| source Duke (X) |
level |
department English (X) |
While many modern and postmodern literatures provide an alternative approach to history, legal fictions, and moral mischief, this course will focus on the ways in which American Indian/Native American literature reimagines and retells older narratives. The course pairs canonical readings with modern revisions. We will begin with the moral journey of ChaucerÂs pilgrims countered and encountered by VizenorÂs Native pilgrims who work through their own morals, particular to American Indian issues but not removed entirely from ChaucerÂs bawdy tales of teaching and experience. Here we will explore what drives the journey of the travelers, as well as understanding the issues as reflective of their cultural background; what problems and tensions do each hold? Then we will move on to looking at how two novels by Thomas King rewrite older narratives, from the Bible to Moby Dick, and how KingÂs narrative interrogates the space of art and vision. What does literature provide for our analysis of art? What remains of social narratives, even after each art form provides alter-narratives? Next we will read about and discuss the feminine narrative with a more contemporary juxtaposition of Toni MorrisonÂs Paradise and LeAnne HoweÂs Shellshaker. These novels provide an interesting contrast of narratives of migration, blood, belonging, and morals. Finally, we will examine the revision of history and alternative vision of religion offered by Vine Deloria Jr., and use the former texts and the experiences of the class to work through the question of multiple truths and double standards. In parallel with these readings, you will develop your own skills of revision but also at writing about literature through your papers and other requirements.
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Imagine a world in which a man can transform into a giant bird for a tryst with his imprisoned lover, a world with magic potions and rings that can erase peopleÂs memories, where lords and ladies encounter mysterious wonders as they journey into enchanted lands in search of adventure. Medieval romances are tales of chivalry and courtly love, filled with adventures and fantastical events. But they also tell stories of a society that is frequently threatened by betrayed trust and often hostile situationsÂconflicts only reconcilable by extraordinary acts of bravery. As we look at these romances we will be asking questions not only about the individual, but about the medieval society they represent as well. What is the nature of the relationships between characters and how do those relationships define and then disrupt social structures and values? How is marriage represented and does it interfere with knightly duties? What are the consequences of adulterous loveÂmost famously, the love between Lancelot and Guinevere, but also between Tristan and Isolde and many of the characters in the lays as well? And how do religious ideologies and practices present themselves and what effects do they have on the values and choices of the individuals involved?
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What is it about Harlem that triggers the (musical) imagination? Taking our cues from Ralph EllisonÂs novel Invisible Man, weÂll explore the creation of a Âgrove in terms of music, lifestyle, and the importance of records as tangible objects and metaphors pertaining to Harlem after the Harlem Renaissance until roughly the birth of the hip-hop novel in the 1990s. Using music, novels, films, and essays, weÂll try to trace the ways in which music informs our understanding of this area over time. From James Brown to Ma$e and Ralph Ellison to Sister Souljah, weÂll examine the changing role of Harlem as a space for the creation of music as well as a spaced defined by the presence of music as a form of cultural expression.
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This class will be examining writing about (and in some ways by) ÂoutsidersÂ: the madmen, recluses, primitives, and outcasts who haunt the periphery of Western culture. Alternately lionized and stigmatized, scapegoated and help us as a solution to the ills of the day (the Noble Savage), the outsider has been around as long as society has. He (or she) holds a particular fascination for the artist: ever since Plato banished the poets from his republic, the figures of the artist and the outsider have tended to go together. In our current time, we may have become more accustomed to the idea of the outsider (especially as represented in art), but the reality of the individual who turns his back on society can still unsettle and provoke.
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In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner first pointed out the importance of the frontier to American mythology just as the era of western exploration was coming to a close. This course will discuss major American writing produced between the Civil War and World War II through the specific lens of the disappearing frontier. Beginning with LincolnÂs ÂGettysburg Address, we will examine how the United States became one settled nation stretching from coast to coast. We will track the image of the cowboy from the Wild West to Wall Street in the works of Mark Twain, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. We will explore the frontiers faced in post-Civil War culture by African Americans and women in the works of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Willa Cather. And we will learn how these myths of the frontier continue to define American culture.
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This class will be devoted to reading and writing poetry. About a third of class time will be spent talking over some of the most significant and moving examples of lyric art, a third or more in discussing poems by class members, and the remaining time will be given to ancient poetic secrets that cannot be spoken of here. Students will be expected to write about a poem week, try out a writing exercise on a regular basis, and keep a notebook.
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This course will acquaint you with the fundamental elements of imaginative writing (image, voice, character, setting and story) as employed in creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry. If you wish to go on to take more advanced creative writing courses in particular genres, this course will help to prepare you for them. It will also help you learn to get ideas on paper with greater ease; make you a more effective and creative writer; and deepen your understanding and appreciation of literature.
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Over the course of this semester we will look at a series of authors who deliberately blur and mix genres, who test the constraints of the forms they are working within. While many of these texts may at first strike you as odd or difficult, I think you will also soon find that they open up new and exciting possibilities for your own writing. Our mode of work will be straightforward: First, we will read and discuss a text together, and then I will ask each of you to imitate and extend its approach in your own writing. And so, for instance, you will be asked to read Anne Sexton's Transformations, a book of poems in which she rewrites a series of fairy tales, and then to try your own hand at reworking a familiar text. Similarly, you'll be asked to write a text that mixes fact and fiction much as Margaret Atwood does in Alias Grace, to experiment with perspective along the lines of Ian Pears in An Instance of the Fingerpost, to construct a multimedia text along the lines of Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine, to draft a series of vignettes modeled on Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and so on. My hope is that, in thus adapting the forms of the authors you read, you will begin both to understand their experiments with genre and to expand your own stylistic repertoire as a writer.
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This course is an introduction to the reading of poetry. We will approach the subject not primarily from questions of theme or thought or even the interpretation of metaphor, but rather from the question of how structure and sound and rhythm affect the reading process. The technical term for this is "rhetorical analysis" - but don't let that scare you. You will learn all you need to know about rhetoric as we proceed. Another way of putting it: Instead of focusing on the question, "What did this mean to you?", we will use that question as a springboard to the more intriguing question, "Why did this mean to you what this meant to you?" We will investigate the phenomenons of rhyme and sound repetition and rhythmic balancing. We will discuss what happens when a line that was supposed to "end" doesn't do so. We will look at all the ways poetry has - and that prose lacks - of making two words or phrases or statements speak to each other which otherwise would not speak to each other. We will develop new uses for the eyes and ears.
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We will spend the semester studying two of the most accomplished instances of spiritual autobiography, St. AugustineÂs Confessions and William WordsworthÂs Prelude. Though separated by more than 1,500 years, both narratives exhibit the persistence of a number of problems intrinsic to the genre of autobiography and felt in particularly acute ways during times of political and religious upheaval, such as St. Augustine and Wordsworth experienced it during the waning years of the Roman Empire and the French Revolutionary upheavals, respectively. Among the issues weÂll focus on are the following: 1) what is the relation between narrative form and conversion? 2) How does the temporal divide between the self writing and the self written manifest itself, especially as regards the relationship between language and memory? 3) What is the goal of such autobiographical writing for its author, its audience, and its historical time? 4) Can a text whose source of Âevidence is preponderantly inward claim spiritual justification, authority, or even exemplarity for the self so conjured up? 5) How do St. AugustineÂs and WordsworthÂs autobiographical narratives negotiate the ancient conflict between truth and rhetoric already embodied by Plato and the Sophists, Ceceronian and Stoic philosophy, respectively? 6) How do the two writers narratives differ, particularly as regards their outlook on notions of virtue and the status of the self?
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ÂThere is no guarantee that we or our movement will survive long enough to become safely historical. We must document ourselves now. ÂBarbara and Beverly Smith in ÂI Am Not Meant to Be Alone and Without You Who Understand: Letters from Black Feminists 1972-1978Â
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What is a ghost? What part does a haunting play in a fictional text? More specifically, why has fear, spectral or otherwise, been so central to the American cultural imagination, from nineteenth century gothic fictions to the late twentieth century obsession with terrorism?
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In a frequent flier age when people travel to study, to work, and to relax with the regularity of the seasons, itÂs hard to think of an era when travel was predictably nasty, disreputable, cost-prohibitive, life-threatening, and frequently involuntary. In this course, we will explore travel tales from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century, attempting first to denaturalize our modern understanding of Âtravel through the lenses of business and leisure. Charting how the mode of travel narrative moves across genres (letters, histories, poetry, drama, and prose fiction), we will also put pressure on our understanding of the Âliterary in a historical frame. As we develop interpretive tools to orient our study of these peculiar texts, we will think about how the fantasies and fears that surround encounters with exotic Âothers often tell us more about early travelers origins than about their destinations. Finally, we will ask how early modern writers respond to organized travel (settler colonialism, trade, slavery) as it reconfigures relations of power on a global scale.
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This course attends to the role played by representations of space and place in articulating the relationship between individual and national identity. Reading a range of amazing eighteenth and nineteenth century texts, weÂll also hone our skills of close reading and essay writing and fearlessly engage with literary criticism.
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Basic film theory and history of motion picture technology. Introduction to experimental, documentary, and narrative forms of Third World, European, and United States cinema. Economics and aesthetics, popular genres with emphasis on the science fiction film. Some titles screened may include: Citizen Kane, Strangers on a Train, Un Chien Andalou, The Terminator, The Battleship Potemkin, Blackmail, Alien 3, Run Lola Run, Chinatown, In the Mood for Love, and Memento.
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If you are interested in DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION, have a DOCUMENTARY IDEA you would like to turn into a short film, or are looking to improve your non-linear editing and shooting skills, sign up for FVD 138 during summer session 2.
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An intense tutorial in the art of finding, researching, reporting, and writing long-form, non-fiction stories. This course presents a strategy for documentary writing that combines the practices of journalism, the aesthetics of the novelist, and the ethics of the documentarian to create longer narratives that are absorbing, complex, artful, and sturdy enough to stand on their own without image or sound. This course is intended for those students who aspire to create written work in the manner of Tracy Kidder, Gay Talese, Susan Orlean, Joan Didion, John J. Sullivan, Donovan Hohn, Martha Gellhorn, Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee, Alec Wilkinson, Jonathan Harr, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, John Hersey, William Langewiesche, William Finnegan, Erik Reece, Jane Kramer, and Eric Schlosser, to name a few writers who, though each very different, share a certain basic approach to this sort of work. This is a nuts-and-bolts course for the writer of narrative nonfiction books and magazine articles that direct attention outward toward other people and communities. (This is not a course for the memoirist.) Students will spend much of the course beginning work on their own long narrative project, or they may continue work already begun. In class we will discuss the tools and techniques of the journalist, weÂll read what some leading practitioners have to say about how they do their work, weÂll read widely varying examples of narrative, and weÂll listen to what some of those writers have to say during guest lectures.
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In Dramatic Writing, we'll look at how plays differs from other dramatic art-
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Please bring all submissions for this class to 305C and they will be mailed to the instructor.
Score: 8.191164 Details | Listing | Web page
Please bring all submissions for this class to 305C and they will be mailed to the instructor.
Score: 8.191164 Details | Listing | Web page
Students must submit 5-8 pages of creative prose -- nonfiction preferably, but fiction is also acceptable by November 11. Please place in Professor Fox's mailbox, 314 Allen.
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Submissions due by November 11. Please place in Professor PopeÂs mailbox in 314 Allen.
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Introduction to the scientific study of linguistics and languages. Topics include the origin and nature of language, methods of historical and comparative linguistics, theories and schools of linguistics, empirical and descriptive approaches to the study of language, including phonology,
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This course will try to change the way you write -- permanently. If you write extremely well already, it will help you understand why -
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In nearly every culture, individuals have chronicled their interior journey in spiritual autobiography. Such narratives frequently take the form of a quest driven by ethical imperatives, pressing circumstances or questions that can no longer be ignored, a desire for self-knowledge, meaning, and often--though not always--a relationship with the divine Other.
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