Fall 2003 Course Descriptions

ENGL 600 Seminar in Verse Composition  Dings   TTH 11-12:15      Hu 312
A year-long course in the art of writing poetry in which students will attempt to revisit and master various aspects of poetic craft as well as discover and/or develop their poetic style. As burgeoning poets who will in many cases be teachers, students should have a wide range of poetic capabilities and not be defined by narrowly developed poetic technique and predispostions. The course will include readings of canonical and contemporary poetry in English as well as usually one paper in response to the readings.  The majority of class time, however, will be spent critiquing peer poems in the workshop mode.

ENGL 610 Reading and Writing the Novel  Hospital        TH 3:30-6     Hu 312
English 610 is the first part of a full-year course in which students produce a book-length manuscript (a novel, a memoir, or a tightly interconnected set of stories). The course involves a number of assigned readings which will be analyzed in class. Special attention will be paid to techniques of structure, narrative voice, tone, characterization, plot pacing, and style. Students will be guided in blocking out an outline of the projected book, and will complete the first 40 – 50 pages during the term. Two chapters of the manuscript will be workshopped in class.

ENGL 700 Intro. to Graduate Study in English   Shifflett    MW 2:10-3:25    Hu 312
A practical introduction to the "close reading" of literary texts, research methods in literary history and criticism, compositional strategies for theses and dissertations, and dealing successfully with the challenges of academic markets and careers.  

ENGL 701A    Teaching College Composition        Rivers      TTH 8-9:15       Hu 308
Introduction to the methods of teaching composition, with emphasis on current pedagogical practice and theory and applications of electronic media. The course provides supervision of graduate students teaching English 101. Restricted to students teaching ENGL 101 at USC.  

ENGL 701A    Teaching College Composition    Rivers   TTH 9:30-10:45        Hu 308
See above description. 

ENGL 712  Shakespeare's Tragedies               Rhu         TH 2-3:15        Hu 308
A survey of Shakespeare's major tragedies and romances from Hamlet to The Tempest.  Attention to genre and other matters of literary interest will be set against the background of Renaissance thought and English political history. A range of current critical and creative responses will also be explored. There may be, in addition, some discussion of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry.  

ENGL 715 English Non-Dramatic Lit. of the Earlier 17th C.   Richey     MW 11:30-12:45      Hu 312
We will study the poetry and prose of the seventeenth century through the Restoration, tracing the historical and political contexts in which it was written as well as the classical and biblical models upon which it was based. We will attempt to listen to the poets of this time in conversation with one another--about patrons and what constitutes the good life, space and topography, the new science and exploration, love and the power relations it manifests, and diverging attitudes toward God, Church, and reformed spirituality.   Requirements: One short paper, one long critical paper, a midterm, and a final exam  Major Text: Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose.    

ENGL 718   English Literature of the Later 18 th C.      Lynn      T 6:30-9      Hu 308
"Soon we shall know everything the 18 th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”  --Randall Jarrell  
The Authors : Samuel Johnson/James Boswell, Johnson/Hester Thrale Piozzi, Johnson/Fanny Burney, Mary Leapor/William Collins, Joshua Reynolds/William Cowper, Johnson/Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot, Oliver Goldsmith/Thomas Sheridan, Johnson/Hume, Edward Gibbon/Thomas Paine, Anna Laetitia Aiken Barbauld/Charlotte Smith, Olaudah Equiano/Hannah More, Edmund Burke/Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Blake/Burns.
The Ideas : Body/Mind, Kairos/Chronos, Words/Things, Liberty/Law, Empire/Community, Faith/Fact, Art/Nature, School/Prison.
The Activities : Lecture/Discussion, three brief (1-2 pages) position papers, three brief (five-minute) presentations, and a 15-20 page project, suitable for submission. Weekly quizzes (drop two), a mid-term (optional), and a final exam (required) will help focus the readings.
1.  This course offers a mostly chronological survey of a wide range of later eighteenth-century writers, reading each one against some illuminating other.
2.  We will trace the influence and evolution of some especially pervasive and powerful ideas—both complementary and contradictory. 
3.  The relative value of these activities: brief papers—15%; presentations—15%; quizzes—10%; mid-term and/or final—30%; final project—30%.  

ENGL 725 English Novel of the Victorian Period Thesing  MW 12:50-2:05 Hu 308
Survey of the development of the novel form, with study of major and lesser-known figures, in relation to social change and publishing conditions. Some authors to be studied will likely include Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Disraeli, Gaskell, Gissing, Trollope, Bronte, and others. The context of the period will be fully explored by way of oral presentations and written critiques of 26 essays in the new Blackwell Companion to the Victorian Novel (edited by Patrick Brantlinger and W. B. Thesing). There will be two essay exams and a term paper (10-12 pages). For further information about specific titles to be studied in the course, please contact the instructor. Please do not purchase any textbooks until after the first class meeting.  

ENGL 733  Classics of Western Literary Theory  Miller     M 5:30-8:15  Hu 308
(Cross-listed with CPLT 701)
The purpose of this course is to examine the birth of western literary theory in its historical, cultural, and technological contexts. As such we will be examining the work of practicing poets, philosophers, literary scholars, rhetoricians, and theologians. Our theme will be how changes in the role and nature of poetry in ancient western society played a determining role in how that poetry was understood and theorized. 

ENGL 735   Post-Colonial Literature and Theory  Dawes   TH 11-12:15  Gamb 354
A careful study of the key texts in post-colonial literature and theory, the course seeks to problematize the concept of post-coloniality while exploring the themes that emerge from that evolving field of study. This course will examine the works of post-colonial authors and scholars from around the world and will explore themes that shape contemporary post-colonial writing while contextualizing them in post-colonial cultures.

ENGL 737  British Women Writers    Stern       MW 10-11:15    Hu 312
Texts by and issues in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature by British women.  Readings include novels, poetry, drama, short fiction, and non-fiction prose.   Assignments include at least 25 pages of professional quality written work, a presentation, and avid participation.  
 

ENGL 745  American Realism & Naturalism       Davis   TTH 12:30-1:45  Hu 308
It is probably more true of this period (1865-1915) than any other in American literary history (except perhaps the 1930s) that its writers watched, read about, and commented on the events of their day – social, political, technological, philosophical, artistic, historical, literary. In this course, so will we. In addition to the readings and a final exam, each student will be responsible for two presentations/papers: one based on 19th-Century archival material and social history, the other on her/his reading of an assigned critical text related to the writer or mode of writing currently being discussed. These two short papers may or may not form the basis of a final article-length paper. Writers covered will include De Forest, Howells, Jewett, Freeman, Zitkala-Sa, Chesnutt, James, Twain, Crane, Norris, Chopin, Harper, and Wharton. We'll also try to squeeze in a Dime Novel, since, for reasons we'll want to examine, at the time these typically outsold any of the above writers' works.

ENGL 750 American Novel to the Civil War James TTH 11-12:15 Gamb 105
A study of the development of the novel in early America, set in the context of literary, social, political, and publishing history. We will ask the standard questions: How do you write a historical novel in a country with scant history? How do you write a gothic romance in a country devoid of crumbling castles? How do the era's major tragedies—Indian removal, the Panic of 1837, and chattel slavery—shape the fate of a young genre in a young nation? We will ask these and other questions of the following novels: Brown's Edgar Huntly, Child's Hobomok,  Cooper's The Prairie, Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Melville's Moby-Dick, Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Wilson's Our Nig. Requirements: bibliographical assignment; approximately 10 pages of critical writing; your choice of a 20-page paper or a comprehensive take-home final exam.

ENGL 753  American Novel Since WWII     Cowart        TTH 9:30-10:45   Hu 312
This course will focus on fourteen or so contemporary fictions, with selected criticism.  Prospective texts appear below. Of course books go into and out of print - I welcome suggestions for books to include. Such suggestions can often be incorporated when problems develop with book orders. Barthelme, The Dead Father or Snow White;  DeLillo, The Names; Pynchon, V; Gardner, Grendel; Nabokov, Lolita; Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance; McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses; Updike, Rabbit, Run; Mukherjee, Jasmine; Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Mailer, The Executioner's Song; Morrison, Song of Solomon; Naylor, Mama Day; Percy, The Moviegoer; Heller, Catch-22; Kingston, The Woman Warrior; O'Connor, Everything That Rises; Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Spiegleman, Maus; Smiley, A Thousand Acres; Hoban, Riddley Walker; Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban; Ellison, Invisible Man; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker or A Gesture Life. SEMESTER GRADE: 10% Daily quizzes, 10% Review/precis (of a book on postmodernism), 60% Three papers, 20% Final exam.

ENGL 757  20th-Century African American Lit.    Whitted   TTH 3:30-4:45 LC 316
This comprehensive examination of twentieth-century African American fiction will be framed around major debates, critical issues, and theoretical (re)visions in African American literary thought. Among the issues we will consider in our investigations of major and lesser known texts are questions of dialect and folk representation, “art” versus “social protest” fiction, black feminist critiques of canon formation, and debates over structuralist and post-structuralist modes of inquiry. Course readings to include works by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, and Colson Whitehead.  

ENGL 760  American Poetry Since 1900 Dings   TTH 3:30-4:45   Hu 308
This course will focus on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, roughly half of the semester for each poet. These two mid-20th-century poets are major poets as well as representative of two major aesthetic strains in American poetry. Most of our time will be spent reading closely and discussing in-depth the poetry of each writer. Students will also read critical essays on each figure, but theory per se will not be taught; instead, it will be assumed that each student is already familiar with various critical approaches, e.g., new critical, feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, post-structural, historical, etc. The poetry will be at the center of our classroom discussion with theory applied eclectically.  Students will determine which critical approach they wish to use in writing their formal papers. Written assignments will include one-page response papers to various reading assignments, two short papers (5-8 pages), and one longer paper (approx. 15 pages).  Students will also be required to make at least one formal classroom presentation on an assigned poem.  

ENGL 790  Survey Composition Study  Friend  MW 10-11:15    Hu 308
If you are new to composition studies, encountering the field for the first time may feel something like landing in the middle of a sprawling and unfamiliar city without a road map.  The intellectual and ideological diversity that makes composition such an exciting field of study also makes it difficult to survey in the space of a semester.  This course, alas, won't provide you with a comprehensive, definitive introduction to the literature of composition studies; there are too many ways of understanding and constructing the field to make such a project defensible—or possible, for that matter. Rather, we'll read about and discuss several key moments in the history of the discipline—several texts that have had a powerful influence in shaping how composition scholars teach, study, and define the field. We'll explore how each text approaches questions like these: How do people learn to write? What constitutes “good writing”? What's the purpose of writing instruction? What role should teachers of writing play in the classroom? In the university? In the public sphere? We won't arrive at conclusive answers for any of these questions, of course. But as the semester progresses, you'll gain a richer sense of how practicing scholars have approached these issues. You'll be better able to see how competing models extend, resist, and engage with each other. And by the end of the semester, you'll have a firmer vantage point from which to critically assess these models and to choose which ones speak most compellingly to your own work as scholar and as a teacher. ASSIGNMENTS: Short papers, working bibliography for research project, final research project (15-25 pages), oral presentation on research project. TEXTS: A Short History of Writing Instruction, James J. Murphy, ed.; Composition in the University, Sharon Crowley; Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy; Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow; Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernism and the Subject of Composition, Lester Faigley; The Rhetoric of Reason, James Crosswhite; plus a course packet containing articles by Linda Flowers and John Hayes, Kenneth Bruffee, Joe Harris, etc.

ENGL 792      Classical Rhetoric       Holcomb     MW 11:30-12:45      Hu 308
This course surveys the major thinkers and practitioners of rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome. As we read the works of these thinkers and practitioners, our primary focus will be on constructing an historical pragmatics of sorts: that is, we will try to extrapolate from course readings the concrete and material conditions of persuasiveness in western antiquity. The assumption informing this process of extrapolation is that “persuasion” is not a trans-historical phenomenon; rather, it is invariably linked to available arenas for oratory and broader cultural contexts. Accordingly, we will be especially interested in the “strangeness” and “unfamiliarity” (from a modern point of view) of rhetorical theory and practices in ancient Greece and Rome. Readings will include Plato's Gorgias and Phaedrus, Aristotle's Rhetoric, Cicero's De Oratore and Murder Trials, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, and Ober's Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. There will also be a course packet of readings. Course work will include a mid-semester proposal paper (6-8 pp.) and “term” paper (20 pp.).

ENGL 820A  Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Felicia Hemans    Feldman TTH 11-12:15    Hu 308
This course will examine both in depth and in context major works by three of the most important and influential women poets of the Romantic era. In the case of Smith and Robinson, we will read prose fiction as well as poetry. We will also explore primary materials such as contemporary reviews, memoirs and letters. Course requirements include two in-class presentations, a 20-page seminar paper, and a short textual editing project.

ENGL 840A  Lit. of the Early South—Exploring a Phantom Nation    Shields     TTH 2-3:15      Hu 312
This course will examine the writings of the staple colonies of the British empire (showing the cultural connections between the writings of the southern mainland and the West Indies), the Old South, the Confederacy, as well as works by southern regionalists of the later 19th-century and the proponents of the “New South.” It will treat novels, poems, histories, memoirs, public documents, religious expressions and oral folklore.  

The literature and civil discourse of the pre-1900 South presents the profoundest set of paradoxes in American literature. The region nourished Jefferson and Jackson, the greatest political champions of democracy in the early United States, yet generated a culture profoundly hierarchical and anti-democratic in tenor. Though it gave birth to Washington and Madison, the foremost advocates of federal nationality and the constitution, the South, following John C. Calhoun, championed states' rights, and during its brief experiment in confederation demonstrated its disenchantment with nationalism.  More disparately multi-cultural in make-up than any other region of the United States with articulate Native, French, German, African American, and Spanish components, the South's public prints became increasingly invested in a vision of white, patriarchal plantocracy. Espousing an ancient ideal of neoclassical agrarianism and agricultural civility, it nevertheless produced the most violent, transgressive, and uncivil literature of the American 19 th century in the work of the southwest humorists. Notorious in its colonial youth for irreligion, it became with the second great awakening the home of the Bible Belt. Embracing a late feudal political economy based on African American slavery, it nonetheless formulated the most cogent critique of industrial capitalism in America. Producing a string of male novelists who looked to Britain and the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott for models, its female prose artists—Mary Boykin Chestnutt, Grace King, and Kate Chopin—looked to France for inspiration. To understand the tensions of the original southern literature is to discover how the roots of America's popular music, the plot of America's national tragedy, the extravagance of American evangelical Christianity, and the dreams of American agrarian utopia arise from this place at this time.  

English 890B  Rhetoric and Alterity  Muckelbauer      TH 6-8:30  Hu 308
"Alterity," or Otherness, is a central concept in much contemporary critical theory, and it has become especially important to scholarship in English studies, both in literary studies and in rhetoric and composition. This course is an interrogation of difference as a discursive practice, a cultural formation, and a political formation linked to systems of power and domination. We will examine a number of theoretical stances on this subject from several critical perspectives, including psychoanalysis, phenomenology, marxism, and post-structuralism.  

Back to Top