SPRING 2010
(Click Here for Fall 2009)

ETS 305-2 Critical Analysis: Theories of the Novel
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Erin Mackie
Starting from the premise that the novel is, in the words of Michael McKeon, "the quintessentially modern genre," this class will study some of the ways that twentieth-century scholars have thought about the novel and its relation to modernity as a historical epoch. When and why did the novel originate? How is the novel distinct from other modes of fictional narrative? What relations do novels bear to other characteristic developments of the modern age such as the sex/gender system, psychic interiority, class, nation, race and ethnicity and the reflexive temporal self-consciousness that characterizes this epoch? How has the genre-novel-changed with cultural-historical shifts? Alongside representative theorists of the novel we will read representative novels. From the theorists, readings will include work by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Nancy Armstrong, Mikhal Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, George Levine, Georg Lukacs, Michael McKeon, Ian Watt and Virginia Woolf. As illustrative test-cases, we will read work by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Julian Barnes and Salmon Rushdie. We will share in common all the theoretical readings; but due to time constraints, the class will be divided into groups, each responsible for a different set of novels.

ETS 305-3 Critical Analysis: The ANTI-Colonial Mode of Thought
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Greg Thomas
It is telling that when current academic paradigms speak of colonialism at all, they tend to speak of "post-colonialism" and thus help to evade or efface the current phase of colonial or neo-colonial empire. This course will examine the critical politics of ANTI-colonialism-past, present and future-oriented-with a focus on selected figures, positions, movements. What is the relationship here between theory and practice, thought and struggle? What sort of ideas emanating from beyond the West (Europe or Anglo-North America) have been recently and historically suppressed? Why? What various affinities and solidarities emerge from the continental and diasporic time-spaces of Africa, Asia and the Americas? Students will develop well-informed responses to such questions in "Critical Analysis." We may read from Fanon, Walter Rodney and C.L.R. James; Ho Chi Minh, Mao and Trinh Minh-ha; Edward Said and Vijay Prashad; Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur and George L. Jackson; Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel and Eduardo Galeano; Ward Churchill and Leslie Silko; Cheikh Anta Diop, Ifi Amadiume and Ayi Kwei Armah. The ANTI-colonial mode of thought will be engaged to think critically about not only the literary culture but also the geopolitics, economics, psychologistics and body politics of colonial empire.

ETS 310-1 Literary Periods: Agrarian to Industrial England and America
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Peter Mortenson
Catherine Belsey defines ideology as "the sum of the ways in which people both live and represent to themselves their relationship to the conditions of their existence. Ideology is inscribed in the signifying practices --in discourses, myths, presentations and re-presentations of the way 'things' 'are'--and to this extent it is inscribed in the language." The course will explore some strands of changing ideology through representations of social and economic life in England and America as they evolve from agrarian to industrial society.  Notions of the "individual" and the nuclear family, of "free market competition" in personal, intellectual and political matters, and of "progress" emerge in the earlier and optimistic phase of this evolution. Industrialization, technology and empirical science are in the main represented favorably until the early nineteenth century at which point dissenting voices become more insistent.  We will examine how the value system and assumptions about the order of things in nature and society are represented and reformulated in some texts written for the most part in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England and America.


ETS 310-2 Literary Periods: American Beginnings
TTh 11:00-12:20
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 315-3 Ethnic Literatures and Cultures:
The Tenement Saga and Early Jewish American Writers
TTh 11:00-12:20
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 between 1880 and 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, Jews 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 320-4 Authors: Reading the Brontes
TTh 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Claudia Klaver
This course will examine the writings of Ann, Emily and Charlotte Bronte in both their socio-historical and biographical contexts. In addition the course will examine the "myth of the Brontes" as constructed by Charlotte Bronte herself, her first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, and later biographers and critics through to the present day. We will read selections from the Bronte juvenilia and Charlotte Bronte's letters; Elizabeth Gaskell's influential Life of Charlotte Bronte ; and the novels: Ann Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall , Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights , and Charlotte Bronte's The Professor , Jane Eyre and Villette . Students will conduct independent research that they will present in class, post weekly on Blackboard, and write two to three substantial essays.
Pre-1900 Course


ETS 330-2 Theorizing Meaning and Interpretation: Culture of Addiction
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Donald Morton
This course investigates a current trend in dominant cultural and literary theory which raises to a new level the oft-heard cliché: "we live in a sick society." This trend rejects the notion that society is basically a rational space governed by shared (common) concepts ("liberty, equality the pursuit of happiness"). Furthermore, according to this view, society is no longer even the more "neutral"-sounding space of discourse, representation and signification. Instead, culture is now the much darker zone of inescapable pathology. The literary and cultural theorists who promote this view are following, among other influences, the ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who defines human nature not in terms of our capacity for reason or work or some other more familiar characteristic, but in terms of addiction. Schelling conceptualizes the subject (the human person) as the subject of "Eigensucht" ("addictive creatureliness"). Following this trend, there is today a growing body of publications in cultural analysis on the human-as-addict: among them, Avital Ronell's Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania ; Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime ; Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield's High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction and Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts's High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity.


ETS 350-2 Reading Nation and Empire: 20th -Century Irish Drama: Playing Nationalism
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Sanford Sternlicht
The Irish War of Independence (1918-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1921-1923) were rehearsed on the stage of the National Theatre of Ireland and later critiqued there. Through reading and analyzing selected plays of William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey and other writers, we will attempt to define the relationship between modern Irish dramatic literature and the development of the Irish independent state. Background lectures and discussions will investigate the roots of nationalism in nineteenth-century political theorists like J. S. Mill and Karl Marx. Also, contemporary political/social critics like Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson and Edward W. Said will provide a post-modern reading of the Irish political and social experiment.


ETS 355-1 The Politics of the English Language
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Patricia Moody
This course investigates such topics as the origins and development of the myth we know as "standard" English, the English-Only Movement, how editors and publishers regulate the homogeneity of printed English, how English actually varies around the world, the politics of its use and reception, how race and gender are encoded and enacted in and through language, how news shapes our views, how television and film convey subtle attitudes toward varieties of language that shape our thinking-in short the fascinating--and important--subject that is the politics of the English language.


ETS 360-1 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Documenting Sexualities
MW 5:15-6:35
Film Screening
M 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 cultural and political role of museums, libraries, archives and publishing houses in documenting sexualities. This course also counts toward the LGBT Studies minor. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required.


ETS 360-2 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Reading British Masculinities, 1700-present
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Michael Goode
This course examines the role of various British literary texts in reflecting and shaping masculinity and masculine identities at different moments during the past three centuries. By no means does the course purport to offer an exhaustive history of masculinity and masculine identities over this lengthy period of time. Instead, it will unfold as a series of case-studies of significant masculine identities that were objects of particular veneration, anxiety, frustration or critique at different points during the historical periods covered by the course. These case-studies will include: the eighteenth-century gentleman, rake, and man of feeling; the Victorian professional, colonialist, factory hand, and dandy; and an array of marginal twentieth-century masculine types, ranging from the shell-shocked soldier and the woman industrial worker to the pornography addict and the punk. Writers covered will likely include: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Henry Mackenzie, Byron, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hughes, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Graham Greene, Derek Walcott, Julian Barnes and Johnny Rotten. Assignments will consist of a 5-page paper, a 10-page paper, and reading quizzes.
Pre-1900 Course


ETS 401-1 Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: Michael Burkard
Each class session will involve: 1) some discussion of assigned reading for the week (we will create our own anthology with the selections handed out); 2) discussion/review of poems which class members will turn in each week; 3) discussion of prosody or other poetic issues brought up by the instructor; 4) there will be two or three sessions during the term when we will listen/watch poets on DVD or video, and three or four sessions of an in-class writing exercise.  Revision of poems will be encouraged when warranted.  Some assignments particular to different individual writing needs will be made when warranted. This is an advanced undergraduate course and your grade will be determined by the quality of your writing over the entire term, and by the quality of your participation in the class dialogue. A final portfolio of anyone's best writing during the term will be individually reviewed with students in conference. Permission of the instructor is needed.  Submit 5 pages of your poetry to Michael Burkard, Department of English, 401 HL.


ETS 403-1 Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction
T 3:30-6:20
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
For this workshop, students will work on writing and reading stories.  In class we will discuss student work as well as work by contemporary writers.   We will focus on useful critique, significant revision and close reading.  Permission of the instructor is needed.  Submit up to 15 pages of your fiction to Dana Spiotta electronically, dspiotta@syr.edu


ETS 405-1 Topics in Medicine and Culture: Disability, Medicine, and Representation
Th 4:00-7:00
Instructor: Rebecca Garden
This course aims to bring disability and medicine into cross-disciplinary dialogue by examining representations of disability and medicine in film, literature and medical texts. These texts and conventions are considered in light of critical discussions of representation and disability. The "medicalization" of disability is examined, with students invited to explore disability and ability as cultural representations, wherein bodily abilities and limitations are conditioned by subjective perceptions of "normalcy." A principal question is how to incorporate a "social model" of disability into medical education and practice. Disability studies scholars and clinicians working on disability will be guest speakers.

ETS 410-1 Forms and Genres: Autobiography/Memoir/Testimony
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Claudia Klaver
In this course we will work together to understand the similarities and differences between the genres of autobiography, memoir and testimony. Obviously these genres overlap and share important similarities, most notably first-person narration about "real" experiences in which the narrator him or herself has been involved. The premise of this course, however, is that these are three distinct genres, that despite their similarities they are not the same thing.

In this course we will read examples of each of these genres alongside theoretical texts that will help us to understand the differences between the genres and, more importantly, the stakes of those differences. Given my own interests and knowledge base, we will focus the questions around works by British and postcolonial women authors of the twentieth century. Thus questions of gender will also be central to the course. Theoretical and critical texts for the course will include work by Sidonie Smith, Leigh Gilmore, Julia Watson, Adriana Caverero and others.

The objective of the course will be to develop an understanding of the contours of these narrative forms, as well as the political, psychological and aesthetic stakes and possibilities embedded in them.



ETS 410-2 Forms and Genres: 20 th -Century Historical Fiction in the US
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
In this course, we will study a selection of historical novels by twenty- and twenty-first-century US writers. We will begin by examining critical and theoretical arguments that weigh the differing truth claims of historiographers and fiction writers, both of whom typically depend on narrative to communicate knowledge about the past and our relationship to it. We will then turn to two influential novels by writers working during the first half of the twentieth century before focusing our attention on postwar historical fiction. Questions that will concern us include: what kinds of truth about the past are available to us? How does the common reliance on narrative shape our knowledge of the past? How do US writers use their historical fiction to engage and challenge powerful ideologies, stories or myths about the nation? Where and how do such writers challenge the boundaries of the nation in the stories they tell about the past and our relationship to it? Likely novels will include: William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, John Dos Passos's The Big Money, E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters and Julia Alvarez's Saving the World.
 

ETS 410-3 Forms and Genres: 20 th -Century American Poetry
TTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Harvey Teres
This course will introduce you to some of the most accomplished and influential American poems and poets of the past century. We will proceed under the assumption that most students have had relatively little experience reading poetry and are perhaps ill at ease doing so. Thus we will spend a good bit of time becoming familiar with what poetry is-its various elements, techniques, forms and functions-and how to read it. We will discuss prosody, and the focus will always be on deriving pleasure from recognizing how masters orchestrate the subtleties of language and meaning. Due attention will be paid both to the formal elements of poems, and to the place a poem occupies within its time and our own. After a brief look at the two nineteenth-century poets who helped create modern poetry-Whitman and Dickinson-we will proceed to consider the work of Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück and several other contemporary poets.


ETS 410-4 Forms and Genres: World Cinema
MW 2:15-3:35
Film Screening
W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Roger Hallas
Cinema has often been called a universal language and it is certainly made all over the globe. But world cinema has a richness and complexity that defies a single model, despite the cultural ubiquity and economic power of Hollywood cinema. This course examines how the history of world cinema is imbricated in the historical processes of modernity, postmodernity, colonialism and globalization. In the first part of the course, we will consider the development of cinema within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual culture, tracing how it contributed to the conceptualization of the modern world as visual spectacle. Subsequently, we will consider how differing conventions of film narrative developed across the globe. The second half of the semester will explore the diverse pleasures and politics of cinema from around the world, including Bollywood, Hong Kong action films, diasporic cinema and European art cinema. We will thus investigate how cinema contributes to our understandings of the world, our places within it and our relations to other parts of it. In sum, we will discover how world cinema is always both local and global. Attendance at weekly film screenings required.
 

ETS 410-5 Forms and Genres: The Mysteries of London
TTh 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Michael Goode
This course examines nineteenth-century crime and mystery literature about London, as well as contemporary novelists', graphic novelists', tourists' and filmmakers' fascination with this literature and with Victorian London. The course is a regular semester-long course taught on the SU campus, but students must also participation over spring break in an SU Abroad short-term program involving nine days of on-site study in London with the professor. Texts covered will include Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, and Alan Moore and Eddie Campell's From Hell. Assignments will consist of a 5-page paper, a 10-page paper, reading quizzes, and a 20-minute presentation to be given during the spring break trip portion of the course. The course is capped at 20 students and admission is by application only. Applications were due at SU Abroad on October 12, 2009.
Pre-1900 Course
 

ETS 410-6 Forms and Genres: Shakespeare on Page, Stage and Film
TTh 3:30-4:50
Film Screening
T 6:30-9:00
Instructor: Peter Mortenson
This course offers a sampling of Shakespeare's plays with examples from different genres and from different periods of his career. We all inevitably read in terms of our own experience. This course seeks to enlarge your reading contexts by considering Elizabethan theater, film, literary genre and cultural history. We will talk about theoretical issues of performance and representation (The texts are scripts for production: how is the script dramatized in our minds? in Elizabethan theater? in film?); about literary and dramatic convention (What is tragedy? Elizabethan tragedy?); about historical context (What kind of society and values seem to have been points of reference when these plays were written? What is to be made of topically "hot" content like sexual harassment, political corruption, racism, gender stereotyping?); and about the relation of these plays to one another ( How do values or ideas or dramatic structures constituted by these play texts interrelate?). Plays to be read include Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth. We will attend a live production and work with some complete play videos as well as comparative videos of selected scenes as indicated in the schedule.
Pre-1900 Course


ETS 410-7 Forms and Genres: The Victorian Novel
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Kevin Morrison
Providing an opportunity for students with some enthusiasm for the nineteenth-century British novel to delve more deeply into the literature and history of the period, this course will stress intensive rather than extensive reading. We will focus on three rich and complex texts: most likely, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872), and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). Our thematic concerns will include the public and private spheres, femininity and masculinity, as well as marriage and the marriage plot. Formal concerns will include the nature of realism; the relationship of history to literature; novelistic genres; and the length, breadth and crowdedness of these novels themselves.
Pre-1900 Course


ETS 420-1 Cultural Production and Reception: Medievalism
TTh 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Patricia Moody
The Middle Ages remain present in modern consciousness, both through scholarship and through popular media such as stage and film, video and reenactment games, poster art, television and print media. This course investigates responses to the Middle Ages across all periods since a sense of the mediaeval first began to develop. It is concerned, then, with creative reception of the Middle Ages, including attempts to 'reproduce' the Middle Ages, as well as with both academic and political-ideological reception of the Middle Ages. We may look at selections from a very broad historical and cultural spectrum: Lord of the Rings to Batman, the Pre-Raphaelites to Shrek, Chaucer to Steinbeck.
Pre-1900 Course


ETS 420-2 Cultural Production and Reception: American Icons
MW 3:45-5:05
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 420-3 Cultural Production and Reception: Allegory and Parody
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Ken Frieden
Under the star of Franz Kafka, our readings emphasize the role of figurative language in allegorical narratives, quasi-allegorical texts, Hasidic tales and parodies.  Short stories by Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld and Isaac Babel raise questions surrounding symbols, tropes, allegory and representation.  Biblical and midrashic narratives provide a background in religious parable and mashal.  Study of stories told by Nahman of Bratslav and about the Baal Shem Tov prepares us for reading anti-Hasidic satires and neo-Hasidic parodies by Joseph Perl and I. L. Peretz.  Pertinent literary criticism includes Walter Benjamin's and Robert Alter's essays on Kafka, and especially Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody, which defines the term in a broad, postmodern sense.  In a Nietzschean tradition, Jacques Derrida's essays illustrate the centrality of metaphor in modern texts, while Paul De Man's rhetorical studies show that allegory, which declined in the nineteenth century, has returned to prominence.


ETS 440-1 Theorizing History and Culture: Milton and the English Revolution
MW 2:15-3:30
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
This course offers a slow and in-depth reading of John Milton's major prose and poetry in the context of the political, religious and social ferment of England in the seventeenth century. Because Milton was at first a propagandist for-as well as a critic of-the revolutionary government of mid-century, his is an intriguing case for examining the relation of poetry and politics. Paradise Lost raises questions that are still with us: what does "freedom"-of religion, the press, speech, franchise, individual-mean? How do we achieve a good society? What role does education play in forming a sustainable Republic? Why is it so difficult to make justice prevail in a "fallen" world? To what extent do people make their own histories? By situating Milton's work in the full range of discourses available-from the far left of the Diggers and the Ranters to the far right of the Monarchists and defenders of Church hierarchy-we can tease out not only the major debates of the period, but also the relation of literature to how these debates unfolded.
Pre-1900 Course


ETS 495-1 Thesis Writing Workshop
W 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
This course is intended to serve as a forum for small-group mentoring and directed research toward producing an ETS Distinction Thesis. Theses are sustained, focused, critical arguments, modeled on a seminar paper or a journal article. The thesis writing workshop will involve generating research questions, compiling a bibliography, trying out different writing strategies, presenting drafts and engaging in collegial peer critique. Readings will include methodological essays on writing/research practices, as well as thesis models and some primary material on the topics chosen by participants to help us become better readers of each other's work. Participation is by invitation or good standing in the Honors Program.