ENGLISH 203 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

FALL 2008

Course Title: AMERICAN INDIAN LITERARY MODERNISM

Time: 11:00 MWF

Class #: 35740

Place: 108 Smith

Instructor: EVANS, Steve

COURSE DESCRIPTION: The title of the course suggests a number of questions that we will consider during the semester. For example, by what characteristics, and within what conceptual framework, can one define “American Indian literature”? Is it possible, even proper, to attempt to place this diverse body of texts within the “traditional” scheme of American literature? What features of written Indian texts mark them as literary, and by whose standards? Perhaps more perplexing, what makes these texts modern? Put another way, how does the work of authors such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich compare to the literature now being produced by writers like Sherman Alexie and Thomas King? Paula Gunn Allen has termed this latter group “the third wave of Native writers”--that is, authors who are “more concerned with articulating contemporary Native experience as it is lived than with busting stereotypes or creating ‘authenticity,’ which were the directives of earlier writings.”

Indeed, the term American Indian itself is suggestive of the conflicted nature of modern Indian experience: Can a person be both American and Indian at once? We will see how certain characters embrace or resist the pull of assimilation into mainstream America, while others strive fervently to maintain tribal traditions and heritage; how questions of identity, or “essence,” are complicated by interrelated notions of blood, culture, and race; how, for many contemporary American Indian writers, the past is inseparable from the present--both literally and literarily. Their variety and differences aside, the works we will study nonetheless comprise a body of literature meant to sustain, in Gerald Vizenor’s fine phrase, “postindian warriors of survivance” (emphasis added)--a term that conflates notions of survival and endurance. Required Work: Occasional quizzes and in-class writing assignments; 2 papers; mid-term exam; final exam. Prerequisite: Completion of English 102 or equivalent.

REQUIRED TEXTS: Dept. of English, Composition and Literature, 2007-2008; Louise Erdrich, Tracks: A Novel; Thomas King, Truth & Bright Water; N. Scott Momaday, The Names: A Memoir; N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain; John L. Purdy and James Ruppert, eds., Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature.

Course Title: THE DARK SIDE OF SATIRE

Time: 2:30 TR

Class #: 35742

Place: 2032 Haworth

Instructor: POPE, Nicole

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Are murder, disease, mutilation, and death fodder for comedy? Writers and fans of dark humor would resoundingly say yes. This class will explore dark humor, or black comedy, a genre in which serious topics become humorous in the right context. Like satire, dark humor often serves as social and political commentary. Such writers point out the often ludicrous and arbitrary aspects of our lives, and suggest that sometimes we cannot escape fate. As Kurt Vonnegut writes in Slaughterhouse-Five, “So it goes.” As we examine the course texts, we will ask ourselves the following: What can writers achieve with satire that they could not otherwise convey? Why has the genre increased in popularity in recent years? What does this popularity say about our current values, sense of humor, and taste levels? What are the limitations of this genre? Above all, how can humor be found in the most depressing, unfortunate circumstances? We will focus on a variety of texts from the beginnings of the tradition to more contemporary takes on the genre. Along with the required literature we will look at films, cartoons, and other media to analyze the inner workings of this controversial humor.

REQUIRED TEXTS MAY INCLUDE: Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace; Heller, Catch-22; Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five; Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Ellis, American Psycho; Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides; and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: EXPRESSIONS OF YOUTH AND REBELLION

Time: 2:00 MWF

Class #: 16568

Place: 1009 Wescoe

Instructor: ELLIS, Iain

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Expressions of Youth Rebellion is a course that will survey a broad range of contemporary discourse relating to youth culture as an arena of socio-political resistance. Issues of generation, class, race, and gender—within contexts of history and geography—will be central to our textual/cultural analyses. Quizzes, discussions, and focused response essays will revolve around the literature, films, and music that we study in class. In addition, students will be expected to research, write, and present a fully-developed analytical research paper that focuses on a writer of “youth rebellion.”

REQUIRED TEXTS: J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice; Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas; Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle; Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries, and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Time: 11:00 MW

Class #: 16552

Place: 155 Robinson

Instructor: DANCE, Daryl Lynn

COURSE DESCRIPTION: The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, gave African American artists of the 1920s an extraordinary opportunity to showcase black talent and creativity to the general (white) public. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston helped white readers to see and black readers to appreciate the complexity of black life.

A class in the Harlem Renaissance will help students understand not only the extraordinary participation of black writers to American literature, but also the politics of creating art. In addition to exploring how competing political, educational, and cultural ideologies are reflected in Harlem Renaissance writings, the class will also examine questions such as the following:

What is the role of a writer in society?
How do writers portray the community to which he or she belongs?
What themes should writers address and how?
How do the audience and the patronage system affect the way in which writers shape the text?

REQUIRED TEXTS: Patton, Double-Take: Revisionist Harlem Renaissance; Larsen, Passing; Thurman, Infants in the Spring; Schuyler, Black No More; Toomer, Cane; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

Time: 1:00 TR

Class #: 16556

Place: 1009 Wescoe

Instructor: McLENDON, M.J.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Using testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust, this course will cover literature dealing primarily with the death camps and ghettos.

REQUIRED TEXTS: Wiesel, Night; Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz; Delbo, Auschwitz and After; Wyszogrod, A Brush with Death; Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter; Volavkova, I Never Saw Another Butterfly; Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle; Sonneman, Shared Sorrows; Klein, All But My Life; Langyel, Five Chimneys; Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor; Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

Time: 2:30 TR

Class #: 16554

Place: 1009 Wescoe

Instructor: McLENDON, M.J.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Using testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust, this course will cover literature dealing primarily with the death camps and ghettos.

Course Title: THE LITERATURE OF SPORTS

Time: 12:00 MWF

Class#: 16558

Place: 1009 Wescoe

Instructor: WEDGE, Philip

COURSE DESCRIPTION: In the Literature of Sports course students will study and write essays on a significant body of sports literature, examining such topics as sports as character-building, sports hero types, hero-worship in fans, violence in sports, corruption in sports, and so on. Required coursework consists of 4 major Essays (45%), a Mid-term (15%), and comprehensive Final (25%). Homework (15%) includes pop quizzes and short writing assignments. Class participation is also of considerable importance.

REQUIRED TEXTS: Eric Greenberg, The Celebrant; John McPhee, Levels of the Game; Clifford Odets, Golden Boy; Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner; August Wilson, Fences; Anne LaMott, Crooked Little Heart; Don DeLillo, End Zone; Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly; Jeanne Schinto, Show Me a Hero; James Dickey, Deliverance; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: THE LITERATURE OF WAR

Time: 9:30 TR

Class#: 16566

Place: 2032 Haworth

Instructor: KERN, Sarah

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course is an intertextual course focusing on the art objects of war. We will concentrate on the experiences of the soldier as revealed by artists and on war literature as a genre. This class does not proposes to have a political bias. Instead, we will look at the experience of war through the lens of art realizing that we cannot fully understand the complexities of war within this limited scope. We will discuss the functions of the genre including resolution with the experience, the demystification of war and the bureaucracy that created it, and its historical progression from a proponent to a protest genre. The class will be responsible for reading responses and three major papers.

REQUIRED TEXTS: Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Joseph Heller, Catch 22; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried; E.E.Cummings, The Enormous Room; Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature. Following the intertextual theme, the class will watch Apocalypse Now, Jarhead, and All Quiet on the Western Front.

Course Title: POSTMODERN AMERICAN FICTION

Time: 10:00 MWF

Class #: 16560

Place: 1009 Wescoe

Instructor: GILES, Todd

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course is a hyper-real pastische of postmodern American fiction ranging from the quirkiness of Richard Braugtigan’s Trout Fishing in America to William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer (which influenced the film The Matrix). We’ll also read numerous stories and selections from Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Anzaldua. Pomo art, music, architecture, and film will also appear on the grid, and be prepared to jack into some pomo theoretical essays by Hassan, Jameson, Baudrillard, and Harraway as well. We will begin, though, by exploring a key modernist text, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, to help us define just what postmodernism is and isn’t. Along with regular daily writing and group work, you will engage in a semester-long course project that will consist of an annotated bibliography, a paper proposal, and a final literary argumentative paper on a text of your choice. Key words: metafiction, new journalism, double coding, pastische, play, rhizome, intertextuality, heteroglossia, anti-form, hyper-reality, simulacra, mayonnaise. Mayonnaise?

REQUIRED TEXTS: Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America; DeLillo, White Noise; Gibson, Neuro-mancer; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions; and Postmodern American Fiction; and Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: SCIENCE FICTION FROM THE 19^th CENTURY

Time: 1:00 TR

Class#: 35744

Place: 4057 Wescoe

Instructor: WILLILAMS, Nathan

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will chart science fiction's development as a genre during a century when science and technology rapidly transformed the world. We’ll begin by studying some of its earliest occurrences, beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. We'll see how real (and not-so-real) science of the era was interpreted by the literati, like Hawthorne and Poe, and how dramatic changes in technology and theory affected the way later authors, like Verne and Wells, portrayed science. New scientific ideas gave writers new ways of thinking about humanity and its place in the world, ways that still profoundly affect us today. We'll see this by reading some of the best known works from 19^th century science fiction. We'll also read some of those revolutionary scientific and social texts for context. Forward... into the past!

REQUIRED TEXTS: Shelley, Frankenstein; H. Bruce Franklin (ed), Future Perfect; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; H. Rider Haggard, She; Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: TURN OF THE 20^th CENTURY: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Time: 9:00 MWF

Class#: 16562

Place: 4057 Wescoe

Instructor: ARAB, Teresa Fernandez

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course involves an in-depth study of works (novels, short stories, poetry, essays, speeches) by several American women writers from the turn of the 20^th century. It is an exploration of the American cultural and political atmosphere in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, a time of social unrest and of questioning of the cultural models dominating most part of the 19^th century. We will study the intersection of gender, race and class issues in this critical period of American culture: the decline of the Cult of True Womanhood and the advent of the New Woman phenomenon, the proliferation of magazine culture and mass readership, immigration, cultural assimilation and literacy, women’s clubs and class stratification. In order to offer all possible angles of these issues we will read works by women from different cultural backgrounds (Anglo-white, African-American, Native-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American, Hawai’ian), as we try to go beyond the overgeneralizations of a feminist study into the subtle issues of class and race, as well as the risky endeavor of cultural preservation, often hidden under the blanket-statement of gender difference.

*Additional materials on the specific writers and the main topics of discussion will be on Reserve at Watson library. Work will probably include three/four main writing projects with some research involved, a final examination (essay form) and small group oral presentations on a topic of the students’ choosing.

REQUIRED TEXTS: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (including magazine articles); Frances Harper, Iola Leroy as well as a selection of essays and public speeches; Maria Cristina Mena, The Collected Stories of…; Mourning Dove, Cogewea; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.

Course Title: UTOPIAN FICTION: NOT SO FAR, FAR AWAY

Time: 9:30 TR

Class#: 16564

Place: 4057 Wescoe

Instructor: MOORE, Gaywyn

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Utopia, a literary genre of a ‘happy place’ and, simultaneously, a ‘no-place’, is a space of fictional possibilities and hopeful imaginations; it is also a space of and for societal critique. These two roles rarely exist in harmony. Or, as Agent Smith explains about the “utopia” of the Matrix: “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program.” (The Matrix). Through texts and films, this class will explore the utopian fiction genre and the technological blueprints that sustain utopias, including social planning, science and architecture as ways to shape and improve humanity. We will begin with Thomas More’s Utopia, moving chronologically forward to the 21^st century, ending with Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember and two films, Metropolis (Lang) and The Matrix (Wachowski).

REQUIRED TEXTS: More, Utopia; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Rand, Anthem; Huxley, Brave New World; DuPrau, The City of Ember; Dept. of English, Composition and Literature.