SPRING 2008

ETS 305-2 Critical Analysis: Psychoanalysis
MWF 9:30-10:25
Instructor: Bob Gates
This section of Critical Analysis will examine some central concepts of psychoanalytic theory as they relate to literary theory and practices of reading. Although we will consider the theories of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, our principle work will be to understand the workings of the unconscious in literary texts, primarily fiction.


ETS 305-3 Critical Analysis: Marxist Ideology Critique
TTH 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Donald Morton
"If the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be."
--Karl Marx, Letter to A. Ruge, September, 1843

At the present time, literary/cultural studies are the scene of an ongoing contestation among—to simplify the issues—humanist, (post)structuralist, and Marxist theories. As against the other two ways of understanding social issues and problems, Marxism sees these matters not simply as problems of representation, prejudice, or personal attitudes, but rather as the effects of labor relations . . . This course will go "against the grain" of dominant forms of inquiry in the humanities by foregrounding the difference of class as a way of understanding developments in literary and cultural studies today and by focusing on the divergence of the Marxist understanding of "the material" from the understandings of that concept found in today's dominant forms of literary and cultural inquiry.


ETS 310-1 Literary Periods: American Beginnings
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
When, where, and with what does “American literature” begin? At stake in this question are our basic assumptions about what Americanness is, as well as our basic assumptions about what literature is. Who gets to be called an “American” and what counts as “literature”? Should Native American oral stories be part of the canon of American literature? How about the letters from Spanish and French explorers describing the Americas to their royal backers? How about William Shakespeare's The Tempest , which takes place on an island obviously inspired by the New World ? This class will read a variety of early American writings, including traditionally revered accounts of the founding and early days of the British settlements at Plymouth , Massachusetts Bay, and Jamestown . But we will also draw from a more expansively defined “early America ,” potentially encompassing Native America, the colonial Americas (Spanish, French, British, and Dutch), and the writers in Europe who were responding to the idea of the New World (new to them, at least).
Pre-1900 course


ETS 310-2 Literary Periods: U.S. American Postwar Fiction
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course offers a survey of postwar U.S. novels and short stories from the late forties to the mid-eighties. We will interpret the fiction through a sociohistorical framework, with particular emphasis placed on investigating the interconnections between aesthetics and politics. Literary critic Paul Maltby has argued that in the postwar period an earlier leftist and/or avant-garde faith in Marxist programs of social change, which called for an overthrow of the material conditions of economic production, faded. In its place, a variety of activists and ordinary citizens began to identify language and culture as "the primary source of oppression and hence . . . the principal sites of protest and resistance." For a good part of the course, we will examine the various ways in which literary texts of the period participated in formulating and substantiating this political thesis. After an initial survey of fiction written in direct response to World War II and its aftermath, we will read literary texts associated with the Beat movement, the Black Power Movement, the Vietnam War, Second Wave Feminism and its (ongoing) critique by women of color, before ending the semester with Don DeLillo's tribute to postmodernism, White Noise .


ETS 315-1 Ethnic Literatures and Cultures:
The Tenement Saga and Early Jewish American Writers
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Sanford Sternlicht
We will read as transformative practice Jewish fiction and other narratives written by immigrant writers who came to Manhattan 's Lower East Side from Eastern Europe from 1880-1920, as well as historical and sociological works about the immigrant experience. The course will investigate the problem of “interpreting” these texts within the context of one of the world's largest and most important migrations. Themes for the course include: the Lower East Side as launching platform; appropriating Anglo-American texts; the immigrant woman's experience; the European legacy; the policies of representation; gender roles and sexual mores: anti-semitism, unity and disunity; generational conflict; new world socialism, capitalism, and Zionism; orthodoxy and secularism; and food as cultural signification.

The course includes at trip to New York City during which we will tour the Lower East Side, visit the Tenement Museum , and voyage to Ellis Island .

Main texts: Roth, Call It Sleep ; Gold, Jew without Money ; Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky ; Cahan , Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom ; Yezierska, Bread Givers ; and Sternlicht, The Tenement Saga: The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American Writers.


ETS 315-2 Ethnic Literatures and Cultures: Contemporary Native American Fiction
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Monika Wadman
This course is an invitation to read a broad range of novels authored by the indigenous writers in the United States with an aim of considering the many different ways in which these authors negotiate the representational quandaries of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition. We will focus on how this fiction confronts the challenge of representing the many versions of indigenous specificity as it is variously transformed (and transforms) in the meeting and clash with settler forms of social and cultural organization at a time when such representations are eagerly appropriated by the public discourse intent on redeeming the United States as a properly multicultural democracy. We will begin the two key texts of the American Renaissance of the late 1960s and 1970s (N.Scott Momaday's 1968 The House Made of Dawn and Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 Ceremony ). From among contemporary writers we will read fiction by Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, LeAnn Howe, Greg Sarris, David Treuer, Linda Hogan, James Welch, and Gordon Henry.


ETS 320-1 Authors: Joyce and Beckett
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Gregg Lambert
This course is designed to introduce students to the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, two Irish authors who stand at the opposite poles of modernist experimentation. We will conduct a survey of their respective works, beginning with Joyce's short fiction through selections from Ulysses , and conclude with an extended selection from Beckett's novels, short fiction, and dramatic works. When possible and available, video presentations of Beckett's plays and dramatizations of Joyce's fiction will be screened in class.

NOTE ON MATERIALS: Books will be available through University Bookstore by beginning of the semester; however, if you wish to pre-purchase via internet or another retailer, please buy the following editions:
Required:
Joyce, James.                 Dubliners—Norton Critical
                                     Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—Norton Critical
                                     Ulysses—Random House (trade)
Beckett, Samuel.             The Dramatic Works—v. 3 of the Grove edition
                                     The Three Novels—The Everyman Library
Recommended:
Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses Annotated.
The Grove Companion to Beckett


ETS 320-2 Authors: Chinua Achebe and the Postcolonial African Novel
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Michael Echeruo
Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart , is generally regarded as inaugurating the classic postcolonial African novel: novels that speak of Africa from within; that contest the idea of Africa represented in the imperial novels of Africa ; that affirm a certain specificity of value and coherence in the African cultures which colonialism sought to destroy.

This course will study four of Achebe's novels, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, and Anthills of the Savannah as reflecting various aspects of the postcolonial novel. A selection of Achebe's essays will also be read.

Students will be required to write two short (6 page) class papers and a final (10-15 page) term paper.


ETS 320-3 Authors: Shakespeare's Poetry
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Dympna Callaghan
We are accustomed to think of Shakespeare as a playwright rather than as a poet. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that even in his plays, Shakespeare always had in mind an audience of readers interested especially in the poetic and specifically lyrical aspects of his work. In addition, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare wrote non-dramatic poetry. This course offers an intensive reading of Shakespeare as a poet. We will focus first and foremost on his non-dramatic poetry, including the narrative poems and the sonnets. However, we will also examine Shakespeare's songs (the musical lyrics that are important aspects of the dramatic impact of some of his most famous plays) and we will consider why Shakespeare includes such intensely lyrical writing in verse written for performance in the theatre.
Pre-1900 course


ETS 320-4 Authors: Wordsworth, Owen, and Austen
TTH 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Peter Mortenson
The end of the eighteenth century is marked by political, social, industrial, and artistic revolution. This course will focus on three exemplary figures with widely different social backgrounds and interests: Wordsworth, Owen, and Austen. We will explore how their lives and work differently illuminate a changing world. Wordsworth revolutionized and democratized the language and subject matter of poetry. His intensely subjective poems influenced the establishment of lyric verse as the dominant form of modern poetry. Owen left home to seek his fortune at the age of ten and became a very wealthy mill owner as the industrial revolution altered the face of English life. He also became a social idealist reformer. Austen's siblings included moneyed gentry and two admirals who fought against Napoleon's navy. Her personal life was largely quiet, but her novels of social comedy set a benchmark for realistic, psychological narratives of domestic life, and are major shapers of the art of fiction. We will view two films of Austen novels and of Sheridan 's wacky comedy The Rivals (a favorite of Austen). Requirements will include two papers and two exams.
Pre-1900 course


ETS 330 -2 Theorizing Meaning and Interpretation: Texts of Cyberculture
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Donald Morton
Using a variety of cultural texts (film, audio, fiction, theory, . . .), the course will inquire into the social and cultural changes taking place under the influence of today's new cyberknowledges and cyberpractices. Among the course's main questions will be the status of technology in contemporary society and culture; the impact of theories of technology on our understanding of the human person as subject (mutations in human subjectivity, the “supersession” of the human by the “cyborg,” the de-naturalization of the “body”); and the impact of cybertheory/cyberpractices on our understanding of all social issues. Since these “cyber” changes are related to a changes in late capitalist knowledges often called “poststructuralism” and “postmodernism,” the course will explore those knowledges at the outset as a framework for discussing cyberculture. This exploration will include such questions as how post-al ideas appear to fit the qualities of the virtual world (non-linearity, de-centering, de-naturalization, the impossibility of locating an “origin” or “starting place,” the centrality of language/signs to social interaction, the death of “Man”/the post-human, the disruption of the logic of cause and effect, the “end” of history, . . . )


ETS 340-1 Theorizing Forms and Genres: African Cinema of Liberation
TTH 3:30-4:50
Film Screening TH 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Greg Thomas
This course will focus on the art and politics of African cinema in cultural and historical context. The esteemed founders of this school of filmmaking are typically named Ousmane Sembene (of Senegal), Med Hondo (of Mauritania and Black Paris) and Haile Gerima (of Ethiopia and Black America), who are all Pan-African artists, intellectuals, and activists. Original and outspoken critics of colonial and neo-colonial imperialism, worldwide, they are practitioners of what could be called an “African Cinema of Liberation” that might cover and stretch beyond the physical continent of Africa itself to reach the African Diaspora or Global Africa at large. We will screen films by figures such as Gaston Kabore, Djibril Diop Mambety, Dani Kouyate, Moussa Sene Absa, Joseph Gai Ramaka, and Raoul Peck as well as Euzhan Palcy, Desire Ecare, Julie Dash, and Toni Cade Bambara in addition to Sembene, Hondo, and Gerima, for example. These film texts will be read in conjunction with critical, historical, and literary texts from a number of other sources. General themes to be considered include: colonialism and slavery; neo-colonialism and empire; oral tradition and storytelling; gender and sexuality; literature and cinema; Pan-Africanism and diaspora; Black and African liberation.


ETS 340 -3 Theorizing Forms and Genres: Signifying Nothing
MWF 12:45-1:40
Instructor: Bob Gates
This course will examine the place of nothing and negativity in literature and culture. Students must arrive at a place from which they can demonstrate an understanding of texts like these:

...the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man")

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. (William Blake)

Nothing will come of nothing. (Shakespeare, King Lear)

Nothing is but what is not. (Shakespeare, Macbeth)

I'm Nobody! Who are you? (Emily Dickinson)

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. (Zen saying)

I know nothing/ learn of me. (W.S. Merwin, "February")

Nothing is confused, except the mind. (Magritte)

Pure Being and pure Nothing are then one and the same. (Hegel)

Without the original and manifest character of Nothing there is no self-hood and no freedom. (Heidegger, "What is Metaphysics?")

The lake is quiet, the trees surround me, asking and giving nothing.
(Margaret Atwood, Surfacing)

The Tao does nothing yet nothing is left undone. (Tao te Ching)

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
(Donald Barthelme, "Not-Knowing")


ETS 350-2  Reading Nation and Empire: Transatlantic Letters: America and Spain
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant
This course sets out to examine several milestones in the cultural history that has linked writers and thinkers from the United States and the rest of the Americas with those from the Iberian Peninsula . Theirs is a web of mutuality woven across several generations by the geography of the colonial transaction, by the wars stemming from imperial competition, and by the immigrant or travel experience of groups or individuals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean . Students will read such American authors as Washington Irving, William Dean Howells, William H. Prescott, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Frank Waldo, and Richard Wright as they engaged Spain and the Spanish heritage in their texts. Concomitantly, students will read such Spanish authors as Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Gaspar Perez de Villagra, Federico Garcia Lorca, Federico de Onis, and Americo Castro as they articulated their rapport with North America . The course studies the positions of Latin American writers such as Ruben Dario, Pedro Henriquez Ureña, and Cesar Vellejo with the polarities often described by Spanish-U.S. relations as well as the positions of writers like Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, George Santayana, Jose Yglesias, and Felipe Alfau, American writers of Hispanic descent who by birth or upbringing found themselves in the midst of the U.S.-Spanish cultural divide.


ETS 350-3 Reading Nation and Empire: Hip-Hop Eshu: QUEEN B@#$H Lyricsm!
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Gregory Thomas
This course is all about Hip-Hop and Black life in Africa 's Diaspora. It is no less about the politics of “gender” and “sexuality.” Our focus will be on one phenomenal figure: Lil' Kim, “Big Momma/Queen B itch!” While much has been made of a few courses on Tupac Shakur, we study Queen B in the context of a culture that goes beyond any music genre or generation; beyond the colonial confines of Plantation America ; and beyond erotic conventions of Western heterosexual patriarchy. In place of bourgeois literature, and even more bourgeois criticism, there will be Hip-Hop audio and lyrics, oral history, ethnomusicology, folklore, magazine articles, interviews, film and video, as well as Black Studies of all kinds: Toni Morrison and Angela Y. Davis on Blues women, Carolyn Cooper on Dancehall Ragga, Cheryl Keyes on female rappers, E. Franklin Frazier on the brown middle-class, Lucille Mathurin Mair on rebel women against chattel slavery, various scholars on Yoruba trickster-gods, Sylvia Wynter on modern sexual categories and, finally, Ifi Amadiume on African matriarchy and pre-colonial gender systems. These works will be critically engaged to provide ample understanding of Lil' Kim's “ Queen B itch” lyricism, her own work in the musical revolution that is Hip-Hop.


ETS 350-4  Reading Nation and Empire: Southern African Literature
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Cecil Abrahams
The course is open to all students.  The course is designed to introduce students to the writings and development of southern African literature. Throughout the twentieth century, southern African life was dominated by the hideous socio-political systems of Apartheid and colonialism. Through the works of writers such as Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Peter Abrahams, Alex La Guma, Bessie Head, Rayda Jacobs, Zakes Mda, and Yvonne Vera, the course will explore the themes of colonialism, racism, class, sexism, and the struggle for liberation from the various forms of human and historical degradations that Apartheid fostered. We shall read the texts closely and explore both through theme and technique the value and importance of southern African literature.


ETS 360-1 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Queer Fictions
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Amy Lang
Gertrude Stein once said “Literature—creative literature—unconnected with sex is inconceivable”; more recently, humorist Fran Leibowitz observed, “if you removed all of the homosexuals . . . from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would pretty much be left with Let's Make a Deal .” Taking up the central role sex plays in the novel and the novel plays in the literary, cultural, and political representation of same sex desire, this course asks what such statements could mean by examining how Anglo-American culture has thought about sexuality and art, love and literature, over the course of the twentieth century.

To explore the literary and cultural importance of the work of lesbian, gay, and queer writers requires that students learn unfamiliar modes of reading attuned to a range of references that challenge our customary assumptions about the novel. This course asks that students commit themselves to reading closely, acquiring new interpretive skills, and entertaining the ambiguous, the difficult, the problematic. Beginning with Oscar Wilde, we will read writers ranging from Radclyffe Hall and E.M. Forster to James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Michael Cunningham, and Alison Bechdel.


ETS 360-2 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Documenting Sexualities
TTH 5:00-6:20
Film Screening T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Roger Hallas
Documentary representation has been central to the emergence and development of modern sexual identities. For instance, nineteenth-century science turned to both photographic portraiture and written case studies in order to name and define homosexuality as a specific sexual identity. But forms of documentation have not only been used to discipline and pathologize sexual acts and identities. Subcultures, social movements, and individual artists have also embraced the desire to document — but in the service of cultural expression, sexual liberation, and collective memory. This course explores how different genres (such as case studies, ethnographies, oral histories, historical narratives, testimonies, portraits, and [auto]biographies) in various media (film, video, photography, graphic art, and literature) have become fundamental tools in the historical struggle over sexual rights. We shall also investigate the role of museums, libraries, archives, and publishing houses in documenting sexualities. Designed in conjunction with the spring events of the Queer Visual Culture series at SU, the course will include visiting speakers discussing the challenges in documenting and archiving diverse sexual cultures and identities. Multi-media projects will be allowed in the final research assignment. Attendance at weekly film screenings is required. This course also counts toward the LGBT Studies minor.


ETS 360- 3 Reading Gender and Sexualities:
Negotiating Differences: Coming of Age Narratives
W 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Vivian May
Using a combination of film, visual art, memoir, and fiction, this seminar explores the influence of place, family, memory, and social role on self-definition and self-representation. We will consider how authors/artists invent new forms of storytelling and negotiate different ideas about the self. We will also examine the politics embedded in everyday life, such as: the multiple facets of identity (including race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation); social expectations, family pressures, and ideas about "normalcy"; the fluid nature of desire and the shifting nature of the self; and the intimacies of power, including how different authors and artists name silences around violence or trauma.


ETS 402 Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry
T 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
A poem is a private, personal moment of expression and, at the same time, an effort to reach the imagination of a stranger. The purpose of this course is to find the sources of emotion in the writer's psyche and to develop the artistic skill to make these wellsprings of experience accessible to readers. Students need to understand the value of a group of people using imagination and intelligence to help each other accomplish a difficult task. Writers in this workshop will write one new poem each week, some in response to assignments. They will revise four of these new poems into carefully considered form. Requirements include reading, written analysis of poems, and memorization. The course is open to anyone who has taken the sophomore workshop. Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of ten pages of original poetry to be considered for admission.


ETS 404 Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction
T 3:30-6:20
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Workshop Format.  Craft, vision, and professionalism.  For writers with works. Permission required.


ETS 410-4 Forms and Genres: Renaissance Verse
W 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Dympna Callaghan
Why was the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the golden age of English Renaissance poetry? Why were so many outstanding poets writing in this period, and how many of them were women? How and why did English poetry change form the 1530s to the 1580s? Who were the writers of this period influenced by, and what kinds of topics did they write about? This course will attempt to answer these questions while engaging with the immensely rich literature of this period and gaining some familiarity with social, cultural, and historical phenomena that produced it. Essentially, we have two tasks before us: the first, to gain an understanding of the poems as poems, as very specifically literary acts of language (rhyme, meter, imagery, diction, etc. will concern us here); our second task will be to determine the place and function of poetry in early modern English society. The poetry of this period is about love (both homoerotic and heteroerotic, human and divine), but it is also about political aspiration, imperialism, and a range of other power relations that informed the fabric of the era's social and cultural life. We will look first at the way English poetry responds to classical precedent, especially the overwhelming influence of Ovid.
Pre-1900 course


ETS 4 10-5 Forms and Genres: Proverbial Wisdom in Shakespeare's Classic Tragedies
TTH 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Michael Echeruo
What conceptions of the world, of man and of the afterlife governed or shaped Shakespeare's idea of tragedy? How far are these notions derived from formal classical and theological formulations; how much from the general “proverbial wisdom” of his age?

This course will study four classic Shakespearean tragedies in light of the above questions: Richard II , Macbeth , Hamlet , and King Lear .

Students will be required to write two short (6 page) class papers and a final (10-15 page) term paper.
Pre-1900 course


ETS 420 Cultural Production and Reception: American Icons
TTH 11:00-12:20
Instructor: David Yaffe
This course will explore the concept of the icon in American culture. How have certain figures become the subject of scrutiny, obsession, even worship? And how has the idea of the icon been a central theme in American literary texts and in American life? Possible icons may include Walt Whitman (a gay icon and poetic icon), Henry James (an icon of the literary Master), F. Scott Fitzgerald (an icon of the Lost Generation), Miles Davis (an icon of black masculine hip), Allen Ginsberg (a Beat icon), Bob Dylan (an icon of the 60s counterculture, much to his chagrin), Billie Holiday (an icon of the martyred jazz diva), Sylvia Plath (an icon of confessional poetry), and Andy Warhol (our icon of iconography itself). Expect two major papers and a presentation of original research.


ETS 430 Theorizing Representation: Shoah: Remembering the Holocaust
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Linda Shires
The Holocaust has gone mainstream—from historical fact to world view. The increased prominence of the Holocaust in our cultural memory has affected film, art, literature, scholarship, the writing of history, the creation of memorials and monuments and museums. It has been used as a point of comparison with major atrocities of our time, but it has also been represented in various ways. What is being remembered, and how, and why…and by whom? This course concerns the twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts of the meanings of the Holocaust through discourses and institutions—how it has been remembered, processed, witnessed, spoken, packaged, and silenced.

Issues: How do individuals and nations deploy varied discourses, and why, to narrate a major historical rupture? How, in what ways, and why has this example of genocide become central to twenty-first-century American, German, and Jewish consciousnesses in particular.

Readings will come from literature, testimony, history, psychological theory, architecture theory, museum exhibitions, and other sources. Films on reserve (no film screening) will include The Diary of Anne Frank , Schindler's List , Life is Beautiful , and Into the Arms of Strangers .


ETS 440 Theorizing History and Culture: Politics and Poetics of the Commons
MW 3:45-5:05
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.”
Pre-1900 course


ETS 450 Reading Race and Ethnicity: Indigenous Film in North America
TTH 3:30-4:50
Film Screening T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Monika Wadman
This course focuses on contemporary cinema by indigenous filmmakers in the United States and Canada . To establish a historical context for our discussions, we will begin with early ethnographic films (Robert Flaherty's 1922 Nanook of the North and H.P. Carver's 193O Silent Enemy ), the western and anti-western tradition (John Ford's 1956 The Searchers , Kevin Costner's 1990 Dances with Wolves , and Jim Jarmush's 1998 Dead Man , for example), and the contemporary multiculturalist retellings of early encounters between American Indians and European missionaries and settlers and of contemporary indigenous realities in the United States (Bruce Beresford's 1991 Black Robe , Terrance Malik's 2005 The New World , and John Fusco and Steven Barron's 2004 Dreamkeeper , for example). For the remainder of the semester we will turn to contemporary documentary and feature films by indigenous filmmakers. Our examples will include films by Arlene Bowman ( Navajo Talking Picture , 1984), Victor Masayesva Jr. ( Imagining Indians , 1992), George Burdeau ( Backbone of the World , 1998), Greg Sarris and Dan Sakheim ( Grand Avenue , 1996), Chris Eyre ( Smoke Signals , 1998; Skins , 2002; and Edge of America , 2004), Sherman Alexie ( Business of Fancydancing , 2002), Randy Redroad ( The Doe Boy , 2001), Zacharias Kunuk ( The Fast Runner , 2002), Mary Kunuk ( Ningiura , 2000), Valerie Red-Horse ( Naturally Native , 1998), Shelley Niro ( Honey Moccasin , 1998, The Shirt , 2003) and Blackhorse Lowe ( 5th World , 2005).


ETS 464-1 Reading Institutions and Ideologies: Hollywood by Hollywood
MW 2:15-3:35
Film Screening W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Steven Cohan
This course will study how Hollywood —viewed as a geographic locale in Southern California , as an industry and corporate enterprise, and as a cultural fantasy—represents itself. Films to be studied may include What Price Hollywood, A Star is Born , Sullivan's Travels , Sunset Blvd, The Bad and the Beautiful , Singin' in the Rain , The Day of the Locust , S .O.B., The Player, Barton Fink, and Get Shorty , among others. In addition, we will view documentaries on Hollywood , produced at different moments in the industry's history. The historical scope of the course will range from the 1930s through the present, which will give us an opportunity to examine Hollywood institutions that appear unchanging, such as stardom, while attending to important shifts in the political economy of movie-making that these films register. Weekly screenings on Wednesday, when some of the documentary material may be shown along with a film, are required. Assigned reading will aim to provide both background on (or analyses of) the films and on the industry's history.


ETS 464 -2 Reading Institutions and Ideologies: Alternative Medicines
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Cindy Linden
In Bodies in a Broken World , Ann Folwell Stanford passionately argues that sick bodies cannot be separated from sick social worlds, insisting that the idea of health localized in individual bodies is a myth. Although Stanford's notion of wellness is contrary to dominant conceptions of health in the United States , it echoes the cosmologies of various ethnic and racialized communities living within the U.S. In this course, we will examine mainstream ideologies of health and medicine alongside the alternatives offered by some of these other communities through readings of both literary and visual texts. These texts will become the catalyst for our own critical imaginings as we explore questions such as: How does medicine reflect cultural mythologies, beliefs, habits of mind, manners, uses of language? What are some of the fundamental cultural assumptions about health, illness, healing, and death that help to shape medicine? How are healing and storytelling related? How are the politics of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality played out in concepts of healing?

We will likely read some or all of the following: Erdrich, Tracks ; Querry, Bad Medicine ; Naylor, Mama Day ; Morrison, Beloved ; Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons ; Chamoiseau, Texaco ; Butler, Parable of the Sower ; and Castillo, So Far From God .


ETS 500 Thesis Writing Workshop
TH 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Claudia Klaver
This course is intended to serve as a forum for small-group mentoring and directed research toward producing an ETS Distinction Thesis. Theses will be sustained, focused, critical arguments, modeled on a seminar paper or a journal article. The thesis writing workshop will involve developing research questions, compiling an annotated bibliography, writing and workshopping a thesis proposal, discussing writing strategies, presenting drafts, and engaging in collegial peer critique. Required readings will include methodological materials on writing/research strategies and readings that students select themselves.