GraduateLevel Course Descriptions
Fall 2009

The concentration under which each course will count in the M.A. program is indicated to the right of its title:

C&R = Composition and Rhetoric
CSAP = Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific
CW = Creative Writing
LSE = Literary Studies in English.

Courses that fulfill the Asia/Pacific requirement are designated “AP”.

• Vandenberg, Peter, Sue Hum, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon, eds. RELATIONS, LOCATIONS, POSITIONS: COMPOSITION THEORY FOR WRITING TEACHERS. Urbana: NCTE, 2006.
• Cheryl Glenn, Melissa Goldthwaite, Robert Connors. THE ST. MARTIN'S GUIDE TO TEACHING WRITING. 5th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003.
• Miller, Susan, ed. THE NORTON BOOK OF COMPOSITION STUDIES. W.W.Norton & Company, 2008.
• Miller, Thomas P. THE FORMATION OF COLLEGE ENGLISH. U of Pitt P, 1997.
• Young, Morris. MINOR RE/VISIONS: ASIAN AMERICAN LITERACY NARRATIVES AS A RHETORIC OF CITIZENSHIP. Carbondale: SIUP, 2004.
• Selber, Stuart. MULTILITERACIES FOR A DIGITAL AGE. Carbondale: SIUP, 2004.
• Mayers, Tim. (RE)WRITING CRAFT: COMPOSITION, CREATIVE WRITING, AND THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH STUDIES. Pittsburgh: U of P Press, 2005.

ENGLISH 610 (01): ELEMENTS OF CREATIVE WRITING (CW) Tuesday 3:00-5:30 p.m. – Professor Rodney Morales
English 610 is a “nuts & bolts” course intended to provide you with instruction in technique and craft in three primary genres—poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction—with brief nods to drama and song lyrics. The primary purpose of this course is to help you develop a critical vocabulary that you can implement in the creative writing workshops you take during your graduate career.

This course was partly designed in response to a need for a graduate-level reading course in which the fundamentals of technique and method can be studied prior to or concurrent with a creative writing workshop in the hopes that students will develop common working vocabularies that facilitate what should be a collaborative effort. Though the emphasis for this course is on reading, as we study the terminology for each genre, there will be numerous writing exercises and assignments that will allow us to practice using the critical and analytical tools that we are acquiring, or, in the case of those of you already familiar with the nuts & bolts of a particular genre, reviewing.

There will be weekly reading and concomitant writing assignments. Everyone is expected to practice writing in each genre. These exercises will lead us to a final project, either a chapbook or an extended essay. We will practice workshop methodology at times, and do some anticipatory troubleshooting as we explore the potential benefits and potential problems posed by the critical examination of each other’s creative work.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

• Boisseau, Michelle, Robert Wallace, and Randall Mann: WRITING POEMS, 7TH EDITION (Longman): 2007.
• Diogenes, Marvin, & Clyde Moneyhun, CRAFTING FICTION: IN THEORY, IN PRACTICE (McGraw-Hill): 2000.
• John Hollander, RHYME'S REASON: A GUIDE TO ENGLISH VERSE, 3RD ED. (Yale University Press): 2001.
• Miller, Brenda, and Suzanne Paola: TELL IT SLANT: WRITING AND SHAPING CREATIVE NONFICTION (McGraw-Hill): 2004.

And there may be a Course Reader, if deemed necessary.

ENGLISH 620 (01): THE PROFESSION OF ENGLISH (C&R)
Tuesday 6:30–9:00 p.m. - Professor Craig Howes
A course originally designed to be everything to everyone, in the past few years, English 620 has increasingly served as an introduction to the topics and methods of Graduate Studies in English; a reading course, designed to help develop a shared critical vocabulary; and a workshop, for developing certain skills in written and oral presentation. I plan to continue this model.

Assignments: I will also follow John Zuern’s practice of downplaying a large research paper as the culmination of the course. A series of smaller assignments, often linked to the written and oral requirements of your other courses, will mark out the progress of the semester. The goal will also be John Zuern’s: “to prepare you for success in [current and] future graduate-level classes in our program and in your future professional lives by grounding you in the research, writing, [presenting], and documentation practices of our field.” (The square brackets are my additions.)

Class presentations, abstracts, writing of different kinds, and a paper written for a concluding mini-conference will structure the semester.
Texts: Leitch, Vincent, et al., eds. THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY, a course packet, and everything you’ll be reading and writing for your other classes.

ENGLISH 705 (01): SEMINAR IN COMPOSITION STUDIES - Mentoring Composition (C&R)
Wednesday 6:30-9:00 p.m. – Professor Jim Henry
When we teach composition, we perform the cultural work of initiating first-year students into the discursive practices and traditions of the Academy writ large and into any local version of it, in the process functioning as agents of the state as it interpellates its subjects. In the case of UH Manoa, we also "teach" a host of subject positions configured through colonialism and postcolonialism's responses to it, along with the usual range of subjectivities ushered in by locating first-year writing instruction in an English department. When one mentors composition, one engages with these cultural constructs as well, in an even more complex institutional subjectivity: that of a graduate student exercising agency in multiple ways, in specific discursive scenarios, while seeking to help first-year students perform within any one version of English 100.

This seminar is intended for anyone who will be mentoring in fall of 2009, for anyone who would like to mentor in spring of 2010, for anyone who has been a part of the UH Writing Mentors initiative in the past, or for anyone interested in probing Composition as it accomplishes cultural work through this configuration. (You can familiarize yourself with the initiative to date through its website: http://www.english.hawaii.edu/mentors)
Our inquiry will dig deeply into mentoring and its agencies through readings of theoretical, historical, and practical texts that help you theorize students' performances in first-year composition when a new actor—the mentor—becomes part of the course. We will thus frame our analysis of mentoring with a particular emphasis on how it articulates with (1) the "first year experience," (2) local practices, and (3) institutional subjectivities.

Our work will include a number of different activities: (1) reading key research and theoretical texts in Composition Studies and related fields as they inform mentoring, with a particular emphasis on (a) place/institutional-sensitive theories of composing; (b) post-process theory; (c) writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines/writing to learn; and (d) postcolonial/cultural theory in Hawai?i; (2) self-analyzing your work as a mentor, or, if you are not yet mentoring, teaming with another course participant in analyzing that person's praxis; (3) reading key research and theoretical texts from outside the discipline of Composition Studies where mentoring has already been explored, including Education, Counseling, and related fields. As the only R1 university in the U.S. implementing mentoring in first-year composition on such a scale, UHM is breaking new ground disciplinarily, and we shall be leveraging reflexivity as researcher-practitioners to analyze this groundbreaking work.

Course goals:

• Reading selected scholarship from the field of composition and rhetoric with a particular emphasis on place/institutional-based theories of writing and the emerging vein of mentoring composition
• Meshing scholarship on Hawai‘i with composition and rhetoric scholarship to figure a praxis of writing instruction
• Developing skills necessary to team with a faculty person in adapting or conceptualizing an FYC syllabus to include a mentor's work
• Developing expertise in conducting intake interviews with students and/or critically analyzing interviewing as a practice, including developing strategies for (rhetorical) listening, building rapport, making referrals, interviewing, mediating conflicts, recognizing the limits of one's expertise, negotiating grey areas between friendship and authority, etc.
• Developing self-reflexivity in mentoring students from a variety of demographics
• Adapting field research methodologies (including IRB protocols) as they pertain to classroom observations and individual conference documentation, possibly with the goal of publishing a scholarly article
• Developing a mentoring portfolio to be used in preparation for teaching applications, graduate study, and/or professional goals
• Collaboratively developing a password-protected website aimed specifically at first-year UHM students and their transition to college-level writing

You can see my current thinking on possible readings at the course web page: http://www.english.hawaii.edu/henry/705/2009/description.html

I'll be working on this course a lot over the summer, and I welcome queries and suggestions from prospective students.

ENGLISH 716D (01): SEMINAR IN TECHNIQUES IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE: CREATIVE NONFICTION
Wednesday 3:30-6:00 p.m. - Caroline Sinavaiana
“Creative nonfiction” … tricks “the reader into going places she would not normally – because that is exactly how I survived and experienced my own life.” Olivia Chia-Lin Lee, one of the highest-paid call girls in San Francisco, “Pimp”

“When I was moving to a house that felt a bit too big yet, I wondered, ‘Well, how does a hermit crab know when it is time to move?” Bonnie J. Rough, “Notes on the Space We Take”

“A poem is more likely to take a snapshot of the world, but nonfiction keeps the camera rolling, resists the urge to say Cut!” J.D. Schraffenberger, “Full Gospel”

In this course students explore contemporary creative nonfiction from a wide variety of cultural perspectives that invite them to explore the singularities and continuities of their own experiences and life stories. Based on the close reading and study of accomplished writers, students will experiment and generate their own essays from memoir and auto/biography, to literary journalism and travel writing, from spiritual biography to sports and science writing. The argument of this course is that such a method of reading and writing is a crucial exercise for younger (or less experienced) writers. To read an accomplished writer’s work as a writer is to learn what to take and what to leave, as well as how to see and hear the world with a writer’s eye and ear.

In the second half of the course, students will concentrate on their own reading/writing projects. Each student will choose a writer crucial to their development as a writer. S/he will write an essay or essays of 25 pages or so based on their immersion in that writer’s work.

The course will be led as a reading and a writing workshop. Students will be required to write something on a blog for each week’s class, to participate fully, and to lead part of one class during the semester.

Reading list:

• Lucy Grealy, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE
• Ann Patchett, TRUTH AND BEAUTY: A FRIENDSHIP
• Barack Obama, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER
• Dinty Moore, THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER
• Dinty Moore, BETWEEN PANIC AND DESIRE
• Natialie Goldberg, OLD FRIEND FROM FAR AWAY

Additional readings will be available in an online Course Reader, including selections from work such as: Albert Wendt; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Jamaica Kinkaid, My Brother; Octavio Paz, The Other Voice; Isabel Allende, Paula; Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family; Eduardo Galleano, The Book of Embraces; Brevity (Ezine); Creative NonFiction (Ezine).

Course Requirements

1. Facilitating Discussion. Each student is responsible for leading part of one class discussion of the week’s readings. A handout of key points, issues, and questions on the week’s reading is strongly recommended here.

2. Online responses: (A) One online letter each week addressed to the class in response to current readings. This should be posted no later than Monday evening, in order to allow time for reading and responding to each other’s ideas. (B) At least one response to any posting by another student, due by Tuesday evening.

3. Final Project: 25 pages (minimum) of polished work in the form of one or more original essays written during the semester.

Final grades are determined along the following lines: Weekly online responses & in-class discussion 30%; Discussion Facilitation 20%;
Final project 50%

ENGLISH 727 (01): SEMINAR IN LITERARY CRITICISM - ETHICS AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION
Tuesday 3:00-5:30 p.m. – Professor John Zuern
This seminar will introduce you to the discussions and debates that have comprised the so-called “turn to ethics” in literary criticism over the past two decades. It will also engage you in modes of practical textual analysis aimed at identifying and illuminating the relationship between the ethical dimensions of literary fictions and the formal features of their narrative structures. You will come away from this course with an understanding of at least two of the major impulses within criticism’s turn to ethics. One of these orientations recuperates humanist ideals, emphasizing the role of literature as a repository of values and an agent of moral edification (e.g. Booth, Nussbaum), while the other extends the anti-foundational and in some cases anti-humanist commitments of poststructuralism and postmodernism into the domain of ethics, viewing literature as the occasion of an encounter with an intractable otherness that cannot be subsumed within presupposed values and conventional standards of conduct (e.g. Derrida, Spivak, Badiou).

The primary texts I have selected all pose problems that can be approached from a variety of literary-critical and ethical perspective. All four novels are formally and/or linguistically inventive, offering occasions to reflect upon the complex interaction of narrative form and ethical function. All the primary materials deal with morally compelling situations, including post-apartheid society in South Africa (Coetzee), colonialism and settler society in Oceania (Mitchell), colonialism and slavery in early America (Morrison), the Holocaust (Safran Foer), and the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants in the United States (McCarthy’s film The Visitor). One of the questions we will consider has to do with the “ownership” of stories: what are the philosophical underpinnings and moral entailments of the claim that certain stories belong to certain people? To what obligations, if any, are writers bound when they endeavor to represent groups and cultures other than “their own”? What are the ethics of the literary imagination?

In order to establish a common frame of reference and a historical foundation for our discussions of ethics and literature, we will devote the first two class sessions to an overview of some of the central texts in the European philosophical tradition to which contemporary treatments of literary ethics frequently refer. These materials include excerpts from Aristotle, Mill, Kant, Levinas, and Derrida. We will spend the remainder of the semester on “case studies” which examine the literary and cinematic texts alongside further readings in philosophy and literary criticism.

I have designed this seminar with the expectation that seminar participants will have some experience with reading texts in philosophy, theory, and/or literary criticism, though not necessarily with the specific texts I am assigning. If you have any questions about your preparation for this class, please contact me before you register at <zuern@hawaii.edu>.

Assignments:

• in-class roundtable contribution (5 minute provocative statement, followed by a structured discussion)
• analysis (5 pages) of a primary text drawing on at least three of the assigned readings in
philosophy and criticism
• abstract for a term paper
• term paper (25 pages)

Required Texts (subject to change; see your Laulima account after August 1 for the final list)
Novels--
Coetzee, DISGRACE
Mitchell, CLOUD ATLAS
Morisson, A MERCY
Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

Film
McCarthy, The Visitor

Philosophy and Criticism
Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence
Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret
Todd and Womak, eds. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary
Theory

Course Reader:
Agamben, from Homo Sacer and Means Without End; Aristotle, from Poetics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean Ethics; Arizti and Martinez-Falquina, “The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English”; Attridge, from The Singularity of Literature and J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading; Bauman, from Postmodern Ethics; Booth, from The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction; Bowles, “A Distant Episode”; Buell, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics?”; Camus, “The Guest”; Derrida, from Of Hospitality and The Gift of Death; Fujikane, “Sweeping Racism Under the Rug of ‘Censorship’”; James, “The Art of Fiction”; Kant, from The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals and “Perpetual Peace”; Levinas, from Otherwise than Being, “Reality and Its Shadow” and “Peace and Proximity”; from American Pacificisms: Mill, from On Liberty; Miller, from Others; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature; Phelan: from Living To Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration; Said, from The World, the Text, and the Critic; Spivak, from Death of a Discipline and “Coetzee, Tagore, and Certain Scenes of Teaching”; United Nations, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

ENGLISH 735Q (01): ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE & THEORY - CULTURE AND SELF-REPRESENTATIONS (LSE & CSAP)
Tuesday 6:30-9:00 P.M. - Professor Ruth Y. Hsu
This course examines the evolution of Asian American literary and cultural representations within the context of an American nationalistic and neoliberal discursive formation that hinges on the concept of national “exceptionalism” and on discursive constructions of gender, racial and ethnic identity. Prior courses in Asian American or Asian diaspora literature or theory are unnecessary.

Readings are meant to enable analysis of questions such as: In what ways have Asian American cultural productions (for example, literature, websites, museums, film, documentaries, political protests, scholarship) attempted to engage with the larger national discourse? What have been significant themes in Asian American cultural and literary texts that undergird the dialectics of minority group self-representation in relation to the narrative of American nationhood U.S. as well as to the economic, political and historical arena of Asia/Pacific? How have literary and cultural studies in this area contributed to the formation of a pan-ethnic Asian American identity? In what ways does the formation of this ethnic group articulate with that of other ethnic and racial groupings within the United States?

The initial cluster of texts comes under the heading “Narratives by and of Asian Americans”. These readings examine the economic, legal and cultural dynamics that went into the early stages of the construction of an Asian American ethnic identity (approximately 1880’s to World War II).

The next set of readings, “Narrating the future,” looks at Asian American ethnic identity formation in the 1960’s and 1970’s in both creative texts as well as in the academy. What were the significant debates among and between artists and scholars? To what extent were these debates sufficiently reflective of the changing demographics and political economy of Asia/America?

“Globalization and Asia America in the Asia/Pacific,” the third cluster of texts, looks at recent Asian America writings in fiction and cyberspace. In the readings for parts 2 and 3, the class will examine much more critically the ideas of nation, race, and ethnicity. How might we understand textual representations of and by Asian Americans within the larger national and global context at a time when national identity is undergoing pressure to be re-defined and when national, political borders are being tested or, rather, made much more selectively permeable?

The course encourages the critical reframing of this area of study away from prevailing concepts of national borders and a national identity by examining recent work on subjectivity in an era of globalization. At the same time, of particular interest in this moment of productive fracture, would be a re-framing of the profound issues arising from the intersections of indigenous politics and American ethnic politics.

One class session will comprise a field trip. A couple of guest speakers have also been scheduled.

Course requirements:
1) Essay -- 12- to 15-page essay on a substantial topic; 2) Leading Class Discussion -- Class members will be responsible for leading class discussion on a specific work; 3) Bi-weekly E-mail response papers.

Readings likely will include:

• Cluster 1:
  Primary Texts:
  1. Excerpts from THE BIG AIIIEEEEE! (1991) (selections will focus on Angel Island and ‘prison’-writing; state legislation, local ordinance that construct an “Asian” subject);
  2. Selected writings of Edith Eaton (1890’s) (first Asian American writer);
  3. Film clips of the “Asian’’ subject in silent movies and pre-World War II, Hollywood movies;
  4. Bulason, AMERICA IS IN THE HEART (1946) (excerpts);
  
  Secondary Texts:
  1. Chan, REMAPPING ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY (2003) (introduction);
  2. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “A Second Life as Heritage—Ellis Island”;
  3. Cheng, THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE (2001) (excerpts)
  
• Cluster 2:
  Primary Texts:
  1. Kogawa, OBASAN (1982) (internment);
  2. ROOTS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN READER (1971) ( excerpts);
  3. Maya Lin and the Vietnam War Memorial Controversy (video);
  4. Wang, CHAN IS MISSING (1989) (movie);

  Secondary Texts:
  1. Bennett, BIRTH OF THE MUSEUM (1995) (introduction);
  2. Cheung, ARTICULATE SILENCES (chapter on Obasan);
  3. Sau-ling Wong, READING ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (1993) (introduction);
  4. Sumida, AND THE VIEW FROM THE SHORE, 1991 (selections)

• Cluster 3:
  Primary Texts:
  1. Hagedorn, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2 (2004) (introduction);
  2. Lee, NATIVE SPEAKER (1995);
  3. TINFISH (experimental poetry; selected issues or chapbooks);
  4. Media reports on Cho Seung Hui (Virginia Tech shootings) and other Asian American “killers”

  Secondary Texts:
  1. Omi and WINANT, RACIAL FORMATION IN THE UNITED STATES. FROM THE 1960S TO THE 1990S, 1994 (selections);
  2. Dirlik, “Asia Pacific studies in an age of global modernity” (2005)
  3. Fujikane, ASIAN SETTLER COLONIALISM (excerpts)
  4. Castells (TBA, excerpts)

ENGLISH 760D (01): TRAGEDY: INFLUENCE AND APPROPRIATION IN EARLY ENGLISH DRAMATISTS: MARLOWE, SHAKESPEARE, DRYDEN (LSE)
Thursday 6:30-9:00 p.m. – Professor Robert McHenry
This seminar explores the ideas of influence and appropriation as they affect the relationship both of Marlowe and Shakespeare (rivals and contemporaries) and of Shakespeare and Dryden (not contemporaries but possibly rivals). We will examine the question of the “anxiety of influence” in Bloom’s well-known formulation and in those of other critics as a means of assessing the relationships among these plays. We will consider aspects of his historical context, as these dramatists wrote before the copyright act of 1710, at a time when ideas of individual authorship and plagiarism were not as well-defined as they came to be later.

Some of the reading strays beyond the boundaries of tragedy, so that the nature of those boundaries and the implications of generic definitions can be examined. We will also look at the “Herculean hero” in these plays and at questions of style. Also, we will consider issues of the canon and literary judgment. Bate and Bloom will lead us to consider writers’ means of expressing and perhaps exorcizing anxiety, which they argue is seen in Shakespeare; Bate defines three stages: “(1) imitation, (2) parody, (3) outstripping” (107). This comparison will allow close readings of plays by both Marlowe and Shakespeare, together with investigations of the kinds of evidence that are useful or misleading. Ultimately, we will attempt to define the importance of Marlowe in making Shakespeare Shakespeare. In the case of Dryden, we will look at a dramatist who self-consciously addressed the role of Shakespeare in the critical and dramatic culture of his own time. Christopher Ricks has written recently that Dryden “is the first great European (not merely English) example of a major writer who is it taking it for granted that the very existence of the past creates the necessity for difference ... for the writer or artist himself” (Allusion to the Poets [2002], 15).

Students will be asked to make one or two presentations to the class, produce a brief critical survey on one topic, and write a seminar paper, which will be presented in an abridged form to the class and discussed critically. Students will have the opportunity to revise their papers based upon the reactions and ideas presented by others in the class.

Texts:

• Bate, Jonathan. THE GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE. Oxford Univ. Press, 2008.
• Bloom, Harold. THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE, 2nd ed. Oxford Univ. Press, 1997..
• Marlowe, Christopher. DOCTOR FAUSTUS AND OTHER PLAYS, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Shakespeare, William. TITUS ANDRONICUS, ed. Eugene M. Waith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984;
• TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, ed. Kenneth Muir, Oxford, 1998;
• THE TEMPEST, ed. Stephan Orgel, Oxford, 1998;
• THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, ed. Harold Brooks. Oxford, 1998;
• THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ed. Jay L. Halio. Oxford, 1998;
• THE TRAGEDY OF ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA, ed. Michael Neill. Oxford, 2001;
• RICHARD II, ed. Stanley Wells. Penguin.

ENGLISH 760J (01): Narrative Theory & Criticism: Narration in Fiction & Film (LSE)
Wednesday 3:30-6:00 P.M. - Professor Glenn Man
This course is a study of narrative in fiction and film, with the emphasis on narration or how a story is told, how a film is presented. Important issues then will be related to point of view, the forms of covert/overt narration, and the relationship between the story and its plot or discourse. The discussion will be conducted on both the level of theory and practice; it will be interdisciplinary, acknowledging similarities in the narration of fiction and film, but real differences as well; and this latter will include a comparative look through the process of adaptation, not to hierarchize one text over the other, but to tease out the reasons for the transformation of narrative and narration from one medium to the other for what this tells us about the strengths and limitations of each.

A secondary, but no less important consideration, will be placing of narratives within certain classifications and the ideology (ies) associated with those: realist narration, modernist narration, experimental narration,, classical film narration and alternatives to it. One example of this would be to look at a Hitchcock film like Vertigo, which reveals the tension between a classical narrative text and an art film text that draws attention to the problem of specularity through a male-oriented narrative that raises issues of gender (who sees, who is seen?) and within the viewing audience (with whom does the male/female spectator identify? how and why? and what are the ideological implications?).

Requirements for the course would include two oral reports, one on a narrative issue/problem/topic in fiction and one in film; a medium size paper stressing close analysis; and a longer research paper. Weekly assignments would include journal entries on the readings and viewings in order to facilitate studying and class discussion.

I'm considering these printed texts for primary texts: Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd Edition (2002); Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (1990); and Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation (2000); Carver, Cortazar, Nolan, Joyce, short fiction; James The Turn of the Screw; Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman; Austen, Emma or Persuasion; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; McCarthy, No Country for Old Men. And these film texts as possible choices: Citizen Kane (Welles), Vertigo (Hitchcock), Annie Hall (Allen), Mulholland Drive (Lynch), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino), Blue (Kieslowski), Amores Perros (Iñárritu), Blow Up (Antonioni) Short Cuts (Altman), Memento (Nolan), The Innocents (Clayton), The French Lieutenant's Woman (Reisz), Emma (McGrath), Clueless (Heckerling), The Hours (Daldry) [the last eight are adaptations].

ENGLISH 760M (01): LAUGHTER AND THE COMIC ARTS: MARK TWAIN (LSE)
Monday 3:30-6:00 - Professor Jim Caron
Mark Twain is arguably the best-known pseudonym in the world, which makes Sam Clemens the best-known American writer. Among authors writing in English, only Shakespeare is quoted as often, and as Shakespeare is for the English, so too Mark Twain for Americans: the cultural icon for their respective nations. Even in popular culture today, Mark Twain makes his presence felt, for example, appearing in an episode of Star Trek: Generations, and giving his name to a prestigious award made annually to the best comedian in the United States. Mark Twain has been represented as the embodiment of an idyllic South, the most vociferous critic of an idyllic South, the epitome of Western journalism, an irreverent travel book writer, the most famous humorist of his day, a fearless anti-imperialist, and a relentless satirist of the damned human race.

The general goal for this course will be to understand these conceptions of Mark Twain by exploring key primary and secondary texts. Because there is so much scholarship on Mark Twain, I will use two related tensions to provide conceptual starting points for our investigation. First is the issue of artistry. A long tradition exists of arguing that Sam Clemens was an undisciplined genius whose works lack artistic design, while the countervailing opinion holds that Clemens was the consummate word-smith and master phrase-maker, the ultimate author to quote. A related issue is how the literary career of Sam Clemens embodied a dispute within American culture between a tradition of belles lettres often marked by nostalgia and a marketplace of poplar writing signaling the advent of modernity. With its apparently inherent low-brow quality, comic writing clearly focuses this dispute. How can such writing find a legitimate place within a culture dominated in defacto fashion by Matthew Arnold’s concept of “high seriousness”? These issues will provide opportunities to explore formal textual concerns as well the contexts of culture, economics, and history. These frames should in turn allow students to discover their versions of Mark Twain, which might focus on persona and identity, satire and humor, the genres of the lecture and the travel book, dream/fantasy narratives, religion, science, race, and gender.

REQUIREMENTS: 1) two oral reports on secondary texts, one from a list I will provide, the other chosen by the student as way to help find a topic for the term paper; 2) short weekly responses and/or evaluations of the primary material, based either on my prompts or student interest; 3) a proposal for a researched term paper; 4) a term paper; 5) a brief oral presentation of the term paper.

TEXTS: Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawai`i (1866) [ed. A. Grove Day]; The Innocents Abroad (1869); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); the “Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts [ed. William Gibson]; Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches [ed. Tom Quirk].

ENGLISH 770 (01): SEMINAR IN PACIFIC LITERATURE: WOMEN WRITING OCEANIA (LSE & CSAP)
Wednesday 3:30-6:00 p.m. – Professor ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui
“It is with profound gratitude to our ancestors, ATUA and spiritual teachers that we have survived to (help) tell the tale.” —Caroline Sinavaiana and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, WOMEN WRITING OCEANIA (2008)

Across the oceanic Pacific, indigenous women have played important roles in movements for political sovereignty from colonial powers, personal autonomy for women’s rights, and have also been quite active in the production of literary arts. The intersection of the two is often seen in the central themes expressed in most indigenous women’s writing—issues of land, family, sexual and national/political oppression.

This course will explore major works of multi-genre Maoli (Indigenous) Pacific Women’s literature from the early nineteenth century to the present within historical and interpretive contexts. Texts will be primarily written in or translated into English. We will examine how colonial resistance surfaced in Pacific literary art forms, especially through the traditional genres of poetry (through chant, song, and genealogy), mo‘olelo or hi/story (oral and written) and dance (choreographed poetry, or poetry in motion), and how that changed under the influence of western forms of literacy (i.e. reading and writing) in the early 1800s. We will look at the transition from oral tradition to written literature, as well as the shift from indigenous languages to colonial ones (primarily English), paying attention to both the interplay between these factors. We will then turn to contemporary literature and examine how social/political history has shaped and influence these modern works, and how it is reflected in them as well. These texts will be multimedia and include poetry, drama, short stories, non-fiction, songs, chants, audio CD, and video/DVD.

Some questions we will examine include: What are common themes (are there?) in Pacific Maoli Women’s writing? What are the contributing factors to Maoli women focusing on these themes? Are they similar to or different from Maoli men’s writing? Indigenous women’s writing from other parts of the world? How does Maoli women’s writing differ from western, colonial, or “mainstream” women’s writing? How does Maoli women’s writing exemplify feminism? How is, according to indigenous Pacific women writers, a different kind of feminism from mainstream feminism?

Goals: 1. familiarizing students with a substantial range of literary work by Maoli women writers in the Pacific over a period of approximately 150 years, and read these texts as cultural, political, and historical productions as well as literary texts; 2. identifying and applying indigenous and other critical theories to the reading of these texts; 3. developing more complex understandings of the dynamics of cultural translation between the practices and aesthetic concerns of Pacific literature in conversation with other literatures.

Students are encouraged to discuss their own theoretical, critical, historical and cultural interests to the reading of these texts, although we will focus on how ethnicity, culture, politics and history have informed, influenced, and changed Pacific literary aesthetics and expression over time. Foundational texts we will use include Donna Awatere, Haunani Trask, Noenoe Silva, Manu Meyer, Lind Tuhiwai-Smith, Leialoha Apo-Perkins, Konai Helu Thaman, amongst others.

We will read the texts chronologically, beginning with early oral texts collected by indigenous women, such as Liliuokalani’s KUMULIPO and selections from Teuria Henry’s ANCIENT TAHITI. We will also look at selections of early female goddesses and guardians, who also demonstrate cultural views on women; figures such as “Pele and Hi‘iaka” (Hawai‘i), Hina (Samoa), and Hinenuitepo (Aotearoa) will be featured as examples of early forms of written folklore in translation.

KALUAIKO‘OLAU in translation is an early historical mo‘olelo which we will read next, in addition to mele (songs, poems) and other literature of the period surrounding the Overthrow and Annexation in Hawai‘i. This will be followed by contemporary land and political struggles documented in various literature around the Pacific.

Students will pose critical questions are write weekly responses on Laulima to the assigned reading. They will also give two oral presentations; the first will be to lead a class discussion on a critical reading, the second will be panel (2-3 members each) which will utilize at least one critical theory or text and apply it to selected readings. Students will also produce a handout to be distributed in class, as well as a short paper (5-7 pages) to accompany each oral presentation. A 25-30 page critical essay on an aspect of Pacific Women’s literature utilizing at least one text from the course will also be required.

SELECTED FICTION, POETRY, AND DRAMA FOR THE COURSE:

• Avia, Tusiata, WILD DOGS UNDER MY SKIRT. (Tonga)
• Figiel, Sia. GIRL IN THE MOON CIRCLE (novel, Samoa)
• Figiel, Sia and Teresia Teaiwi. TERENESIA. (audio recording)
• Frazier, Frances, tr. THE TRUE STORY OF KALUAIKOOLAU. (non-fiction, Hawai‘i)
• George, Miria. AND WHAT REMAINS. (drama, Aotearoa)
• Grace, Patricia. COUSINS. (novel, Aotearoa)
• Kihleng, Emelihter. MY UROHS. (Micronesia)
• Kneubuhl, Victoria Nalani. HAWAI‘I NEI, ISLAND PLAYS. (drama, Hawai`i)
• Lili‘uokalani. HAWAI‘I’S STORY BY HAWAI‘I’S QUEEN. (non-fiction/autobiography, Hawai‘i)
• Makini, Jully. CIVILIZED GIRL. (Melanesia)
• Mila, Karlo. DREAM FISH FLOATING. (Aotearoa)
• McDougall, Brandy Nalani. KA MAKANI PA‘AKAI, THE SALT WIND (Hawai‘i)
• McGregor, Lurline Wailana. BETWEEN THE DEEP BLUE SEA AND ME (novel, Hawai‘i)
• Perez-Wendt, Mahealani. ULUHAIMALAMA. (Hawai‘i)
• Potiki, Roma. Shaking the Tree. (Aotearoa)
• Sinavaiana, Caroline and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds. WOMEN WRITING OCEANIA WEAVING THE SAILS OF THE VAKA, a special issue of PACIFIC STUDIES, vol. 30 no. 1-2, March/June 2007. La‘ie: Brigham Young University. (anthology, Oceania)
• Spitz, Chantal. ISLAND OF SHATTERED DREAMS. (novel, Tahiti)
• Takehiro, Sage U‘ilani. HONUA. (Hawai‘i)
• Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia. RUAHINE, MYTHIC WOMEN. (stories, Aotearoa)
• Vaite, Celestine. BREADFRUIT. (novel, Tahiti)

ENGLISH 775 (01): SEMINAR IN CULTURAL STUDIES: MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF CULTURE (CS&R)
Friday 2:30-5:00 p.m. - Professor John Rieder
Our concerns in this seminar on the relation of the Marxist tradition to problems in cultural studies will include: the bearing of social class on cultural production and interpretation; the relation of cultural production and reception to the production and circulation of commodities; the theory of ideology and the practice of ideology critique; and the relation of colonialist-imperialist politics and the world capitalist economy to ideologies of race and the meaning of place. I expect that the members of the seminar will bring other topics to bear on the discussion based on their own projects and interests. The goal is to make the students conversant with Marxist concepts as they apply to cultural studies and to enable us to reflect together on the way these concepts can be used or need to be modified in the contemporary world.

The course will begin with the thesis that Marx achieved or at least made possible a fundamentally new set of interpretive strategies aimed at the understanding of social life and cultural activity, and will then proceed to examine the implications of these strategies for contemporary cultural studies. Reading and discussion of Marxist social theory and cultural criticism will constitute the bulk of the course.

Students will be required to prepare synopses of assigned readings and questions for discussion, and each student will be responsible for leading discussion on one text or group of texts. Students will also be asked to assign a short text (a poem, a short story, a set of images, a piece of film, a website) to the class, and to conduct a discussion of the impact of Marxist theory on the way we understand and value such a text. I'll also be asking for term research papers on a writer or topic covered in or relevant to the course.

The texts listed below will be ordered at Revolution Books. We will be reading only short sections of some of them, but the list might be considered the beginning of a working scholar’s collection of essential Marxist texts:

• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT (Note: Be sure to get the new translation by Edmund Jephcott published by Stanford UP, not the older one published by Continuum).
• Louis Althusser, LENIN AND PHILOSOPHY
• Jerry Anderson, CONSIDERATIONS ON WESTERN MARXISM
• Walter Benjamin, ILLUMINATIONS
• Frantz Fanon, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
• Antonio Gramsci, SELECTIONS FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, EMPIRE
• Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, THE JAMESON READER
• THE MARX-ENGELS READER, ed. Robert C. Tucker.
• Dave Morley, STUART HALL: CRITICAL DIALOGUES IN CULTURAL STUDIES

ENGLISH 775 (02): QUEER STUDIES, & QUESTIONS OF RACE, CLASS, NATION & GENRE (LS, CSAP)
Monday 6:30-9:00 p.m. - Professor Cynthia Franklin
In this course we will investigate queer theory and its intersections with studies of class, race, nation and genre. Our basic premise for the course is that human sexuality and gender are socially constructed and regulated. Our primary concern will be to understand the multiplicity of ways in which families, communities, and nations institutionalize heterosexuality and gender roles, and the ways in which individuals and groups can and do resist these roles. We will undergo this exploration by reading works of theory that have been foundational to the field (for example, those by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jonathan Katz, and Eve Sedgwick) as well as studies that are at the forefront of the field today and that are considering its intersections with ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, transnationalism, and diaspora studies (for example, works by Roderick Ferguson, Gayatri Gopinath, Martin Manalansan, Jaspir Puar).

We will analyze these theoretical texts in relation to other contemporary cultural texts—novels (ROLLING THE RS, BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), autobiography or mixed-genre works (THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK, LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS, TIMES SQUARE RED, TIMES SQUARE BLUE), plays (ANGELS IN AMERICA), feature films (FIRE, BOYS DON'T CRY) and documentaries (THE BRANDON TEENA STORY). Most of our texts come from authors and filmmakers with diverse cultural perspectives who are situated in Hawai'i, the continental U.S., and Canada, and who identify as and/or explore being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. In combination with the theory we will read, these texts provide insight into how conformity to sexual and gender roles gains people acceptance by one's family, community, and nation. They establish, in other words, the connections between sexual and gender identity and various forms of citizenship and communal and familial belonging. These texts also establish ways that sexual and gender roles have unacknowledged race and class biases, and how deviating from or challenging these roles often results in alienation, exclusion, and even violence or death. Many of the texts trace as well how people challenge the sexual and gender roles assigned to them and, in the process of doing so, forge alternative families or communities, and/or begin to imagine new formulations of national belonging. As we read or view "imaginative" cultural texts alongside more purely "theoretical" ones, we will consider if—and if so, how and why—different genres enable different kinds of mappings or imaginings of nonheteronormative desires.

The course will be run as a seminar. Weekly required letters to the class on the readings will help determine the shape of class discussion and will comprise 20% of the final grade. Once during the semester, students will present on a text of their choice (worth 10%). Students will also write a short (5-page) analysis of one of the texts (worth ~10%), and a seminar paper (approximately 20 pages, worth ~60%). Everyone will give brief presentations of their final papers at the end of the semester.    

1. Primary texts (tentative):

• Dorothy Allison, BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA (novel)
• Samuel Delaney, TIMES SQUARE RED, TIMES SQUARE BLUE (autobiography/essays)
• Tony Kushner, ANGELS IN AMERICA (play)
• R. Zamora Linmark, ROLLING THE Rs (novel)
• Audre Lorde, ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME (autobiography)
• Deepa Mehta, FIRE (film)
• Cherríe Moraga, LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS (autobiography)
• Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK (mixed-genre)
• Kimberly Peirce, BOYS DON'T CRY (film)
• Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir, THE BRANDON TEENA STORY (documentary)

2. Secondary readings (tentative):

• M. Jacqui Alexander, "Imperial Desire, Sexual Utopias," in PEDAGOGIES OF CROSSING
• Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, "Queer Nationality"
• Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination"
• Judith Butler, UNDOING GENDER
• Ann Cvetkovitch, selections from AN ARCHIVE OF FEELINGS
• Jose Esteban, excerpt from DISIDENTIFICATIONS: QUEERS OF COLOR AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POLITICS
• Roderick A. Ferguson, ABERRATIONS IN BLACK: TOWARD A QUEER OF COLOR CRITIQUE
• Michel Foucault, excerpts from THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY
• Gayatri Gopinath, IMPOSSIBLE DESIRES: QUEER DIASPORAS AND SOUTH ASIAN PUBLIC CULTURES
• Judith Halberstam, IN A QUEER TIME AND PLACE: TRANSGENDER BODIES, SUBCULTURAL LIVES
• Guy Hocquenghem, selections from HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE
• Jonathan Katz, "The Invention of Heterosexuality"
• Martin Manalansan, excerpts from GLOBAL DIVAS: FILIPINO GAY MEN IN THE DIASPORA
• Jaspir Puar, TERRORIST ASSEMBLAGES: HOMONATIONALISM IN QUEER TIMES
• Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, selections from EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, selections from TENDENCIES