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Courses for 2008-2009Now you can check all of our course offerings and descriptions online here. The courses below will appear in this system but we list them on this page as they are new for the 2008-2009 academic year. Screwball Comedy This course has as its primary focus the genre of Screwball Comedy-Hollywood's answer to the Depression Era. As Pauline Kael once said about these comedies, they present "Americans' idealized view of themselves-breezy, likable, sexy, gallant, and maybe just a little harebrained." What we'll do is read plays, screenplays, and a novel that exemplify this quintessential American form of anarchy. We will view a few films in class, and students will be expected to view several more outside of class. A tentative list of readings includes Philip Barry's play The Philadelphia Story, Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's plays The Front Page (which becomes His Girl Friday in the movies) and Twentieth Century, and Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. Ms. Candyce Canzoneri Studies in Literature and Culture - Late Twentieth-Century Black Literature The Civil Rights Movement preceded the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, an era wherein Black activist organizations opposed pacifist policy of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In contrast, Black Power Movement political strategy demanded, rather than requested, freedom and liberation for Blacks throughout the Diaspora. Moreover, whereas the Civil Rights Movement, as evidenced by the leadership of the NAACP, was lead by a middle-class, bourgeois/professional contingency, the aims of the Black Power Movement were activated by disenfranchised youth raised in poor and working class Black families. Late twentieth-century Black literature devotes special attention to the multiple and dynamic tensions between these two crucial groups. Notable authors James Baldwin, Paul Beatty, Pearl Cleage, Charles Fuller, Sam Greenlee, Chester Himes, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison engage this debate. Their novels and plays position readers to analyze how the policy and strategy of these two factions clashed through contemplations about class distinctions, color consciousness, gender roles, citizenship, and cultural identity. Dr. Phyllis Burns Three Masters of the Short Story: Chekhov, Munro and Martone This course will explore the evolution of the short story over the last century and a half, focusing on three innovators: the compassionate Russian realist Anton Chekhov (1864-1900); the Canadian Alice Munro (b 1931), explorer of self-deception and frustration amidst moral confusion; and Michael Martone (b 1956), whose array of stylistic experiments only enhance his insight into contemporary American, especially Midwestern, culture. Dr. James Gorman Digital Essaying Digital essays enable students to explore and reflect on their own experiences using a rich repository of media: digital photos, voice-overs, web graphics, and soundtrack. Students will incorporate their writing, visual literacy, project management and computer literacy skills to enrich their understandings of the building blocks of expository, creative, and autobiographical writing. Students will view and critically analyze the growing body of work in this medium, participate in a series of hands-on tutorials and critique sessions, culminating in a public screening of their own best digital essays. While there are no prerequisites, students should be reasonably comfortable working with computers and digital images - in-class software tutorials will be focused on Photoshop (photo editing), Adobe Premiere Pro (nonlinear video editing), and Audacity (sound editing). Students are responsible for purchasing a 2- or 4-GB flash drive to store projects-in-progress ($30-50 or $60-100), several CD-ROMs for saving finished projects, and one textbook. Dr. Shannon Lakanen Studies in a Major Author - William Blake The ambitious aim of this course will be to read and understand Blake's major poems, especially Jerusalem. We will approach this task by starting with the more straightforward Songs of innocence and Songs of Experience. We will make use of Frye's justly famous Fearful Symmetry as a guide, and read, as he recommends, The Four Zoas in preparation for our study of Jerusalem. The challenge of this course will be to provide the needed background in the history of ideas, in the analysis of Blake's imagery, and in his personal biography, while at the same time establishing a felt connection to his long poems as works of imaginative literature. We will also grapple with the extreme diversity of interpretation in Blake scholarship, exemplified by such figures as Harold Bloom, Thomas Altizer, and Northrop Frye. Dr. Jeremy Smith The Brothers Karamazov We will spend the quarter reading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. This novel of almost 1000 pages is certainly Dostoyevsky's masterpiece and, as many would argue, one of the very greatest novels ever written. Dostoyevsky sums up his view of the entire human condition through a novel that also happens to be a mystery and a thriller. The main characters span the length and breadth of human possibility-from saintliness to radical evil and everything in between. The novel presents Dostoyevsky's own intense struggle with the central questions of human existence-the nature of human evil, the possibility or impossibility of faith, the nature of human goodness, the nature of God. It examines those questions, and presents the central characters' philosophical and theological views, both through dramatic action as well as through dialogue, through essays written by the characters, and through stories embedded within stories. The variety of the characters, the complexity and seriousness of the viewpoints they espouse, and the excitement of the novel's dramatic action will provide ample basis for our weekly discussions. The course will be graded on the basis of attendance and participation, as well as reading journal. Dr. Jeremy Smith Studies in World Literatures - Issues in Postcolonial Literatures and Theory: "Language Wars" A series of key literary tropes might be considered foundational to literary studies: center and periphery, belonging and exile, self and other. This course will investigate the foundations of such literary tropes particularly as they emerge in colonial and postcolonial literatures. How do these binary tropes of power work to set up, narrate, and sustain a legacy of colonial domination and violence? How is such an enduring narrative legacy of violence reproduced-but also configured-in postcolonial literatures? And what does this narrative legacy of power and its dismantling mean for the foundations of literature or reading practices in our current moment? The question of narrative power in postcolonial studies includes issues of nation-languages and national literatures, monolingualism, the politics of translation, minority literatures, "rotten English," and the emergent categories of "global English" or new literatures in English. Beginning with imperial texts of Conrad and Kipling and ending with the "global novel," we will trace how-and by whom-"postcolonial" or "world" literature gets defined. Dr. Karen Steigman Studies in Literary and Critical Theory - Psychoanalysis and Interpretation Freud's publication of Interpretation of Dreams (1900) at the dawn of a new century inaugurated a revolutionary way of thinking about individual human beings, social groups, and the place of both in the greater world at large. Though Freud's aims for psychoanalysis were largely scientific, therapeutic and practical-the province of the doctor's office-he continually sought to show how literature and the literary text exemplified the truth of various aspects of his theories. Today, psychoanalysis continues to be among the most vital critical, interpretive theories in English Studies. In this course, we will try first to understand some of the basic theses and categories of psychoanalysis as a conceptual system. This will involve us in a direct encounter with significant Freudian texts-as well as with the ideas of his modern interlocutors and interrogators (most notably the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan). In this encounter, we shall also track and deepen our understanding of the connections between psychoanalysis and the critical theories inseparable from it (e.g., feminism, Marxism, post colonialism, queer theory, etc.). Throughout, we will try to uncover the way psychoanalysis helps us become better readers and interpreters of literature and culture. Our overarching goal here will be to see how, and to what extent, basic psychoanalytic concepts-desire, fantasy, enjoyment, hysteria, obsession, perversion, etc.- might be a part of an ethics for the twenty-first century. Dr. Paul Eisenstein
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