Critical Studies in English

ENGL 4039: Critical Studies in English

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 20:54:32 +0000

ENGL 4039: Critical Studies in English Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/24/2020 - 14:54

Concerned with developments in the study of literature that have significantly influenced our conception of the theoretical bases for study and expanded our understanding of appropriate subject matter.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Requires prerequisite courses of ENGL 2102 and ENGL 2112 (all minimum grade C-). Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) English (ENGL) or Humnanities (HUMN) majors and minors only.
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

Section 001 with Ed Rivers

Modern Short Story

This course studies the modern short story. For each assignment students have the option of writing an analytical paper or their own short story. Along with mainstream stories of traditional length and format, we look at flash fiction, post-modern fiction, digital fiction, and the current state of fiction on the web. Most of the material is online, meaning very little expense for texts. Instruction is mainly by discussion. Authors include (but are not limited to) Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, John Barth, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. The overall goal is to acquire new ways of understanding creativity, including your own.

Probable requirements: two short papers (five or so pages), two in-class tests, a mid-term paper, and a final paper. For further information contact the instructor: ed.rivers@colorado.edu.

Taught by Ed Rivers.

Section 002 with Karim Mattar

Writing the Global City

Think about Seattle. A major city on the Northwest coast originally built on Duwamish and other tribal lands, it is home to some of the largest, wealthiest, and most influential corporations of the contemporary global economy – Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, T-Mobile US, Expedia, Costco, Starbucks, and Nordstrom, to name a few. Yet at the same time, the city is currently undergoing a homelessness and poverty crisis, with the third largest homeless population in the US and approximately 12% of its one million or so residents living below the poverty line. In Seattle, it is not unusual that people with full-time jobs – including government employees such as mailmen and -women – live in tent cities. At once an epicenter of globalization and an exemplar of the economic and other forms of violence attendant on such, what does Seattle tell us about our present phase of capitalism? Might Seattle and other global cities be regarded as privileged sites for exploring capitalism’s contradictions and abuses? And how can the literatures and cultures of global cities such as Seattle help us get to better grips with the wider world that these cities represent and, increasingly, control?

In this course, we address these questions through close attention to contemporary literary and cultural representations of the global city. We frame our discussion with reference to Saskia Sassen’s influential “global city” paradigm and the spatial theory of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Edward Soja, and others. In addition to Seattle, possible case studies include London, New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, El Paso-Juárez, Beijing, Mumbai, Cairo, Dubai, and others. Possible primary texts include literary works by Peter Ackroyd, John Lanchester, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Art Spiegelman, William Gibson, Hunter S. Thompson, Roberto Bolaño, and Salman Rushdie; films by Fritz Lang, Stuart Townsend, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Jehane Noujaim, and Todd Phillips; urban landmarks such as the Twin Towers, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, and the Burj Khalifa; popular music by artists such as Biggie Smalls, Nas, and Lauryn Hill; street art such as graffiti; revolutionary art such as that witnessed in Zuccotti Park and Tahrir Square; and so forth.

Course assignments include: regular contributions to class discussions; a presentation; a midterm essay (2,000 words); a final essay (4-5,000 words); and three contributions to a class blog.

Taught by Karim Mattar.

Section 003 with Marty Bickman

Teaching English

Montessori education suggests three stages of learning. First you understand the concepts, then you practice its applications, then you teach it to someone else as the "final." These are the guiding principles of this course, that you've been studying and practicing English for several years and your "capstone" or synthesis is to figure out and experience how to teach it to others.

The main impetus for this course is the gap between our theories (almost all of them) and our practice, a gap that Jim Sosnoski has explored in a recent book titled Modern Skeletons in Postmodern Closets. While we recognize that the literary text generates a number of divergent responses, we often work in the classroom towards closure and consensus. Further, we know that literature speaks to our whole being, to our emotions and senses as well as to our intellects, but the kinds of responses we encourage are often abstract, generalized, cognitive ones. Too often process--the pluralistic, the erring, the mysterious--is ignored, suppressed, or finessed to get to some kind of product on schedule. Even in classrooms where the most radical lines of social defiance are presented, the structures of authority and patterns of interaction remain as rigid and unimaginative as ever.

We will not try to reinvent the wheel, but will study what has been done already to help us conceptualize what we see. When I first taught a version of this course over three decades ago, there were few publications relating pedagogy to theory. Now I find the opposite problem; a minor industry has arisen, although unfortunately too little of it really does address the human, concrete realities of the classroom. Two strands of theory most relevant for our work will be the varieties of reader-response criticism and the revival of interest in pragmatism. We will be reading, then, among others, Louise Rosenblatt, Norman Holland, Jane Tompkins, David Bleich, Robert Crosman, Stanley Fish, Richard Poirier, and Richard Rorty. I will also try to skim off the best writings about education in general from teachers, philosophers, and psychologists such as John Dewey, John Holt, Nelson Goodman, and Jerome Bruner.

All of us will be keeping a running journal from which we will share extracts at regular intervals. It is highly recommended, but not absolutely required, that you do some actual teaching or tutoring over the course of the semester with real students in a K-12 situation. I will have some options I can offer and if you plan to do something time consuming and extensive we can arrange for you to receive extra credit hours for your service learning work. Prospective students are encouraged to talk to the instructor before the semester begins, to talk about matters such as community placements and customizing the course for you.

Required texts:

Jane Tompkins. A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. Perseus Books, 1996
Elaine Showalter. Teaching English. Wiley-Blackwell, 2002

Taught by Marty Bickman.

Section 004 with Ramesh Mallipeddi

Literature and Human Rights: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Rights are entitlements or justifiable claims; human rights are a special kind of claim that one is entitled to by virtue of being human. In recent scholarly accounts, the eighteenth century has emerged as the period when rights became human rights, that is, when rights were declared as natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone), and universal (applicable everywhere). This course examines the role of literature in imagining and articulating rights, focusing in particular on literary forms such as the epistolary novel, the Bildungsroman, and autobiographical testimony. Possible topics for discussion include: the role of sentimental literature in shaping new conceptions of human equality; the relationship between humanitarian sensibility and human rights; and the ways in which various marginal groups, especially women and slaves, used the language of rights to advance claims of equality. Readings may include: Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits; J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace.Requirements: mandatory attendance and participation; reading responses; one 5-page essay; and a final 10-page research essay.

Taught by Ramesh Mallipeddi.

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ENGL 4039: Critical Studies in English

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 23:47:05 +0000

ENGL 4039: Critical Studies in English Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/13/2020 - 17:47

Uncommon Arrangements: Love in Modernist Fiction

This seminar will examine the representation of love and relationships in modernist novels published between 1910-1945, a period spanning the two world wars in which a radically new order of gender, sexuality, and class relations coincided with innovations in literary representation. We will look closely at a range of affectionate relationships including: traditional marriage, unconventional domestic arrangements, same-sex couplings, friendship, childlike relationships, and creative attachments of emotional or political necessity. Beginning with some early essays and short stories on the topic of love and romance, we will generate a series of problems and questions in order to ask: Did the sexual frankness of the moderns contribute to cultural stability or disorder? Do unconventional arrangements work? How is romantic experimentation depicted? Can betrayal be channeled into something that strengthens the tie between people? Is it possible that some extraordinary arrangements are more enduring than ordinary marriage? By exploring such questions we will attempt to understand why the topic of love was such an enduring source of cultural fascination for modernist writers.

Taught by Jane Garrity ONLINE during Maymester (May 11 - May 29, 2020).

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ENGL 4039: Critical Thinking in English Studies (Spring 2020)

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 22:40:43 +0000

ENGL 4039: Critical Thinking in English Studies (Spring 2020) Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/14/2019 - 16:40

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Requires prerequisite courses of ENGL 2102 and ENGL 2112 (all minimum grade C-). Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) English (ENGL) or Humnanities (HUMN) majors and minors only.
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English

Section 002: Literature and the City

A promise of opportunity; a site of misery and alienation; an escape from the country; a space of deviance and crime—the city has historically alternately fascinated and repelled, a spatial locus that mediates the dreams and fears saturating our cultural imaginaries. This course will focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and filmic representations of the city and the urban experience. We will take a broad global and temporal perspective: that is to say, we will read early twentieth-century modernist texts that sought to come to terms with the experiences of alienation and consumerism signified by the city; move on to consider late twentieth-century postmodern representations of city space as a site of futuristic technology and simulacra; and finally, turn to postcolonial renditions of cities in what is known as the “global South”—in sites like Johannesburg, Mumbai, or Lagos—to think about how forms of global socioeconomic and racial inequities are spatially reproduced. Texts we might read include Joseph Conrad's _The Secret Agent_; Jean Rhys's _Good Morning, Midnight_; Italo Calvino's _Invisible Cities_; J.G. Ballard's _High Rise_; Phaswane Mpe's _Welcome to Our Hillbrow_; Teju Cole's _Open City_, and Chris Abani's _GraceLand_.

Taught by Dr. Janice Ho.

Section 003: Home in the U.S. Millennial Novel

How has home—as a concept and a reality—changed in the U.S. at the millennium in response to 1) greater global mobility and rootlessness, both chosen and imposed; 2) the idea of "homeland"; 3) the persistence of homelessness; 4) changing ideas of dwelling, social reproduction, and domesticity; 5) settler colonialism, migrancy, and diaspora; 6) new technologies that render home permeable or continuous with the outside world; and 7) “solestalgia,” or the homesickness one suffers while still at home? In attempting to answer these questions through selected essays and novels, this course seeks to develop a critical geography of home. We will read Don DeLillo, Mao II (1992); Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (1997); Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000); Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead (2002); Teju Cole, Open City (2011); and Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2014).

Taught by Dr. Karen Jacobs.

Section 004: The Literature of Defiance

All too often, English majors are told that their studies are impractical. W.H. Auden’s famous line, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” is often misunderstood as admitting the powerlessness of literature in general. In fact, though, literature has a track record of empowering social change. This course will examine the relative effectiveness of strategies of the “literature of defiance” across history. Poetry and fiction can dismantle taboos. Literature can also challenge and reframe what we value as a society: Describing the inspiration for Patrick Bateman, the bloodthirsty stockbroker antihero of his controversial novel American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis said that when he moved to New York City as a young man, he was taken aback by the rampant materialism of Wall Street and the ambitious strivers around him: “I wrote it as an act of defiance to stop myself from slipping into that kind of lifestyle.” His novel led many readers to question this way of life as well.

We will study:

-Banned books
-Obscenity
-Muckraking and investigative journalism
-Books and other media questioning censorship and government control of communication (including the screenplay for Snowden, about one of the most polarizing figures in recent American history: a government contractor who surreptitiously gathers and exposes state secrets)
-Boundary-pushing literary depictions of violence, from the severed heads in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus onwards
-Literary defiance of racial barriers (including debates over Mark Twain’s depiction of black characters, his use of dialect, and his choice to include what some call racial slurs)
-Texts that defy traditional conceptions of what deserves to be called literature: Can videogames be studied in the same way a complicated poem can?
-Literature defying traditional taboos related to gender
-Literary depictions of controlled substances (including Reefer Madness)

Reading List: John Milton, Areopagitica; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; George Orwell, 1984; Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho; Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw; Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Oliver Stone, Snowden

Taught by Dr. Nicole Wright.

Section 005: Sonic Fictions: Free Jazz, Funk, and Dub

This course explores the eruption of black music as a means of sonic resistance in the twentieth century. We’ll begin briefly with the blues as the foundation of sonic blackness, but our main pursuit will be musical forms that set their sights on liberation. We’ll look closely at the poetry and music of Sun Ra, progenitor of today’s Afrofuturism. Then well study the parallel developments of funk in the US and reggae/dub in the Caribbean, focussing on the music and mythologies of George Clinton and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Social context will direct our explorations, so we’ll read widely in cultural history (Amiri Baraka, Val Wilmer, William L. Van DeBurg, Nicholas de Monchaux), sonic theory (Jaques Attali, Kodwo Eshun, Julian Henriques), and literature (Gayle Jones, Jayne Cortez, Marcia Douglas, Ishmael Reed). Requirements include short writings, a collaborative presentation, and a final project. Come prepared to funkatize the galaxy.

Taught by Dr. Paul Youngquist.

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ENGL 4039-007: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Global Indigeneity (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 19:56:58 +0000

ENGL 4039-007: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Global Indigeneity (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/23/2019 - 13:56

Instructor: Prof Karim Mattar

In this course, we explore literary and cultural works by indigenous writers from around the world in relation to the histories of colonialism and incorporation to which their communities have been subject. Employing a broad comparative framework, and looking into the histories of indigenous communities in the United States, Kenya, Libya, Palestine, India, and New Zealand from the 19^thcentury to the present as case studies, we ask how such texts address questions of collective historical trauma, and what new critical insights into the local / global dialectic might be gleaned when they are read alongside one another. All in all, we aim through our readings and discussions to develop what Chadwick Allen calls a strong, “trans-indigenous” literary critical response to the violence of colonial modernity. Primary texts include novels, poems, essays, films, and multimedia websites by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm & Josie Douglas, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ibrahim al-Koni, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, Reina Whaitiri & Robert Sullivan, Lee Tamahori, Cormac McCarthy, and others.

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ENGL 4039-004: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Modernism (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:52:28 +0000

ENGL 4039-004: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Modernism (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 15:52

Instructor: Prof. Laura Winkiel

Modernism was born in the little magazines. Though modernism may not have invented this form, it certainly perfected it. Cheap to publish, collective, multi-generic, multi-medial and interspersed with ads, editorials, and readers' letters, the little magazine has been largely eclipsed in the digital age. However, digital media allows us wide access to this lost art form. This class will investigate modernism, a political, cultural, literary and arts movement of the early to mid twentieth-century that fundamentally transformed life and literature from staid conformism to something rife with provocation and newness, as seen through its little magazines. While we will certainly read some of the most well-known authors of the period: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, we’ll also investigate how these and other writers got many of their ideas in early twentieth-century salons, cafes, museums, and city streets and also depended on editors, publishers, critics and collaborators for helping them get published. We’ll pair the “great” works with their circulation in little magazines to get a fuller sense of the publishing and public worlds in which they appeared. These magazines are available digitally and in the Norlin Library’s special collections.

Requirements: This course emphasizes the making of modernism and, hence, our class will also emphasize action: doing, reading, discovering, surveying, mapping. You will complete a reading report of a modernist journal, a periodical survey, a presentation and a final project that consists of learning in depth about a particular aspect of modernism.

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ENGL 4039-003: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Posthuman/Postnature (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:50:52 +0000

ENGL 4039-003: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Posthuman/Postnature (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 15:50

Instructor: Prof. Karen Jacobs

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ENGL 4039-002: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Mythology and Modern Literature (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:48:54 +0000

ENGL 4039-002: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Mythology and Modern Literature (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 15:48

Instructor: Prof. Marty Bickman

The course focus on the prevalence to two mythic patterns and how they persist and are transformed in the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, the more masculine journey of the hero and the more feminine archetype of Demeter and Persephone. For the former, our main example will be Moby-Dick, although we will read shorter works by John Barth and Robert Graves, as well as mythographic essays by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. For the latter, we will do a close study of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter along with supplementary critical materials, all found in Helene Foley’s edition of the Hymn. The modern materials will focus on women’s poetry beginning with Emily Dickinson moving through Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and more contemporary figures. Backgrounds to the literature will include study of 19th and 20th century mythography and 20th century psychology and anthropology. �ֲ��ý will be expected to be active participants and share in the creation of course structures and content. To this end, attendance is required and a sense of community will be rewarded even more than individual achievement. Instructors are encouraged to speak with the instructor before the class begins, so we can ground each other in ways of proceeding. Phone: 303 492 8945.

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ENGL 4039-001: Critical Thinking in English Studies, What Is an Author? (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:46:54 +0000

ENGL 4039-001: Critical Thinking in English Studies, What Is an Author? (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 15:46

Instructor: Prof. Thora Brylowe

This course examines the construction of the modern author, exploring the relationship between literary books and the people who make them, write them, and read them. We begin at the end, with the death of the author. The first half of the course deals with postmodern fiction and with theoretical works from various camps (like Deconstruction and American media theory) that seek to dethrone "The Author" by revealing that he is nothing more than a construct, a collective fantasy, a consumer product. The 1960s and 70s saw widespread recognition that the author was a category ready made to package, organize, and discipline readers and texts. We will have to consider what it means to sweep away this powerful creation, who is—was?—at the center of our discipline. If the author dies, what of the reader and the text? What possibilities arise from such a momentous shift in perspective? The second half of the course will look for answers in the birth of the author, which happened through cultural and legal changes in the eighteenth century. In Britain, these changes cleared space for a new kind of canonicity and a reorganization of the literary field. We'll take a look at shifts in publishing and editing and read works of literature. The course will finish up with a novel that digests many of these competing notions of authorship, Ian McEwan’s 2001 Atonement.

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ENGL 4039-005: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Teaching English (Spring 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:21:01 +0000

ENGL 4039-005: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Teaching English (Spring 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/04/2018 - 13:21

Professor Martin Bickman

All of us will be keeping a running journal from which we will share extracts at regular intervals. There will also be a larger semester project which is very open-ended and which you and I will discuss in conference.

There will be a service-learning component to the course, recommended for all but particularly to those who haven’t taught in the past. If you choose to do this, you can either find your own placement or consult with me. My two favorite placements are the Reading Buddies Program at the Boulder Public Library or work this Val Wheeler, a superb teacher at Casey Middle School. Both have been excellent experiences for previous students in the class. If you chose to do this service learning component you will receive an extra credit hour if you so wish under the rubric “Service Learning in English.” If you’re interested in this option, please contact me at least a week before the semester begins at bickman@colorado.edu or 303 492 8945.

STUDENTS ENROLLED IN 4039-005 CAN OPT TO PARTICIPATE IN AN ADDITIONAL 1-CREDIT SERVICE LEARNING PRACTICUM. CONTACT PROF. BICKMAN DIRECTLY FOR MORE INFO.

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ENGL 4039-004: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Prison Literature and Critical Prison Studies (Spring 2019)

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:16:31 +0000

ENGL 4039-004: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Prison Literature and Critical Prison Studies (Spring 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/04/2018 - 13:16

Professor Cheryl Higashida

Incarceration and criminalization have concerned many of the writers, philosophers, and activists who are central to literary, ethnic, and women and gender studies - for example, Harriet Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, John Okada, Zitkala-Sa, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wright. We will read these and other authors in order to investigate how and why literary genres and theories have responded to the development and expansion of the prison system over the 19th through the 21st centuries. We will also explore other forms of narrative art including film (Titicut Follies, The Shawshank Redemption), television (The Wire), and music and poetry by Gil Scott-Heron, Kendrick Lamar, and others. Through these works, we will think about how mass incarceration in the U.S. produces and impacts race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and class as modes of oppression and resistance. Finally, we will debate efforts to create alternatives to policing and prisons.

Contact the instructor with any questions: Cheryl.Higashida@colorado.edu

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