WINTER 2003

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

ENGLISH 23B: ENGLISH LITERARY TRADITION. In this course we will consider works that explore the origins of domestic ideology, the family, and the home; we will also look at the conflict between different worlds and world views at the moment when the world itself was changing because of exploration, trade, and colonization. There will be all sorts of marginal characters-fops, libertines, women, slaves and adolescents. We will examine their modes of "resistance" and whether or not they could overcome the cultural forces working against them.

Each of the students will be expected to attend class and participate in class discussions. Familiarity with the readings will be assumed, and occasional quizzes may be introduced as a way of checking on the reading. Students will also complete a short (500 word) essay and a longer 7-10 page final essay. There will be a final exam.

Mr. Haggerty. LECTURE: TR 12:10-1:30. DISCUSSION: M 8:10-9:00, M 9:10-10:00, M 10:10-11:00, R 8:10-9:00, T 9:10-10:00, T 8:10-9:00.

ENGLISH 31: AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION. In this survey of American Literature, we will focus on defining characteristics of  America and American. Central to our discussion will be the narratives of capture and captivity which are at the heart of our national sensibility. We will read Hern an Cortes, Women's Captivity Narratives, Slave Narratives, Ben Franklin, assorted poems and short stories, and novels by Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. There will be a mid term, final, weekly notes, and two short papers. There are also assigned TA sections.

Mr. Cohen. LECTURE: TR 8:10-9:30. DISCUSION: W 8:10-9:00, W 9:10-10:00, F 11:10-12:00, F 8:10-9:00, F 9:10-10:00, F 12:10-1:00.

ENGLISH 101: CRITICAL THEORY. This course will consider some of the theoretical texts that have revolutionized the study of literature, art, and culture in the university in the past quarter century. It will do so through a focus on key terms at the heart of debates in which those texts participated, such as "discourse," "writing," "author," rhetoric," "realism," "unconscious," "femininity," "ideology." Theorists and critics to be read include Levi-Stauss, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Bakhtin, Freud, Irigaray, Cixous, and Spivak. Several short literary works (poems and short stories) also will be considered in light of these debates. Readings will comprise a course photocopy packet of essays and literature, Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Lentricchisa and McLaughlin's Critical Terms of Literary Study , and a novella such as Heart of Darkness or The Turn of the Screw . In addition to an essay and/or literary text for every class meeting, there will be a variety of required written assignments, among them in-class exercises and an internet course site project, one due roughly every other week (these will replace the usual in-class mid-term and final and will constitute a significant percentage of the final grade as "participation."). Two four-five page papers are also required, one on a critical text or debate, and one drawing on that material for the analysis of a literary text read for the course.

Ms. Tyler. MWF 11:10-12:00.

ENGLISH 121E: CARIBBEAN LITERATURE. We will be reading a selection of texts representing a range of genres and cultural traditions from primarily (but not exclusively) the Anglophone Caribbean. We will examine the 'postcolonial' conditions in which these texts were produced and consider the influences on Caribbean literature of race, nationalism, political revolution (or its failure), African versus European traditions, gender politics, diasporic identities, and globalization. Examples from the visual arts and music (and possibly film) will be used to supplement our discussion of the written word. Assigned authors will be chosen from among the following: Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Michelle Cliff, Aimé Césaire, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Dandicat.

Ms. Fabricant. MW 5:10-6:30.

ENGLISH 122: LITERATURE AND SEXUALITY: QUEER AMERICAN NOVELS. Novels that take same sex desires as their explicit topic, books ripe with queer possibilities, and stories that leave heterosexuality feeling distinctly unappealing. All written before the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1970s (in fact, half of the reading is in 19th C. literature).  Readings will include major critical works in queer theory/sexuality studies.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Herman Melville, Billy Budd

Henry James, Turn of the Screw

Henry James, The Bostonians

Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

Coursepack

Two papers.

Ms. Doyle. TR 9:40-11:00

ENGLISH 128E: MAJOR AUTHORS - CHAUCER.

Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

In this course, we will consider both the work and the legacy of Chaucer's poetry, especially The Canterbury Tales. We will study his works both in the context of the late fourteenth century, with its catastrophes such as the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War, the dual papacy and the overthrow of a king, as well as its rapidly shifting social and mental structures, not least of all those related to class, gender, religion and power. We will also consider how Chaucer has been regarded in the half millennium or more since his death, including the remarkable resurrection of his work on new electronic resources such as the Internet (which he would have appreciated given his technical and scientific interests). We will learn to read and pronounce his work in the original Middle English; we will also explore some new electronic resources through our computers and some old archival records at such institutions as the Huntington Library and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Text: The Riverside Chaucer. Requirements: Midterm Examination; Final Examination; Term Paper; In-Class Oral Report; Recitation.

Mr. Ganim. TR 9:40-11:00.

ENGLISH 128J: MAJOR AUTHORS - JANE AUSTEN. This course will serve as an introduction to Austen's six major novels--Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion--and to some of the unpublished fiction (especially Lady Susan) and the letters.  We will also read critical essays on Austen's work by Claudia Johnson, Tony Tanner, and Mary Poovey.  We will focus to a significant degree on the following issues: the professionalization of the female novelist and the emergence of the woman reader; Austen's negotiations of the eighteenth-century literary tradition and her relation to contemporary female writers like Edgeworth, Burney, and Wollstonecraft and to the feminist debates of her time; the analyses of romantic love, marriage, alliance, and female friendship in the novels; and the question of gentility, property, female inheritance, and poverty.  Students are strongly advised to read Northanger Abbey and Lady Susan over the winter break.  Two papers and a final exam. Ms. Roy. TR 3:40-5:00. 

ENGLISH 137T: CULTURAL STUDIES IN A PRISON NATION. This course explores the ways the prison industrial complex has historically shaped representations of the prison experience, most especially in literature, film, and music, and examines the various ways writers, artists, and activists have positioned their work as a critical intervention. Readings move across a range of genres (crime fiction, rap, Hollywood cinema, autobiography, memoir, critical essay, children's literature) in order to complicate thinking about what it means to live in a prison nation - a country that spends more on incarceration than education and has come to increasingly rely on prison as a profitable business. Some of the issues that we will examine include: historic visions of the Prison Industrial Complex, constructions of criminality, gender and the politics of punishment, juvenile justice, personal experience as critical engagement, and the relationship between art and activism. The course will conclude with the third annual UCR student organized symposium where members of the class will showcase their final projects.

Course Requirements: quizzes, midterm, short essay, mini-essay, final project.

Assigned Reading: Mumia Abul Jamal, Live from Death Row; Miguel Pinero, Short Eyes; Assata Shakur, Assata; John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers; The Visit (film); Walter Dean Myers, Monster; Walter Mosley, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned; Course Reader compiled by professors with selections from Prison Masculinities, The Celling of America, Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization, The Media Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, The Public Assault on America's Children and more. Books available at The Hispanic Bookcase, 1345 University Avenue; reader at Vision Copy Business Center, 1450 University Ave.

Ms. Lopez, Ms. Ongiri. TR 11:10-12:30.

ENGLISH 140J: LITERACY NARRATIVE. In this course, we will read and write literacy narratives. When we think of literacy, we typically think of reading and writing as simple, technical skills that should be mastered at an early age. The literacy narratives we will read, however, envision literacy in much broader terms, as social and cultural practices that organize our ways of knowing ourselves and others. Literacy, in critical theorist Henry Giroux's words, can be seen as "a narrative for agency," wherein "human beings can locate themselves in their own histories and in doing so make themselves present as actors in the struggle to expand the possibilities of human life and freedom."

We will examine various kinds of literacy narratives in four different volumes. In Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color , Victor Villanueva, Jr. retells and, at the same time, problematizes the familiar story of an immigrant realizing the American Dream-lifting himself by his own bootstraps from the mean streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant to the ivied halls of academe.  Bootstraps demonstrates how writers use autoethnography-a fusion of autobiography, the stories we tell about ourselves, and ethnography, the stories we tell about others. Autoethnography examines how the writer's own sense of self has been linguistically, ideologically, and culturally constituted. Whereas Villanueva constructs and deconstructs his own literacy narrative, Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives presents other people's literacy narratives. Brandt's is an historical and ethnographic study, based on eighty in-depth interviews, that traces the changing material and cultural landscape of learning to read and write in twentieth-century America.

In our third book, T he Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community , we will see a third kind of literacy narrative, what the author, Ellen Cushman, calls an  "activist" ethnography. Renouncing scientific objectivity, Cushman makes the subjects of her ethnography co-investigators. In this study, Cushman shows the agency and self-reflexivity of members of an African American community, while she also observes and assists them in their struggle to develop rhetorical tactics to negotiate with people in positions of power. Finally, to help us negotiate our way through this complicated terrain, we will depend on Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook , a collection of academic analyses and arguments.

You will be expected to develop questions for discussion and to engage the readings in a midterm and final examination. The final course project will be an autoethnography, ethnography, or academic argument.

Ms. Axelrod. TR 2:10-3:30.

ENGLISH 142E: WITCHCRAFT AND CULTURAL PRACTICE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND. A course on the cultural poetics of witchcraft and witch-hunting in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.  We will explore representations of witches and witch-hunting in legal documents, "notorious crime" pamphlets, religious tracts, and plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their contemporaries, as well as consider a broad range of early modern beliefs about witchcraft and magic.  In addition, we will investigate interpretations of witch-hunting offered by historians, feminists, and literary scholars, giving special attention to the role of gender in the hunts.   Some familiarity with Renaissance literature is helpful but not required.  Readings include: Dekker, et al, The Witch of Edmonton, Gibson, Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing, Jonson, The Masque of Queenes, Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, Middleton, The Witch, Shakespeare, Macbeth, Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness.   

Ms. Willis. TR 5:10-6:30.

ENGLISH 145G: FILM AND TRAVEL. Since the beginning of film history, travel has been one of the defining tropes of the cinema. All films "journey" in one form or another, showing the audience a new place, some new characters, new scenery, but many films take travel as their very subject. Such "travel films" cater to a fascination with places that are foreign, exotic, or sacred, and sometimes places that are familiar. This course examines a disparate group of mostly American films that exemplify particular questions related to travel. We will explore the variety of beliefs, myths, and stereotypes that have shaped the cinematic depiction of foreign and familiar places. The beginning portion of the course will focus on documentary film; in later weeks we will look at science fiction, comedies, and the road movie. We will ask how each film constructs a world "apart" from its spectator: How and why is this world different? How does each film construct a sense of place? How do films construct their viewers as located subjects? In addition to sharpening students' skills in close reading and critical film analysis, this course will explore critical issues of race, geography, and tourism. Films discussed may include: Nanook of the North, Chang, King Kong, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Letter from Siberia, Road to Rio, After Hours, Bonnie and Clyde.

Ms. Peterson. LEC: TR 8:10-9:30; SCR: R 5:10-8:00.

ENGLISH 152: RENAISSANCE REVOLUTIONS. Studies in some of the major ideas and movements of the English Renaissance (1500-1600), such as Christian humanism, neo-Platonism, syncretism, puritanism, rational theology, science, republicanism, centering on such figures as More, Elyot, Castiglione, Ascham, Sidney, Jonson, Bacon, Hobbes, and Milton.

Mr. Appleford. MWF 10:10-11.

ENGLISH 161A: RESTORATION AND 18 TH CENTURY LITERATURE. We will be reading notable examples of the period's major genres-Restoration drama, satire, and the novel-and examining how these works were shaped by the historical circumstances of the time, including political and ideological conflicts, religious divisions, and the changing role of women in society. Special attention will be paid to the effects on literature and the new print culture of the growth of capitalism and the emergence of Britain as a colonial power, which had a particularly strong impact on the writing produced in Ireland. Assigned readings will include texts by Jonathan Swift, Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson.

Ms. Fabricant. MW 7:10-8:30 p.m.

ENGLISH 172A: EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE. This course will serve as an introduction to the poetry, fiction, and discursive prose of the first half (roughly 1825 to 1860) of the Victorian period in Britain.  It will examine some of the most compelling and contentious philosophical, political, and aesthetic debates of the period, debates that showcase early Victorian views about the distinctiveness of the age and its relation to myriad imagined pasts and imaginable futures.  It will focus on the following topics and questions: urbanization and ethnographic documentation of the urban poor; domesticity, "women's work," and feminism; industrial capitalism, progress, and the critique of modernity; colonialism, slavery, and the making of English masculinity; religious crisis and scientific discourse; and artistic production and gendered identity.  It will feature such authors as Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill, T.B. Macaulay, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, J.H. Newman, Sarah Stickney Ellis, and Robert Browning; it will also feature critical essays by Mary Poovey, Patrick Brantlinger, Martha Vicinus, Raymond Williams, and Jeff Nunokawa.  These readings will be supplemented by a single novel, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair .  Students are urged in the strongest possible terms to read Vanity Fair over the course of the winter break.   Victorian novels offer a superabundance of pleasures; a certain amplitude (800 pages in this instance) is one of them.  Two papers and an open-book take-home final examination. Ms. Roy.  TR 11:10-12:30.

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GRADUATE COURSES

ENGLISH 260: OLD ENGLISH ELEGIAC POETRY. The texts we will read are: The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wifes Lament, The Husbands Message, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Ruin, Deor, and the so-called Lament of the Last Survivor from Beowulf.  These poems concentrate on themes of loss and transience.  We will spend about one-third of class time on reading and translating from the Old English, and students will be tested on their knowledge of the original texts.  Students will take turns leading seminar discussions, and will also write a term-paper.  Topics for study will include individual poems, and may also include the following:

• the Exeter Book manuscript and textual criticism;
• the metre;
• construction of individual personae;
• lyric speakers;
• heroic values and Christian values;
• perceptions of time and transience;
• is there a distinctive women's voice?
• separation and loss;
• diction, (oral) formulae, metonymy and kenning;
• rhetorical structures, large and small;
• possible social functions or meanings of the poems;
• the reception of the poems in the 19th and 20th centuries;
• close comparison of modern translations.

Book: Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre

Study.  McGill-Queens University Press 2001.

Ms. Elder. W 2:10-5:00.

ENGLISH 265: ROMANTIC LITERATURE: WILLIAM BLAKE IN MULTI-MEDIA CONTEXTS. The seminar will concentrate on William Blake's multi-media, visual/verbal performances, particularly his illuminated books, as well as the use of exhibitions, print technologies, and modern digital media to display, edit, and study his works. We will make extensive use of original drawings and prints, facsimiles, and the online William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org --please view before our first meeting.). Like Blake the Transcendental Craftsman, we will wrestle with the mediated nature of all representation and the impossible relationships between bodies and that which pretends to exceed bodies. This focus, however, will not delimit a wide range of possible research projects, including comparatist topics (e.g., Blake and Allen Ginsberg, Blake and music) for seminarians whose main interests lie outside British Romanticism. Collaborative research and co-authored seminar papers are also welcome.

The subject of the seminar is prompted be an extensive exhibition of William Blake's works at the Huntington Library, 19 January to 25 May 2003. If logistics allow, one meeting of the seminar will be at the Huntington to view and critique the show, and another at the instructor's home to do some illuminated printing. Be prepared to get your hands dirty with etching ink.

Required text: D. V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake .

Mr. Essick. T 9:10-12:00.

ENGLISH 268: 20 TH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE. One of the legacies of the Jamesian articulation of "point of view" is a discernible preoccupation, in several modernist novels, with visuality and positionality. This preoccupation takes many forms: an interest in spectatorship, sightseeing, and visual explorations of "otherness"; the emergence of the genre of "portraiture" novels; representations of voyeurism and exhibitionism; explorations of visual intersubjectivity; curiosity about visual curiosity; depictions of visual phobias, visual fixations, and the gaze. In this seminar, we will be reading seven modernist texts that provide particularly good examples of these visual and positional concerns: James's The Portrait of a Lady , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its remnant early draft, Stephen Hero , Joyce's "Nausicaa," Lawrence's St. Mawr , and Woolf's To the Lighthouse . We will try to examine some of the following questions: What are the implications of "taking up" a particular position? Why is positionality sometimes psychically unstable? Why do some subjectivities find point of view difficult to establish? What makes some visual positions politically problematic, dishonest, or imperiling? To help us explore these questions, we will be reading simultaneously a survey of interrelated theoretical texts that make various claims about visuality and/or positionality (texts by Freud, Caillois, Lacan, Silverman, Mulvey, Neale, Alloula, Doane, Newman, and Bhabha). One of the aims of the course is to demonstrate how theoretical arguments can open up one's understanding of novelistic discourse; another is to explore the ways novelistic discourse can strengthen and/or call into question various theoretical claims.

Course Requirements:

Oral presentations, class participation, and a final essay (12-15 pages for MA students; 20-25 pages for Ph.D. students).

Ms. Devlin. F 2:10-5:00.

ENGLISH 269: RACE, HISTORY, AND THE ART OF (AND ABOUT) THE LONG CENTURY. The beginnings of a critical inquiry into the impulse towards the production of historical narratives about race in 19th-century American studies.  We will read a few key histories - Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, C.L.R. James's Black Jacobins, and Du Bois's Black Reconstruction.  This combination of texts should reveal the orientation of the seminar towards Marxist and African-American critical perspectives. Novels will range in tone and style - Uncle Tom's Cabin, Contending Forces, Benito Cerino, and Beloved.  We will explore the place of history and politics in our own writing as we interrogate the mandate to produce the effect of historical inquiry in the varieties of criticism that dominate American Studies at this moment (New Historicism, Cultural Studies).

This is a reading intensive seminar.  Please read ahead!

Requirements:

• Attendance
• Summary/Polemic - each student in this seminar will be asked to produce asummary of one seminar meeting's discussion, and one brief polemical (500 to 1000 words) statement about one of the texts we are reading.
• Presentation - this should be about 15 minutes in length, and treated as a conference presentation.  Ideally, you will be able to submit this paper to conferences.  The text is to be turned in for feedback.
• Paper - 15 page expansion of the presentation.  The aim here is to provide you with the occasion for writing a conference paper (which is usually 8 or 9 pages), and/or for exploring larger issues - I will give extensive feedback on these papers, aimed at identifying issues large, complex, and ambitious enough for larger projects, and the provocative and yet manageable ideas good for conference presentations.

Ms. Doyle. R 2:10-5:00.

ENGLISH 273: VIOLENCE AS CRITICAL DISCOURSE IN U.S. LATINA/O LITERATURE. This seminar presents an overview of contemporary U.S. Latina/o literature with attention to the ways writers explore violence as a foundational element in identity formation and as a critical discourse. Readings will focus on a representative body of writing by noted authors as well as single, lesser known but pivotal works. Some of the questions that inform our readings: How do Latino/a male and female writers approach the subject of violence? How do matters of violence intersect with, or indeed directly guide, concerns of race, class, gender and sexuality? How does a focus on violence expand, limit, or otherwise challenge critical readings of Latina/o literature? In what ways might we read writing on violence as a critical discourse? Seminar participants will be asked to work across a range of genres in their own writing for the course. Requirements: a paper abstract, a panel proposal, a 7-10 page conference talk, and a critical book review essay or academic journal essay.

Reading List :

James Gilligan, Violence a National Epidemic ; Carla Trujillo, ed., Living Chicana Theory ; Ray Gonzalez, ed., Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood ;

Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets ; Miguel Pinero, Short Eyes ; Luis Rodriguez, Mi Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA , Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times , America is Her Name , It Doesn't Have to be This Way ; Abraham Rodriguez, Spidertown , Boy without a Flag , The Buddha Book ; Emanuel Xavier, Christ-Like ; Gil Cuadros, City of God ; Cherrie Moraga: Heroes and Saints & Other Plays , The Hungry Woman ; Ana Castillo, The Mixquihuala Letters , Sapogonia ; Christina Garcia, The Aguero Sisters ; Julia Alvarez, In The Time of Butterflies ; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street , Woman Hollering Creek ; and A Course Reader compiled by professor.

** Books available at The Hispanic Bookcase, 1345 University Avenue; reader at Vision Copy Business Center, 1450 University Ave (will be ready to pick up by week 1).

Ms. Lopez. T 2:10-5:00.

ENGLISH 275: FILM AND VISUAL CULTURE . SEMINAR ON THE VIRTUAL. This seminar will examine theories and cultural forms of the virtual in terms of digital media form, globally extensive processes of mediation, and networks of technologies, cultures, and power.  The rise of the cybernetically mediated cultural work in networked form has produced challenges to accounts of the status, form, and reception of the audiovisual work. Accordingly, theories of interpretation of cultural works in mediation have responded by re-evaluating accounts of subjectivity, authorship, agency, cultural form, production, and reception, and proposing revisions or new accounts.  From textual poaching, to collective intelligence, to technological embodiment, innovations in  cultural and media theory attempt to locate the virtual in relation to a set of shifts and reconfigurations in the kind of and capacity for reader, viewer, or audience engagement with digital cultural forms: virtual reality, networked authorship, multilinear narrative, interactive gesture, configurable media and identities, or other emergent forms. In this seminar we will investigate critical accounts of the performativities of narrative, identity, and reception in regard to the virtual, and will work to specify the ways these appear and operate differently in virtual form or as virtual matter in comparison, primarily, to film, but also in relation to literature.

Texts (subject to change and supplementation; there will also be a course reader):

• Morse, Virtualities
• Weber, Mass Mediauras
• Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
• Hayles, How We Became Post-Human
• Levy, Cyberculture
• Poster, What's the Matter with the Internet?
• Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies

Mr. Tobias. SEM: F 2:10-5:00; SCR: M 5:10-8:00.

ENGLISH 278: MINORITY DISCOURSE. BLACK BODY POLITICS: THEORY AND PRAXIS. This class will examine the current cultural and theoretical discourse relating to the production and consumption of the Black body in literature, film and theory. We will consider the politics of representation in relationship to quest ions of masculinity, violence, the Black body as spectacle, the body in relationship to constructions of urbanity, and the Black body in a transnational economy. Texts examined might include The Color Purple (film and book), Gayl Jones' Corregidora , Julie Dash's Illusions and Daughters of the Dust , Fatima El Tayeb's Everything Will Be Fine , Ngozi Onwurah's The Body Beautiful and Coffee Colored Children , Branwen O paku's Dirt Eater , Raoul Peck's Profit and Nothing But , Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston and Stephanie Black's Life and Debt . The course will address recent theoretical positions articulated in African American, Cultural, Literary, and Film Studies by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Phillip Brian Harper, Elizabeth Alexander, Wahneema Lubiano, Dorothy Roberts and Paul Gilroy among others.

Ms. Ongiri. W 2:10-5:00.

ENGLISH 279: SEMINAR IN RHETORICAL STUDIES :   Trajectories Through the History of Classical and Modern Rhetoric. The seminar will examine the practice and theory of persuasion in classical and early modern (mainly eighteenth-century) discussions of rhetoric, with some reference to the role of that heritage in the rhetoric of the American founding.  We'll be asking a number of questions: What is the nature of persuasion?  Upon what framework of ideas and assumptions do such definitions depend?  Can it be discussed without being persuasive?  Are there diverse persuasions?  To what degree is the American founding influenced by the classical/early modern heritage of rhetorical theory and education? We will read Aristotle's Rhetoric , Plato's  Phaedrus   and Gorgias, Cicero's De Oratore (selections), and excerpts from Bacon, Locke, Blair, Campbell, Vico, and others, as well as selections from Washington, Hamilton,  Madison, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

Mr. Briggs. T 2:10-5:00.