The pedagogical practicum is designed to build skills in teaching at a university level generally and teaching Wayne State's English 1020 course specifically. By reading pedagogical scholarship, familiarizing themselves with the challenges and controversies of the profession, and composing lesson plans and teaching strategies throughout the semester, students will engage both the theoretical and practical vectors of teaching first year composition. Most classes will be devoted to discussion of class readings and of lesson plans for Eng 1020. There is no research paper required for the course; graded deliverables include weekly responses to readings and other prompts, lesson plan designs and teaching demonstrations, assignments involving the use of technological resources for teaching, and the drafting of a teaching portfolio for use as a job application resource.
This course is designed for and restricted to students entering the English PhD program at Wayne State University. All incoming PhD students must take this course in the fall term of their first year in the program. The course has two main objectives: (1) to introduce incoming doctoral students to the profession of English studies in the 21 st century, with a particular emphasis on how WSU’s program relates to the profession writ large and how WSU students may enter the profession, and (2) to introduce students to crucial issues in “critical theory.” In seeking to meet the first objective we will begin the course by considering Gregory Semenza’s honest and entertaining Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. We will read this text while we “read” – via a variety of brief and simple exercises – our own department: the program requirements, faculty strengths, placement history, required academic CVs for graduate students, etc. We will then turn our attention to meeting the second objective (though we will never stop working on the first) by reading Alain Badiou’s Ethics, a concise, provocative critique of late twentieth-century thought. Badiou’s argument is that for the past forty years or so too much intellectual and political attention has been paid to the notion of the “other” and “otherness” and “difference” to the extent that we are all now engaged in simply a kind of watered down ethics. This stems, Badiou argues, from the way the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas has been all too casually distributed post WWII. Badiou’s critique of our “Levinasian” tendencies will allow us relatively quick access to critical and complicated debates in French phenomenology and Marxism, debates that underwrite, again, much of what is understood as critical theory. A critical set of binary oppositions will begin to emerge -- self v. other, transcendence v. immanence, etc. – that currently organizes a wide range of critical thought, literary analysis, and cultural study. Students will do presentations on their own “field” of interest and, as a group, we will read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – and view the film version, scheduled for a November release. In addition, we will spend some time with Pixar’s Wall-E.
This seminar concentrates on masterworks of English Renaissance literature with which every student in the field should be familiar. While it avoids amorous lyrics and the performed drama of the period, it highlights (with the exception of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) whole works of poetry and prose, rather than selections, though Sidney’s Arcadia will be studied only up to the point at which that author completed his revision of the work in its third book. The genres include pastoral eclogue, allegorical romance, prose romance, novellas, erotic epyllia, the essay, the religious lyric collection, the (anti-epic) epic, and closet drama.
The works will be set in their cultural and socioliterary contexts and we will read scholarly/critical works that open them up to varied kinds of interepretation.
Requirements include short writing pieces on each of the works read, reports on secondary literature, a report on the term paper project, and a term paper.
Schedule
Sept. 3: Introduction
Sept. 10: Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar
Sept. 17, 24: Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590), Books 1-3
Oct. 1, 8: Sir Philip Sidney, (New) Arcadia
Oct. 15: George Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F.J. and John Lyly, Euphues
Oct. 22: Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander and William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
Oct. 29: Francis Bacon, Essays
Nov. 5, 12: George Herbert, The Temple
Nov. 19, Dec. 3: John Milton, Paradise Lost
Dec. 10: Milton, Samson Agonistes
This course will examine the complexities of a period that constitutes the matrix of modernism as well as enacting the death throes of the Victorian age. We will be reading texts dealing with eugenics and degeneracy, muscular socialism and aesthetic neurasthenia, the New Woman, sexual “inversion,” the explosion of the repressed, and what Yeats prophetically called “the Celtic twilight.” Three anthologies of poetry and prose, novels, and plays as well as selected readings on degeneration and psychoanalysis make up the reading list, which is available on Blackboard. Course requirements are a short analytic essay (25%), a longer research paper (50%), and two presentations, one on matters related to the reading but extraneous to the specific assignments and one on the final paper, the last expected to be a professional conference-level talk (10% and 15% respectively).
This class provides an introduction to the graduate study of film and new media. The main focus will be on film and media theory. We will look at the various ways that film has been theorized over the course of the past century.; and we will make some attempt at the end of the semester to consider questions involving newer, post-cinematic media forms (TV, video, digital media). We will watch a number of feature-length films and shorter films and videos in the course of the semester, but the emphasis will be on the readings, and on general questions in film and media theory and history, rather than on the interpretation of individual works.
Writing Machines is designed to introduce students to the increased focus within English Studies on the rhetorics, politics, and aesthetics of new media and information technologies. Topics covered will include the relationship between episteme and tekhne in the Western philosophical tradition, the impact of technology on contemporary critical and cultural theory, and, most generally, the kind of work on and with new media and its associated vectors that takes place within English Studies. Although this is a Rhetoric/Composition course, we will spend equal time engaging work within philosophy, film and television studies, economics, and literary studies. Our tentative list of texts includes works by Adam Banks, Jonathan Bellar, Richard Dienst, Deleuze, Derrida, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Alexander Galloway, N. Katherine Hayles, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Bernard Stiegler, Stuart Selber, and Paulo Virno. Whenever possible, these authors will join us via tele- or videoconference for short periods during class meetings to personally field students' questions and comments about their work. In addition to a research paper, course deliverables include weekly responses, brief presentations on works related to our readings, and the design of a professional web presence for use during the job search process (no previous web design experience required).
This seminar provides an introduction to the field of historical and comparative linguistics. (1) Historical linguistics is concerned with language in its dynamic state, and the object of study is language change at every structural level: its causes, its paths, and its outcomes. We will pay special attention to the role of language variation and language contact in language change. (2) Comparative linguistics involves the reconstruction of earlier language states through close analysis of two or more languages which are judged to be related. We will also study the controversies about how language relationships are determined, and how family trees are constructed. Grades will be based on weekly assignments, two exams, and a term paper. Recommended: LIN 5290 Phonology.
Space is the place, as Sun Ra famously claimed. In modernism, there has been a long-standing understanding of the spatial form of the autonomous work (Joseph Frank), while Fredric Jameson has theorized the spatial turn of postmodern culture, moving away from the autonomous work toward the sites in which it is produced and consumed. Recent work by critical geographers and the emerging discourses of globalization indicate that there is much more to it than that, however.
This seminar will investigate the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic deployments of space as a category in modernist and postmodern literature and visual art. First, I will draw on my research (published and in process) in modernist historicism and critical regionalism to construct a theoretical framework for reading texts that map horizons and spaces of modernity onto aesthetic forms and philosophical projects. Second, I will take up accounts of space in the construction of the work, drawing on aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological approaches. Finally, I will want to consider discourses of the visual arts and digital culture for new approaches to what we mean by space, from Robert Smithson to recent global conceptualisms.
The seminar will take up major texts that involve spatial mapping as a part of their forms, modernist novels and long poems that map social modernity: likely choices are John Dos Passos’s The Big Money; William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; Melvin B. Tolson’s A Gallery of Harlem Portraits; Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems; Joanne Kyger’s Places to Go. But I will also be searching for new texts that paradigms of new spatial forms, and will be very open to student suggestions: Robert Smithson’s writings; Kamau Brathwaite’s Ancestors; Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives; W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn; Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy; Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City are some recent examples, and there will be others. If there are students interested in other approaches, we may include a Victorian or postcolonial novel or take up spatial aspects of childhood development and disability.
The shift from Fordism to Postfordism is crucial to understanding American history and culture as well as questions of globalization. This course will provide a solid understanding of the concepts of Fordism and Postfordism and how they are essential for theorizing America in a global context. Fordist models, for example, were key to Americanization programs in Europe and elsewhere, especially in the early post-war period. Postfordism, meanwhile, insofar as it has done away with the limited social safeguards of Fordism, has increasingly interlinked the world, making it far more vulnerable to market fluctuations. We will also consider the ways in which Postfordism is both itself a historical result of Fordism and a break from it, leaving a deep, but often not well understood impact on the U.S. and the world. Via the course readings, we will examine how the shift to Postfordism has challenged conventional understandings of socio-cultural institutions and practices. Readings are designed to focus on issues such as labor, space, race, multiculturalism and gender. Emphasis will be placed on the various Marxist theories of Fordism and Postfordism. We will read historical, theoretical and literary/cultural texts by writers whose ideas are important to conversations on globalization and Americanism. The list may include the following: Mike Davis (City of Quartz), Antonio Gramsci (selections from The Prison Notebooks), Karl Marx (selections from Capital), Cedric Robinson (selections from Black Marxism), David Harvey (The New Imperialism and selections from The Condition of Postmodernity) Herbert Marcuse (selections from One Dimensional Man) John Dos Passos (selections from the USA Trilogy), Heather Ann Thompson (selections from Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern City), Jon Cruz ("From Farce to Tragedy: Reflections on the Reification of Race at Century's End"), Jodi Melamed ("The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism") Angela Davis, ("Gender, Class, and Multiculturalism"), Alain Lipietz ("Postfordism and Democracy") and Bob Jessop ("Postfordism and the State"), Dorothy West (“The Typewriter”), Myra Page (Moscow Yankee), Charles Chaplin (Modern Times), Michael Moore (Roger and Me), Angie Cruz (Let it Rain Coffee). This course should be of interest to students working in the areas of twentieth century and beyond, American literature/studies, cultural studies, and globalization studies. Students will have an opportunity to develop a major seminar project commensurate with their own intellectual interests.
The subject of this graduate seminar is representations of children in Victorian literature. The course will examine attitudes toward children as they developed during the nineteenth century and focus on specific texts either written for children or in which children play an important role. Texts include Oliver Twist, Tom Brown's School, The Water-Babies, Alice in Wonderland, Kim, and others.
Through the frame of theoretical and critical essays this course will explore the idea of transnationalism, a dominant concept in the current global context, as it is depicted in a variety of twentieth-century- and twenty-first-century novels. These texts have settings that straddle continents and interrogate boundaries, national and ethnic divides, and population “cleansing” in contexts as different as northern Africa, Malaysia, Europe, South America. One or two of the novels are fantasy novels that carry our present concerns with displacements and e/immigrations into futuristic or imagined locales and offer us a more distanced perspective; others deal with the transnational “body” as not so much human as a production of the human. The course will require two papers—an analytic essay and a longer research paper, as well as two class presentations—one on a subject not directly discussed in class and another, a formal conference-type address, on the completed research paper.
In this course we will examine literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries classified under the rubric of Realism and Naturalism. We will discuss the theoretical assumptions guiding the relation these authors saw between fiction and the world around it and we will try to describe the characteristics of the world to which they are referring, in particular how economic concepts, like those of money, credit, speculation, labor, inflect the fiction We will read Balzac, Zola, E. Gaskell, Disraeli, Frank Norris, Dreiser, Howells, Crane, Sinclair, Riis, and Machado de Assis.
Each student will give an account of one book of theory or criticism, and there will be one long paper at the end of the course. There will also be a "conference on Realism/Naturalism" where students will present a short version of their final paper. Classes will be held as discussion, with the occasional lecture where appropriate.
Winter 2008 - Tuesday 6-9 PM
This course examines the production, circulation, and consumption of American literature, from its early circum-Atlantic configurations through the consolidation of a U.S. literary marketplace in the nineteenth century. Each week we will examine a primary text that illuminates and, in many cases, thematizes the workings of print culture, alongside one or two critical or theoretical texts that extend our understanding of the work. We will end by exploring the multifarious texts, both verbal and visual, that proliferated around the bestselling book of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
This course is also intended to introduce you to research methods in print culture, which you will practice in a series of written assignments and in-class presentations. These assignments will be help you learn how to use (and interrogate) critical debates, to navigate the library’s extensive database collection, and to read printed works as material texts as well as literary ones. Finally, academic writing has its own peculiar genres, and you will practice two of the most common of these in your final assignment: a proposal for a short talk to be presented as part of a mini-conference on Uncle Tom’s Cabin print culture, and the talk itself.
This is a research and theory course for those who are currently teaching or plan to teach college-level writing. The main course project will be for each student to develop a personal philosophy of writing instruction, based on course readings in the history of writing instruction, as well as research and theorizing on the development of writing abilities in young adulthood. The other course project will be to write a case study of a college writer, based on observations and interactions with the writer. This course will be reading and writing intensive.
This seminar will address the text of a heterodox black aesthetic woven through vernacular performance, surrealism, Marxism, existentialism, and jazz into a whole art that, despite sectarianism and identity politics, still lives on. Moving through, more paideumatically (by a map drawn from the sea rather than the shore) than along one line, we will read somewhat genreclastic works, including Du Bois ‘s Dark Princess, McKay ‘s Home to Harlem, Samuel Beckett ‘s jazz writings and other Francophone African translations (from the full edition of Nancy Cunard ‘s The Negro), Fanon ‘s Black Skin White Masks, Richard Wright ‘s Color Curtain, James Baldwin ‘s Another Country, Malcolm X ‘s Last Speeches, Walter Rodney ‘s Groundings with my Brothers. Sun Ra ‘s Space is the Place, Ousmane Sembene ‘s Black Girl and the documentaries The Cry of Jazz and Soul to Soul are films we will share. These and the work of such critics as Cedric Robinson (Black Marxism), Brent Edwards (The Practice of Diaspora), C.L.R. James (probably The Negro Question), Kamau Brathwaite (Roots), Nathaniel Mackey (Discrepant Engagement), Robin Kelley (Freedom Dreams) make this course of useful interest to students of modern literature and theory for whom the black literary canon and/or the black diasporic avant-garde might be new. Participation and seminar papers (preceded by précis and group engagement) can carry your scholarly and theoretical interests toward publication, because we will be rowing together on exciting critical currents.
This course will offer an introduction to graduate level study of Shakespeare by concentrating, primarily, on the vexed question of Shakespeare’s religion through – for absence of a better term – the eyes of “postmodern” or “postmetaphysical” religion. Traditional Shakespearean scholarship has yet to determine whether Shakespeare was a Protestant, crypto-Catholic, or prescient atheist. The dominant argument, still, is that Shakespeare somehow “transcended” (interesting metaphor?) religion and moved toward a kind of secular humanism that we now supposedly all embrace or should embrace. Of course, this not only begs the question if one can “transcend” religion, but it also begs the question regarding whether what we embrace is “secular,” pure and distinct from religion (to my mind a rather quaint notion, especially in that the very notion of secular is so clearly linked to a certain notion of Christianity and western enlightenment). So: we will cover a wide range of “religious” issues in Shakespeare our “secular” culture has so reasonably and rationally abandoned: sacrifice, redemption, allegory, typology, penance, forgiveness, faith, hope, charity, tolerance, love, etc. The critical religious figures you will hear a lot about are Abraham and Paul, particularly Paul. At the same time we are reading Shakespeare, of course, we will be using Shakespeare to negotiate the larger question at hand: the relationship between the religious and the secular or, to put the issue in a more ontological framework, the question of Being and something “other” than Being – a tension as old (at least) as Parmenides and one that still plagues and enriches us. The working assumption is that Shakespeare thinks – and prays – and very often collapses the (minimal?) difference between the two. As you might have guessed we won’t spend a lot of time with dusty doctrinal points or giving ecumenical hugs as the NY Times admonishes us to do; instead, I am more interested in what Jacques Derrida calls a passion for the impossible, a “religion without religion.” We will read The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, Richard III, King John, The Merchant of Venice,Othello,Timon of Athens, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline, and – my current favorite -- All is True (Henry VIII). Selected “secondary” readings from Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, Levinas, Marion, Nancy, and, of course, Kierkegaard. But the plays are das Ding here. In short, you will be exposed, especially in early lectures and discussion to crucial gestures in what many might call “high theory” (what I call continental philosophy), but as this is a 7150 I will concentrate more on the craft of reading and writing about Shakespeare in a lively and intelligent fashion than presenting an overview of this philosophical tradition. We will get at ideas through Shakespeare, in other words, not impose ideas on his plays. I will be talking a great deal about philosophy, theory, religion, etc., as those are my interests, and, at the moment, I can’t talk about Shakespeare enthusiastically in any other language, but I still aim for this to be an introduction to graduate level study of Shakespeare. One of the great challenges facing graduate students of literature (and those teaching grad. Courses) after about 1980 has been how to teach “theory” and “literature” at the same time without having one take from the other in terms of time and attention. For example, students often spend so much time reading “secondary” texts that they skip the “primary” text entirely. Inasmuch as Shakespeare thinks or theorizes – or at least that is my wager – we should have less trouble with that divide here.
When Aristotle defined deductive reasoning as "the body of persuasion" in the Rhetoric he largely purged the discipline of its preexisting concern with the connection between physical embodiment and forces of persuasion. During the past decade these repressed elements — and their related structures of affect, performativity, materiality, and sensation — have returned with a vengeance to rhetorical studies. In this seminar we will examine both the importance of embodiment to the origins of rhetoric as well as its more current return(s): how the body has emerged as a problem for critical thought in the past and the questions it provokes for rhetoric, politics, and ethics in the present. Though grounded in current and emergent rhetorical theory, this seminar will draw on an interdisciplinary range of critical studies into embodiment and its relation to persuasion (including literary and cultural studies, film, neuroscience, and psychology). Our tentative list of readings includes texts by Bataille, Jonathan Beller, Kenneth Burke, Judith Butler, Derrida, Mladen Dolar, Richard Doyle, Epictetus, Foucault, José Gil, Guattari, Kafka, Brian Massumi, Mario Perniola, Plato, Elaine Scarry, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, and Elizabeth A. Wilson.
Emphases: Rhetorical Theory, Critical and Cultural Studies, Science Studies
Requirements: weekly written responses, book presentation, research paper
The thematics and focus of this seminar reflect the ambiguities of its title, consisting in an exploration of a variety of texts in which medieval writers attempt both to con-figure (i.e. to represent) and to figure out the congeries of people(s), places, genders, territories, and beings that constitute the existential and/or non-Eurocentric other. Topics include travel, both geographical (Marco Polo, Mandeville) and mental or imaginative (the Other World, supernatural or theological); human others (Jews, Saracens, Asians, and other “pagans”), and non-human others, both natural and monstrous. The materials, cross-cultural in nature, are susceptible to a variety of theoretical orientations. While some of the Middle English texts will be read in the original, the majority of our pieces will be in Modern English translation.
In this seminar we will examine the connections between modernist aesthetic practices and the development in the late nineteenth century of a new discourse of sexuality. One important component of this discourse is the idea of sexual "identity;" along with the institutionalization of sexual identity came the pathologization and criminalization of "homosexuality" and the normalization of "heterosexuality." We will be interested in the impact that these developments had upon the attraction, function and reception of literary practices. A major theme will be the ways that the aesthetic might be seen as a space that deflects, transforms and/or perverts the epistemological pressures to reveal or disclose a sexual identity while at the same time preserving or promoting homoerotic energies. Readings to include works by Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Monique Wittig and others.
This course considers how experiences of violence and desire are central to early articulations of Black subjectivity and continue to inform contemporary deployments of African Diaspora. On one hand, the project of Diaspora imagines a triumphant project of unity, resistance and re-creation; on the other hand, the historical subjects of Diaspora experience rupture, dispersal, and continued trauma. Interestingly, very little contemporary scholarship has theorized the contradictions and paradoxes that arise from the space between these two understandings of Diaspora. In this seminar, we will interrogate this conceptual tension by reading 18 th- and 19 th-century works by writers of the African Diaspora against the grain of contemporary theories of Diaspora. Our primary focus on literature by 18 th- and 19 th- century Black writers—including Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Juan Manzano, Victor Séjour, and Pauline Hopkins—will be complimented and informed by contemporaneous writings that shape and reflect the dominant ideologies of race and subject formation during the era of slavery and in the aftermath of emancipation. Twentieth-century pieces include those by Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Brent Edwards, Paul Gilroy, Joan Dayan, Frantz Fanon and Eduoard Glissant.
Emphases: Cultural Studies, Critical Theory
Fall, 2007 (Thursday, 6:00-9:00 p.m.)
This seminar will concentrate on the secular lyric from Sir Thomas Wyatt through the mid-seventeenth century. It will deal with the two systems of literary transmission (manuscript and print) and the ways verse served social, political, and aesthetic purposes in each context. Topics to be addressed include: the different roles of authors and readers in the two transmission systems; the practice of poetical anthologizing and its micro- and macro-cultural contexts; the development of the idea of “literariness” and of literature in the early modern period; the significance of the “sonnet craze” in late Elizabethan England; women’s participation in the manuscript system; and the conflict between author-centered and reader-centered textuality. Most of the poetry included is amorous verse and attention will be divided between the work of such canonical authors as Sidney, Donne, and Shakespeare and the larger field of poetic writing found in manuscript collections and printed poetical miscellanies. Requirements include reports on particular secondary works (usually articles), leading a discussion on a printed or manuscript miscellany, an oral report on a project developing into a term paper, and a final (15-20 page) paper.
Emphases: cultural-materialist criticism, bibliographical and textual study (including the History of the Book), literature and history
Theoretical as well as practical questions of agency have been of major concern in rhetoric since its origins in ancient Greece. Contemporary critiques of the Enlightenment ambition for sovereignty have cast doubt on rhetoricā?Ts concern with agency by pressing the importance of adequately acknowledging the limits of our subjectivity. This seminar draws on contemporary critiques of subjectivity to reformulate rhetoricā?Ts concern with agency. We will use theories of subjectivity to develop a rhetorical agency grounded in contingency and vulnerability. Theoretical sources will include but not be limited to: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition; Patchen Markel, Bound by Recognition;Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism, and Leoni Sandercock, Toward Cosmopolis. Practical examples will be drawn from my research on rhetoric in Detroit and South Africa.
The course will survey important writing by romantic-era women.
We will read travel literature (Wollstonecraft), feminist polemic
(Wollstonecraft and Robinson), journal writing (Wordsworth), drama
(Baillie), slave narrative (Prince), poetry (Lyon, Hemans, et alia),
and fiction (Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, Inchbald, Austen).
Providing a contextual framework is Paul Keen's Revolutions in
Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture 1780-1832
(Broadview Press, 2004). We will also read some texts by male
romantic-era writers from Blake to Byron in terms of gender (for this
we'll use the Romantic volume of the Norton Anthology). Susan
Wolfson's Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism
(Stanford, 2006) will not be a required text but will influence how I
read our seminar's texts. I will also be usingWilliam Galperin's "oppositional" theory of reading and making use of cosmopolitanism
from Habermas and Kant.
As of 11/6/06: "The purpose of this workshop for serious writing students is to help them continue the development of their creative writing skills. The emphasis will be on rewriting and developing one or a series of final draft works. Students will receive in-class critiques from the instructor and their peers, as well as one-on-one consultation with the professor as needed. Each student will work in the genre(s) of their choice. Students in consultation with the professor will decide on their major project. Class participation in the critique sessions is a must. More than one unexcused absence will affect the final grade. Texts and assigned readings will be given on an individual basis.
There will be no mid-term or final exam. Papers will be typed; double spaced or proper format for poetry orplays. No binders."
As of 10/1/06: "I haven’t made any decisions yet, but I can tell you that we will be studying feminist rhetoric from a number of angles, and then seeing how those angles inform (or don’t) the teaching of composition. By angles I mean rhetoric studies as constituted in English departments (including some literary approaches to rhetoric) as well as in Communication departments."
more info to come...
As of 11/29/06: "My thoughts are pretty vague so far, but for the moment, I'm thinking about choosing a few 'classic' figures and/or texts for the first half of the course and maybe co-constructing the syllabus with everyone in the second half, with an eye toward discussions of how to use seminars to read for the QE, how to think about areas of expertise within the field, etc."
As of 10/25/06: "I havent made a syllabus yet, but here's what i have by way of a course description: [sic] This seminar will approach the history of literary theory by way of the recurring attempt to understand the relationship between aesthetics and affect. Readings may include Plato and Aristotle on mimesis; Longinus, Burke, Kant on the sublime; Freud and Breuer on the 'talking cure,' Sartre on the emotions, Susanne Langer on art and feeling, assorted writings by Benjamin, Adorno and Marcuse on the aesthetic, history and affect, and recent critical work on affect by Eve Sedgwick, Neela Gandhi, Paolo Virno, Brian Massumi and others."
As of 10/4/06: "In this course we will explore the vexed question of Shakespeare's religion through - for absence of a better term - the eyes of "postmodern" or "postmetaphysical" theology. Traditional Shakespearean scholarship has yet to determine whether Shakespeare was a Protestant, crypto-Catholic, or prescient atheist. The dominant argument, still, is that Shakespeare somehow "transcended" (interesting metaphor?) religion and moved toward a kind of secular humanism that we now supposedly all embrace or should embrace. Of course, this not only begs the question if one can "transcend" religion, but it also begs the question regarding whether what we embrace is "secular," pure and distinct from religion (to my mind a rather quaint notion). So: we will cover a wide range of "religious" issues in Shakespeare our "secular" culture has so reasonably and rationally abandoned: sacrifice, redemption, allegory, typology, penance, forgiveness, faith, hope, charity, tolerance, love, etc. The critical religious figures you will hear a lot about are Abraham and Paul. At the same time we are reading Shakespeare, of course, we will be using Shakespeare to negotiate the larger question at hand: the relationship between the religious and the secular or, to put the issue in a more ontological framework, the question of Being and something "other" than Being - a tension as old (at least) as Parmenides and one that still plagues and enriches us. The working assumption is that Shakespeare thinks - and prays - and very often collapses the (minimal?) difference between the two. As you might have guessed we won't spend a lot of time with dusty doctrinal points or giving ecumenical hugs as the NY Times admonishes us to do; instead, I am more interested in what Derrida calls a passion for the impossible, a "religion without religion." We will read The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, Richard III, King John, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Timon of Athens, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline, and - my current favorite -- All is True (Henry VIII). Selected "secondary" readings from Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, Levinas, Marion, Nancy, and, of course, Kierkegaard. But the plays are the das Ding here."
As of 10/25/06: "The focus of the course is Austen and history. William Galperin's The Historical Austen (2005), currently the most interesting piece of Austen criticism, is one of our texts, along with the six major Austen novels plus Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon. To help us locate Austen in her own time we'll also read from Paul Keen's Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780-1832 (2004). Keen's book includes extracts of romantic-era literature relevant to social class, women, slavery, empire, the book trade, and so on. We'll read one non-Austen novel for the sake of comparison—Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812). Edgeworth, more popular than Austen at the time, writes about things that usually do not get into Austen novels, such as Irish nationalism, but both are novelists that deal with gentry life. Each week we will read something from the library's electronic reserve, articles and book extracts on ways of reading Austen and reading historically. Questions about Austen's fiction that will be addressed include: the extent and nature of her feminism, epistemological issues of how experience becomes knowledge, ethical and political implications of the texts, formalist considerations of how Austen fits into the history of the novel, hermeneutical considerations of how to read Austen in both her and our time. Each student is responsible for one facilitation (leading the class discussion on a critical article or one of the Keen pieces or a part of Galperin's book). At the end of the seminar the students will present an oral report on their research on some aspect of Austen and history. Written work: six one-page response papers; a final paper on Austen and history, at least 12 pages."
As of 10/3/06: "I am interested in Janet Staiger's MEDIA RECEPTION STUDIES and also a recent book by Barb Klinger on media in the home entitled BEYOND THE MULTIPLEX: CINEMA, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, AND THE HOME. I want to look at some of the work found on the online journal PARTICIPATIONS, which is dedicated to reception studies and the media. There have been many fan studies, especially about programs like BUFFY; quite a bit of this research has been devoted to Internet fan communities. Stars have also been the subject of audience research, as in Michael DeAngelis's GAY FANDOM ANDCROSSOVER STARDOM: JAMES DEAN, MEL GIBSON AND KEANU REEVES. I hope to feature some of the classic theoretical work on reception, as in the work Hans Robert Jauss, who coined the phrase "reception studies." And we'll
probably look at notions of the film spectator, reviewing some of classic theoretical essays, such as Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." When I began working in reception studies in the late eighties,it was largely focused on film audiences. But television and media studies have a long tradition in audience research, and with the new media boom, there has been much more interest in television, the Internet, and other forms of "new media." This list of texts is tentative, but it offers a provisional outline of some of the directions I plan to pursue in this course."
As of 10/19/06: "Memory fatigue has set in," writes Andreas Huyssen--in the first few pages of yet another book about memory. The paradox is one that will remain with us throughout this course: so much has been published on memory in the last few decades that we wish we could simply forget it; but, like history, memory insists on remembering us--or at least on being remembered by us, and written about as both an enduring and a pointedly timely concern. "Memory Theory" constitutes a substantial engagement with influential twentieth- and twenty-first century histories and theorizations of memory. We start with Richard Terdiman's Present Past and Georg Lukacs's The Historical Novel to posit a memory (and history) crisis around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. We proceed to the early Bergson, and from there to a collection of Frankfurt School readings--Benjamin's "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" and "The Storyteller," Habermas from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Additional readings are likely to include Pierre Nora on Les lieux de mémoire and responses to him (by Huyssen, among others); Maurice Halbwachs on "collective memory"; Ian Hacking; and trauma theory from Cathy Carruth and others. Binding it all together (in my utopian imaginings, anyway) are three texts that will
function as both "theory" and "literature": Wordsworth's Prelude (the 1850 text), Proust's Swann's Way, and Sebald's Austerlitz.
NB: Students should arrive at the first class meeting of the semester having read the "Preface" to and the first two chapters of Richard Terdiman's Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). I will place a photocopy of this material outside my office during the last few weeks of fall semester so that it may be reproduced (and returned, please).
As of 10/1/06: Below is "a description of a course I taught sometime ago; I may vary the texts a bit, but the aims of the course will be pretty much the same—the dissemination through literature of scientific misinterpretations and social-science distortions of the theory of evolution. The pseudoscience of eugenics and its applications via psychology in the 20th century will also be part of the course."
PLEASE NOTE: THE ACTUAL SYLLABUS FOR WINTER 2007 IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION, BUT THE INFORMATION (FROM A PAST COURSE) BELOW WILL GIVE YOU AN IDEA:
This course will center on the increasing authority of scientific "truth" in the human sciences of the second half of the 19th century; we will concentrate on major breakthroughs, such as the articulation and dissemination of the theory of evolution, in scientific, literary, journalistic, and philosophical writings. We will follow the various representations, refractions, distortions, and popularizations of scientific hypotheses and the processes by which these hypotheses, sometimes quickly discarded by scientists, become hardened into "facts" used to implement public policy and to influence artistic representations. We will focus on the ways in which non-scientists aspire to the authority of science and/or dissent from it, at the complicated relationship between the dominant discourses in a historic period and their lasting political and social influence.