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Open courses in English (*Not real-time Information. Review the "Data current as of: " statement at the bottom of hyperlinked page)
Wolverine Access Subject listing for ENGLISH
Winter Academic Term '02 Time Schedule for English.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Only first-year students, including those with sophomore standing, may pre-register for First-Year Seminars. All others need permission of instructor. (3). (HU).
First-Year Seminar
Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).
Course Homepage: No homepage submitted.
In this course, we will look at poems, plays, novels, and short stories, analyzing how their beginnings and endings adhere to and depart from conventional literary models. We will be particularly interested in narratives of love, education, and profession. Texts may include Charles Dickens' David Copperfield; Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth; Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre; poems of Robert Browning; poems of Christina Rossetti; and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.
Medieval literature reveals the contradictory western invention of
romantic love and sexual desire. Here we discover ideas about the
sinfulness of sexuality, but also the acceptance of prostitution as a
legal, civic enterprise. We learn that many diseases are thought to result
from sexual intercourse, but also that intercourse is believed to be a
remedy for some physical ailments.
In this seminar, we will investigate
the challenges of understanding these and other conceptions of human
sexuality ñ and explore the influence of medieval literature on our own
Good, hard critical thinking about discrimination and poverty is almost impossible if we confine our minds within university walls. This experiential learning course gets you out into the community, working with kids or adults from impoverished backgrounds and talking with people from a wide variety of identity groups. These activities, along with reading novels and memoirs written from the point of view of people who have experienced discrimination and/or poverty, and writing about your questions, thoughts, and opinions in a variety of interesting formats will help you understand the challenges of "making it" in America today.
Time commitment: Volunteer work in Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti (two hours per week); mandatory participation in the University of Michigan's nationally acclaimed FIGS (First
Year Interest Groups) Program (four meetings per term); class discussion and hands-on activities (no lectures); in-depth journal writing
(2-4 pages per week); reading and writing about memoir and fiction (your choice of three books from an approved list); and several short papers, in several drafts, on topics chosen by the class.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Completion of the Introductory Composition requirement. (3). (HU).
Credits: (3).
The political and social breakthroughs achieved by the gay liberation
movement in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s were made
possible the emergence of an openly gay male literary and visual culture. By the mid-1980s, that culture was remarkably accomplished, sophisticated,
and diverse, at once self-critical and self-assured, displaying a sexual
honesty and explicitness, and enjoying an increasingly international scope.
This course will survey some of the novels, stories, essays, poems,
cartoons, and films produced by gay men (and others) during the intense
cultural ferment of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a few glances at
work composed both slightly earlier and slightly later. Avoiding the
coming-out story and the romance plot in favor of other, more innovative
forms, the course will offer students a chance to recover a sense of the
possibilities of gay male cultural expression in the days before the
Abercrombie catalogue.
Included in the course will be works by Pedro Almodóvar, Gregg Araki, Neil
Bartlett, Allan Bérubé, Arthur Bressan, Dennis Cooper, Howard Cruse, Melvin
Dixon, John Greyson, Allan Gurganus, Essex Hemphill, Alan Hollinghurst,
Derek Jarman, David Leavitt, Adam Mars-Jones, Mark Merlis, James Merrill,
Dale Peck, James Purdy, Annie Proulx, Christos Tsiolkas, Michael Warner,
and Wong Kar-wai.
Students will be required to attend a weekly evening session for film
Join us as we look at one of the primary regions of the United States and
explore how writers depict it and its people in literature: the Midwest or
"America's Heartland." We will be examining the works closely, looking at
the ways in which home, region, and community shape character and looking
at the ways in which place is central to the discovery of self. We will
look at a number of writers from the region, examining how they reinforce
or contradict one another, and we will attempt to define "regionalism" and
establish some theory about it. Writers may include Anderson, Arnow,
Baxter, Bellow, Brooks, Cather, Dreiser, Dybek, Farrell, Fitzgerald,
Harrison, Hayden, Hemingway, Keillor, Lewis, Morrison, Smiley, Twain,
and Wright. Weekly reading responses, two short papers, and a final exam.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Completion of the Introductory Composition requirement. (3). (CE). May not be repeated for credit.
All sections of 223 teach the writing of two of the following three genres: fiction (including personal narrative), drama, and poetry. Different sections will emphasize the individual genres to varying degrees. Course work involves the discussion of the process of writing and the work of a few published authors. Students will do exercises meant to develop a sensitivity to language and a facility with evocative detail, voice, form, and so forth. Most classroom time, however, is devoted to reading and discussion of student writing. A final portfolio of revised finished work of 35-50 manuscript pages may be required.
This writing workshop will focus primarily on poetry and fiction. Authors we'll be reading include Stanley Kunitz, Tim O'Brien, Mary Oliver, James Baldwin, Jane Kenyon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Louise Gluck, George Saunders, and the old Heimingway. By the end of the academic term you will have a 35-page portfolio consisting of two or three stories and five to ten poems.
In this course we will examine the history of storytelling, and its many modern manifestations. Emphasis will be placed upon learning traditional forms before experimenting with them. Students will read various examples of storytelling at its best from around the world, along with essays on the craft from experienced storytellers. We will come to understand the revision of drafts as an indispensible facet of story writing. Much of our in-class time will be dedicated to collaborative workshopping of students' stories. We will also examine different forms of poetry, and consider rhythm and sound and expressive, precise word choice as vital elements of both poetry and prose. Over the course of the academic term students will be required to produce at least two polished stories and five to ten poems. Grades will be based mainly on class attendance and participation in workshops, and on the improvement shown in final portfolios. Other requirements may include a writing journal, a book review, or attendance at public readings.
Diane Wakoski has written at length about the presence and importance of a writer's "personal mythology" at the center of their attempt to make art. This is the idea that it is through one's own experience that one best expresses the larger complex issues of the human condition. It also implies that some awareness of the myths ñ the stories of people's lives ñ that have always been the subject of art, are necessary. We will explore these myths in our extensive reading of contemporary poetry which is essential to any attempt to write it. The course is a workshop, so it will consist of much class discussion and peer critiques. There will also be some consideration of the writing of the short story, though roughly two-thirds of the course will focus on poetry. "Poetry," again, says Diane Wakoski, "is the image. It gives us something to live for both when life is good, and when it is not."
Acclaimed fiction writer Grace Paley once said, "I went to the school of poetry in order to learn how to write prose." Though it would be a mistake to view poems as mere tools for fiction writing, we will spend class time discovering the ways in which the elements of poetry ñ among them, rhythm, image, meter, form, and voice ñ are essential to the creation of successful fiction. We will devote the first half of the semester to poetry, ours and more professional pieces, and the second half to applying the techniques we have studied to our own short stories. Students will be expected to complete course pack readings, participate actively in a workshop setting, attend readings by professional writers, and participate in a reading of their own. Most importantly, however, students must come to class willing to improve their own writing, to listen and discuss and experiment and use the techniques of both genres to create the best work that they can.
We're going to read authors we like, and try to figure out why we like them. We're going to write what we want, and focus our experiments and discussions on how to write these things. We're going to try and write poems and prose pieces that are imaginative, affecting, and structurally intelligent, all at once. When we workshop our writing, we're going to give thoughtful consideration to each piece on its own terms. Required work: reading assignments and suggestions, peer critiques, attendance at two local public readings, weekly writing exercises, four revised poems, and 2-4 revised prose pieces.
(The initial instructor, Zachary Sifuentes, has been reassigned to English 125.069.)
This course is designed to introduce you to the fundamentals of writing in two genres, poetry and fiction. Attention will be paid to the specific techniques of these genres, with an underlying emphasis on that most fundamental issue which all writers must face: finding material that matters and having the courage to write honestly about it. Students are therefore encouraged to take emotional risks in their work to write about material that they find compelling, maybe even a little scary, and to explore. The course operates on the premise that this is ultimately the most fulfilling kind of work to do, for you and for your reader. For my part, I pledge to provide you with a classroom space that provides encouragement and safety for this kind of exploration. The primary emphasis will be on student work and on the workshop (a class discussion that will provide constructive feedback to encourage strengths and strengthen weaknesses in your work). In addition, I will provide individual feedback on all work. We will also read and discuss published poetry and fiction, mostly contemporary, examining it for what it can teach us about craft, emotion, and honesty as well as for inspiration. Requirements include both a poetry and a fiction portfolio of revised work; exercises, workshops, and readings as assigned; attendance at two public readings during the academic term; and active participation in class discussions and activities. Bring your sense of humor, your willingness to seem weird, and your enthusiasm.
When ordering lunch in a new restaurant, do you: (a) go for the bizarre, fruity-spicy, may still be alive, house special; (b) search the menu for the closest thing to a chicken club sandwich; or (c) avoid the whole situation because, hey, the chicken club at the diner around the corner ain't half bad? Well, there will be no chicken club in this class. Be prepared to try anything in your writing. Sure, we'll cover the basics ñ image, metaphor, tone, plot, character ñ and we'll read and talk about contemporary writers (behind their backs!). You'll write a lot, workshop some, discuss, and EXPERIMENT! Get ready to discover the voluminous, shape-shifting, angel/devil writer that lurks within you. Poets and fiction writers alike are welcome, as the course will cover BOTH genres.
This introductory workshop in poetry and prose, with a slight emphasis on poetry, will explore the craft of writing as well as the craft of reading. Most of our class time will be devoted to workshopping original student work, but we also will discuss readings (TBA) and questions that arise concerning the writing process. Periodically we will look to in-class writing exercises to freshen our approach. Course requirements include weekly writing assignments, culminating in a final revised portfolio of 6-8 poems and 15-20 pages of prose. Other requirements include short written reflections on the reading assignments, responses to fellow students' works-in-progress, active class participation, and attendance at at least one public reading.
This course is designed for writers who specialize in poetry or prose fiction but secretly want to engage the less familiar genre and for ambidextrous writers who use whatever form fits the feeling and the content. The course emphasizes the tricky but rewarding interaction between two dominant modes of expression ñ poetry and prose ñ and how a careful study of each can enrich the writing of the other. In clearer terms: the course will reveal why every serious fiction writer should read poetry, and why every serious poet should read fiction. Study of form and language will be used as a point of entry into exploring this interrelationship. Studied writers will include Attwood, Borges, Carter, Carver, Dickey, Goldbarth, Haas, Oliver, etc. ñ a cast of dozens who either write in both genres or produce work containing elements of both. Students will be expected to produce 30 pages of polished poetry and prose.
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/223/010.nsf
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The Annex Artist is an artist of a diaspora, an expatriate, or one who simply goes beyond Joyce's goal of "being at home in the world" and annexes spaces of the world in a non-materialistic, linguistic method. An Annex Artist is usually found suspect of a defined national identity, and might, at first, live as a voiceover within society, and fear both losing and being persecuted for his or her sudden appearance. Voiceovers themselves are not seen, but if seen, are attributed as a deviation and error of who should be heard.
In this introduction course to writing poetry fiction, we will explore the term Annex Artist that I've created through examining different writers throughout the world. (Poetry will always have bilingual translations.) We'll investigate the implications of residency as the official and stable fluctuates with national immigration movements: space as an idol and the home as a myth. We will read poets such as (but not limited to) G. Apollanaire, Pablo Neruda, C. Simic, Nazim Hikmet, F. Garcia Lorca, Y. Amichai, O. Mandelshtam, T. Borge Martinez, T. Transtomer, and C. Vallejo. Fiction will focus on the short story, including J. Diaz, Hemingway, F. O'Conner, D.F. Wallace, A. Chekov, and S. Bellow.
This course will focus on the craft of writing both poetry and fiction. Using the workshop format, students will learn the basic compositions of both genres and the skill of critiquing their own and others' work. Students should expect to submit a minimum of five poems and ten pages of fiction in their final portfolio, all of which will undergo intensive revisions. A presentation on a contemporary writer is likely. Readings may include poems and stories by a variety of authors, including Anne Carson and Peter Ho Davies. We will also consider the current crop of writers who have just published first books, as well as the increasingly blurred "dividing line" between poetry and fiction.
This course will explore the genres of poetry and fiction, focusing on each craft through workshop critique of the students' work and discussion of the strategies used by major contemporary authors and poets as well as writers of past ages. Students will investigate the ways in which writing can create a conversation between the author and the reader and the importance of that dialogue in society. The greater part of class time will be devoted to critiquing the fiction and poetry of the students, with some time spent discussing the work of writers such as Langston Hughes, Anne Carson, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, William Shakespeare, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mark Twain, and Zora Neale Hurston. By the end of the term students will have compiled a portfolio comprised of roughly 15 pages; attended at at least one reading outside of class; and completed a short reaction paper on a contemporary collection of poetry or short fiction. "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." (Emily Dickinson)
This course will be run on the assumption that the process of writing is mainly about how something is said, not what is said. How often have we had the desire to write a poem or story, but do not know how to create an authentic voice or structure? In this workshop, we will be preoccupied with the creation of fertile, evocative space where the student's natural creativity can blossom. We will look at writers who have succeeded in creating imaginative, poignant, and surprising fiction and poetry, and we will participate in the long-standing and honored act of imitation, where the students will deliberately copy someone else's work in order to see, first hand, how it is working. But mainly, the workshop is about the student's writing. Each student will be expected to create approximately 10 pages of poetry and 20 pages of fiction. Besides creating our own work, we will be expected to give intelligent and informed comments to each other. Be prepared to listen, speak, debate, respect, and learn about writing. In a course such as this, participation is mandatory. Grades will be based mainly on a final, revised portfolio. Writers to be discussed include Flannerty O'Conner, James Bladwin, Junot Diaz, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Tate, and Thylias Moss.
Stories arise from the drama of conflict; poetry emerges from thoughtful reflection on the world around us. Both require that we pay close attention to language and structure. Our concern in this course will be to consider what it is that we most want to say, and then to determine how best to say it.
This introductory course will focus on the writing of fiction and poetry, with an emphasis on the former. While our class time will be devoted primarily to the workshopping of student writing, we also will read a significant amount of published poetry and prose in order to familiarize ourselves with the elements of each. In-class writing exercises will supplement these discussions. Each student will complete two polished short stories and 5-7 revised poems; attendance of public readings and brief written analyses of published works also will be required.
Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pcrymble/syllabus.html
This course will be weighted equally in the study of both short prose fiction and poetry. Considerable emphasis will be placed on issues of craft in each genre, and to that end, a selection of seminal essays, statements of poetics, manifestos, and various other written considerations of how writing works and breaks down will be central to how the course operates.
I will devise a course pack of readings selected primarily from among the leading voices in poetry and fiction (in English) of the 20th century. Richard Hugo's slim volume of indispensable essays, The Triggering Town, will also be a required text.
The final portfolio will be a revision of half the term's work, but must include writing in both genres. A short meditative essay (2-3 pages) discussing what you feel you have accomplished will preface your revised work. Class participation is required and will be built into the grading rubric. Students must also attend at least one public reading during the term.
In this course we'll spend half of our time writing short stories, and the other half writing poetry. The bulk of our class time will be spent workshopping original student work, but we will also read stories and poems by contemporary writers, and we'll do A LOT of work with writing exercises to force ourselves to expand our understanding of how metaphors can function to control the development of an idea, how a setting can influence what happens to our characters, how our characters make decisions that aren't always the best for them but always do have consequences, how we can control our images through the words we choose to describe them (consider the difference between a paragraph composed completely of simple sentences with monosyllabic words and a paragraph like the one you're reading now), and so on ad infinitum. We will also emphasize, either a lot or a little (depending on the class), the idea and practice of imitation, since I think one of the best ways to develop the craft of writing is by reading published work and trying to understand how your favorite writers are successful by attempting to do what they do yourself. The goal of the course will be to assemble and revise (with a strong emphasis on revision) a substantial collection of stories and poems from the work and exercises we do in class, and to develop our understanding of what makes a good poem a good poem and a good story worth reading.
What does it mean to create "contemporary" poetry and fiction? What on earth do people write about these days? In this course we'll explore the best and worst of the most current short stories and poems that are going into print by taking our readings from recent "Best of"s, journals, and magazines. We'll discover which works we love and hate, why some risks are worth taking while others end up badly, and how we can apply what we learn to our own work. There also will be some brief overview of the last 100 years so you get an idea of why we ended up where we are today. And most importantly: you will write stories and poems, share them with the
class, and learn how to revise and polish them. At the end of the course you will have fifteen pages of fiction and 6-8 poems.
Even when we strive to write about events we have never experienced, fiction and poetry have a way of channeling our own lives to the page and rewarding us with a substantial piece of personal history. Writing is proof that we exist. In a workshop environment focusing primarily on fiction and secondarily on poetry, students will strive to locate an authentic voice in respect to their own life experiences and the lives of those around them, while avoiding the autobiographical and sentimental. Students will be expected to invest serious thought to their work as well as the work of their peers. A final portfolio of two short stories and 5-8 poems will be expected, with a minimum of 30 pages total. Though sessions will focus primarily on collaborative work, students also will be assigned readings from The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories.
An introduction to the writing of poetry and fiction, this course is geared toward students who are willing to immerse themselves in the writing process and work together to improve their technique. The course will take the shape of a workshop. We also will read and discuss the work of various published writers, confer about issues of craft, and turn to in-class writing exercises to enliven our approach. Among other course requirements will be a final revised portfolio of fiction and poetry, active class participation, and attendance at two public readings.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Completion of the Introductory Composition requirement. (4). (HU).
Credits: (4; 3 in the half-term).
This course furthers the aims of English 124 and 125 in helping to analyze the various claims of a given issue and to develop ways of exploring and defending positions, ideas, and beliefs in writing. Careful attention will be paid to the process of reasoning, the testing of assumptions and claims, the questioning of beliefs, and the discovery of ideas and evidence through analysis and rigorous articulation in written discourse. The course will also focus on considerations of style, formal strategy techniques, and revision as integral to precision in making points and developing argumentative ideas both for purposes of individual reflection as well as for the purpose of persuading an audience.
In this advanced course in argumentative essay writing, we will consider various styles of argument and review the many types of logical fallacies. Critical reading strategies will be as important as effective writing techniques. We will explore ways to use personal experience and observation as well as research from critical and primary sources. Discussion, informal writing (either in-class assignments or response papers), and four formal essays will be required.
Contact the Comprehensive Studies Program for more details.
An argument can be any text that expresses a point of view. Strong persuasive writing is as creative, engaging, and rigorously articulated as any other form of art ñ whether written, spoken, or visual. With these statements in mind, this course will focus upon further developing diverse rhetorical strategies employed in argumentative writing. We will read nonfiction essays by writers from widely ranged backgrounds ("creative" and "scholarly," contemporary and historical), as well as essays-in-progress by students in the class. Course requirements include active participation, in-class writing exercises, weekly reading responses, four formal essays, and peer critiques of essays presented in workshop.
From commercials to documentaries, tools of argument and persuasion are used in every aspect of non-print mass media. In this course we will examine approaches used by audio-visual texts, using both classic and modern rhetorical models. We will track the components of each argument down to their prime components and discuss their viability. Written work will consist of both analysis and creation of visual argument.
In this course we will focus on techniques for achieving, organizing, and expressing an argument in expository essays. Because effective writing depends on interesting ideas, an emphasis on pre-writing methods will help you to develop a more persuasive style. Critical reading assignments involve the idea of democracy. Beginning with Machiavelli's The Prince, we will read and analyze essays on democratic government to help develop our own organizational skills. Daily readings, class discussions, and some brief writing assignments will provide structure for our weekly meetings. In addition to weekly assignments, the writing load for the course includes three short essays (5-6 pages), a research paper (15-18 pages), and written outlines of in-class presentations.
In this advanced course in argumentative essay writing, we will consider various styles of argument and review the many types of logical fallacies. Critical reading strategies will be as important as effective writing techniques. We will explore ways to use personal experience and observation as well as research from sources. Discussion, informal writing (either in-class assignments or response papers), and four formal essays will be required.
Land of opportunity. Democracy. All men are created equal. Phrases like these seem intrinsically "American" and have indeed shaped our national identity for many years. Yet where do they come from, how have they changed, and why do we cling to them? What kind of America (and Americans) do they evoke? Whom do they include and exclude?
In this course we will identify and analyze the ways in which traditional American myths and values have been developed and manipulated by public figures and organizations to change the way Americans live, learn, vote, shop, and worship, among other things. We will read historical and contemporary essays relating to these issues, as well as practical essays on the art of persuasion, logic, and argumentation. Students will be encouraged to scrutinize American popular culture,
advertisements, political campaigns, and legal documents in order to form their own ideas and arguments about how American myths and values are manipulated in our culture. Students will write three to four persuasive essays that will require critical analysis, careful argumentation, and some outside research.
Three basic assumption guide this argumentative writing course:
(1) An argument entails differing points of view. An argumentative essay explores such differences through analysis of an issue under question. Therefore, at the heart of an argumentative essay is an issue about which reasonable adults might differ.
(2) Arguments are most convincing when they are most informed. Opinion and hear-say "evidence" may be a starting point, but a convincing essay must offer more, and offering more means library research.
(3) Arguments are most complete when they are informed through feedback: every essay written for the course will be critiqued by at least two other students.
This is NOT a course in simply and persuasively stating opinions that you already have. It is a course in formulating opinions via critical thinking about differing approaches to debatable issues. Issues for the four major essays will grow out of the required reading texts and films.
Texts: Schlink, The Reader; Krakauer, Into the Wild; Suskind, A Hope in the Unseen; Edwards, Burning All Illusions (Note: This text may be changed for another in the Winter Term.); Weston, A Rulebook for Arguments 2nd ed.; Harvey, Writing with Sources: A Guide for Students.
Films: Return to Paradise, Obedience, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Moral Life of Children, The Color of Fear, excerpts from Full Metal Jacket and Still Killing Us Softly.
Requirements: Four five-to-seven page argumentative essays each citing three
sources, eight two-page typed critiques of other student essays, and on-time class attendance and informed participation in class discussion.
This course is designed to help you improve your writing skills through the writing of argumentative essays. The word "argument" comes from the Latin word for "silver" and literally means to make an idea clear, just as you can see your reflection clearly in polished silver. Thus, when I use the term "argumentative," I don't employ it to refer to fighting or bickering; rather, I use it to refer to rational persuasion presented in readable English. It is worth noting that the word "persuasion" from from a Latin word that means "sweet" and is related to the ancient Greek word for "pleasure."
Writing is a skill that can be learned and improved upon with practice and with critical feedback from others. As such, an essential component of this course will be in the workshop, where we will read and critique each others' papers. The goal of the workshop is to provide a variety of viewpoints and suggestions from which the author may draw when revising his/her paper. Good writing is also interconnected with good reading, so we will discuss assigned readings together with an eye toward what choices go into writing an essay, and how they affect the final product. This course requires participation from everyone!
Required Texts: Everything's an Argument, and The American Heritage Dictionary.
Arguments are all around you: on bumper stickers, in clothing catalogues, on the website where you check the news, in the owner's manual for your car, on a t-shirt, in a memoir, on a menu, in a love letter. You've been evaluating arguments ñ and creating them ñ since before you could talk.
In this course, we will hunt down arguments in their natural habitats: in newspapers and magazines, on the radio and TV, on the web, on billboards, in courses at the university, and in conversations among friends. We will pick them apart, figure out how they work, and talk back to them. You will use your expanded and deepened understanding of argument to create stronger, subtler, and more effective arguments of your own: expect to write and revise three formal arguments totalling 15-30 pages, and numerous informal assignments, including regular participation of an
online discussion group.
What makes writing persuasive enough so that you take notice? What does it take to change people's minds and perhaps even inspire them to act? To explore these questions we'll read classic persuasive writings such as Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" as well as current literary, academic, and political writings and analyze the strategies different writers use. These writings will bring up a host of current issues and you can choose to write about those of particular interest to you, getting extensive feedback from readers as you explore different perspectives, construct extended arguments, test your evidence, question your assumptions, and search for ways to make your point of view clear, credible, and convincing. Writing requirements include exploratory drafts, freewritings, in-class exercises, reading responses, critiques of other students' drafts, and analyses of the writing process, resulting in a portfolio consisting of 25 pages of revised and polished essays.
All writing is built, in part, of argument. In fact, every conscious move we make argues some precept, from the reliability of the power grid (flicking on a light switch) to the appropriateness of certain kinds of dress (wearing shoes to class). This course will focus on the recognition, analysis, critique, and production of arguments, implicit and explicit, large and small. For texts, we will look to essays, op-ed pieces, articles, fiction, movies, advertisements, and, most important, your and your fellow students' writing. We will study the rhetoric of
argument, but we will focus on its practice. Requirements will include in-class writing exercises, short presentations, and several college-length essays with revisions.
Since this course was designed to augment your palette of writing skills, I have tried to provide a text, A World of Ideas, that offers a variety of thematic possibilities. Its eight sections ñ Government, Justice, Wealth, Mind, Nature, Culture, Faith, and Poetics ñ represent a wide range of thought. Looking at a tradition of critical thinking that stretches from the Chou dynasty (sixth century B.C.) to the late twentieth century, we will carefully examine the structure of various truth claims and studiously consider their method of persuasion. The practical purpose of this course is to further develop your writing skills in a way that ensures your continuing academic success!
In this course we'll practice pitching persuasion from several angles (personal, humorous, investigative, serious, skeptical, assertive, political, minimal, excessive) and combinations of angles, all in service of fanning the flames of discontent. Those happily mired in their lives ought to consider both another section of this course and cryogenic encapsulation for thawing and proper replacement as intelligent, unapologetic enemies of the state later on. Bring your gusto and your language. Leave your expectations at home. Everyone will be required to compose four arguments, totalling 25-30 pages. I look forward to it.
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/225/025.nsf
See English 225.015.
See English 225.011.
The pulse of this course is your voice. In order to appreciate the art of persuasion you must begin with what you value, what moves you, how you communicate, how you listen, and for what you are willing to fight. What you have that no other writer has is your own way of phrasing, your own way of seeing, your own history that shapes your lens. This class is designed to give you the structure and tools you need to realize your own intentions and reach your audience. We will learn that a successful persuasive essay is not one that aims to win, but rather one that demonstrates thoughtful exploration and acts as a dialogue. This course is structured as a writing workshop and you will learn to critique each other's work based on the values of craft. We will read as writers; essays are our only texts.
This course extends the aims of English 124 by focusing upon what specifically constitutes argumentative writing. In this course, we will think about what exactly is an argument and will discuss how argument and argumentative writing plays a vital role in our society. By looking at things that are familiar to us ñ such as journalistic writings, essays, and the media ñ in a new light, we will learn to recognize how we are constantly being persuaded to do something, think something, act in some way, or participate in some type of belief system. Argumentative prose is all around us, and we will begin to analyze the structure and methods involved in effective persuasion. As we delve into the ways our identities are constantly being constructed by the skillful manipulation of words and images, we will pay particular attention to identity politics and to issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the course we will read thoroughly and dissect the writings of others, engage in class workshops in which we comment upon which strategies work in our peers' papers and which are less effective, practice revising our own writing, and gain the confidence to create new forms of argument. Our goal is to master the art of structuring a position, of using reasoning and logic to defend that position, of anticipating and deconstructing counter-arguments without dismissing or underestimating them, and ultimately, of persuading our audience to believe what we want them to believe. The skills we learn in this course can apply to a variety of real-life situations such as writing a job application, a political campaign, a legal argument, a business presentation, or a
journal article, all of which use the strategies of argumentation.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Permission of instructor. (1-3). (Excl). (INDEPENDENT). May be repeated for a total of three credits.
Credits: (1-3).
Registration only by arrangement with the instructor.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (CE).
See Theatre and Drama 227.001.
Credits: (4).
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/229/001.nsf
In this course students will analyze and practice the types of writing done by technical and profesional writers. Like all effective writing, technical and professional writing emerges from an understanding of purpose and audience, from an understanding of "the rhetorical context." It is the specifics of its rhetorical context ñ not any implied intellectual difference ñ that distinguishes technical and professional writing from other forms of writing. Thus, a major goal of this course will be to help students develop the analytical skills they will need to navigate the rhetorical contexts technical and professional writers encounter in a variety of fields.
Since most technical and professional writing is the result of collaborative activity, students should expect to work in teams in the course, but the course will
also address more personal issues, such as the writing of resumes and letters of self-promotion.
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/229/002.nsf
Although this course in entitled "Technical Writing," it is actually much more directed toward business or professional writing. We will talk about the differences between academic discourse and technical writing, keeping in mind that the two most important points of academic writing ñ audience and purpose ñ also apply here. To achieve the result you want from a business communication, you will need to know your audience and your purpose, and you will need to design your document(s) with your audience and purpose in mind. Class discussions and peer evaluations of your drafts will help you produce effective documents.
This course will focus in part on professional examples and in part on student writings which will be discussed in a workshop format. I do not plan to lecture at any great length, and you will not have to laboriously scribble notes during each class. Rather, we will have an ongoing discussion about writing and, more importantly, about rewriting ñ the key to successful writing.
I am requiring you to keep a portfolio of your work in this course. You will submit this portfolio to me at the end of the term. I don't require portfolios in my other courses, but your polished and finished assignments will, most likely, be useful in the future. Assignments such as resume writing, personal statements, and cover letters will be invaluable to you as you go out into the real world.
Because the course has a workshop component, be prepared to talk (when it's your turn, of course). Your participation in class discussion is vital. Vigorous (that is, helpful and friendly) discussion is not only fun but also a relatively painless way to learn. From our discussions, we (and I do mean we because I will be learning from you, my students) will learn not only about writing well but also about how our opinions and our styles of writing affect others in ways we might not previously have considered.
Finally, to successfully communicate, you must write with clarity and authority. To do so, you need to boost your receptive and productive vocabularies. In order to increase word recognition, all of you will periodically bring to class words from your various readings, words that have stumped you or that you needed contextual clues to understand. We as a class will define and discuss these words so that they may become a part of our working vocabularies.
Required Work: Eight to ten business documents, portfolio of all your finished assignments, participation in workshop discussions, and mandatory attendance.
Texts: The American Heritage College Dictionary (3rd Edition, hard cover) and student assignments.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU).
This course is designed to give the student an introduction to the development and rise of the novel as a social phenomenon by analyzing how the novel comically treats both other novels that precede it and the continued influx of popular writing that has accompanied the novel since its beginning. The student will learn to recognize and analyze concepts fundamental to comic literature such as parody and pastiche, satire and irony. Yet more importantly the student will learn to analyze the continued struggle between "high" and "low" art that forms a principle tension in comic novels from the eighteenth century through to our present day. The comic novel often attempts to elevate itself above other books by laughing at, mocking, and deriding popular publications; this, while the novel itself is a supposedly democratic or bourgeois art form. We will ask when if ever the novel succeeds in distancing itself from the popular press and what that means for the novel's readership and purpose. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we will enjoy a good laugh with some fantastically funny books.
Readings include Gulliver's Travels, Tale of a Tub, Pamela (selections), Joseph Andrews, Tristam Shandy, Bouvard and Pecuchet, At Swim Two Birds, and Molloy.
In this course we will learn about the mechanics of narrative ñ plot, character, theme, genre, style, voice ñ and the skills of literary analysis, by examining the myth of the vampire. We will begin with the ancient vampire myths from the Far East and India, move to those of Eastern Europe, continue by examining the eighteenth-century European vampire panics, read Polidori's Romantic Vampyre, examine Bram Stoker's Dracula, and finally analyze twentieth-century popular incarnations of the vampire myth in novels (Anne Rice, Stephen King, Christine Freehan), film (Nosferatu, Bram Stoker's Dracula ), TV (Buffy,) on the web, and in popular culture (vampire balls). We will investigate how culture, historical time, and gender play a role in the vampire myth. How and why does the vampire myth change depending on the particular fears or desire of a people, country, or time? How do desire and fear combine and interact in the vampire myth?
Requirements for class: class participation, web-based conferencing, weekly response papers, two papers of 5-6 pages each, a final in-class (optionally collaborative) presentation.
Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thowe/teaching.htm
Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of ñ even ñ the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness ñ what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent ñ these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sidesÖ. -Doris Lessing
Why are literary villains repeatedly depicted as ethnic 'Others,' women, or those whose sexual preferences deviate from a presumed norm? In Unbreakable, a recent film by Manoj Shyamalan, Samuel L. Jackson explains the representational logic of the comic book villain by pointing out the "elongated head" and "protruding lips" of the evildoer, his "darker skin" and "animalistic appearance." Clearly, these can be read as offensive physical stereotypes of ethnicity. What do you think the hero of this film looks like? This course will examine a variety of fictional texts ñ work by Wells, Beckett, Anand, Shelley, O'Connor, and others ñ in order to understand the ways authors have represented difference as a form of criminality. One of the goals of this class is to develop a repertoire of analytical tools for the effective, thoughtful study of fiction. Written work will include two 5-7 page essays, weekly 1-page personal responses, and a final exam covering the essential concepts of literary analysis.
After the publication of Joseph Heller's novel in 1961, the phrase "catch-22" quickly worked its way into our cultural vocabulary, becoming synonymous with the impossible, or more pointedly with the absurd world, where sanity is insanity, and where "truth" and "meaning" become eerily unstable concepts. In this course, we will look at modern and postmodern texts which depict absurd worlds, or chaotic or abnormal worlds lurking under the thin veneer of the normal ñ particularly through the subthemes of the chaos of war, childhood, and "simple" country life, among others. And we'll do this by employing a number of theoretical perspectives, including postmodern, feminist, and critical theories, in our reading of a collection of texts as diverse as Heller's Catch-22 and Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
Our goal is to construct meaning out of our reading of literature. We will begin with the assumption that you all have some experience reading, discussing, and analyzing literature, and that you bring with you your own assumptions and expectations about the reading of literature. As we begin, we'll build from your previous experiences with literature, paying attention to central features of literary analyses ñ narrative construction, voice, characterization, theme, style, etc. As we proceed, however, we are going to confront our assumptions, and contextualize them through a deeper understanding of the theories which shape our readings, and the contexts in which literature is produced and consumed.
Expect to read approximately 5-10 short stories and at least three novels. Expect to write at least five short exploratory pieces (1-2 pages in length), and at least three literary analyses (4-5 pages in length).
Texts should include: Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster (NY: Vintage, 1990); Josephe Heller's Catch-22 (NY: Scribner, 1996/1961); J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (NY: Scholastic, 1999); Ann Ruggles Gere & Peter Shaheen (eds.) Making American Literatures (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2001).
Course pack of short stories will include: Flannery O'Connor's "The River" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find"; Simon Ortiz' "Men on the Moon"; and Raymond Carver's "So Much Water So Close to Home" and "Why Don't You Dance."
There are long short stories that read like novels and short novels that have the feel of short stories. Discussing works that fall between categories offers distinct opportunities to explore the form of both the short story and the novel, as well as the territory of the novella. This course will examine a wide range of "in between" 20th century works with the goal of using form as a way to define particular characteristics of literature and encounter works that often resist categorization. Using these works to illuminate the boundaries between current categories will allow us to explore and interpret these boundaries across a wide range of writers and fictions. Readings will include works by Stephen Crane, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, Nella Larsen, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, William Maxwell, Philip Roth, William Trevor, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Charles Baxter among others.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Prerequisite for concentrators in the Regular Program and in Honors. (3). (HU).
What does it mean to be an author, to create a story? To figure that out, we'll be authors ourselves a little and ask about our own responses as readers. We'll read texts closely, attempting to understand their less accessible meanings, the effect of the social and economic context in which they are written and read, and what's at stake for us, if anything, in the content. We'll be interested in the social purposes of literature and in questions of authors' responsibilities. We'll read or view The Official Story, Interviews with My Lai Veterans; Wiesenthal's The Sunflower; Coetzee's Age of Iron; Thomas' The White Hotel; Kingsolver's Pigs In Heaven; Washington's Iron House; Cervantes' Emplumada; and Shange's "spell #7." Class participation will be important, and you'll write 25 pages worth of essays and literature, the nature of which we'll determine together. No exams.
What is it about being human that so encourages us "to tell" our stories to others? I have to wonder about how our futures depend on "seeing" and articulating small glimpses of our past. We will want, in this class, to think about the power and the connectedness that the act of telling stories might provide. For example a character in Ursula Hegi's Stones From the River thinks: Every time I take a story and let it stream through my mind from beginning to end, it grows fuller, richer, feeding on my visions of those people the story belonged to until it leaves its bed like the river I love. And then I have to tell the story to someone.
Our readings will often focus on the dynamics of the imaginative process ñ our own as well as the author's. As the term continues and we discuss various 20th century literature (mostly), we will find ourselves grappling with issues as basic as how an author creates these amazing characters to tell their own stories, their own lives.
How do perceptions of "The Americas" differ, or converge, in the United
States and Cuba, in Trinidad and Argentina, in Haiti and Brazil? What
accounts for the ways in which "America" is thereafter translated into
"Literature"? And how is this clarified by the narratives and plays and
poetry that we get in, say, Nash Candelaria's Memories of the Alhambra
and Jo Sinclair's The Changelings; in Arthur Miller's Death of a
Salesman, Earl Lovelace's "Jobell and America" and Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint? We'll explore similar issues when we read Rosario
Ferre's "When Women Love Men" and Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables.
So too when we turn to Alejo Carpentier's Concierto Baroque, Derek
Walcott's O Babylon!, and Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hand of an
Angry God."
These apparently similar and yet opposed stories about "America": what do
they teach us about how "Literature" is defined in different places? And
by whom? How does a Flannery O'Connor ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find") get
to be important, or forgotten, in one context, an Austin Clarke Growing
Up Stupid Under the Union Jack in another, and a Herman Melville
Bartleby, the Scrivener in yet another part of the New World?
Note: preceded by short informal reports (1-2 pages) on each reading, the
"Final" for this course will be a comparative essay on any two of the
regions that we'll cover during the academic term.
What we call "family" is often based on our own experience. In this class we will explore various concepts of "family" through reading novels and short stories. As we read Ron Hansen's Atticus, Toni Morrison's Sula, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood, Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, and selected short stories, we will look at how notions of "family" are affected by gender, sexuality, race, and class. There will be three in-class essays. Class participation is essential.
Looking specifically at works by writers who represent and/or discuss multiple racial backgrounds and identifications, this course asks such questions as: How do race, class, and gender shape our ideas about literature? How is race ñ and specifically, African American identity ñ constructed in these works? Who is this literature for? How do legal definitions of color shape a specific writer's presentation of race? What does this literature tell us about power? How might each of us read a literary work differently, and why? Using Claudia O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Biracial as our starting point, we will read such works as Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, William Faulkner's Go Down Moses, Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, James MacBride's The Color of Water, and Gus Lee's China Boy. In addition to viewing in class the controversial film Jefferson in Paris, students will attend (at reduced cost) the Feb. 17th (Sunday afternoon) performance of From the Diary of Sally Hemings, a new song cycle based on the story of Sally Hemings, the (enslaved) mistress of Thomas Jefferson. Students will be evaluated on class participation and several short (3-4 page) papers.
This course introduces students to key terms and practices in the study of literature. This section of "What is Literature?" will combine the study of the genres poetry, short story, novel, play, and film with an introduction to critical perspectives such as psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, linguistics, new historicism, and cultural studies. We will read Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, Keats, Cisneros, Joyce, Mansfield, Wharton, Faulkner, Morrison, and Hwang, and view the films Bladerunner and Law of Desire. We will familiarize ourselves with issues relating to form, gender and sexual identity, ethnicity, representation, colonialism, narration, and commodity culture. Expectations: 3 papers (one 2-3 page paper, one 3-5 page paper, one 5-7 page paper), weekly quizzes, presentations, enthusiastic participation, and regular attendance.
Through close readings and analyses of a wide variety of short stories, we will develop a deep understanding of how this form works and gain insights into the ways in which all forms of fiction are written and received. Elements to be discussed include characterization, voice, style, structure, dialogue, setting, point of view, and theme. In addition to reading stories for every class, students will be required to keep a reading journal and write a four-to-six page critical essay and a five-to-ten page short story.
Aiming both to instruct and to delight ñ and thus honoring one classic definition of literature ñ this course showcases a broad range of literary genres. Here you will encounter likely suspects, such as fiction and drama, and much less conventional ones, such as film, television, and advertising. What knits this diversity together is what must knit any diversity together: our willingness to reflect carefully on how we think and why we think that way. This is a course about thinking about literature. All I can say about the readings at this point is that they will be chosen for either or both of two qualities: (1) they're fun; and (2) they challenge us. Three papers, several small examinations.
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2001/winter/english/239/009.
What a story means has a lot to do with how it's told. In this section of "What is Literature," we will explore some essential questions of contemporary literary discourse through the consideration of narrative and the delights and implications of story-telling. Using as our main source what D.H. Lawrence called "the great book of life," the novel, we will look at the varied strategies authors employ to present their stories to their readers and how those strategies reflect the writers' ideology and culture. Writers speak to their culture, and thus we will situate our texts within the culture that produced them to examine the specifics of this interaction. I have chosen some of my favorite stories from some of my favorite authors ñ including possibly Woolf, Spiegelman, Hemingway, Brontë, O'Brien, Morrison, Alexie, and Banks and other, less-known contemporary writers. Requirements: two essays, a midterm, and a final; contributions to the discussion of class texts on the computer conference (COW); regular attendance, and active class participation in discussion.
The novita (from the Italian word for 'novelty') is a novel rendered in short stories, or a novel consisting principally of short stories and some chapters. I consider it the newest, and probably the most interesting fiction genre in existence. My course will focus on the (probably inadvertent) development of the genre, and its various structural, and aesthetic techniques. We shall begin our study by first looking at those texts closest to them (and from which the novita most likely grew) in form: the linked story collections, collections (links) which are composed of short stories that are contiguous in terms of setting, characters, and/or themes, but not intentionally written to resemble the conventional novel. The course will not make use, however, of the conventional (or 'chapterized') novel itself, since it is unlikely that students will be unfamiliar with that particular form. The main objective of the course is to make students conversant, first, with the novita as a distinct form embodying certain narratological characteristics peculiar to itself, and secondly with the individualizing features ñ character development, consciousness, chapterization, plot, language, and themes embeded in each work.
The aim of this course is to introduce you to the art of poetry so that you can read and discuss any poem with understanding and delight. During the term, we will move from a general survey of poetic techniques and forms to a more detailed study of the work of a selection of authors from the Renaissance to the present. For the former, we will use Western Wind by John Frederick Nims. For the latter, we will use a course pack of selected poems. Formal writing will include three (ungraded) exercises in poetic analysis and four (graded) papers (3-5 pages) on individual authors and poems.
In this course, we shall study closely a variety of poems written in English from about 1600 to the present. The task of the course is a pleasurable and progressive understanding of how poems work, that is, what techniques poets use to articulate their visions of experience. We shall pay close attention to the language, forms, figures, and themes of verse, to literary-historical conditions that influence poetic craft, and to the intertextual connections that create constellations of poems across the centuries. The textbook, Norton Introduction to Poetry (seventh edition) by J. Paul Hunter, will be our chief reading, in addition to handouts. Because this is a discussion class, regular attendance and participation are required. Other requirements include a series of short papers, supplemented by a reading journal, a midterm, and a final examination.
This course will provide an introduction to poetry, emphasizing the association of form and content and their link to the historical context in which poems were originally written. Our poets will range from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot. The course will, for the most part, be organized chronologically, but we will on occasion trace certain themes, techniques, and forms as they appear in a cluster of poems of different periods. We will also use other cultural artifacts to illuminate the workings of the poems of particular eras. The class will discuss, for instance, the common features of Renaissance poems and paintings, and the relationship between twentieth-century impressionism and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Course requirements include active class participation, several short papers, and a final exam.
My aim for this course is to enrich your understanding and love of poetry by introducing you to ñ and asking you to meaningfully engage with ñ a range of influential poems written in English. Toward this end, we will focus on major poems written from the Renaissance to the present time. We will examine how poems achieve their power both formally (through a close examination of their prosodic elements) and through close readings, primarily in the form of class discussions, but also in the form of written explorations of these texts. Because seriously engaged classroom discussion is vital to this course, regular attendance and active participation are required. The Norton Anthology of Poetry will be our primary text, in addition to handouts.
This course, a prerequisite for concentrators in English, is an introduction to English and American poetry. In this section, students will read a wide variety of poems drawn from WESTERN WIND , ed. J.F. Nims. I shall be organizing the course according to poetic kinds or themes, working chronologically within each category. Occasional brief lectures will serve to direct and focus discussion, which will be the primary method of instruction. Student responsibilities in the course include the following: three or four in-class writing exercises, one or two oral reports, a long end-of-term essay, and a final examination. Regular class attendance is required, and each student's contribution to class discussion will be a factor in the assignment of grades.
In this section of English 240, we will focus on the meaning of poetic form. Reading a wide variety of poems, from different periods and places, we will explore the following questions: how do poems ask us to read them? what do poems do to ordinary language? how do the forms in which poems are written become meaningful? We will begin our reading in and around The Norton Anthology of Poetry, moving through a series of units designed to raise and explore some of the questions above; we will then read several short volumes of twentieth-century poetry together, including perhaps Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III and Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah. Students will be expected to read carefully, participate enthusiastically in class discussion, and write four papers.
This course will focus on the techniques of verse ñ how poems are put together and how they work. We will consider a wide range of texts from the Renaissance to the present day, with an emphasis on shorter lyric poetry. Requirements include full class participation, several short written exercises, an oral project based on the study of a major poet, and a final exam. Readings will be from The Norton Introduction to Poetry (7th edition).
This course seeks to provide you with both the technical skills for
reading poetry and a broad historical overview of the English lyric
tradition. We will begin by studying form and figurative language,
deepening our understanding of the many ways poetry creates meaning:
sound, structure, language, imagery, tone. Our readings will be (for
the most part) chronological, sampling broadly from rich tradition of
English verse. Toward the end of the term, we will focus more closely on
two twentieth-century poets, probably W. H. Auden and Eavan Boland. In-class work will be dedicated primarily to exercises in close literary
analysis. Requirements will include: frequent short writing
assignments; quizzes on poetic terminology; recitation of a poem; three
formal papers. Pleasures will include the opportunity to read
heart-rending, eye-opening, mind-bending, and beautiful literature.
The reading for this course will be drawn from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Shorter Edition, and a course packet.
An introduction to poetry: its traditional forms, themes, techniques, and uses of language; its historical and geographical range; and its twentieth century diversity. The course will include discussion of oral and written traditions and the place of performance in contemporary poetry; the kinds of power (from the magical to the political) which have often been associated with poetry; the relationships between secular and sacred traditions in poetry; and the varying roles of audiences and readers in the traditions of poetry. There will be discussion of the function of historical and national categories, as well as those of race, gender, and class.
Poetry 240 is a course in ways to understand, feel, enjoy, evaluate, and interpret poems. Poetry differs from ordinary language and from prose in certain fairly conventional and (for poetry) advantageous ways, and we shall try to understand how it does so. As we look at ñ and hear ñ poems, we shall consider such things as sound, diction, rhythm, figures of speech, the line, form, genre, authorship, audience, and context. Our readings will come from various cultures, old and now; most readings will be British and American, most of these recent or contemporary. We'll pay some attention to the histories of poetry, and try to get a feel for the contemporary poetry scene. Texts: an introduction to poetry book and an anthology, both in course pack form. Everyone will write three essays on increasingly challenging topics. There will be a test on "technical terms," another on the course readings, and a final exam asking for the interpretation and evaluation of some new poetry.
Poems are difficult. Some may seem exclusive; others may even appear
to be tests. This course is designed to offer another perspective on poetry as well
as the tools to maintain it. We will focus on contemporary American
poetry but will also examine the traditions and voices to which it
responds. Course requirements include regular attendance, short (2 page)
papers, a midterm, a class facilitation, and a longer (6-8 page)
reflective paper. The readings will be drawn from an anthology, TBA.
What is Poetry? Here is a question to which this class will respond, "Isn't that the wrong question?" We will focus instead on what poetry DOES, and the means by
which it works. To that end, rather than relying on unnatural
anthologies of poems never meant to inhabit the same book, we will read select
volumes of contemporary poetry featuring poets such as Frank Bidart and
C.D Wright. Each contemporary writer will be examined in light of the
poetic traditions they reproduce, distort, or otherwise embody; in this
fashion we'll learn about poetry not just an artifact, but as set of
methods and that very thing capable of altering the quality and scope of
your life. This section requires several response papers, a few lengthier
meditations, participation in an online group diary, and the commitment to
class conversation that, I promise you, will range from the rollicking to
the profound. Not for the faint of heart!
Prerequisites & Distribution: No credit granted to those who have completed or are enrolled in RC Hums. 281. (4). (HU).
See Theatre and Drama 211.001.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Completion of Introductory Composition. (4). (HU).
English 267 will give students a chance to grow more adept
at reading six to eight of Shakespeare's plays closely, not just as
literature but also as scripts for stage performances. It will be a
collaborative venture combining lectures, video selections, in-class
writings, student group presentations, discussions, and readings.
Students should plan to read each play at least twice, noticing how
scenes fit together, how characters get developed how the webs of
imagery weave a theme, and how the language creates the timeless music
that keeps Shakespeare such a living part of our heritage.
Requirements (and approximate weights toward the grade):
One of the major themes in American literature is the "Americanization" of members of the various racial, religious, and ethnic groups within American society. This section of English 270 will follow the theme of Americanization beginning with Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the writers in the traditional American canon, and continuing with novels and short stories from other American voices and talents including women, Chicano, Asian-, African-, Native- and European-American writers, selections which more fully represent "American" or United States literature. The class will be a mix of lecture and discussion, and all students are expected to read and be prepared to discuss the works in class. Requirements also include weekly reading responses, a final, and two short 4-5 page papers.
Prerequisites & Distribution: CAAS 111. (3). (HU).
This course will introduce students to some of major writers of the African American literary tradition. Works will be drawn from the late 1700s to the present, and we'll be reading widely (e.g., poetry, novels, autobiography, essays, etc.). As we study this material, we'll be considering the following: What does/should a black literary canon look like? What has allowed or hindered its formation? What has its impact been on "American" literature? What kinds of assumptions are we, as modern readers, bringing to the material? What kinds of self-conscious, critical questions about aesthetics, literary history, and the politics of writing might we ask of these writers' works?
Course Homepage: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/courses/ind.htm
Our language has changed dramatically in the twelve hundred years of its recorded history. We would not recognize speech (Old English) of the first Germanic peoples who migrated to post-Roman Britain in the fifth century; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Middle English) might seem to be written in a foreign language; even Shakespeare's (early Modern) English requires special efforts. Our main task will be to understand something of sounds, words, and structure of English at each of these earlier periods, but especially we will work to understand why and how a language changes (or doesn't). Course work will consist of frequent short assignments, group tasks, in class workshops, a midterm, and a final. The major prerequisite is that you come prepared to have fun.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (HU). May be repeated for a total of eight credits.
For centuries, homosexually-inclined women and men have looked to
ancient Greece for a prestigious example of a society that not only
tolerated but even celebrated same-sex love and desire. Even today,
ancient Greece, as well as ancient Greek authors such as Sappho or Plato,
continue to represent important sources of lesbian and gay pride. But what
did such authors actually say, and what exactly did the Greek approval of
homosexuality come down to? Was ancient Greece really a world without
homophobia? What was the relation between the ancient Greek acceptance of
some kinds of homoerotic behaviors and other features of ancient Greek
society, such as slavery or the subjugation of women? What are the
political stakes in different interpretations of ancient Greek sexual life
and what, if anything, does an understanding of ancient Greek sexual
attitudes and practices have to offer queer politics or queer culture
In an effort to answer these and other questions, we will read in
modern English translation a wide selection of ancient Greek (and perhaps a
few Roman) texts that deal with same-sex love, desire, and sexual behavior. Some of these texts are classics; others are almost unknown. We will also
read some modern scholarship on the topic. We'll conclude by studying
recent English-language fiction by lesbian and gay male writers that
focuses on ancient Greece and that indicates the range of possible re-uses
of ancient Greek materials by modern lesbian and gay male culture.
Course Homepage: http://www.umich.edu/~esrabkin/313SFw02.htm
We will examine both the history and the diversity of science fiction prose by reading a representative international sampling of some of the best examples written since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Generally, we will approach each primary text in three ways: through a consideration of its backgrounds (scientific, mythic, and so forth), through specific questions the text raises (moral questions, questions of plausibility, and so forth), and through the traditional discipline of criticism (what is science fiction? what is the relationship of character to theme? and so forth). The written work for the course will revolve around weekly, short papers, and two longer papers. There are no exams. Authors studied include Mary Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Wells, Zamiatin, Capek, Stapledon, Bradbury, Clarke, Miller, Dick, LeGuin, Lem, and Gibson.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
In this course, we will investigate the relationship between women and novels. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and making our way into the early twentieth, we will explore the ways women's lives have been imagined by female and male novelists. At the same time, we will consider how developments in print technology and publication practices shaped both the genre of the novel and the role of women as authors, readers, and subjects of fiction.
Readings may include: Aphra Behn, Oronooko; Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; George Eliot, Mill on the Floss; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield; George Gissing, New Grub Street; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.
This course will examine the relationship between women and space in twentieth century writings by women as a way of addressing questions of geography and identity. As elite women experience greater mobility, how do they represent their voluntary migrations? How do interiors continue to locate female experience? How do dislocations, the result of immigration or travel, result in the relocations of female identities within written narratives? How are spatial metaphors used to describe the place of the woman writer in culture? Primary texts include Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Dinesen's Out of Africa, Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, Cather's The Professor House, Cisnero's The House on Mango Street, Yamada's Camp Notes, Brookner's Hotel du Lac, and Kincaid's A Small Place. Assignments involve several short essays and either a midterm/final or a paper and its revision.
Over the past three decades, feminist critics have turned to women poets to explore questions about female subjectivity, to construct alternative literary traditions, and to imagine the possibilities for a feminist poetics.
In this course, we will read women's poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alongside recent critical essays, in order to analyze and historicize different ideas about "the woman poet." We will consider how and why particular women poets (such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Eavan Boland, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Rita Dove) have become significant figures within feminist literary criticism.
Our goal throughout the academic term will be to develop critical skills and appreciation for the complexity of writing in (and on) poetry by women. Course requirements will include two 7-8 page papers, several informal writing assignments, participation in a student panel, and regular attendance. No final exam.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU). Laboratory fee ($35) required. May be repeated for credit with department permission.
Lab Fee: Laboratory fee ($35) required.
In this course, we will be reading books by writers who create characters whose race is different from their own such as Susan Straight, James Baldwin, and about five others. Students will have to write about seventy-five pages of journal writing that will be both personal and scholarly. That may sound like a lot of writing (it is!) but I want people to be as open and honest about their personal perceptions about race as they can be. Aside from the scholarly writing, personal stories, responses to current world events, familial attitudes, poems, memories, etc., are fair game. Finally, attendance and discussion are of the utmost importance, comprising some 30% of your grade.
The books we will be reading include:
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/317/002.nsf
See Women's Studies 483.010.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU). May be repeated for credit with department permission.
After the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, theatres reopen with renewed vitality. Women are now included on the public stage, and brilliant new plays explore themes of gender and society. Throughout the eighteenth century, London theatres continue to thrive, reflecting changing social attitudes and concerns. We will examine these attitudes, the role of women, the rise of the star system, the significance of the actor-manager, and power of the box office. We will also look at changes in stagecraft, especially those that reflect international influences imported from France and Italy. Representative dramatists will include Dryden, Wycherley, Etherege, Behn, Cibber, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Farquhar, Gay, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. Requirements include a research project, a midterm, and a final exam.
This course teaches students how to use their creative skills and social commitments to facilitate the powerful expressiveness of high school youth and of incarcerated youth and adults. In-class exercises, improvisations, and discussion of theater and pedagogical texts prepare us to assist workshop participants in imagining and shaping their own plays. Students will work an average of two to three hours a week in one of a number of state correctional facilities located in Adrian, Jackson, Ypsilanti, and Plymouth, at Henry Ford or Cooley High School in Detroit, or at one of three juvenile facilities. An additional two hours is spent in class meetings, and a further hour is devoted to meetings between each site team and the instructor. No exams. Admission to the class is by permission of instructor. Check 3275 Angell Hall for specially posted hours for interviews for this course.
Prerequisites & Distribution: English 223 and junior standing. (3). (CE). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
This is a poetry section; we will spend the academic term, in the workshop and in tutorials, discussing the craft and techniques of verse. There will be assigned exercises, but for the most part each student will work independently to develop the voice and style(s) most congenial to his or her talent. Students will keep a journal devoted mainly to their reading of poems and essays about poetry. At least one anthology will provide opportunities for conversations about contemporary poetics. Active participation in class discussion is an essential requirement of this course. Must submit a 10-15 page portfolio by noon on January 7 to 3187 AH.
Students are expected to maintain journals throughout the term, to comment thoughtfully and intelligently on one another's work and on short stories selected from the text, and to come up with forty pages of reasonably polished fiction. Attendance at the 4-5 readings sponsored by the English Department is also required.
In order to enroll in this course, students need to: (1) Get on the Waitlist. (2) Submit a 10-15 page portfolio of poetry or prose to the Main Office, room 3187 Angell Hall to the Undergraduate Student Services Assistant by noon on January 7. (3) When you bring in your portfolio, please complete the 323 registration form. You will be notified by the Department of acceptance into the course, shortly after.
The heart of this fiction workshop is the development of your original
literary fiction. We'll focus primarily on short stories, considering
possible sources of story writing, ways into fiction-making, and the
potential of various story forms; investigating work by contemporary
writers; and building fully realized original stories. As we discuss
student work and the stories of published writers, we'll explore voice,
characterization, point of view, structure, lyricism, uses of time, and
other elements ñ the art and architecture of story-making. Workshop
participants will write several short, focused pieces, in addition to longer
stories responses to fiction by other students and to formal public
readings. Interested students should have previous experience with fiction
In order to enroll in this course, students must: (1)Get on the waitlist, (2) Submit a 10-15 page portfolio of poetry or prose to the Main Office, 3187 Angell Hall to the Undergraduate Student Services Assistant by noon on January 7, 2002, and (3) Complete the 323 registration form when you bring in your portfolio. You will be notified by the Department of acceptance into the course after January 7.
There is no solid answer to the question "What makes poetry poetry?" However, there are elements in every good poem which can be defined and practiced, such as metaphors, form, rhythm and meter, music, and imagination. This workshop course will be full of practice in recognizing these elements and learning how to use them yourself.
You will also learn how to develop your poetic imagination and fantasy, use all of your senses, and be thrifty with the unloading of emotions in poems. Strange as this may sound, the underlying emotion has to be controlled and sublimated. A famous Dutch poet once said: "If you make a poem crying, there will only be snot on the paper."
In every class we will discuss a certain element of poetry, such as those mentioned above. Poems will be handed out, read, and analyzed on the use of these elements. Then we will try certain things out together in the classroom and the results will be discussed. I also will talk about making poems as a process, by raising questions like: Why did you choose this subject? What happened while making this poem?
You also will have the chance to read your poems to the class and then everyone will be invited to give his/her opinion in a positive, constructive way. Alternately, we may form smaller groups in which to discuss each other's work with kindness and discernment. In the last class we will talk about the possibilities for publishing your poems, sending them in to poetry competitions and/or literary magazines. I will talk about the ins and outs of the life of a (Dutch) poet, answer questions, and give some advice on how to read poetry before an audience.
There will be assignments for every class. There also will be a website for this workshop where you can read about your homework and about the special poetic forms we will be practicing. There will be URLs for reading more about technique and the poets handled in the coming lesson(s). Also, you will be able to post your poems on this website for everyone to read.
You must bring one copy of your assignment(s) to class for every student and myself. You are invited to read your poem to us and every student will have a chance to give an opinion. At the end of the session I will add remarks which may have been overlooked.
Ideally every student will have a turn each class, but if there are too many students, I will select some poems to be discussed during the session in such a way that everyone will eventually get a turn.
Of course you are welcome to write and revise as many poems as you want as often as you want. You may ask me to read and comment on them always. You may post these on the website, email, or hand them in to me personally.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl).
Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term in the half-term).
"Works of fiction exist in a space between the Double and the Other. To enter into
a work of fiction is in a sense to transform the Other into a Double,"
writes Professor Paul Coates. In this writing seminar, we will want to
concentrate our attention on how and why authors involve us in the most
unlikely identifications. What does Gunter Grass, in The Tin Drum, have
in mind with a character who refuses to grow up, for example? Or, how
does John Irving, in A Prayer for Owen Meany, create a hero for us out of a
little guy who looks translucent (his blue veins show through his skin),
has a strange sounding voice, and is extremely manipulative? Nearly
all term we will be reading works that help us to make meaning and
connections out of the implications of the three unlikely joined subjects
in the title of this class. And we will consistenly be aware of that
"space," between the text and ourselves, between the characters and our
own identities. We want to consider the ways in which we, in the process of
reading and writing, actually create the text and recreate our "selves."
"Technical" writing is not necessarily "scientific" writing; rather, it refers to the dissemination of knowledge that is the territory of experts or specialists. As you pursue a major, you are developing an area of expertise, becoming a specialist; thus, your work in this class will reflect your own educational and professional interests. The emphasis in technical writing is on recognizing your audience, developing a persuasive and readable voice, and writing with specificity. Discussions and assignments will include letters of application and resumes, grant proposals, informative essays, and a longer research project. We will be reading, discussing, writing (and rewriting), critiquing, and workshopping. You will find this writing-intensive course most valuable if you have a specific project on which you are ready to focus.
This upper-level English course asks that students do weekly volunteer work at a local non-profit organization (list provided). While all students will be asked to do some writing for their community partners ñ for instance, contribute to a grant proposal, newsletter, website, or brochure ñ our course's primary focus will be on the student's interactions with and responses to his/her work site. In our class meetings, we will discuss issues raised by our community work and by several related, assigned readings ñ such as our motives and presuppositions; our respective roles as outsider and insider; the new listening, interactive, and organizational skills that may be required; and our community partners' often differing agenda and goals. We will also use class time to workshop and group-edit all of the required community-related assignments. In addition to keeping a weekly reflective journal, students will do some modest research that culminates in an oral report and larger paper that combines personal and analytical styles of discourse. Course grade will be based on the student's writings, class participation (including the oral reports), and a reasonable but consistent time commitment at the community site.
Much like the English 225 courses I have taught over the last dozen years, this course will focus on (1) improving your vocabulary, (2) strengthening your grammatical, mechanical, semantical, and syntactical skills, and (3) helping you find your voice. I insist that you make the private public (ideally, to illustrate a universal truth or a general principle) in order that you establish your authority to comment on the topic of your essay, that you pen an essay which is not generic, and, most importantly, that you write with a human voice (not dead, wooden prose written by an obscurantist concentrating in philosophy [mea culpa to any philosophy concentrator reading this course description]). Although this course is not difficult, it is perhaps the most labor-intensive course you will take. Quid pro quo ñ be prepared to work hard for me, and, in the process, you'll learn much about writing. The reading material for this course is your peers' writing. This will be a fun, interesting, profitable, and practical course. Text: The American Heritage Dictionary.
In this class we will explore a variety of approaches to writing about society. Writing about the social world is notoriously difficult, as notions we tend to take for granted, such as our understandings of causality or human agency, are hard to support in rigorous argument, and they often seem to resist portrayal in vivid prose. Yet, society is something most of us are interested in talking and writing about. It is a topic that is as important as it is elusive, and to write about it well we will need to hone our analytical and authorial skills. Our readings will include classic academic articles from anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as works of fiction and non-fiction journalism. Students will be required to write three major papers, and to practice basic skills, such as interviewing, argumentation, and exposition. Students will also be expected to work closely with the instructor in the revision of papers. The class will be of particular interest to aspiring fiction writers, and those planning to work in the social sciences, journalism, or law.
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/325/007.nsf
Central to the myth of the American Dream is the construct of the immigrant, those "tired" and "poor," welcomed to our shores, expecting to find "streets paved with gold," and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" limited only by their own energy and desire. Not surprisingly, some of America's most compelling literature is about and by immigrants who write of the promise and disappointment of that dream and of the inevitable conflicts between old world ethics and new. This composition class will make their writings and the essays you compose in response to their ideas its focus. We will read texts by Alvaraz, Rodriguez, Doctorow, Morrison, Alexie, Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and other professional writers ñ and by the writers in this class. Requirements include three 6-8 page essays, responses to each others' essays, active participation in class discussion, and regular attendance.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Engl. 227. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
See Theatre and Drama 327.001.
Prerequisites & Distribution: F/V 230 or 236. (3). (HU). Laboratory fee ($35) required. May be elected for a total of nine credits.
See Film and Video Studies 330.001.
See Film and Video Studies 331.001.
See Theatre and Drama 323.001.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (Excl).
Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~tobin/html/E351.html
Who invented you? What does it mean to be you, or any one person, apart from others of your kind? The works we will be studying are the building blocks of our concepts of identity. They provide a diverse picture of who we are and what we do: the self as castaway or genius, as solitary thinker or alienated victim, as moral superior or criminal. We will read works both of great artistic innovation and of the popular imagination, our one requirement being that they have had a lasting impact on the way we imagine ourselves. Works include Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, The Lyrical Ballads, Mansfield Park, Walden, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, The Wasteland, A Room Of One's Own, The Invisible Man, In Cold Blood. Two lectures and one discussion weekly. Requirements are three papers, midterm, and final.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (HU).
Shakespearean drama is concerned ñ one could say obsessed ñ with identity and its transformation. Sometimes the metamorphosis is a happy one, as when female characters crossdress as men, escape their harsh fathers, and find lovers of their choice. Sometimes the change is tragic, as when King Lear self-destructs before our eyes. Characters constantly ask, "Who am I?" and assert "I am not what I am." We will focus on how identity is created out of, and often threatened by, such social rubrics as gender, rank, nationality, race/ethnicity, and sexuality in the four dramatic genres in which Shakespeare wrote. Placing Shakespeare's plays within their original time and place ñ the competitive theatrical marketplace of turn of the century London ñ we will focus on reading for character, theme, and dramatic structure. Assignments will include an in-class midterm and final exam; several 2-page response papers to prepare you to participate in lecture and discussion; and a staging design to be shared with your discussion section. Lively engagement in both discussion section and lecture are presumed.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of eight credits with department permission.
This course will be an intensive study of some representative masterworks
of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in England. While dealing with these
texts analytically, we will also explore them in their historical, social,
political, and cultural contexts. Readings will include a substantial
selection from Chaucer's Cantebury Tales (in Middle English; learn to
read it and dazzle your friends), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, some
medieval plays, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a selection of Renaissance lyric
poetry (e.g., Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell), and a
Jacobean play by Jonson or Webster. We may throw in a play by
Shakespeare, depending on the class' familiarity with his canon. The
course, which meets four hours per week, will be part informal lecture
(particularly when we deal with the context and background of these works)
and part discussion (mostly when we focus on the texts themselves). Each
student will write three essays of approximately five pages each, a
one-hour in-class essay at mid-term and a final examination.
After a brief survey of English prose from the 14th to the 18th Century, we shall study the following forms from the same period: alliterative verse, rhymed couplets, various stanza forms, sonnets, and blank verse (narratives and plays). The emphasis will be on shifts of style through time, on trying to define and explain these shifts in terms of cultural forces and authorial talents. Poets will include Langland, Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Swift, and Pope. Everyone will need to learn to read Middle English, to scan verse, and to gain familiarity with various terms for characterizing poetic style. Everyone will be asked to engage in detailed textual analysis as well as to write on broader issues. Required texts: The Norton Anthology of Literature, Vol. I, and a course pack.
Some of the most fascinating and challenging works in earlier English literature worry about the problems that arise when people seek to find and understand themselves, both as inwardly defined individuals and as socially defined members of various groups: a marriage, a noble court, or a nation, for instance. Do self-discovery and social identity confirm and support one another? Do they undermine or even endanger one another? How does literature contribute to the quest for a self, whether in or out of society? We will read a variety of literary versions of the relation of self and society, including works by Marie de France, Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Requirements include class participation, several moderate papers and presentations, and a final examination. This course satisfies the Pre-1600 requirement for English concentrators.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (Excl). May be repeated for credit with department permission.
The eighteenth-century literary landscape is commonly divided into "high" and "low," with the great verse satires, tragedies, and didactic novels elevated high above the level of popular culture. In this course, we will complicate this simplistic opposition and explore the complex interrelationships between elite and popular culture in a range of "high" and "low" texts. At the "low" end, we will consider jestbooks (collections of jokes), fables and folktales, ballads and drinking songs, cartoons, farces, and even puppet shows. Alongside these, we will read a set of mainstream eighteenth-century novels: Richardson's Pamela, Fielding's Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy, Sterne's delightful parody of realistic fiction. Accepted "literary" novels, we will find, draw much of their imaginative force from popular culture. Finally, as instances of a persistent deflationary strain in eighteenth-century literature, we will read a pair of travestic texts by Henry Fielding: The Tragedy of Tragedies, his hilarious burlesque of "heroic" tragedy, and Shamela, his parody of Richardsonian sentimentality.
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/371/002.nsf
This course will survey the literature of two of the most turbulent and formative centuries in the history of the English-speaking world with a particularly keen eye on political and social change. We will begin by briefly considering key literary, political, philosophical, and religious ideas during the reign of King Charles I and the Interregnum and how they reveal the imminent tension and upheaval in English society. We will study parts of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost within the context of the English civil turmoil and read John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. Next, we will explore several works about colonialism in the New World, including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and the fourth part of Jonathan's Swift's Gulliver's Travels. After observing the changing culture of literacy in the eighteenth century, we will read John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (a satiric, riotous play), Samuel Richardson's Pamela (often considered the first fully realized novel), and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (a classic novel of sentiment). There will be a consideration of the link between Sentimental literature and the ideas of the American and French Revolutions as well as Mary Wollstonecraft's The Rights of Woman. Finally, we will read certain poems by William Blake, William Wordsworth, and other Romantic poets. Course work will consist of two exams, three formal papers (totaling about twenty pages), and constant, dutiful reading.
This course will explore Modernism ñ the style/movement that dominated the "high" art of the first decades of this century. While we will read a few poems (Eliot, Yeats) and glance briefly at some of the art and music, the focus of the course will fall primarily on fiction. Works to be read include Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Mann's Death in Venice, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Course grades will depend on two essay exams, frequent short, informal writing assignments, and two five page analytical papers. Regular attendance is essential.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of six credits with department permission.
As its literature attests, Hawai'i is simultaneously the uniquely
multicultural fiftieth state of the Union, a colonial outpost, and the disputed sovereign nation of native Hawaiians. As might be expected, the literature of Hawai'i is a highly contested terrain ranging from works by native Hawaiian writers, "local" writers, and works by "foreigners." This course allows students to read and study the literary and oral traditions of Hawai'i, including works by writers of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean descent, through competing paradigms which attempt to place Hawai'i's literatures and cultures within the historical, social, and political contexts of western imperial expansion, globalization, Asian American literature, and the native Hawaiian movement toward cultural autonomy and self-determination. This course will examine the ways in which the literatures of Hawai'i have been and can be read through these frameworks as well as how they also problematize and contest these categories. We will read Melville, London, and Maugham and look at how Hawaiian and "local" writers such as Balaz, Holt, Trask, Murayama, Pak, Yamanaka, and Cobb Keller respond to European and American representations of Hawai'i and its people. Requirements include midterm and final exams, one 3-5-page paper, and one 7-8-page paper.
This new course will use a comparative approach to constructing a tradition of Jewish literature in our country during the last century. We will study the literature both in itself and as a paradigm for contemporary debates about cultural hybridity, assimilation, and ethnicity. Our reading will mix familiar and unfamiliar names (and why so many Jewish writers remain outside the canon will be one question we shall ask). We begin with neglected authors of late 19th century such as Emma Lazarus, use Israel Zangwill (author of the play The Melting Pot, which made that phrase popular) as our transition point, and turn to successive generations of Jewish-American authors, such as Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Allen Ginsberg, and Wendy Wasserstein. Contemporary readings on Anti-Semitism, economic and educational history, and cultural theory will help us explore the problematic nature of group identity within a complex society. Written work will include weekly response paragraphs, a midterm, a term paper (8 pages), and a final examination.
The Bible is a book, a text: it is also a collection of texts of the most astonishing variety and range. Our first task will be to try to understand these works in terms both of form and content and then of the circumstances which occasioned and shaped them. We will also study how the Bible came to have its present form(s), and consider its transmission as text and as cultural influence. Students will be encouraged to study especially the literary influences of the Bible in authors of interest to them. The particular readings will be influenced by class needs: we shall surely include Genesis, Exodus, Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isiah, Hosea, Mark, The Acts of the Apostles, Romans, and the Apocalypse.
Writing Requirements: three essays of moderate length, a midterm and a final. Class attendance and participation essential.
This term we will examine (often with the aid of parallel translations) works in early Middle English, as well as the better known and more frequently studied major authors ñ Chaucer, Gower, Piers, the Pearl poet. Readings will include selections from prose and poetic histories, mystical writers; contemporary social and political documents (laws, recipes, medical texts, chronicles, charters). We will examine a wide range of early Middle English texts as we develop an appreciation for the roles written English played in medieval England and the cultural and political consequences of the ability to read and write. [Although this course follows up on material covered in English 407 (reading Old English), 407 is not a prerequisite.]
Prerequisites & Distribution: Permission of Instructor. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
Course Homepage: http://www.umich.edu/~mmx/w02/414w02syl.htm
This course offers students the opportunity to work in groups creating and/or augmenting web-based resources for the study of a humanities topic of their choice. Students may register in groups with the mentorship of any collaborating faculty member or register singly and form partnering and, if needed, mentoring relationships. All students will study in the field of their chosen group, learn modern information technology, and use that technology to produce materials that become part of on-going resources for use by themselves and others. Reading, writing, and production requirements will be adjusted to the backgrounds of each student and the needs of each group. A typical minimum requirement is the equivalent of reading five books in the field of choice (e.g., 18th century satire or The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), mastering at least three substantial programs (e.g., Flash or Photoshop), and producing the multimedia equivalent of 30 pages of revised, researched prose.
Note:Students must add themselves to the waitlist, and then contact the professor for permission into this course.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Senior concentrator in English. May not be repeated for credit. (4). (Excl).
Close analysis of five classic novels of 20th Century English and American literature: A Farewell to Arms, The Good Soldier, To the Lighthouse, As I Lay Dying, and Ulysses. Attention will be paid to the authorial techniques of presentation, and written work will consist of exercises in imitation of Hemingway, Ford, Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce. Instead of asking what does Joyce mean, we'll talk of what means he deploys; instead of discussing Woolf as incipient suicide, we'll talk of Mrs. Ramsay's death in a parenthesis. The article of faith throughout is that imitation is not merely the sincerest form of flattery, but also a good way to read.
The terrible events of September 11 and thereafter provide a pertinent and tragic context for this course. For the makers of the culture of the Enlightenment ñ the scientists, philosophers and imaginative writers whose remarkable work was done in the two centuries spanning the years 1600 to 1800 ñ either lived in or knew of a Europe that had been devastated by political conflict fueled by fierce religious passions. Taken together, the tendency of their work was to seek for a better way. Directly or by powerful implication their work amounted to a piercing criticism of the claims of religious authority and had in sight the reconstruction of human life on entirely secular grounds ñ on the basis, that is, of what could be known from our experience of this world, and not from what was revealed in the supernatural heavens. About the supernatural heavens and their inhabitants the skeptical thinkers of the Enlightenment didn't believe anything much could be known, but they did know that claims to such knowledge, especially when allied to political ends, could create havoc on earth. Among the results of their effort are some of the elements of modern life that we most value: religious toleration, freedom of speech, political democracy, immense advances in the scientific understanding of our natural environment, technological mastery of that environment, and greater material well-being and personal freedom than mankind had ever known before. Scientists, historians, psychologists, political theorists, philosophers all created the Enlightenment ñ Galileo, Gibbon, Locke, Hume ñ and we will read significant segments of their works. But, as is appropriate to an English course, our primary focus will be on how the literary imagination flourished in this revolutionary environment: Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson will be central to the course, with important corollary reading in the French writers, Voltaire and Diderot, and the American, Benjamin Franklin. Moreover, we will find room in this course for some work with John Milton ñ a writer who responded with ardent enthusiasm to the political and intellectual ferment of his time and who is of interest to us in this course precisely because his enthusiasm for the revolutionary environment of the Enlightenment seemed to him entirely compatible with religious convictions and commitments that other Enlightenment thinkers were more reserved about or hostile to. In working with Milton, we will focus mainly on Areopagitica, Milton's grand but troubled argument for freedom of the press, and I will expect students to know his Paradise Lost, either through previous course work or their willingness now to get to know it independently. All along we will be interested in those critiques of enlightenment culture ñ assessments of the costs associated with all its benefits ñ articulated by its own most interesting creators and by those who were to come later ñ including such major imaginative writers as Dostoyevsky, and such twentieth-century thinkers as Michel Foucault and Thedore Adorno.
In the course of the term, students will write two or three short papers of about 3 pages each, and will prepare a term paper of about 20 pages which will require some study of recent scholarship. Each student will also make at least two presentations to the class. The course will be conducted primarily through class discussion, but from time to time I will give an informal lecture.
Late medieval England witnessed tremendous political, economic, and
religious upheaval, including the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the
heretical Lollard movement, and the troubled kingship of Richard II and
his deposition by Henry IV. This class explores the literature that
responded to ñ and sometimes participated in ñ these and other crises,
looking both at works that protest contemporary social conditions and
those that advocate patient endurance of them. At this early moment in
the English tradition, how does imaginative literature intervene in the
world of political event and social ideology? What is the relationship
between polemical works and self-consciously literary ones? We will read
texts that address changing and contested understandings of political
authority, religious practice, gender ideology, and class mobility;
these will include Lollard texts, several of Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, the Book of Margery Kempe, works from the Piers
Plowman tradition, and some urban drama.
Course requirements: active participation in class discussion; reading
journal; one 20-minute oral presentation; 15 pp. seminar paper.
Course Homepage: http://coursetools.ummu.umich.edu/2002/winter/english/417/005.nsf
What does it mean that the protagonist of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, upon first viewing the grounds of a country manor remarks that to be mistress of that estate "might be something!" When Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine says, "Give me a map; then let me see how much is left for me to conquer all the world," what relationship is suggested between maps and such conquering heroes? This class will examine how the literature, cartography and other printed geographic texts of 17th and 18th century England created ideas of place and space. We will further consider the how these texts are linked to new conceptions of land; money and wealth; and national, local, and individual identity. We will read three novels by Daniel Defoe including Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, as well as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Additional readings, in a fairly full course pack, will include several recent essays on critical cartography, a few travel accounts from the period, and a number of poems. Course work includes two exams, weekly contributions to an online discussion, a brief class presentation, and a single, sustained, and substantial sixteen-page term paper.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Open to seniors and graduate students; written permission of the instructor is required. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for credit.
A workshop course in the nature and technique of prose fiction. Classroom discussion will focus on student work ñ with an average expectation of 10,000 words to be submitted during the term. Revision, written critiques of the work of other seminar participants; attendance at the Visiting Writer Series of readings will also be expected. Permission of Instructor required. Students who wish to enroll in the course should get on the Waitlist by going to the English Main Office in 3187 Angell Hall, then bring a manuscript for review to the first class session. A list of admittees will be posted soon thereafter.
This is a studio course designed to help advanced undergraduate writers further develop their art, build on their knowledge of craft, and refine their own aesthetics and understanding of literary fiction's possibilities. How do you as a writer and as a reader define "story"? What shapes of fiction do you draw on, invent, or reinvent to convey your particular vision, and what new territory might benefit your work? We'll focus primarily on short forms of literary fiction, exploring their potential and their limits, the uses of traditional and inventive structures, ways of presenting character, choices in narration and point of view, the music of the language, etc. We will read published fiction by several contemporary writers, and throughout the term workshop writers will produce and present new fiction, write brief experimental exercises, and read and respond to fiction by other workshop members.
Permission of Instructor required. Students who wish to enroll in the course should get on the Waitlist by going to the English Main Office in 3187 Angell Hall, then bring a manuscript for review to the first class session. A list of admittees will be posted soon thereafter.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Open only to seniors and graduate students. (3). (Excl).
Upper level students who are interested in the writing of non-fiction, creative, prose should join us. We will want to uncover, in our discussions, how we go through a continuing process of creating and recreating ourselves. Primarily, we will obtain a focus in our discussions by immersing ourselves in "other" people's points of
view. The literature we read will present a diverse group of writers who
write about being Native American, Asian American, African American, Jewish
American, or homosexual. Although the final syllabus has not been made,
selections will most likely include the following writers: T. Morrison, M.
Hong-Kingston, M. Cunningham, L. Erdrich, and M. Chabon.
Requirements include: a continuing writing process with a final result of
approximately twenty pages of polished prose and a weekly short response to
a fellow student's writing. The subject of your writing will be determined
by you, but the form of the paper will be a critical analysis that reaches
for the intellect of your reader as well as the emotional center.
This course is a continuation of English 325 and will focus on (1) improving your vocabulary, (2) strengthening your grammatical, mechanical, semantical, and syntactical skills, and (3) helping you find your voice. I insist that you make the private public (ideally, to illustrate a universal truth or a general principle) in order that you establish your authority to comment on the topic of your essay, that you pen an essay which is not generic, and, most importantly, that you write with a human voice (not dead, wooden prose written by an obscurantist concentrating in philosophy [mea culpa to any philosophy concentrator reading this course description]). Although this course is not difficult, it is perhaps the most labor-intensive course you will take. Quid pro quo ñ be prepared to work hard for me, and, in the process, you'll learn much about writing. The reading material for this course is your peers' writing. This will be a fun, interesting, profitable, and practical course. Text: The American Heritage Dictionary.
Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~alisse/ENGL425w02/index.html
The signers of the United States Constitution declared our freedom of expression the most important right of United States citizens. Susan B. Anthony and dozens of other women used the only power they had, the power of language, to ensure women their right to vote in the United States. And the persuasive eloquence of Martin Luther King, Jr., changed this nation's consciousness. These were ordinary people doing extraordinary things with language. What about you? Do you aspire to extraordinary things, or do you simply hope to land a great job or appeal a parking ticket? Either way, you'll need to use persuasive writing. This academic term, we will increase our awareness of, respect for, and facility with persuasive writing. But our enthusiasm for and understanding of argumentative writing can grow only if we care about what we're doing (and even have some fun), so usually you will choose your own topics as we play with, analyze, and practice argumentative writing. To guide us in these challenging but rewarding enterprises, we'll use a textbook, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. We'll write almost daily, in the form of short exercises, rhetorical analyses, and longer essays; plan on lots of informal writing and three formal essays of 3-6 pages each.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior standing and permission of instructor. (1-4). (Excl). (INDEPENDENT). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
Credits: (1-4).
Prerequisites & Distribution: English 223, 323, and 423/429. (3). (Excl).
This course is a thesis tutorial for undergraduate students who are in their last year of the Creative Writing Subconcentration and have taken the 200-, 300- and 400-level writing workshops. Working closely with the writing faculty, students will complete a major manuscript. The course will culminate in a reading series in which students present their best work to the public. The first class meeting will be held on Thursday, January 10 in G239 Angell Hall; thereafter, biweekly tutorials will be scheduled according to the convenience of the instructor and students.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Written permission of instructor is required. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for credit.
This course offers a chance for undergraduates, as well as graduate
students both in the PhD and MFA programs to learn virtually all there is
to know in one term about rhyme, meter, stanza forms, etc., in an
atmosphere catering both to the practicing poet and the non-specialist.
This is a "singing school." We will approach the subject the way poets,
professional and amateur, have always approached prosody ñ by "studying /
Monuments of its own magnificence," as Yeats put it, and then trying to
set up our own lean-tos.
The course has two aspects: one, historical and explanatory; the other,
practical. The professor will offer a historical survey of versification
in English, beginning with the Old English alliterative line, glancing in
a very amateur manner at the Classical meters, moving all the way to free
verse and beyond, to the return to rhyme and meter among poets of the 80s,
90s & 00s. On the practical side, each student will be asked, each week,
to write in the verse form that is being studied.
Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form and The Shorter Norton
Anthology of Poetry will be primary textbooks. There is also a coursepack
incorporating selections from John Frederick Nims, Robert Graves, Robert
Bridges, George Saintsbury, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics, John Thompson's Founding of English Meter, Vladimir Nabokov's
Notes on Prosody, Charles O. Hartmann's unsatisfactory book on free verse,
Harvey Gross' Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, and obscure snippets from
here and there.
Class limited to fifteen on the undergraduate level and five on the
graduate level. Expect to work hard, learn a lot, and have a lot of fun.
Course Homepage: http://www.umich.edu/~ece
The success of the novel as a popular literary genre tends to obscure the
fact that it is a fairly recent innovation. In this course we will survey
the first century of the novel's development in Britain, reading
path-breaking works by such writers as Haywood, Defoe, Richardson,
Goldsmith, Radcliffe, and Austen. What distinguishes the novel, we will
ask, from other literary forms, and why did this genre take hold when it
did? What were the chief concerns, whether social, moral, or aesthetic,
of novelists writing in the eighteenth century, and how did these evolve
over the course of the period? Finally, how do the best-sellers of
eighteenth-century fiction reflect and contribute to conditions of daily
life and thought at the time? Course work is selected from a menu of
innovative assignments including a dramatic performance, an oral
presentation, close reading exercises, a final exam, and a collaborative,
web-based research project to be included as part of the
Eighteenth-Century England web site www.umich.edu/~ece.
This course will examine developments in English fiction from the turn of
the century to the mid-1940s. We will explore the ways in which the
twentieth-century novel, rather than being driven primarily by plot, attempts
to trace, in Joyce's words, "the curve of an emotion" or to incorporate, as
Lawrence desires, philosophy and fiction in the novel. Virginia Woolf tells
us that "human nature changed" in the first decade of the 1900s. Certainly
the way novelists constructed human nature altered dramatically. We will
discuss issues that repeatedly manifest themselves in these novels: how do
men and women in the twentieth century respond to or initiate the radical
redefinitions of sex roles that characterize the modern period? How do the
wars of the first half of the previous century shape and deform the novels
written at that time? How does this body of fiction address (and fail to
address) the volatile issues associated with race and class in the first
half of the twentieth century? We will also pay close attention to the
variety of ways each author positions her/himself in relation to a past:
how does the modern stand in relation to history? Readings will include a
substantial course pack and the following texts: Gertrude Stein, Three Lives;
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; D.H. Lawrence, Women
in Love; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; and Ralph Ellison, The Invisible
Course requirements are three essays (two five-page papers and a final, more
substantial essay that's seven to nine pages long). There will be a final
This term, we will read a dozen American novels written within the past fifty years. Possible list of authors: (Gayl) Jones, (J.K.) Toole, DeLillo, Roth, Baker, (Marilynne) Robinson, Ford, O'Brien, Cunningham, Munro, Erdrich, (Rosellen) Brown, Tyler, and Ha-Jin. In addition to discussing the intellectual and emotional content of each book, we will take apart each novel and see how the writer has put it together. To this end, we will focus on questions of structure, voice, point of view, setting, control of information, tense, authorial intrusion, modes of discourse, authorial distance, gestures toward realism and flights into fantasy. We will pay special attention to ways in which these novels are problematic and develop possible criteria for reviewing contemporary fiction. Though this is slotted to be a large class, students will be encouraged to take active part in discussions. Each student will turn in two short papers and one longer essay.
This course will provide you with an overview of the major aesthetic directions in American poetry since 1945 and introduce you to the various critical traditions devised to explain them. To this end, Contemporary American Poetry (7th Edition) will serve as the basis for studying the key poets of this period. We will also look at the full careers of three poets: Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Robert Hass (who will deliver the Hopwood Lecture in February). Also, we will look at two recent volumes by "newer poets," two books of criticism, and a coursepack of supplementary readings. Students will be required to give one presentation and write two research papers.
See Theatre and Drama 322.001.
See Theatre and Drama 322.002.
Medieval drama encompasses a wide range of texts, from extremely bawdy secular literature to serious devotional plays. Some texts explore the comedy of human sexual desire, others the grotesque possibilities of the sexualized body. As we read these plays, we will come better to appreciate how literature invents sexuality. Still other texts seek to teach Christian biblical history to the laity, beginning with Creation and ending with the Last Judgment. Although the Christian Bible obviously inspires such literature, the actors speak distinctly unbiblical words, at times uttering blasphemous scatological curses, at other times mocking ecclesiastical rituals. These plays will allow us to explore the connections between serious religious aspiration and carnivalesque laughter. Throughout this course, we will discover that European culture changes significantly between the twelfth century and the fifteenth, leading to fascinating changes in definitions of both sexuality and piety. Course requirements: active participation in discussions, reading response papers, peer critiques, and two short essays.
In this course, we will explore the diversity of writing ñ poetry, fiction, autobiography, experimental prose ñ of the Romantic period (1780-1830), with particular emphasis on the later part of the period. We will read Dorothy and William Wordsworth, both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Keats, Byron, Austen, Thomas De Quincey, and others. Topics will include: formulations of freedom, scandal and irony, gender and romanticism. Students will write one paper, one annotated bibliography which will allow them to do advanced research on a topic of their choosing, and one take-home final exam.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is an anthology of stories varying in style and genre, told by similarly diverse fictional narrators. Including both the stateliness of the Knight's Tale and the ribaldry of the Miller's Tale, it creates a new audience in English for a literature simultaneously playful and serious. We will read most of the Tales, paying attention to the work's qualities as an innovative story collection. Central questions will include: How does the Canterbury Tales address its audience? What is the purpose of its interpretative openness? What relations develop between literary style and social position? We will focus especially on narrative voices and the effects they create in their readers; audio tapes will help us hear these voices in Middle English. One or two short papers, one longer paper, and a final examination.
This course will cover texts in American literature from the colonial period of the early seventeenth-century writings of John Smith to the 1830s. We will examine how "American" writers wrestle with certain concepts, for instance, the New World, being American, freedom, democracy, slavery, and the Indian, that all merge to construct a unique American personage. We will be reading works by John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Crevecoeur, William Bradford, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and James Fenimore Cooper.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be repeated for credit with department permission.
Credits: (3; 2 in IIIb).
This course will explore the interrelationships of class and money in some American fiction. These will range from the rags-to-riches success formula of Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick of the 1880s to Tom Wolfe's satire of the glitzy get-rich 1980s, Bonfire of the Vanities. In between we will read Henry James' The American, Jack London's Martin Eden, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus. Grades in the course will be based on two exams and frequent short writing assignments.
This course introduces students to the literature of the early Americas. There will be units on Conquest and Contact, Captivity Narratives, and Capitalism and the Invention of Race. We will read literature produced by Europeans about their real or imagined encounters with the peoples of the Americas, as well as reports on Native peoples' responses to the Europeans. We will read the testimonies of Africans and African Americans about the Middle Passage and enslavement, as well as European-authored antislavery narratives and stories of cross-racial romance. We will also consider both literary and historical scholarship on the early histories of conquest and slavery, as well as analyze more recent cultural products ñ including fiction and film ñ reimagining this era. Assigned texts include: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Jill Lepore, The Name of War; Caryl Phillips, Cambridge; and Giles Gunn, Early American Writing. Grades in the course will be based on active class participation, two exams, and short writing assignments.
Prerequisites & Distribution: English 274 and CAAS 201 and/or 320 strongly recommended. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
This course will examine how certain fictional narratives by twentieth-century African American writers represent race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will be reading works by Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Pauline Hopkins, Andrea Lee, Ntozake Shange, and Paule Marshall, to name a few writers.
See Russian 479.001.
Charles Dickens was the Shakespeare of Victorian Britain, a prolific creator of memorable characters and incidents, at once comic and tragic. He also reflects that notorious Victorian value ñ earnestness. And Oscar Wilde is, well, the Wilde of Victorian Britain. In his writings and in his own life, he was so dazzling that even those who wished to hate him had to give up and laugh with him. But his life also took a classically tragic form after his public humiliation and imprisonment for homosexual offences. This double-author course showcases these two different literary stylists; it explores the historical differences between the early- and mid-Victorian moment of Dickens and the Late-Victorian, fin-de-siècle moment of Wilde; and it considers the critical uses to which these two authors are put today. I anticipate that we will discover the genuine complexity of Dickens' human vision and the surprising earnestness of Wilde's. Two papers; two examinations.
In an interview from the early 1980s, Toni Morrison states that "narrative remains the best way to learn anything. . .so I continue with narrative form." The aim of
this course is to explore, in detail, Morrison's uses of narrative form and figurative language. We will read virtually all of Morrison's novels, examining the
development of themes and formal strategies. We will also read Morrison's literary and cultural criticism, paying particular attention to the ways in which issues in
the novels are addressed in these non-fiction works. Among the questions we will attempt to answer by reading the novels and criticism together is the question of
how narrative might function as a form of theory. Other ongoing concerns of the class will be to situate Morrison's work in the African American and American
literary traditions and to investigate the connections between her aesthetics and those evident in African American music.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (1). (Excl). May be repeated for credit with department permission.
Mini/Short course
Credits: (1).
Primo Levi was a Jew from Torino who survived a year in Auschwitz. His books, which deal recurrently with this experience, arguably constitute one of the major moral and stylistic projects of this century. In this course we will discuss five of them: Survival at Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Monkey's Wrench, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and The Saved. We will also read selections from his poems. We will examine in particular his understanding of the role of memory and remembering in constituting social experience, and observe the ways in which he confronts the problem of writing about the unspeakable. Coursework includes one 8 page essay and a final exam.
Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~alisse/ENGL484w02/index.html
Most nineteenth-century American women had little or no access to political leaders, higher education, or even the wages they earned; they were not allowed to vote, sign contracts, or own property in the United States. Despite these rigid constraints and tremendous opposition, over a span of eight decades American women generated massive social and political changes. How? By using the only tool available to them: language. Clearly, what we say, how we say it, and to whom it is said can ñ and does ñ change the world. In this class, you'll learn to use rhetorical theory as a way to critically examine persuasive appeals while we study texts from the nineteenth-century woman's rights movement. Together, we will consider the power of language to define, reform, and even revolutionize politics and society. Work for the course includes class participation, quizzes, and two exams. For waitlist and attendance policies, visit the course website.
This course is an introductory survey of literary theory from the romantics to the present, but with emphasis on the exciting and absolutely fundamental changes that have taken place in the past twenty-five years. Major areas of study will include Romanticism, Modernism, New Criticism, Post-structuralism, New Historicism, Feminism, and Multiculturalism. We will be using various kinds of literary theory to help us answer basic questions about what and why we read, questions like: What gives us literary pleasure? Do authors determine the meaning of their texts, or do readers? How is literature related to society and politics? Can pornography be literature? Is there a difference between literature and propaganda? How are male readers/writers different from female readers/writers? On what principles was our literary canon established, and should it be revised? Mix of lecture/discussion, but with a strong emphasis on student participation. Two, possibly three short papers, and a final project.
Prerequisites & Distribution: See School of Education Bulletin. (3). (Excl).
An examination of the practical problems of the classroom designed for prospective teachers of English.
Prerequisites & Distribution: English 492, admission to the English Honors Program, and permission of instructor. (1). (Excl).
Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior or senior standing, and permission of instructor. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of 9 credits.
An intensive study of Shakespeare's language of erotic love, desire, and sexual violence in his sonnets, narrative poems, and plays. Focusing on the ways in which gender and sexuality were conceptualized in the late 16th century, we will engage in thematic readings of texts that are grounded in an understanding of their original historical context as well as in an appreciation of their continuing relevance. We will pursue many questions, including: How are masculinity and femininity defined? What does it mean to desire? What is the impact of patriarchal marriage on the choice of a mate? In a period prior to the division of homosexuality from heterosexuality, how is eroticism conceptualized? What kinds of sexual violence are represented? How are gender and sexuality related to such variables as social rank, race, and national identity? How are gender and sexuality tied to literary genre and dramatic/narrative structure? In addition to reading across the Shakespeare corpus, assignments will include reading critical essays and watching films. Written work will include a report on secondary criticism, analysis of a film, and a 12-15 page paper on a topic of your choice. Vigorous, consistent class participation is presumed.
Prerequisites & Distribution: Permission of the instructor. (3). (Excl). (INDEPENDENT). May be repeated for a total of nine credits.
Participation in the teaching of a regularly offered course. Involves readings in educational theory, written work relating to teaching activities, and regular contact with the instructor. (This is an English Department independent study number and is not to be confused with School of Education teaching courses).
Prerequisites & Distribution: Junior standing; and permission of instructor. Not open to graduate students. (1-4). (Excl). (INDEPENDENT). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
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