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ENGL-042-01 Gateway:Mod &/or Post-Modern Lit
Fall 2009
Professor David Gewanter
Voice and Form. This course explores the productive conflicts between a writer’s several voices, and the literary forms they inhabit. A writer’s several voices, characters, sensibility, and imagined world will fight and befriend the literary form that houses them. In modern and contemporary literature, this struggle between voice and form becomes especially acute, sending out sparks, flames, stinging smoke, and not a few misfires. This course will offer a close study, and some practice, of four modes of writing in which the writer’s presence battles with form: fiction, stage-dialogue, poetry, and personal prose. We will explore and discuss great writers of these genres—both those that with apparent loyalty fulfill a formal promise, and those others intent on mayhem and sabotage. We will hear craft lectures from the excellent writers in our Department who work in these forms; we will write critical prose on selected works; and we will try our hand at composing—not for grades—our own poems, stories, personal essays, and a short radio-dialogue. Our frame-breaking authors include D.H. Lawrence, Michael Ondaatje, and Anna Deavere Smith, poets such as Heaney, Eliot, Moore, Toomer, and several others.
Spring 2010
Professor Lisbeth Fuisz
Schooling the Nation: Narratives about Twentieth-century U.S. Education
Over the course of the twentieth century, education has been positioned as the solution to problems besetting the United States caused by war, immigration, industrialization, and expansionism. This course examines a variety of texts, both fictional and non-fictional, that respond to this positioning of schooling as a primary means of unifying America and creating productive citizens. The course juxtaposes common-sense understandings of the aims of education with writings that critique contemporary educational institutions. We will read books such as American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa (1921), Wind From an Enemy Sky by D’Arcy McNickle (1978), My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918), and Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928). These texts raise questions for us to consider that are still pertinent today: What is the purpose of education in a democracy? Who has access to education? Is all education created equal? We will approach these texts as literary scholars, learning some of the terminology and techniques of the field. Assignments in this course will center on the writing process (prewriting, drafting, responding, revising, editing, and publication) in order to develop critical thinking skills that can be used in a variety of academic disciplines.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
Sections:
ENGL-042-02 Gateway:Mod &/or Post-Modern Lit
Fall 2009
Professor Libbie Rifkin
The Poetry and Culture of Washington, DC
This course uncovers a hidden side of Washington--the diverse literary communities that have flourished in the shadow of the Capitol for the past 150 years. We'll begin with the poetry and prose Walt Whitman wrote while nursing Civil War wounded in the hospitals that crowded the city. Then we'll focus our attention on the New Negro Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s, reading such writers as Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Langston Hughes. We'll look critically at poetry read at presidential Inaugurations and political protests, and we’ll read, listen to, and visit with poets and editors working in DC today. Students will participate in literary historical walking tours of DC neighborhoods and will incorporate these experiences into their writing for the course.
Spring 2010
Professor Lisbeth Fuisz
Schooling the Nation: Narratives about Twentieth-century U.S. Education
Over the course of the twentieth century, education has been positioned as the solution to problems besetting the United States caused by war, immigration, industrialization, and expansionism. This course examines a variety of texts, both fictional and non-fictional, that respond to this positioning of schooling as a primary means of unifying America and creating productive citizens. The course juxtaposes common-sense understandings of the aims of education with writings that critique contemporary educational institutions. We will read books such as American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa (1921), Wind From an Enemy Sky by D’Arcy McNickle (1978), My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918), and Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928). These texts raise questions for us to consider that are still pertinent today: What is the purpose of education in a democracy? Who has access to education? Is all education created equal? We will approach these texts as literary scholars, learning some of the terminology and techniques of the field. Assignments in this course will center on the writing process (prewriting, drafting, responding, revising, editing, and publication) in order to develop critical thinking skills that can be used in a variety of academic disciplines.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-042-03 Gateway:Mod &/or Post-Modern Lit
Fall 2009
Professor Libbie Rifkin
The Poetry and Culture of Washington, DC
This course uncovers a hidden side of Washington--the diverse literary communities that have flourished in the shadow of the Capitol for the past 150 years. We'll begin with the poetry and prose Walt Whitman wrote while nursing Civil War wounded in the hospitals that crowded the city. Then we'll focus our attention on the New Negro Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s, reading such writers as Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Langston Hughes. We'll look critically at poetry read at presidential Inaugurations and political protests, and we’ll read, listen to, and visit with poets and editors working in DC today. Students will participate in literary historical walking tours of DC neighborhoods and will incorporate these experiences into their writing for the course.
Spring 2010
Professor Wayne Knoll
Because this Gateway course is principally geared for the prospective English major, our principal objective is to assist the student to further develop skills in close textual reading and in effective writing. We will read key texts of seven modern American writers of fiction and poetry who significantly interacted with each other—Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings. We will discuss these texts as their authors interacted with each other, principally as they experimented with innovative literary techniques and thus revolutionized American literature, both fiction and poetry. Writing requirements: two short papers and a literary journal reflecting personal analysis and class discussion of these texts, occasional quizzes, and voluntary power point presentations on the lives of these American Expatriate writers.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-042-04 Gateway:Mod &/or Post-Modern Lit
Fall only
Fall 2009
Introduction to Modernism
Prof. Rubin
What does it mean for a literary text to be modernist? What is the significance of modernism as a descriptive category for the dominant literary movement in early twentieth century Europe? Does modernism have a project, and if so, why does it assume the form that it does? What are its features and what are its limitations as a particular practice? How do theories of modernism address these limits? In our reading of novels by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett, we shall explore the various critical attempts to define modernism and to comprehend its aims, its intentions, and its modes of resistance.
Spring 2010
Professor Scott Heath
‘New’ Black Aesthetics
As historically disenfranchised people of color have been collectively occupied with attaining recognition as citizens and with determining how to exercise fully the rights indicated by this citizenship, they have been represented (by others and by themselves) politically, socially, and artistically in ways that work both within and against the boundaries of Americanness. From slave narratives to hip_hop tracks, many otherwise race-specific expressions of marginal resistance in the United States have been appropriated to the extent that they have become in some ways synonymous with the conventions of mainstream Americana. In this course we will explore the ways that the notion of blackness has been and continues to be constructed, commodified, challenged, and reconceptualized in literature and in other contemporary media. We will think through various approaches to the interpretation and critique of culture, taking particular interest in those expressive modes that have been called “popular” and that have not been generally classified as “black.” And in this context we will begin to reevaluate exactly what these descriptors mean. With this project in mind, our class meetings will be arranged thematically, crossing disciplines to incorporate conversations about books, films, and music in which this discussion happens and about genres of text, such as speculative fiction and punk, with which African Americans have not been typically associated in the public imagination. We will examine works that exhibit aesthetic tendencies and discursive styles that might be deemed “new” or “alternative” (perhaps even radical and interventionist) to the extent that black people have not been heavily represented as producers or subjects—even as we locate certain cultural continua that would contradict this assumption. Among our consistent talking points will be ideas of cultural property and authenticity, feminism and the performance of masculinity, cosmopolitanism and globalization, and public versus private text. Considering that identity and community are inevitably mediated through conceptions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, we will work to think more critically about the ways that black cultural production can be read.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-042-05 Gateway: Mod &/or Postmodern Lit
Spring only
Modernism and its Discontents
What does it mean for a work of art to be “modern”? What does it entail to implicate a literary text as “modernist”? What is the significance of modernism as a descriptive category for the literary movement in early twentieth-century Europe? Does modernism have a project, and if so, what are its limitations and how does modernism address these limits?
Through readings of texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Andre Breton, Aimé Césaire, and Samuel Beckett among others, this course introduces students to the various critical attempts to define “modernism” and to comprehend its aims, its intentions, and its modes of resistance to the work of art. Analyzing the cultural pressures informing the modernist shift away from earlier literary forms (such as realism, naturalism, and symbolism), we shall examine both how and why modernist texts enact this rupture.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-042-06 Gateway: Modern &/or Postmodern Lit
Spring only
‘New’ Black Aesthetics
As historically disenfranchised people of color have been collectively occupied with attaining recognition as citizens and with determining how to exercise fully the rights indicated by this citizenship, they have been represented (by others and by themselves) politically, socially, and artistically in ways that work both within and against the boundaries of Americanness. From slave narratives to hip_hop tracks, many otherwise race-specific expressions of marginal resistance in the United States have been appropriated to the extent that they have become in some ways synonymous with the conventions of mainstream Americana. In this course we will explore the ways that the notion of blackness has been and continues to be constructed, commodified, challenged, and reconceptualized in literature and in other contemporary media. We will think through various approaches to the interpretation and critique of culture, taking particular interest in those expressive modes that have been called “popular” and that have not been generally classified as “black.” And in this context we will begin to reevaluate exactly what these descriptors mean. With this project in mind, our class meetings will be arranged thematically, crossing disciplines to incorporate conversations about books, films, and music in which this discussion happens and about genres of text, such as speculative fiction and punk, with which African Americans have not been typically associated in the public imagination. We will examine works that exhibit aesthetic tendencies and discursive styles that might be deemed “new” or “alternative” (perhaps even radical and interventionist) to the extent that black people have not been heavily represented as producers or subjects—even as we locate certain cultural continua that would contradict this assumption. Among our consistent talking points will be ideas of cultural property and authenticity, feminism and the performance of masculinity, cosmopolitanism and globalization, and public versus private text. Considering that identity and community are inevitably mediated through conceptions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, we will work to think more critically about the ways that black cultural production can be read.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-042-07 Gateway: Modern &/or Postmodern Lit
Spring only
Interventions in Modern Poetry
This course will examine diverse currents in the explosive, hybridizing, deregulated, re-forming poetry of the early to mid-twentieth century: the revolution of the word. Film and visual art will necessarily supplement our study, since the “-isms” or movements we will be most concerned with found expression in a variety of media. Call it the rise of inter-artistic vanguards. The chief tendencies within Imagism, Vorticism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism (s), Expressionism, & Negritude will surveyed. Careful to understand that these movements do not account for the entire poetic field of Modernism, we will position the impulses ranged under these names--as is customary--in relation to broad historical and social changes then underway in the United States & Europe, taking special notice of responses to World War I, developments in machine technology, and an ongoing urbanization. Our special focus will be the problem of critical approaches to these works. Taking lyric poetry as a point of departure, we will search for ways of writing about texts that, in some ways, resist or evade the habits of lyric address & subjectivity. Students can expect to write occasional analytical responses & three short papers; there will be a midterm & a final exam.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-042-08 Gateway: Modern &/or Postmodern Lit
Spring only
Literatures of Sight and Sound: from "Serious" Comics to Digital and Sound Poetry
Literature and the visual arts exist largely as separate aesthetic categories. There are many works, though, that mix forms from these categories, examples from books to paintings, to video, to digitally animated text, that combine pictures, drawings or other graphic elements with printed words or text. For decades such combinatorial strategies have been common in advertising and in popular forms like comics. Increasingly, they are now used to literary ends, in work, that in aggregate, seems to beg the construction of a new, hybrid category: a visual literature. While it can be argued that examples of visual literature can be found in many historical periods, the application of the term to work from the second half of the twentieth century seems to be the most productive, given the unusually wide range of examples, and especially given the recent proliferation of electronic forms that demonstrate a similar hybridity.
The focus of this class will be to examine contemporary “visual“ literature and spillover forms in sound and performance and consider their implications. We will be especially interested in understanding how so-called visual works merge the traditions of literature and the visual arts and challenge the way we view, read and value aesthetic objects, in a culture increasingly dominated by technology as seen on the Internet, in television, film, video and graphic images.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
ENGL-042-09 Gateway: Modern &/or Postmodern Lit
Spring only
Literatures of Sight and Sound: from "Serious" Comics to Digital and Sound Poetry
Literature and the visual arts exist largely as separate aesthetic categories. There are many works, though, that mix forms from these categories, examples from books to paintings, to video, to digitally animated text, that combine pictures, drawings or other graphic elements with printed words or text. For decades such combinatorial strategies have been common in advertising and in popular forms like comics. Increasingly, they are now used to literary ends, in work, that in aggregate, seems to beg the construction of a new, hybrid category: a visual literature. While it can be argued that examples of visual literature can be found in many historical periods, the application of the term to work from the second half of the twentieth century seems to be the most productive, given the unusually wide range of examples, and especially given the recent proliferation of electronic forms that demonstrate a similar hybridity.
The focus of this class will be to examine contemporary “visual“ literature and spillover forms in sound and performance and consider their implications. We will be especially interested in understanding how so-called visual works merge the traditions of literature and the visual arts and challenge the way we view, read and value aesthetic objects, in a culture increasingly dominated by technology as seen on the Internet, in television, film, video and graphic images.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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