Courses scheduled for Spring 2008


ENG 615 Open Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: Michael Burkard  
This class will weekly review new poems by participants. There will be weekly reading from outside authors and artists (Robert Creeley, Joy Harjo, Fanny Howe, Louise Bourgeois, Wassily Kandinsky, e.g.) to suggest possible writing assignments. Some collaborative assignments are likely. Undergraduates may register for this course with instructor's permission (undergraduates interested should submit to the instructor 3-5 pages of recent poetry by October 31). Thorough written and spoken attention to the student work and other reading assignments will be a requirement.

ENG 617 Open Fiction Workshop
TH 3:30-6:15
Instructor: CW Staff

ENG 630-2 Graduate Proseminar : The Long Eighteenth Century
W 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Erin Mackie
Framed by the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the French Revolution in 1789, this seminar provides an in-depth examination of some of the major texts and discourses that constitute the academic field of eighteenth-century British literary and cultural studies. We will pay considerable attention to some of the most influential critical-historical approaches that have defined this period over the past twenty-five years or so. Beginning with the Restoration, the course proceeds through an examination of how the crises of authority that emerge from mid-seventeenth-century upheavals are confronted for the next fifty-odd years within a range of texts—dramatic, satiric, lyric, prose fiction, periodical essay. We will look at how authority devolves from the dynastic sovereign and is consolidated within a cultural elite increasingly defining itself not in terms of status or wealth but in what we call aesthetic and ethical terms that internalize and sublimate the absolute values of honor and worth. The modern novel is a key instrument in this internalization of value and we will devote considerable attention to its most prominent representatives and theorists. As we move through all these issues, we will give considerable attention to how (modern) notions of gender and sexuality coordinate with this internalization of identity as “subjectivity.” Finally, English colonialism in the West Indies gets underway and then flourishes in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth century. In this seminar we will attend to how this development is handled culturally and discursively. Among the authors we will read, the following figure prominently: John Dryden; John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester; John Milton ( Paradise Lost ); Aphra Behn; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope; Daniel Defoe; Joseph Addison and Richard Steele ( The Tatler and The Spectator ); Samuel Richardson; Henry Fielding; and Frances Burney.

ENG 630-3 Graduate Proseminar : Film Theory
T 12:30-3:20
Film Screening TH 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Roger Hallas
This seminar provides an advanced introduction to the field of film theory. The seminar involves three broad sections: (1) “classical” film theory and its focus on the question of defining the film medium and its specificity; (2) the “grand” or “apparatus” theory of the 1970s and 80s when film studies worked to establish its own disciplinary autonomy through its appropriation of semiotics and psychoanalysis; (3) the historicizing and de-essentializing turn of film theory which both situates film within the larger frames of modern/postmodern culture and emphasizes questions of gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, and globalization. Although we will read the texts of film theory in broadly chronological order, the seminar resists a teleological approach (i.e. one that generates a progressive model of “theoretical obsolescence”). While theories will be historicized within the intellectual and cinematic contexts from which they emerged, they will also be put into conversation with each other throughout the whole course. Weekly film screenings will provide opportunities to illuminate key concepts, generate discussion, and enable careful textual analysis. The aim of this seminar is to provide you with a firm grounding in the changing issues within film theory, to immerse you in classical and contemporary scholarly writings on film, and to enable you to develop a critical vocabulary for audio-visual analysis.

ENG 630-4 Graduate Proseminar:
The Public Voice of Twentieth-Century American Poetry
T 9:30-12:15
Instructor: Harvey Teres
This course will survey some of the most accomplished and influential poets of the past century, including Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Philip Levine, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Alan Dugan, Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Frank Bidart, Charles Bernstein, Louise Gluck, Li-Young Lee, Billy Collins, and various hip-hop and slam lyricists. Attention will be paid to the craft of poetry, to poetry's effect on readers individually and collectively, and to its role within American society as a whole. Theodor Adorno's “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Robert Pinsky's Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry , Joan Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, and James Longenbach's The Resistance to Poetry will help frame the course's broader concerns.  

ENG 650-1 Forms: Teaching Creative Writing in the Community
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Michael Burkard
We will use Kenneth Koch's Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? as a main text. The classes will prepare students for teaching creative writing at community sites and venues (the sites are yet to be determined). The sites may include middle schools, elementary schools, social centers, the justice department, and high school populations. Collaboration is a common element in this course. The class meetings at SU are used to formulate what assignments would work well in the venues. (It is possible that a few students might get to collaborate with a photography study at one of the high schools.) The site visits would number 6-8 sessions. A project for the term's end will be an anthology from each of the groups we work with. This is an invigorating way to contribute to the community and to your own teaching, editing, and writing experience (it also allows me a chance to write a more comprehensive letter of recommendation for those interested in teaching). Pam Heintz oversees our course with her expertise, and we may ask former students of the course to attend a class and lead us in an exercise or two. Students will most likely visit a chosen site for 6-8 one hour (approximate) workshop sessions. Interested undergraduates may register for this course after submitting a statement of their interest and background, and after meeting with the instructor (by October 31).

ENG 650-2 Forms: Art and Craft of Poetry
T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
The governing idea of this course is that a piece of writing is always a deliberate construction that uses what the writer has learned from others to generate an intense experience in the reader. We will spend several weeks on various rhythmic traditions and stanza patterns, not because everyone should use these, but because any writer who gets the feel for these patterns has better access to most of the best poetry written in English, and greater freedom in the act of composition. Other topics will include image, diction, tone, point of view, and argument. Weekly handouts will describe principles to be studied in poems assigned as reading, and in that week's writing assignment. Prose writers as well as poets may find this course useful.

ENG 650-3 Forms: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire : The Layering of Modern Narrative
W 9:30-12:15
Instructor: David Treuer
No writer in English was more aware of his own processes and his linguistic habits than was Vladimir Nabokov. He speculates in Speak Memory , echoing Flaubert, about how much you might know if you knew only six or seven novels very, very well. With this sentiment in mind, we will be getting to know Nabokov's Pale Fire as well as humanly possible during this term. We will, by the time we are done, have read Pale Fire at least three times and this course will resemble more a gathering of detectives than a workshop. That is, it will be our job to peel back the different layers of Pale Fire –from the initial reading of “plot” and “character” to deeper levels that include a host of literary references. In doing so we will come into contact with a rich literary tradition from which Nabokov has cobbled his novel. Once we have found as many of the book's constituent elements as possible, we will reassemble the book and see what that kind of layering does to a story. What does the inclusion of detail, so detailed that it escapes most readers' attention, do? It is rare to take a course dedicated to the work of one author, to familiarize oneself with the growth and concerns of one mind; however in the case of Nabokov, by dedicating ourselves to his work, we will come into contact with the theoretical issues of authorship, authority, influence, and tradition and we will see clearly how novels are assembled.

ENG 650-4 Forms: Whitman and Dickinson Seminar
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Bruce Smith
Students in this course will be asked to read the complete poems of Whit man and Dickinson, the progenitors of American poetry.

Whitman's “barbaric yawp” in “Song of Myself” counters Dickinson 's songs (“My business is to sing”) in the 1,789 poems she wrote in her lifetime. Whitman is among the first to stake out forbidden territory (race, masculinity, morality) for American poetry and to find a form that persuasively enacts the poem's content. Dickinson torqued the language to create lyric cries and arresting moments. In her famous remark to Higginson, Dickinson said: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way?"

The emphasis of discussions will be both on the language of each poet , the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination—the vision that's unique to each author. We'll consider the continuances and the ruptur es that each new style demands as well as what surrounds each work of art in the way of culture and biography. Stude nts will be asked to write two short papers and one longer paper on each poet.

ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: Politics and Poetics of the Commons
TH 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
“The Commons” has become a ubiquitous metaphor in current debates about the internet, global resource depletion, and new political formations, but its etymological roots are in an agrarian space that emerged under very different conditions, conditions that—along with “the Commons” as such—were largely destroyed with the emergence of Capitalism (though variations persist around the globe even now). In this class we will shuttle back and forth between reading literatures from the Medieval and early modern period when “the Commons” was a potent site of political struggle in England, and the literatures and debates that draw on fantasies of “commons” today. Texts may include Langland's Piers Plowman , More's Utopia , the pamphlets of the Diggers, country house poems, Hobbes' Leviathan , Milton's Paradise Lost , and other evocations of “green worlds,” as well as examples of the discourse of “the Commons” that has emerged since the publication of Garrett Hardin's influential essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the late 1960s. Some attention will also be given to historical accounts of agrarian commons and their persistence and demise, as well as to the emergence of forms of democracy that depend upon conceptions of “the common good” or “the common people.” Important uses of “the Commons” in the work of Hardt and Negri, Naomi Klein, Ranciere, and others, make it an important site of exploration for anyone interested in the intersection of theory and politics today.

Students registering for this course must get in touch with the instructor as soon as possible since I want to experiment with forming the syllabus in dialectic with seminar participants (clbartol@syr.edu). In fact, I want us to try to enact a commons in this class as well as explore theoretical elaborations, historical descriptions, and literary representations of them. This means that we must begin working together from the soonest possible moment (if you are not willing to invest your time in this way, this is not the course for you). Such a project will likely “fail” but even so I believe that it can be pedagogically very instructive—and, I hope, interesting and engaging for everyone involved.

ENG 730-5 Graduate Seminar: “Native American Literary Nationalism”
TH 9:30-12:15
Instructor: Scott Lyons
For some time now, the possibility of a distinct, decidedly Native American critical theory has tantalized literary scholars and political theorists with professed commitments to indigenous cultural survival and/or political sovereignty. Of course, the notion raises plenty of questions. What do we mean by “Native American,” and how do we recognize it when we see it? What's at stake in a “separatist” discourse, and how is it justified? Is such a critical theory too dependent on problematic notions like identity or “race” to be of use? Is it hopelessly essentialist? Finally, how might a distinct Native American critical theory speak to someone–a literary scholar, say, or political theorist–who is not Native American?

This seminar will tackle these important questions and others in an effort to comprehend a growing formation in critical discourse: specifically the rise of Native American literary (and other kinds of) nationalism. Native American scholars, artists, activists, and other intellectuals took a strong nationalist turn starting in the 1990s, but it was really more the critical discourse and not the nationalism per se that was new. The American Indian civil rights movement of the 1970s had not only produced a well-known literary renaissance; it also amplified tribal-nationalist political themes that, while previously muted, were never completely silenced. When growing numbers of Native people subsequently moved into the academy and other venues for public discourse, they brought their nationalisms with them, and one result has been a proliferation of work with nationalist themes. Of course, it goes without saying that these nationalisms fly in the face of other theoretical calls for “transnationalism,” “post-nationalism,” etc., creating opportunities for misunderstanding and, well, sometimes even hostility. This seminar will be for understanding and against hostility as we try to unpack the nationalist turn in Native discourse from an historical and scholarly point of view.

We will start with history, examining not only the “Red Power” movement of the civil rights era but going even further back to locate the seeds of our present nationalistic time. We will then read theories of nationalism, both tribal and otherwise, produced by figures as varied as Ernest Gellner, Anthony D. Smith, and Taiaiake Alfred, to consider points of connection and disconnection. From there we will encounter some recent examples of nationalist literary theory produced by Native Americans, including the work of Simon Ortiz, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Lisa Brooks, and Jace Weaver, alongside critical studies that either challenge the nationalist paradigm or simply concern themselves with other issues (e.g., Elvira Pulitano, David Treuer, Paula Gunn Allen, and Arnold Krupat). Finally, no course on the subject of indigenous nationalism would be complete without a sense of how globalism intersects with Native politics and critical discourse (especially in the wake of the United Nations' adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), so our seminar will conclude with some consideration of the global dimensions of indigenous nationalism and critical theory.

ENG 730 -6 Graduate Seminar: American Realism and the Gilded Age
W 12:45-3:30
Instructor: Amy Lang
We are living, it is said, in a “new Gilded Age,” an age, that is, of stark economic inequality and unchecked political corruption, of vulgarity and specious glitter, of imperial adventure and spiritual depletion. The post-Civil War period dubbed the Gilded Age by Samuel Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner in 1874 and now taken to embrace the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth is one of dramatic social and technological transformation and striking contradictions: labor unions as well as corporations consolidated their power; more goods became available to more people even as the conspicuous consumption of the rich reached new heights of absurdity; African American leaders gained public attention even as lynching increased; white women entered schools and workplaces even as department stores claimed them as denizens of the new “ladies' paradise.”

Despairing at an America “endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body” but “little or no soul,” Walt Whitman urged his contemporaries to “look [their] times . . . searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.” Fiction writers—realists, naturalists, veritists—took up his call as did a wide array of reformers, muckrakers, and utopians. In this course, we will read across this array of writers—Henry James and Edith Wharton alongside Andrew Carnegie on the uses of wealth, for example, or Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris in conjunction with Henry George's Progress and Poverty and the Populist Platform, Stephen Crane in tandem with Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives , Charles Chesnutt and W.E.B. Dubois next to the anti-lynching journalism of Ida B. Wells, and so on. Our first object will be to explore in historical detail the ways in which these novelists—many of them engaged in propounding what they took to be radically new literary forms and purposes—imagined, comprehended, resisted, or accommodated the changed material conditions and relationships, the new political and intellectual movements, and the emergent cultural forms of turn-of-the-century America both in their fictions and in their writing on fiction. The Gilded Age has, not surprisingly, been a period of intense interest among scholars of American literature and culture in recent years; we will supplement our reading of Gilded Age writers with a selection of current scholarly works both for what they teach us and in an effort to inquire into the uses of this historical moment for our present.

My hope is that this seminar will be of interest not only to students of American literature but to those interested in the broader project of reading historically. No prior knowledge or special expertise is required, only a willingness to read a lot.

ENG 799 M.F.A. Essay
TH 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Arthur Flowers

Craft analysis.  Chosen writer.  Chosen passage or aspect.