Spring 2007
The spring 2007 semester features new general education courses (including two team-taught general education eligible courses) and new courses for majors (including English 300) at all levels.
Meriem Pages will offer a new readings course at the 200-level with the title Imagining the Orient. Magic lamps, desert kingdoms, camels, pyramids, belly-dancing maidens, and mighty sultans . . . All of these conjure up images which we associate with the Orient, as some have called the Middle East or the Arab world. But what exactly is the Orient? Is it real or imaginary? Can we even talk of any one image of the Orient or are there several depictions of it? In this course, students will question the nature of the image of the Orient. The course will begin by looking at early representations of Muslims in medieval and early modern texts, focusing particularly on the myth of the legendary Saladin. After an examination of the image of the Orient in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, students will turn to an analysis of its representation in modern narratives, leading to and including our perception of the Arab world today. Here students will study the place of ancient Egypt and Egyptomania in the creation of this later vision of the Orient. Throughout the semester students will also be looking at representations of the Middle East in art, cinema, and music.
Fiona Mills will offer a special topics writing course entitled Race(ing) and Writing. In this course students will examine the ways in which different ethnic/racial groups use language: African American Vernacular English; language choices in bilingual Latino/a communities; critical race theory and sociolinguistics. Students will also explore language use and rhetoric in rap, hip hop and spoken word movements and consider the rhetoric of whiteness. Additionally, students will interrogate the ways in which nationality, gender and/or sexuality inform racial rhetoric. Lorianne DiSabato will teach the readings course Toe the Line: The Frontier in American Literature. At the end of the 19th century, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier—the ragged edge between civilization and wilderness—was the reason for Americans' fascination with exploration and innovation. Although Turner observed that America's geographical frontier had closed, American writers before and since have used the image of living on the edge as a metaphor for self-reliance and philosophical searching. In this class, we will trace the image of the frontier in American literature, reading texts by authors such as Whitman, Cooper, Thoreau, Cather, and Dillard. Anne-Marie Mallon's Women's Roles, Women's Voices: Sisters, Mothers, Daughters, Lovers will survey fiction, poetry and drama by women about women in their many roles, assigned and chosen. The texts will be multicultural, mostly modern, always challenging, and will examine women's roles from multiple perspectives.
The spring 2007 semester features two exciting opportunities for students to work with two professors in an area of common inquiry. Robin Dizard and Brinda Charry will examine literary texts that deal with issues of race and cultural difference and study the emergence and development of "race" as a category of identity in Writing Race through the Ages - From the Renaissance to Contemporary Literature. William Stroup and Mark Long will explore a diverse set of historical and conceptual questions about the meanings of mountains for the human imagination in Mountains and the Literary Imagination, a course in which students will read writings from a range of cultural, mythological and religious traditions, including European Romanticism and American nature writing. The course will also examine representations of mountains in the visual arts.
William Stroup will offer Literary Form and History: Drama. This is the first offering of a required course in the revised English major that is designed to help students develop their sense of literary history across a wide range of historical periods. From Aeschylus to the 21 st century students will read a range of plays that will help them become familiar with several of the conventional traditions, and the spirited challenges to those traditions, in the cycles of literary history.
Richard Lebeaux's 20 th Century Jewish-American Fiction will include writing by such writers as Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Michael Gold, Tess Slesinger, Delmore Schwartz, I.B. Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, E.M. Broner, E.L. Doctorow, Steve Stern, Art Spiegelman, and Allegra Goodman. Among the issues/themes to be explored—in the context of the American culture and the Jewish-American experience—are immigration / assimilation / ambivalence, and the Jew as alienated / marginal / victim / sufferer / survivor; anti-Semitism; the Jew as radical/liberal/conservative; the impact of, responses to, the Holocaust; the Jew as writer / artist / intellectual / cultural critic; the Jewish-American writer entering (and influencing) the mainstream; the American Jew and Israel; religious / spiritual / secular orientation; issues of ethnicity, gender, and social class; images of Jews in America; the search for identity as Jews and Americans. Anna Kaladiouk's Self and History in Russian Autobiography examines representations of the self and history in Russian autobiography of the 19 th and the 20 th centuries. Authors will be selected from the following list: Nadezhda Durova, Sofia Kovalevakaia, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexandra Kollontai, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak.
In Theory and Practice of Poetry William Doreski will explore the theoretical and practical implications of environmental poetics. Students will consider the work of John Clare as an English predecessor, Emerson as theorist, Whitman and Wordsworth as foundational poets, and John Ashbery and other contemporaries as possible exemplars of what Angus Fletcher calls the environment-poem. Students will write both original poetry in this mode and a critical essay. Sally Joyce's Theory of American Indian Literature focuses on the development of theories of tradition, invention and aesthetics in American Indian literature during the last twenty-five years of the American Indian literary renaissance. Major topics include the problems of reading American Indian literature as history; literature as participating in the marketing of Indian history and culture; cultural essentialism; the possibility of the oral tradition in written work; and the questions surrounding Indian authorship and Indian identity. Students will read theory/criticism and some literature, all written by American Indian authors. And Anne-Marie Mallon's single-author seminar, Virginia Woolf, will focus on the work of modernism's most famous woman writer. Woolf's novels, essays, letters, as well as the many studies that have examined her personal and political vision, her writing style(s), her biography, her gender, and her death, will give students a wonderful plethora of materials with which to work and (critically) play.
Fall 2006
A range of new courses are scheduled for Fall 2006. The tale of the legendary King Arthur continues to fascinate and inspire our collective imagination. But, who was Arthur? Was he a Celtic warrior chieftain fighting against the Saxons or a symbol of the sophistication and refinement of medieval courtly love? Was there ever a real Arthur or is he a completely fictional figure, a myth perpetrated through the ages? Meriem Pagès will explore these questions in King Arthur in Literature, Art, and Film, a course that will focus on the development of the Arthurian legend from the early Middle Ages to the present day. Richard Lebeaux's Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs in/and the 1960s will explore, parallel, and compare/contrast the lives, musical careers, songs/ albums/ performances, and achievements of singer-songwriters Bob Dylan and his contemporary, Phil Ochs, in the context of the 1960s. In addition to the albums/CDs, students will read Michael Marquesee’s Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Marc Eliot’s biography of Phil Ochs, Death of a Rebel (copies to be loaned to each course participant), and pertinent films and videos. Women's Roles, Women's Voices: Sisters, Mothers, Daughters, Lovers, offered by Anne-Marie Mallon will focus on fiction, poetry and drama by women about women in their many roles, assigned and chosen. The texts will be multicultural, mostly modern, always challenging. Brinda Charry's Early Modern Literature and Literary Theory will take up an interrelated set of questions. What is literary and cultural theory and how do we apply it to our study of literature? What is the relationship between “history,” “theory” and “literature,” especially when one is studying literary texts written several hundred years ago? Readings for this course will include plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists of the period, sonnets and courtly love poetry, and key texts by literary theorists and critics such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Howard, and David Kastan. And Kirsti Sandy's Rhetoric in Action: Language, Text, Community will provide English majors the opportunity to use their skills in literary analysis to examine texts from a rhetorical perspective. Rhetoric, loosely defined as “the art of persuasion,” can provide students of literature with new ways to read and understand all kinds of “texts,” from books to graphic novels to architecture.
Summer 2006
The 2006 summer session will feature two new courses. The first, Ali Lichtenstein's Topics in Writing: Creative Process, examines the influence of gender on writing as it investigates engendered writing and common/different experiences of expression and creative process. Does gender influence what is written (content)? Does gender influence choice of audience? Does gender influence experience of creative process, and if so, how? This experiential course will emphasize gender and individual/collaborative writing, reading, and creative process. The second course, Anna Kaladiouk's Self & History in Russian Autobiography will examine representations of the self in history in Russian autobiography from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Authors will include Catherine the Great, Nadezhda Durova, Sofia Kovalevakaia, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Evgeniia Ginzburg.