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Summer 2005 Course OfferingsCL N1A, #28305, WELLS, MWF 9-11, 125 DWINELLE“Narrative Imperatives: Fiction versus History”Within the West, and until the nineteenth century, history and literature occupied the same branch of knowledge.A contemporary dictionary of historiographic terms, however, defines narrative as “a true story about the human past,” while the definition of this same term changes substantially when considered as literary. How do the two practices define narrative in different ways? To what extent does history draw upon fiction’s impulse to narrate, and to what extent does fiction cast itself as its own “true story”? How do each grapple with what the American critic Van Wyck Brooks has deemed “the usable past”? In this course, we will explore the convergences and divergences of the historical and the literary, beginning with Aristotle’s definition, which foregrounds the difference between history and poetry. We will then move to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which draws history’s burdens into the poet’s imperative, and to Shakespeare’s framing of the nightmare of history in Hamlet. We will end up treating contemporary concerns on the nature of narrative and its importance for the potential overlaps between history and fiction. Along the way, we will address questions about off-kilter temporalities, nostalgia and utopia, the nature of “fact,” and the status of popular histories and documentaries that borrow liberally from the literary. We will also address the challenges that arise for students and critics when we move back and forth between the two disciplines. Does the literary preserve a remainder the ultimately distinguishes it from the historical? If so, how, when, and where can we find it?
Texts will be chosen from among the following:
Along with two recent films:
To help us begin to engage with some of the terms at stake in these debates, a reader will be available with shorts selections from Brooks, Hayden White, Roland Barthes, Gonzalez Echevarria, Hannah Arendt, Northop Frye, William Carlos Williams, and others. CL N1B, #28310, KAY, TT 9-11, 125 Dwinelle“Style and Modernity”When we call something “modern,” do we mean that it’s surprising? shocking? fun? creative? We all have an intuitive sense of words like “ancient” and “modern,” but our intuitions can be hard to actually describe. This course will be centered around the question of what makes a text modern. We’ll read a variety of twentieth-century books in many styles, including some modern renditions of The Odyssey, which might help us figure out what we mean by this elusive word. We’ll focus on the style of what we read and not just the “plot:” this includes speaking style, imagery, vocabulary, and even how the words are put together on the page. I don’t want to end at a single definition of modernity. Each of the books we read has a real personality. Some of them may have designs on us; they may even rebel against our efforts. Some will invite us into their worlds, but then leave us stranded in an alien landscape. Sometimes, we can even detect a sarcastic laugh that mocks our efforts at friendship. Each encounter between a text and a reader can happen differently, and discussion of our individual reactions is absolutely crucial to understanding these texts. Texts
CL N41E, #28315, ALLAN, MWF 9-11:30, 56 Hildebrand“Thinking Through Cinema”Writing in 1931, the French critic, George Duhamel described cinema as “a spectacle that demands no effort, that does not imply any sequence of ideas, that raises no questions, that evokes no deep feeling, that lights no light in the depths of any heart, that excites no hope, if not the ridiculous one of some day becoming a ‘star’ at Los Angeles.” Responding to Duhamel’s remarks, over seventy years later, we might wonder how cinema has moved us to think differently. What relation does cinema set forth between seeing, feeling and understanding? In what ways is film instructive in helping us to see anew? This course sets out to explore both how different critics have thought about cinema and how cinema, in turn, alters how it is we think. The semester will be divided into four parts, each of which touches upon a specific aspect of cinematic thinking and film history. The first section will address the spectacle of attraction in early and avant-garde cinema; the second will focus on affect in narrative film and melodrama; the third will address the film essay and documentary film; and the fourth will question aesthetic form in global cinema. Film Theory
Films
CL 50, #28320, TRAN, MWF 9-11:30, 125 DWINELLE“Unfamiliar, Defamiliar: A Foreign Writing Workshop”All of life is a foreign country. This workshop will make strange the English language, not allowing us to take any aspect of the language (or our writing of it) for granted. Our engagement with the short story genre will be “foreign” in two senses. First, we will work closely with a number of writers for whom English is not their native tongue. We will see how they work with the English language, what they bring to it, how they defamiliarize it, and their relationship with language. We will look closely at their style and how their use of language works with or against their work: Do they, for example, make non-English-speaking characters speak English? What are the effects? How does language affect the craft of their story, if at all? And of course, we will ask why they are considered such great stylists. We will study the English short stories of Joseph Conrad, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Anzia Yezierska. Secondly, unlike most American writing workshops, we will be writing pastiches following the lead of the writers mentioned above, and we will spend as much time on pastiches as we do on our own writing. CL N60AC, #28325, WHITE, MWF 9-11:30, 121 WHEELER“Song of Myself: Experience and Experimentation in Contemporary American Poetry”"Poetry wrenches around our ideas about our lives as it grows alongside other kinds of human endeavor. But it also recalls us to ourselves--to memory, association, forgotten or forbidden languages." (Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There, 234) Lyric poetry is often thought of as a sort of window to the soul, a direct representation of the poet's experiences and emotions. In this model--that has arguably dominated American poetry for the last century--the poetic voice is intimate and personal, often expressed in what seems to be natural speech; with its emphasis on the individual, history and politics are even seen as suspect. As we will see, however, the lines between individual and societal, experience and history, are hardly clear-cut, and we will examine a selection of poetry that purposefully blurs and even erases these distinctions. In ways that may be more immediate or apparent for "minority" poets, poets who are marginalized by a dominant Anglo-American paradigm, experience is dependent on culture, on race and ethnicity, on gender and sexuality. American history has been determined, in turn, largely by conflicts over and between these very categories. In fact, the very definition of American history is at stake. Whose history are we talking about? How can or does an individual relate to history? When and why is the personal political? How are experience, memory, and history intertwined? And what do these questions have to do with the way "American" poetry is defined? These questions are frequently taken up not only in the language of the poem, but also in the form of the poem itself. We will begin with a consideration of Walt Whitman's innovations in terms of the poetic voice in his Leaves of Grass, a landmark for American poetry. We will then turn to the ways that similar questions of voice and form are taken up in contemporary poetry. We will read a selection of poems that cuts across poetic schools and traditions--from so-called "confessional" poetry to avant-garde and experimental poetry that expands the limits of the genre. Additionally, these poems cross--and often blur--lines of race and ethnicity, national identity, and gender and sexuality. These poets include Adrienne Rich, Thomas Lux, Susan Howe, Li-Young Lee, Myung Mi Kim, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Antonia Quintana Pigno, Elizabeth Alexander, Michelle Cliff, and Kamau Brathwaite. They represent Anglo-American, Jewish, Asian-American, African-American, and Chicano/a writers; American-born, immigrant, and ex-pat; male and female, gay and straight. In addition to their poems, we will read prose works (memoirs and essays) by many of these poets, writings that discuss their poetry, their lives, and the relationship between the two. All of these poets take up the question of the role of poetry: what are its responsibilities? and what are its possibilities? How can the poem both reflect and transcend context? How can we read these poems mindful of the poet's history and experiences, but without reducing them to a record of the poet's biography? How can the poet represent identity and history--without erasing their complexity and even contestedness--while at the same time creating a poem--imaginative, transformative, and lyrical? Recognizing the potentially problematic link between experience and the poetic voice here results not in the breakdown of the poetic voice, nor its failure, but rather opens up new opportunities for experimentation. Texts
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