Fall 2004 Course Descriptions

ENGL 600 Seminar in Verse Composition Dings TTH 12:30-1:45
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 602 Seminar in Prose Composition Hospital TH 3:30-6
This will be a reading-intensive and writing-intensive workshop on the short story. A wide variety of examples of the form will be studied, and the techniques of the finest practitioners will be analyzed. Students will write their own short stories and submit them to the workshop process. A rigorous standard of editing and revision will be expected before final versions are submitted.

ENGL 650C Reading and Writing Children’s Literature Johnson TTH 9:30-10:45
This course is designed for students who want to become familiar with children’s literature as a field of scholarly inquiry and who want to write children’s literature as well. Thus, the course will consist of reading primary works (mostly twentieth- century American children’s literature), examining recent criticism in the field, and writing and critiquing original manuscripts. This course is not for those who think of the field as “kiddie lit” or imagine beginning their lives as writers with children’s books and then graduating to adult literature.

Requirements: Regular attendance; active and consistent participation in class discussion; an original manuscript of a “work in progress” be it a collection of poetry, chapters of a novel, or some other genre. This must be accompanied by a short paper documenting the process of conceptualizing, researching, and/or writing the manuscript; or a critical paper of 15 pages or 25 pages. The topic is to be chosen and refined in consultation with the professor.

ENGL 680 Survey of Linguistics Weldon TTH 3:30-4:45
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of linguistics and to provide a general understanding of human language- its defining characteristics, how it works, and how linguists examine it. We will begin with a focus on the major levels of language structure and their corresponding linguistic sub-fields, namely, phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. We will then examine other sub-fields of linguistics such as semantics, pragmatics, historical, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Cross-listed with LING 600.

ENGL 700 Introduction to Graduate Study Shields TTH 12:30-1:45
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 001 Teaching of Composition Friend MW 10-11:15
ENGL 701A 002 Teaching of Composition Friend MW 12:50-2:05
Teaching writing can be a lonely business--especially when you're doing it for the first time. Although USC offers dozens of sections of 101 each semester, when you step into your classroom, you may have little idea of what colleagues are doing in their teaching and only vague memories of the writing courses you took as an undergraduate. This course aims to bring your teaching out of this anxious, solitary realm by giving you a background in pedagogical theories and practice and a community of teacher-scholars with whom you can share your work.

During the semester, we'll explore some of the best current theories and research in composition and rhetoric, the academic field that deals most closely with methods of writing instruction. We'll bring in experienced professionals in the field to model approaches that work well for them and to help you adapt their ideas to your own classrooms. We'll give you hands on practice with electronic technology for teaching writing, including Internet resources, listservs, and instructional software. But most importantly, we'll use part of each class to discuss the day-to-day challenges you face in your own classrooms, and we hope to create a supportive community of colleagues with whom you can share your ideas and successes even after the term has ended.

Note: Enrollment in English 701A is limited to teaching assistants teaching English 101 at USC for the first time. If you have any questions about whether you can take this course, please contact the First-Year English Office or Professor Friend (chfriend@mailbox.sc.edu).

ENGL 710 Renaissance Miller TTH 11-12:15
TBA

ENGL 712 Shakespeare’s Tragedies Gieskes MW 11:30-12:45
We will read a selection of Shakespeare's tragedies from early in his career (Titus Andronicus) to the four great tragedies of the turn of the century as well as Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, and The Tempest. In addition, we will read two non-Shakespearean tragedies (Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy) as we place Shakespeare's plays into their dramatic context. Shakespeare did not develop early modern tragedy in isolation, nor did any of his contemporaries.

Our collective goal will be to develop a sense of the social and cultural resonances of tragedy in Elizabethan and Jacobean society as well as a working definition of “Shakespearean Tragedy.” We will also strive to understand some of the generic changes that can be seen in Shakespeare's later career. Students are encouraged to see as many filmed (or live) productions of the plays as possible, as we will be discussing the plays as plays--that is scripts to be performed--as well as literary texts.

We will also read a selection of non-dramatic texts whether they be sources, influences, or responses; these will include period theorizations of tragedy. We will pay attention to the literary, historical, and political contexts of the plays in early modern England. In addition, we will read and discuss a variety of critical approaches to the study of Shakespearean tragedy.

ENGL 724 English Romantic Prose Feldman TTH 11-12:15pm
By examining major prose works by British prose writers of the romantic era, this course will provide a framework for a fuller understanding of all British and American 19th and 20th century literature. We will trace the transformation of aesthetic values as we explore the development during this crucial period of the novel, the short story, literary criticism, and the personal essay. The reading list will include the following works: Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater; William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent; Susan Ferrier, Marriage; Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian; Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho; Jane Austen, Northhanger Abbey; Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House; Mary Shelley, Matilda and a selection of short stories; William Hazlitt, Selected Essays; Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice; Joanna Baillie, De Montford; and selections by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

ENGL 729 British Poetry Since 1900 Madden TTH 3:30-4:45
This course will be a survey of British poetry since 1900. (We will begin in 1889, where Raymond Williams locates the beginning of modernism, with the death of Robert Browning.) Topics to be addressed will include: decadence and aestheticism, modernism and modernist poetics, Georgian and Imagist poetics, Ireland and Irish politics, the use of myth, poetry of the Great War, the relation of the poetic to the political, postcolonial poetry, and issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Texts will include: Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry – Keith Tuma, ed.; The Lost Land – Eavan Boland; Trilogy – H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); The World's Wife – Carol Ann Duffy; The Waste Land – T. S. Eliot; The Man with Night Sweats – Thom Gunn; North – Seamus Heaney; The Ballad of Reading Gaol – Oscar Wilde; World War One British Poets – Candace Ward, ed.; Selected Poems and Four Plays – W. B. Yeats (Rosenthal, ed.). We will also read 2 additional books by contemporary poets.

Grades will be based on 2 presentations (historical and literary-critical), a short literary analysis paper, a final research project (with annotated bibliography), a short essay exam (take-home), and other class writing.

ENGL 733 Classics of Western Literary Theory Shifflett TTH 12:30-1:45
A survey of norms and innovations in literary criticism--and theories of artistic form and social process that inform
criticism -- from Plato to Dryden. Texts will include a standard anthology and a photocopy coursebook containing exemplary scholarship.

ENGL 744 American Romanticism Walls TTH 2-3:15
When Thoreau was at Walden, he surveyed the pond and discovered that "the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth," a discovery he generalized to "the sun in the system and the heart in man." This course will honor the sesquicentennial year of Walden by surveying the length and breadth of the world of Walden in Thoreau's day, in hopes of discovering the book's own greater depths. Thoreau's one-person utopia draws together an extraordinary range of issues: working from Walden out, we will explore such questions as natural
science, the formation of the two cultures, and the beginning of American environmental writing; anti-slavery, reform, and women's rights in antebellum America; and the emerging role of the poet and literary artist, both male and female, in 19th-century American society. Readings will focus on Thoreau, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Louisa May Alcott,
Whitman, and Dickinson.

ENGL 752 Modern American Novel Cowart TTH 9:30-10:45
This course will focus on fourteen or so volumes of American fiction published between 1900 and 1952, with selected criticism. I welcome suggestions for texts to include in the event of problems with book orders. Prospective Texts: Cozzens, Castaway; Wharton, The Age of Innocence; Adams, The Education of Henry Adams; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer; Cather, My Antonia (Dover $2); Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Stein, Three Stories (Dover $2); Trilling, The Middle of the Journey; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; West, Miss Lonelyhearts/Day of the Locust; Porter, "Old Mortality," "Noon Wine," "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"; Ellison, Invisible Man.
Semester grade: 10% daily writing; 10% review/precis (of a book on modernism); 60% three papers; 20% final exam.

ENGL 757 20th Century African American Literature Whitted MW 2:10-3:25
Our study of twentieth-century African-American literature combines major and lesser known texts with cultural criticism, theoretical interpretation, and literary auto-analysis. Questions of racial representation, vernacular traditions, canonicity, intertextuality, and social responsibility will shape the way in which we read and evaluate the imaginative works of African-American writers. In an effort to facilitate in-depth analysis, our goal will be to highlight a single theme, trope, or scholarly debate surrounding each work through critical response papers and student-led discussions. Readings to include works by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Sterling Brown, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, and Randall Kenan. In addition to weekly response papers, students will be required to give a class presentation and write two research papers (12-15 pages each).

ENGL 790 Survey of Composition Studies Holcomb MW 10-11:15
This course is a foundational course for comp/rhet majors and minors. It surveys a selection of key thinkers and texts that have helped to define the field of Composition and Rhetoric. Emphasis will be on differing (sometimes competing) theoretical approaches to writing instructions and their practical consequences in the classroom. We will cover such topics as the history of writing instruction in American universities and colleges, the process movement (including expressivist, cognitive, and transactional approaches), style, and digital rhetoric. ASSIGNMENTS: weekly one-page response papers, paper proposal and bibliography, and final research project (15-20 pages). TEXTS: James Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, Victor Villanueva’s Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, Richard Lanham's Analyzing Prose, and Jay David Bolter's Writing Space.

ENGL 792 Classical Rhetoric Mucklebauer T 3:30-6
This course will introduce you to some of the main problematics of classical rhetoric, paying particular attention to Greek antiquity. Even more specifically, much of the course will focus on the supposed debate between Plato and the sophists. While we will read a number of "primary" works (6 or 7 Platonic dialogues, for example), we will also read them in conjunction with contemporary "theoretical" appropriations of these works (for instance, we will read Plato's "Phaedrus" in conjunction with Derrida's essay, "Plato's Pharmacy"; or we will read selections from Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics" in conjunction with Heidegger's essays on Physis).

ENGL 794 Modern Rhetorical Theory Smith MW 11:30-12:45
TBA

ENGL 815B The Eighteenth-Century Periodical Rivers M 3:30-6
In this seminar we will explore the nature, diversity, and importance of the eighteenth century literary and political periodical from its beginnings in the Restoration to its many manifestations throughout the eighteenth century. Particular emphasis will be placed on the periodic essay as developed and practiced by Addison, Steele, Johnson and others; on the political periodicals of the 1720s and 1730s; and on the connections between the periodicals and other literary forms and British culture in general during this period. The goal of the course is for students to engage in reading and research that will facilitate development of their dissertations and/or lead to publishable scholarship.
There will be two major research projects with presentations for the seminar.

ENGL 821B Marriage, Love, and Lives in the Thesing MW 12:50-2:05
Age of Queen Victoria
This seminar will consider intimate personal relationships of both authors and characters in texts. It will cover biographies, novels, and non fictional prose works. Some authors to be studied will include: Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Thomas Hardy, and others. Some novels will possibly include: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, C. Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, etc. Non fiction prose works about home life, the status of men and women, and the professions by Florence Nightingale, J. S. Mill, John Ruskin, and others will be studied. Some other authors to be studied: H. Martineau, F.P. Cobbe, M. Oliphant, H. Taylor, M. Caird, Mrs. Humphry Ward, as well as a range of literary and aesthetic criticism by Victorian women writers.

Supplementary xerox packets and materials will be available at Universal Copies. Students should not purchase any textbooks until the final, definitive list is distributed at the first class meeting. Feel free to contact the instructor if you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns.

Assignments: an oral report on a critical book and/or article (one 5 page paper version); a second oral report (individual or group class presentation); final essay exam; a 10 12 page term paper suitable for delivery at a conference or for publication (assistance from instructor will be cheerfully offered to all students).

ENGL 841A American Women Writers & the Literary Marketplace James TH 3:30-6
Examination of the textual history of two novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), will anchor our study of the relationships among American women writers, their readers, and publishers in the last two centuries. Written work will consist of weekly assignments, scheduled reports (two each), and a major paper. Depending on the writer or writers emphasized in your research, the seminar may be counted toward a concentration in either nineteenth- or twentieth-century American literature. It may also count toward Ph.D. minors in Women’s Studies and the History of the Book, as well as toward the graduate certificate in Women’s Studies.

Each phase of the course requires an interdisciplinary approach to texts and contexts. We will examine the impact of gender, race, and class on such focal topics as theories of women's creativity; definitions of authorship and authors’ rights; the evolution and transmission of texts; dramatic adaptation; publishing protocols; marketing; author-publisher relationships; magazine publication; international copyright; censorship; canon formation; readers, reviewers, and the politics of reputation.

ENGL 842C Psychoanalysis, American Radicalism, & the Politics of Literary Modernism
Forter W 5-7:30
This course examines American modernism in two closely related contexts. The first of these is the explosive spread of industrial capitalism that took place between 1890 and 1920—a transformation that artists and intellectuals of this period experienced as both enormously exciting and catastrophically destructive. The second context concerns the emergence, in response to the spread of capitalism, of a distinctive strand of American radicalism that sought to harness what psychoanalysts call “Eros”—the human capacity for love and sexual connection—in the name of various libratory projects: feminist, anti-capitalist, gay, and anti-racist. We will read a range of primary and secondary documents relating to both these contexts. These will include essays and speeches by American radicals, historical interpretations of various social movements, and a recent history of the Harlem Renaissance (one site of anti-racist cultural energy). In addition, the course will explore a range of more recent arguments in the tradition of emancipatory psychoanalysis. These are texts that reinterpret Freud in a way that stresses the sociohistorical causes of psychic suffering; their authors seek a revolution in consciousness, but argue that this can only take place through a rearrangement of the social world that liberates our capacities for reciprocity, love, and intersubjective connectedness.

Course Requirements: four-page analysis of a political text, due Week 5; four-page close-reading exercise of a literary text, due Week 9; paper proposal, including annotated bibliography, due Week 11; fifteen-page paper on at least one literary and one political text, due on last day of class.