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Our classes have general descriptions in the bulletin, available here. Detailed individual descriptions are posted below. We will post additional descriptions as they arrive. You may also contact faculty for more information.
Special Topics: Tolkien’s Middle Earth / EH 590 - 101
John Halbrooks
This course will consider Tolkien's fictional world in the context both of his scholarship and of his historical moment. Tolkien served on the front lines in the First World War and was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, but his work as a philologist and a scholar of medieval literature positioned him for a response to the trauma of the first half of the twentieth century that was quite different from that of the High Modernists. We will read his fiction, his scholarship, and examples of the kinds of texts that influenced him. The course will be quite reading-intensive, and so students are strongly encouraged to read as much as possible of The Hobbitand The Lord of the Rings before the summer session begins.
Special Topics: The Cinematic Novel / EH 590 - 501
Christopher Raczkowski
As a concept, the cinematic novel has numerous definitions and has been used for a dizzying array of analytical purposes. Critics have used it to identify everything from novels about Hollywood filmmaking to Hollywood film adaptations of novels. Others have used it as a way to theorize the powerful influence of film on the novel: how certain techniques like montage, cross-cutting, flash-back, slow-motion, fade out, close-ups, wide-angles, etc. have influenced the way writers produce narrative visions of the modern social world. Given the large number of novelists employed as screenwriters in the early days of filmmaking, the term is equally appropriate for thinking about the way that the cinema was and continues to be powerfully influenced by the techniques of the novel. In this class, we will utilize all of these conceptions of “the cinematic novel” in order to focus on the 20th century shift from modernist to postmodernist culture. More specifically, my hope is that a focus on the cinematic novel can serve to highlight a shift in narrative techniques or modes of seeing (and representing) the world that underwrites the transition from modernist to postmodernist art and thought. Through our readings (Anita Loos, Nathaniel West, Stanislaw Lem, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, Patricia Highsmith), film screenings (Robert Altman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Federico Fellini, Coen Brothers, Howard Hawkes), regular discussion, short response papers and two longer research papers, the goal of this course it to provide you with a scholarly foundation in modernist and postmodernist literature and film and a better understanding of the complex aesthetic and historical relation of novel to film over the last century.
EH 599 Thesis Hours
Please see Dr. Harrington if you would like to register for thesis hours and have not already discussed your committee, graduation requirements, etc.
Graduate Writing for English / EH 502 - 501
Cristopher Hollingsworth
The Island: Adventure and Philosophy. This course introduces the student to graduate writing and research in English, using the conference paper “process” (proposal, research and drafting, presentation) as a pedagogical structure. Our focus is the island, an ancient and still essential locus of adventuring and philosophizing. Works to be read include Homer’s Odyssey, More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Tournier’s Friday, and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.
Teaching College Composition / EH 505 - 101
Larry Beason
This course covers both theory and techniques for teaching writing at the college level. EH 505 is primarily intended for teaching assistants who are teaching EH 101 at USA, but other graduate students are encouraged to contact Dr. Beason for more information about enrolling (460-7861).
Studies in Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Histories / EH 517 - 501
Richard Hillyer
These notes are very tentative, as I have only just begun thinking about how this course will go. Our governing theme will be something along the lines of “From Crux to Canon: Shakespeare and the Editorial Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Play selections will probably include Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, and 1 Henry IV. Assigned secondary reading will most likely include Paul Collins, The Book of William: How Shakespeare Conquered the World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), and a pair of chapters from Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), conveniently available through the USA library as an e-book. I shall probably assign in addition a course pack of writing about Shakespeare by Jonson, Milton, William Collins, Dr. Johnson, and Charles Lamb, together with some pages of mine concerning the feud between Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald, who early in the eighteenth century produced rival (in every sense) editions of Shakespeare. The major writing assignment will be a research paper. Likely topics will include the following: assessing the contribution of a specific eighteenth-century editor of Shakespeare; focusing on some aspect of Shakespeare’s canonicity as an author whose work has long been edited and discussed as if it were a secular Bible; examining how a single passage from a play of his has been edited and annotated from the eighteenth century to the present. Other possibilities will no doubt arise as we share our thoughts in class. I realize that the words “editing” and “eighteenth century,” together with their corollary term “history,” will translate for most people as “boring, boring, boring.” But for all that my proposed approach looks and sounds dry-as-dust, I honestly think it has the potential to achieve something exciting and hard to accomplish: a fresh look at Shakespeare that sees some way past his canonization as the Bard (and all the cultural baggage accompanying it) by contemplating the early stages of that not inevitable process.
Antebellum American Fiction / EH 544 - 501
Patrick Cesarini
Grad Fiction Writing Workshop I and II / EH 583- 501/584 - 501
Carolyn Haines
The graduate fiction writing classes are focused on the basic elements of fiction and how to apply them to short fiction, literary fiction, or genre fiction. The focus is on writing and critiquing. Students write their own fiction while also reading and offering constructive criticism on the work of their fellow students. Several published novels are also deconstructed. Students learn the power of point of view, the balance of narrative summary and immediate scene, the use of setting and theme in all types of fiction, how to write effective dialogue and create powerful, unforgettable characters, among other things.
Grad Poetry Writing Workshop I and II / EH 585- 501/586 - 501
Sue Walker
Special Topics: Rethinking the Book: Typographical Innovation and Material Experimentation / EH 590 - 101
Justin St. Clair
This course will investigate some of the properties of experimental print fiction that current e-readers and iPads have a hard time replicating. Our first unit will investigate three books that make unconventional use of typography: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Steve Tomasula’s Vas: An Opera in Flatland: A Novel (2004), and Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! (2012). Our second unit, meanwhile, will take a material turn, examining how the book as a technology can be extended beyond its conventional limits. Readings will include four books in boxes—Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1 (1962), B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), and Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012)—as well as Jonathan Safran Foer’s die-cut masterpiece Tree of Codes (2010) and an issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (#17) that masquerades as a pile of junk mail. As we make our way through these various texts, we’ll consider a range of relevant theoretical issues—from Danielewski’s frenetic remediation to the ways in which Tomasula and Foer appropriate and reconfigure earlier literary works.
Seminar: Victorian Popular Fiction / EH 592 - 101
Ellen Burton Harrington
When the arch-villian Fosco of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White exclaims, “What a situation! I suggest it to the rising romance writers of England,” he draws attention to the sensation novel’s place in the expanding literary marketplace of Victorian Britain. Popular, “low” novels attract a readership across classes, targeting a female, as well as male, readership and influencing literature of all kinds. This class will examine popular novels and stories from the mid and late-nineteenth century, looking at the way these melodramatic and often formulaic texts comment on significant political and social issues of the day, including the Woman Question and manhood, varieties of sexuality, religion and morality, atavism and degeneracy, human psychology, class, and empire and the nation, as well as their self-conscious awareness of the literary marketplace. Readings include well-known authors and novels of the day, such as The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Rider Haggard’s She, Grant Allen’s The Typewriter Girl, and a variety of short stories from Gaslight and the Sherlock Holmes serial from the Stanford Community Reading Project.
Seminar: Graduate Non-Fiction / EH 592 - 502
Jesmyn Ward
Thesis Hours / EH 599
Please see Dr. Harrington if you would like to register for thesis hours and have not already discussed your committee, graduation requirements, etc.
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