GRAD Classes & Seminars
FALL 2001 SDSU GRADUATE COURSES
NOTE: Course offerings listed below are subject to change. All courses may not be listed here. Refer to the Fall 2001 schedule or glass case in front of English and Comparative Literature Department office for the most current listing

English 601: Literary Study in a Multicultural World J. Robinett

This course will investigate selected issues in literature, cultural criticism, post-colonialism and imperialism. Readings include texts and essays from non-Western cultures that challenge the idea of cannon, the definitions of genre and dominant cultural views, and offer alternative visions and structures (literary and otherwise). The focus will be on intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, race, diversity and imperialism/nationalism, and on the exploration of literature as the site where social and cultural values are inscribed and from which they are also derived. 

Required texts:
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
al-Shaykh, Hanan Women of Sand and Myrrh
Amado, Jorge Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel One Hundred Years of Solitude
Farah, Nuruddin Maps
Ha Jin Ocean of Words
Kincaid, Jamacia Lucy
Mishima, Yukio Confessions of a Mask
Miyabe, Miyuki All She Was Worth
Ninh, Bao The Sorrow of War
Roy, Aundhati The God of Small Things
Lentreccia, Frank and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study

English 604A: Rethinking the American Renaissance R. Schneider

This course will examine the constellation of writers (Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Stowe, Whitman, Dickinson) that emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to learn more about what early scholars of American literary history called the "American Renaissance." Beginning with the 1830s and 40s, when the very idea of an "American" writer was considered laughable by most of the Western world, we will investigate not only the various kinds of literary texts produced by mid-nineteenth-century authors (essays, short stories, poetry, speeches, letters, novels, autobiographies) but also the ways in which these texts were deployed as responses to key social and political tensions such as slavery, various reform movements, imperialist expansion, industrialization, immigration, the increasing role of women in the public sphere. As we move closer to the Civil War era, we will begin tracing the development of key modes of writing and thought that have been used to describe and define the literature of this period: Transcendentalism, Sentimentalism, and Romanticism. As we look closely at these three literary modes, we’ll also try to establish the different kinds of work performed by the writing of this period (artistic? cultural? political? all or none of the above?) and what is at stake for our American Renaissance figures as they attempt to participate in-or resist-the making of a national literature.

Finally, since the idea of the American Renaissance as a literary category was initially based on the assumption that certain writers merited particular attention as "the best" this country has ever produced, we’ll devote time to studying the practice of literary history and the politics of canonization: how "classic" writers get to be called "classic" and why. 

Writers likely to include both traditional "American Renaissance" figures?Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman?and more recent additions to that category?Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson. Selected critical and theoretical works relevant to the study of nineteenth-century American literary history and the politics of canonization will also be included. 

English 606A: The Child as Subject and Object J. Cummins

In this class we will consider the fluctuating positions the child inhabits as both subject and object. To understand this fluctuation, we will take two major approaches, one that considers the child and visual culture, and the other that considers the child's role in the culture of commodity. In the first section of the class, we will examine media forms that posit children as either seeing subjects or seen objects. To this

end, we will study picture books, other illustrated literature, and film, asking ourselves about the relationships between vision and power when the child views (as subject) or is viewed (as object). In the second section of the course, we will analyze the social expectations concerning the commodification of childhood, both in terms of child as consumers (subject) and consumed (object). We will examine the packaging of

children's literature into *things* such as toys and food as well into other art forms, such as film, video, and television. We will ask ourselves if children themselves are packaged, fashioned into commodities, or if they have some control in the economy as packagers. Does this fluctuation between object and subject have something to do, in the end, with the transitory nature of childhood?

The reading list has not yet been determined, but we will read several picture books and novels. In addition, we will study theory related to visual culture and commodity culture.

English 624: Postcolonial Irish Literature J. Griswold

An examination of the Irish and representations of the Irish in film and literature since the 1916 Easter Rising and with a special emphasis on contemporary literature. With

discussions of history, music, and a dozen other topics, this is as much a class in Irish Studies as Irish Literature.

English 625: Writing in America: the ‘50s J. Rother

In this course we will have at a slew of books that are mostly as different from one 

another as they are from other books of their own distant kin in literature. Readings will concentrate on those difficult-to-classify works that shaped the American milieu from odd and even eccentric redoubts in the culture (and soon to be "counterculture"); that exerted an influence both out of shape and out of kilter with an utterly schizoid decade-and-a-half that began with a war in Korea and ended with the assassination of a president who took the largest steps toward immersing America in an even costlier war in the same part of the world. Through the diffractive (but also radicalizing) lenses of writings by Edward Dahlberg, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Norman Mailer, Roberty Creeley, J.D. Salinger, James Baldwin, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, C. Wright Mills and Jack Kerouac, students will, it is to be hoped, see the period of the ‘60s and beyond — the wates of Postmodernism-in-excelsis — in clearer perspective.

Required: Oral reports, several brief critical papers, and a final research paper on a topic of each student’s own choosing. 

[Note: The only limits imposed on discussion will be those arising out of the limitations of our own imaginations as readers, our own critical intelligence as a group, and — perhaps most importantly — what remains in print from this gloriously diverse, yet unfairly neglected, time in America’s not too distant cultural life.]

English 626: West Asian and Mediterranean Literature D. Shojai

In conjunction with a proposal before the Modern Language Association to open a new Division of West Asian and Mediterranean Languages and Literatures, this course will attempt to define and to explore the cultural topography of a region of the world interconnected in human history but viewed as being oppositional and fragmented from the Middle Ages down to the Post-Colonial Period. Colonial terms such as Near and Middle East will be replaced by indigenous terms such as West Asia in an effort to discern the cultural ties that reflect the integrative aspect of the region’s long and rich literary history. Within this context, the literature of North Africa is not apart from that of Europe but a product of the Mediterranean world linked to West Asia through common language and history. Selective readings of major literary works will be drawn from three periods: the Ancient, the Renaissance, and the Modern. Also critical texts will include Edward Said’s Orientalism and Benedict Anderson’s ImaginedCommunities. This course will involve a midterm paper in response to questions, a class presentation, and a research paper.

English 700: Chaucer and his ContemporariesL. Amtower

Chaucer has been called the father of English literature, perhaps rightfully so. His works introduced a new way of thinking about characterization and subjectivity in literature and arguably launched a humanistic movement in England. However, Chaucer was not alone in his endeavors. Many of his talented contemporaries, equally interested in the human condition and perhaps even more aware of the pragmatic uses of literature, have been overshadowed by Chaucer’s overwhelming presence. This course will examine Chaucer alongside the works of Langland, Gower, Hoccleve, Henryson, Dunbar, and others, paying special attention to the cultural and critical frameworks that helped to promote the late medieval interest in language and the "textualization" of the self. Along the way, we’ll also absorb much of the best of late medieval culture, as we discuss Chaucer and his contemporaries, critique of courtly love and chivalric ideals, their interest in ideology and the mapping of the human psyche, and, most of all, their participation in the birth of English humanism. Texts will include The Canterbury Tales, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and miscellaneous other works.

English 724: British Poetry and Its Medium J. Farber

A study of British poetry from the early 16th to the early 20th centuries in relation to its aesthetic medium. We'll be looking at prosody, imagery, diction, figurative language, structure, density, and resonance. This course should be useful for graduate students with a special interest in poetry, but also for those who feel that they haven't yet made, and would like to make, a strong aesthetic connection with the British poetic tradition.

English 726: Sem: POETRY OF WITNESSLynda Koolish

---"O rain of stars in the darkness, constellation of dead brothers

I owe you my blackest silence, my resolve…"

--Victor Serge

In Angel of History, poet Carolyn Forché writes of what she describes elsewhere as "the moral imperative of historical remembering." She writes of her own inexorable moral complicity, expressing hope in the redemptive power of poetry. Like other poets of witness, only in rare moments does she write explicitly of politics and ideology.

Using as its central texts Angel of History, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (an anthology edited by Forché), and a course reader compiled by the instructor, this course will explore the work of some extraordinarily gifted poets who have commanded themselves to write, to bear witness, to call for resistance to the incendiary violence and cruelty that have marked the past century. We will be reading poems by René Char, Guillaume Apollinaire, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Irena Klepfitz, Czeslaw Milosz,Wislawa Szymborska, Yehudi Amichai, Pablo Neruda, Roque Dalton, Eduardo Gaeano, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Ishmael Reed, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Louise Erdrich, Judy Grahn, Muriel Rukeyser, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dennis Brutus, Wole Soyinka, and Carolyn Forché.

This course is a graduate Comparative Literature seminar, with class participation not only encouraged, but essential. We will emphasize close readings of extraordinarily rewarding (if often difficult) poems. I hope that part of the pleasure of the course for each of you will be the process of remembering/ (re)learning - in a supportive and non-competitive environment - how to fall in love with poetry, with language, how to pay attention to image, line and breath, how to discover your own intuitive gifts of imagination, empathy and intellect.

Requirements include one twenty minute oral presentation on a topic to be determined by the student, relevant to a given week’s reading, and one shorter (5-6 page) and one longer (10-12 page) papers on topics of student’s choice (but to be approved in advance by the instructor, and to focus on a more complex topic than a reading of a single poem.) Collaborative papers are encouraged, especially for the longer paper. Freewrites on a single poem to be discussed in each week’s reading are due at the beginning of each class. This assignment should take at most 25 minutes a week: 5-10 minutes to decided which poem you want to write about; 5 minutes to read the poem to yourself at least twice, and ten minutes (timed please) to type it directly onto your increasingly comfortable responding to, thinking about, and writing about poems. They will not be individually graded or commented on, but as a course requirement, you must complete all but two of the weekly freewrites on time, with one late freewrite allowed, and one skipped freewrite allowed (but not encouraged). Because this class meets only once a week, students who miss more than two classes will have their grades seriously affected. There will be no exams. 

Grading:

20% Active class participation and freewrites

35% short paper

45% short paper

English 750F (previously designated 789): Fiction Workshop H. Jaffe

This course is designed principally for MFA students who are writing short or extended "serious" fiction. MA students may also enroll but are asked first to consult with the instructor.

Each participant will be required to submit a minimum of two individual texts, or self-contained segments of a lengthier work. In addition, there will be occasional brief texts generated by "prompts."

A characteristic session will consist of two or three xeroxed fictions to be read aloud. Then two (rotating) student-critics will deliver a fairly brief (five to ten minutes) commentary on the particular text. Finally the class and instructor will comment on the text.

Each class participant will have written her/his commentary, and these comments (signed), along with the instructor's, will be passed on to the writer whose text has been critiqued.

Specifically, each participant will be obliged to comment carefully and at reasonable length on each xeroxed fiction. The commentary (which also includes the oral commentary) may be playful and "meta;" but it must also accomplish three overlapping purposes: describe the text, offer remedial suggestions where necessary, and briefly summarize.

English 750F: Fiction Workshop D. Matlin

An advanced Creative writing workshop concentrating on the writing of fictions. Students will be required to produce new works and to discuss those works in both the workshop and in consultations with the teacher. Because of this advanced level, students will be expected to produce and to demonstrate the evolution of their works on a week-to-week basis. The workshop will explore the particular kinds of fiction each student will be writing, the language, the ideas, the arrangements and rearrangements, and the processes of editing and hearing which will help to bring the work to its "breathed breath of life." What are the modes of articulation and what do those modes require to make a story work or a novel begin to work to both the ear and the eye, to give it stability and the energies of discovery and what those discoveries do to connect to the world and to the reader? What is at stake, what is at risk in the actual, making itself? The course will also be directed by a series of assigned readings as a way for the students to find a gauge for their ideas of stories which emerge in the writing, its actions, its materials, and its tellings.

English 750P MFA Poetry Workshop S. Alcosser English 750P is a poetry workshop in which members of the MFA Program write and discuss the composition of poems. Previous knowledge of prosody and the history of poetry is assumed. We will examine the composition and rhetorical argument of poems with emphasis placed on innovation as well as tradition.
 

 

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