| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department ENGLISH English (X) |
North Americans may think of the Caribbean as a vacationerÂs haven of beaches and palm trees. But the region has a long, painful, and complex historyÂand it has produced, since the middle of the 20th century, a distinguished and richly varied literature, including two winners of the Nobel Prize, Derek Walcott and V. Naipaul. This literary outpouring began in the 1930s and continues to the present day, despite the disillusioning realities of the postcolonial era. This class will introduce you to some of the best English-language Caribbean writers and to the cultural conflictsÂconcerning race, colonialism, language, and identityÂthat inform their work.
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Most of us like to travel or would like to travel. Some of us get to travel, and some of us have even traveled to get to the US as immigrants or as international students. But all of us can travel through travel writing. In this course, we will trace the history and development of travel writing from the records of early explorers like Marco Polo to the heyday of British travel writing in the 1930Âs by authors like Robert Byron and to the popular travel writing of today. We will also explore issues of how journeys affect the traveler as well as how they affect the places and people of travel destinations.
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This course is intended to help students improve their writing and use that writing to gain a deeper understanding of ethical decision-making. Students will learn techniques for writing effective narrative, reflective, persuasive, and research essays. These techniques include the effective use of specific details to engage and persuade readers, methods of organization that enable readers to follow your line of thinking easily, and strategies for editing sentences for clarity and conciseness. For the research essay, each student will be able to choose an ethics-related topic from fields including science, medicine, law, politics, sports, journalism, religion, engineering, business and others.
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An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other members poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the Anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students participation, the more they will learn from the course.
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A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique.
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A reading and writing course in the personal essay. Students will read widely in the genre of the personal essay, and gain exposure to larger world of creative nonfiction, including texts in memoir, public diaries and journals, nature and travel writing,lyric essays, and creative cultural criticism. Students will also consider English prose style and how it works both grammatically and artfully. Among the subjects taken up are phrase, syntax, diction, figures of speech,irony, and rhythm.
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What happened? Who am I? Who did it? And how do narratives help us answer these questions? Do the activities of interpretation and discovery only repeat the very puzzles they attempt to solve? Is there any innocent re-telling or detection? From short stories to long novels, from stories of growth to tales of crime, from early 19th-century England to late 20th-century America, these are some of the questions that preoccupy literary writers. In this course we will explore the various ways writers create and resolve mysteries about identity through the technique of narrative; and we will consider the complicated relationships between discovery and guilt, action and narration, crime and detection. Along the way, we will consider examples drawn from one of the most dominant forms of narrative in contemporary culture: film.
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What spooks America? From the Puritan Âcity upon a Hill, to Tom PaineÂs Common Sense, to EmersonÂs American Adam, America was imagined as a New World paradise, a place to begin the world anew. And yet, from the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, to the origins of the American Gothic in the Age of Reason, to MelvilleÂs Moby Dick, American literature has been haunted by fantasies of terror, sin, and violence. Why? This course will seek to answer this question. Focusing on a selection of imaginative writings, including origin stories, poems, novels, and a slave narrative, we shall seek to identify and understand the significance of the terrorsÂof the savage, the dark other, the body, the passions, nature, mixture, blood violence, authoritarian power, and apocalypseÂthat continue to haunt and spook the origins and development of American literature. Students will be encouraged to draw connections between past American fantasies and fears and contemporary popular culture and politics, from classic American films like HitchcockÂs Psycho to Crash, from American blues and jazz to Bruce SpringsteenÂs Born in the U.S.A, from Mc Carthyism and the Cold War to and the war on terror.
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This course will approach its central questionÂhow literary traditions are created and developed over timeÂby way of the Bible, the single most important source of themes and stories in Western culture. We will concentrate on a few books of great literary interest: Genesis, Exodus, the Song of Songs, the short stories of Ruth and Jonah, and the Gospels. Other readings will include a wide selection of poems and a few stories inspired by these books; two modern novels; and a distinguished critical study that reads the Bible itself as if it were a novel. In God: A Biography, Jack Miles rereads Scripture with a view to understanding the Âcharacter development of its central figure. Anita DiamantÂs The Red Tent fictionalizes the saga of JacobÂs family from Genesis in novelistic terms, while Toni MorrisonÂs Beloved masterfully fuses two biblical paradigms, the Exodus and the sacrifice of the firstborn, lending great power to her narrative of African-American slavery.
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Students will have the opportunity to enhance their writing skills through the critical reading and writing of creative nonfiction. The course will be especially interesting to writers who want to experiment with voice, context, concept, and point of view. The class will be conducted as a workshop, with each student maintaining a portfolio of written pieces. Class time will be devoted to discussion, writing instruction, and sharing of work. Depending on individual interests and needs, students will set goals for the quarter and, in frequent conferences with the instructor and other students, work towards meeting those goals. Revisions are encouraged.
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The Video Essay: Writing with Images and Sound. This course in advanced creative nonfiction focuses on applying literary techniques to the composition of short multimedia essays. Like its print counterpart, the video essay is an attempt to see what one thinks about something. The video essay may engage with fact, but tends to be less self-assured than documentary. Rather, the video essay, writes Phillip Lopate, wears confusion proudly as it gropes toward truth. Agnes Varda, the poetic French filmmaker who coined the term cinécriture, or film writing, best described the promise of the form when noting that, for her, writing meant more than simply wording a script. Choosing images, designing sound  these, too, were part of that process. This course explores the many ways in which writing in the video essay formÂwriting for viewers and listeners rather than readersÂdiffers from print. We will seek to understand how sound and image make a direct appeal to the senses, as well as learn how the writerÂs voice collaborates with audio and visual elements. Readings and screenings include George Orwell, Joan Didion, Don Delillo, Ross McElwee, Agnes Varda, and Chris Marker.
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The novel as descendant of the epic has often been an agent of nation and convention building. But the form also contains the anti-thesis of that, the ability to subvert. Subversion in this case is not a nihilistic impulse, but rather a process of constructing an alternate history, or state, or community of ideas. Carnival, as theorized by Bakhtin, will guide our reading, as will other short readings on the body and narrative like Elaine Scarry and Frazier. We will ask ourselves important questions about possibility, aesthetics and even the functions of literature as it pertains to the novel. Given that most of our education would have been in the North American form, we will read six short novels from the US, Scandinavia, Morocco, China/Tibet, and Zimbabwe to see what these situations and realities can reveal about the form of narrative, subversion and its dialogue with the world.
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Even early in his career, Shakespeare experimented with a wide array of genres as he distinguished himself among his contemporaries in 1590s England. While on stage he was instrumental in developing and/or rethinking the genres of tragedy, comedy, and history, in print he stretched the capacities of both narrative and lyric poetic traditions. The purpose of this class is to get a sense of the diversity of ShakespeareÂs early work as it formulated the many concerns, insights, obsessions, and linguistic techniques that would come to characterize him as a distinctive and even legendary voice of his age. We will begin in the realms of tragedy and comedy as we observe Shakespeare transition from imitator to innovator, then move to the sonnets where nearly all of the poetÂs ideas may be seen in microcosm. The second half of the class will examine ShakespeareÂs magnificent history cycle (the second ÂHenriadÂ), which traces the intersections of power, legitimacy, and theater through the reigns of Richard II to Henry V.
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Romantic poets radically reinvented the sense of time for the modern era. From WordsworthÂs Âspots of time to BlakeÂs prophecies and KeatsÂs lyrical suspensions, Romantic poetry presents an impressive range of conceptions of time that still inform the way we think about ourselves and our places in the world today. We will trace the ways in which these conceptions shape the advent of modernity in relation to such issues as periodization, progress, and posterity, as well as to the shadows of the French revolution, the writings on the Âspirit of the age, and the acceleration of history visible when Wordsworth refers to the Âgreat national events which are daily taking place. We will consider what roles poetic traditions, forms, and rhythmic movements play in shaping a sense of time, enabling us to explore also the ways in which poetry imagines history at a moment when the sense of flux and the fleeting present made that imagining all but elusive.
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From the distance of the 21st century George Eliot is one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century, as well as one of the great intellectuals. But in her own time she drove her father crazy with her non-religious beliefs, and courted public scorn with her to-say-the-least unconventional ways for the time. In this course we will focus on two of her novels, Daniel Deronda, her final work, and the mid-career Romola. They differ greatly in externals, except for their length. Daniel Deronda is set in 1865 London, Romola in 1492 Florence; one thus might fall into the category of Âcondition of England novel, the other is a historical novel. But each novel anatomizes a horrific marriage from courtship to dissolution. In both Eliot creates eponymous heroes/heroines and supporting casts whose stories challenge prevailing prejudices no less than she did in her own life, including institutionally sanctioned anti-Semitism in Victorian England and religious hysteria in fifteenth-century Florence. In addition to reading these two novels, students will read non-fiction by Eliot, including from her works of translation, as well as critical and theoretical works of both her contemporaries and ours.
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This course examines the intersection of art and autobiography in postcolonial cultures. We read works by prominent and upcoming writers, especially the way the writers use of self-representation to critique colonial and postcolonial relations in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Comparing poetry, novels and auto/biography, we will pay close attention to the artistic devices the writers deploy in composing stories about themselves or historical personalities. We will also discuss key concepts in postcolonial theory such as Âabrogation, Âhybridity, Âcounter-hegemonic discourse, Âthe subaltern and Âsyncreticism as they are manifested or contested in literary texts.
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Throughout the twentieth century, the terms "urban" and "black America" became so intimately connected that they are often used as correlatives. By tracing different representations of urban life, this course examines the signification of the metropolis in African American cultural production. Although our focus will primarily center on cultural texts, we will address a number of the "push and pull" factors which prompted the Great Migration and the social forces which have subsequently kept many African Americans in the city. In focusing on a set of cultural texts, we will consider the ways in which African Americans have imagined both the allure and dangers of life in the city. Literature may include work by Larsen, Ellison, and Baraka; artists may include the photographers Wayne Miller and Camilo José Vergara as well as the painter Jacob Lawrence; film media may include Coolie High and Good Times; music will include hip hop artists from a range of performers from Public Enemy to Common.
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This course will explore the work of several 20th century poets through the guiding idea of a spiritual quest. We will ask how such questions shape poems and the poets who write them; how poets respond to the call to forge a rigorous and original language of ÂgnosisÂ; and how they map the intersections of seen and unseen worlds, heard and unheard music. We will read poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Linda Hogan, and Dan Beachy- Quick. We will examine how poets synthesize tradition and originality; how they express mystical experience; how they conceive of the self and the other; how they use symbol and allusion; how they assume or reject a vatic (prophetic) voice; and how they respond to the interrelations of nature. We will read framing essays by Louise Bogan, Eleanor Wilner, Stanley Kunitz, Sri Aurobindo, Lewis Hyde and Joseph Campbell.
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The word Âcharacter abounds in meanings: it can indicate a printed letter or number, a fictional person, a vague but admirable quality we seek in elected officials, or a personÂs moral or psychological essence. This course examines some of the roles Âcharacter played in American texts from the founding to the Civil War. Political writers in the early United States insisted that the viability of republican government rested on the character of representatives. At the same time, the science of physiognomy, which asserted that a personÂs character could be read from his or her face, enjoyed extraordinary popularity. Novelists and memoirists addressed a complex of related questions. Is personal character a matter of inner essence or public performance? What are the consequences of Âreading a person like a book? And how might the tropes of reading and performing character change our ideas about reading, performance and personhood?
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The question ÂWhat is America? is older than American literature; while often asked by U.S. writers, it is hardly their monopoly. This course examines the long history of how writers from abroad have depicted the figure of ÂAmerica. We will begin with a number of early modern European texts that portray and respond to the ÂNew World and its imaginative consequences. We will then turn to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works that explore America in natural, political, and social terms. Finally, we will examine texts that explore and critique twentieth-century images of America: the Wild West, the land of unlimited opportunity and ruthless competition, and the émigréÂs escape from a troubled past. What, we will ask, are the defining features of ÂAmerica in these texts, and how do writers invoke and transform them? How does ÂAmerica coincide with (or differ from) Âthe New World or Âthe United StatesÂ? And how might the international construction of the figure of America reshape our understanding of the nation and national literature?
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What is globalization? Did it start three decades ago or 5000 years ago? And whatever it is that changed within the global economy starting in 1973, what does this mean to our understanding of literature, art, and the individual subject? Have ways of knowing themselves changed in the past three decades? This seminar introduces a series of terms, theories, and texts that address these questions. Surveying writing from transnational cultural studies, anthropology, diaspora studies, literary theory, and economics, we will try to come to an understanding of the cultural forms and forms of culture produced during the past three decades. What is the place of literature and more traditional forms of cultural production (e.g. film) in a world of blogging, TXT messaging and YouTube? Though there are no prerequisites to the class, students interested in postcolonial and diaspora studies will be able to pursue and develop their interests here: The global flow of peoples, finances and cultural representations are in deep relation; the breakdown of the colonial system in the post-WWII period was a catalyst for both processes. We will address the relationship of globalization to the breakdown of empires (traditionally understood), and consider the moment of globalization as the successor to the postcolonial. Our discussions will be animated by several works of literature and film, with a focus on works from the U.S., Middle East and South Asia, and their diasporas. These texts not only help to define the period itself, but also activate questions of the local within the transnational, the status of the subject, and the meaning of the local within globalization.
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An advanced yearlong course in reading for writers that requires critical anal¬ysis and intensive writing of poems. An exam on the summer reading from the 393-1 Reader will be given the second week of class. Texts for the first term will include collections by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Louise Bogan, and Gwendolyn Brooks. The Fall-Winter semester will be devoted to analysis (both written and oral) and imitations of these poets using the concepts presented in the Reader that relate to the ways in which form allows theme. A 12-15-page paper will be due in December comparing the work of a studied poet with one from outside the course reading list. The course ends with two weeks of Daily Poems. In the second semester, beginning in early February, students will read longer works by various poets that will lay the foundation for the cumulative composition of a work that by the end of May 2010 will total at least 125 lines, with the possibility for a public reading of those poems at the end of the quarter.
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The first half of an advanced yearlong course in reading for writers, critical analysis of the technique of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. An exam on the summer reading (available in June) will be given in the second week of class. The first two-thirds of the course will be devoted to reports on the technique of four or five assigned writers (list of authors to come please contact the Writing major office in early June), and short original creative nonfiction pieces based on qualities particular to each of these authors. Students write short annotative papers on technique and craft as identified in the selected writers, and endeavor to imitate those techniques in their creative work.. The final third of the course will be focused on the development and revision of a longer original creative nonfiction piece.
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A two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major.
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This course will examine the intersection of politics and allegory in late medieval England. The literary centerpiece of the class will be William LanglandÂs allegorical dream vision, Piers Plowman. The Middle English equivalent of a best seller, it now has, according to A.V.C. Schmidt, Âa serious claim to be the greatest English poem of the Middle Ages. Far from being confined to a courtly and literary elite, however, LanglandÂs poem was invoked by the participants in the 1381 Peasants Revolt, who claimed support from ÂPiers the Plowman my brother as they demanded charters that would end their servile status and allow them to bargain as equals with the great estates. Beyond Piers Plowman, our primary texts will draw from the tradition of medieval political allegory from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries  a tradition that crossed the divide from manuscript to print to serve as a direct antecedent for Early Modern allegories such as SpenserÂs Faerie Queene. Secondary texts will consider both theories of allegory and medieval political theory, which often had allegorical undertones; readings will include selections from Angus FletcherÂs Allegory, Gordon TeskeyÂs Allegory and Violence, Ernst KantorowiczÂs The KingÂs Two Bodies, and Steven JusticeÂs Writing and Rebellion. Throughout we will consider the intimate relationship between allegorical and political representation, whether in light of the medieval distinction between the frail human body of the officeholder and his eternal, sacralized existence as officeholder, or in light of the 1381 rebels efforts to renegotiate their position within the body politic.
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