Course Descriptions for Previous Semesters
: Fall 2004 Graduate Courses
SUMMER 2004 GRADUATE COURSES
Session 2: Evening (8 Week) Schedule, May 10-July 2
ENG 542: Topics in Multicultural American Literature
Instructor: Lukens
Monday and Wednesday, 6-8:30 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: This is a course establishing some familiarity with
a range of plays written by Native American and First Nations
playwrights, but concentrating mainly on the production of critical
and contextual writing about these plays and their potential
audiences. Special emphasis on the development and application
of theoretical approaches to intertribal theater, and on documenting
the intersection of intertribal theater with both Native and
non-Native communities. Some attention to the history and development
of Native theater troupes will be included in the course; students
will also seek out information on performance history and critical
reception of plays in production. As necessary, these readings
will be contextualized by instruction, research, and further
reading on history and cultures of Native American and First
Nations peoples and playwrights.
Texts:
Seventh Generation: an
Anthology of Native American Plays. Ed. Mimi Gisolfi
D’Aponte (1999) Theatre Communications Group
American Indian Theater in Performance: a Reader. Ed. Hanay
Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby (2000) UCLA
Stories of Our Way: an Anthology of American Indian Plays. Ed.
Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby (1999) UCLA
Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Tomson Highway (1989) Fifth
House
The Rez Sisters. Tomson Highway (1988) Fifth House
Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Craig S. Womack
(1999) University of Minnesota Press
Better-n-Indins. William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. (in manuscript)
Beyond the texts listed above, you will be expected to do research
on criticism of Native drama, as well as on performance history
and critical reception of performances.
Assignments:
Students will meet initially to read and discuss primary works
(plays) by Native playwrights; you will be expected to produce
an informal written response to each play we read and discuss.
This course runs concurrently with and beyond THE 480 Staging
Intertribal Theater (May 10-28, MTWRF 12:15-3pm in Cyrus Pavillion
Theatre), and students in ENG 542 will be encouraged to observe
and/or to work collaboratively with those in THE 480 on the production
of several scenes from plays by Native playwrights.
Based on reading and other experiences in the course, students
will propose term projects of their own design. Term projects
should focus on the production of theoretical, literary critical,
or contextualizing papers about the practice and reception of
intertribal theater, and its relationship to both Native and
non-Native communities.
Session 7: Three Week Schedule, June 7-25
ENG 529: Topics in Literature: American Poetry of the 1940s
Instructor: Visiting Assistant Professor K. Silem Mohammad
Monday-Friday, 9:15 AM - Noon
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: This course
is designed as a complement to the upcoming National
Poetry Foundation conference Poetries of the 1940s,
American and International, to be held June 23-27 in Orono.
We will read selected work (both verse and criticism)
by poets whose literary reputations were firmly established
by the 40s (e.g., William Carlos Williams, Wallace
Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore), as well as those
who were emerging or less well-known figures (e.g.,
Louis Zukofsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Robert Duncan). Topics
will include World War II, the waning and transformation
of modernism, new directions in African-American poetry,
and the emergence of a "postmodern" poetics
emphasizing proceduralism and other forms of experimentation.
The course will begin with a brief survey of significant
developments in American poetry in the early part of
the 20th century (Imagism, the Objectivists, etc.),
and will conclude with a glance at the legacy inherited
from the poets under study by innovative contemporary writers
(many of whom will be in attendance at the NPF conference).
At the end of the third week, students will attend the conference
for credit.
Texts: A course reader with a sampling of work by assorted poets
and a weblog with links to various sites and electronic texts.
Evaluation: One seminar presentation, one paper, and one conference
report (length and specific format to be determined).
Session 15
ENG 529: Topics in Literature
Instructor: Brinkley
Tuesday and Thursday, 6-8:30 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: To come
Texts: To be determined.
Evaluation: To be determined.
ENG 699 (Graduate Thesis)
This course is arranged through the Graduate Coordinator and
available to current graduate students in English only. Credits:
1-6
FALL 2004 GRADUATE COURSES
ENG 505 (01): Graduate Writing Workshop
Instructor: Ford
Tuesday and Thursday, 2-3:15 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: This is an intensive writing course at the advanced
level. Most of the work will take place in weekly workshop settings.
The instructor will also be available for individual tutorial
conferences. By the end of the semester each student is expected
to have completed a solid collection of short stories or poems
or to have made substantial progress on a novel.
Texts: None
Evaluation: Letter grade based on quality of work and participation.
ENG 529 (01): Studies in Literature: Utopia and Postmodernism
Instructor: Jacobs
Tuesday, 3:30-6 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: By its conservative critics, Utopia has been characterized
as a mode of thought at best naive, at worst totalitarian. Its
goals are said to be achievable only through the forceful imposition
of a static model of perfection upon a necessarily conflicted
and diverse humankind. While it is true that visions of utopia
are everywhere employed by individuals and groups hoping to impose
their versions of the good upon others, postmodern thought has
informed a new generation of utopian thinkers who address in
more ambiguous and complicated ways the ancient utopian question:
to what extent, and to what ends, do we humans create the realities
we inhabit? and how then should we live?
After reviewing the foundational
text of the genre, Thomas More's Utopia, we'll work
through a group of late-20th century theoretical and
literary texts that explore the dynamics of what Ernst
Bloch calls "The Principle of Hope."
Probable texts:
Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone
Calvino, Invisible Cities
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Delany, Trouble on Triton
Hadid and Schumacher, Latent Utopias
Jameson, Seeds of Time
Le Guin, The Dispossessed and/or Always Coming Home
Mayer, Utopia (1984)
More, Utopia (1518)
Selections from Bloch, Levitas, Moylan and others TBA.
Evaluation: Several short papers, weekly informal postings,
class presentations, a final research paper.
ENG 542 (01): Topics in Multicultural
American Literature: Stage
Left: Playwrights from the Margins
Instructor: Lukens
Monday, 3:10-5:40 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: The course will be an opportunity to work with drama
created by playwrights outside the dominant culture(s) of Anglo
North America. We will read plays by Native American, African
American, First Nations and Afro Canadian playwrights, and spend
serious effort on searching out secondary work in the field.
Emphasis on discovering ways to read across the borders of identity,
experience, and disciplinary boundaries.
Texts will include some of the following:
Beatrice Chancy, George Elliott Clarke
Black Theatre USA, ed.
Hatch & Shine
Red on Red, Craig Womack
Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, ed. Mimi Gisolfi
D'Aponte
Staging Coyote's Dream, ed.
Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays, ed. Geiogamah and
Darby
Where the Pavement Ends, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.
Evaluation: To be determined.
ENG 553 (01): Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Instructor: Brucher
Monday, 6-8:30 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: We'll read fairly widely in early modern drama and
scholarship. To gain a sense of this ambitious, popular, and
quirky drama, we'll explore changing dramatic conventions, particularly
in revenge and domestic tragedies, and in comedies of social
life. This course considers Shakespeare as a working dramatist
among a few of his major contemporaries and rivals. Oral presentations
and class discussions will define problems in interpretation
and test effects of the drama against critical principles and
cultural contexts
Texts: Plays (to be announced) by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd,
Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, and Ford, among others.
Evaluation: Two oral presentations, two short (4-5 pp.) papers
(perhaps based on the oral presentations), and a long (10 pp.)
paper.
ENG 556 (01): English
Romanticism
Instructor: Brinkley
Wednesday, 6-8:30 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate Standing or permission
Description: Studies in Romanticism with emphasis on the legacy
of English Romantic poetry and prose in post-romantic literature.
We will consider, for example, how Wordsworth's originality influenced
such writers as De Quincy, Baudelaire, Proust, and Walter Benjamin.
Or, to trace a different tradition, Whitman and Wallace Stevens.
Or, still another tradition, Woolf and Lawrence.
Texts: Still to be chosen.
Evaluation: To be determined.
ENG 570 (01): Critical Theory
Instructor: Friedlander
Wednesday, 3:10-5:40 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Description: This seminar
will look at a variety of forms of "close
reading," beginning with the practice as codified for
literary critics by Cleanth Brooks and radicalized by Paul
de Man, then moving backward and forward in time to consider
alternative versions produced within different disciplinary
contexts or with different conceptions of text as their basis.
Our aim will not be a history of criticism or exhaustive survey
of possibilities, but a close reading of specific instances
of close reading supplemented with a short number of programmatic
essays. To narrow our focus somewhat, we will limit ourselves
to critical and theoretical texts published after World War
Two.
Texts: Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading or The Rhetoric of Romanticism
and four others, probably to come from the following list:
Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture
of Conduct
George Bornstein, Material Modernism
Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, et al., Doing Cultural Studies: The
Story of the Sony Walkman
Russell J. Reising, Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American
Social Text
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
Peter Szondi, Celan Studies
Robyn Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop
Cultural Forms
Evaluation: Six brief responses papers (3 pgs. each) and an
extended close reading of a text of your own choosing (12-15
pgs.).
ENG 693(01): Teaching College Composition
Instructor: Burnes
Tuesday and Thursday, 11 AM -12:15 PM
Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing in English an appointment as
a Teaching Assistant in the Department of English
Description: A seminar in the theory and practice of teaching
ENG 101, College Composition. Seminar participants actively review
their understanding of the conventions and contexts of academic
writing, practice and critique ways of responding to student
writing and of planning sequences of writing assignments, and
begin to read in the discipline of composition studies. They
pay particular attention to current scholarship on processes
of writing, on reading and writing as functions of academic discourse
communities, and on the institutional setting of writing instruction.
Throughout the semester, they keep teaching journals, plan assignment
sequences with theoretical justifications and present these to
their peers, compile annotated bibliographies on topics of interest,
and write position papers on selected aspects of their teaching.
Required Texts: To be decided.
Evaluation: Teaching journal, assignment sequence with accompanying
rationale, annotated bibliography with critical introduction,
two position papers, and seminar presentation: both oral and
written.
ENG 697 (Independant
Reading) & ENG 699 (Graduate
Thesis)
These courses are arranged through the Graduate Coordinator
and are available to current graduate students in English only.
Credits: 1-6
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