This course was designed to provide students fundamental concepts of literary theory and grounding in various critical methodologies or ways into literary texts. With these goals in view, we will be focusing our classroom attention on learning literary theory, both historical and contemporary. Our discussions of assigned literature will, in turn, be directed at the ways that a work has been, and could be, understood and expanded through specific theoretical approaches to its text. Throughout the semester, we will alternate readings of literary theory with studies of particular literary works that have been published, with one exception, in the “Case Studies” series by Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press. (The exception is The Waste Land, which is not included in the series but which is available with accompanying criticism in the Norton Critical Edition). These editions contain both the literary text and theoretical approaches to that text—including reader response, cultural, deconstructive, feminist and gender, psychoanalytic, new historicist—to which we will add others, and combinations of others, that we have studied as theory in the course. Our email and class discussions will explore ideas generated by the published theoretical criticism on the literature, rather than individual thematic readings of the works themselves.

More than introduce fundamental concepts, I hope to communicate the importance of critical methodologies as ways of participating in the community of knowledge and thinking about a text. I would like you to appreciate literary theory not as something you “have to know” in order qualify for the profession, but as a complex of ideas that give coherence to the constructing, reconstructing, and deconstructing texts, ideas that you can not only apply but also combine and transform as you produce your own ways into literary works.

The written requirements will be short papers in response to theory and theoretical approaches to specific literature; oral reports on assigned readings for class; participation in web discussions before class; and a final 20-page research paper (with annotated bibliography) that combines two or more theoretical methodologies into a single original argument, specifically in response to Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

Reading List (specified edition required)

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the disciplinary histories, developments, and ongoing controversies that have given shape to the relatively new field of Composition and Rhetoric. This will demand first studying Rhetoric (a field several millennia old) as a singular discipline, replete with methodologies for analyzing, teaching, and performing rhetorical action in the public sphere(s). It will also demand studying rhetoric’s specific integration into English studies as a critical, theoretical, and practical framework for examining discourses and for teaching writing (ie, Composition Studies). It’s a bit of a balancing act to survey two disciplines (three if you count their conflation as another field), in a single semester; nonetheless, it can be done with the help of some focal points that can enable newcomers to the field to interpret and make productive use of its far-too-wide-ranging set of methodologies, critical theories, sub-disciplines, and partnerships. That said, this course will survey the field(s) of Composition and Rhetoric with a particular thematic thrust: an examination of the evolution of a central disciplinary project—the production of an ethically charged, discursively empowered citizen body. From its inception in Classical Greece to its various manifestations today, the teaching of rhetoric and writing has been informed by a desire for democracy through civic discourse, a necessary condition for which is the educating of rhetorically-adept citizens who can convince others of truth (whether that is to be understood as a contingent, socially-constructed “truth” or a universal “Truth” to be discerned through dialectic or rational inquiry). We will follow and analyze that project as it has adapted to evolving social, material, institutional, theoretical, and cultural conditions.

The course will involve students in a combination of collective inquiries and individualized scholarship; we will study the material and explore the course’s thematic thread through lectures, discussions, presentations, online dialogues, and sustained scholarly projects. Most in-class time will be devoted to seminar-style discussions, either face-to-face or virtual. Students will have common readings to write about and discuss through a series of short public papers (25%), as well as separate monographs/collections to summarize, reflect upon, and present to the class in teams (25%). In the second half of the course, students will work on two individual major research projects: a history report that allows each student to better understand an issue in the field by learning and effectively reiterating its history (25%), as well as a scholarly, thesis-driven article on the same issue to be submitted for publication (25%).

No prior knowledge of composition and/or rhetoric is required, but it will certainly serve as an effective foundation, as will previous study across each of the concentrations.

Readings for the course:

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition. 2nd edition. Bedford St. Martin’s, 2001.
Enos, Theresa, ed. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Erlbaum, 1998.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Erlbaum, 2000.
Coleman, Lisa, and Lorien Goodman, eds. Enculturation: Rhetoric/Composition: Intersections, Impasses, Differends. 5:1 (2003). Available online.
A Course Pack constructed by students from readings in three of the field’s main journals.

This course is designed as an advanced introduction for practicing writers. It will make you aware of historical and contemporary developments in creative writing – some of the ethical issues writers need to be concerned with, as well as aesthetic considerations in your genre. We aim to develop and improve a significant body of your creative work through the class workshop and feedback from me. This work will be informed by the course texts, and distributed readings, this semester.

Requirements:

2-3 page project proposal due Jan. 25 (10%)
This is a brief essay describing the creative project you will undertake this semester in prose, non-fiction prose or poetry. I will be looking for demonstrated interest, commitment and experience in the genre you choose to write in. You must demonstrate an understanding and an alliance with the ideas of at least one recognized writer in your genre. The creative portfolio component of the course will be due on the last day of class. We will regularly workshop material for your portfolio throughout semester.

Weekly reaction to the readings due by 12 noon of the Tuesday prior to the forthcoming class (10%)
This will be posted to the class website discussions list. The reaction to each weekly reading should be no less than 100 words. This will enhance class discussion.

Creative Writing Portfolio (35%)
This will be no less than ten poems, or two chapters of a novel, or two short stories, or two creative non-fiction essays. Page length to be negotiated with me.

Creative Writing Journal (30%)
In this weekly journal you will integrate notes on the course readings and discussions with your own observations about your writing journey. I will check your journal three times in the semester, each time grading it out of ten.

One brief class presentation on a course reading (5%)
This will begin class discussion.

Full attendance and active participation in class (10%)
More than three unexcused absences and I may give an “F”grade. Turn up and participate!

The goals of this course are to provide some historical sense of how and why cultural studies emerged, to give students some basic tools for doing cultural analysis, to set ourselves to work doing some analysis, and to reflect critically on our efforts.

The first half of this course will focus on two of the major theoretical traditions from which cultural studies developed, Marxism and semiotics. Readings from Karl Marx’s Capital and Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics will introduce the concept of commodity fetishism and the field of semiotics. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte and selections from Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks will introduce the Marxist analysis of politics and class struggle. Roland Barthes’ Mythologies will provide an example of how semiotic analysis with a generally Marxist orientation can be used on a variety of cultural texts and practices. Finally we will take a necessarily brief look at the two major “schools” that produced cultural studies as a discipline—the Frankfurt School (e.g. Walter Benjamin) and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (e.g. Dick Hebdige). During these weeks the students will also exercise their skills on analysis of a symptomatic cultural artifact from the mid-twentieth-century US, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

The second half of the course will turn to Hawai‘i and the Pacific. We’ll do some reading in post-colonial theory, and we will use it (and our earlier reading) to discuss the relation between global economy and indigenous culture in Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. We’ll talk about the history and effects of colonialism here in Hawai‘i, and read some critical work on local and Pacific literature, tourism, and the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. We will ask about the relevance of all of this theoretical material to understanding the current literary scene in Honolulu, based on readings from recent issues of Bamboo Ridge, Tinfish, O‘iwi, and Hawai‘i Review. During the last meetings students will give reports on some local cultural practices involving tourism (shows, monuments, hotel architecture and decoration, etc.).

At the end of the term students will be required to produce a sustained piece of analysis of a cultural practice or text, with some reference to or use of Marxist concepts and semiotics. Along with the final paper there will be a required piece of reflection on and auto-critique of the project. The project may be, but is not required to be, an extension of the report on a local cultural practice involving tourism. There will be a 5-6 page paper due midway through the term, and a 200 word project proposal due in early April.

The following texts are available at Revolution Books:

Bamboo Ridge 25th Anniversary Issue. Issue #84, Fall 2003. Bamboo Ridge Press
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hill and Wang.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Schocken.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge.
Hereniko, Vilsoni and Rob Wilson. Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Rowman & Littlefield.
Tucker, Robert, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. Norton.

Other texts will be made available in photocopy or in a course reader.

Rhetorical criticism is to rhetorical theory as literary criticism is to literary theory. This analogy, at the head of a course description, is understandably rhetorical: its message is “In case one doesn’t know what rhetorical criticism is, most likely one does know what literary criticism is.” The message, in turn, suggests the writer wants to demonstrate a reasonable correspondence between two kinds of criticism, one less familiar—but one that is the subject of this seminar.

When one is properly prepared, there is much to be gleaned from such a message (in such a place, at such a time). This seminar, I think happily, does not look at the messages of course descriptions, but at those of music (which, to throw down an early challenge to ourselves, is, according to Thomas Mann, “ambiguity as a system”).

Does music have messages? We shall see, moving from a re-introduction to classical rhetorical theory to readings in contemporary rhetorical criticism to our applying rhetorical criticism to choices made from within the rich cultural, economic, social, and political contexts of American popular music—from, for example, the artist-as-rhetor (Armstrong, Sinatra, Dylan, for example) to the collective identification rhetoric of American Idol, for example, to the political life of a working-class folk lyric (This Land Is My Land, for example) to the industrialization of the black vernacular in, for example, rap and hip-hop.

The primary purpose of the class is to do things with rhetorical criticism that are imaginative, rigorous, radical, and important—that’s all—so that messages in language (not only spoken but sung, played, danced, and shown) become articulated, articulate, and worthy of our attention. Students will do a short and long paper, at least one in-class presentation, a presentation on the final project (which will emerge in the forms of proposal, bibliography and draft), and will each lead one session of discussion.

Required Texts:

Roderick Hart and Suzanne Daughton’s Modern Rhetorical Criticism, 3rd edition; Roy Shuker’s Understanding Popular Music, 2nd edition.

Handouts will include excerpts from classical texts such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s On Oratory, and Quintilian’s Institutes and modern or contemporary texts such as Rosteck’s At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, Barthes’ The Responsibility of Forms, Burke’s Counter-Statement and The Philosophy of Literary Form, O’Meally’s The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Brackett’s Interpreting Popular Music, Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Baraka’s Blues People, Keil’s Urban Blues, Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Early’s Speech and Power, Filene’s Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, Guralnick’s Lost Highway, and Brummet’s Rhetoric in Popular Culture and Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience.

This is a course in the close study of plot, which includes consideration of works whose management of plot is distinguished by the kind of skills the writers in this class would like to master.

The basic source materials for this class begin with Aristotle and move to E. M. Forster and other writers in the twentieth century who have commented usefully on plot in fiction.

The students in this course will study both the basics of what constitutes plot in fiction, and go into the question of general concept in terms of ‘significance’ of event in fiction, and then into the intricacies of structural arrangement, specifically how writers exploit a story-line to its fullest. This involves, first of all, the connection between event and character, and then selection, management of time sequence, pace and its effects, and the possibilities of plot as extended metaphor. We will consider the rich possibilities of management of ‘antecedence’ or what is commonly called ‘back-story,’ and the execution of structural arrangement for the purpose of elevating the antecedent into a functional role in the plot.

Course work for this class will include a series of short exercises involving multiple executions of provided story beginnings, two brief reports on plots in fiction that either succeed or fail (drawn from the student’s casual reading), and one long project involving the student’s own writing—a story, or novel chapter accompanied by a full self-analysis of how plot is managed in the work. This project would be a 25-30 page paper (example included), which explains fully the writer’s own understanding of how he or she has managed the material of the story in terms of time sequence, selection, dramatic focus, etc.

Reading List:
Light in August – Faulkner
When She Was Good – Roth
Lord Jim – Conrad
A contemporary popular novel, as yet not selected.
Short Stories: selected from various anthologies, provided in individual copies
A Class Reader including essays, parts of Aristotle’s Poetics, parts of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, excerpts from R. V. Cassill’s Writing Fiction, etc.

Goals, Scope, and Methods: We will investigate major works of African-American literature from the early nineteenth century to the present within historical and interpretive contexts. The goals of the seminar will be 1) to introduce important African-American texts not generally familiar and to reread more popular or familiar texts in light of critical approaches taken over 150 years, 2) to read texts as cultural, social, and historical documents as well as literary texts, thus expanding understanding of African-American intellectual, social, and political history, and 3) to apply recent developments in African-American critical theory to the reading of these texts.

Although students will be encouraged to bring their own theoretical, critical, and historical interests to the reading of these texts, we will establish some common ground by posing general questions about “race” in American literature and history and examine ways race has influenced the writing of all American literature, as Toni Morrison sets forth in Playing in the Dark, and how concerns about race have determined the direction of domestic American history. So we begin with selections from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as well as the entire Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.

Because history is such an integral part of African-American literature, we will read texts generally according to chronology. Following the slave narrative, we move to the turn of the century with Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 historical novel, The Marrow of Tradition, and excerpts from both DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901). The segue into the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance of the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s begins with Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a 1912 novel of passing, which we will read alongside Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929) and Judith Butler’s essay on Passing from Bodies That Matter, followed by Toomer’s Cane and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (with Gates’ essay on Hurston from The Signifying Monkey). Poetry will be via handouts along with critical essays on the Harlem Renaissance by Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and other literary critics.

The move into the Chicago Renaissance as it is now called, the protest literature of the 1930s and 1940s, is dominated by Richard Wright and Native Son (1940). Hurston and Wright unfavorably review each other as Their Eyes is published too late and Wright becomes an icon who both influences Ellison and Baldwin, then is in turn critiqued by them as they publish their first novels Invisible Man (1952) and Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), supplanting Wright as the preeminent African-American writers and rejecting the protest novel as the only legitimate vehicle for expression.

We will read some of the poetry from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and turn to drama: Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Wilson’s Fences (1985), then finish the course with major contemporary writers Alice Walker (The Color Purple) and Toni Morrison (Tar Baby) and critical theorists: Deborah McDowell’s The Changing Same (1995) and Bernard Bell’s The Contemporary African American Novel (2004), among others.

Requirements: a presentation of a critical essay and a discussion presentation of a text; a short (5-page) paper after the first six weeks to be presented in class; a research paper (15-20 pages), which may be a development of the short paper or an exploration of a new topic, and an oral presentation of this research paper during the final class meeting.

A course in Beowulf is the traditional second semester for students in Old English, and this class will be for those who have finished English 601 or its equivalent, either in the fall of 2005 or at some other time, and who want to continue with their study of Old English poetry and language. We will read the entire poem in the original; we will give special attention to its diction and its metrics, two of the aspects of the text that can only be examined in the original language; and we will discuss some important issues in its scholarly reception.

In addition to an in-class report and a final paper, there will be required in-class recitations and a final exam.

Prerequisite: English 601 or its equivalent at another institution.

Required Texts:

Beowulf: An Edition with relevant shorter texts. Ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

A Beowulf Handbook. Ed. Robert D. Bjork and John D. Niles. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Tony Tanner remarked in 1996 that “Cymbeline . . . is the most extra-ordinary play that Shakespeare ever wrote” because he “has taken an assortment of the most disparate, incongruous, intractable material imaginable, all concerning important matters -- sexual, familial, dynastic, political, imperial; and proceeds to show with what a light touch it can be handled. He allows it to puddle and fog together to the point of hopeless chaos, and then -- whoosh! it’s all significantly related and cleared up.” The last act in which the “whoosh!” occurs is the longest last act in Shakespeare and brings together 24 to 26 different plot points, depending on who’s counting. In a postmodern Santa Cruz production in 2000 that included six video screens and dressed Cymbeline in Union Jack pajamas, a bell was rung whenever one of the plot points in the final scene was revealed. One goal of this course is to help you appreciate the ringing of that bell.

To get the bell, it helps to understand the genres Cymbeline evokes, since generic expectations condition audience responses. Categorized in the First Folio of 1623 as a tragedy, the play stages historical events including a war between Rome and Britain, but it is structured like Shakespeare’s comedies, has links to the tragicomedies being written around 1610, and for the last 100 years has also been classified as a romance. In order to appreciate these generic issues, we will read the other dramatic romances that Shakespeare wrote toward the end of his career, Pericles, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as well as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster and at least one other play that he drew on as a source, Mucedorus. This last text was one of the most popular (and hilarious) plays on the English Renaissance stage, and it featured a bear. We will also read the historical materials that Shakespeare drew on for Cymbeline, including selections in Holinshed’s Chronicles and collateral material on the Romans and early Britons in Camden’s Britain and Speed’s History of Great Britain. These readings will be accompanied by some of the best criticism that has been written on the play.

The course will be taught in multi-week clusters that combine primary readings with secondary materials. In addition to clusters on historical sources and the early Britons, on romance and tragicomedy, there will be clusters on gender, on race and ethnicity (about the Britons, Saxons, Welsh, and early modern constructions of race in relation to climate and temperament), on colonialism (how viewing Rome as a civilizing influence licensed Britain’s own colonial expansion), and on performance history (including early modern theatres, both public and private, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century production history, and twentieth-century films). There will also be a two-week cluster on textual editing. After reading general materials on editing and comparing different editions of the text, you will get some experience editing a short passage by preparing the text, textual notes, and commentary. This work is designed to help you appreciate the instabilities of any text and the different choices that editors have to make in constructing them. The four Shakespeare plays we are reading have been selected from four different series partly for this purpose -- the Oxford, Cambridge, Norton, and Arden series.

Assignments for the course will include a short editing project of at least twenty lines from Cymbeline; a short (4-5 page) essay on one of the readings; one or two presentations on the readings; a seminar paper (15-20 pages) at the end of the semester, and a presentation on that paper. The seminar paper may be on a text related to those we have read in the course or related concerns; it does not have to be directly on Cymbeline.

Texts for this course will be available at Revolution Books.

Course texts:

Cymbeline. Ed. Martin Butler. Cambridge UP, 2005.
Pericles. Ed. Suzanne Gossett. Arden Shakespeare. Thomson Learning, 2004.
The Winter's Tale. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford World Classics, Oxford UP, 1996.
The Tempest. Ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman. Norton Critical Edition. W.W. Norton, 2003.
Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. Philaster. Ed. Andrew Gurr. Manchester UP, 2003.
The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart. Ed. Sara Jayne Steen. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
A course reader will be available after the course begins at Professional Image.

Provisional list of required reading:

Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler.
Brian Gibbons, chapter on Cymbeline from Shakespeare and Multiplicity

Historical Sources and Constructions of Britain:
Raphael Holinshed, from The First Volume of Chronicles, The Third Booke of the Historie of England.
Raphael Holinshed, from The Description and Historie of Scotland.
William Camden, Britain: or, a Chorographical Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans Philemon Holland, 1610, selection
John Speed, The History of Great Britaine, 1611, selection
Leah Marcus, “Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality”
Martin Butler, “Introduction”
Wiley Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton, selections

Romance and Tragicomedy:
Boccaccio, The Decameron, Day II, the ninth novella (1620)
Fredryke of Jennen, a prose retelling of Boccaccio’s story (1560)
Mucedorus (1598, 1606, 1610)
Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster (1610?)
Barbara Mowat, “What’s in a Name?: Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy”
Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, “Introduction: The Politics of Tragicomedy, 1610-50”
Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England, selections
Gender:
The Letters of Arbella Stuart, ed. Sara Jayne Steen
Westward for Smelts (1620), selections
Janet Adelman, “Masculine Authority and the Maternal Body: The Return to Origins in the Romances”
Jodi Mikalachki, “The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism”
Valerie Wayne, “The Woman’s Parts of Cymbeline”
Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Race and Ethnicity:
Mary Floyd Wilson, “Cymbeline’s Angels: English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama”
Garrett Sullivan, “Civilizing Wales: Cymbeline, Roads, and the Landscapes of Early Modern Britain”
Jean Feerick, Reproducing Race: Early Modern Bodies and the Construction of National Difference, 2002 Ph.D. diss., selections

Colonialism:
Andrew Hadfield, “’What is the matter with yowe Christen men?’: English Colonial Literature, 1555-1625”
Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire, selections
John Kerrigan, “The Romans in Britain, 1603-1614”
Ros King, selections from Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Materials in the Norton edition on postcolonial readings and rewritings of The Tempest

Textual Editing:
D.C. Greethan, Textual Scholarship, Chapter 9
Jerome McGann, The Texual Condition, selections
Selections from editions of Cymbeline, including the First Folio (1623), Norton Shakespeare (1997), Oxford (1998), Folger (2003), Cambridge (2005), and Arden

Performance History:
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, selections
Roger Warren, Cymbeline in Performance, selections
Valerie Wayne, “Cymbeline: Patriotism and Performance”
Elijah Moshinsky, dir., Cymbeline, BBC film version starring Helen Mirren
Joe Banno, director, Cymbeline, Washington Shakespeare Company, 1996
Danny Scheie, director, Cymbeline, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, 2000 (if I can get it)
Shakespeare, Pericles

This course is located at the intersection of a number of burgeoning fields of study: life writing, disability studies, queer studies, feminist economics, and care ethics. In it, we will read memoirs that explore experiences of illness or disability—one’s own or a loved one’s—that include cancer, eczema, MS, fetal alcohol syndrome, alcoholism, Down syndrome, and depression. We will investigate the various kinds of care that individuals and institutions in the memoirs extend to those experiencing illness or disability. Our purposes in doing so will be two-fold. (1) We will think about how first-person representations of illness and disability afford ways to recognize—and sometimes challenge—the social construction and maintenance of bodily and mental norms and the dehumanization of those who do not conform to these norms. To help us with this project, we will read work from within the field of disability studies and investigate the strengths and limitations of ideologies of individualism and self-help. To do so, for example, we will accompany our reading of bell hooks’ representation of depression, and of her memoir wounds of passion’s imaging of suffering as stigmata, with articles by Erving Goffman and Lerita Coleman on the social construction of stigma. To take another example, we will read Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face alongside work by Rosemary Garland Thomson that posits women’s “extraordinary bodies” as sites of resistance. (2) We will consider how love and care are institutionally structured, raced, classed, sexed, and gendered; and we will examine the political, economic and social effects of these structures—ones that become particularly evident with the work of care that is required by illness and disability. We will think about how romantic and familial love are institutionally organized and sometimes violently repressive as well as beautifully enabling in their effects. We also will consider how the care available within medical institutions can offer people intimacy and love and position patients as victims of state violence. For example, Eve Sedgwick’s Dialogue on Love at once shows how “patients” are dehumanized and denied agency as it demonstrates how love and erotics can flourish within medical institutional contexts. In addition to analyzing the dominant ways in which care and love are structured, we will consider the alternatives to them that some of the memoirs envision, in the forms of non-heteronormative friendships, families, and romantic love. Our investigation of these topics will be aided by readings in care ethics, feminist and marxist critiques of the family, and queer theory.

Requirements: 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, you will present on a text of your choice, taking up issues of historical or theoretical importance to the text (worth 10%). You will also write a short (5-page) analysis of one of the texts (worth ~10%), and a seminar paper (approximately 20 pages, worth ~60%). With permission, creative writers may write a memoir, with the understanding that it must demonstrate critical engagement with the readings and issues discussed in class. Everyone will give brief presentations of their final papers at the end of the semester.

Primary Texts (to be ordered through Revolution Books; listed in order in which we'll be reading them): bell hooks, wounds of passion; James Frey, A Million Little Pieces; Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty; Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face; Eve Sedgwick, Dialogue on Love; Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord; Marion Deutsche Cohen, Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse; Michael Berube, Life as We Know It; Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependence; Anne Kennedy, Sing-song; Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum, Cancer in Two Voices; Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

Course Reader (to be ordered through EMA Campus Copy Store).

Tentative Schedule:

Weeks 1-3 (Readings in Disability Studies Theory):
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, 42 U.S.C.A. 12101 et seq 1993.
Cynthia Franklin, “Rethinking Intelligence: Memoirs and Disability Studies”
Thomas Couser, excerpts from Vulnerable Subjects and Recovering Bodies
Lennard Davis, “Constructing Normalcy” and excerpts from Bending Over Backwards
Simi Linton, excerpts from Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity.
Selections from the 2005 PMLA forum on disability studies

Weeks 4-6 (individualism and self care):
bell hooks, wounds of passion
Erving Goffman, “Selections from Stigma”
Lerita Coleman, “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified”
Rosemary Garland Thomson, excerpts from Extraordinary Bodies; "Theorizing Disability"
Cynthia Franklin, "The Politics and Poetics of bell hooks’ Stigmata: from Clint Eastwood to St.
Theresa"
James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty
Suellen Grealy, “Hijacked by Grief”
Weeks 7-8 (institutional intimacies):
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
Eve Sedgwick, Dialogue on Love
Cynthia Franklin, "The Erotics of Illness and Institutional Intimacies: Eve Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love"
Eve Sedgwick, “Queer and Now”; "Gee Boy George"; Articles for MAM

Weeks 9-11 (bringing public policy home: family memoirs, institutional change):
Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord
Thomas Couser, “Raising Adam: Ethnicity, Disability and the Ethics of Life Writing in Michael
Dorris’ The Broken Cord”
Ruth Hubbard, “Abortion and Disability: Who Should and Who Should Not Inhabit the World?”
Marion Deutsche Cohen, Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse
Colin Danby, “Retheorizing Households: Beyond Heteronormativity”
Barbara P. Solheim, “The Possibility of a Duty to Love”
Michael Berube, Life as We Know It
Cynthia Franklin, "Bringing Public Policy Home: Michael Bérubé's Life as We [Should] Know It"
H. M. Johnson, “Unspeakable conversations”

Weeks 12-15 (relations of care that critique, defy and/or stand outside institutional structures):
Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependence
Vrinda Dalmiya, “Knowing and Disability: The Challenge of Care”; “Knowing People”
Anne Kennedy, Sing-song
Susan Wendell, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability"
Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum, Cancer in Two Voices
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Adrienne Asch, “Critical race theory, feminism, and disability: Reflections on social justice and
personal identity”

Beginning in a substantial sense in the Thirties, the South Asian novel in English grew by the end of the twentieth century into one of the most important and avidly followed phenomena of contemporary world literature. In this context, this course aspires to three objectives simultaneously: to introduce students to this phenomenon in a historical way; to introduce them to some of the methodologies of literary criticism and cultural studies; and to introduce them to some of the major debates in postcolonial studies. Hence, the semester will be more or less evenly divided between the reading of novels and of works of literary and cultural criticism. This format will allow us both to explore the various theoretical issues raised in the criticism in their own right and to take them to discussions of the novels. At the end of the semester, students should not only have a first hand knowledge of a few of the key South Asian novels in English but a working sense of the debates within postcolonial cultural criticism. Novelists we will read include Narayan, Desai, Rushdie, and Mistry.

We will begin by reviewing some of the foundational notions necessary for an understanding of a cultural phenomenon such as the South Asian novel in English. Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/Postcolonialism will help us map the field of postcolonial studies. Criticism by Lukacs and Bakhtin will provide us with powerful models for the analysis of South Asian novels in English as a cultural form. Trivedi and Mukherjee will help us recognize the often invisible relationship of such novels to vernacular contexts. Essays by Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, Benedict Anderson, and Partha Chatterjee will enable us to place this cultural form within the historical development of nationalism. Other works by Casanova, Brennan and Appadurai will allow us to appreciate the transnational context within which it has grown to global prominence in the last twenty-five years. And works by such scholars as Spivak, and Radhakrishnan will engage us with the comparativist methodologies necessary for an understanding of the South Asian novel in English as a cultural form. Thus, our concerns will be literary, cultural, historical, critical, theoretical.

Requirements: a presentation on one of the readings for the class (also to be turned in as a five page paper); a five page research proposal with attached five page annotated bibliography due mid semester; and a twenty-five page term paper due at the end of the semester. In addition, students will be expected to participate in online discussions conducted in parallel to our class sessions.

Note: Since I am a novelist myself and so much of the course deals with novels, I welcome students on the creative writing track to this class. Such students will benefit from exploring the novel as a cultural form and be able to pursue projects that both fulfill the requirements of the class and contribute to their own development as fiction writers.

This course will explore the role of literature, oral composition and creative writing in the indigenous cultures of Hawai‘i and Polynesia. It is an in-depth study of the literature of Polynesia especially the literature in English by indigenous writers. The class will look at a whole selection of that work and how that literature has emerged and developed in those cultures especially in relation to colonialism and anti-colonialism. The class will be studying such texts as ‘Oiwi 3 edited by Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui, Whetu Moana edited by Wendt, Whaitiri and Sullivan, Leaves of the Banyan Tree by Albert Wendt, and Potiki by Patricia Grace. A Supplementary Reader of poetry and stories by Polynesian writers will also be provided. Through the study of that literature we will also learn much about the cultures and countries out of which that literature has come.