, sometimes doing so, naturally enough, in self-promoting ways. Second, we will explore how the novel's ascendancy at this moment depended on dialectic between two opposing impulses. On one hand, the Romantic novel has at its core the impulse (also an element in the antiquarian and literary-historical interests of the era) to revive romance—to recover archaic ways of believing and of suspending disbelief that were felt to be vanishing into the nation's past. On the other hand, the novel's "rise" in the generic hierarchy in the early 1800s had much to do with the savvy way in which novelists, composing what we might call "footnote novels," linked their fictions to the new discourses of the modern fact, and to the nation-making genre of history particularly. Third, we will observe that the novel's rise related to its evolving gender politics—a fact not unrelated to the previous two points. Engaging these issues, we will read several novels by two writers to whom histories of the British novel have assigned pivotal, one might even say parental, roles. These two have, moreover, been used to represent two pathways for the novel as it developed through the nineteenth century and beyond: the novel of manners (domestic novel) and the historical romance. One of the goals of the course is to explore these positions and representations in terms of the gendered and national narratives they offer; another is to open up questions of history and romance within the novels themselves.

Dr. Miranda Wilcox, "Tolkien, Lewis, and Medieval Literature"

This section will discuss and examine how the popular and accessible fiction of Tolkien and Lewis incorporated two important modes of medieval literary narrative: allegorical and symbolic. Plus, how symbol and allegory provided models for modern literature.

Dr. Kristin Matthews, "Post-war Fiction and the Discourse of Dissent"

This section will focus upon the role of literature in the representation and critique of U.S. social history after World War II. In particular, the class will examine the occasion, ideology, and aesthetics of dissent in postwar American letters.

Dr. Danette Paul, "Debates, Disasters, and Dames — The Unexpected in the Rhetoric of Science"

Literature, popular culture, and civic life have been affected by science.  In the 19th and 20th centuries, science became a dominant force in culture, shaping our notions of truth.  Considered in this light, science seems a Borg-like force against which "resistance is futile."  Its history is often recounted as a steady stream of logical progress by great men of science.  However, closer study reveals debates, disasters and dames.  This class will explore the unexpected in the rhetoric of science, such as debates over astronomy, evolution, and DNA; disasters, such as the Challenger and Three-mile Island, and women's role in science.

Dr. Gloria Cronin, "Modernity in Black and White: Primitivist Modernism"

This course will be about the influence of race (whiteness and blackness) on the aesthetic, cultural, and political dimensions of Modern American Literature. This means understanding Primitivism, a major racial narrative of transatlantic modernism. Hence we will study modern anthropology, eugenics, ethnography, African artifacts, white fascination with African masks, Jazz, the Josephine Baker and the primitive black body, plus African American folk culture. We will also study the Edgar Rice Burroughs production of Tarzan, the photography of Michael Leiris, and the modernist fascination with the American South West. Our task will be to identify how these formations play out our texts, paintings, and photographs. We will end with Blackness speaking back to Primitivism, sometimes appropriating for its own purposes, always rejecting it.

Dr. Nick Mason, "The Coming and Going of Print Culture"

This section will study how literature has responded to the two most significant ruptures in human communications of the past 300 years--namely, the eighteenth-century rise of print culture and the current transition from print to electronic media. What anxieties and hopes were widely manifested in the early phases of print culture and how have many of these same emotions reemerged with the rise of modern electronic media? How did the proliferation of the printed word change human cognitive abilities and what brain functions might we lose in a post-print age? How has literature already begun adapting to the decline of print and what sorts of changes might we expect in the generation ahead? These and a range of connected questions will drive our class discussions and the research projects students will complete by semester's end. In addition to a range of literary texts, we will also read Finkelstein and McCleery’s Introduction to Book History, Striphas's The Late Age of Print, and Hayles's Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.

Dr. Stephen Tuttle, "The Literature of the Fantastic"

The Fantastic is a borderline literature that inhabits a space between two genres. On one hand there are stories of the strange but true, and on the other there are marvelous stories and exist outside the world as we know it. Fantastic literature keeps the reader guessing for as long as possible, asking us to question what is real and what is imagined, what is natural and what is supernatural. We will begin this course by reading Tzvetan Todorov's important theoretical definition of the genre, and then examine fictions that attempt to blur the line between scientific and supernatural explanations of the unexplainable. Our readings will center on the 19th century when ghosts, monsters, doubles, and weird science gain a particularly strong foothold in popular literature.