COURSE DESCRIPTIONS FOR FALL 2007

ETS 107-1 Living Writers
AND
ETS 107-2 through 9
W 3:45-6:30
Instructors: Staff

This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear visiting writers read and discuss their work. The class is centered on six readings and question-and-answer sessions. Students will be responsible for careful readings of the writers' work. Critical writing and detailed class discussions are required to prepare for the question-and-answer sessions with the visiting writers.


ETS 113 Survey of British Literature to 1789
MWF 9:30-10:20
Instructor: Jon Singleton

This introductory course provides an overview of British literature from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution (an event that was very important to the English). In one sense, then, it's about very old texts, but in another sense its concerns are much more modern. The study of English literature, as a discipline, did not fully take shape until the 19th century—a time when the little island nation of England had become the head of the sprawling British Empire . The texts that those early "English" scholars identified as part of the British literary tradition were, therefore, texts that spoke in one way or another to their own understanding of their place in the world. This is still part of the reason that we study literature today: it helps us feel as though we better understand how far we have (or haven't) come in the history of human experience. At the same time, whether we notice it or not, the literature we read is tangled up with the societies that produced it—their religion, politics, nationalism, and everyday life. British Literature I offers a chance to read literary texts from Beowulf to Shakespeare's King Lear to Milton 's Paradise Lost to Swift's Gulliver's Travels , while exploring the social concerns these texts engage—both for their original readers and for us today.


ETS 114 Survey of British Literature since 1789
TTH 5:00-6:20
Instructor: Tanushree Ghosh

This course is a survey of major British literary works from 1789 to the present. Students will acquire a general knowledge of historical movements and trends in British intellectual history. Roughly categorized into the following periods, "Romanticism," "The Victorians" "Modernism," and "Post-modernism," this course will consist of a chronological selection of widely recognized authors. The readings will include novels, poems, plays, and other historical texts. By the end of this course, you should be able to:

1. Identify the major authors and genres, important texts, and main themes of the literature of England from 1789 to the pre sent.

2. Achieve a familiarity with the basic vocabulary used to dis- cuss these literary texts.

3. Possess an understanding of thesignificance of historical and cultural contexts in the process of literary production.


ETS 115-1 Topics in British Literature
TTH 2:00-3:20
Literature & Politics 1570-1670
Instructor: Michael Echeruo

This course will be a general introduction to English literature and politics of the period 1570–1670. It will examine the various ways in which England's major dynastic, religious, social, and constitutional controversies under Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I, and Cromwell were treated/canvassed in the poetry, drama, and prose tracts of the period.

A text of English history will be assigned to provide an overview. Specialized articles will be assigned when examining particular texts. Selections will be mainly from the work of Spenser and Raleigh; of Marlowe and Shakespeare; of John Donne, Ben Jonson, Marvell, Milton and Francis Bacon. A sampling of “libels,” pamphlets, and tracts will be read.

A Class Reader will be provided. Two short (4-5 page) class papers and a long (10-15 page) final research paper will be assigned . There will be no end-of-course examination. Regular class attendance is required.


ETS 115-2 Topics in British Literature
TTH 11:00-12:20
The Victorian Bildungsroman
Instructor: Claudia Klaver

This course will examine fictional and nonfictional bildungsroman —coming of age stories—from the nineteenth century. We will think about why this type of story came into its own as a generic form during this period. We will also examine the nature of the “self” that is constructed and comes of age in these narratives, particularly how that “self” is related to its historical context. We will explore the similarities and differences between fictional and nonfictional narratives.

This is a writing intensive course, so writing about the texts we read and discuss will constitute a significant portion your learning process.

Texts will include Dickens's David Copperfield , Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, John Stuart Mill's Autobiography , Charles Darwin's Autobiography, and a photocopied coursepack. Students will write regular close reading essays and three 4-6 page formal papers on assigned topics.


ETS 117 Survey of American Literature to 1865
MWF 9:30-10:25
INSTRUCTOR : Michael O'Connor

In this course we will examine a range of literary texts produced in the area that is now the United States and written during the period between the moment of European contact and the Civil War, 1492-1865. At least since John Winthrop's famous 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity”, with its vision of the new colony as a “City on a Hill,” writers have tried to define what kind of a society America is and, by extension, what an American is. This course will read many of the attempts to address these issues and place them in their historical contexts, including contact and conflict between Europeans and Native Americans, the American Revolution and subsequent nation-building, concerns about industrialization and class, as well as struggles over slavery and servitude. We will also explore conflicts about race, ethnicity, religion, and changing gender roles and mores as they impact these literary texts. We will be reading sermons, autobiography, nonfiction, novels, poetry, short stories, and sketches and considering how they manifest, explain, and struggle with the question of what America is and will be.

This course is a writing-intensive course. Assignments will include weekly responses posted to Blackboard, two short essays, a longer paper written from a submitted proposal, and short oral presentations.


ETS 118 Survey of American Literature from 1865
MWF 11:40-12:35
Instructor: Rachel Collins

In this course we will examine American literature produced between the Civil War and World War II. During this period increasing urbanization, immigration, and industrialization were shaping American culture and manifesting themselves in American literature. Our course texts are concerned with urban poverty and growing class conflict, African Americans' "great migration" to the North, contestations over women's social place, and the rapid expansion of a consumer-oriented society. We will pay particular attention to the three major fictional modes of the period—realism, naturalism, and modernism– and will place them in a sociohistorical context in order to understand how the larger social conflicts and upheavals of the period prompted writers to become dissatisfied with inherited forms of literary representation. In addition to fiction, we will read a sampling of poetry, plays, and nonfiction from this period. Writers will likely include: Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Jane Addams, Edith Wharton, W.E.B. DuBois, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner, among others.


ETS 119-1 Topics in American Literature
TTH 3:30-4:50
Modern American Comedy
AND
ETS 119-2 Topics in American Literature
TTH 2:00-3:20 Modern American Comedy
Instructor: Sanford Sternlicht

Tragedy is about dying and death. Comedy is about living and life. Like tragedy, comedy is basically a literary form. Although it is about life, it is not a direct replication of life. The world of comedy is a real place (except in the Theater of the Absurd), but the characters in comedy are generally eccentric. That is why we laugh, and laughter is as cathartic as crying. Inheriting comic traditions from Shakespeare and Shaw, American playwrights have written many fine comedies full of romance and satire, the two basic ingredients of the form. This course will try to determine what exactly is AMERICAN comedy through a study of plays by American playwrights of different periods. As comedy is often the weapon of minorities, it may be significant that most of the chosen playwrights are or were members of ethnic groups treated unequally by American society in the past and even in the present.

Requirements: Three 1500 word essays and satisfactory attendance and class participation.


ETS 119-3 Topics in American Literature
TTH 12:30-1:50
Contemporary Fiction in the U.S.
Instructor: Monika Wadman

Study of prose fiction written in the United States since 1992 until the present. Authors considered will include Neal Stephenson, Annie Proulx, Karen Tei Yamashita, Cristina Garcia, Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, Chang-rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead, LeAnne Howe, Michael Cunnigham. Theoretical and critical issues to be discussed: previous and current conceptions of “ America ” and American literature and culture; literary evaluation and canon formation; class, race, and gender in American literature and literary studies; politics of literary prizes and college reading lists; multiculturalism.


ETS 121-1 Introduction to Shakespeare
MW 9:30-10:25
ETS 121-2 thru 3 Discussion Sections
F 9:30-10:25
ETS 121-4 thru 5 Discussion Sections
F 10:35-11:30
Instructor: Dympna Callaghan

This course offers an intensive introduction to the plays and poetry of arguably the world's greatest writer, William Shakespeare. In this class, we will read a play from each of the major genres in which he wrote—tragedy, comedy, and history, as well as some of his non-dramatic poetry. We will pay particular attention to Shakespeare's language and to the historical, literary, and theatrical contexts of his plays. No previous familiarity with Shakespeare is required, but students must be committed to careful and sustained critical reading.


ETS 145-1 Reading Popular Culture
TTH 9:30-11:00
Film Screening TH 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Staff


ETS 145-3 Reading Popular Culture
TTH 3:30-4:50
Film Screening
TH 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Christina Parish


ETS 145-6 Reading Popular Culture
MWF 11:40-12:35
Film Screening
M 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Soumitree Gupta

This course provides an introduction to popular culture's intersections with everyday life and with the larger social and political structures of power within which it is situated. Thus, instead of taking the phenomenon of popular culture for granted, this course will begin by asking: What is popular culture? What meanings does it produce? Who produces these meanings? How do these meanings define our identities and our “place” in the world? In the second half of the course, we will examine the relationship between the producers and the consumers of pop cultural commodities in both U.S. and global contexts. Is it possible that the same cultural object produces different meanings for different consumers? How do different subcultures and minority groups use pop culture to resist and subvert the dominant ideologies of gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, and produce new meanings? We will examine a broad range of pop cultural artifacts, including cinema, television, advertising, popular music, science fiction, computer games, fanzines, slash fiction, and webzines in order to examine popular culture as a dynamic and contradictory site of meaning-making for different social-political-cultural groups. At the end of this course, you should be able to engage in an informed and sophisticated analysis of popular culture and its conflicting cultural politics.

Attendance at weekly screenings is required.


ETS 145-7 Reading Popular Culture
MWF 10:35-11:40
Film Screening
W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Staff


ETS 151-1 Interpretation of Poetry
MW 3:45-5:06
Instructor: Brooks Haxton

This course will involve weekly reading of poems selected as examples of particular poetic techniques: image, narrative, diction, tone, argument, and so on. Each week's handout will describe the technique in that week's reading and present relevant questions. Four short essays by students will analyze individual poems with respect to a poet's use of one of these techniques. Final grades will include papers (70%) and classroom presentations and participation (30%). No prerequisites. Attendance required.


ETS 151-2 Interpretation of Poetry
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Bruce Smith

The course will consist of discussion of poems from the various traditions of poetry. I'm interested in what makes the poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the emotions. I'm interested too in what provokes and challenges us, what gives it its power to seduce and trouble and soothe, what gives it its music and voice as distinct from speech.

Students will be asked to write eight short two-page papers in which they examine closely a single poem by a poet from the course. Students may opt to write more papers (up to ten) and receive extra consideration for them. In addition, students will be asked to choose a contemporary poet and present the work of the poet in class. Attendance at readings on campus is encouraged. Emphasis is on style and substance, music and image. Multiple ways of reading poems will help the students expand the range of poetic possibilities.


ETS 152-1 Interpretation of Drama
TTH 8:00-9:20
Instructor: William West


ETS 153-1 Interpretation of Fiction
MWF 9:30-10:25
Instructor: Bob Gates

This course takes up the subject of fictional characters who are in some way or another trying to “interpret” the “fictions” of their lives. We will look at characters who confront the experience of a “self” that is expressed, revealed, or acted out, but is felt to be “other” than their already known experience of self--who they think they “are,” their constructed fiction of a “self.” The notion that an "other" self may become known to us by speaking or acting through us derives from the psychoanalytic notion that the "self" of every person includes a vast area of unconsciousness. We will read novels and short stories in which characters try or fail to come to terms with the expressions of these unknown "other" selves. These expressions will range from memories and dreams to compulsive behaviors, lies, fantasy figures, artistic expressions, seeing "aliens," and spontaneous speech. What these "self-expressions" all have in common is that they are initially strange and incomprehensible (i.e. "unreadable" or “fictional”) to the very people who would seem to be their "authors."


ETS 153-3 Interpretation of Fiction
MW 2:15-3:45
Instructor: Jolynn Parker

In this course we will work to develop an understanding of what fiction is, how it acts upon us, and how we act upon it. Careful examination of plots and masterplots, narration and focalization, characterization, symbol, and figurative language will help us become better critical readers of literary convention and close readers of language. Throughout, we will consider the cultural significance of what kinds of narratives (and narrative innovations) have been rewarded with sales, recognition, and literary prizes. Structured around the topic of marriage and family, readings will include Foster's The Coquette, Austen's Pride and Prejudice , Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , Bechdel's Fun Home , and short stories by Hawthorne, Melville, Conan Doyle, Wharton, Faulkner, Roth, Walker, and Lahiri, among others. Assignments will include close readings, two short papers, and a longer final paper.


ETS 153-4 Interpretation of Fiction
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Staff


ETS 153-7 Interpretation of Fiction
MW 5:15-6:35
Instructor: Forbes Morlock

This course introduces students to a variety of forms of fiction and of thinking about fiction. Questions of narrative structure and performance will be central to our discussions of stories and storytelling. Also central will be the limits of fiction—and, in particular, one limit which goes by the name “truth.” So we will be reading a few philosophical works along with a couple of theoretical texts. Principally, though, we will explore the nature, genres, and voices of fiction through tales, short stories, novels, and a film. Readings will be drawn from among the following: Bible, Plato, Ovid, Pliny, Kleist, Poe, Doyle, James, Wilde, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Benjamin, Chandler , Blanchot, Derrida, Le Doeuff, Rancière, Singer, Kiarostami.

Requirements will include three short papers.


ETS 154-1 Interpretation of Film
MW 11:40-12:35
Film Screening
W 7:00-9:00
ETS 154-2 thru 3 Discussion Sections
TH 3:30-4:50
ETS 154-4 thru 5 Discussion Sections
F 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Roger Hallas

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interpretation of film. Regarded as the quintessential medium of the last century, cinema has profoundly shaped the ways in which we see the world and understand our place within it. Focusing principally on classic and contemporary English-language cinema, we will investigate how meaning is produced in cinema. The course integrates a close attention to the specific aesthetic and rhetorical aspects of film with a wide-ranging exploration of the social and cultural contexts that shape how we make sense of and take pleasure in cinema. No prior film experience is required.


ETS 181 Class and Literary Texts
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Don Morton

Daily news reports indicate that class differences are growing exponentially in U. S. society. By examining a variety of cultural texts (theory, fiction, film, television programs . . . ), this course will explore such questions as these: Is class a significant marker of social difference in the United States ? What understanding of class is the common sense understanding and is it the most useful way of thinking about class? Why is there so much interest in the U. S. colleges and universities in teaching students about various forms of “cultural” differences such as race, sexuality, ethnicity . . . and very little interest in teaching them about class difference? The goal of the course will be to connect what we learn from the readings to the issues we face in present-day U. S. class society.


ETS 182 Race and Literary Texts
MW 5:15-6:35
Instructor: Michael Dwyer

“I'm not a racist or anything, but...”

While America is alternatively described as a “melting pot,” a “salad bowl,” or any number of other culinary metaphors, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made it startlingly clear that racial inequality is alive and well in the United States of America . However, it seems that the legacies of Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement can often obscure the very real conditions of race in contemporary US society, even in our everyday lives here in Syracuse .

This class will foreground works of literature and popular culture in an attempt to interrogate issues of race in America , to explore how racial categories have been created and re-created, and and how categories like gender, class, and sexuality intersect with race. Readings from a range of disciplines will provide students with the historical and social context necessary to analyze cultural texts, like novels, short stories, advertisements, films, music, and speeches. This course will provide students with the necessary tools to analyze how literature and popular culture both perpetuate and resist dominant understandings of race.


ETS 184 Ethnicity and Literary Texts
MW 3:45-5:05
Introduction to Latino Literature
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant

This course surveys the large, rich, dynamic, and original body of writings produced by American writers of Hispanic descent from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It offers a historically oriented, regionally balanced, and aesthetically representative sampling of texts by Latino poets, novelists, short fiction writers, playwrights, and essayists. The authors considered include Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita Gonzalez, Sandra Cisneros, Americo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldua, Graciela Limon, Tomas Rivera, Denise Chavez, Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Tato Laviera, Abraham Rodriguez, Piri Thomas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Cristina Garcia, and Oscar Hijuelos. Through class discussion and examination of critical works, the course addresses issues of history, culture, language, border life, hybridity, transnationality, and diasporic identity as part of a quest to identify the rapport between the artistic and the political as enacted in the literary texts, their location in the market, and their reception by various constituencies of readers.


ETS 192 Gender and Literary Texts
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Staff


ETS 200 Selected Topics
TTH 2:00-3:20
HONORS
Malcolm X
Instructor: Greg Thomas

He was “the finest revolutionary theoretician and activist produced by America 's [B]lack working class in [the twentieth] century,” according to the late, great historian John Henrik Clarke. Malcolm X is, for many, more icon or memory, even an object of adulation (or condemnation) as opposed to a monumental mind and body of the Pan-African Black liberation movement. This is despite his extreme dexterity in Black history and folklore, U.S. public debate, as well as local and global political analysis. What's more, he may be unmatched as an orator, an organizer, and a political-intellectual figure of African Diaspora. This course will therefore engage his thought and his activism in addition to his legacy via his own textuality--not to mention film and video, essays, and poetry by others focusing on his work as an insistent, persistent source of inspiration.


ETS 215 Sophomore Poetry Workshop
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Charles Martin

We will commence, or continue to develop, a lifelong connection with poetry by reading, writing, and discussing poems in a workshop setting. With regard to reading, our goal will be to learn how to read poems better than we do now, with increased understanding and appreciation. With regard to writing, we will explore a variety of different kinds of poetry, old and new, formal and free, aiming first at fluency, then at accomplishment. We will begin each class with a discussion of a poem or two written by poets from outside the class, using them as examples or models for analysis and performance; we will continue by reading and discussing work of student poets.


ETS 217 Sophomore Fiction Workshop
TTH 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Creative Writing Staff


ETS 230 Ethnic Literary Traditions
TTH 11:00-12:20
Survey of African Writing
Instructor: Cecil Abrahams

This course introduces students to African literature written since 1960. The work of well known writers such as Chinua Achebe( Things Fall Apart ), Buchi Emecheta( The Joys of Motherhood ), Ousmane Sembene ( God's bits of wood ), Ngugi wa Thiong'o ( Weep not, child ), Alex La Guma ( A Walk in the Night ), Bessie Head ( When Rain Clouds Gather ), Rayda Jacobs ( Confessions of a Gambler ) and Tsitsi Dangarembga ( Nervous Conditions ) are studied from a literary, political, historical, and socio economic view. Themes such as colonialism, apartheid, personal and national liberation receive much attention.


ETS 235-1 Classics of World Literature I
M 2:15-3:35
ETS 235-2 Instructor: Harvey Teres
W 2:15-3:35
ETS 235-3 Instructor: Beverly Allen
W 2:15-3:35

This is an introductory study of some of the most valued and enduring literary works from ancient cultures around the world. We begin with some of the earliest surviving texts from Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures ( Gilgamesh and Egyptian love poems), proceed to the Hebrew Bible (the “Old” Testament), Sanskrit and Greek epics ( The Ramayana and The Iliad ), classical Chinese philosophy (Confucius and Chuang Tze), Greek and Roman lyric poetry (Sappho, Catullus, and Horace), Matthew's gospel, Saint Augustine, Tang and Song dynasty Chinese poetry (Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and others), and Japanese (women's) lyric (Murasaki Shikibu and Ono No Komachi). Each Monday a distinguished faculty member from a department in the College of Arts & Sciences or The Maxwell School who is an expert in the text for that week will introduce us to it. Every Wednesday Professors Allen and Teres will meet with individual sections to facilitate discussion of that same text in greater depth.


ETS 242-1 Reading and Interpretation
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Amy Lang
AND
ETS 242-2 Reading and Interpretation
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Patricia Moody

ETS 242 introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it-and the difference that makes. Its goal, in other words, is not only to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one mode or method of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively, and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep, and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways texts mean and the ways readers produce meaning. Each section of ETS 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include representation; author/ity, textuality, and reading; subjectivity; and culture and history.