SPRING 2003
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
ENGLISH 12R: COMEDY CULTURA: CHICANA/O AUTOBIOGRAPHY. This course is an introduction to the genre of Chicano/a autobiography. The purpose of the course is to teach the students different techniques for liberating and exploring the self-styled discursive voice and for using personal experience and family history as the source for imagination and creative production.
The focus of this course is to investigate humor within the context of cultural identity, autobiography, performance and storytelling. In the first half of this course, we will examine and discuss influential Latino/a writers and performers who use humor as their vehicles: Marga Gomez, Latins Anonymous, Monica Palacios (yours truly), Michele Serros and Jose Antonio Burciaga. Using these writers and performance artists as inspiration, students will then focus in the second half of the quarter on creating, shaping and critiquing their personal stories.
The weekly writing assignments which will be kept in a journal, will allow the writer/student to explore a humorous life adventure unique to your cultural identity. This empowering exploration of personal truth, will be developed, processed and shaped into a 15 page humorous chapter of your personal life story. A 10 minute selection from this chapter will be read to a small audience at the end of the course as the "final exam." Students have the option of incorporating performance elements into their presentation if desired. Ms. Palacios. TR 11:10-12:30.
ENGLISH 23C: LITERARY TRADITIONS. A journey through major works of British Literature, beginning with the romantic poets and essayists of the late eighteenth century and concluding with late Victorian writers such as Algernon Swinburne and Thomas Hardy. We will read poetry, non-fiction prose, a great Victorian novel (Charles Dickens' Hard Times ), and Oscar Wilde's delightful comic drama, The Importance of Being Earnest . Lectures will concentrate on close readings of individual texts placed within the social and political contexts of their time. Examinations and essays to be announced at the first class meeting. Class texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature , vol. 2, 7 th edition; Dickens, Hard Times .
Mr. Essick. LECTURE: TR 8:10-9:30. DISCUSSION: T 11:10-12:00, M 9:10-10:00, T 10:10-11:00, R 10:10-11:00, R 12:10-1:00, R 1:10-2:00.
ENGLISH 32: 20th CENTURY LITERATURE. This class will consider some of the many and varied forms literature took in a century marked by rapid and often violent change. From Charlie Chaplin to Virginia Woolf to Ralph Ellison, from the trenches of France to Harlem to Nagasaki, we will consider the claims of realism and fantasy, sur-realism and testimony in modernism and postmodernism. In class writing, midterm, final and two papers.
Ms. Kinney. LECTURE: MWF 11:10-12:00. DISCUSSION: M 8:10-9:00, M 10:10-11:00, M 1:10-2:00, W 12:10-1:00, R 7:10-8:00, W 8:10-9:00.
ENGLISH 102-01: INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL METHODS. An introduction to various critical models in literary studies. We examine a series of texts from multiple genres from King Lear to "Civil Disobedience;" from Melville to Silko; and including Dickinson and Jonas Very. There will be a few writing assignments, oral presentations, and other general good fun.
Mr. Cohen. MWF 2:10-3:00.
ENGLISH 102-02: INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL METHODS. What is a sonnet? What is a poetical line and how is it made? What is scansion? How do we read various forms of poetry? What makes poetical language reverberate in our memory? What is dramatic form? What is fiction? Why should literature be composed, read, performed, and taught? What makes literature valuable? What have been the most intriguing answers to these questions over the past five hundred years? Do poets and writers give us some answers to these questions? Do critics and theorists know more about these issues than poets and writers? Do they know more now than they used to?
If you are interested in exploring such questions, join us for a discussion of form, theory, and criticism with regard to poetry, drama, and the novel. We will read dozens of fascinating short poems, The Tempest , and Jane Austen's novel Persuasion as well as many critical and theoretical writings. (For the latter purpose, we will Charles Kaplan's collection called Criticism: Major Statements .) As true poetical scientists of the subject, we will also experiment with making tiny samples of literature, theory, and criticism on our own. There will be several papers and a final exam (half of that exam being a "take-home" assignment).
Mr. Briggs. TR 9:40-11:00.
ENGLISH 103: ADVANCED COMPOSITION. Principles of expository prose, with intensive practice. Advanced course in composition, not remedial.
Ms. Tuell. MWF 12:10-1:00.
ENGLISH 112: HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. This course surveys the development of the English language from its Indo-European roots to contemporary North America, Australia, and Britain. In order to understand the development of English, we will begin with some basic concepts of structuralist linguistics, such as the theory of the phoneme. In addition to linguistic change, we will look at historical developments which had a decisive effect on the language, like the Viking invasions and the North Atlantic slave trade. As a side-line, students will sample Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, and find out just how many common expressions come from Shakespeare. Finally, we will examine the current role of English as an international second language.
Expect weekly quizzes, brief videos, a term-paper, and opportunities for extra credit.
Ms. Elder. TR 3:40-5:00.
ENGLISH 117B: SHAKESPEARE. This course aims at intensive examination of Shakespeare's "Comedies," with special attention to the "problem comedies," as well as to examples of "romantic comedy" and "farce," including The Taming of the Shrew , Love's Labour's Lost , As You Like It , The Merchant of Venice , and Measure for Measure . The student's grade will be based on quizzes, a midterm, and a final examination. The text for the course is:
The Riverside Shakespeare . Ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin [any edition].
Mr. Stewart. TR 9:40-11:00.
ENGLISH 122: OSCAR WILDE. This course consists of a close reading of most of Wilde's major prose, poetry and drama. Our critical focus will be on the ways in which Wilde's canon participates in scientific and anthropological debates about human sexuality which emerged at the end of the 19th century. Class requirements will include two essays and two examinations. Class attendance is required.
Mr. Bredbeck. TR 3:40-5:00.
ENGLISH 127A: AMERICAN POETRY. We shall read and discuss a selection of great American poems, representing the amazing cultural and regional diversity of our country. From the colonial period, we shall read Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Phillis Wheatley. From the nineteenth century, we shall focus on two poetic giants: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. We shall also read such poets as Ina Coolbrith, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances Harper, Sadakichi Hartmann, Lydia Kamakaeha, and Edgar Allan Poe. We shall also look at anonymous Native-American, Asian-American, and Chicana/o poems. There will be two short papers, a midterm, and a final exam. Required text: The New Anthology of American Poetry , edited by Axelrod, Roman, and Travisano.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
-Walt Whitman
I dwell in Possibility-
A fairer House than Prose-
More numerous of windows-
Superior-for Doors-
-Emily Dickinson
Mr. Axelrod. MWF 1:10-2:00.
ENGLISH 128G: MAJOR AUTHORS. MILTON. This course will be given over to study of the major prose and poetry of John Milton, beginning with his venture into the political controversies of his time, proceeding to the more important of his early writing, and concluding with Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes . The student's grade will be based on quizzes, a midterm, and a final examination. The assigned text will be The Riverside Milton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1998).
Mr. Stewart. TR 2:10-3:30.
ENGLISH 128I: MAJOR AUTHORS. SWIFT. "On what poor engines move / The thoughts of monarchs, and designs of states. / What pretty motives rule their fates! / How the mouse makes the mighty mountain shake!
We will be reading and discussing a large selection of works by the 18th - century Anglo-Irish writer, Jonathan Swift, arguably the greatest satirist the English language has produced. We will be situating his best-known works ( A Modest Proposal, Gulliver's Travels ) within the larger context of his entire canon - which includes political and economic tracts, sermons, and prose and verse satires on a wide variety of contemporary follies - and within the framework of the colonial relationship between England and Ireland, about which Swift had many brilliantly scathing, darkly comic, and disturbingly relevant things to say. Areas of particular concern for us will include popular satire and culture (both in England and Ireland); print technologies; literary and political censorship; 18th -century Dublin (Swift's birthplace and primary residence); the growth of capitalism and what one historian calls the "fiscal-military state" after the 'Glorious Revolution' ; the emergence of Britain as an imperial world power; and the different constructions of "authorship" during Swift's lifetime.
Ms. Fabricant. MW 5:10-6:30.
ENGLISH 128O: MAJORS AUTHORS. MELVILLE. The man, the myth, and my obsession. We will start with A Peep at Polynesian Life, spend six hundred and some pages chasing a great white whale, and after a few stops in between with a chameleon con-man in search of a little confidence. There will be two papers, weekly notes, and with some help from friends, a reading of a musical version of The Confidence-Man.
Mr. Cohen. MWF 12:10-1:00.
ENGLISH 128S: MAJOR AUTHORS. JOYCE. Joyce's controversial modernist masterpiece, Ulysses , will be examined in this course as a psychological epic of human drives, desires, and sexualities; as a historical epic of a city and its complex cultural/historical heritage; as a stylistic epic of relentless formal experimentation; and as a revisionary Homeric epic of wandering and return. The emphasis will be on close readings of Ulysses itself, Joyce's use of mythic substructures, and the larger question of the modernist epic's relationship to the classical one, The Odyssey . What attracted Joyce to "revise" this ancient yet perduring story? How are the two texts similar and yet very different? What ideological structures reflected in the epics have remained intact over the centuries? Which have disappeared, changed, or been superseded by others? Required texts are Ulysses (preferably the 1986 corrected edition) and The Odyssey (preferably Samuel Butler's translation--one which Joyce himself used--available as a coursepack at Printing and Reprographics). Optional texts are Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book and Don Gifford's "Ulysses" Annotated . This course is designed for English majors, but it is open to students in any field who--when its comes to reading--have Odysseus's perserverance, patience, and sense of adventure.
Ms. Devlin. MWF 11:10-12:00.
ENGLISH 130: COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS. "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." School children memorize these lines as well as participate in the rituals of Thanksgiving, but little attention is paid to the discursive realm of early colonial contact in the "New World." This course is designed to acquaint students with a range of responses to contact with the "Other" from 1492 to the early 19th century in what is now known as Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. We will question and think critically about the ways in which Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, Europeans, and European Americans encountered each other through reading literature. The purpose of the course is to understand how individuals from various spiritual, cultural, linguistic, and social backgrounds negotiated difference in what became known as the "New World." In addition, we will be examining these texts and contexts in relation to the narratives of science fiction and ethnographic film in order to see how earlier encounters shape our vision of future contact with "Others."
Ms. Raheja. MWF 10:10-11:00.
ENGLISH 134: AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1945. In this class we will study American postmodernism as both a literary style and a response to the terrible historical realities of modern life after WWII, especially the atomic bomb and the Cold War. If you have wondered what postmodernism is, or why it is the way it is, this is the class for you. Weekly informal assignments, midterm and final exams, and a 10 pp. paper.
Ms. Kinney. MWF 9:10-10:00.
ENGLISH 136T: U.S. LATINA/O DRAMA AND PERFORMANCE. This course looks at contemporary Latina/o dramatists and their theatrical explorations of the role violence plays in shaping Latina/o identity. Some of the questions that drive the course: In what ways do dramatists script individual bodies in an effort to define ( or redefine) a larger social body? When do the issues of race, class, gender and sexuality most challenge the vision of a unified Latina/o identity? How does a focus on violence complicate thinking about identity and community? Dramatists that we will discuss include: Cherrie Moraga, Luis Alfaro, Migdalia Cruz, Monica Palacios, Josefina Lopez,
Maria Irene Fornes, Culture Clash, and John Leguizamo. Students will be required to attend at least one play from the spring Super Teatro series at the Mark Taper Forum : John Leguizamo's Sexaholic , Culture Clash's Chavez Ravine , or Luis Alfaro's Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner . The series runs March 11 - July 6. Please log on to the website ( http://www.TaperAhmanson.com) and purchase tickets in advance. Students may purchase a pass for all three for $77 (T/W/Th eves). Professor is working to arrange performances that include post-play discussion with the actors and directors.
Course Requirements:
reading quizzes, two short papers, midterm, and a group final that consists of performed scenes from the plays we'll be reading.
Books will be at The Hispanic Bookcase, 1345 Univ. Ave. (951/682.0049), the reader at Vision Copy (951/686.2679).
Ms. Lopez. TR 10:40-12:00.
ENGLISH 140J: "KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN: READING NATIVE AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOL NARRATIVES. The policy of forcibly educating Native American children in boarding schools in the United States and Canada in order to assimilate indigenous subjects into the national body politic began during the early colonial period and reached its zenith in the 19th century with the founding of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. This course examines a selection of autobiographical narratives written by students enrolled in these schools with attention to the ways in which personal narrative is crafted under conditions of physical, emotional, and spiritual violence. Alongside autobiographical texts, we will focus on theories of autobiographical practice as well as the historiography of Native American education.
Texts examined will include: Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940; The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe; Viola Martinez:
California Paiute; and They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School as well as a number of films and photographic collections documenting the boarding school experience.
Ms. Raheja. MWF 1:10-2:00.
ENGLISH 144I: RACIAL DIFFERENCE AND VISUAL CULTURE IN THE POST -COLONIAL WORLD. How are filmmakers and other visual artists seeing the world "with other eyes" in the contexts of post-coloniality, transnational corporatization, and militarization? What changes in our understanding of racial and ethnic categories, in where we look for historical "events," and in what we expect from an "aesthetic" experience are being worked out in terms of different localities and socio-political pressures as well as in relation to the homogenizing forces of commercial globalization?
We will see artists approaching a range of thematic issues, while also working in formal ways to challenge and change our ways of seeing. Reaching out to heterogenous audiences, these works construct complex figures of subjectivity (including gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity), time /space, agency, and history. In doing so, they give us a multi-dimensional lens through which to apprehend many of today's most pressing issues.
Some of the filmmakers and visual artists we may consider are Tony Bui, Trinh-T. Minh-ha, Cheryl Dunye, Spike Lee, the "Ghetto Art" collective, Emir Kusterica, Lourdes Portillo, Yarelli Arizmendi, Aida Mancillas , Victor Masvayesva, Shashwati Talukdar, and Salem Mekuria.
Ms. Waller. LEC: MWF 1:10-2:00; SCR: W 5:10-8:00.
ENGLISH 144K: DECOLONIZING THE SCREEN. The course will focus on race and ethnicity in visual culture, primarily film, with special attention to the critique of dominant representations of racial and ethnic difference. We will consider some of the issues of greatest concern to critics, scholars, and filmmakers who have explored race and ethnicity in their work: positive and negative images, stereotypes and realism, ethnography and the social construction of racial identity, racialized voyeurism and fetishism, anti-racist visual aesthetics, colonialism and visual media, passing and mimicry, whiteness as a racialized category. Authors to be read include Mercer, Stam and Spence, Snead hooks, Trinh, Piper, Heung, Hall, and Jameson, as well as others. Among the films to be screened are Born in East LA, King Kong, Perfumed Nightmare, Reassemblage, Illusions, Imitation of Life, The Jazz Singer, Tongues Untied, Aletheia, Hairpiece, and Xala, among others.
Ms. Tyler. LEC: TR 11:10-12:30; SCR: R 7:10-10:00.
ENGLISH 148Q: MAJOR AUTHORS. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. A course on the plays, poetry, and life of Christopher Marlowe. We will take a close look at Marlowe's plays in the context of Elizabethan theater and cultural traditions, considering such issues as theatricality and power, identity and transgression, sexuality and the body, exoticism and the familiar. In addition, we will consider Marlowe's afterlife in criticism, biography, and film, and probe the cultural significance of the Marlowe 'myth' in his own time and ours. Celebrated as a precocious and ground-breaking playwright, Marlowe was also vilified as a spy, a sodomite, and an atheist. Come discover what all the fuss was about. The reading list will include Dr. Faustus, Edward II, Tamburlaine, Parts I & II, and Hero and Leander, among other works.
Ms. Willis. TR 2:10-3:30.
ENGLISH 151A: MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 1066-1500. Gender, power and religion in the high and late Middle Ages. Courtly love and heresy; Mystics and mysticism; The Holy Grail; Mystery Plays; female saints (and male devils); Female recluses and hermits. Requirements: 1 report presentation; midterm and endterm exams; 10 page term paper.
Mr. Ganim. TR 12:40-2:00.
ENGLISH 166T: CONFIGURATIONS OF FEMALE IDENTITY IN BRITISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE. A study of Romantic period texts, mostly written by women, in which females attempt to construct their personal identities and roles in life within the context of the social and historical restraints imposed upon them. We will begin with the first, great classic of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , and William Blake's poetic response to it, Visions of the Daughters of Albion . By way of contrast, we will examine William Wordsworth's masterpiece of masculine self-fashioning, "Tintern Abbey." Women's poetry, and a brief look at pictorial representations of women, will be our focus during the middle parts of the course. We will conclude with Charlotte Brontë's novel of female self-discovery, Jane Eyre . Class lectures and discussions will focus on the close reading of specific texts with an emphasis on the major theme of the course. Assignments: mid-term quiz, term paper, final exam. Class texts: the works by Wollstonecraft, Blake, and Brontë noted above; Women Romantic Poets 1785-1832 , ed. Breen.
Mr. Essick. TR 11:10-12:30.
ENGLISH 172T: VICTORIAN MONSTERS. The Victorians were immersed in change of all sorts--intellectual, social, and political. And despite what seemed the inevitability of "progress" during the era, many were concerned both with change that was too rapid and uncontrolled and with the failure to change quickly enough. In this class we will be examining the literary and social representations of some of those reactions to change. From early works by people like Chadwick, Mayhew, and the investigators of the sensational "Andover Scandal," which raised visions of necrophagy and cannibalism, to the works at the end of the century by authors like Conan Doyle, Stoker, and Wilde, we will be examining the ways that Victorian fears were represented, often personified, as "monsters." Class, sexuality, desire, the "other," crime, insanity and other Victorian Monsters will be discussed. Readings will include novels, social prose, poetry, journalism, drama from the period as well as selected critical and theoretical works. Midterm, final, paper.
Mr. Childers. TR 12:40-2:00.
ENGLISH 176T: IMAGINARY EMPIRES: WOOLF, HEMINGWAY, FORSTER. This course will consist of intensive close reading of three major novels of British and American modernism, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse , Ernest Hemingway's The Son Also Rises , and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India . We will examine ways in which these texts explicitly and implicitly grapple with knowledge revealed by the cross-cultural conflicts of both Indian nationalist resistance to British colonization and World War I.
The critical focus of the course will be on developing advanced close-reading skills and critical argumentation, especially use of textual proof. Class requirements will include three essays and several quizzes. Class attendance is required.
Mr. Bredbeck. TR 12:40-2:00.
GRADUATE COURSES
ENGLISH 260: MEDIEVAL LITERATURE . THE OCCULT HISTORY OF BRITAIN. A study of the obsession with the legendary origins of British culture from the twelfth through the early eighteenth century and beyond. Literary reflections of such theories of British origin as the fall of Troy and Trojan emigration to Britain; Giants led by Hercules; Gog and Magog; the legend of the Holy Grail and its relation to the separate lineage of British Christianity; the ancient settlement of Britain by the Phoenicians; the linkage of the Druids with the secret knowledges of the Egyptian and Pythagorean mysteries. How myths of origins become central the genre of romance. How these myths are inflected in Malory's Morte D'Arthur , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, Spenser's Faerie Queene , Scottish and Welsh revivals, eighteenth century antiquarianism, nineteenth and twentieth century racial constructs.
NOTE TO PARTICIPANTS: It would help to read the Penguin paperback edition of the translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain before the first class.
Mr. Ganim. W 2:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 262: RENAISSANCE LITERATURE. A course on the plays, poetry, and life of Christopher Marlowe. We will take a close look at Marlowe's plays in the context of Elizabethan theater and cultural traditions, considering such issues as theatricality and power, sexuality and the body, authorship and identity, exoticism and the familiar. We will also consider Marlowe's afterlife in contemporary criticism, biography, performance, and film, and probe the cultural significance of the Marlowe 'myth' in our own time. Close attention will also be paid to Marlowe's complex relationship with magic and religion and the legacy of the Faust legend. Students will have considerable latitude in selecting and designing their own research projects.
Reading list will include (but not necessarily be limited to):
Marlowe, C. Tamburlaine, Parts I and II.
--------. Doctor Faustus.
--------. The Jew of Malta.
--------. Edward II.
--------. Dido Queen of Carthage.
--------. Hero and Leander and other poems.
Photocopied Reader of critical essays and documents.
Ms. Willis. R 6:40-9:30.
ENGLISH 270: 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL FICTION. This seminar will explore questions regarding modern and postmodern fiction. The purposes of the course are to examine the development of the form of the novel and of narrative methods and aesthetics developed during the twentieth century and, in the process, to challenge and define the terms "modern" and "postmodern" in relation to the novel. We will also critique many of the theories and critical approaches that have been formulated to explain and examine these subjects and texts. As usual, I will also be interested in the relations between the texts and the social, political, religious, cultural, and historical contexts, especially of the United States, which appear to have influenced or permeated the works in some ways. One contextual thread that will run though the course will be the continuities or lack of them between writing in the United States in the twentieth century and the ideas and expression of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To what degree can we still perceive the Puritan and Enlightenment traditions present in our writing. The course will also look at connections between our primary texts and the ways in which issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class have been studied in relation to contemporary literature.
Week I. (Apr. 3) Introduction and discussion of materials that I will have put in the mailboxes of seminar members.
Week II. (Apr. 10) Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Week III. (Apr. 17) O'Connor, Wise Blood
Week IV. (Apr. 24) Percy, The Moviegoer
Week V. (May 1) Hawkes, Death, Sleep, and the Traveler
Week VI (May 8) Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Week VII. (May 15 Delillo, Mao II
Week VIII.(May 22) Morrison, Jazz
Week IX. (May 29) Silko, Garden of the Dunes
Week X. (June 5) Completion of student reports and general conclusion
Mr. Elliott. R 2:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 276: COLONIAL & POSTCOLONIAL STUDY. "The narrow basis of realism, as an art that mirrors common-sense day or pigmented identity, tends inevitably to polarise cultures or to reinforce eclipses of otherness within legacies of conquest that rule the world. In so doing it also voids a capacity for the true marriage of like to like within a multi-cultural universe." -Wilson Harris
In this seminar we'll be exploring some important aspects of postcolonial theory with particular reference to Ireland and the Caribbean, and considering their implications for various political, philosophic, and aesthetic issues. Topics for discussion will include race, identity, diasporic communities, tourism, 'creolization,' carnival, and pertinent aspects of globalization. Special attention will be paid to problems of representation in literature, especially debates over the efficacy or failure of realism to help achieve liberatory ends within postcolonial society, and the use of alternative linguistic or generic registers (myth, 'magical' or 'marvelous' realism, etc.) to overcome realism's perceived limitations. In order to appreciate the diverseness of postcolonial cultures and at the same time understand the similarities they share, we'll be reading a selection of 20th-century literary and critical texts by both Caribbean and Irish writers.
Ms. Fabricant. T 6:10-9:00.
ENGLISH 278: MINORITY DISCOURSE .
The Problematics and Possibilities of Pleasure:
Asian/American Bodies, Aesthetics and Spectacles
This course will examine the Asian/American body as a site at which questions of pleasure and politics are particularly fraught. Given the ways in which the Asian body in the Americas has been classed and classified - as one that labors in the fields or sweatshops, transgresses geopolitical borders, enacts hyperbolized straight femininity, epitomizes denigrated queer masculinity and/or inhabits an interstitial (and invisible) space between black and white - how do Asian/American subjects themselves claim and experience their embodiment? Further, how does the category of the aesthetic - understood broadly - function as an avenue for agentive possibility?
Those who are planning to focus in Minority Discourses, feminist theory, race studies and nation studies will find this seminar relevant for thinking through pleasure as a category for theorizing the subject. Readings will include excerpts from Foucault ( The Uses of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality ) , Freud ( Beyond the Pleasure Principle ), Gary Fisher ( Gary in Your Pocket ), Guy deBord ( La société du spectacle ), Ladelle McWhorter ( Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization ) and Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection .
Possible texts (please check the listserve for a firm list)
- Joy Kogawa, Obasan
- Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Blu's Hanging
- Frank Chin, "The Chickencoop Chinaman"
- David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
- Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories
- Justin Chin, Bite Hard
- Evelyn Lau, Fresh Girls
- Mei Ng, Eating Chinese Food Naked
- David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America
- Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief
- Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage
- Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
Ms. Yamamoto . W 2:10-5:00.
ENGLISH 279: RHETORICAL STUDIES. This seminar will examine the rich and varied field of Literacy Studies. When we think of literacy, we typically think of reading and writing as simple, technical skills. But the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition defines literacy in much broader terms as "the ways that individual acts of writing are connected to larger cultural, historical, and social and political systems." We will begin our examination of literacy by critically examining traditional "great divide" theories that assume literacy, in contrast to orality, fosters higher-order thinking. To counter these theories, we will read ethnographic research such as Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words , a study comparing children's language development in white and black Southern working-class communities; Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and The Tools, a study of the sophisticated oral and literate rhetorical strategies used by a group of African Americans in a Northeastern city to negotiate with people in positions of power; and Marcia Farr's " En Los Dos Idiomas : Literacy Practices Among Chicago Mexicans," a study of ways reading and writing are learned lírico , outside of school. We will also read autoethnographies such as Victor Villanueva's Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color , that retells and, at the same time, problematizes the story of the American Dream; and Keith Gilyard's Voices of the Self , that explores the intersections of "survival, race consciousness, and communicative skill" from the perspective of an African American linguist. We will conclude with a book that combines autoethnography and ethnography to study academic literacy, Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared . Class responsibilities will include active participation, oral reports, and the writing of an ethnography, autoethnography, or a more conventional research paper.
Ms. Axelrod. T 5:10-8:00.