Fall 2006 Course Descriptions

ENGL 600 Seminar in Verse Composition Dings TTH 2:00-3:15
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 602 Seminar in Prose Composition Blackwell TTH 11:00-12:15
Designed for students accepted into the MFA fiction program, English 602 is a small, intensive workshop in the art and craft of the literary short story. Students will spend the majority of their time writing original stories and analyzing the fiction submitted by other workshop members. As time allows, we will examine virtuosic examples of the form—both classic and contemporary, traditional and experimental.

ENGL 610 Writing the Novel Hospital TH 3:30-6:00
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 submit 30 revised and polished pages of the manuscript at the end of term. Two chapters of the manuscript will be workshopped in class.

ENGL 615 Academic & Professional Writing Bruccoli MW 4:00-5:15
Workshop on researching and writing literary biography.
Requirements: Students will write one obituary, one Dictionary of Literary Biography entry, and one publishable chapter of a literary biography (5,000-plus words).Course will meet twice a week in the Special Collections Division, Thomas Cooper Library. Students will have access to rare-book and manuscript collections at the Library.

ENGL 680 Survey of Linguistics Weldon TTH 3:30- 4:45
(crosslisted LING 600)
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.

ENGL 701A Teaching of Composition Rivers MW 10:00-11:15
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

ENGL 702 Old English Gwara TTH 11:00-12:15
A study of the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Emphasis on language learning, with special attention paid to grammar and translation of selected prose passages and major poems. Grammar quizzes, translation project, final paper, final exam.

ENGL 708 Medieval Literature Crocker MW 2:30-3:45
Envisioning the Self in Medieval Literature. Although we will begin with early treatments by Boethius and Augustine, the bulk of this course explores the assemblage of a legible and writable identity in fourteenth and fifteenth century English visionary writings. Focusing on writers including Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, we will think about different versions of the spiritual self as these relate to figurations of rank, gender, and sexuality in medieval culture. We will investigate the ways that a spiritual self gains credibility, considering critiques of affective displays of piety by the Cloud of Unknowing author and other religious writers. As a way of thinking about the construction of the spiritual self as a trope of literary representation, we will also read a couple of late medieval dream visions, including selections from William Langland’s Piers Plowman, as well as the whole of the late medieval masterpiece, the Pearl.

ENGL 711 Shakespeare I: The Comedies & History Levine T 2:00-4:30
This course examines Shakespeare’s comedies and English history plays within their cultural and dramatic contexts. Our approach will be to read individual plays in conjunction with recent theoretical and critical work. We will look closely at seven or eight plays—to include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and Twelfth Night—along with one critical essay each week. Requirements include regular participation in the weekly discussion, short analytical writing assignments (in relation to critical essays), a close reading of a passage from a play (6 pages), and a longer critical paper (approximately 12-15 pages). Texts include Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945-2000, ed. Russ McDonald (Blackwell, 2004) and a recent Shakespeare anthology (Riverside, Norton, or Bevington, for example); you may also use single editions of the plays (New Arden or Oxford usually offer the best texts; I will be happy to make recommendations for each play as well).

ENGL 723 British Poetry of the Romantic Period Feldman MW 11:15-12:30
This semester the course will focus on the women poets—on major works by Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, Anna Seward, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Tighe, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Mary Howitt, Ann Radcliffe, and others. As we consider the literary, social, and aesthetic perspective of women, we will also necessarily take up issues of canon formation, conditions of authorship, and gender politics. Course requirements include two ten-page essays, 2 class presentations and a final exam.

ENGL 725 Victorian Novel: Desire, Fear, and Representation Stern T 5:30-8:00
This class will provide an in-depth survey of major issues in the Victorian novel. We will read across a range of fictional modes (realism, sensation, detective fiction, political fiction), and will attend to the relationship between the novel and other literary forms. Our primary texts will include better- and lesser-known novels by Austen, Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Stoker, Trollope, and Wood. Secondary materials will provide a fundamental grounding in cultural history and gender studies. Course requirements include reading at least 300 pages per week; producing roughly 25 pages of professional quality writing; and showing up with an avid sense of intellectual curiosity.

ENGL 729 British Poets Since 1900 Madden MW 2:30-3:45
This course will be a survey of British poetry since 1900. 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 Four Quartets – T. S. Eliot; North – Seamus Heaney; The Whitsun Weddings – Phillip Larkin; The Ballad of Reading Gaol – Oscar Wilde; collections by T. S. Eliot and by W.B. Yeats, with other selections to be determined. Grade will be based on class presentations, short response papers, and a final research project.

ENGL 733 History of European Literary Criticism Shifflett TTH 3:30-4:45
(Cross-listed CPLT 701)
A survey of norms and innovations in literary theory--and ideas of artistic form and social process that inform literary theory--from Plato to Burke. Three exams and one 25-page paper.

ENGL 744 American Romanticism Jackson TTH 9:30-10:45
The focus of this course is American literature from the 1820s through the 1860s with special attention to Romanticism, its various cognates (sentimentalism, sensationalism, and the sublime), and also its antipodes. The study of antebellum American literature is currently experiencing a period of immense and very exciting transformation, both in terms of the range of authors studied and also in approaches used to study them, and our course will reflect this transitional moment. In part it will serve as a reconsideration of familiar authors such as the Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman) and those who loved to hate them (Hawthorne, Melville, Poe); equally, it will function as an advanced introduction to more recently canonized authors: domestic women writers, urban reformers and muckraking journalists, gothic novelists, Native American activists, and fugitive slaves. Attention to primary texts and historical contexts will be balanced against readings in scholarly works, again ranging from classic to cutting edge. Among other issues, we will consider historicism and print culture studies, postcolonialism, debates over subaltern agency and authenticity, and the recent interest in circumatlantic, hemispheric, and global perspectives on American literature. A menu of distinct assessment schemes will be offered to meet the needs of each student depending on his or her interests and subsequent
career plans.

ENGL 752 Modern American Novel Powell W 5:30-8:00
This course will examine selected American novels and literary criticism from the first half of the twentieth century, including but not limited to fiction by Djuna Barnes, James Branch Cabell, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Heinlein, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright. Students may expect to examine a book each week, prepare several presentations and short essays, write a substantial research paper in lieu of a final exam, and participate in class discussion.

ENGL 790 Survey Composition Study Friend TTH 9:30-10:45
This course is designed to introduce students to and prepare them to undertake scholarly work within the field of composition and rhetoric. While it is a requirement for composition and rhetoric majors and minors, interested students from other areas of English studies are welcome. We will read about and discuss key moments in the contested history of the discipline, focusing on texts that have had a powerful influence in shaping the way composition scholars research, teach, and construct their field. We’ll also survey major intellectual movements in the field and consider the current status of the discipline in U.S. colleges and universities. In addition, we’ll hear from guest speakers working in various areas of the field and students will share their course projects in progress. Assignments: weekly reading responses (1-2 pages each), a book review, an oral presentation, and a research paper or bibliographic essay (15-20 pages). Readings: TBA.

ENGL 792 Classical Rhetoric Holcomb MW 12:15-1:30
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.

Required Texts: Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s De Oratore (2 vols.), Quintilian’s On the Teaching of Speaking and Writing, and Ober’s Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. I will supply other class readings.

Assignments and Grades: Mid-semester proposal paper (6-8 pp.) 40% “Term” paper (20 pp.) 60%

ENGL 825D James Joyce and Ulysses Rice TTH 12:30-1:45
This course will focus almost entirely on a close reading of James Joyce’s masterwork, Ulysses, beginning with a quick overview, in the first two weeks, of his earlier works of fiction: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We will be using the Hans Walter Gabler edition of Ulysses (Random House 1984, 1986), which has line numbering throughout; even if you already own another edition of Ulysses, you should buy this one. I will also ask the bookstores to stock Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book—a helpful running explication, keyed to the Gabler and a few other editions—and especially recommended for the first-time reader of the novel. Some students might also wish to invest in Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated.

Requirements:
1. Course paper (c. 10-15 pp.), suitable for conference presentation, due at the end of the term.
2. Comprehensive final examination on Ulysses.
3. Review essay on Colin MacCabe’s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (2nd ed.).

ENGL 830C Deleuze Muckelbauer/Smith M 5:30-8:00
(taught with CPLT 703)
Michel Foucault famously claimed that the 20th century might one day be known as Deleuzian. This course will introduce students to some of the possible implications of this claim by exploring the thought and work of Gilles Deleuze. We will examine some of the theoretical traditions to which Deleuze’s work responds as well as survey the swarm of concepts that he invents. Among the texts that we will consider are the following: Difference and Repetition; Nietzsche and Philosophy; Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Bergsonism; Foucault; Masochism: Coldness and Cruely; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature; Cinema II: The Time Image; What is Philosophy?; and A Thousand Plateaus.

ENGL 842E St. American Lit/Modern Primitive Poets Butterworth MW 4:00-5:15
An intensive study, using Jungian and neo-Darwinian perspectives, of five 20th Century American poets who attempted to recover a radical connection to the empirical world. Texts: W. C. Williams, Selected Poems and Patterson; Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems; Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems; R.P. Warren, Selected Poems, 1923-1985; James Dickey, The Whole Motion and Deliverance; Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey; Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Course requirements: 2 oral reports (15 minutes); 1 academic-journal-style book review (7-10 pages); 1 seminar paper (15-20 pages); 2 ½ hour final examination.

ENGL 843D Philosophy and Literature against the American Grain: Walker Percy and
Stanley Cavell in Context Rhu TTH 12:30-1:45
(taught with CPLT 880R and PHIL 760)
Walker Percy and Stanley Cavell are American writers of inarguably high stature in the late 20th century and the new millennium. Also both clearly try to affiliate their work with traditions of thought central to continental philosophy and its unorthodox American reception. Cavell finds in Emerson and Thoreau native grounds for his philosophy of immigrancy. He casts himself as a “hobo of thought” and as an heir, via Nietzsche and Heidegger, of transcendental philosophy from Königsberg to Concord. Percy finds in Søren Kierkegaard a Christian forerunner of the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose novels set the standard he seeks to achieve in works of fiction like The Moviegoer and Lancelot. To find his own voice and discover an alternative path, Percy resists the confines of Southerness and disputes the claims of science just as Cavell struggles with pragmatism and its kindred claims of practical efficacy and ready solutions without needless soul-searching. Both writers insist upon challenges of living – such as human finitude, sexuality, and the presence of others – as constitutional features of whatever worlds we inhabit, transcendental conditions we must learn to abide, not just problems to solve and get over. The unlikely kinship of these two writers will be explored not only in its sources but also in its destinations. Their legacy and the persistence of such lines of thought resonate tellingly in contemporary novelists like Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day) and Josephine Humphreys (Dreams of Sleep) and in philosophical physicians like Peter Kramer (Listening to Prozac, Against Depression) and Carl Elliott (A Philosophical Disease, Better than Well).

SPCH 700 Issues & Methods in Speech Comm. Research Fenske TH 5:30-8:00
This course is designed as an orientation to the field of communication through a survey of various research issues and methods. Throughout the semester, we will be familiarizing ourselves with the history of the field, with some of the variety of approaches to communication inquiry, and with current trends in scholarship. We will also have to opportunity to hear research and teaching presentations from resident experts in the areas of, for example, rhetorical history, rhetorical theory, rhetorical criticism, and feminism.

SPCH 701 Teaching Speech Communication Gehrke M 5:30-8:00
This course serves both as a primer for new teachers in the area of speech communication and as an introduction to the study of rhetorical pedagogy within the field. The attention of the course is divided roughly equally between practical matters (course construction, classroom management, and teaching practices) and the major theories and philosophies of rhetorical pedagogy from ancient Greece to the 21st century. Assignments include syllabi construction, lesson plans, a statement of teaching philosophy, and a research paper. For more detailed information, including a preliminary syllabus, please see the link provided under the course listing in the Master Schedule Online.

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