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| 2009-2010 |
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Violence and Creativity in the Twentieth Century, an undergraduate lecture course, explores the relationship between violence and creativity in twentieth-century fiction. Some writers argue that creativity is stifled by violence; some argue that creativity resists violence; some argue that violence spurs creativity, that creativity requires violence, or that violence is one of the forms that creativity can take. We will examine all of these positions and others as they are explored by writers including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Anthony Burgess, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie. (Fall 2009)
See Paper 1;Paper 2;Paper 3;Paper 4;Paper 5 |
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The Postwar British and Irish Novel from Lamming to Sebald, a graduate seminar,
examines the British and Irish novel after 1945 in the context of transnational methodologies and paradigms. We will aim to assess whether the category of “British novel” makes sense in this period, taking as our examples novels that have been assigned to various micronational identities (English, Scottish, Irish, Black British, and so on) as well as those assigned to global or transnational origin. We'll read relevant works of criticism to help us in this endeavor. By starting with the Caribbean-British novelist George Lamming and ending with the German-British novelist W.G. Sebald, both of whom authored influential books called The Emigrants , we'll consider the centrality of migration, multilingualism, devolution, and globalization in the development of post-war British writing. Additional reading will include some of the following: Spark, Greene, Naipaul, Rushdie, McEwan, Lessing, Toibin, Ho Davies, Ishiguro, Phillips, Banville, LeCarre, Desai, Lessing, and Brookner. (Spring 2010) |
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English 353:389: Critical and Uncritical Reading, an undergraduate course, introduces students to the history and theory of critical and uncritical reading. Our texts will include exemplary works of literary criticism and theory as well as novels, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and a film. Topics will include the genealogy of critique and the idea of “the critical”; texts and paratexts; psychoanalysis and deconstruction; biographical reading; evasion and the unwillingness to read; reading with and against the grain; the geography of reading; the history of the book; and the ethics and politics of translation.
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English 350:594: Modernism, Translation, and the New World Literature, a graduate seminar, will explore literary and critical texts that take as their principal concern the relationship between modernity and transnationalism. We will discuss recent efforts to determine when and where Anglophone modernism is located, and we will ask how paradigms of modernism are transformed by the inclusion of literary texts that originate beyond Europe and the U.S. |
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350:393:01: Violence and Creativity: Introduction to the Contemporary British Novel, an introductory lecture course, explores the relationship between violence and creativity in twentieth-century British fiction. Some writers argue that creativity is stifled by violence; some argue that creativity resists violence; some argue that violence spurs creativity, that creativity requires violence, or that violence is one of the forms that creativity can take. We will examine all of these positions and others as they are explored by twentieth-century writers from James Joyce to Salman Rushdie. See syllabus. |
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350:437:01: Vernacular Fictions: Joyce and After, an advanced undergraduate course, introduces students to major works of modernist fiction, including Ulysses, and to theories of explicitness and everyday life. We will focus on several practices of "vernacular fiction" in twentieth-century narrative: the vernacular of spoken idiom and dialect; the vernacular of popular culture; the vernacular of explicit sexuality and unflinching description; the vernacular of multiculturalism and micronational identities. See syllabus. |
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