Haverford College English Department

Course Guide

Spring 2017

Containing descriptions of readings, approaches, and course conduct for all

department offerings.

Major Requirements:

The two-semester Junior Seminar in English with tutorial (298a, 298J, and 299b); Senior Conference (English 399a and b); plus a minimum of seven additional courses within the major. The program should include courses from across the spectrum of the department’s offerings and evince the richness of an archive drawn from British, American, and World Anglophone literature. At least two courses must be in literature written before 1800 and two courses must be taken at the 300-level. Admission to the major requires completion of two courses at the 200-level by the end of the sophomore year; one of these must be an "introductory emphasis" (IE) course. English 150L substitutes for one 200-level course and carries the IE credit. For Spring Semester 2017, courses 212b and 258b are designated introductory emphasis (IE). 300-level topics courses using the same number but with different titles may be taken to satisfy the major requirement.

Creative Writing Concentration

The Creative Writing Concentration requires two courses in creative writing (only one of which is counted toward the major) and the writing of a senior thesis (399) composed of an original creative text and a rigorous critical introduction. Those interested in completing the Concentration as seniors must submit a portfolio of creative work to the department chair, Professor McGrane, by the Friday before Spring Break of their junior year (no extensions). The Departmental Concentration Committee will grant admission to students whose work suggests their readiness to generate a substantial literary project.

Haverford College English Department Course Offerings for Spring 2017

Laura McGrane, Chair COURSE NUMBER DIV. DISTR. COURSE NAME (Abbrev.)

SECTION NUMBER

CLASS HOURS LTD. ENROLL. INSTRUCTOR

CLASSROOM PREFERENCE

212b The Bible and Literature (IE) M/W 12:45-2:15 S. Finley

214b Literary Theory: The Human T/Th 2:30-4 B. Parris

216b In the American Strain: Music in Writing (1855–1975) T/Th 11:30-1 T. Devaney

232b Performance, Literature, Archive M 7:30-10 J. Pryor

258b The Novel (IE) T/Th 8:30-10 R. Mohan

261b American Literature 1865-1914 M/W 9-10:30 G. Stadler

277b Postcolonial Women Writers (GS/AA) T/Th 1-2:30 R. Mohan

292b Poetry Writing Workshop II F 1:30-4 T. Devaney

294b Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction W 1:30-4 A. Solomon Med. Room

299b Junior Seminar I I T/Th 10-11:30 L. McGrane

299j Junior Seminar II II T/Th 10-11:30 C. Zwarg

356b American Environment and Place T 7:30 – 10 S. Finley

361b Topics: New Black Arts Movement (AA) M 1:30-4 A. Solomon Med. Room

364b John Brown’s Body W 1:30-4 C. Zwarg

390b Celtic Fringe T/Th 1-2:30 M. McInerney HU 150L DS, BP, GS HU 399 CZ, BP, RM, SF, GS, DS, MM, AS, JP

IE Intro Emphasis CL Cross listed with Comp. Lit.

AA Africana GS Gender & Sexuality Studies

English 212b Stephen Finley M/W 12:45-2:15 HU II

The Bible and Literature

This course will offer students the opportunity to read widely among the literatures of the Bible, considering in their turn Biblical myth, legendary or patriarchal history, law, chronicle, psalm, love-song and dirge, prophecy, gospel, epistle, and apocalypse. While continuing to acknowledge the Bible as scripture, the course will study the Bible as narrative, as canon and form, and as a richly tropic and intertextual network, the encyclopedia of the figura. Although technical matters of general importance will be surveyed, we will attempt a reading of the Bible as a total form, as the darkly radiant text that permeates English and American literature. Our concern with the Bible as canon, as comprehensive form, will entail an effort to read the Biblical text for its figurative interconnectedness, remembering that the Septuagint (the Hebrew Bible in Greek) served as sacred archive, history, and scripture for the writers of the New Testament. The complex literary symmetry of the Christian Bible that resulted will be one of our recurrent topics of discussion, and our study of important and diverse Biblical genres, including ode, elegy, type-scene, parable, and sayings, will often require our reading forward and reading back between Hebrew scripture and Christian Bible. The Bible's intense and interior confirmation of its own reiterated structures, such as that of passover or ritual cleansing, generates its haunting power to conform its readers to itself. It has been often and even now remains a dangerous book (or books--the biblia). In addition to this study of the Bible, we will look throughout the term, as occasion allows or demands, at examples of the relationship between the literatures of the Bible and of English. The central feature of the course is an extremely diverse and wide-ranging collection of materials (via Moodle documents), one that draws from numerous traditional and contemporary (alternative) sources in order to illustrate the continued life of Biblical narrative and poetry. We will try to analyze the terms of the typical interchange between sacred and secular text, in works by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Vaughn, Traherne, Milton, Dryden, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ruskin, Newman, Patmore, Hopkins, Owen, T. S. Eliot, A. R. Ammons, W. S. Merwin, John Hollander, Denise Levertov, Alice Walker, Sharon Olds, Eleanor Wilner, Breece Pancake, and others. We will also note the richness of modern and contemporary Jewish and Israeli poetry, including Yehudi Amichai, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, Hayim Nachman Bialik, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Rose Drachler, Haim Guri, Linda Zisquit, Amir Gilboa, Rachel Korn, Leonard Cohen, and Robert Mezey. We will consider brief excerpts, as well, from Shulamith Hareven’s Desert Trilogy. We will touch from time to time the issue of Biblical translation, not least to hear the language of the Authorized Version (1611), which has so often sponsored those endless resonances and echoes in the literatures of English, and to collate traditional Christian readings with The Torah (Jewish Publication Society, 1962), and with other contemporary translations from the Hebrew, including Robert Alter’s edition of Genesis (1996) and David Rosenberg’s The Book of J (1990). Inevitably, the course will address what might be called deforming un/readings of the Bible, those pressured by fierce ideologies, whether political/national, sexual, and/or literal/fundamentalist. Throughout we will work to avoid the supercessionism with which Christian exegetes have colonized and concentrated the Hebrew tradition. We will find ourselves asking: can the Bible survive the claims of its ostensible defenders?

(See page 2 for Course Requirements and for a list of textual sources.) Course Requirements: Regular class attendance, two essays, one brief (2-3 pages) early in the term, and one longer (4-6 pages) toward term's close. A couple of short writing exercises (in class) during term, and a final, self-scheduled, comprehensive examination. There will also be at least one evening session of the course, “Biblical Pizza,” where we view a series of clips and shorts from the filmic history of biblical narrative in the 20th century. Texts The Oxford Annotated Bible, with the Apocrypha. ed. Revised Standard Version (Oxford UP, 1973). Literary Texts: Many of our readings among the poets will be part of a class-wide collection: we will build up an anthology of poems and chapters as the semester progresses. See the list of names given above. Our accompanying critical readings will contain parts from the following: Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981): "Biblical Type-Scenes and Uses of Convention," and "Composite Artistry," and "The Life of the Tradition" from his The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985). Jan Assman, “Mnemohistory and the Construction of Egypt,” from Moses the Egyptian (1997). Erich Auerbach, "Odysseus' Scar," from his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1953). The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (Oxford UP, 1986): Harold Bloom's "From J to K, or the Uncanniness of the Yahwist," and Herbert N. Schneidau's "Biblical Narrative and Modern Consciousness." A. C. Charity, Events and their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (Cambridge UP, 1966). C. Stephen Finley, Nature's Covenant: Figures of Landscape of Ruskin (Penn State Press, 1992): "The Typology of Atonement," pp. 227-39. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Harcourt Brace, 1982). Robert Grant and David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (1984). Stephen Greenblatt, "The Word of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," from his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (U of Chicago, 1980). Jon D. Levenson, Sinai & Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (HarperCollins, 1985). Emmanuel Levinas, “The Bible and the Greeks,” “Peace and Proximity,” and from interviews. The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Harvard UP, 1987). Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard UP, 1992). Barry Qualls, "The Word made novel," from his The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge UP, 1982). Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford UP, 1985) David Tracy, “Christian Witness and the Shoah,” from Holocaust Remembrance, ed. Geoffrey

Hartman (1994).

Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Fortress P, 1978). Ben Witherington III, Women and the Genesis of Christianity (Cambridge UP, 1990)

English 214b B. Parris T/Th 2:30-4 HU II

Literary Theory: The Human First and foremost, this course introduces students to literary theory through readings of philosophical, aesthetic and theoretical texts concerned with what literature is and how it works. Our readings will range from the classical tradition to the early modern period, and on to modern and contemporary approaches to recurrent concerns that herald the rise of “theory” as an interdisciplinary approach to the humanities and its modes of self-reflexive inquiry. The course is divided into three sections: Classical and Early Modern Thought; Post-Enlightenment World-as-Symptom; and Formalism, Structuralism and their Aftermaths. Through readings, lectures and discussions, students will gain an understanding of the historical development of literary study and its disciplinary formation, as well as an appreciation for ongoing conversations about the status of “theory” and its role in literary and other humanistic fields of inquiry. Over the course of the semester, a closely related topic that will help focus our investigation of these texts is their understanding of the human. Because philosophers, literary and cultural theorists concerned with literature are also ultimately concerned with its place in human life, their perspectives on literature entail certain assumptions, arguments, or claims about the human being – what it is, how it thinks, feels, speaks, reads, makes decisions and acts in ways that shape the course of its life and the lives of others. We’ll consider how various forms of power and influence, from structural economic relations to the unconscious to sexuality and gender, are felt in human life and show up in the stories we tell.

English 216b T. Devaney T/Th 11:30 – 1 HU II

In the American Strain: Music in Writing 1855-1975 This seminar is an investigation of music in American literature through close study of seminal texts. Walt Whitman was immersed in opera; Emily Dickinson was steeped in the hymnbook; Zora Neale Hurston in folksong; Amiri Baraka in the blues and bebop; John Cage in silence. We will explore how poetic music and ‘music’ diverge, but also look at the ways in which music and poetry have fed and inspired each other. What does Whitman mean when he says he hears “America singing”? What are the implications of “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else”? We will explore the roots of the lyric and the tradition of the single expressive speaker, as well as look how measure and musical effects are deployed and felt in poetry and prose. This course is an exploration of what Alice Notley calls “musical closework.” Charting the rich borderlands between music and speech we will reconsider Louis Zukofsky’s oft quoted formulation “Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.” We will pay close attention to how the breath and ear are used in the structuring of a poem as well as we explore how the breath-unit helps us experience the event of the text. Considering music and prosody we will investigate ideas around the variable foot and projective verse as each seeks to find its own measure or sound, poem-by-poem. Some questions include: What do we hear when we read? What is the relation of the body and the text? How do personal experiences of music inform how we listen/hear/interpret? In open-field poetry, how does the articulation of phraselike shapes help the reader to speak the poem? W.C. Williams provides one guide: “...the best of what the best of us write comes to us by way of the ear, is there a valid reason why it should not be studied and understood?”

English 232b J. Pryor M 7:30-10 HU II

Performance, Literature, and the Archive

Is literature an event or an archive? Are archives performances? Do performances leave a trace? How do we understand both literature and performance as citational (embedded in a history of representation) and performative (or making something happen in the present)? And what might we gain from thinking of history, literature, and performance as a set of interconnected practices—explicit, fugitive, iterative, transgressive, provocative, or banal—rather than as a set of meanings? This course examines the uses of performance theory for reading 19th, 20th, and 21st century American literature, performance art, and other modes of cultural production. We’ll draw from performance theory’s grappling with questions of embodiment, eventfulness, gesture, identity, presence, repetition, reproduction, script, and timing to ask what kind of relations these texts enact or make possible, and how they register but also transform the histories that haunt them. Particularly attention will be paid to the politics of identity--including race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship--with an explicit focus on the meaning of events and their aftereffects for marginalized subjects and among various cultures of trauma and resilience.

Selected Readings: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words Jacques Derrida, from Archive Fever Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” Peggy Phelan, from Unmarked: the Politics of Performance Diana Taylor, from The Archive and the Repertoire Rebecca Schneider, from Performing Remains Carolyn Steedman, from Dust: The Archive and Cultural History Ann Cvetkovich, from An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures Marvin Carlson, from The Haunted Stage: Theater as Memory Machine Avery Gordon, from Ghostly Matters Tavia N’yongo, “Race, Reenactment, and the ‘Natural-Born Citizen’” Gertrude Stein, from The Making of Americans and Three Lives Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light in Water Peggy Shaw, Must Helen Molesworth, from Work Ethic Requirements: Active class participation One in-class presentation Two field-trips and two 2-3 page performance analyses Three 3-5 page papers One 10 page final paper in stages: close reading, annotated bibliography, outline, draft

English 258b R. Mohan T/Th 8:30-10 HU II

The Novel

This course is a survey of the British novel in the twentieth century, during which the form increasingly became fraught with self-consciousness and irony. To an unprecedented extent, novelists themselves entered into skirmishes over questions such as: Should the novel describe the workings of historical reality or must it reveal the intricacies of the self and its inner life? Should the novel, like other arts, assiduously pursue the perfection of its technique and medium or must it abandon itself vitally to chance, fluidity, and hybridity, appropriating and incorporating all manner of ideas, expressive possibilities, and forms? Is representation ever objective or ideologically innocent? Are conventions such as “realism,” “character,” “plot” and “narrator” still meaningful or aesthetically interesting and how must they be redesigned to meet the demands of contemporary experience? What are the novel’s unique pleasures in a world overridden by narratives in visual media? We will explore the responses these questions have generated in novels, statements by novelists, and narrative theory. Likely Texts for the course: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902) James Joyce, Chapters 1 and 4 of Ulysses (1922) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955) Angela Carter The Passion of New Eve (1977) John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses (1988) Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001) Critical essays by Ian Watt, Virginia Woolf, Seymour Chatman, Eric Auerbach, Peter Brooks, Rosemary Jackson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Patricia Waugh, and Linda Hutcheon. Course Requirements: 4 short pieces of close reading (2-3 pages), 2 essays (5-7 pages), and a class presentation. This Course satisfies the Introductory Requirement for the English major has no pre-requisites.

ENGL 261b G. Stadler M/W 8:30-10

American Literature 1865-1914 In the late 19th century, questions about the nature of the "real" and its representation took on new currency. New technologies such as photography, telegraphy, motion pictures, and phonography made it possible to manipulate the world of the senses, and to make it possible to see and hear things in ways previously impossible. Emancipation and women's suffrage movements threatened to change long-standing, dominant ideas about the supposed reality of racial and gender hierarchies, but many fought these changes and worked hard to maintain the old status quo. The U. S. changed from a largely rural to a largely urban nation, bringing more people into closer contact with strangers, changing the ways time patterned their lives, and bringing them into contact with more mass-produced commodities than ever before. In this class we will look at the struggle to represent the "real" in the face of these transformations. We will look at the period's explicitly stated interest in "realism" and examine the dimensions of this category: what does "realistic" mean? whose reality are we talking about? is realism only about the visible? who gets portrayed as subjects and objects of vision? how did new media technologies shape literary versions of realism? Readings will include: Henry James, Daisy Miller Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus tales Charles Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine” and “Po’ Sandy” Stephen Crane, “Maggie,” "The Open Boat," "An Experiment in Misery" W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood Edwin S. Porter, selected films Frank Norris, McTeague Jacob Riis, “The Bend” and photographs from How the Other Half Lives William James, “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished” Edward Bellamy, “With the Eyes Shut” We will also read some pertinent literary and cultural criticism. Requirements: Attendance Class participation Regular posting on discussion board Four 4-6 page papers

English 277b R. Mohan T/Th 1-2:30 HU II

Postcolonial Women Writers

This course will focus on contemporary writings by women from a range of postcolonial societies, and examine the ways they intervene in, energize, and complicate the aesthetic and political discourses that shape the norms and hierarchies pertaining to gender and sexuality. In particular, we will explore the ways writers use diverse narrative traditions such as folklore, fable, historiography, and memoir--as well as, more recently, digital writing styles--to give voice to their particular historical, cultural, and political perspectives. We will also trace the play of irony, parody, and mimicry as writers figure their ambivalent positions as women, especially around issues of modernity, immigration, sexuality, religion, nationalism, globalization, development, and neoliberalism. Novels will be selected from the following: Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies (2015) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Americanah (2013) Tahmina Anam, The Good Muslim (2012) Kiran Desai, Inheritance of Loss (2006) Pettina Gappah, The Book of Memory (2015) Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016) Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004) Shani Mootoo, Valmiki’s Daughter (2010) Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2014) Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses (2005) Zadie Smith, NW (2012) Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us (2007) Short Stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (2008), Helen Oyemi’s What is Not Yours is Not Yours (2016) Poems from Juliane Okot Bitek’s 100 Days (2016), Mahtem Shiferraw’s Fuschia (2016) Critical essays by Leila Abu Lughod, Chimamanda Adichi, Elleke Boehmer, Hazel Carby, Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Higgonet, Maggie Humm, Chandra Mohanty, Fatima Mernissi, Raka Ray, Chela Sandoval, Gayatri Spivak Course Requirements: 2 short essays (5-7 pages), 1 long paper (10 -12 pages), a class presentation on contexts and backgrounds relevant to the texts we will be reading, and class participation.

English 292b T. Devaney F 1:30-4 HU II

AdvancedPoetryWritingII English 292-B01 is an advance creative writing workshop on poetry. The focus is on student work. The workshop involves both reading and writing poetry. Students will have the opportunity to expand their repertoire by modeling their pieces on the work of various poets including: Alicia Ostriker, Richard Hugo, Ocean Vuong, Morgan Parker, and Charles North. We will analyze selected poems by these artists to investigate issues of form, urgency, and lyricism to enhance our own work. Over the semester the class will work on a collaborative poetry project “Imaginative Interventions.” Muriel Rukeyser offers one path: "Always we need the audacity to speak for more freedom, more imagination, more poetry with all its meanings. As we go deeper into conflict, we shall find ourselves more constrained, the repressive codes will turn to iron. More and more we shall need to be free in our beliefs, as we to our forms." Requirements: Students will write two poems a week (using a modeling method) and respond to the selected readings. A final portfolio of revised work is required. The last third of the class will focus on revision and on the student portfolio. PLEASE NOTE: TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THIS COURSE YOU MUST SUBMIT THREE TO FOUR ORIGINAL POEMS TO The Haverford English Department Office (Woodside 100). Submissions should include contact information including email address. No electronic submissions. You will receive notice of whether you’ve been accepted to the class at the start of the spring semester. Course has a limited enrollment of 15 students.

English 294b A. Solomon W 1:30-4 HU II

Advanced Fiction Workshop

Students in the Advanced Fiction Workshop will not only continue to hone the basic elements of their fiction, including character development, dialogue, plot and prose style, but will focus much of their efforts on revision and the process of "finishing" a story. Other central themes of the course will be finding a form for the story you want to write and developing a distinctive voice. We will immerse ourselves in collections of short fiction, and work that lurks at the boundaries of novel and novella. Students in this course will read authors such as Edward P. Jones, Lorrie Moore, Junot Díaz, Danielle Evans, Amy Hemphill, Henry James and Gwendolyn Brooks with an eye toward reading as writers, but the centerpiece of course meeting will be a fiction workshop where we respond to student drafts. Students will be responsible for drafting two 10-12pp stories for workshop, and submitting revisions, as well completing a series of more informal exercises. This semester will include a masterclass by Elizabeth McCracken. Attendance is crucial to the health of creative writing workshops. Students who already have conflicts scheduled with two or more meetings should consider enrolling in another class.

This course has a limited enrollment of 15 students. You must submit a writing sample for consideration. Please submit a HARD COPY fiction sample of 5-12 pp to Prof. Solomon, labeled with your name, year, major, and previous college creative writing classes you have taken. To be considered for the class, you must submit this sample to the English Department office, Woodside 100, by the end of the pre-registration period.

English 390b M. McInerney T/Th 1 – 2:30 HU III

The Celtic Fringe: Contemporary Irish, Scottish and Welsh Poetry This course will begin with readings in the work of three monumental figures: W.B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas. These three poets, all associated with Modernism, cast long shadows across Ireland, Scotland and Wales that extend even into the twenty-first century. Successive generations of poets respond and react to these giants, even as all three of the Celtic “nations” move along different paths towards self-governance (independence in the Republic of Ireland, devolution in Scotland and Wales, the continuing resistance to British colonialism in Northern Ireland). We will explore the relationships between poetry and politics, the personal and the universal, history and myth-making in the works of English language poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Edwin Morgan, Carol Ann Duffy, R.S. Thomas, Gwyn Williams, and Gwyneth Lewis. While no knowledge of any language other than English is required for the course, we will listen to recordings of poems in Irish, Gaelic and Welsh, and read translations of work by some poets who choose to publish in those languages, or in the Scots dialect. The class will be conducted as a true seminar, with much of the responsibility for directing discussion falling on the students. The syllabus for the last section of the course, on truly contemporary writers, will be entirely determined by student research and interest. Texts: Patrick Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Blackstaff Press, 1996) Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah, The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Penguin 2007) Menna Elflyn and John Rowlands, The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe Press, 2003) The Collected Works of Dylan Thomas, ed. Paul Muldoon (New Directions, 2010) W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M.L. Rosenthal (Scribner, 1996) Supplemental required readings including poems by MacDiarmid will be available on Moodle. Requirements: Regular contributions to the class blog. One short (4-6 page) essay on Yeats, MacDiarmid or Thomas. One research project/oral presentation on some aspect of Celtic culture (i.e. Irish folk music; Welsh mythology; Scottish nationalist politics) Final Essay, 12-15 pages. Active Participation Pre-Requisites: Two courses at the 200 level, or permission of the instructor. *Enrollment is limited to 15 students.

English 356b S. Finley T 7:30-10 HU III

Studies in American Environment and Place

This course will examine the intersection of three principal areas of concern: 1) self-identity or person, as shaped and marked by dwelling in place; 2) how person and place express the cultural and national programs of the American 19th and 20th centuries; and 3) how all of these depend upon the resources of the material environment in which life is lived, whether sustainably, indeed, healthily, or not. This seminar gravitates toward American environmental history, and it canvasses urban and industrial as well as classically rural habitations. J. E. Malpas has described human life as “essentially a life of location”; he studies how places themselves become mysteriously “suffused with the ‘human'" (Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (1999). In remembering the past, we press upon history (one’s own as nested in a specific temporal horizon) in order to understand what has survived in or through a particular place, what has been endured, suffered, and lost. As the course progresses, we will also turn to questions about how the local or regional environment is always an expression of larger forces, even where it may serve as a protest or resistance to the erasure of its uniqueness, its organic and cultural inheritance. How do we preserve our home, our college landscape, in its relationship to its neighborhood, its local watercourses, flora and fauna, in the midst of ecological crisis and large-scale indifference to the landscape’s fragile inscape and material memory? Readings: Primary readings will be gathered from texts mostly American, from the 19th and 20th century. We will read widely in theoretical texts concerned with the cultural production of landscape, in the polemical literature of environmentalism, in landscape design and gardening (we may study closely one or two landscapes of the American Country Place era), in the art of the Hudson River Valley School and the “Illuminist” art of George Inness, and in American environmental history. Class texts: Thoreau, Walden, ed. Rossi (Norton Critical Ed., 3rd ed, 1997) William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983; 2003) Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It (Univ. of Chicago, 1976; 2001) Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial, 1974; 2007) Ammons, The Selected Poems, 1951-1977 (Norton, 1977), and other selections.

William Least Heat Moon, Prairyerth (Mariner Books, 1999) Barbara Babcock Millhouse, American Wilderness: The Story of the Hudson River School of Painting (2007) Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (Vintage 2003) Secondary readings will include Heidegger (“Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and “The Thing”), Pierre Nora (Les Lieux de Memoire), Hoskins (Making of the English Landscape), J. B. Jackson (A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time), John Elder (Reading the Mountains of Home), James Corner (“Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice”), Pierce Lewis (“Axioms for Reading the Landscape”), Meinig (Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes), Groth and Bressi (Understanding Ordinary Landscapes) McKibben (The End of Nature), Casey (Getting Back into Place), Malpas (as above), Vitek and Wes Jackson (Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place), Warren (American Environmental History), Sternberg (Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History), Worster (The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination), and Cronon, ed., (Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature). Film resources: Three films will be shown, at intervals, to accompany the course, from work by Mark Rydell, Peter Weir, Carol Ballard, Christopher Monger, and/or Jim Sheridan. Boots, as well as books: Members of the seminar will be encouraged (sometimes led) to walk, investigate, and observe local gardens and ordinary landscapes, in addition to the Magill Library Archive, which contains a wide collection--from nearly two centuries--of documents about our immediate locality. Class requirements: Two shorter writing exercises/responses (1-2 pages); two essays, one shorter (3-4 pages), one longer (4-5), and a final term essay or web project on place/environment studies, or place memoir (10-12 pages). Films will be put on reserve and the viewing of them will be required/strongly encouraged. Film segments or clips may be shared during the seminar hours.

English 361b A. Solomon M 1:30-4 HU III

The New Black Arts Movement: Expressive Culture after Nationalism

While the literature of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s occupies a

tenuous place in the academy (in comparison with, say, slave narratives or the Harlem Renaissance), its influence as an aesthetic and a political sensibility resonates forcefully in contemporary African American culture. This course will begin with an exploration of the literary achievements of BAM, and then move into contemporary literature, charting the influence of the era.

We will consider the following questions among others: do contemporary black artists think of themselves as participating in a nationalist movement of any kind? How are they portraying and theorizing African American identity? For whom do they write and with whom are they fighting? The requirements for this course will include three essays ranging from 5pp to 10pp and several brief informal writing assignments. *The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, vol. 2 for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange Fledgling, Octavia Butler The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates the new black, Evie Shockley Citizen, Claudia Rankine Skin Inc. (Identity Repair Poems), Thomas Sayers Ellis The Sellout, Paul Beatty To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar (buy or download entire album with access to album art)

*tentative reading list

English 363b Christina Zwarg W 1:30-4 HU III

Topics in American Literature: John Brown 's Body: Violence, National Fantasy, and Bodies that Matter

Martyr, fanatic, hero, revolutionary, terrorist, sage? Who was John Brown and what did he come to represent for our culture? When Harriet Jacobs informed Lydia Maria Child that she wished to close her slave narrative with a discussion of John Brown's famous raid on Harper's Ferry, Child strongly advised her against it. Fearful that he would be accused of assisting Brown, Frederick Douglass fled to Canada. So did the husband of Julia Ward Howe, Sam Gridley Howe, one of the "secret six" who backed Brown's cause. Despite their previous belief in the efficacy of civil disobedience, Emerson and Thoreau both gave lectures on Brown's behalf, and upon hearing of his execution, Victor Hugo wrote a long tribute to Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom. Douglass, William Wells Brown and Martin Delany praised Brown when the occasion allowed, sometimes connecting and comparing his actions to Nat Turner's slave rebellion. For others, the association with Turner and the violent course adopted by Brown elicited fears of anarchy and social disorder. And indeed, the path to a violent Civil War seemed to get shorter with each new expression of sympathy for a man some took to be a dangerous fanatic. This course will use the spectacular life and death of John Brown to examine a common set of interests in a diverse set of texts produced across two centuries. These interests include terrorism and the place of violence in the cause of liberty, the relationship of aesthetic value to changing social and political claims, the role of race and gender in the construction of emancipatory rhetoric, the role of that same rhetoric in the creation (or conservation) of a cultural and national sense of history, including the primary forgotten history of Haiti, as well as the terrorizing activity of lynching. We will look at the transformation of this story through a number of forms, including the essay, the short story, the novel, the public letter or lecture, the poem, and the song. Additional reading materials might include: Michel-Rolph Trouillot Silencing the Past W. E. B. Du Bois John Brown; selections from Black Reconstruction Jean Baudrillard The Spirit of Terrorism Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience and Other Essays Harriet Beecher Stowe Dred (selections on Nat Turner) Brian Massumi on dread Herman Melville Benito Cereno and Bartleby, the Scrivener Walter Benjamin, On Violence: Judith Butler on Benjamin William Faulkner Light in August Don DeLillo Mau II Pre-requisites: Two 200-level English courses or consent of the instructor. Cross -listed with African and Africana studies and Gender and Sexuality studies

*Class enrollment is limited to 15

English 390b M. McInerney T/Th 1 – 2:30 HU III

The Celtic Fringe: Contemporary Irish, Scottish and Welsh Poetry

This course will begin with readings in the work of three monumental figures: W.B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas. These three poets, all associated with Modernism, cast long shadows across Ireland, Scotland and Wales that extend even into the twenty-first century. Successive generations of poets respond and react to these giants, even as all three of the Celtic “nations” move along different paths towards self-governance (independence in the Republic of Ireland, devolution in Scotland and Wales, the continuing resistance to British colonialism in Northern Ireland). We will explore the relationships between poetry and politics, the personal and the universal, history and myth-making in the works of English language poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Edwin Morgan, Carol Ann Duffy, R.S. Thomas, Gwyn Williams, and Gwyneth Lewis. While no knowledge of any language other than English is required for the course, we will listen to recordings of poems in Irish, Gaelic and Welsh, and read translations of work by some poets who choose to publish in those languages, or in the Scots dialect. The class will be conducted as a true seminar, with much of the responsibility for directing discussion falling on the students. The syllabus for the last section of the course, on truly contemporary writers, will be entirely determined by student research and interest. Texts: Patrick Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Blackstaff Press, 1996) Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah, The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Penguin 2007) Menna Elflyn and John Rowlands, The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe Press, 2003) The Collected Works of Dylan Thomas, ed. Paul Muldoon (New Directions, 2010) W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M.L. Rosenthal (Scribner, 1996) Supplemental required readings including poems by MacDiarmid will be available on Moodle. Requirements: Regular contributions to the class blog. One short (4-6 page) essay on Yeats, MacDiarmid or Thomas. One research project/oral presentation on some aspect of Celtic culture (i.e. Irish folk music; Welsh mythology; Scottish nationalist politics) Final Essay, 12-15 pages. Active Participation Pre-Requisites: Two courses at the 200 level, or permission of the instructor. *Enrollment is limited to 15 students.