Courses scheduled for Fall 2008
(Click Here for Spring 2008 courses)


ENG 630-1 Graduate Proseminar: Film Melodrama
T 12:30-3:15
Film screening
W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Steven Cohan
This course will study the history of melodrama in American film as well as the contextualization of film melodrama in US cultural and social history. Gender, sexuality, class, race, and the family are issues that will dominant the course, since they seem crucial to the melodramatic form and its recurring conventions and themes. However, the very term “melodrama” will be treated as a problematic for the course too: just what is melodrama? It has been considered a genre—sometimes called “the woman's film” and identified with stars such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck—which emphasizes exaggerated emotions, interpersonal conflicts, and plots that rely on contrivance and stereotypical characters to project a moral universe of good and evil; in many respects, as a genre melodrama appears to have migrated to television in the form of soap operas, Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and made-for-TV movies on the Lifetime cable channel. Melodrama can also be examined as a cinematic style of excess, evident in mise-en-scène, music, star iconography, and performance techniques. For that matter, melodrama has also been approached as a modality of narrative essential to film and other popular forms (for instance, in the way that star biographies or “up close and personal” stories of Olympic athletes are framed), the opposite of “realism.” Viewed as a narrative mode, and recalling the original sense of the term from its origin in theater (“drama with music”), melodrama can be seen as intrinsic to, perhaps even equivalent with, the film medium as developed in the US from the silent era through the present. From this latter perspective the melodramatic dimension of film challenges dominant aesthetic assumptions about the medium's realism. Finally, “melodrama” as a term naming an object is itself subject to historical change and its institutional locales, constructed in one way by the film industry, for example, and in another way by academic film studies. Regardless of how it is understood, it is hard to deny that melodrama has been and continues to be essential to the way that film speaks to and connects with popular culture.

Books to be ordered for the course include John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (Wallflower Press, 2004) and Barbara Klinger, Melodrama & Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Indiana UP, 1994); the rest of the reading, some from now out-or-print anthologies, will be downloadable on class reserve. Film selection will concentrate on the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s but not entirely.


ENG 630-2 Pro-Seminar: The Romantic Period
TH 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Mike Goode
This course will examine the wide variety of writings produced in Britain between 1789 and 1832. While focusing primarily on poetry and novels, we will also read some plays, biographies, essays, travel accounts, political pamphlets, conduct books, philosophical treatises, landscaping manuals, children's educational materials, histories, and broadsides. The goal will be to give you a sense of a complex field of conversations and genres developing in conjunction with various kinds of historical events, practices, experiences, and trends in the period. You likely will not walk away from this course with a clearer sense of what “Romanticism” is or even with a clearer sense of what makes these years a “period” than you had before the course. In fact, we will be attending to the strictures that such terms can place on our understanding of the broad cultural output of the years 1789-1832. You should, however, leave the course with a clearer sense of the importance of the period's cultural productions to the histories of everything from authorship, poetry, literature, the book, character, architecture, fashion, garden design, and estate management, to rank, class, gender, sexuality, slavery, nationalism, imperialism, secularization, the public sphere, physiology, feeling, and historicism. One further course goal will be to familiarize you with some of the most significant recent scholarly conversations about the period, which more often than not focus on literary texts in relation to one or more of these diverse histories. The idea is not just to spark your interest in joining these conversations and imagining as-yet-unrealized ones, but also to have you bear them in mind as you study other periods/fields. Writers covered will likely include: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Thomas Love Peacock, William Hazlitt, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Radcliffe, Felicia Hemans, Anna Barbauld, Catherine Macaulay, Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, John Clare, Robert Burns, Thomas De Quincey, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Thomas Clarkson, William Gilpin, Humphrey Repton, and Thomas Trotter. Writing assignments will be bi-weekly Blackboard posts, a short book review, and a longer seminar paper.


ENG 631-1 Critical Theory: Politics of Theory
TH 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Greg Thomas
This course offers an introduction to the leading theoretical arguments and modes of inquiry underwriting the study of literature and culture—arguably in the U.S. , in the Americas , and in the world. The first order of business in such an undertaking is to put great pressure on satisfactory or unsatisfactory definitions or concepts of “theory” (or “theoreticism”) itself, as it is construed as somehow apart from “practice,” “empiricism” (even “nativism” or “primitivism”), etc. A second order of business is to engage in a survey of prevailing schools thought, ones easily identifiable as “theoretical” in the handling of traditional academic-intellectual business at this point in historical time. A third order of business is to challenge the domination or hegemony of such canonical “theory-making” (very much akin to nation-building, as in the tradition of empire) by considering a range of works not always conventionally identified as “theory,” arguably because of the origins, preferred genres, or perhaps politics of the works produced. We'll therefore read in Marxism, post-structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, etc.—along with Invention of the Americas , Toward the African Revolution , Mutha' Is Half a World , Left of Karl Marx as well as The Mass Psychology of Fascism , just for example.


ENG 650-2 Forms: Motives and Metaphors
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Bruce Smith
“The spontaneity is beautiful,” Gary Snyder says, “but poetry is a social art that is linked to its past and particularly to its language, that loops and draws on its past and that serves as a vehicle for contact with the depths of our unconscious—and that it gets better by practicing.” 

This course will explore the question, “What does the poet need to know? ” What works (beside the poems of other poets) might be most valuable for a poet during his/her apprenticeship? Since writers and readers are moved to emulation, what are the works that have informed the practice of our writers?

The first half of this course will examine the sources and origins of poetry in essays by Lorca, Stevens, Mandelstam, Montale, Milosz, and others. The second half of the course will examine the practice of poetry in essays by Levertov, Bogan, Moore, Auden, Carlos Williams, Jarrell, Heaney, Crane, and others.

In addition, the instructor will assign essays from the fields of music, art, philosophy, anthropology, mythology, criticism, and books by poets towards defining the “vocation” of the poet in the modern world. 

Students will be asked to write responses, both critical and creative, to the reading.


ENG 650-3 Forms: Poets and Artists
T 9:30-12:20
Instructor : Michael Burkard
This course will study poems by a variety of poets (Neruda, Vallejo, Sharon Olds, Cornelius Eady, to name a few); the course will also look at the work of the painter Kandinsky (excerpts from his book SOUNDS ), and artist Louise Bourgeois. There may be required attendance at an art venue or two that would take place during the term. Weekly presentations by students will be required, and creative responses from each student for each poet/ artist studied.


ENG 650-4 Forms: If It Walks Like a Duck…
TH 12:30-3:15
Instructor : Chris Kennedy
In the past twenty years, the prose poem and flash fiction (aka microfiction, sudden fiction, micro-story, short short story) have emerged as viable sub-genres. Though both forms have a long history, in recent years a number of print and on-line journals and anthologies have begun to feature work from these two sub-genres, and some new journals are devoted exclusively to the forms. Despite the proliferation of pp/ff, as one anthology characterizes the work, defining the difference between the two is often a difficult and perplexing task. Why is one piece of writing a prose poem and another of similar length a work of flash fiction?

This class will provide an opportunity to explore prose poetry and flash fiction with the goal of distinguishing the characteristics that make them separate forms while identifying their commonalities.

Writers we will read include Joe Wenderoth, Lydia Davis, Brian Evenson, Russell Edson, Amy Hempel, Charles Simic, Nin Andrews, Gary Lutz, and Sarah Manguso among many others.


ENG 650-5 Forms: Book to Film
T 12:30-3:20
Instructor: George Saunders
In this course, we'll discuss the transition from book to film with the intention of understanding narrative structure. As I write this, the course is still under construction, but we'll be reading novels and stories, seeing the resulting films, discussing omissions and additions, writing some original screenplays, outlining etc.— the hope here is to understand some new things about narrative efficiency and urgency, and about what makes for velocity and undeniability in the two mediums.


ENG 715-1 FIRST POETRY WORKSHOP
W 12:45-3:30
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
All the first-year poetry students in the MFA program will be together in this workshop, writing at least one new poem a week, critiquing these in class, and revising them into further drafts. Reading of poetry and prose may be assigned as this seems helpful. Some prose and poetry writing assignments may also prove useful. Open only to first-year MFA poets.


ENG 716-1 Second Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: Michael Burkard
We will workshop a poem by each member of the class each week. Revision will be expected when necessary. Each week a poem from an "outside" source will be discussed as well. Individual reading assignments will be given when necessary / appropriate. Some possible sources in art will be viewed, and we may view some art venue on campus or in Syracuse . I am usually interested in some "older" or "failed" work students have written, so we may see if we can find any new solutions to writing that isn't working. I would have an expectation that each writer will produce a minimum of ten new poems. I would have an expectation that each writer will participate actively in class discussions.


ENG 717-1 First Fiction Workshop
Th 9:30-12:15
Instructor : Lynne Tillman


ENG 718-1 Second Fiction Workshop
T 3:30-6:20
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Craft. Production. Vision. Sophistication.


ENG 719-1 Third Poetry Workshop
T 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Chris Kennedy


ENG 721-1 THIRD FICTION WORKSHOP
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: George Saunders
This class, which is required of and restricted to third-year MFA students, involves the close-reading and editing of manuscripts, as well as discussion of published stories, and general preparations for the MFA thesis project.


ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: The Harlem Renaissance
TH 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course offers an introduction to the texts and contexts of the Harlem Renaissance. We will read African American literary texts alongside newspaper journalism, memoirs, visual texts, and historical and critical accounts in an effort to understand the various energies and tensions undergirding the cultural renaissance in Harlem during the 1920s. We will investigate such topics as the competing attempts to define the “New Negro,” the role played by African American literary production in political struggles against white terrorism and black disenfranchisement, the role African-American culture played in contemporary struggles to critique and transform Anglo-American culture and cultural dominance, literary efforts to absorb and reconcile rural and urban forms of African-American expression, struggles over the relationship posed between “the modern” and “the primitive,” and related struggles over the commodification of blackness. Course readings will include work by Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Walter White, Alain Locke, Angelina Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond and Nella Larsen.


ENG 730-4 Graduate Seminar: GOING PUBLIC:
THE LITERARY ACADEMY AND THE COMMON READER
T 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Harvey Teres
This course will explore the critical, moral, and political conditions and consequences of teaching English in our time. We will review the creation of the “English” department in the 19 th century and the subsequent history of the discipline, paying particular attention to the role of “professionalization” and the historical relationship between the literary academy and the broader public. This will afford us a view of what English departments do, have done, and might do in the future, with an eye toward the possibilities of developing stronger connections to the world beyond the academy. These possibilities will be considered in light of the current national initiative within higher education for increased public engagement, an effort that goes under the name “scholarship in action” here at SU. To this end, students will be given the opportunity to develop their own publicly-engaged projects, perhaps by creating partnerships with groups and individuals in the surrounding community with an interest in literature or the popular arts. Students may engage in more traditional literary historical or interpretive projects as well.

In the first half of the course we will survey a range of Western and non-Western social arrangements from antiquity to the present in which the scholar and/or the university have played different roles. We will follow this with an examination of the history of higher education and the profession of English in the United States (using Christopher Lucas' American Higher Education , Gerry Graff's Professing Literature , and Steven Mailloux's account of the changes wrought in our own department in the 1980s). From here we will consider some of the important statements regarding the proper role of the scholar, critic, and artist in American society: Emerson's “The American Scholar,” Tocqueville's Democracy in America , Whitman's “Democratic Vistas,” DuBois' “Criteria of Negro Art,” and F.O. Matthiessen's “The Responsibility of the Critic.”

In the second half of the course we will acquaint ourselves with different ways of reaching out to the public. We will read literary and cultural criticism by public intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag. We will then look at the most interesting recent discussions of civic engagement for the academic humanities as advocated in Ernest Boyer's recent Scholarship Reconsidered. We will then turn to the “common reader” and what his or her experiences with reading actually might be. Finally, we'll tackle Janice Radway's Reading the Romance as an example of research and scholarship produced through the interaction of an academic and “common readers” and use this as a guide to doing ethnographic work of our own.