CU English

Selected Spring 2010
Graduate Level Course Descriptions

Course Offerings:

ENGL 5059-001: Literature and Theories of Reading, 1800-1900
Instructor: Professor Sue Zemka
Call No. 24900
R 1-3:30 pm — LIBR M549
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

In this course we will read some major writers of the period 1800-1910, focusing on the topic of theories of reading, literary appreciation, and literary interpretation. What did Victorians think happened during the activity of reading poems and novels? They had various ways of approaching the topic: through eighteenth-century aesthetics; through cognitive science and psychology; and through Judeo-Christian spirituality and hermeneutics. We will investigate these nineteenth-century theories of reading, teaming them with the following primary authors: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, the Spasmodic poets, John Keble, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Henry James, George Gissing, and William Butler Yeats. We will seek to understand why our twentieth and twenty-first century interpretive practices, with their elaborate theoretical methods, replaced earlier attitudes towards reading that were based on pleasure and pain and on mental, spiritual, or physical processes. We will also see how this shifting emphasis (from the Victorian embodied experience of reading to twentieth-century hermeneutics) yields different ideas about the political and the cultural missions of literature.

In one component of the course, students will learn to research nineteenth-century periodicals in order to investigate literary reviews of the era.

Our survey of nineteenth-century theories of reading will include excerpts from the following scientists, philosophers, critics, and religious thinkers: David Hartley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Arthur Henry Hallam, John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, John Henry Newman, E.S. Dallas, Walter Pater, Leslie Stephen, and the memoirs of Victorian readers. We will also be aided by recent literary critics whose work illuminates the history of reading, including Roger Chartier, Alan Richardson, Garrett Stewart, Catherine Gallagher, Franco Moretti, Suzy Anger, and Nicholas Dames.

Please contact the instructor for further information: Sue.Zemka@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 5139-001: Intro to 20th C. Literature in English
Instructor: Professor Laura Winkiel and Professor Janice Ho
Call No. 15512
W 1-3:30 pm — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the critical terms, aesthetic forms and scholarly debates surrounding and informing 20th c. literature in English. Our theme for this course will be globalization and literature. We will track the rise of modernist, postmodernist and postcolonial literature through the lens of the British Empire and its decline. Texts may include: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Leonard Woolf’s Village in the Jungle, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Elizabeth Bowen’s Last September, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe, Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things.

Requirements: short reading responses, class presentation and short paper, and long research paper (that may be developed from the short paper).

Please contact the instructors for further information: Laura.Winkiel@Colorado.edu / Janice.Ho@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 5169-001: Intro to Mulitcultural Literature
Instructor: Professor Penelope Kelsey
Call No. 25478
T 3:30-6 pm — ECON 16
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

This seminar will introduce students to US ethnic and postcolonial literatures, and to theories of and methodologies for reading, teaching, and recovering these works. In this course, we will read a wide range of works by authors of color and study how they address issues of community, identity, language, color, belonging, oppression, resistance, and aesthetics. We will strive to craft frameworks for reading diverse literatures based on the parameters or worldview delineated by the authors as well as critics of color engaged in similar endeavors. We will also consider points of convergence and divergence between literatures of the colonial and postcolonial.

Please contact the instructors for further information: Penelope.Kelsey@Colorado.edu

ENGL 5229-001: Poetry Workshop: Short
Instructor: Professor Julie Carr
Call No. 15515
M 2-4:30 pm — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in CW

In this poetry workshop we will be focusing our reading on the short poem.

We’ll begin with Dickinson, and then move to the shorter poems of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. We’ll read the lyrics of Robert Creeley, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and Barbara Guest before turning to more contemporary poets. These will include, but not be limited to, Fanny Howe, Graham Foust, Anne Carson (as translator of Sappho), Rae Armantrout, and Jean Valentine.

Reading these poets will help us to focus on questions of the line, enjambment, condensation, and the intensities and multiplicities of lexical, syntactical, and grammatical choices in their most minimal manifestations.

You will be encouraged but not at all required to practice the writing of short poems. You will also be asked to write three short papers for this class, and to produce a poetics statement to accompany your final portfolio of the semester’s work.

Please contact the instructors for further information: Julie.Carr@Colorado.edu

ENGL 5239-001: Fiction Workshop: Stealing Beauty: "Translating" from the Sister Arts
Instructor: Professor Jeffrey DeShell
Call No. 15517
R 2-4:30 pm — HLMS 259
Prereq: Graduate Standing in CW

“Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal.” —T. S. Eliot

“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.” —Pablo Picasso

Writing is never done in a vacuum; it occurs always in context. Often fiction writing is provoked by contact with other art forms like painting, music and film. If composition is a series of decisions about what goes where, shouldn’t the translating of decisions from painting, music and film into narrative language be possible? And if it is possible, how can we go about it? Or, to start from the other direction: how can we weave our obsessions with music, painting and film into our fiction writing? The Greek word for this translating is ekphrasis (which usually refers to poetry), and in the contemporary world we often speak of allegory and mimesis. We’ll try to bracket the theoretical discussions and center our discussion on practical larcenous techniques.

Please contact the instructors for further information: Jeffrey.DeShell@Colorado.edu

ENGL 5279-001: Studies in Poetry: (Un)Defining the Lyric
Instructor: Professor Ruth Ellen Kocher
Call No. 24901
R 1-3:30 pm — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in CW or Instructor Consent

This course will examine the proliferation of text defined by, influenced by, categorized as, resistant to, and governed by the notion of the lyric word. We will examine the notion of lyric in its manifestations as a literary device, both as a governing and deconstructive center, taking into consideration critical perspectives on poetry genre through essay, interview, theory, and discussion. Students will also be asked to read assigned primary collections of poetry and generate commentary on that work within the context of class discussion and lecture. This course aims to examine lyric both within and without predictable parameters and encourages students to (re)define lyric through emerging trends, technologies, and dialogues as well as within the context of traditional perspectives. Student research will culminate in a research project of no fewer than 20 pages of critical writing.

Please contact the instructors for further information: Kocherr@Colorado.edu

ENGL 5299-001: Studies in Young Adult Literature
Instructor: Professor Stephen Graham Jones
Call No. 15519
W 1-3:30 pm — HLMS 259
Prereq: Graduate Standing in CW or Instructor Consent

Specifically, teen-lit, the twelve-plus crowd, though early on we'll dip into Wimpy Kid territory, so as to distinguish the target age groups somewhat. In here we'll read across what's been hot and good recently, and cross our fingers that those two are often the same book. To be sure we get a wide-enough selection, we'll be reading at least one each week here. Fourteen novels, say. And not so much the classics, the time-honored, the stuff you read yourself. The market now is what matters. And I assume we can all draw on our own readings for whatever we need from back then. In addition to fiction (yes, hopefully some short story collections in there, or an anthology of short fiction), we'll also be looking into the critical studies around YA fiction—articles, books, whatever we need. As for assignments past the weekly—and those'll be digging and presenting up reviews and the like—plan on the usual two: one paper mid-semester, another at the end. The first'll be to establish the investigation's going well; the second'll be the completed investigation, be it an article or a piece of YA fiction itself (with accompanying short, prefatory essay).

Please contact the instructors for further information: Sgjones@Colorado.edu

ENGL 5309-001: Playwriting Workshop
Instructor: Professor Sidney Goldfarb
Call No. 25428
T 1-3:30 pm — HLMS 259
Prereq: Graduate Standing in CW

This course is open automatically to graduate students in Creative Writing, and to grad students in Theater and Dance, and Film Studies, and to other students, with approval of the instructor. The course is designed to accommodate those who have much experience writing plays and those who have none at all. A small number of exercises will be assigned, some based on the reading, some on exploratory experiments. The Class is designed to be of use to students with a substantial background in the subject, and those who have very little. Some reading will be assigned according to student need and interest. Writing exercises, emerging sometimes from the reading, but also from the newspapers, and from extended overheard conversations, or from other matter suggested by the students, will be assigned frequently. Students must chose a writer from the reading list as a tacit mentor and give a class presentation of some aspect of their work. Reading is important only to the degree that it provokes the imagination as to the possibilities of the form. Emphasis will be on the performance of student work. Students may write several short works, a medium sized work, or the beginning of a longer play, roughly 20-25 pages in total. Full length plays are also acceptable, should a student be so inspired. Special attention will be paid to the relations between poetry, fiction, film, and the play, so that the course be equivalently beneficial to poets, fiction writers, screenwriters, a variety of thespians, as well as to playwrights. Grading is as follows: 20% reading; 20% class participation; 20% exercises; 40% final project or projects.

Reading List

Strindberg, Five Plays, tr., Carlson (Minnesota)
Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, trans., Musa (Penguin)
Beckett, Selected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (Grove)
Genet, The Balcony (Grove)
Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Grove)
Kennedy, In One Act (Minnesota)
Fornes, Plays (PAJ)
Sarah Kane, Collected Plays (Methuen)

Please contact the instructors for further information: s.goldfarb@comcast.net

ENGL 5529-002/COML 5660-001: 'Phantasmagoria' and the Psychic Life of the City
Instructor: Professor Eric White
Call No. 25250
F 2-4:30 pm — KTCH 231
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

"Phantasmagoria" originally named an early nineteenth-century magic-lantern show involving optical illusions of a flux-like, apparitional sort. The word thus designated a succession of rapidly changing visual effects produced by a technological apparatus that can be thought of as a primitive avatar of the cinema. Within a few years of its coining, however, phantasmagoria had been metaphorically applied, Terry Castle says, to "something wholly internal or subjective: the phantasmic imagery of the mind." But even as it became the "perfect emblem of the nineteenth-century poetic imagination," the term was extended in quite another direction to suggest the felt quality of objective social experience. As Walter Benjamin has observed, the teeming street-life of the nineteenth-century metropolis transformed the city for the flaneur into "phantasmagoria." From early on in its development, then, the visual technology that has since become so ubiquitous a feature of contemporary society provided privileged metaphors both for imaginative experience and for cultural life in general. The present seminar will, first of all, explore this extension of the semantic scope of "phantasmagoria" across the 19th and into the 20th century. At the same time, cognate conceptual developments will also be considered including, in particular, the "psychic automatism" the Surrealists attributed to unconscious mental processes and what both Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze have referred to as the "simulacral" character of contemporary cultural production. We will thus trace what may be described as a genealogy of the imagination as that faculty has evolved in the midst of the technocultural context of urban "modernity." The tentative reading list includes works by such writers as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Honore de Balzac, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Machen, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Angela Carter.

Please contact the instructor for further information: Eric.White@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 5529-003: At Home Abroad and Abroad at Home: Traveling and Writing and Travel between 1711-1850
Instructor: Professor Jill Heydt-Stevenson
Call No. 25544
T 1:00-3:30 pm — LIBR M549
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

This course will explore the institution of travel narrative both as an object of study and as a critical and ethical exploration of the constitution of self, community, and nation. We will engage a number of genres: travel narratives (letters, journals, diaries, official reports, etc.) and novels, poems, plays, and visual representations that include voyages to or depictions of India, the Middle East, Italy, and England. In doing so, we will be addressing questions about narrative: What is a narrative? What constitutes narrative, especially when it is a fiction pretending to be truth or truth presented as fiction, or both simultaneously—or neither? What are its devices? Do some narratives have more "value" than others—that is, is there a hierarchy of narrative (Pride and Prejudice vs the travel guides by Gilpin that inform the novel?)? What can some narratives do that others cannot? What larger understandings do we receive when we read literature and travel writing in conjunction with one another? This will lead us to issues of representation—how are countries (Italy, England), things (the Venus de Medici, collections), famous people (Zenobia, the Improvisatrice) mediated variously given their respective genres? To what degree are these works reflective or simply reflective of constructions—that is, what are their relationships to representational systems? What are the dynamics that drive the explorer to wander and propel the artist to depict the voyage? We will look at how the experience of foreign art, climate, people, architecture, poetry, language, landscape, and politics contributed to how the British defined themselves. What special meanings and opportunities and disabilities did travel represent for women?—for example, those such as the fictional Sophia Goldborne who thrives in Calcutta and the real Henrietta Stanhope who lived most of her life in Syria? We will be focusing too on how Italy or Syria could represent “otherness” for English writers, yet also, in embodying the Classical World, be a standard for culture itself. We will look at such topics as how the body feels and what it is experiencing while traveling; traversing class/racial boundaries; crossing between and combining private and public spheres; writing from exile; education as a prerequisite to touring and/or the education of the tour provides; the travel narrative as an intertextual and multi-genre discourse; rites of passage. The course thus should prove useful both for students studying the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and for students interested in aesthetics, historiography, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, the novel, and cultural studies.

Possible Authors and Texts:

India:
Brittle, Emily (George Dallas?). The India Guide: or, A Journal of a Voyage to the East-Indies in the Year 1780. In a Poetical Epistle to Her Mother (Calcutta, 1785).
Fay, Eliza. Original Letters from India (1779-1815)
Gibbes, Phebe. Hartly House, Calcutta (1789)
Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan): The Missionary (1811)

The Middle East:
Anon. Letters on a Journey to Bombay, through Syria and Arabia (1834)
Anon. Travels through Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and the Holy Land
Carne, John. Letters from the East (1830)
Cowley, Hannah. A Day in Turkey (1791)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e: Written During her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Porter, Anna Maria. “Palmyra: A Tale” (1797)
Peacock, Thomas Love: “Palmyra” (1806, 1812)
Semple, Robert: Observations on a Journey . . . to Smyrna and Constantinople (1807)
Shaw, Thomas. A Journey to Palmyra (1757)
Shelley, P.B. “Ozymandias”
Volney: Ruins
Volney: Travels to Egypt and Syria (1783, 1784, 1785)
Wood, Robert: Journey to Palmyra

Italy:
Wincklemann
Radcliffe, The Italian
Staël: Corinne, or Italy
Hemans: Selections from The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy
L. E. Landon: Selections from The Improvisatrice
Lamartine: Graziella

England: The Lake District
Gilpin, William: Various travel guides
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (Conversation Poems)
Radcliffe, Ann: A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794
Wordsworth, Dorothy: Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals
Wordsworth, William: Selections from The Prelude (1799, 1805)

Other texts, including theoretical and critical essays, will be made available.

Course requirements
In addition to reading the assigned texts in preparation for each week’s class, students are expected to do the following:
1. A preparatory focus point assignment for one of the class meetings. For this assignment, you will choose an issue, section, or passage from the text for which you have signed up, and prepare a 1-2 page written statement about this issue in advance of the class. Your statement must be e-mailed to the class by the Friday before the relevant class. Your written statement might identify an important issue in the text and provide additional background, or identify a crucial scene in the text and raise questions about its interpretation, or develop a close reading of a short passage, etc. In class, you will present your focus point orally (maximum 10 minutes) in order to add any relevant comments; but the emphasis should be on identifying an issue for general discussion.
2. Final Essay: (10-15 pp).
3. All participants are expected to take an active part in class discussion. The quality and quantity of your contributions are important aspects of your overall performance in the seminar.

Please contact the instructor for further information: Jill.Heydt@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 5559-001: Digital Poetry and the Limit of Interpretation
Instructor: Professor Lori Emerson
Call No. 25512
R 3:45-6:15 pm — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

This course will serve as a graduate-level introduction not only to the field of electronic literature generally and digital poetry in particular, but it will also be a kind of laboratory in which we'll experiment with the limits of literary interpretation. How do we account for texts which are dynamic, emergent, constantly shifting and morphing? If description is the best we can hope for, is description then a form of interpretation? It is my hope that, in conjunction with both live and virutal guest lectures by digital poetry practitioners we will together create a working vocabulary for reading works of electronic literature. Our course will be organized into five broad units: 1) digital poetry and the illegible; 2) reading digital poetry into/out of the early twentieth century avant-garde (through movements such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism); 3) reading digital poetry into/out of concrete poetry from the 1950s and 1960s; 4) procedural writing, computer-generated poetry and code-work; 5) contemporary conceptual writing as digital poetry.

Please contact the instructor for further information: Lori.Emerson@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 7019-001: Freedom, Rebellion, and Globalization in Early Modern English Literature
Instructor: Professor Valerie Forman
Call No. 24858
F 2-4:30 pm — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

The seventeenth century in England witnessed an explosion of writing about the possibility of freedom and the forms of tyranny and enslavement that restricted it. In this class we will explore the shape that narratives and discourses of freedom took in the period by reading them in relationship to forms of rebellion and globalization, whose discourses and practices were crucial to defining and imagining freedom. This was an age that saw an unprecedented proliferation of new literary genres and a revision of existing genres. How did new genres and the mixing of genres arise to register and address the crises of the seventeenth century? More specifically, how did this veritable information revolution play a part in the crises of freedom and unfreedom in this period: for example, a war (the English Revolution in which neighbors sided against neighbors and one branch of the government went to war against another), a regicide (the execution of King Charles I), the planting of colonies in the Atlantic and West Indies, and a radical increase in global trade and in the forms of unfree labor that supported it? Some other questions we will consider: what shapes do narratives of both armed and nonviolent resistance to various forms of authority take? How did concerns about gaining and losing liberty, which were largely understood as political problems, come to be represented differently in the context of unfree labor and concerns about free trade in both the West Indies and East Indies? How did the crises of the seventeenth century afford new possibilities for women to participate in political practices and to imagine alternative relationships among liberty, equality, and prosperity? We will also explore literature that conducts imaginative experiments in what political, economic, and other kinds of community could emerge in the vacuum created by the elimination of tyrannous forms of authority and oppression. While focusing on literature of the early modern period, this course looks forward to contemporary debates about neo-liberalism and globalization.

Though almost all of the texts we will read were written by English authors and published in England, many of these authors had traveled to the Americas—especially to the West Indies. One of the questions we will explore, then, is how ideas about freedom, new political institutions, and forms of literary experimentation emerged through exchanges made across and within the Atlantic—among Britain, the coast of North America, and the English and Spanish Caribbean. The course will thus explore current critical trends in Transatlantic studies in relationship to seventeenth-century literature.

We will be reading a variety of genres and some texts that don't fit neatly into any one literary genre: tragedy, tragicomedy, epic poetry, travel narratives, lyric poetry, political pamphlets, petitions, early communist tracts, and prose narratives—including one that is often considered the first novel in English and sometimes also the first American novel. Though most of the literature we will be reading is of the early modern period, we will most likely end with a contemporary novel that looks back to this period. In studying texts that cover most of the seventeenth century, we will be putting literary periods that are usually divided from one another into dialogue. We will also be giving considerable attention to the literature of the middle of the seventeenth century—a period whose aesthetic achievements have been largely ignored in literary studies. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own interests and special expertise in relation to the topic of the course through research projects and a final paper.

Some texts we will be likely to read: William Shakespeare, Coriolanus; John Fletcher, The Island Princess; Bartolomé de las Casas, Tears of the Indians; Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam; Captain John Smith (selected writings); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave; Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter; Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko: A Tragedy; Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure; John Milton, Paradise Lost (selections) and political tracts; Morgan Goodwyn, Negro's and Indian's Advocate; Richard Ligon, A History of Barbadoes (selections); "Inkle and Yarico" (various versions); Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom; England's Slavery, or Barbados Merchandize; Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations (selections); Edmund Hickeringill, Jamaica Viewed (selections); Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Please contact the instructor for further information: Valerie.Forman@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 7059-001: Advanced British Literature 1660-1900: Literature and Economics (1700-1900)
Instructor: Professor Catherine Labio
Call No. 24904
W 4-6:30 pm — HLMS 259
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

Literature and economics are so routinely defined as diametrically opposed disciplines that we tend to forget how enmeshed the two disciplines have been since their modern inception. The aim of this course will be to appreciate a) the role played by literary and artistic works in the formation of an economic and moral subject and b) the part played by modern economic thought and new economic realities in the emergence of modern literary and artistic forms.

Subtopics will include:
1) the relationship between virtue and wealth, commerce and sentiment;
2) the ascendancy of the aesthetic in the formation of the commercial and moral subject;
3) romanticism and the “spirit of commerce”;
4) aestheticism and the representation of labor and poverty; and
5) the fictional nature of capital.

We shall be studying works by writers and artists such as Susanna Centlivre, Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Sarah Scott, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie, Joseph Wright of Derby, Thomas Gainsborough, William Wordsworth, J.M.W. Turner, Robert Owen, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, George Elgar Hicks, John Linnell, Ford Madox Brown, Luke Fildes, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, and William Morris.

Please contact the instructor for further information: Catherine.Labio@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 7119-001: Exchanges and Comparisons: Atlantic and Hemispheric “Crossings” in the 17th and 18th century “New” World
Instructor: Professor Teresa Toulouse
Call No. 24902
M 2-4:30 pm — HLMS 259
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

In the first half of the course, the seminar will critically examine selected current theories and debates about literature’s role in colonial Atlantic “exchanges,” both as the object of such exchanges and as critical commentator on them. Such a discussion will involve us in questions not simply of “ Britishness”, but also of colonial and metropolitan differences and conscious uses of such differences within the Anglo-American world. More specifically, we will address questions about how different genres either become directed to and/or themselves arise in the context of a range of burgeoning economic and cultural exchanges across the Atlantic. Writers addressed may include: Richard Hackluyt, Captain John Smith, Ann Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Phyllis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano.

The second half of the course will critically examine some selected current theories and debates about hemispheric comparisons, specifically those involving Hispanic and Anglo writers of the 16th and 17th century. In addition to the Anglo-writers suggested above, we may include writers such as Christopher Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Bernal Diaz, Sor Juana de la Cruz and Carlos Siguenza y Gongora.

Students will be required to give two reports and to produce two 10-15 pp. papers, one of which they will present to the class (in the form of a short conference paper) at the end of the term.

Please contact the instructor for further information: Teresa.Toulouse@Colorado.edu.

ENGL 7179-001: Journeys Through Race and Time: African American Fictions of Travel
Instructor: Professor Cheryl Higashida
Call No. 24905
T 2-4:30 pm — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL

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-definition. Even as slavery and imperialism led to forced migration, segregation, and incarceration for people of African descent, many of them literally refused to “stay in their place.” As slaves, freedwomen and men, 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 (in which I include “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 relationships between them.

In bringing cultural studies of travel to bear on African American literature, we will raise questions about the sites and transits – hotels, stations, different modes of public and private transportation – that are illuminated and redefined by readings in which travel plays an important role. We will think about how reconceptualizations of travel entail reconceptualizations of home, culture, and community – and how they are written and read. We will examine conventions of travel writing in relation to other genres like the sentimental novel, ethnographic writing, and autobiography.

At the same time, we will think about how African American Studies has theorized travel and migration as racialized, gendered, and class-ed modes of political struggle and subject formation. We will spend considerable time on debates within African American Studies around diaspora, nationalism, transnationalism, imperialism, and (post)colonialism.

Primary readings will likely include Martin Delany, Blake, or the Huts of America (1861-1862); Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902-1903); James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1929); Claude McKay, Banjo (1929); William Attaway, Blood on the Forge (1935); Alice Childress, A Short Walk (1979); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2007); and selected poetry and prose by Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and June Jordan.

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; Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States; and Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Colonial World; in addition to essays by M.M. Bakhtin, James Clifford, and Brent Hayes Edwards.

Course requirements: consistent and active attendance, weekly reading responses, an oral presentation based on a research paper (8-10 pp.), and a final paper (18-20 pp.) with annotated bibliography.

Please contact the instructor for further information: Cheryl.Higashida@Colorado.edu.