Optional Content Course Descriptions, Fall 2009

 

 

Below you will find the course descriptions for Optional Content courses in the English Department for Fall ; additions and updates will be posted as soon as they are made available.

 

To read all of the course descriptions for the department, go to the current issue of the Undergraduate Bulletin or to TitanWeb. For more information about these courses--or about *any* English courses you are interested in taking--do not hesitate to contact the instructor named in the course listing in TitanWeb, or contact the English office.

 

 

Selected Course Descriptions Fall 2009

 

English 226-001 Modern American Literature: 19 th- & 20 th- Century American Lit

Instructor: Robert Feldman

The purpose of this course is to gain an understanding and an appreciation of a number of major works by well-known modern American writers.  Students will examine American literature between the post-Civil War era and the present.  The literary genres of study will consist of short stories, poetry, novels, and dramas.


English 226-002: Modern American Literature: Stillness,Violence, & Wonder

Instructor: Laura Jean Baker

Using Charles Baxter's essay "Stillness" and Flannery O'Connor's essay "A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable"as ways of understanding how violence, and alternatively stillness, function in contemporary literature, we will engage in an ongoing dialogue about writing effective fiction that uses aggression between characters as narrative necessities. At what point in the writing process does violence become gratuitous, and in what way can stillness and silence either complement or supplant violence for the sake of producing, within readers, a sense of joyous wonder.

 

 

English 226-004, Modern American Literature: Writing the Road

Instructor: staff

The United States as a nation has always been in motion.  Native Americans made use of vast trade networks even before the first Europeans learned of the continent’s existence.  Once they stumbled upon it, America became a destination for wave upon wave of migrants.  As a result, the original inhabitants were forced to relocate, a very different sort of travel than that experienced by those who came willingly to the so-called New World.  Further, travel was imposed upon countless Africans, kidnapped and brought in chains to America.

The twentieth century witnessed many new and varied forms of travel, fuelled by ever new means of transportation, from the automobile to the airplane to the virtual travel provided by the Internet. 

Beyond mere physical travel, America has always prided itself, rightly or wrongly, as a society within which individuals can move freely among socio-economic classes, depending on the will to work.

In this class, we will examine and analyze a number of texts from the twentieth century, each of which deals with literal or figurative travel.  While this trope is the organizing concept of the class, we will explore each novel on its own terms and in its own historical context."

 

English 228-001 H: Modern American Lit: 19 th- & 20 th- Century American Lit

Instructor: Robert Feldman

The purpose of this course is to gain an understanding and an appreciation of a number of major works by well-known modern American writers.  Students will examine American literature between the post-Civil War era and the present.  The literary genres of study will consist of short stories, poetry, novels, and dramas.

 

English 324/524-001, Gender in Literature (OC): Women and the Environment

Instructor: H. Jordan Landry

This course focuses on American representations of women and the environment. In particular, through the exploration of novels, theory, literary criticism and historical essays, we will study a vast range of perspectives on women’s shifting relationship to the land. From the beginning of this nation’s history, writers here and abroad, most often male, associated the “purity” of the land, its unspoiled beauty, with a woman’s virginity. And, historically, the destruction of the land, whether through mining, clear cutting, or land fills, has been linked to the rape of women. Thus, women equaled nature, men culture. In contrast, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, women writers began to represent women as the means to saving the land and, often, the people living on it. In this course, we will investigate American women writers’ reactions to these long-standing symbolic connections. We will examine women’s views on such issues as the significance of goddess and earth-based religions; the treatment of animals, women, the poor, people of color, plants and the environment by corporations; the impact of globalization on food, water, waste and wages; and the growth of a variety of movements to advocate for the survival of the earth and all those dependent on it. Taking its cue from ecofeminism, the course emphasizes the analysis of intersecting oppressions as well as interlocking dimensions of difference. In other words, discussions and readings will foreground the interplay between –isms (from speciesism to racism to sexism and beyond) and the many facets of identity that come together to make up the self. One of the course’s main objectives is to explore in-depth the pleasures and dangers of thinking about women and the land.


English 332/532-001, Early Women Writers

Instructor: Julie Shaffer

In this course, we will look at novels by a number of different women of 18th and 19th century Britain to gain an idea of what struck them as concerns, whether it be to celebrate what they found good about their lives or to challenge what they thought needed to change.

 

English 342/542-001, Lit of Romantic Era (OC): Romantic Nature(s)

Instructor: Christine Roth

One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can. -- William Wordsworth
The concept of "nature" is one of the most central and most diverse concepts in Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Indeed, some scholars have registered "no fewer than two hundred meanings which are attached to the word 'nature' in the eighteenth century" ( Berlin 75). While this course offers a fairly comprehensive introduction to Romanticism in nineteenth-century England—focusing on those works by major canonized authors that any Romanticist is still expected to know, some works from the currently expanding Romantic canons, and a taste of the most recent scholarship and disputes—we will begin our weekly discussions by considering the treatments of "nature" in all its forms and the connections between ecology, subjectivity, culture and literature in the assigned readings.  Creative writers may substitute selected critical assignments with creative ones.

 

English 350/550-381: Travel Writing in Nicaragua

In this January Interim course, join Friends of Nicaragua—a nonprofit organization improving lives through sustainable community development and cultural exchange—in a two-week service-learning experience at the Women in Action Project in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. In addition to assisting Women in Action with education, health and food projects, immerse yourself in Nicaraguan family life and visit scenic and cultural destinations around the country while studying how to bridge cultures through travel writing. You may alternately register for this course as English 405 (Creative Writing) or English 302 (Advanced Composition for the Humanities). If you’d like to participate in this course, you must apply through the Office of International Education. Please contact Douglas Haynes in the English Department with questions.

 

English 351/551-001, Medieval Literature (OC): Medieval Religious Discourse

Instructor: Margaret Hostetler

Description: This course will focus on the role of religious discourse in medieval texts. We will look at a variety of texts—some of which focus directly on religious issues, some of which simply assume a religious norm as background, and some of which seem to question or parody religious belief. The goal is to see the flexibility and dialogic nature of medieval religious discourses, including the sincere, the extreme, the perfunctory, and the critical. Readings will include The Letters of Abelard and Heloise; Lais of Marie de France; Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, Second Nun’s Tale, and Prioress’s Tale; The Dream of the Rood; The Life of Christina of Markyate; and excerpts from Dante’s Divine Commedy and from a variety of other texts both historical and literary.

 

English 354/544-001, Studies in Travel, Lit & Culture (OC): Encounters With the Foreign

Instructor: Douglas Haynes

This course will examine books of literary nonfiction that dramatize the issues contemporary writers confront when they venture into foreign cultures, countries, and states of mind. In particular, course readings will deal with how literary journeys and cross-cultural encounters are shaped by different forms of travel and the forces of migration, political violence, globalization, and tourism. Students will write critical responses and personal essays that narrate interactions with the unfamiliar, with the goal of recognizing both the promise and problems of travel narratives today.

 

English 357/557-001, Literature & Other Arts (OC): Images of Indians in Children’s Literature

Instructor: Miriam Schacht

A vast number of children's books and films deal with American Indian themes, and many perpetuate stereotypical views of Native peoples.

Students in this course will examine representations of American Indians in literature for children and young adults, including those texts that have shaped their own world views. The goal of this course is for students to develop a critical awareness of stereotypes about race and culture in children's books and films. Students will also consider how to maintain this critical viewpoint in the future, addressing the real-world ramifications of these ideas for all adults and especially for future educators.

 

English 371/571-001, African American Women Writers (OC): The Evolution of a Lit Tradition

Instructor: Norlisha Crawford

In this survey course, students will read seminal literary texts, written by African-American females, who have helped to build African-American intellectual traditions of racial uplift and challenged stereotypes regarding gender roles over time in the United States.

 

English 387/587-001, Special Topics Rhetoric & Composition (OC): Rhetoric of Laughter

Instructor: staff

Rhetoric traditionally has been defined as the art of persuasion, a study with classical roots in Athens and Rome. Recently, some theorists defined rhetoric as the study of how meaning is made, of not just what is said but how it is said. This course will study the role of laughter in rhetoric. First, we will establish a basic understanding of rhetoric and will study theories (ranging from classical to modern) of why we laugh and what our laughter might mean. Then, we will use our insights to examine key moments in texts that invite readers to laugh as well as moments of characters’ laughter in literary classics as well as pop culture artifacts (i.e., film, advertisements, lyrics, etc.). We will consider how these moments open a range of meanings and interpretations. Through our studies, we will become more thoughtfully aware of what laughter might mean and will become keener observers of how meaning is communicated.

 

English 396/596-001, Literature & History (OC): The Great Depression

Instructor: Don Dingledine

This course will explore the complex relationship between historical events and literary texts by focusing on the Great Depression. The stock market crash of 1929 brought an end to the optimism, exuberance, and excess of the Roaring Twenties. With as many as 15 million American workers out of a job by 1933, the Great Depression was a time of evictions, breadlines, and mass migrations. Their faith in capitalism and rugged individualism severely shaken, Americans asked probing questions about the responsibilities of a government to its citizens and of individuals to each other. The role of art in society also became a subject of debate. Could individual artistic expression give voice to the collective experiences of the masses? Did the irony, distance, and often obscure complexity of Modernism make it an inappropriate vehicle for expressing the hopes and fears of ordinary Americans? How might art document profound despair and suffering without trivializing it or turning it into spectacle? We will engage such questions by reading primary and secondary historical texts alongside literary works such as Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money, Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

 

English 405/605/-001, Creative Writing (OC): Hybrid Narratives

Instructor: Laura Jean Baker

In this course we will explore the extent to which memoir writing and poetry is fictional and the extent to which short fiction and poetry are autobiographical. In exploring these blurry boundaries among genres, we will also read and write narratives that purposefully defy categorization by genre: pieces that are poetic, autobiographical, fictional -- imaginative and factual -- all at once.

 

English 481-001, Seminar English Studies (OC): Dostovesky, God & the Devil

Instructor: Duke Pesta

Shaped by his own terrifying childhood experiences and a horrific jail term in Siberia, Dostoevsky came to understand that suffering and doubt are necessary precursors to any meaningful faith in God. He conveys these insights in novels and short stories that are among the most philosophical, entertaining, and compelling ever written. In Notes From a Dead House, Dostoevsky provides a brutally factual account of his life in prison, where he encountered remorseless murderers who nevertheless wept like babies before the cross on Easter Sunday. Crime and Punishment combines a compelling murder mystery with deep insights into the nature of crime, guilt, and redemption. In The Idiot, Dostoevsky exposes the hypocrisy of Christian Europe by introducing a Christ-figure, Prince Myshkin, into Russian society and demonstrating how quickly he's destroyed by the very Christians he came to save. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s greatest work, he provides the most compelling reasons ever assembled why God cannot exist, and then demolishes them one by one, offering instead a profound affirmation of God and the human spirit. 

 

English 481-002, Seminar English Studies (OC): Wisconsin Writers

Instructor: Ron Rindo

An intensive examination of Wisconsin’s literary landscape, which features well-known writers such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Thorton Wilder, as well as lesser-known figures such as Anish’nabe storytellers, poet Lorine Niedecker, and fiction writers Susan Engberg and Lorrie Moore. Together, we will read, discuss, and write about the work of several Wisconsin writers, and then students will develop final capstone writing projects focused on Wisconsin writers of their choice.

 

English 710 (Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov)

Shaped by his own terrifying childhood experiences and a horrific jail term in Siberia, Dostoevsky came to understand that suffering and doubt are the necessary precursors to any meaningful faith in God. Matched only by Shakespeare in his knowledge of human nature, Dostoevsky’s novels are among the most philosophical, entertaining, and compelling ever written. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s greatest work, he provides the most compelling reasons ever assembled why God cannot exist, and then demolishes them one by one, offering instead a profound affirmation of God and the human spirit. The course will emphasize Dostoevsky’s unique and contrarian positions vis a vis the other great thinkers of nineteenth-century Europe, specifically Nietzsche and Marx. 



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