English 495: Extended Descriptions

All seminar courses, instructors, and descriptions are subject to change without notice.

Spring 2012

Section 1: Gloria Cronin – Writing it Forward: Toni Morrison Writing Into William Faulkner’s Margins

This class will explore the intertextual relationships between selected texts of two great 20th century Nobel Laureates, Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. Out of this literary conversation two major racial and religious assessments of American history emerge, the major subject of this course. Morrison, who has always honored Faulkner as her key literary mentor, nevertheless set about writing backwards and forwards into his Southern version of Southern and American history, racial myopias, issues of masculinity and femininity, racial politics, and American social conditioning as she produced her own masterworks. It is a fascinating conversation. Faulkner was a Southerner, male, white, a generation older than she, and associated with American modernism. Morrison is a Northerner, a woman, black, and associated with post- sixties postmodern fiction. Our major texts will be: William Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom Absalom!, and Go Down Moses; and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Song of Solomon, and   . 

Section 2: Brian Jackson – American Religious Rhetoric

This course will take a rhetorical approach to religious speeches, public controversy, arguments  about God, and spatial worship in America. We’ll begin with the some of the most famous Protestant speeches in U.S. history, move through public debates on evolution and other controversies, analyze the arguments of the New Atheists, and conclude with Hell House, a documentary film on an evangelical Halloween fundraiser in Texas. Students will read a variety of theoretical and primary texts, write a few rhetorical analyses (including one research project), join a book club, do a group presentation on religion in the public square, and attend one non-LDS religious service to write an experiential analysis. Our ultimate goal is to become better rhetorical critics of the American religious experience.    
 

Summer 2012

Jackie Thursby – Women’s Culture, Women’s Folklore

A directed study of folklore, folkways, and culture based on women's expressed social behaviors both in the United States and abroad. Class time will be spent in lecture and discussion augmented by film clips, fiction and non-fiction book talks, and possibly a few guest speakers on contemporary foods, fashion, and other cultural /social aspects. Required reading will include four books with settings over time and place: A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, Laura Schenone; Mormon Healer & Folk Poet, Margaret K. Brady; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou; Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi. Reading responses and a researched term paper will be required.

Fall 2012

Suzanne Lundquist-- Carl G. Jung and Popular Culture,

This course will explore the psychological theories of C. G. Jung as they reveal the archetypal themes recurrent in popular culture. The works and films of Christopher Nolan (Inception and The Dark Knight), and Dan Brown (The Lost Symbol and The DaVinci Code) will be explored (among others). Scholarly reviews of these works will be considered as well.

Gloria Cronin—The Broken End of Time, Or, History Unhinged: Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Jewish American Literature in the post the 1980s engages provocatively with the Jewish immigrant experience, the Eastern European Yiddish literary legacy,  postmodernity,    contemporary Israel, gender conflict,  belief and disbelief, fiction as midrash,  absent fathers, the Holocaust,  the plight of American second, and third generations of Holocaust survivors, and the ethical issues of Jewish memory and witnessing. Balancing all of these “negative epiphanies” is also the literature of American self-inquiry and much salvific humor and laughter. In this course we will read: Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire; Jonathan Rosen, Talmud and the Internet , Philip Roth, Plot Against
America,  Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light; Michael Chabon, Kavalier and Clay, Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces;  Jonathan Safran Foer,  Extremely Loud and  Incredibly Close; Art Spiegelman Maus 1&2, and selected short stories by a variety of authors.

Keith Lawrence—Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Criticism

Selective exposure to the variety of Asian American fiction, this course will focus on primary and secondary works. Students will become familiar with the political and aesthetic debates unique to the field of Asian American literature and explore how literary criticism has shaped and changed literature published by Asian American authors.

Jill Rudy—Fairy Tales and Allied Forms: A Literary Vanguard?

In this seminar, we will ponder the implications of the persistence, shape shifting, and popularity of fairy tales on literature as a human activity.  Fairy tale is a folk narrative genre allied with myth, legend, folk tale, and personal experience narrative and a literary genre allied with epic, romance, gothic, children’s literature, postmodern parody, and world literature.  Starting with collections of classic fairy tales, we will also read Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Northanger Abbey, The Song of Hiawatha, selected Poe short stories, and a self-selected fairy tale retelling. 

We will center our study on how fairy tales position traditional stories as normative and innovative forces in historical trajectories of literatures.  In other words, we will explore how fairy tales can be the base of literary development, the source of national literature, the realm of children’s and young adult literature, the epitome of postmodern play, and the intertext of horror, fantasy, and romance in popular culture.

Rick Duerden—Ben Jonson: Comedies and Economies

Ben Jonson’s comedies satirize greed, the con, and commodity fetishism; they examine London from its underworld to its most pious citizens; and besides, they’re funnier than Shakespeare’s comedies. In this seminar, students will study what has been called the new economic criticism and early modern emergent capitalism as well as residual patronage and gift economies in preparation for and alongside deep readings of Jonson’s comedies.

Brian Roberts—Literature of the New Negro Era

Arising in opposition to what was termed the Old Negro, the New Negro was a discursive mechanism aimed at contesting and supplanting the racist images of African Americans that found currency during the decades of slavery and Reconstruction. The New Negro emerged in the 1890s, gained traction during the first two decades of the twentieth century, sprinted during the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s, and largely ran its course by the end of the 1930s. The New Negro racial formation became strongly associated with Harlem, but its geographies were expansive. In the context of the New Negro’s expansive geographical and temporal tradition, this course asks students to engage with major themes of New Negro writing: issues of roots and routes, allegories of racial representation and literary representations, questions of comparative failure and success, interrelations of propaganda and aesthetics, tensions produced by the centripetal and centrifugal forces of Harlem, intersections of state-based nationalism and race-based nationalism, productions of interracial prejudice and intraracial prejudice, and the uses of comedy and tragedy.

Jamie Horrocks—Deviance in Victorian Literature and Culture

Nineteenth-century British literature imagined into being a panoply of characters who operate outside the norm, some truly frightening (Mr. Hyde, Bertha Mason, Dracula, and Henleigh Grandcourt) and some who simply exist beyond the boundaries of “good” behavior (the Mad Hatter, Sherlock Holmes, “Mr. Bunbury,” and Scrooge). Alongside these fictional characters, real-life Victorian deviants (Jack the Ripper, Sweeny Todd, and hosts of those whom Frances Power Cobbe described collectively as “criminals, idiots, women, and minors”) saturated non-fictional print culture, suggesting to readers that their lives were constantly being invaded by society’s “others.”

According to Michel Foucault, one of the unique contributions of the Victorians was the invention of deviance itself, and this course will examine that claim by considering how the emerging nineteenth-century interest in the abnormal, the unnatural, and the pathological led Victorians to construct notions of deviance still in circulation today. Our readings in a variety of genres will include forays into dirt, pauperism, and hysterics as well as the more conventional examples of deviance as we explore—with the help of recent theoretical work—what it meant to be both normal and abnormal in Victorian Britain.

Jamin Rowan--The City in American Literature and Culture

In this course, we will examine how writers have responded to the challenge of representing the U.S. city. These authors have attempted to make sense of the hard facts of city life through a variety of literary forms (e.g., fiction, journalism, memoir) and participate in well-established patterns of storytelling (e.g., realist fiction, migration narratives, crime stories, and magical realism). These texts invite us to investigate the complex issues of race, gender, class, politics, and geography that shape the lives of the people who inhabit the city. We will supplement the body of urban literature that constitutes the core of this course by considering the ways in which other artists and urban intellectuals have responded to urban life through a variety of aesthetic forms: painting, photography, film, music and architecture. As we situate these literary and nonliterary attempts to represent the city in their particular historical contexts, we will gain a greater understanding of the transformation of urban life in the United States over the past two centuries.
 

Winter 2013

Kristin Matthews—African American Literature and the Politics of “Home”

America has been called “home of the brave” and “land of the free.” “Home” invites ideas of inclusion, community, and safety. At the same time, “home” also communicates a sense of “belongingness” that, while including some, necessarily excludes “others” from particular spaces, places, and orders. Understood in these ways, “home” becomes a concept that is at once philosophical, psychological, and political. Our class this semester will focus on the ideas, performance, and complexities of “home” in post-WWII African American literature. These texts pose key questions about “home” and its relationship to geography, ancestry, language, history, displacement, class, and gender. Ultimately, the texts selected for this course examine what it means and what it takes to feel “at home” in one’s community and one’s own skin.

Dennis Perry—The Gothic in Literature and Film

This course will explore classical, surrealist, and modern film adaptations of gothic texts and conventions. Gothicism is a slippery term and genre, some claiming it more of a quality or “mode,” like humor, that can be plugged into any number of genres. In addition to genre controversies, we will explore the psychological dimensions of the Gothic and study how German Expressionist cinema illustrated extreme states if mind in a way that became a stylistically significant influence on early film adaptations of gothic literature. Students will study both literary and critical texts on the gothic tradition as well as film adaptation theory.
 

Brandie Siegfried—Shakespeare and Film

This section of English 495R will focus on a variety of theatrical, socio-historical, political, philosophical, religious and literary issues in relation to how and why Shakespeare is adapted to film.  Special attention will be given to five main objectives. Students will

(1) read seven of Shakespeare’s plays with critical attention;

(2) view at least nine film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays;

(3) read and respond to both literary and film critics as they develop their own scholarly stance in relation to the movies;

(4) gain specific knowledge of the literary sources and the cultural influences that bear on the development of the film adaptations;

(5) add to their understanding of the continued influence of Shakespeare’s plays historically and in contemporary life.

The course will include some film theory but will focus especially on the historical relationship between stage performance, dramatic painting, and the development of film adaptations (moving pictures).

Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Criticism—Keith Lawrence

Quite predictably, a crucial historical concern of Asian American literature has been Asian American identity. But Asian American writers have also been engaged in and have made significant contributions to discussions of broader American identity. Interestingly, all such identity discussions by Asian Americans have been framed in response to white-created racial stereotypes as well as to literary and social criticism generated by fellow Asian American authors and historians. In this class we will first consider about a dozen representative short stories and essays from white American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Next, we will consider essays by eight Asian American literary critics and
historians from the 1960s forward. In the context created by these contrasting white and Asian American voices, we will read fiction by seven contemporary Asian American writers, focusing on themes of American and Asian American identity.

Summer 2013

Jacqueline Thursby—Women’s Culture, Women’s Folklore

A directed study of folklore, folkways, and culture based on women’s expressed social behaviors both in the United States and abroad. Class time will be spent in lecture and discussion augmented by film clips, fiction and on-fiction book talks, and possibly a few guest speakers on contemporary foods, fashion, and other cultural/social aspects. Required reading will include four books with settings over time and place: A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove (Laura Schenone), Mormon Healer and Folk Poet (Margaret K. Brady), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi).