Graduate Course Offerings
Fall 2012
ENG 630-1 Graduate Pro-Seminar: Victorian Genders and Sexualities ENG 631-2 Critical Theory: Politics of Theory ENG 650-1 Forms: The Novella We will focus on the different styles and strategies in writings by Grace Paley (poems: Fidelity), C.D. Wright (poems: The Big Self), Denise Duhamel (poems: The Star Spangled Banner), and Lisa Jarnot (poems: book to be chosen soon). We will also read interview material and statements by the artist Louise Bourgeoise, and view work by French photographer Sarah Moon. Stories by Grace Paley, and work by Bourgeoise and Moon, will be available on library reserve or in conference. With Bourgeoise and Moon we will see what effective analogies could be made between a visual artist's work and process and a writer's work and process. With Paley's work we will spend some time on her comparing / contrasting her poems and stories. The other works we will read: Ultramarine (poems: Raymond Carver), On the Tracks of Wild Game (poems: Tomaz Salamun), Etheridge Knight (poems: The Essential Etheridge Knight), John Ashbery (text yet to be selected) : some of Carver's stories will also be on reserve and we will view some of his writing comparing / contrasting his poetry and fiction. We will also view the artist William Kentridge (composer of the opera "The Nose," based on Nicolai Gogol's short story), and discuss his work and his comments on his practices and process. The class enrollment is limited to 16 (no audits). Students will lead presentations and discussions of the writings/ art at hand each class session. Written responses, either in the form of a student's own creative writing, or in the form of a brief (250-300 words) and relevant critique will be required for 10 of the classes. Other ideas for presentations will be possible if the ideas appeal. Grading will be based on the quality of anyone's participation in discussion, and in her / his writing over the entire semester, as well as the interest generated by presentations. Ideally, the course will suggest at least a few new possibilities for strategies (or lack thereof) in one's own current creative writing, whether poetry or fiction or… Books would include: Confessions of St. Augustine (conversion to Christianity) Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (conversion to atheism) There will be a reading journal and memoir writing assignments, as well as a major memoir segment for the final paper, which we may or may not workshop. ENG 721-1 Third Fiction Workshop Likely course material includes: Thomas More’s Utopia, Alain Badiou’s writings on Plato, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Cameron’s Avatar, Digger Pamphlets, Occupy Wall Street manifestos, colonial travel narrative, Hardt and Negri on migration, Milton’s Areopagitica, and Web 2.0 manifestos. I am also invested in testing out the capacity of genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, and magical realism (eg Octavia Butler, China Mieville, Wall-E, Patrick Chamoiseau) to stage the particular kind of dialectical critical pressure that Thomas More’s Utopia—I will argue—enacts. As these examples of possible texts suggest, my concern will be to draw your attention to why and how “the common” manifests so frequently in current ecological, digital, political, and globalization debates and resistance movements—as well as in cultural forms—and to attempt to tease out the tendrils of misrecognition, fantasy, and nostalgia—as well as the challenge of unfinished historical struggles—that link contemporary envisionings and practices to earlier “commons”—and break with them.
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: Claudia Klaver
The goal of this course is to introduce graduate students to a range of feminist and queer readings of nineteenth-century literary and cultural texts. Although our reading will be heavily weighted toward the Victorian novel, we will also read a significant selection of Victorian poetry.
The course will be divided into three segments (though most of the literature that we read could fall into more than one segment). First, we will examine fictional, poetic, theoretical, and critical models of normative genders and heterosexualities in Victorian England. We will explore the domestic ideology that dominated the organization of such cultural norms, examining particularly the forms of masculinity and femininity that it naturalized, and the institutions of romantic love and bourgeois marriage that the ideology supported. Primary texts for this section will probably include Dickens’s David Copperfield, Eliot’s Adam Bede, and/or Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, as well a poetry by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
In the second segment of the course, we will explore desires and practices that coexist with, are articulated in relation to, and/or present transgressive challenges to more normative Victorian desires and sexualities. The goal of this unit will be to think outside of the homo/hetero binary, examining instead sites such as the eroticized child, pornography, cross-class and interracial romances, and role-playing. We will look at Charles Dodson's relationship with Alice Liddell and John Ruskin's infatuation with Effie Gray; “Walter's” My Secret Life, the textual and photographic self-documentation of the life-long relationship between Hannah Cullwick and Walter Mumby; and perhaps Meadow’s Seeta.
Finally, in the third segment of the course we will examine the presence and “problem” of homoerotic or queer genders and sexualities in Victorian fiction and poetry. We will not only explore the role that “queer” characters and relationships play in a number of texts, but also the analytical and historical questions that accompany such perverse readings and re-readings of characters and texts. Primary texts will include Bronte’s Villette, Stoker’s Dracula, Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, and poetry by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Michael Field.
ENG 630-4 Graduate Pro-Seminar: US Modernism
M 9:30-12:15
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course offers an introduction to modernist fiction in the US. We will begin by contrasting two accounts of the modernist emphasis on difficult form. Lukacs condemns modernist investments in “spatial organization” and aesthetic experiment for refusing the writer’s political and ethical task of socio-historical engagement. More recently, David Harvey has argued that the formal features of modernist texts confront as such a crisis of representation intrinsic to the experience of modernity, and thus engage the task of socio-historical engagement more fully and with more insight than writing in other genres. With these arguments in hand, we will read an array of texts associated high modernism, the Harlem (and Chicago) Renaissance, the proletarian literature movement, and popular or middle-brow modernism. Areas of social change and social struggle that we’ll be discussing in relation to these texts include: the betrayed legacy of Emancipation and the fight for racial justice; sexual revolution, gender emancipation and women’s suffrage; capitalist expansion, labor radicalism, and the ethical role of the state; new animosities and cross-fertilizations between high art and mass culture; massive immigration, migration, and the pro-nationalist bid to forge a distinctly “American” voice.
Tu 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Greg Thomas
This course offers an introduction to central theoretical questions, arguments, and modes of inquiry underwriting the formal study of literature and culture—arguably in the US, in the Americas, and in the world. The first order of business in such a context would be to put great pressure on satisfactory or unsatisfactory definitions or concepts of “theory” (or “theoreticism”) itself, as it is construed to somehow stand apart from “practice,” “empiricism” (even “nativism” or “primitivism”), etc. A second order of business would be to engage in a de facto survey of prevailing schools of thought, ones easily identifiable as “theoretical” in the handling of traditional academic-intellectual business at this point in historical time. A third order of business would be to challenge the domination or hegemony of such canonical “theory-making” (very much akin to nation-building, as in the tradition of empire) in part by considering a range of works not always (or ever) conventionally identified as “theory,” arguably because of the origins, preferred genres, or politics of these “theorizing” productions. We may thus read in fields generally classified as Marxism, post-structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, etc.—but along with texts such as The Invention of the Americas, The Wretched of the Earth, “On the Abolition of the English Department,”Red, White & Black, Almanac of the Dead, as well as The Mass Psychology of Fascism, just for example.
F 10:35-1:20
Instructor: Brian Evenson
In this class, we'll read a number of novellas, think about what the novella offers writers that is different from the novel and the short story, and workshop parts of a novella.
ENG 650-3 Forms: Innovative Approaches to Editing
Th 9:30-12:15
Instructor: George Saunders
This class will attempt to get into some strange but hopefully productive corners of the question: “How can I make my fiction more compelling, edgy, and moving?” In the academic setting we normally approach writing from one of two directions: (1) the workshop, or (2) by studying classic texts, but via a “for writers” approach (i.e., our Forms courses). While both approaches have their advantages, I’ve found myself wondering if there might be a third way, that comes at texts from a new direction and, in the process, reconfigures our habitual approach to editing. So, in this course, among other things yet to be determined, we’ll (a) study and edit the less successful (published) works of great artists; (b) closely and critically examine contemporary works of fiction as they appear in several popular magazines; (c) do extremely close line edits of texts by ourselves and others, in an attempt to destabilize our habitual relation to our own prose. The point of all of this is to tease out the most efficient relation between our reading and writing practices.
ENG 650-4 Forms: Four Women and Three Men
Tu 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Michael Burkard
ENG 650-5 Forms: Memoir
Th 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Mary Karr
My memoir class will focus on revelations. The class may include a meditation component. The purpose of the class is for each student to have a revelation.
Autobiography of Malcolm X (to Islam)
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton (to Catholicism)
Speak, Memory, Nabokov (to aestheticism)
Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston (to woman warrior)
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Harry Crews (to his father's son)
Possessed, Elif Batuman (to theorist from novelist)Dispatches, Michael Herr (to Buddhist)
ENG 650-8 Forms: Tribes of American Poetry
Tu 9:30-12:15
Instructor: Bruce Smith
The Fugitives, the Confessionals, The New York School, the Beats, and the Slam poets are not the only schools or movements that have found a common identity and practice. This course will examine groups that are defined aesthetically, geographically, racially, and politically, as well as determine new designations such as the “New Ellipticals” or “Neo-Formalists.” The course will also examine pairings of older schools such as The Black Arts Movement where artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience with new manifestations such as The Dark Room Collective where sustaining writing in community is as much a practice as the activism of building a community-based reading series for writers of color. Older and newer models will be paired for reading and students will be asked to do weekly presentations as well as written responses to the reading.
ENG 715-1: First Poetry Workshop
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis. Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop. Admission is strictly limited to first year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.
ENG 716-1: Second Poetry Workshop
Tu 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Bruce Smith
Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one “free” poem to push back against the world with the imagination per week. The emphasis will be both on the craft—the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination—the vision that's unique to each individual. Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as models or targets for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer. This term I’ll begin class with what I call an “exemplary” poet–avoiding the more prescriptive term “essential.” Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.
ENG 717-1: First Fiction Workshop
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
This course is the workshop for students in the first year of the MFA Program in Fiction.
ENG 718-1: Second Fiction Workshop
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Craft. Discipline. Vision. Heart.
ENG 719-2: Third Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:30
Instructor: Mary Karr
This is an advanced course based almost entirely on revision, so your notes on each other’s poems should be detailed and serious. I’d also like to see your revisions fairly regularly in conference, and for you to keep different drafts of the same poem. We’ll also be looking at entire books with an eye to building a thesis in the spring. For the first class, bring in copies of tables of contents and actual, physical first books that you like a lot. Also at the first class, you’ll bring in a poem each, but thereafter, one poet will bring in groups of 6-8 poems, rather than our looking at one per human. If this doesn’t fly, we’ll go back to the old way, but I often find it’s clarifying before thesis work.
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: George Saunders
This class is required of, and restricted to, third-year students in the fiction program. We’ll read and critique the work of our peers. The instructor will focus on various topics, including avoidances, structural examination of stories, the importance of compression, and the development of a personal style of line editing.
ENG 730-2 Graduate Seminar: Postcolonial Dialogues: Literature and Criticism
Th 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Manan Desai
How have writers from Africa and South Asia responded to, appropriated, and reworked Joseph Conrad’s fictions of empire? How have the forms of the bildungsroman and autobiography been used by subaltern writers in India and Central America for political claims? And how might we read these various appropriations of western literary forms without recourse to the simple formulation of the empire “writing back,” a notion dangerously close to reducing postcolonial literature to a derivative discourse. In this course, we will draw connections between works from various geographical and temporal locations through a long conversation about narrative form, dialogism, intertextuality, circulation, and translation in, what Pascale Casanova has recently described as, “the world republic of letters.” Likely literary texts include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay; Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; Emile Habiby’s Saeed the Pessoptimist; Aime Cesaire’s The Tempest; George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile; and Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter. We will also spend a unit on the genres of autobiography, life-writing, and testimonio, including works by Rigoberta Menchu and Sharankumar Limbale.
ENG 730-3 Graduate Seminar: Temporality and Embodiment
Tu 12:30-3:20
Film Screening: Tu 7:00-10:00
Instructor: Chris Hanson
The adoption of standard time in the late nineteenth century was a direct result of industrialization and the development and expansion of steam-powered transportation across Europe and North America: as railway networks grew to connect more distant spaces, so too did the need to synchronize train schedules between towns and regions. Prior to the widespread use of standardized timekeeping, a single train could pass through dozens of local time “zones” during a trip of a few hundred miles. Railroads also contributed to what Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as the “annihilation of time and space” as geography was altered and compressed by the capacity to travel large distances in short amounts of time and senses of localized time were discarded in favor of standardized modes.
During this period, the function of time within social and cultural practices shifted dramatically; temporality was explicitly linked to the measurement of productivity of labor with devices such as the time-stamp machine, and the emergent representational forms of photography and cinema radically reconfigured understandings of time. A pronounced and sustained philosophical investigation on the perceptual experience of time and space emerged in the wake of these profound industrial, technological, cultural, and social changes—an inquiry which continues to this day as later media forms such as television and digital media continue to challenge, redefine, and reshape our experience of time. We will examine the varied functions of temporality and the relationship of time to our perceptual apparatus and lived experience through a range of theoretical lenses, using films and other screen media texts as our case studies to investigate the shifts in the conceptions and experiences of temporality initiated by industrialization and which continue today. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required.
ENG 730-4 Graduate Seminar: Politics and Poetics of the Common
Tu 9:30-12:15
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
Do “we” inhabit a “global commons?” What do these terms (“we,” “global,” “commons”) mean to the—often very differently-positioned—users who deploy them (not only is it evoked in the global South as well as the North, but the “common” is as likely to be championed by libertarians as autonomists)? Taking up such questions, this seminar has three intertwined goals: first, to survey a sampling of significant texts (literary, theoretical, legal, political, etc) in which the concept/figure of “the common” has played an important role, from Hesiod and Plato to Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek, and Vandana Shiva. Second, to see if it is possible to sort out “myths” (regressive) of “the common” from “utopian” (progressive) aspects in current debates by taking this long historical view. Third, to explore the possibility that the oblique moves of cultural figuration might sometimes address “the common” more productively than direct conceptualization can do—and why that might be the case.
Course material will be drawn largely from the diverse archives that I have been thinking about in my current book project, “A Natural History of the Common,” and thus will include a heavy (though by no means exclusive) emphasis on early modern British material, since I am suggesting in this book that it is impossible to understand current uses of “the common” in English fully without careful attention to the agrarian commons that emergent capitalism destroyed in early modern England—fantasies of which still turn up in diverse sites globally—as well as the elaborate baggage of meanings and affective resonance that “common” has accrued over centuries of –often highly charged—use in English. By focusing the seminar on a book project, I hope to be able to show how one positions oneself in complex debates and contributes to them.
A 20-25 page seminar paper on a topic specifically related to course problematics will be required, but given the conceptual nature of this class, wide flexibility in choice of topics will be possible.
Since I am on research leave during spring 2012, students with questions about, or suggestions for, the course should contact me at clbartol@syr.edu. A sample of my work on this subject can easily be accessed here (it was also published in Angelaki) : http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~global/wps.htm