4000-Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 4038-002: Modern Short Story
Instructor: Professor Rivers
Fall, 2008
MWF 2:00-2:50
ATLAS 1B25
A study of the modern short story in English, with emphasis on American writers.
The course will aim for both variety and in-depth study. For variety, we will read one or two works by a number of authors including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, and others. For in-depth study, we will read a number of stories by two major (and very different) authors: Tobias Wolff and Vladimir Nabokov. The course will pay special attention to political, scientific, and literary contexts and will include opportunities for students to write their own short stories. It is an advanced seminar with limited enrollment and will be taught mainly by discussion.
Texts: All texts will be available on line or on e-reserve. There are no books to buy.
Requirements (subject to change): two in-class tests; two papers (five to ten pages); mid-term; final.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Riversj@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4038-003: The Literature of the Fantastic: Imagination and Metamorphosis Instructor: Professor Eric White
Whether it opens onto a prospect experienced as infernal (in tales about vengeful spectres and maleficent apparitions) or marvellous (as in an alchemist's magical transmutation of reality or an adept's visionary transport), the literature of the fantastic invariably entails, in Roger Caillois's words, "a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissable within the changeless everyday legality." The fantastic upsets mundane appearances and dominant paradigms, disassembles the received order of things and confronts the putative finality of definitive worldviews with the unforeseeable and the unprecedented. Alternately inducing feelings of astonishment and terror, exhilaration and repulsion, it testifies both to the incomprehensible multiplicity of objective reality and to subjective desire's limitless capacity for metamorphosis. In this course, we will track the development of the fantastic as it has evolved over the past two centuries, from E.T.A. Hoffmann, Honore de Balzac, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker, to Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter. Written work will include three 5 - 6 page essays and a final examination.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Eric.White@colorado.edu .
ENGL 4038-005: Creating North American Identities: Mexicanos, Hispanos, Pochos, y Chicano/as
Instructor: Professor John L. Escobedo
The working theme for this course, “Creating North American dentities,” examines the various characterizations Mexicans have attained in the U.S. since the Mexican American War. As such, this course will present a body of texts that illustrates the development of Mexican American literary traditions that reflect the inherent divergence within Mexican identities in the United States.
Throughout the course, we will review legal documents, newspapers, manifestos, poetry, short stories, and novels to explore lo Mexicano, lo Hispano, y los Pochos, y Chicano/as.
Please contact the instructor for further information: John.Escobedo@colorado.edu
ENGL 4224-001: Modern British and Irish Novel
Instructor: Professor Eric White
As we read a selection of writings by Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Angela Carter, we will consider the textual innovations and cultural issues at stake in modern British and Irish fiction. Readings for the course will include:
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse
Samuel Beckett, Molloy and The Unnamable
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus.
Written work: two 5-6 page essays, a midterm and a final examination.
Please contact the instructor for further information:Eric.White@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4665-002: 21st Century Fiction
Instructor: Professor Jeremy Green
"I believe the narrative form is very, very tired," observed the cultural critic Steiner earlier this year. Is Steiner right? Certainly, serious literary fiction faces significant challenges: the energies of modernism and even postmodernism are on the wane; novels now compete with a culture of the screen and network; the pace of contemporary life seldom allows for the careful prolonged reading novels demand; authors are marketed through image and soundbyte; publishers focus on profit margins to a greater and greater degree. Yet the last decade in the U.S. has seen the emergence of a number of exciting innovative writers of fiction. These are the authors—late postmodernists? post-postmodernists?--that we shall study in this class. Their work is challenging, strange, disturbing, and sometimes very funny. Although the reading list has yet to be finalized, we will read works by at least some of the following: Ben Marcus, Lydia Millet, Kathryn Davis, Percival Everett, Laird Hunt, Rikki Ducornet, and Steve Erickson. Workload: two papers (one long), a reading journal, a final.
Please contact the instructor for further information: jeremy.green@colorado.edu.
ENGL 4697-001: Journeys Through Race and Time: African American Travel Narratives and Fictions of Travel
Instructor: Professor Cheryl Higashida
The fundamental theme of New World African modernity is neither integration nor separation but rather migration and emigration.
-- Cornel West
Travel has played a central role in African American projects of political resistance and self-determination. Even as slavery and imperialism led to forced migration and immobility for people of African descent, many of them refused literally to stay “in their place,” as defined by the dominant racist social orders. As slaves, freedmen and women, missionaries, sailors, diplomats, emigrants, laborers, expatriates, and tourists, African Americans have traveled throughout the U.S. and beyond its shifting, vexed borders. Fictions of travel and nonfiction travel writing by African Americans remind us that the space between “African” and “American” sets in motion a host of questions about the meanings of each of these terms as well as the relationship between them.
In bringing cultural studies of travel to bear on African American literature, we will raise further questions about the sites and transits – hotels, stations, different modes of public and private transportation – illuminated and redefined by readings that foreground travel. We will think about how reconceptualizations of travel entail reconceptualizations of home and culture. We will also examine conventions of travel writing in relation to other genres like the sentimental novel and new journalism. The greater emphasis, however, will be on bringing African American studies to bear on studies of travel as a racialized, gendered, and class-ed mode of political struggle, cultural formation, and subjectivity. We will spend considerable time on debates within African American studies around diaspora, transnationalism, and imperialism.
Course requirements will likely include a 5-page paper, an oral presentation, an annotated bibliography, an 8-10 page final paper, and of course consistent attendance and participation. Through written and oral work, we will develop close reading, critical thinking, argumentation, and composition skills.
Possible primary readings include Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Martin Delany, Blake, or the Huts of America; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men; William Attaway, Blood on the Forge; Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow; and Audre Lorde, “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” and “Grenada Revisited.”
Possible secondary readings include selections from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Who set you flowin’?: The African-American Migration Narrative; Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country; and Michelle Stephens, Black Empire; in addition to James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” and Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of ‘Diaspora.’”
Please contact the instructor for further information: cheryl.higashida@Colorado.EDU.