Spring 2006 Course Descriptions

ENGL 601 Seminar in Verse Composition Dawes TTH 9:30-10:45
A course in poetry composition that will pay careful attention to poetic forms, and the business of editing a poem to find the poem within the poem. A portfolio of poems will be evaluated at the end of the course. Intense round-table discussion about the poetry of the students will be supplemented by close one-on-one dialogue with students about their work.

ENGL 611 Reading and Writing the Novel Hospital TH 3:30-6
English 611 is the second 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 revise and update the outline of the work-in-progress which they produced in Eng 610, and will write a further 50 pages of the manuscript. Two chapters of the manuscript will be workshopped in class.
[NOTE: It is not a pre-requisite to have completed 610 in order to take 611, as the course can accommodate any stage of a book-length work. However, priority is given to students who took 610 in the fall term, and new students can be added only if spaces are available.]

ENGL 701B Teaching Composition Rivers (001), Watson (002) 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 705 Chaucer Crocker MW 2:10-3:25
This course will explore Chaucer’s literary masculinities in relation to cultural constructions of manhood in late medieval England. Reading conduct treatises, religious writing, misogamous satires and admonitory pieces, we will think about the social expectations for different formations of masculinity in Chaucer’s day. While selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and his minor poems will anchor the course, we will place our investigations of late medieval masculinities in dialogue with modern theoretical treatments of gender and sexuality (including those by Lacan, Bhabha, Bersani, Butler, Silverman, and Bourdieu). Since this course is drawn on a companionate model of critical and literary inquiry, we will work through theoretical treatments of gender and sexuality even as we assess how medieval constructions of masculinity/maleness/manhood potentially challenge those perceptual certitudes.

ENGL 713 Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline Drama Gieskes TTH 11-12:15
This course will survey a representative sample of non-Shakespearean drama from the 1580s up to the 1630s. This period saw dynamic changes in dramatic form, in theatrical technique, and in dramaturgical style. We will read plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Massinger, Dekker, Webster, Ford, and others. This reading will be supplemented by important critical and theoretical works as well as some nondramatic materials from the period.

ENGL 718 English Lit. of the Later 18th C. Jarrells TTH 9:30-10:45
In this course we will survey the prose of the Romantic period by attending in particular to the novel, the tale, and what Katie Trumpener has described as ‘the constitutive influence, stimulus, and competition they offer one another’. We’ll start with two eighteenth-century texts (James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland) and the debate they inspired about Enlightenment, sensibility, nationalism, and narrative. We’ll then follow this debate through the emergence and development of the two Romantic-period genres that came to embody it: the historical novel and the national tale. Our core texts will be Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, Sydney Owensen’s The Wild Irish Girl, Walter Scott’s Waverley, Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond, and James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar. These texts will be situated with and against other works from the period, including Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, William Blake’s Poetical Sketches, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Charlotte Smith’s Desmond, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book, and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides. Requirements include a presentation, a critical survey, and a paper.

ENGL 727 Victorian Prose Stern TTH 2-3:15
Money, Sex, Filth, and Society: Major Issues in Victorian Prose
This class is a survey of major issues in Victorian culture, with a particular emphasis upon debates concerning gender and sexuality; sanitary reform; class and the market; and the rise or decline of civilization. We will read primarily non-fiction prose, but will also dip into other genres, including melodrama, the novel, poetry, and art. Our primary authors include both canonical and non-canonical figures (Acton as well as Arnold, Craik as well as Carlyle, Norton as well as Newman). This syllabus also incorporates a healthy portion of secondary reading material so as to prepare students to enter current debates within the fields of Victorian studies and of literary studies in general. Those who enroll should be prepared to cozy up with the likes of Bourdieu, Butler, and Foucault, and to engage with current criticism.

Course assignments provisionally include informal weekly reading responses, 15-25 pages of formal scholarly writing, and a lively sense of intellectual curiosity.

ENGL 730 Modern British Fiction Rice T 3:30-6
Probable texts: Wells, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds; Conrad, Under Western Eyes; Joyce, Dubliners; Mansfield, Stories; Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Lawrence, Selected Stories; Huxley, Brave New World; Greene, The Third Man; Golding, Lord of the Flies; Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat; Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions; Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. Plus, one collateral text in literary theory and/or cultural studies: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment
Assignments: Brief reaction essay on Horkheimer and Adorno (c. 5 pp.), Term research paper (c. 15 pp.), Final Examination

ENGL 734 Modern Literary Theory Steele T 6:05-8:35
Cross-listed with CPLT 702
This course looks at the major problematics for the study of critical theory from the Enlightenment to the present. Students will be introduced to the theoretical approaches to history, language, subjectivity, aesthetics, ethics and politics that define the modern and postmodern eras. The course begins with the crises of modernity and the systematic response to the dilemmas of the Enlightenment proposed by Kant. The course moves historically from then on examining important paradigms of thought from Hegel to contemporary thinkers.

Students will be asked to write a 20 page term paper in which they bring a theory or theories to bear on their particular area of interest, make an oral presentation (15 minutes maximum), and do a take-home final exam .

ENGL 742 American Colonial and Federal Literature Shields TTH 11-12:15
The course will be a workshop in primary texts and original research. It will be concerned with constructing narratives about literature, considering revisionary history, original history, and biography. From the multitude of texts generated by the exploration of America, English colonization, imperial war, American Revolution, and Nation Building from 1580-1800, we will focus on several themes: 1. the explosive creativity of Puritan Reformed Christianity in generating new forms of and functions for writing 2. the role of belle lettres in the “civilizing process” 3. imperialism and the literature of piracy 4. natural science and the creation of new paradigms of knowing, and 5. inscribing Enlightenment in the founding charters of the United States.

SPCH 749 Performance Studies Fenske TH 5:30-8
This course is a selective overview of the interdisciplinary terrain of performance studies as an emerging field of inquiry into culture, literature, and the arts. Some of the general questions that will be posed are: What is Performance? What is Performativity? What is/are Performance Studies? What value does “performance” have as an approach to culture, literature, identity, and art? In approaching these questions, we will call upon discourses from the fields of communication, rhetoric, theatre, sociology, and anthropology. Rather, however, than providing definitive answers to these questions, the course is designed to evoke their complexity.

Major assignments will be grouped around the following topics and will require students to engage with both creative as well as more traditional forms of scholarly representation: performance and culture, performance and history, performance and textuality.

We will read, among others: Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander, Richard Schechner, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Joseph Roach, Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Erving Goffman.

ENGL 751 American Novel from the Civil War to WWI Davis MW 10-11:15
This course covers many novels found on the American literature reading lists and will be organized around historical trends and events. Beginning with writings inspired by the Civil War itself, we will turn to themes including the rise of the city, nostalgia for the country, the closing of the frontier, upsurges in religious sentiment and scientific skepticism, and issues of gender, race, and ethnicity at the century’s turn. Works will include but are not limited to Crane’s Red Badge, Howells’s Hazard of New Fortunes, Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, Frederic’s Damnation of Theron Ware, and Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk. One close reading; two short papers–-one putting a literary text in dialogue with context and the other putting an additional text in dialogue with theory; and a longer (15 pp) final paper.

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. 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 Body Artist; Pynchon, Slow Learner; Gardner, Grendel; Nabokov, Pale Fire; Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet; Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance; McCarthy, Child of God; Updike, Rabbit Run; Mukherjee, Jasmine; Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Mailer, An American Dream; Morrison, Song of Solomon; Naylor, Bailey's Cafe or Linden Hills; Percy, The Moviegoer; Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Salinger, Nine Stories; O'Connor, Everything That Rises; Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Spiegelman, Maus; Smiley, A Thousand Acres; Hoban, Riddley Walker; Chang-rae Lee, Aloft; and fictions by Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia.

Semester Grade: 10% Daily writing, 10% Review/precis (of a book on postmodernism), 60% Three papers, 20% Final exam

ENGL 760 American Poetry Since 1900 Vanderborg M 5:30-8
This course offers a selection of 20th-century American modernist 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:
1. Each week there will be a response paper (approx. 500 words) on the primary reading.
2. A shorter literary paper, approx. 6-7 pages, on one of the week's reading selections, including an annotated bibliography of the secondary sources you used.
3. One oral presentation on an assigned critical/theoretical reading.
4. A 20-25 page literary research paper, which may build on preceding work.

Grading: Literary analysis paper: 25%, critical presentation and handout: 20%, final research paper: 40%, weekly response papers and class participation: 15%

ENGL 782 Varieties of American English Weldon MW 3:30-4:45
Cross-listed with LING 745
This course will examine variation in American English. Social, regional, ethnic, and stylistic variation will be covered, along with models for collecting, describing, and applying knowledge about language variation. Special emphasis will be placed on vernacular varieties of American English, particularly in South Carolina and the American South. In addition, the course will survey current issues in the field of language variation and ongoing changes in American English.

SPCH 790D Rhetoric, Power, and History Gehrke M 5:30-8
Perhaps no thinker has pervaded the arts and humanities as broadly or as deeply as Michel Foucault. His work can be found in nearly every portion of the academy, referenced in everything from rhetoric to business management to policy studies. Yet, in all this frenzy of work in the wake of Foucault, how much have we concerned ourselves with his methods and their political importance? This course seeks to explore the question of method in the works of Michel Foucault, the importance of history to his project, and the politics embedded in those methods and studies. In so doing, we will map out a terrain of opportunities for doing historical studies as rhetorical studies and simultaneously as a peculiar form of what Foucault called hyper- and pessimistic activism. Readings will include Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, Fearless Speech, and The Politics of Truth, as well as a collection of lectures, interviews, and essays by Foucault and by scholars working in both Speech Communication and English.

SPCH 790E Post-Feminist Rhetorics Poirot T 5:30-8
This course traces the historical and theoretical development of “postfeminism” in mainstream and academic milieus. Examining everything from post-modernism/structuralism/colonialism to the mainstream media’s construction of life after feminism, students will be asked to analyze and evaluate various and disparate post-feminist rhetorics.

ENGL 797 Current Scholarship in Rhet/Comp Muckelbauer W 5:30-8
This course is designed to focus on professionalizing students for the field of rhetoric and composition. Each week we will read articles from the most recent issues of some of the top journals in the field, including CCCC, College English, JAC, Pedagogy, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly (as well as a few others). The purpose of reading these articles will be not only to get a sense of some of the salient issues in current scholarship, but also to develop some strategies for producing an article for journals such as these (and others). To this end, the major writing assignments for the course will include publishing a book review, producing a talk, and revising a paper that you have written in another course for publication (you will be expected to send this paper out for editorial review).

ENGL 813 The Late Epic Shifflett MW 12:50-2:05
We shall study epic poetry and theory from the late 16th century through the middle of the 18th century. Given the encyclopedic nature of the form, and given the great cultural prestige that the form enjoyed, study of epics and epic theory of this period necessarily also involves study of ancient and early modern ethics, historiography, and poetics; the politics of literary form and the rise of a formal criticism that purported to stand outside politics; ancient and early modern arts of war, memory, oblivion, and peace; and the development of new ideas of selfhood, community, and transcendence amid the breakdown of traditional religious and dynastic ideologies that had previously motivated epic writing. Major writers to be read and discussed are likely to include Vergil, Lucan, Silius Italicus, Statius, Petronius, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Torquato Tasso, John Harrington, George Chapman, Michael Drayton, Thomas May, Richard Fanshawe, Paul Scarron, William Davenant, Abraham Cowley, Alexander Ross, Georges de Brebeuf, John Milton, Samuel Pordage, Thomas Hobbes, Lucy Hutchinson, Samuel Butler, Charles Cotton, John Dryden, Richard Blackmore, and James Macpherson among others.

ENGL 825C Contemporary Post Colonial Dawes TTH 12:30-1:45
Discourse & Literary Practice
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 841B The ‘Other’ American Renaissance: Jackson 12:30-1:45
Mystery, Marriage, Manumission, Market
This class offers an advanced introduction to three literary genres of mid-nineteenth century America: the urban gothic or ‘city mystery’ novel, the female bildungsroman or domestic novel, and the anti-slavery novel. All three were immensely popular and influential in their day, fell into critical disrepute in the twentieth century, and are now experiencing a rapid revival in attention from literary historians. Disparate as they may seem, all three genres grew out of and responded to a monumental social transformation of the nineteenth century that historians call the Market Revolution, and we will use this hidden cohesion to our advantage, reading some of the best critical and historical scholarship on this phenomenon to explore how these genres addressed crucial issues of race, class, and gender in the antebellum period. The rediscovery of these works in the 1980s and 1990s is also the consequence of a market revolution, but this time this time it is a revolution in the academic job market, in the sphere of branded critical discourses, in a world of academic superstars, and in the segmentation of university and trade presses. In addition to considering how these works functioned in their antebellum milieux, then, we will also use their rediscovery as case studies in the sociology of the contemporary academy and explore a handful of significant academic careers, paradigm-making books and articles, and several unpublished dissertations. Readings will include George Lippard’s The Quaker City, George Thompson’s City Crimes and Venus in Boston, Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World, Susanna Cummins; The Lamplighter, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative, together with a coursepack of shorter primary and secondary readings. (A word on the course title: ‘The “Other” American Renaissance’ is not only a reference to F. O. Mathiessen’s classic 1941 exercise in canon making – The American Renaissance – but also a nod at two other works: Jane Tompkins’ essay “The ‘Other’ American Renaissance,’ which scandalized many by putting the evangelical/sentimental novel at the center of antebellum literary history, and Stephen Marcus’s The Other Victorians, which likewise raised hackles by placing pornography at the center of the polite nineteenth century. While this course will follow neither work in lockstep, it is intended to do what those books did, which is to offer a fresh - and hopefully refreshing - take on a well established subject).

ENGL 890E Style, Rhetoric, and Performance Holcomb MW 2:30-3:45
Over the past fifty years, stylistics has developed from the strict formalism of Roman Jakobson and the New Critics to a pursuit more sensitive to contextual, social, and ideological issues. Throughout these years, one overriding question has confronted theories and analyses of style: how do we move, and then warrant that move, from descriptive statements about style to interpretive ones? A standard answer to this question—that is, one of the most common and pervasive interpretive strategies that I’ve seen in theories and analyses of style—can be summed up by Pope’s dictum in “Essay on Criticism”: “The sound must seem an Echo to the sense” (74). In other words, stylistic form reflects, encodes, reinforces, embodies—in short, echoes—thematic content (in more recent ideologically oriented studies, style is often presented as echoing ideological content). This is a useful interpretive strategy, and it has produced some compelling analyses of style. But the conclusions it produces (that is, demonstrations of how form echoes content in a given text or collection of texts) are, from a certain perspective, trivial and fail to answer a more fundamental question: Sound may echo sense, but what does a sound echoing sense do?
This course addresses this and other questions. We begin with theories of style found in Greek and Roman rhetorics where the verbal devices gathered in catalogues of figures of speech and thought are presented as part of the orator’s repertoire of performance. We then explore developments in several key texts from the early modern period—most notably, how writers of these texts use the figures as a collection of sociological heuristics to name and “sum up” recurrent behaviors and situations. Next we survey more recent developments in stylistics, tracing the “sound echoes sense” topos and attempting to go beyond it. Finally, having equipped ourselves with a vocabulary for analyzing style, we examine samples from three arenas of performance: academic, political, and computer-mediated discourses.
Two overarching goals inform this course—one theoretical, the other more practical: first, to view patterns of language as rituals of language that participate in broader communicative rituals and behaviors; second, to cultivate a skill that I believe every graduate student in English should possess—and that is, to analyze prose style.
Assignments: weekly response papers (approximately 1 page, single-spaced); project proposal (7-10 pages, double-spaced); final project (20 pages, double-spaced).
Required texts: the bulk of course readings will be gathered in a course packet, including excerpts from Aristotle, Cicero, Quintillian, Henry Peacham, and George Puttenham; articles and book chapters from (among others) Roman Jakobson, Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes, Richard Schechner, Stanley Fish, M. A. K. Halliday, Richard Lanham, and Jeanne Fahnestock. Other course readings will be supplied by me.

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