Department of English - Fall 2006 Schedule
Course # |
Course Name |
Instructor |
Time |
Days |
Bldg/Room |
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|
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ENGL 606 |
Rhetoric Theory & Practice |
Taylor, T. |
12:30-1:45 |
TR |
GL 316 |
ENGL 657 |
Contemporary Asian/American Literature |
Ho, J. |
3:00-4:15 |
MW |
GL 302 |
ENGL 661 |
Intro. to Literature Theory |
Curtain |
6:00-8:30 |
M |
GL 318 |
ENGL 719 |
Old English Grammar & Reading |
Wittig |
9:00-9:50 |
MWF |
GL 221 |
ENGL 780 |
Pro-Seminar: 800-1500 CANCELED |
Leinbaugh |
2:00-3:15 |
TR |
GL 321 |
ENGL 784 |
Pro-Seminar: American Literature Before the Civil War |
Richards |
11:00-12:15 |
TR |
GL 321 |
ENGL 785 |
Pro-Seminar: Literature After 1870 |
Allen |
5:00-6:15 |
TR |
GL 318 |
ENGL 805 |
Studies in Rhetoric & Composition CANCELLED |
Anderson, D. |
3:30-4:45 |
TR |
GL 316 |
ENGL 830 |
Studies in Renaissance Literature: Non Drama |
Wolfe |
5:00-7:30 |
M |
GL 321 |
ENGL 831 |
Seminar: 18th Century Literature |
Reinert |
3:30-4:45 |
TR |
GL 321 |
ENGL 841 |
Seminar: 19th Century Roman English |
Moskal |
2:00-4:30 |
T |
DE 405 |
ENGL 860 |
Seminar: 20th Century Literature English/American |
Wagner-Martin |
3:00-5:30 |
M |
MU 111 |
ENGL 871 |
Seminar: African-American Literature |
Coleman |
3:30-6:00 |
T |
HN 103 |
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ENGL 657: Contemporary Asian American Literature
Dr. Jennifer Ho
This course will provide an introduction to contemporary Asian American Literature and theory. Through novels, films, and critical essays, we will explore the richness of this burgeoning field and examine how Asian American literature fits into, yet extends beyond, the canon of American Literature. With the 1989 publication of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Asian American literature has flourished at an exponential rate. And even before Tan's wildly successful publishing phenomenon, in the mid 1970's, Maxine Hong Kingstons and Frank Chin pioneered the wave of current Asian American literature. Asian American writers have won the Pulitzer Prize, been featured in an anthology of the best writing of the century, and enjoy an unprecedented popularity among readers in the U.S. and abroad.
Additionally, my goal for this course is to have graduate students develop and submit abstracts for the 24th annual Association for Asian American Studies conference (to be held in NYC April 4-8, 2007). The final papers for this course will serve both as an introduction to research in Asian American literary studies as well as a conference paper that they will be able to present at AAAS at a panel that will *hopefully* be accepted.
Texts:
Chin, Donald Duk
Kingston, Woman Warrior
Ozeki, My Year of Meats
Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Wu, Asian American Studies: A Reader
Lunsford, Easy Writer
Gibaldi, MLA Handbook
Lee, Aloft
Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
Thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For
ENGL 719: Old English Grammar & Reading
Dr. Joseph Wittig
An introduction to Old English language, with some attention to its social and cultural contexts. Emphasis is on learning the rudiments of Old English as introduction: to the structure and history of the English language; as preparation for further study of linguistics or the history of the language; and/or to Old English literature. Those majoring or minoring in medieval will be asked to read more extensively in OE and be held responsible for more linguistic detail.
Exams and Papers: Regular in-class translation quizzes; midterm and final exam. A a term project (its nature negotiable) to supplement class work.
Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion
Texts
Bright Ringler Cassidy, Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader
Recommended: Mitchell-Robinson, A Guide to Old English
ENGL 780: Proseminar, English Literature, 800-1500
Dr. Ted LeinbaughThis course will survey the major works of Old and Middle English literature using a standard anthology (the Norton) and will then focus on several representative texts (with special emphasis on Beowulf and Chaucer) with a view towards investigating scholarly approaches to literary material and the research tools necessary for the study of Old and Middle English.
Exams and Papers: Short reports (each student will present three or four), one longer essay and a final exam.
Texts: The Norton Anthology; Peter Beidler, ed., The Wife of Bath (essays on New Historicism, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, and Feminist Criticism); Seamus Heaney, ed. Beowulf; other works tbd. Extensive reading in academic journals and secondary works.
ENGL 784: Proseminar in American Literature Before the Civil War
Dr. Eliza Richards
Scholars have debated the meaning of the term “American” and the stakes of studying “American” literature since the nation was founded, and even before that. Recently, critics have questioned whether we should continue to define our field of study according to national boundaries: are we reinforcing a myth of exceptionalism by delimiting the field in this way? How can we open the study of antebellum U.S. literature to diverse influences and ideas outside the nation? What is the shifting place of the “literary” text within U.S. print culture? How do we determine which works we choose to study, out of a vast number of poems, plays, novels, short stories, and autobiographical narratives written by people of diverse racial, economic and ethnic groups? Rather than presuming to know the answer to these crucial questions, we will take them as the basis of our collective inquiry. This course offers an overview of the history of American literature to 1861 and its critical traditions. Because it is impossible to cover all the important works in all genres within such a broad chronological sweep, we will focus on texts that pose interesting theoretical and methodological questions and that have garnered substantial critical attention.
Writings by: Anne Bradstreet, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Rowlandson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman.
ENGL 785: Proseminar, Literature after 1870
Dr. Nicholas Allen
This course will ask the 'idiotic question', of the politics of modernism. We will concentrate on three authors: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, and three texts, Murphy, Ulysses and Yeats's Poems. We will approach each from postcolonial and historicist perspectives to explore how 'politics' have been constructed, and elided, in critical and popular reception. My intention is to read Beckett, Joyce and Yeats in approach to questions of general concern, partition, borders, cultural nationalism, decolonization. Each class will lead with a brief graduate presentation. Assessment will be designed to suit your professional needs. This will result in a document useful to your progress, which may include an essay for publication, a conference paper proposal or part of a dissertation chapter.
ENGL 805: Twentieth Century Rhetoric, Technology and English Education
Studies in Rhetoric and Composition
Dr. Daniel Anderson
We will survey major areas of interest in rhetorical studies during the twentieth century. We will examine foundational and structural rhetorics of the early twentieth century as well as the re-emergence of rhetoric as an area of interest to critical studies through writers like Kenneth Burke. We will also look at post-structural and postmodern rhetorics of the latter half of the twentieth-century. We will concurrently look at twentieth-century communications technologies, connecting them with their contemporaneous rhetorical texts as well as examining the rhetorics of technology that emerge with inventions such as the radio, television, personal computer, and Internet. We will apply this examination of the intersections of technology and rhetoric to a tracing of trends in English Education. We will look at how technology and rhetorical theory relate to teaching in English Departments and to the enterprise of higher education. The course will combine discussion and workshop activities, allowing us to digest readings as well as practice rhetorical moves facilitated by the latest communications technologies. Projects will include a short-to-medium length paper, a small-to-medium scale technology project, and a larger paper or technology project. Materials will include a reading packet of essays and the books, Higher Education Under Fire; Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities by Michael Berube [We'll probably look at his most recent book instead of this one-a new one is supposed to be on the way out.]; and Multiliteracies for a Digital Age (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) by Stuart Selber.
ENGL 830/CMPL 872: Renaissance Humanism and the Play of Interpretation
Graduate Seminar in Renaissance Literature
Dr. Jessica Wolfe
A graduate seminar for students of late medieval and Renaissance literature, intellectual history, and related disciplines, this course focuses on the literary and philosophical writings of Renaissance humanists active in Italy, France, the Low Countries, and England between around 1430 and 1580. In particular, we will examine how the scholarly, poetic, historical, and scientific endeavors of Renaissance humanists both reflect and precipitate changes in the theory and practice of interpretation.
By "interpretation" I mean the various ways in which poets, scholars, and natural philosophers of the period "read" the book of nature and of scripture, as well as how humanists ranging from Lorenzo Valla and Marsilio Ficino to Erasmus, More, Rabelais, and Montaigne are engaged in hermeneutic debates and in various other conflicts regarding the interpretation of texts, bodies, and signs. We will explore how the causes and consequences of these conflicts and debates are rooted in the underlying intellectual developments of the period - the revival of ancient philosophies such as Skepticism and Epicureanism, the rise of "modern" philology and changes in editorial practice, the appeal to scriptural authority at the heart of the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, the emergence of new historical and legal methods and discourses, and developments in various disciplines of natural philosophy such as anatomy, cartography, natural magic and the occult sciences, and the "chemical philosophy". The course will also examine the various material and ideational changes that accompany or follow the rise of print culture - changes in writing and reading practices, challenges to conventional biblical hermeneutics, debates over rhetoric, and shifts in the methods and assumptions informing how humanists edit and interpret classical texts.
Requirements. Students will write one long (15-20pp.) research paper and will also pursue a shorter, independent research project (5-8pp.) focused on one or two 15th or 16th-century texts held in UNC's Rare Book Collection or in Duke's Special Collections. Barring illness, attendance and participation are expected at all classes.
Readings. All primary and critical readings will be in English, though we will use bilingual, facing-page translations wherever possible. Knowledge of Latin, Italian, and/or French is very helpful, but not required, and all students will be encouraged and guided towards research projects suited to their discipline and their foreign language skills. The vast majority of readings will be available on electronic reserve and/or other electronic databases. The reading list supplied below will likely be narrowed and altered depending on the availability of suitable editions and translations.
Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine; L.B. Alberti, Momus; Marsilio Ficino, selections from his Platonic Theology and Three Books on Life; Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; Angelo Poliziano, selections from his Silvae and other works; Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance; Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly; selections from Parabolae, De Copia, and other rhetorical works; Paraclesis (Preface to his Novum Testamentum); selections from his Paraphrases and Commentaries; selections from his Adages and from his Controversies; More and Erasmus, Translations from Lucian; Thomas More, Utopia; selections from his controversial and polemical writings; Guillaume Budé, selections from his De Philologia; John Colet, selections from his Commentaries on Paul's First Corinthians; Philip Melanchthon, selections from his theological, philosophical, and rhetorical works; H.C. Agrippa, selections from Three Books of Occult Philosophy and De Vanitate; François Rabelais, Pantagruel and Tiers Livre; selections from the Quart Livre; Juan Luis Vives, Fabula de Homine [A Fable on Man]; Conti, Mythographiae; Paracelsus, selections from his medical writings; Girolamo Cardano, De Vita Propria Liber [The Book of my Life]; Francesco Guicciardini, Detti e Fatti [Maxims]; J.C. Scaliger, Poetics; Peter Ramus, selected writings; Jean Bodin, selections from his Methodus and other writings; Michel de Montaigne, Essays, including "Of Experience" and "Of Coaches"; Etienne de la Boëtie, selected writings; Gabriel Harvey, "Earthquake Letter" and other writings; Francis Bacon, Essays and selections from his scientific writings.
ENGL 831: Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Dr. T. Reinert
In this course we will be reading major English women novelists of the 18th century. We will start with six works by Eliza Haywood: three novellas and the novels Love in Excess, Eovvai, and Betsy Thoughtless. Then we will read Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, Frances Burney's Evelina and Cecilia, and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. We will reflect on a range of social issues confronting 18th century women and women novelists-in particular, restrictions on their self-presentation in public, obstacles to their experience of the world at large, and evolving expectations about love and courtship. We will see how the understanding of these issues was both reflected in and shaped by literary conventions, including forms of libertinism, romance, sentimentalism, and the gothic.
Exams and Paper: One short paper, one long research paper.
Teaching Method: Discussion.
ENGL 841: Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Dr. Jeanne Moskal
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is the novel most frequently taught to American undergraduates, yet few readers have scanned another word by this eloquent woman writer. Participants in this seminar will discover that Mary Shelley created in other genres (travel books, biography, apocalyptic fiction) and that she addressed surprisingly current concerns, such as pandemic disease, sexual abuse and a woman-centered theology.
The course has a three-week introduction to Romantic-period controversies over political revolution, abolition, the rights of women, the abolition of slavery, and the proper uses of science. Seminar members then study Mary Shelley's oeuvre in its generic contexts; that is, we read her Gothic novel, Frankenstein, in conjunction with selections from other contemporary Gothics; her historical novel, Valperga, in conjunction with Walter Scott, and so on. Students write short weekly papers (one to two pages) responding to the assigned reading and a 25-page seminar paper, which is also presented orally to the class. The course is designed so that members will learn from each other as well as from the instructor.
Specialists in national literatures other than British are welcome in this course. Mary Shelley's oeuvre can provide a comparative perspective for your interest in specific genres, such as travel literature or the Gothic; or in medicine and literature; or in the gender-based conditions that inform women's writing and/or their acceptance in the literary canon.
A list of publications by previous members of this seminar is posted on the instructor's door, Greenlaw 523. If you have questions, please contact the instructor by email at jmoskal@email.unc.edu
ENGL 860: Seminar in 20th Century Literature (English and American)
Dr. Linda Wagner-Martin
Seminars in 20th century American literature draw from an incredible richness of texts and approaches. I believe that the ideal seminar combines core texts and discussions with each students' working in areas most fruitful for them--undergirded with immense reserve lists and much individual conversation with the teacher. In the interests of professionalization, each student will write a polished essay (which will likely go through several drafts) and then present a shorter "conference" paper from that essay. In the early meetings, students will also present on their novel or memoir of choice (see parts II and III below).
The work of the seminar:
(1) To study American modernism and its current issues through reading Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) and The Garden of Eden (1986); suggested critical texts, Moddelmog's lesbian reading and Eby's fetishism.
(2) To study and explore "Depression" writing. Class will read Albert Halper's The Chute and Tillie Lerner Olsen's Yonnondio in common, and then choose a third text (memoir, photo-text, short stories, novels) from an extensive list which includes Mike Gold, Albert Maltz, Meridel LeSueur, Tom Kromer, Arna Bontemps, Lin Yutang, James T. Farrell, Robert Cantwell, Nelson Algren, Caldwell and Bourke-White, William Rolllins, Jr., Pietro Di Donato, Mary Heaton Vorse and others. Even the outstanding critics of the period, Barbara Foley and Paula Rabinowitz, have not included much textual material in their heoreticalapproaches. This is a really rich source for understanding the ways "modernism" became "post-modernism."
(3) To ferret out important strands at mid-century. The class will read Lillian Hellman's memoir Scoundrel Time in common but as above, choose various patterns of development: Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty as representative of women writers, Ellison and Wright, Nathaneal West and Salinger as comedy of the grotesque, and other important writers such as Nabokov, the Beats, William Gass, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room..... It is also possible to follow so-called mainstream writers (Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, Hellman) through the 30s and 50s, since everyone kept writing. The approach of the course is to allow your exploration and focus of a number of resources to flower into an essay you are excited about.
ENGL 871: Seminar in African-American Literature
Dr. J. Coleman
Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, many African American novels since 1950 in the recent postmodern era focus substantively on sacred, spiritual, and supernatural traditions in African American culture from various critical and adversarial viewpoints, nevertheless seldom subverting the underlying traditional beliefs of the culture. Christianity and voodoo/hoodoo are the main religions portrayed, and the Bible is a primary literary and cultural source. This aspect of recent African American fiction has received only cursory critical attention, and because of this is a largely hidden and unexplored part of the fiction. This course explores the African American tradition from this perspective on a graduate seminar level.
Exams and Papers: One seminar paper of at least twenty pages due by the end of the class
Teaching Method: Seminar discussions
Texts: Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Visitation of Spirits, Beloved, The Cattle Killing, The Color Purple, Mama Day, Louisiana, Mumbo Jumbo