Fall 2005 Course Descriptions

ENGL 600 Seminar in Verse Composition Dings TTH 2-:315 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 predispositions. 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 Writing the Novel Blackwell TTH 3:30-4:45 Hu 308
TBA

ENGL 700 Introduction to Graduate Study Gieskes TTH 12:30-1:45 Hu 308
ENGL 700 is designed to provide an introduction to the theoretical and practical elements of graduate study in English. Attention will be paid to the history of the profession, to current trends in scholarship, to research skills, to the practice of literary close reading, and to professionalization. We will read a diverse collection of historical and theoretical texts and will engage in practical activities designed to inculcate some of the skills necessary to be successful in English studies at the graduate level.

ENGL 701A Teaching of Composition Friend
MW 10-11:15 (001) Hu 308
MW 2:10-3:25 (002) Hu308
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 703 Beowulf Gwara MW 12:50-2:05 Hu 308
Intensive study of the Old English epic poem Beowulf with particular reference to historical and grammatical features. Other Old English texts may be read. This course emphasizes philology as an approach to meaning. Papers: 1 essay-translation (3-4 pages). Reports (written): annotated transcript of teleconferencing seminar. Quizzes: 5. Exams: One hour mid-term, 3 hour final. Texts: F. Klaeber, Beowulf (3rd ed.); J.R. Clark-Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Enrollment is limited to students who have completed ENGL 702.

ENGL 712 Shakespeare II: The Tragedies Rhu MW 12:50-2:05 Hu 312
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 Non-dramatic Literature of the 17th C. Richey TTH 9:30-10:45 Hu 312
As this course involves the non-dramatic work in the seventeenth century, I would like to explore the reading by genre, reading the writers in relationship to and against one another:
In the first part of the course we will read the poetry of men and women writing in the Early Seventeenth Century (Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, George Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth, John Milton) over against the lyric poetry of others writing during and after the English Civil War (Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Katherine Phillips, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton). We will analyze how figurations of gender, read in terms of power relations, subjectivity, and spirituality, can be seen to illuminate the sociopolitical and religious position of each writer. We will also consider Renaissance ventriloquism--how writers of the first half of the Seventeenth Century are appropriated and transformed by writers of the second half.
In the second part of the course, we will read the prose of men and women (among these Lancelot Andrewes, Frances Bacon, Margaret Hoby, Eleanor Davies, Ann Clifford, Bathsua Maken, Milton, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, and Thomas Hobbes) looking at the way they articulate their attitudes toward the new science, education, religion, politics, and the nature of the self. Requirements: Short close reading, oral presentations, one researched critical paper, 10-15 pages).

ENGL 723 British Poetry of the Romantic Period Jarrells MW 10-11:15 Hu 312
James Chandler describes the literature of the Romantic period in terms of "...a new preoccupation with the dating of the cultural place, the locating of the cultural moment." This preoccupation has continued in our own critical moment, where a number of new historicisms have worked to change the way we view Romantic-period poetry-indeed, the Romantic period itself. In this course we will survey the poetry of the period while paying close attention to a few key texts: William Blake, America. A Prophecy, Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, Anna Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, James Hogg, The Queen's Wake, Lord Byron, Childe Harold, and Percy Shelley, "England in 1819" and Peter Bell the Third. How did / do these texts locate their cultural moment? How did critics, reviewers, and poets of the period situate them? How do we? To help us answer these questions we will look at some of the relevant criticism, from William Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age to the problems of periodisation that preoccupy the present.

ENGL 733 History of European Literary Criticism PA Miller T 5:30-8 Hu 303
Cross-listed with CPLT 701. See http://www.cas.sc.edu/DLLC/CPLT/courses/synopses.html for a description.

ENGL 735 Post-Colonial Literature and Theory Garane TTH 2-3:15 Hu 214
Meets with CPLT 703. See http://www.cas.sc.edu/DLLC/CPLT/courses/synopses.html for a description.

ENGL 745 American Realism and Naturalism Davis TTH 11-12:15 Hu 312
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 752 Modern American Novel Forter W 5:30-8Hu 312
This course will focus on the American novel from the turn of the twentieth century to the early 1950s. I hope that student interests will help determine the issues we pursue—but the kinds of things that most concern me are: the relationships among modernist, realist, and naturalist modes of storytelling; questions of gender and sexuality, especially in the context of social and personal loss; the forces of capitalist modernity and how these are related to literary modernism; the role of WWI in shaping modern American literature; the place of African American experience and literature in the construction of an “American” canon; and the connections between psychological and political experience on one hand, and literary forms on the other.
Texts: K. Chopin, The Awakening; W. Cather, The Professor’s House; J. Toomer, Cane; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; E. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; W. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! N. Larsen, Passing; T. Olsen, Yonnondio.

ENGL 757 20th-C. African-American Literature Whitted T 5:30-8:00 Hu 308
Our study of twentieth-century African-American literature combines major and lesser known texts with cultural criticism and theoretical interpretation. 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. After establishing a contextual framework through the writings of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Anna Julia Cooper at the turn of the century, our readings will be divided into four thematic units that have become particularly widespread in African-American literature: 1) "Modernity and the Folk"; 2) "Navigating the Urban Landscape"; 3) "The Black Bildungsroman" and 4) "Drama and African-American Identity." Course assignments include weekly response papers, an oral presentation, and a final research paper (20-25 pages).

ENGL 776 Descriptive Bibliography & Textual Criticism Scott W 9:05-11:35
This course draws on the resources of Thomas Cooper Library's Special Collections to study the changing physical or material forms in which literature (and other texts) have been disseminated and preserved. Over the past two hundred years, the library has acquired materials ranging from fifteenth-century incunabula and Renaissance maps to world-class collections of Burns, Darwin, Emerson, Whitman, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others. For CLIS students, this cross-listed course provides an introduction to older materials and to the special issues they raise for librarians, both in general and specialist rare book settings. For students in English, it provides a broad overview of book history and an understanding of the methods and approaches through which scholars research the material text. The course provides an introduction to: the ways that books have been manufactured over the past 500 years; the methods that scholars (and librarians) have developed for describing the distinctive features of a printed book, and for analyzing its bibliographical make-up; the reference resources, both in print and electronic form, that are available to help in researching rare books; and the procedures, and theories about text, that editors commonly use to construct new editions of established works. A sub-theme of the course will be the interrelation between formal bibliographical scholarship and the apparently different aims and methods of, e.g., the book dealer's sale catalogue, on-line vendor cataloging, auction catalogues, exhibition catalogues, or the library cataloguer contributing to one of the major established electronic bibliographical utilities such as OCLC or RLIN. Written Work: In addition to regular attendance, the course requires (1) a series of short practical exercises (some in class) involving bibliographical description, textual comparison, or the interpretation of bibliographical descriptions from standard sources; (2) two short exams based directly on material covered in class; and (3) a case-study, either bibliographical or editorial, on a book or short text chosen by the student after discussion with the instructor. Texts: to be announced. Meets in the Rare Books Room at Thomas Cooper Library.

ENGL 790 Introduction to Composition Studies Watson M 5:30-8 Hu 312
Introduction to Composition Studies is designed to prepare both MA and PhD students to do scholarly work in the field of Rhetoric and Composition. To that end, we will read about the contested history of composition pedagogy and research; the development of the field within contemporary American colleges/universities and English departments; and the major intellectual movements within the field. Students will be expected to complete weekly reading responses/posts, a major class presentation and short paper (8-10pp) on a book/study not covered in our course readings, as well as a final bibliographic essay (10-12pp).

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 or 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.

ENGL 796E Teaching Shakespeare to Undergraduates Miller M 3:45-6:15* Hu 308
This class will prepare you to teach a one-semester survey of Shakespeare’s plays at the undergraduate level. You’ll get an intense introduction to several of Shakespeare’s plays as well as to the basics of teaching literature at the college level, from text selection to evaluating written work. You’ll experiment with and be exposed to a wide range of teaching styles and assignments, and you’ll leave the course with your own teaching portfolio, including a number of well-researched lesson plans.
Requirements: The main requirements for this class will include attending the practicum (a section of ENGL 405), preparing and offering a practicum teaching unit, and submitting a series of written assignments to be gathered into a final portfolio.
Practicum: *All students enrolled in 796 will be required to attend a section of ENG 405 that serves as the practicum for the course. This section meets T/Th at 12:30.
It will be imperative for students enrolling in 796 to hold open a place on their schedules for the practicum, and to attend regularly. (The practicum requirement involves a significant commitment of time and energy, but it is the unanimous recommendation of students and faculty and who have been through the course.)
Students in 796 will form teaching teams of 2-3 students each. These teams will design and then teach one-week units in the practicum sections. Your plans will be discussed in advance, and we will regularly evaluate one another’s performances.
The probable list of plays to be covered in the practicum is Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear.
Portfolio: Written assignments for the course will be gathered into a teaching portfolio similar to those many institutions require their faculty to submit.

ENGL 820B The Gothic Novel Feldman TTH 11-12:15 Hu 308
This course investigates the popular culture craze for Gothic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. We will start with the earliest examples of this phenomenon in Britain by examining key novels by Ann Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, which helped to define the phenomenon. Then we will consider how Gothic literature developed in poetry, fiction and drama both in England and America by considering such texts as S. T. Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Mary Robinson’s “The Lady of the Black Tower,” Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Byron’s Manfred, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Charles Brockton Brown’s Wieland, as well as later works such as William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Along the way we will try to understand why the Gothic so captured the popular imagination and why it continues to do so today.

ENGL 825B “After Postmodernism From Postmodernism to Complexity” Rice
MW 2:10-3:25 Hu 312
This course will begin with a brief overview of the principal topoi of postmodernism—observer-created reality, the “game,” metanarrative, pastiche, undecidability, magic realism—and attempt to trace the international cultural paradigm shift towards a complexity-based view of reality—chaos, self-organization, emergence—as reflected in several major works of fiction. The course will also feature collateral readings of accessible, popular accounts of theories of chaos and complexity in a wide range of fields. A seminar paper—suitable for conference presentation—on a topic arrived at in consultation with the instructor, will be due at the conclusion of the course.
Texts: Postmodernism: Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths—observer-created reality, the “game”; Pynchon, The Crying of Lot-49—undecidability; Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler—metanarrative; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude—magic realism. Transition: Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince—decidability. Complexity: Chaos: Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet; Milan Kundera, Immortality—toward emergence. Emergence: Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before; Don DeLillo, Underworld; Viktor Pelevin, The Life of Insects. Puzzles: Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled. Collateral: Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Introducing Postmodernism; James Gleick, Chaos; Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason; M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity.

ENGL 841B The Transcendentalists Walls TTH 2-3:15Hu 308
Early in the nineteenth century, many writers and thinkers in the young United States were swept away from the Enlightenment ideals of their founding fathers into a new world defined by what will be our three “R’s”: political revolution, romanticism, and reform. This seminar will take up the intersection of European ideas and American realities represented by the American Transcendentalists, a loose group of rebels, dreamers, and freethinkers who gathered around the essays and lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson and from there set about the immodest task of remaking America--and thence, they hoped, the world.
Required Books: Joel Myerson, ed. Transcendentalism: A Reader; Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, ed. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry; Lewis Hyde, ed. The Essays of Henry David Thoreau [or possibly William Rossi, ed. Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays]; additional readings from Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and others, as well as secondary and theoretical essays to be determined.

ENGL 842D Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, Powers Cowart TTH 9:30-10:45Hu 308
For students undaunted by the prospect of reading thirteen or fourteen demanding novels in the course of a single semester. At the rate of roughly a book a week, we’ll study the major work of four especially important contemporary American novelists: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Richard Powers. Fictions to be studied will probably include: Pynchon’s V., The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Gravity’s Rainbow; Powers’s Galatea 2.2, Operation Wandering Soul, and The Gold-Bug Variations; McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men (to be published July 2005), and DeLillo’s White Noise, Libra, The Names, and Mao II.

ENGL 890D Rethinking Ethics, Politics, and Pedagogy A “Rhetorical” Perspective Smith
TH 5:30-8:00 Hu 312
Long before it was reduced to the teaching and study of how to be an “effective” writer or speaker, rhetorical pedagogy, theory, and practice in the Western tradition was inextricably connected to the arts of ethics and politics. To teach and to study rhetoric was to be concerned with cultivating styles of (co)existence and response-ability that enabled “virtuoso” performances of citizenship, which required an existential orientation keenly attuned to the dynamics of and potentials for ethical, political, and pedagogical action. This special topics course will explore this “older” sense of rhetoric. Toward that end, we will engage primary works from and secondary scholarship about the ancient rhetorical tradition, as well as a few contemporary texts in Continental philosophy that will help us to rethink ethics, politics, and pedagogy from a rhetorical perspective. The instructor invites not only students of composition and rhetoric to participate, but anyone interested in the intersections of ethics, politics, and pedagogy.

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