Oh my Lord, the class schedule is up and there are so many classes I want to take...
These are just a few...
English 141
Section: 2
Title: Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.): “’Race,’ [Creative] Writing, and Difference”
Instructor: Giscombe, Cecil
Time: TTh 12:30-2
Location: 110 Wheeler
Book list: See below.
Course Description: This course is an inquiry into the ways that race is constructed in literary texts and a look-by-doing at our own practices as people engaged in creative writing.
The purpose of writing in this course is, broadly stated, to engage public language on one hand and personal (meaning specific) observations and experiences on the other. The purpose of writing is not to come up with answers to the truly vexing problems of racism and economic and political disparity. The purpose here is to pursue consciousness. How one refers to race (one’s own as well as the races of others) is of paramount importance; the fact that there are ways in which American cultural institutions typically quantify and refer to race is of at least equal importance.
The writing vehicle will be, for the greatest part, the personal essay. It’s a peculiar form related to fiction and to autobiography and to poetry. We’ll likely read Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Audre Lorde’s Zami; we’ll read essays and stories by James Baldwin, Tess Schlesinger, Richard Ford, Jean Toomer. We’ll lean on Philip Lopate’s Art of the Personal Essay.
Writing assignments will broad; that is, they will allow for a variety of responses.
English 165
Section: 2
Title: Special Topics: Narrating Absence: Not-Knowing in Literary Analysis
Instructor: Clowes, Erika
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 103 Wheeler
Book list: Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land; Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man; Faulkner, W.: Sanctuary; James, H.: The Turn of the Screw; Course Reader, including Freud’s essay on fetishism, excerpts from Muller and Richardson’s The Purloined Poe, Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters,” & D. F. Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”
Films: Coppola, F.F.: The Conversation (1974); Hitchcock, A.: The Birds (1963)
Course Description: Critical reading usually involves reading “between the lines” of a literary text, picking up on the implications of its manifest content. In this course, however, we will focus on reading what is altogether missing: for example, the lack of a coherent narrator in Eliot’s Waste Land; the act of waiting for someone who never comes in Beckett’s Godot; or the literally unspeakable horror represented by birds in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Though the assigned texts come from several time periods, one of the primary goals of the course will be to understand why the explicit inclusion of ellipses and “unrepresentable” ideas is most characteristic of modernism. Does the nameless or “undomesticated” element serve to subvert the dominant culture, or, conversely, to define it? Do blank spaces unsettle narratives, or provide a harmonious “negative space”? How do they function in concert with other experimental techniques, such as stream-of-consciousness narration and fragmentation, from which seemingly nothing is excluded? Finally, we will consider the relationship of narrative absences to paranoia—both the characters’ and our own—as we attempt to impose meaning upon these non-signifying spaces.
English 166
Section: 4
Title: Special Topics: Literary and Cinematic Cities
Instructor: Edwards, Erin
Time: TTh 2-3:30
Location: 122 Wheeler
Book list: Breton, A.: Nadja; Calvino, I.: Invisible Cities; Ellison, R.: Invisible Man; Joyce, J.: Dubliners; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; Woolf, V.: Mrs. Dalloway
Films: Metropolis (1927); Rear Window (1954); Blade Runner (1982)
Course Description: This course examines representations of the city in twentieth-century literature and film, asking how urban experience shapes modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. The course will examine the material conditions and demands of the city, but it will also consider the city as, in Italo Calvino’s terms, “made of desires and fears,” as complex, unstable sites of community and alienation, novel enticements and novel anxieties. In Invisible Cities, Calvino writes:
With cities it is as with dreams; everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
Calvino suggests that the city, like a text, is a kind of representational riddle that invites interpretation or decoding. We will thus consider the way in which urban experience produces a particular kind of subject who must interpret the city’s palimpsistic layers and create his or her place within its perspectival vicissitudes. Our texts take us into particular cities—Paris, London, Dublin, New York, and San Francisco—but the course is also, more generally, a consideration of the way in which one’s relation to and experience of place shape subjectivity.
English 180H
Section: 1
Title: Short Story
Instructor: Chandra, Vikram
Time: MW 4-5:30
Location: 126 Barrows
Book list: Reader
Course Description:
“The lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne…”
-- Chaucer
This course will investigate how authors craft stories, so that both non-writers and writers may gain a new perspective on reading stories. In thinking of short stories as artifacts produced by humans, we will consider – without any assertions of certainty – how those people may have experienced themselves and their world, and how history and culture may have participated in the making of these stories. So, in this course we will explore the making, purposes, and pleasures of the short story form. We will read – widely, actively and carefully – many published stories from various countries in order to begin to understand the conventions of the form, and how this form may function in diverse cultures. Students will write a short story and revise it; engaging with a short story as a writer will aid them in their investigations as readers and critics. Students will also write two analytical papers about stories we read in class. Attendance is mandatory.
English 180Z
Section: 1
Title: Science Fiction: Speculative Fiction and Dystopias
Instructor: Jones, Donna
Time: MWF 11-12
Location: 166 Barrows
Book list: Hoffman, E.T.A: The Sandman; Adam, Villiers de l’Isle: The Future Eve; Wells, H.G.: The Island of Doctor Moreau; Capek, Karel: R.U.R; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; James, P.D.: Children of Men; Mielville, China: Perdido Street Station; Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep; Thacker, Eugene: The Global Genome; Moylan, Tom: Scraps of the Untainted Sky; Jameson, Frederic: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions; Otis, Lisa: Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science and Politics
Films: Soylent Green (1973); Bladerunner (1981); Gattaca (1997); Children of Men (2006)
Course Description: This course will examine in depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the thematics and topoi of the new life sciences—representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life-forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How does literature’s encounter with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subject? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered, a subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material and technological mediation lie the construction of a flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of ‘being’, a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, then how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course. You may of course bring others.
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