Spring 2005 Course Descriptions

ENGL 601 Seminar in Verse Composition Dings TTH 11-12:15
This course is the second half of a year-long course in the art of writing poetry. It is open only to students who are officially enrolled in the MFA program—any genre—and those who are not enrolled but who have prior permission from the instructor. A writing sample will have to be approved before such permission will be granted. The primary activity will be the intensive discussion of peer work; however, several books of poetry will be required reading, and several technique-oriented poems will be required in response to the readings. Other poems will be entirely the project of the individual artist. Professional quality work and the individuation of artistic style are the top priorities of this course. Please see the instructor if you have any questions.

ENGL 603 Seminar in Prose Composition Singleton W 3:30-6
This course is the second half of a year-long course in the writing of fiction, focusing on the short story. The course is open only to MFA students. Visiting Professor George Singleton will teach the workshop-intensive seminar. Singleton is the acclaimed author of such story collections as Why Dogs Chase Cars (2004), The Half-Mammals of Dixie (2002), and These People Are Us (2001). Enrollment is limited to 10 students.

ENGL 650D Kenneth Burke: "BetweenLiterature and Rhetoric" Smith TH 3:30-6
It has become a commonplace in the academy that rigid distinctions often impose problematic limits on the ways in which we think and act, as well as diminishing possibilities for productive relationships within and between communities. Hence, the emergence of interdisciplinarity as a desideratum within and between fields of academic study. Nevertheless, the boundary within most English departments between the related disciplines of literary studies and rhetorical/composition studies is rigid in a number of ways. In an effort to attenuate the limitations of this dualistic division, this special topics course invites students from both fields to consider the productive possibilities of working within the liminal space between them. Toward that end, our work will consist of (1) a brief study some of the scholarship that examines the historical, institutional, and conceptual roots underlying the "division" between literary studies and rhetorical/composition studies; (2) a protracted engagement with the writings of Kenneth Burke (the primary focus of the course), a thinker whose work seems to defy this division; and (3) an exploration of the work of several scholars who might be said to exhibit a Burkean "sensibility."

ENGL 701B Teaching Composition Rivers TTH 8-9:15
Introduction to the methods and critical principles of teaching literature at the college level. Required of and limited to Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics teaching assistants in their first year of teaching at USC and currently teaching English 102. Spring semester only.

ENGL 702 Old English Gwara MW 11:30-12:45
Introduction to the grammar and syntax of Old English and a study of important short poems. This course, in combination with ENGL 703—Beowulf and Old English Heroic Verse (to be offered in Fall 2005), will fulfill one foreign language requirement (with a grade of "B" or better in both courses).

ENGL 711 Shakespeare I: The Comedies and Histories Levine MW 12:50-2:05
This course will examine Shakespeare's comedies and English history plays within their cultural, political, and dramatic contexts. Classes will take up individual plays in conjunction with selected readings in Tudor cultural texts and recent critical practices (new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism and gender studies, psychoanalysis). Our concern will be to generate methods and materials for investigating the relationship between these plays and Elizabethan culture. Assignments: a seminar paper (15 20 pp.); one report on primary research (5 10 pp.); mid term and final exams. Texts: The Norton Shakespeare (or comparable edition), two or three critical texts, and a packet of photocopied materials.

ENGL 723 British Poetry of the Romantic Period Feldman TTH 2-3:15
By examining the major statements by and about canonical and noncanonical poets of the Romantic era, this course will provide the framework for a fuller understanding of all British and American 19th- and 20th-century literature. We will explore the transformation of aesthetic values from the mid-18th century to the present day by concentrating on those writers who made the most significant innovations during the Romantic era. We will read poetry by William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Clare, Robert Burns, Jane Taylor, Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Mary Tighe, and others. Assignments: two papers, 10-12 pages each; oral reports; final exam.

ENGL 725 Victorian Novel Thesing MW 2:10-3:25
Survey of the development of the novel form, with study of major and lesser-known figures, in relation to social change and publishing conditions. Authors to be studied may include Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Gaskell, Gissing, Trollope, Brontë, Braddon, 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, please contact the instructor. Please do not purchase any textbooks until after the first class meeting.

ENGL 726 Victorian Poetry: Tennyson and His Contemporaries Scott MW 4-5:15
This course examines the development of Victorian poetry through the sixty-year career of Tennyson, from Poems by Two Brothers (1827) to The Death of Oenone, and Other Poems (1892). In each decade, Tennyson's own poems will be examined as being in dialogue with those of his contemporaries and with competing Romantic, Victorian, and proto-modern ideas about the role and nature of poetry. While not aiming at a formal survey, the course will provide some discussion of most major Victorian poets (including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and various writers of the 1890s), as well as of such Victorian publishing and poetic genres as the literary annual, political ballads and newspaper verse, hymns, wisdom literature, Spasmodic poetry, the Parnassians, Aestheticism, the Counter-Decadents, etc. Note that the class will meet in Thomas Cooper Library. Assignments: one short(ish) report, one longer paper; final exam similar to M.A. comprehensive exam. Texts: Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (one vol. version); two additional texts TBA; supplementary package. It is assumed that course participants will have access to a general Victorian anthology (Collins/Broadview, O'Gorman/Blackwell, Houghton & Stange), or to a general teaching anthology covering the Victorian period (Norton, Longman, etc.).

ENGL 730 Modern British Fiction Rice TTH 12:30-1:45
This course is a survey of 20th-century British fiction. Texts may include Wells, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds; Conrad, Lord Jim; Joyce, Dubliners; Mansfield, Stories; West, The Return of the Soldier; Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover; Waugh, Black Mischief; Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Murdoch, The Good Apprentice; Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country; Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions; Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; plus, one collateral text in literary theory and/or cultural studies: Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination. Assignments: two brief reaction essays on Bakhtin (c. 5 pp. each); term research paper (c. 15 pp.); final examination.

ENGL 732 Principles in Literary Criticism Muckelbauer T 5:30-8
Over the last few decades, there has probably been no more contentious word in the humanities than the word "theory." Whether you despise the term or champion it, it is virtually impossible to be a scholar in an English department these days and avoid being involved with theory in some substantial way (owing, in no small part, to the contested meaning of the word itself). This course is designed to introduce you to a number of concepts, questions, and currents that have been circulating through the "theory" world over the last 30 or so years. The syllabus is structured primarily as a kind of survey, meaning that we will spend a relatively short time on a wide array of different types of scholarship and different types of "theoretical" questions, from questions about authorship, interpretation, and context, to questions about labor conditions, gender dynamics, and colonization. As a result, the course will engage currents in theory that are recognizably "literary," as well as those that might be more aptly named "critical theory" or "social theory" (and we will also consider the recent spate of proclamations about "the end of theory"). The reading list will be diverse, but to give you a sense of the direction of the course, some of the work we will read comes from scholars such as Paul DeMan, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Frederic Jameson, Louis Althusser, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Henry Louis Gates, Gilles Deleuze, and Terry Eagleton.

ENGL 737 British Women Writers: Medieval and Renaissance Women Writers Richey TTH 12:30-1:45
This course will consider the works of women from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, including such writers as Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, Marie de France, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney, Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Stuart, Elizabeth Cary, Teresa of Avila, Mary Wroth, Diana Primrose, Eleanor Davies, Margaret Fell, Katherine Philips, and Anne Bradstreet. We will consider what their voices add to the debate about women's status and authority, to the question of sociopolitical change, to the literary presentation of love, friendship and marriage, and to the representation of spirituality. Requirements will include oral presentations, a short close-reading, a midterm, and a 15-page essay involving careful research.

ENGL 742 American Colonial and Federal Literature Jackson MW 10-11:15
An advanced introduction to the English literatures of America from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century. Topics covered will include the politics of early colonial writing, Puritanism, the literatures of sociability and the salon, the Enlightenment, Afro-Atlantic writing, Revolutionary discourses, the emergence of the novel, and the rise of Romanticism. We will also discuss the historiography of the field, which has changed dramatically in the past twenty years, and look at recent critical and theoretical approaches to the study of early American culture.

ENGL 750 American Novel to the Civil War Walls TTH 2-3:15
The years from the American Revolution to the Civil War saw the emergence of a new literary genre, the American novel. Two questions will guide us through this literature: first, what makes a novel (or should it be "romance"?) distinctively "American"? (This was the leading question for early writers of the United States, as well.) Second, how has the canon of American literature been constructed? Our texts will include Rowson, Charlotte Temple; Cooper, Last of the Mohicans; Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Melville, Moby-Dick; Poe, Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym; Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; and Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall, plus some attention to the slave narrative and selections from the relevant critical literature. Requirements: two papers, an oral discussion, a final exam.

ENGL 753 American Novel Since WWII Cowart MW 11:30-12:45
This course will focus on fourteen or so contemporary fictions, with selected criticism. Because 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. Prospective texts: 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 Must Converge; 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 760 American Poetry Since 1900 Vanderborg W 5:30-8
This course offers a selection of 20th-century American poetry, focusing on what happens to genres such as epic and lyric and to practices of collage and citationality. We will examine the authors' constructions of a poetic subject and object as well as of a literary tradition, analyzing the ways in which the experimental forms reflect conflicts over the poet's role in the polis. Assignments: weekly response paper (approx. 500 words); short literary paper (approx. 6-7 pages) on one week's reading selections, including an annotated bibliography; one oral presentation on an assigned critical/theoretical reading; and a 20-25 page literary research paper, which may build on preceding work. Evaluation: literary analysis paper: 25%, critical presentation and handout: 20%, final research paper: 40%, weekly response papers and class participation: 15%

ENGL 793 Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Medieval to Modern Holcomb MW 2:10-3:25
A survey of the major theories of rhetoric and composition from medieval to modern times focusing on 1500 to 1800. For additional information, please contact Professor Holcomb (HolcombC@mailbox.sc.edu).

ENGL 810A Studies in Spenser Miller M 3:30-6
We will focus on Spenser's extraordinary poem The Faerie Queene. The required texts for the course are Hamilton's extensively annotated scholarly edition of the poem, and an invaluable reference work, The Spenser Encyclopedia. I won't assign specific readings in the latter, but you will find yourself consulting it all the time; it should be valuable long after this course is over as a reference work on all sorts of items relevant to the English Renaissance. We will also read a selection of critical articles designed to acquaint you with important aspects of the poem's literary background and historical context, and to give you a sense of the critical methods and interpretive issues central to the best current work on Spenser.
Requirements: Written synopses of critical essays due every week for the first half of the semester; regular attendance and participation are required along with timely completion of these written assignments. Assuming you meet these minimum standards, your grade for the class will be based primarily on the major research project you undertake, whether it is a seminar paper, a web site, or an edited version of a poem or section of a poem. This project is to be designed in consultation with the instructor.

ENGL 825B Irish Literature Since 1800:Gender, Sex, and Nation Madden TTH 9:30-10:45
We will examine the literature and culture of Ireland of the last two centuries, focusing especially on works suggesting the complex relations of national and sexual politics. Our focus will be on the literary and cultural constructions of nation and community in relation to tropes, themes, and issues of gender and sexuality—especially narratives of romance and images of Ireland personified as mother and lover. As we develop familiarity with the themes, issues, and socio-historical contexts of Irish literature, and as we explore both traditional and nontraditional representations of gender and sexuality in Irish literature, we will also examine the usefulness of feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory in the study of this literature.
Texts: Eavan Boland's The Lost Land; Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa and Translations; Seamus Heaney's North; J.S. LeFanu's vampire novella Carmilla; Frank McGuiness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme; Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl; Jamie O'Neill's At Swim Two Boys; Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling; Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol and prison writings; and poems by W. B. Yeats and others.

ENGL 843C Ellison's Invisible Man and American Culture Whitted TH 3:30-6
Widely praised as an American literary achievement, Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man provides an interdisciplinary playground for scholars interested in exploring African American culture between the World Wars. We will use Invisible Man as a lens through which to view elements of folk storytelling traditions, the influence of jazz and blues music, migration narratives, black nationalist ideology, and other social movements of the Depression Era. Students will have the opportunity to grapple with the text's dilemma of "invisibility" and the discourse of racial identity from different critical perspectives, including psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and feminist approaches. A recently published biography, along with Ellison's essays and lesser-known short stories will also deepen our knowledge of the author's background and writing career. We will conclude with three works – Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928), "The Man Who Lived Underground," by Richard Wright (1942), and John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead (2001) – that feature strong intertextual relationships with Ellison's eclectic writing style, themes, figurative language, and narrative strategies. Along with the readings listed below, Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man, edited by Lucas E. Morel, and New Essays on Invisible Man, edited by Robert O'Meally, will supplement our readings of Ellison's work. Assignments will include weekly response papers and an oral presentation. Students will also spend the last three weeks of the semester researching, writing, and peer-editing a 20-25 page paper of publishable quality. Please note that our investigation will be both reading- and writing-intensive. Multiple readings of Ellison's novel are essential for successful participation in this course. Students are required to read Invisible Man before the start of class in order to facilitate rigorous intellectual study during the semester.

ENGL 845A Civil War as Literature Shields TTH 9:30-10:45
A seminar exploring the greatest crisis in American national history in the texts it generated. We will explore every genre of writing and orature occasioned by the conflict: fiction, letters, memoirs, songs, satirical prints, public documents, tracts, newspaper stories, poems, sermons, speeches. The semester will be divided into four parts: prophecy, reportage, memory, fantasy. Prophecy will treat antebellum texts instrumental to the outbreak of violence: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walker's prophecy of hemispheric race war in War in Nicaragua, fire-eater writings by Edmund Ruffin, the proclamations of John Brown, H. D. Thoreau, portions of the Lincoln-Douglass debates, black nationalist writings by Martin Dulany, and abolitionist speeches by Frederick Douglass and Horace Greeley. Reportage will include Thomas Higginson's record of black camp songs and spirituals, newspaper reportage by Porte Crayon and others, oratory by Lincoln, Whitman's Specimen Days and Drum Taps, Timrod's war poetry, Melville's war poetry, soldier diaries and letters. Memory will treat recollective accounts by participants—Mary Boykin Chesnut's Diary, Grant's memoirs, the memoirs of John Singleton Mosby, and reflections by Nicholas Trescott and Alexander Stephens. Fantasy will treat imaginative elaborations of events: fiction by DeForest, Page, Faulkner, Mitchell, Foote, and a contemporary author of the student's choice.

ENGL 890C Voice, Silence, Race, Rhetoric Watson TTH 9:30-10:45
This seminar provides an historical and theoretical investigation of the persuasive practices of African Americans (c.1600-1900). As such, it interrogates "voice" and "silence" as key rhetorical and historiographical tropes. For additional information, please contact Professor Watson (Swatson@mailbox.sc.edu).

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