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Spring 2009 Course Descriptions
Locations to be announced
Undergraduate courses
English 200: Introduction to Undergraduate Study in English
Professor Stephen Dilks
TR: 9:30-10:45
English 200 investigates practices of reading, writing, and research
associated with English studies. The course teaches multiple ways of
analyzing literary texts, exploring relationships between different
genres and historical periods, developing questions about authorship,
publication, reception, and influence.
In Spring 2009 we will work with Beowulf (parallel text edition
translated by Seamus Heaney), Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe), Mary Prince (by Herself), The Waste Land (Eliot) and For
Colored Girls (Ntozake Shange), developing an understanding of how
authors in different historical periods and cultural contexts narrate
the lives of restless individuals and changing communities. In addition
to helping you learn about English studies, I will do my utmost to help
you become a better reader, writer, and researcher!
This course will fulfill a 300/400-level literature requirement for the
major with permission from the Undergraduate Program Director. Please
contact Jennifer Phegley (phegleyj@umkc.edu)
for more information.
English 214: Introduction to Fiction
Professor Lindsey Martin-Bowen, J.D.
This survey course covers short stories by nineteenth and twentieth
century western writers and a contemporary novel. The class
emphasizes--but is not limited to--fiction by women and other minority
writers, such as Kate Chopin, Katharine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston,
James Joyce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Cheever, Louise Erdich, Jamaica
Kincaid, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Along with participating in the
standard lecture format, students will work in groups to analyze
stories' fictional elements and relate them to such cultural themes as
tensions between the genders and races, man's inhumanity to man, the
search for meaning in a chaotic universe, and so forth. We will also
view two films.
Each student will also choose one of the novels, Anne
Tyler's The Accidental Tourist or Digging to America, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or Leslie Marmon
Silko's Gardens in the Dunes. Not only will students respond to
their selection in their reading journals, but we will discuss both
selections in groups.
Prerequisite: The ability to read closely, pay attention in class,
and discuss literature enthusiastically. Regular attendance is
mandatory.
English 225: Composition II
Professor Lindsey Martin-Bowen, J.D.
Along with developing critical thinking skills, students will
learn various rhetorical and research skills in this Composition II
class. The readings will include primarily essays, and one unit will
focus upon literature (short stories). Students will complete a reading
journal in which they reflect upon readings in depth. They will also
participate in group work and will write four research essays, including
an annotated bibliography for their final essay. We will also view two
films.
Students will also prepare for and take a practice WEPT (Written English Proficiency Test) to help them hone their skills
for taking the actual exam.
Prerequisite: Completion of English 110, the ability to read closely,
pay attention in class, and discuss writings enthusiastically. Regular attendance is mandatory
English 300CD: American Social Film
Professor Joan Dean
TR 12:45-3:00
Ref: 23010
Tivoli Theatre/Manor Square
This cluster course (English, History, and Communication Studies) looks
at American dream as represented in film. The class integrates various
approaches to the American sound film between about 1930 and 1990. On
most Tuesdays we will screen a film, such as Modern Times (1936), Rebel without a Cause (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), or The Graduate (1967). On Thursdays each of the
professors (Dean from English, Poe from Communications Studies, and
Wykoop from History) will lecture on the film.
Students are evaluated by two examinations (including the final as
scheduled) and two writing assignments.
The class meets at the Tivoli Theatre in Manor Square in Westport.
English 305 WI: Theory and Practice of Composition
Professor Katie Kline
This is a junior-level, writing-intensive composition course where we
will spend much of our time together reading, writing about, and
discussing issues related to literacy and the teaching of writing. We’ll
put our theoretical study of literacy in the practical context of
teaching reading and writing. We will be exploring and examining our own
literacy education, influential theories in the teaching of writing, and
various cultural, personal and academic perceptions of reading and
writing.
English 310: Introduction to Linguistics
Professor Jeannie Irons
TR 9:30-10:45
HH 109
This course will introduce you to the study of human language. In this
course, we will investigate what we know about the structure and use of
language (i.e. the sounds, words, phrases/sentences, and meanings).We
will examine language from historical and sociological perspectives and
study the various social factors that contribute to language development
and diversity. This course should enrich your curiosity about how
language works, and in particular, help you understand how we use it.
Students will be required to take three exams over the course of the
semester in addition to completing weekly assignments and quizzes.
English 311: American Literature I
Professor John Barton
MW 2:00-3:15
Ref: 21307
This course surveys U.S. literatures from the colonial period to just
before the Civil War. It begins with Cabeza de Vaca's Relación,
a narrative of Spanish contact with the "New World," and concludes with
the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, major precursors of the modernist
movement. The course will cover a wide range of important literary
works from many different genres and examine them in relation to the
cultural and historical contexts within which they were produced. In
our exploration of American literature before the Civil War we will give
special attention to questions about race and gender.
English 312: Creative Writing: Prose
Professor Michael Pritchett
MW 5:30-6:45
Ref: 21309
Location: FH 304
How A Good Story Begins
This course assumes that:
1. A good story begins after something has already happened to
throw your character from cooperation with the fair status quo
into active revolt against an unfair change to the status quo.
2. A good story begins when the weight of circumstance is thrown
against the favored character and they act to save themselves or
someone or anything the reader values from harm.
3. The reader responds to unfairness and suffering, and suffering over
unfairness.
4. A good story is dramatic, allows us intimacy with the characters,
includes their physical and emotional experience, invites us into a
special world, is compressed, uses consciously-crafted language to
express a personal vision of reality, and is complete and satisfying.
In this course, students will have an opportunity to write and workshop
two short stories, and closely revise their stories for submission to
literary journals.
English 315: Creative Writing Poetry
Professor Michelle Boisseau
MW 12:30-1:45
“Work might be electric Rest / To those who magic make.”
--Emily Dickinson
Writing poems has been compared to handling lightning, hitting the head
on a nail, picking apples, finding what will suffice, and dwelling in
possibility. This class aims to make you a more sophisticated reader of
poetry and to channel your new reading skills into new poems. This
class emphasizes the poetry writing process from the invention of the
poem, to developing it through many manifestations into the creation of
a polished draft. This class will 1) help you understand what is
involved in writing a good poem and help you discover how to begin
writing them yourself 2) show you how contemporary poetry is composed,
structured, and revised 3) help you develop your skills in deploying
poetic devices like image, metaphor, and lineation 4) help you develop
skills in evaluating the poems of others and your own poems and to
develop revision strategies 5) introduce you to the recent work of some
contemporary poets and help you discover how to use their poems as a
launching pad for your own. Weekly readings in texts and weekly
workshops of assigned poems. Prerequisite: English 315.
English 317: Survey of British Literature I
Professor Jennifer Frangos
TR 5:30-6:45
Ref: 21311
Location: RH 402
This course will serve as an introduction to literature in English from
the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, with an emphasis
on reading these texts in their social and cultural contexts. We will
look at major and minor writers, a wide variety of literary genres, and
a range of supplementary materials (political treatises, scientific
writing, art and music, fashion, maps, popular entertainments, and so
forth). As we read and discuss, we will consider questions such as: How
is a text created by a culture and how does it in turn help to create
that culture? What problems, tensions, and issues does the literature
seem to be working out for the culture? What issues seem important to
literary texts, what issues seem unimportant, and why? Who has power in
the culture, who is resisting or perpetuating that power structure, and
how does literature (or a given literary text) reveal, perpetuate,
resist, or re-imagine the culture’s power structure?
Be prepared to do a lot of reading: we will be covering more than 1000
years of literary and cultural history. Very often, you will read far
more than we are able to discuss in a given class period. Because much
of the reading for this semester deals with language, culture, and
experiences very different from our own, you should plan to read each
text or selection more than once, and to work on the ability to read
critically and thoroughly and in context, rather than simply for plot.
Coursework will include 3 exams, one group project, reading quizzes, and
active participation in discussions.
English/Classics 318: Bible as Literature
Professor Cynthia A. Jones
A critical study of the major portions of the Old and New Testaments and
the Apocrypha, with special attention to the development of literature
from oral tradition, the literary genres, themes and archetypes
represented in the collection, and the diction and style which have
influenced later literature.
The class also explores the relation of Biblical literature to the
historical, religious and cultural milieu of the ancient Near East.
In this course, students read the Bible as a literary text. When we read
Shakespeare's Hamlet as a literary text, for example, we don't
read it to learn about the history of Danish kings or the nocturnal
habits of ghosts; instead, we read it to learn about love, treachery,
jealousy, and revenge; we admire Hamlet's wit and empathize with his
dilemma.
We will assume that the Bible is a human document, an anthology of
writings put together over time, and that these writings can be analyzed
as literary texts. We will ask literary questions: How does Abraham
change as a character? How does water function as a symbol in the Bible?
How is the relationship between Ruth and Naomi different from that of
Jacob and Laban? Is Saul a tragic hero? How does the issue of a Gentile
church affect the structure of the synoptic Gospels?
Students explore the literature through character analysis, evaluate the
theme of retribution in the Wisdom Literature; discuss such issues as
the theory that good will be rewarded and evil will be punished; concern
for our origins (creation, and ends (death); and the issue of the
incomprehensible in life.
Develop skills to provide detailed literary analysis (close reading) of
the stories contained in selected text; being sure to include considerations of (a) the story’s boundaries, (b) how it shapes the
reader’s feelings toward its main characters, (c) why it gives attention
and space to some scenes and not others, and (d) its meaning by itself
and in a larger literary context.
English/Classics 319: Myth and Literature
Professor Jeff Rydberg-Cox
M 12:30-3:30
Ref: 23011
This course explores the stories and characters of classical
mythology with a primary focus on Ancient Greece and a secondary
emphasis on myths of the Ancient Near East and Ancient Rome. It also
explores the conceptual foundations of mythology including the ways that
the concept of a ‘myth’ has changed from antiquity to the present, the
literary, social, and religious contexts of myth, theoretical approaches
to ancient myth, and representations of mythic stories in contemporary
film and literature.
In the course we will read Barry Powell's textbook Classical Myth,
substantial excerpts from the Odyssey, excerpts from the Aeneid, and several versions of the myth of Orpheus and Euridice.
We will compare these myths with three films - Jean Luc Goddard's Contempt, William Wyler's Roman Holiday, and Alfred
Hitchcock's Vertigo.
English 321: American Literature II
Professor M. Walter Guilfoil
TR 11:00-12:15
Ref: 21314
RH 404
This course will cover American literature from 1865 up through the
twentieth century. It will ask questions about what makes a piece of
literature canon-worthy, who decides what texts should be read in
literature courses, and how can students take part in this debate. Some
of the authors that will be read in class may include: Henry James,
Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Elizabeth Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner,
Sylvia Plath, and Allen Ginsberg.
English 323: Shakespearean Drama
Professor April Austin
TH 11:00 – 12:15
Ref: 21315
CH 105A
William Shakespeare’s canon includes 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 epic
narrative poems. The First Folio was published posthumously in 1623,
and since then the works have been studied, analyzed, and appreciated as
some of the finest masterpieces of the English language. His vivid
characters and universal themes continue to stir the imaginations of
twenty-first century audiences. We will explore Shakespeare’s works in
terms of historical, social, and contemporary contexts. We will look at
Elizabethan theater performance standards and conditions and examine a
selection of sonnets and plays for their literary and performance
value. Not only will we endeavor to embrace the complexities of
Shakespearean language and gain confidence with it, we will look at
various interpretations by actors and directors.
English 327: Introduction to British Literature II
Professor Jennifer Phegley
TR 3:30-4:45
Ref: 21318
HH 315
This course is intended to introduce you to some of the significant
works by British writers from the late 18th century to the early 20th
century, a period that covers the major literary and intellectual
movements of Romanticism, Victorianism, and Modernism. Given the wide
range of diverse literature produced during this period of rapid social,
technological, and economic change, our survey of the field will
necessarily be limited. However, by the end of the course you will have
encountered many important literary figures and discussed some of the
central issues that have defined British literature and culture. We
will approach the selected texts by looking closely at their content,
form, and historical context as well as the influences of the authors,
editors, publishers, and readers who created, sold, and responded to
these texts.
Texts:
David Damrosch, et al., eds., The Longman Anthology of British
Literature, Volume 2a, 2b, and 2c, 3rd Edition.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times. Broadview Press Edition. You MUST
buy this edition.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Broadview Press Edition. You MUST
buy this edition.
English 333: African American Literature II
Dr. Anthony Shiu
TR 2:00-3:15
Ref: 21319
RH 404
African American Literature II will focus on African American literature
published after the Harlem Renaissance. This course will cover a range
of authors and several genres, which will include fiction, poetry,
autobiography, essays, film, and songs.
We will examine a broad range of “literature” produced by African
Americans, from traditional novels to detective fiction to science
fiction to poetry to music to film. In our work, we will develop our
argumentative and interpretive skills in relation to a number of issues,
themes, and concepts which emerge out of and in relation to African
American literature: individual and group identity, exclusion,
community, and political critique. African American literature, at
minimum, is always “double-voiced,” offering us assessments and visions
of past and present society with an eye toward the possibilities of the
future. We will dedicate our time and energies to examining all of these
dimensions while developing a sense of how African American literature
relates to our ever-broadening understanding of what “American
literature” is and what “America” can be(come). Likely texts/films
include Octavia Butler’s Dawn, Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who
Sat by the Door, Chester Himes’ Cotton Comes to Harlem, Spike
Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Audre
Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Toni Morrison’s Song
of Solomon, and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.
English/Classics 340A: Classical Literature in Translation
Professor Cynthia Jones
T 6:00-8:45
Course covers ancient literature from Greece to Rome. The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo, Aristophanes,2 edited
by David R. Slavitt, Classical Tragedy: Greek and Roman, edited
by Robert W. Corrigan, and Plautus: Four Comedies, translated by
Erich Segal.
The students will read a selection of literature from these cultures
developing an understanding of the great variety of literature these
societies developed. From love songs, poetry, epic tales, and plays we
will delve into the thoughts of peoples long gone but certainly not
forgotten.
For each culture we visit through literature we will first discuss the
society that produced the literature. Asking such questions as: What was
the purpose of the literature in their society, who read it, how was it
shared with the community, and why is it important today?
Students read the literature in translation and discuss the assigned
readings during our class meetings, including discussion of the critical
essays contained in the texts.
Third: Writing assignments and exams will evaluate the student’s
understanding of the material.
Students will analyze themes in The Iliad: (1) Glory and Honor;
(2) Revenge, (3) Role of Gods and Goddesses in motivating action. How do
these themes move the poem forward?
We address such issues as fate in Greek epics and plays, asking: How
much is the Greek responsible for his own fate and how much do the god’s
control it in The Iliad?
For comedy we look at factors in generational conflict plays in both the Wasps and Lysistrata? How are the ‘old’ portrayed in the
plays? Wise, useless, etc? and why do you think that Aristophanes needed
the various props he utilized to induce a comic reaction in the plays,
were not the Athenians astute enough to catch the humor through the
lines?
As the students read the Classics tragedies we consider: what is the law
and how is it manifested in these the plays? One method is to trace the
transitional theme of blood-revenge to rule by law in the three plays.
How does Aeschylus take us from the old way to the new?
Also included in as reading in the course are critical essays such as “Form and Persecution in the Oresteia,” by Kenneth Burke, “The
Bacchae: A City Sacrificed to a Jealous God,” Robert
Corrigan’s “An Ecstasy of Madness (Medea).”
English 345WI: Women and Literary Culture
The Female Gothic
Professor Kristin Huston
MW 5:30 – 6:45
In her 1976 work Literary Women, Ellen Moers defined a new
construction of gothic fiction, one that focused exclusively on works
written by female authors. In this class, we will explore what exactly
the gothic is, how women wrote within and blurred the generic
conventions of the gothic, and how these “female gothic” fictions
situate women in the culture created within the novel. Female
authorship, power, sexuality, and the depiction of the body will all be
explored. Critical readings will include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Frances Restuccia and Ellen Moers. Our primary
literary texts will include Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Mary
Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,
and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, along with selections
from Ann Radcliffe, Louisa May Alcott, and Shirley Jackson.
Assignments will include a major research project along with reading
responses, a team project, and presentation.
English 351: Rhetorics of New Media
Professor Daniel Mahala
MW 1:00-12:15
How are the uses and functions of alphabetic literacies changing under
the pressure of new media today? What are the implications of the shift
from alphabetic literacy to networked multimodal media for persuasion,
for public discourse, and for democracy? In this class, we will explore
the emerging rhetorics of new media by examining both new media texts
themselves (including networked media, multimedia art and performance,
and films ranging from Vertov’s The Man With The Movie Camera, to Babel, to mainstream popular films such as The Matrix and Minority Report), as well as the outpouring of recent theoretical
and historical work on media epistemology (Postman, Manovich, Bolter,
Feenberg), visual ways of knowing (Barthes, Berger, Mitchell, Wysocki),
media transformations in the past (such as the advent of daguerrotypy,
radio, and film), and even, more broadly speaking, the increasingly
complex relations between humans and machines (Haraway). We will also
examine recent work on the political economy of networks (Goldsmith and
Wu, Lessig, McChesney) and activist uses of new media (for instance,
essays in van de Donk’s Cyberprotest) in order to better
understand the social and political forces driving both the possible
uses and technological development of new media. Ultimately, our key
focus will be to probe the implications of the spread of new media
technologies for public discourse and democracy.
Students will be required to take exams and do reading and writing in
text form, but will also have options to integrate new media into their
academic writing in experimental ways. However, the course will NOT be
focused on technical instruction in using audio-visual equipment and
software, so the option of using multimodal rhetorics in writing will
depend on students’s prior familiarity with the needed technologies.
Technical familiarity with multimedia equipment and software is neither
expected nor required.
Course texts may include excerpts from:
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology
Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a
Borderless World
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Lessig, Lawrence, Code: 2.0
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Wim van de Donk, Ed., Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens, and Social
Movements
Anne Wysocki et. al. Writing New Media
Possible Films:
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel
Steven Spielberg, Minority Report
Dziga Vertov, The Man With The Movie Camera
Andy Wachowski, The Matrix
English 375: Colonial Literature
Professor Wilson-Tagoe, Visiting Professor in Black Studies
TR 9:30-10:45
As a system of political domination linked to European expansion and
imperialism, colonialism has generated a heteregeneous body of
ideological, cultural and literary expressions in both metropolitan
centers and postcolonial locations. How does this literature illuminate
the nature, paradoxes and conflicting interpretations of colonialism?
What forms of power and struggle does it manifest? How can different
forms of this literature be read intertextually and against the grain of
Postcolonial theory? This course is structured under two broad and
inter-connected topics: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses on
Colonialism; Colonialism in Imaginative Literature. For topic 1 short
extracts will be made from the following: Anthony Froude, The English
in the West Indies (chapter 1) The Writings of Cecil Rhodes (1 chapter) Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism(1-45)
Valentine Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, (Chapter 1), Edward
Said, Culture and Imperialism (chapter 1).
Required Texts: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Leonard Woolf,
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, J M Coetzee, Foe, Derek
Walcott, Pantomime, Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the
North, Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy.
Classics/English 376: Ancient Models of the Hero – Pagan Warrior Ethos:
Models of the Hero through Classical Literature and history
Professor Cynthia A. Jones
TR 9:30-10:45
Ref: 22724
HH 306
This course seeks to trace the heroic model through literature and
history by reading selected works of poets and historians. The course
will primarily focus on works ranging from Homer, Thucydides, Livy,
Plutarch, Caesar, Tacitus, Sallust, and Beowulf. Students will also
examine the impact the heroic model has on modern literature, art,
history and social structure.
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Undergraduate/Graduate Courses
English 410/5510: Black Women Writers
Professor Hadara Bar-Nadav
TR, 2:00-3:15
From the first it has been like a Ballad.
It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
This discussion-based course is designed to further your critical
reading and awareness of literature by Black women writers. Though the
tradition of Black women writers consists of a substantial
international, centuries-long, and varied tradition, we will focus on
twentieth-century poetry to give the course a manageable scope. Readings
will include an anthology, individual books of poetry, and criticism. We
will study women poets of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement
and their precarious membership to these aesthetic communities. In
addition, we will examine contemporary and recent literature and ask
what, if anything, has changed for black women writers writing today.
Specific authors studied may include Helene Johnson, Gwendolyn Brooks,
and Rita Dove as well as the more experimental writers Ntozake Shange
and Claudia Rankine.
This course exists in part as a response to the erasure of Black women
from American literary studies. We will consider the significance of
what it means for a writer to labeled a black woman writer, a woman writer, or simply a writer. Emphasis will be placed on
issues regarding identity and its construction and the interconnected
subjectivities of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation thematized
in much of the literature. As a community, we will examine the narrative
strategies and literary devices used by Black women as they envision,
voice, and represent themselves. We also will explore revised reading
strategies and engage in contextualized readings of the social,
political, historical, cultural, and personal conditions out of which
Black women write.
Requirements include rigorous reading of course texts, energized class
participation, several short response papers, a presentation, and a
final research project.
English 417/5517: Modern Poetry
Professor Michelle Boisseau
Wednesday, 2:00-4:45
“The imperfect is our paradise” or “April is the cruelest month”
This course will focus on four central poets of the first generation of
American Modernism: Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Moore. Our
investigation will begin with Eliot's The Waste Land, postwar
milieu, and the, often fiery, responses to Eliot's vision of a failed
civilization and his assertion that a complex world required a difficult
art to confront it. While our emphasis will be on scrupulous readings of
the poems with an an eye to their artistry and to what they show us
about how the poets created alternative visions to Eliot's, we will also
put the poems in conversation with each other, examine the poets within
their critical context, and look to the poets' influence on later
generations. Texts to include: & Ellman, Norton Anthology of Modern
and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1; & Thompson, The Robert Frost
Reader; of America, Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.
English 432: Advanced Prose Workshop
Professor Christie Hodgen
“He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a
door.” -- Guy de Maupassant
In this advanced fiction workshop we will focus on character. How is
character created? What makes a fictional character memorable,
original, authentic? How does an effective sense of character help to
determine the story’s plot, structure, and point of view? This semester
we will study some of the most enduring (and only occasionally
endearing) characters in literature, from Chaucer’s pilgrims to Joyce’s
Dubliners. We will use as our texts Alice LaPlante’s study of craft,
“The Making of A Story,” and Zadie Smith’s anthology of characters, “The
Book of Other People.”
Class will be conducted in a workshop format, with each student
submitting two stories (a minimum of ten pages each) for the
consideration of the group. In addition to the writing of two stories,
students will be responsible for reading, editing, and commenting on
peer work. A number of quizzes, exercises, and responses to the
assigned reading will round out the semester’s work.
English 433/5553: Studies in Authorship, Reading, & Publishing
Publishing Identities: Women & Print in the United States
Professor Jane Greer
MW, 2:00-3:15
This course explores the history of women’s publishing practices in the
U.S. since the early decades of the 19th century. More
specifically, we will investigate how women have constructed public
identities for themselves through periodicals and other publications,
such as the Lowell Offering of the 1840s; The Working Woman of the 1930s; zines of the 1990s; and the digital publishing
practices of the 21st century. How have periodicals and other
publications sponsored the literacy performances of a range of diversely
circumstanced women? What are the rhetorical affordances of a
periodical, a zine, or a blog? How have women seized and/or created
publication opportunities in order to gain a wider hearing for their
views, create a sense of solidarity, and resist their inscription in
widely circulating cultural narratives of gender?
Students enrolled in this course will complete an original research
project on a women’s publishing project of their own choosing and may
opt to present their findings in a traditional research paper or as a
Sophie Book, a multimedia publishing platform that we’ll be learning
about in class. Possible subjects might include: The Lily (1849-1856); Cherokee Rose Buds (1850-54); Farmer’s Wife,
(1891-1894); The Ladder(1956); or any one of countless other
fascinating possibilities.
Students enrolled in this class may also have the option to explore
first-hand how the process of publication can help construct new public
identities by working with students at the new Southwest Early College
Campus (65th and Wornall) on a book project.
For undergraduate students, this course may be counted toward the minor
in Women’s & Gender Studies.
Tentative Reading List:
Benita Eisler, ed. The Lowell Offering
Martha M. Solomon, A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press,
1840-1910
Noliwe Rooks, Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines & the
Culture that Made Them
Kathyrn Thoms Flannery, Feminist Literacies, 1968-75
Essays and Articles Available at Bb site, including selections from
James P. Danky and Wayne Wiegand’s Women in Print; Sharon M.
Harris and Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women
Editing Periodicals, 1830-1910; and Stephen Dumcombe’s Notes from
Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture.
  
English 434: Postcolonial Literature
Professor Wilson-Tagoe, Visiting Professor in Black Studies
Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45
Postcolonial literature is shaped by the experience and continuing
global impact of European colonization of various regions of the world.
How is this experience explored in literature? What forms of literary
expression, alternative meanings and other knowledge has this literature
generated and how may these be related to theoretical formulations and
debates in Postcolonial theory? How do contexts of slavery and variables
of race, gender and class impact on the key themes and strategies of
Postcolonial literature? This course focuses on different genres of
Caribbean and African Literature and encourages a mutual interrogation
of literary texts and theoretical formulations. The course is structured
under the following interconnected topics: Re-routing History/Claiming
Space and Agency; Postcolonial Pathologies and Cultural Identities;
Postcolonial Journeys and Transatlantic Dialogues.
Required Texts: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, George Lamming, In the Castle of my Skin, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Nervous Conditions,
Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, Merle Hodge, Crick Crack Monkey, Derek Walcott, Omeros, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy.
English 435-0003: Advanced Creative Writing Poetry
Asst. Professor Robert Stewart
Monday., 5:30 to 8:15 p.m.
Ref. 24855
Flarsheim Hall 338
An advanced poetry workshop that includes intensive reading of
contemporary poetry and aims at each student creating a portfolio of
publishable poems. More important will be the effort to discover how
language can be authentic and not affected, vivid and not vague,
important and not pretentious. The focus of the course will address a
variety of topics, such as metaphor and closure; imitation and the line;
form and voice. May be repeated once for credit. Prerequisite: For
Undergraduates Restrictions: ENGLISH 315 or equivalent Offered: On
demand.
English 437: Prose Forms: The Shape of Story
Professor Catherine Browder
Creating a work of prose requires that a writer acknowledge, "form
follows function." Content will always influence the "shape" or
structure of a story. By prose forms we might include the long story,
novella, novel, linked-story collection, episodic novel, essay novel,
the play, the creative nonfiction book, and others. In one
semester we cannot consider every variety of Form. Therefore, this
particular class, "Prose Forms WS 2009," will focus on the innovative
short story including micro-fiction; the long story including the
novella; the short novel; and the one-act play. Writers we will read and
study include ground-breakers in the short story such as Gogol and
Chekhov as well as contemporary writers and innovators such as Robert
Olen Butler & Lydia Davis (micro-fiction), David Ives (innovative
one-act plays), Vladimir Nabokov (short novel), Steven Millhauser
(innovative fiction), A. S. Byatt (long story), Andrea Barrett &/or Jim
Harrison (novella), and others. Ideally, the study of these forms, and
their relation to content, will empower students to write in a fictional
form they have not before tried.
English 440/5540: American Culture
“When in the Course of human events . . . ”: Declarations/Futures in
American Culture
Professor Anthony Shiu
Tuesday 5:30-8:15 p.m.
This is a course devoted to the study of fictions concerning
“possibility” in American cultural production. Why possibility? During
our term together, we will read and view literary and filmic texts that
imaginatively explore the terrain of America in search of alternative
future(s) and vision(s). We’ll also read theory and criticism that tries
to answer the question, including basic work in genre theory,
postmodernism, and poststructuralism—from Frederic Jameson’s “critical
utopias” to Donna Haraway’s “cyborgs.” While our Declaration takes the
form of an obligation or contract, it also sides with chance and
contingency; for every “self-evident” truth, there is a “pledge” of “our
Lives”—shared and multiple—to the other. This pledge, then, is the
forward movement of thinking otherwise and ethically, and we’ll dedicate
ourselves to analyzing how the American imagination perpetually attempts
to think freedom.
We’ll explore a diverse set of readings spanning a number of genres,
most likely including pulp fiction, travel narratives, border
literature, transnational literature, science fiction, utopian/dystopian
fiction, and film. Likely texts/films include Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,”
W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Comet,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and With Her in Ourland, Ernest Hemingway’s Garden of Eden,
Joanna Russ’ The Two of Them, Bienvenido Santos’ What the Hell
for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco, Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human, and B. Traven’s The Death Ship, along with Brazil and Solaris. We’ll also read from a variety of
critical and theoretical fields, such as Poststructuralism and Ethnic
Studies, by reading from the works of several theorists, including
Randolph Bourne, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Fredric
Jameson, Jean-Luc Nancy, David Palumbo-Liu, and Darko Suvin.
The seminar’s work involves classroom discussion, scholarly
presentations by students, occasional reading responses, and a research
paper.
English 445/5545: History and Principles of Rhetoric
Professor Daniel Mahala
Thursday, 5:30-8:15
The purpose of this course is to survey the meanings that rhetoric has
accumulated in its twenty-five hundred year history in the West, and to
search for possible uses of this tradition in the present. Throughout
the course, therefore, we will be reading rhetorical texts from the past
alongside more contemporary texts that interpret, apply, or question the
older texts.
A major argument of the course will be that rhetoric can be fruitfully
defined as a field of study that conceptualizes relationships between
language, knowledge, and power and that links these concepts to the
practice of speaking and writing. Here are some questions this view of
rhetoric raises:
• How is access to the powers of discourse regulated in society?
• What are the historical roots of dominant Western notions of "reason,"
"knowledge," "argument," "persuasion," "objectivity" and "style"? How
have these notions been shaped by the historical exclusion of women, the
poor, and people of color in western rhetorical traditions?
• How have technological innovations in media - writing, printing,
television, digital media - changed the character of discourse in
history and today?
• How have social activists used writing, speech and media to spark
social change in the past and what rhetorical tactics promise to be most
successful today?
Among the writers whose work we will likely study are: Plato, Aristotle,
Cicero, Locke, Stewart, Grimke, Douglass, Nietzche, Bahktin, Burke, and
Foucault. We will also study the work of practicing contemporary
rhetorical theorists and teachers, pairing their work with the
historical texts in order to create a dialogue between past and present,
and to highlight voices from social groups whose perspectives have been
marginalized within mainstream traditions.
Students should expect short weekly writing assignments as well as a
longer essay.
English 447/5547: Introduction to Literary Criticism
Professor Thomas Stroik
TR, 2:00-3:15
We students and teachers of literature often find ourselves cast as
literary commentators and critics. As we approach works of literature
critically, we raise and pursue questions about the nature of
literature, the meaning of literature, the value of literature, the
pleasure of literature, and the practices of reading and/or writing
literature; and we ponder the entanglements of author, reader, genre,
text, language, culture, and the politics of English Departments. In
this course, we will continue our critical wanderings (and wonderings)
about literature, but we will historicize them by placing them in
relation to the many literary critics who have preceded us. Guided by
literary critics from Aristotle to the present, we will journey through
the major theories of criticism in hopes of locating and refining our
own critical assumptions and methods.
English 449A-0001: Publication Practicum (an internship with New
Letters magazine and BkMk Press)
Editor Robert Stewart
Time: personalized schedule
Ref. 21324
University House, 5101 Rockhill Road
This course provides practical, real-work experience and instruction
with New Letters magazine, BkMk Press (book publishing), and to
some degree with New Letters on the Air (radio series) in
publications management, copy editing, manuscript evaluation, grant
development, writing and market research, creative writing and other
skills. Enrollment each semester caps at three students. References
recommended. May be taken for no more than three credit hours over a
maximum of two semesters. Permission of the instructors required. See
"Internships" at www.newletters.org.
English 449B: Publishing Practicum
Professor Jennifer Frangos, associate editor The Eighteenth Century:
Theory and Interpretation
Tuesday, 3:30-4:45
This course will cover the basics of producing an issue of an academic
journal. Students will acquire hands-on experience with an issue or
issues of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, at
all stages of production, from receiving the manuscript and scheduling
its production, through copyediting and formatting, applying house
style, composing and receiving author queries, and submitting the
manuscript to the press, to proofing first pages, compiling author and
editor corrections, and receipt of the final product, as well as author
contracts and permissions, communicating with authors and editors, and
record-keeping. In addition to production work on essays for the
journal, each student will prepare a manuscript of her/his own (e.g.
critical essay, creative piece, review or review essay) for submission
to an appropriate journal or other venue.
Please note that though we will be working with journal editing, most of
these skills are transferable to book publishing and non-academic
journal publishing.
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Graduate courses
English 5503: Old English
Professor Virginia Blanton
Thursday, 5:30-8:15
5 Reasons to Study Old English:
5. Because it fulfills the MA English requirement in medieval
literature.
4. Because it counts as the fourth semester of foreign language for the
MA
(if you have already had three semesters study of one language).
3. Because it makes you a better thinker and writer—ask Dr. Boisseau!
2. Because all the cool kids are doing it.
1. Because you can finally read Beowulf in the original:
Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Old English was spoken and written in England between 500 and 1100, and
in this period, some of the most evocative medieval poems were produced.
Likewise, a number of prose pieces were composed, mostly for the reading
of the laity. Unfortunately, most audiences today can only read this
literature in translation, as Old English is significantly different
than Modern English. This course in Old English will provide the tools
needed to read this literature in the original, to become a proficient
translator of Old English, and to develop an appreciation for
Anglo-Saxon literary culture. As we work, we will discuss not only the
grammar of individual passages but also the literary and linguistic
aspects that emerge because you are studying them in the original. Some
of the pieces we will study are: The Dream of the Rood, The
Wife’s Lament, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Judith.
Graduate students can anticipate:
*preparing weekly translations of short Anglo-Saxon poems/prose texts
*taking two short translation exams
*producing one short translation exercise of a saint’s life, with
critical apparatus
*reading criticism on Anglo-Saxon literature, history, and culture
English 5550D: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature: Crime Fiction
Graduate Seminar
Professor John Barton
Wednesday, 5:30-8:15
This course will examine a range of now-famous or then-popular literary
works that represent or respond to crime, especially murder. We will
begin with a brief survey of the Puritan Execution sermon, what one
cultural historian has recently identified as the “origins of American
popular culture” (Cohen, Pillars of Salt). The course will then
turn to its principal subject matter: crime novels and short stories
written in the gothic, sentimental, and sensational traditions.
Authors of primary works will include canonical figures, such as Charles
Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and
Lydia Maria Child, as well as lesser known writers, such as George
Lippard, William Gilmore Simms, E.D.E.N Southworth, and John Rollin
Ridge (a.k.a. Yellowbird). In addition to reading novels and short
stories related to crime, we will engage an interdisciplinary,
law-and-literature perspective by cross-examining some of our literary
works in relation to famous nineteenth-century trials and court
transcripts, as well as essays, treatises, and books dealing with
“criminal jurisprudence,” an emerging extralegal discourse that today we
would associate with criminology.
Course Requirements: brief weekly quizzes; several short response papers
(1-2 pages); and a critical research paper (17-20 pages). Each student
will also be required to help lead one class discussion.
English 5555H: Graduate Writing Seminar: Prose
The Short Story and The New Yorker
Professor Christie Hodgen
TR, 9:30-10:45
This class will focus on the reading, writing, and publication of short
fiction. Class will be conducted in the workshop format, with each
student submitting two stories (a minimum of fifteen pages each) for the
consideration of the group. In addition to the writing of two stories,
students will be responsible for reading, editing, and commenting on
peer work.
We will use as our textbook The Complete New Yorker*, a set of 9
DVD-ROMS containing the full text of every issue of The New Yorker published since 1925 (over 4,000 issues). Over the decades The New
Yorker has published many of the finest practitioners of the short
story form; no other publication has approached its influence. Our
reading will include stories by John Cheever, John Updike, William
Maxwell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Vladimir Nabokov,
Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Edward P.
Jones, and many others.
In addition to two stories, students will also produce a short paper in
which they study one of the following topics:
• the work of a single author published multiple times in the magazine
• the fiction published during a particular time period (What kinds of
stories, for instance, were published during the Depression? During
WWII? During politically-charged years such as 1968 or 2001?)
• the history form over the decades: trends, changes, and regressions
* Cost of The Complete New Yorker is $39.99
English 5555K: Graduate Seminar in Creative Writing: Poetry
Writing the First Book
Professor Hadara Bar-Nadav
Tuesday, 5:30-8:15
This Graduate Seminar in Poetry will emphasize the reading and writing
of first books of poetry. We will engage in rigorous reading of recently
published first books by a variety of publishers and discuss the often
mystified contest system. We also will explore ways to develop a book
manuscript, from the revision of individual poems to creating an
infrastructure and ordering poems. In addition, students will gain
familiarity with literary journals and prepare individual submissions of
their work.
Regular workshop will support the writing and revision process. As a
writing community, we will redefine the workshop format so that it best
suits its members. Together we will consider various strategies to
sustain our poetry projects—both within this class and beyond as you
continue to develop your manuscripts. Along with individual poetry
collections, we will be reading Tony Hoagland’s playfully titled Real
Sofistikashun to support the workshop and discussions on craft.
In addition to writing your own poetry chapbooks (with a vision and a
plan for expansion!), requirements include engaged participation in the
workshop, rigorous reading of course texts, a presentation, book review,
and prepared poetry submissions. Curiosity, ambition, and perseverance
are necessary, both for this class and for your lives as writers.
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