Spring 2010 Course Offerings


English 618B
The Nonfiction Workshop
Kevin Oderman

The focus of our work this semester will be on the “personal essay.” Hard to define. Indeed, the umbrella term, creative nonfiction, suffers from the same generic muddledness. Not journalism, not fiction, not poetry, not expository prose. Still, nonfiction is porous, communes with all these things it is not and more. The personal essay doesn’t so much confine this mess as throw a loop into it, the persona of the writer, saying “I,” just as you were told not to in English 1 (or somewhere). We won’t sort out the generic difficulties. Better, I think, to exploit the possibilities of something not too formed, and therefore malleable to your hands.

That said, literary essays that are not personal are also welcome. While personal writing makes a good fit for a workshop, in that it requires less research, it is only one kind of creative nonfiction. If you have an expertise you’d like to employ or an interest you’d like to explore, you will be accommodated. Ditto for anyone writing a memoir.

The readings for this course, with one or two possible exceptions, will all be contemporary, even very contemporary, and will feature a wide variety of writing strategies. You will be encouraged to explore the territory, both in what you read and in what you write.

You should expect to produce, and then revise-until-finished, two essays for this class. MFA students in all genres are welcome. All that’s required is curiosity and enough seriousness to engage the course. Then we’ll see what you can make of it.

NB: About the professionals: I roll the reading list. If you took the class last year, you should expect about 80% of the work will be new to you. However, if you took the class two years ago, it will be closer to 50%


English 741
Seminar in American Studies
Michael Germana

Nineteenth Century American Literary Magazines

A cultural history of American magazines and an historical overview of the social and cultural forces that transformed the literary marketplace, this course takes a wide purview in its approach to American magazines. Beginning with the republican periodicals of the late eighteenth century and ending with pulp magazines of the early twentieth century (themselves products of the “magazine revolution” of the 1890s), this course will hone our primary researching skills while providing an overview of recent critical approaches to the study of American magazines. During the semester we will recontextualize canonical authors like Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman, who published their work in magazines like Putnam’s, Godey’s Lady’s Book,
and The United States Democratic Review, and examine how writers like Lydia Maria Child, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Charles Chesnutt found their niches in an evolving magazine marketplace. We will also view magazines in the historical, cultural, and social contexts they engaged in dialectical commerce, and illustrate how they articulated abolitionist ideology, participated in Reconstruction, gave rise to mass culture, and much more.

Each student who enrolls in this class will lead one class discussion, craft three response papers based upon independent primary research, and write a 20-25-page seminar paper of publishable quality.

Primary sources include: selections from antebellum publications like the Liberty Bell; Civil War magazine stories both Union and Confederate; African-American periodicals, including the Anglo-African Magazine, the Colored American and the Fredrick Douglass Paper; a myriad of periodicals accessible via the “Making of America” databases at Cornell and Michigan, which boast full text runs of magazines like Appleton’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the Overland Monthly, the Southern Literary Messenger, Putnam’s, and Scribner’s; and the vast collection of wordsearchable titles collected in the “American Periodicals Series.”

Secondary sources include: Frank Luther Mott’s History of American Magazines, David Paul Nord’s “A Republican Literature: Magazine Reading and Readers in Late-Eighteenth-Century New York,” Carolyn L. Karchar’s “Rape, Murder, and Revenge in ‘Slavery’s Pleasant Homes’: Lydia Maria Child’s Antislavery Fiction and the Limits of Genre,” and selections from Patricia Okker’s Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America, Ezra Greenspan’s Representative American Publisher: George Palmer Putnam, Kathleen Diffley’s Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876, Sue Rainey’s Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape, Richard Broadhead’s Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, Richard Ohmann’s Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century, Erin A. Smith’s Hard-Boiled: Working Class Readers and Pulp Magazines, among others.


English 669
Victorian Literature
Dr. John Lamb

Transatlantic Melodrama and the Melodramatic Body

This course will take as its starting point Peter Brooks’s claim in Body Work that the melodramatic body is a “body seized by meaning” as well as the claim in both literary and film studies that melodrama functions as a “matter of seeing” and that melodrama itself is a “body genre.” The course will commence with Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and end with Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, with a “postscript” devoted to the silent film melodrama of D.W. Griffith. In between, the course will focus on some of the following categories and texts:

  • Temperance Melodrama—The Drunkard and Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance”
  • Domestic Melodrama—Craik’s Olive or Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters and Alcott’s Behind a Mask
  • Urban Melodrama—Lippard’s The Quaker City and Gissing’s The Nether World
  • Race Melodrama—Uncle Tom’s Cabin (and illustrations in American and English editions), Boucicault’s The Octoroon, Craik’s “The Half-Caste,” Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and other anti-slavery poetry like Collins’ “The Slave Mother”
  • Imperial Melodrama or the Melodrama of Nation—Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha”
  • Male Adventure Melodrama—Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Haggard’s She

Secondary material will contain essays and selections on melodrama and transatlantic studies. One of the questions we will attempt to answer is why the term “melodrama,” central to the study of nineteenth-century British and Continental literature, has such little currency (outside the stage melodrama) in American studies.


C&I 694c:
Special Topics: Media Literacy in Education

This course will have three dimensions: 1) exploring research and common concerns related to children/adolescent engagement with media and popular culture; 2) understanding debates about identity formation and representation of culture in the media; and 3) exploring strategies for bringing the study of the media and popular culture into the K-12 curriculum.

Readings will include: Buckingham, D. (1996). Moving images: Understanding children’s emotional responses to television; McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding comics: The invisible art; selections from various media and cultural studies theorists (e.g., Adorno and Horkheimer, Althusser, Sholle and Densky, Jenkins).

Contact Dr. Sheila Benson (sheila.benson@mail.wvu.edu or 293-9445) for further information. Graduate-level students from across programs are welcome!



English 693L
Kirk Hazen

Style, sociolinguistically speaking . . .

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.” Oscar Wilde

“If I’m gonna go down, I’m gonna do it with style. You won’t hear me surrender, you won’t hear me confess cause you’ve left me with nothing, but I have worked with less.” Ani Difranco

Style is a mixed bag. Lots of people seem to want it. Many people use it to judge others. Everyone agrees it’s important, but it is notoriously difficult to define. In this course, we will strive to understand how language scholars have defined style and develop our own definitions. We will then apply these approaches in a stylerific research project. From all this work, students will have a theoretical framework for handling style for the rest of their careers.

If human languages were more like computer languages, we would not have to weave our way through semantic jungles. But human language has fundamental qualities of complexity, variability, and systematicity: It is unlike most things in the universe. The complex web of meanings which scholars attempt to explain with the term style too often leaves students discouraged and disengaged from the study of language. To avoid such a problem, this course focuses on practical answers for what style might be for human language. Correspondingly, assignments incorporate analyses of how style works in different contexts (e.g. private, public, academic, professional, legal).

Readings:

Nikolas Coupland. Style: Language Variation and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford, eds. Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (Cambridge
University Press, 2001)

Essays on eCampus.

Assignments:
Weekly online discussion of the readings
Two short papers
Research proposal
Research paper (including abstract,
paper, presentation, and bibliography)


ENGL 782
Current Directions in Literary Study: Race Theory in Black and White
Professor John Ernest

This course will be an introduction to race theory, with a focus primarily (though not exclusively) on constructions of “blackness” and “whiteness” in the United States. In the first half of the course, we will study primarily theories and historical/cultural studies of race in the United States, and in this way we will work to both understand and problematize the concept of race and the theories that address this concept. We’ll then turn to my recent attempts to apply race theory to a reconsideration of nineteenth-century African American literary history, and we’ll conclude with studies of three early-twentieth-century African American texts. Throughout the course, we’ll draw from African American poets to examine our studies of race theory through the lens provided by literature, while also thinking about possible applications of race theory to the study of literature. The reading load will be someplace between demanding and downright heavy; the discussions will, I hope, range from delicate to difficult to revelatory. Course assignments will include opportunities to explore how the issues are similar or different in regard to other constituencies or in different national settings. Assignments will include two oral presentations, regular informal writing assignments, and a seminar essay.

Required Texts (in order of appearance)

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. ISBN: 978-0809016280

Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993. ISBN: 978-0631180784

Sullivan, Shannon and Nancy Tuana, eds. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0801484636

Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN: 978-0231134545

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN: 978-0691130286

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN: 978-0674951914

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. ISBN: 978-0809016280

Gross, Ariela J. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0674031302

Roediger, David. How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. London: Verso, 2008. ISBN: 978-1844674343

Goldberg, David Theo. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Malden, MA Blackwell, 2009. ISBN: 978-0631219682

Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 978-0415938365

Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0807859834

Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Basic Books, 2002. ISBN: 978-1560254461

Schyuler, George. Black No More. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. ISBN: 978-1555530631

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. ISBN: 978-0813511702

Harper, Michael S. and Anthony Walton, eds. The Vintage Book of African American Poetry. New York: Vintage, 2000. ISBN: 978-0375703003

ENGL 680
Introduction to Literary Research
Tim Sweet
tsweet@wvu.edu

Overview

English 680, Introduction to Literary Research, is designed to introduce first-year master’s degree students to the kinds of research and writing they will do in academia. While research and writing skills will continue to be developed in other courses, this course provides an explicit foundation for understanding the expectations for and forms of research in literary studies. The Graduate Program Committee has specified that the course cover three main areas:

Research methods: locating, evaluating, and incorporating information from a variety of primary and secondary sources

Genres of academic writing: understanding the expectations conventions of academic genres

Textual studies: understanding the technologies of the transmission of texts

This term, we will use Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and the Declaration of Independence as common texts from which to work on these areas. You will also work on an independent project culminating in a conference-length paper on a topic of your choice.

Assignments

Library research assignments
Critical edition of a text (short excerpt including annotations)
Assessment of recent directions in scholarship in a specific field
Conference-paper sequence (abstract, annotated bibliography, list of research tools, paper, oral presentation)

Texts

James L. Harner. Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies. 5th edition. MLA, 2008. ISBN: 9780873528085

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. 1955. U of North Carolina P, 1996. ISBN: 9780807845882

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. Frank Shuffelton. Penguin, 1999. ISBN: 0140436677

William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. 5th edition. MLA, 2009. ISBN: 9781603290401



ENGL 606
Humanities Computing
Instructor: Brian Ballentine
E-mail: brian.ballentine@mail.wvu.edu
Office: Colson 211

Technology education is not a technical subject. It is a branch of the humanities.—Neil Postman
The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

Description:

This course begins by subscribing to Postman’s claim that the contexts and consequences of technology matter just as much, if not more, than technology itself. In his Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, Stuart Selber has picked up Postman’s critique and has attempted to sketch (in non-prescriptive terms) a portrait of the ideal multiliterate student. He organizes the portrait around what he terms functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies. Mirroring Selber, we will be using these categories as a loose framework for examining how we use (functional), question (critical), and produce (rhetorical) technology.

Humanities Computing is designed with Professional Writing & Editing (PWE) students in mind but the theory and practice embedded in this course are applicable broadly. Technical expertise is not necessary, only a willingness to learn. Employment opportunities admittedly have an influence on the course’s strategies especially in regard to the selection of functional literacies. Students will leave with exposure to Photoshop, Dreamweaver (HTML), Flash, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XML, as well as specific Web 2.0 technology. Many of these technologies are tools of the trade for professional and technical writers, technical editors, web content developers, visual designers, and communication and new media specialists.

Along with these select functional literacies, we will address Selber’s other two literacies by exploring the social, cultural, political, legal, and ethical dynamics of digital spaces. The pursuit of critical and rhetorical literacies will lead us to current scholarship on issues of ownership and authorship including a look at current debates surrounding intellectual property (specifically copyright) and the internet. We will also be introduced to the open source phenomenon (with an eye on distinctions between open versus proprietary software) and the Free Culture movement.



ENGL 618
Emily Mitchell

In this class you will share your own original works of fiction with a workshop of your peers. You will be submitting between two and four short stories (or novel excerpts) for reading and critique. You’ll be encouraged to revise previously-submitted works for rereading later in the semester.

The class will also include the reading and discussion of recent and contemporary authors. We will be studying published texts from the perspective of craft, which is to say we will treat the author as very much alive, if not always well, and assume his or her intention shapes the texts she or he produces. We will be asking what we can take (or reject) from these stories to inform and improve our own practice as writers.

Authors we’ll read may include: Christine Schutt, Junot Diaz, Percival Everett, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Graver, Michael Chabon, Geraldine Brooks, Skip Horack and Alexander Hemon.



English 634:
Metadrama and Metatheatre
Ryan Claycomb

Throughout their history in English, drama and theatre have exercised a self-reflexive interest the possibilities and responsibilities of playwright, actor, and audience. For example, at the center of Hamlet we find a series of theatrical enactments that doubly stage a series of potentials for and anxieties about theatre itself—its ability to prick the conscience of a king, and to lead its hero potentially into madness. And from medieval morality plays through to postmodern pastiche, we can find actors breaking through fourth walls, plotlines penetrating narrative frames, and playwrights staging themselves and their audiences in powerful and compromised positions.

This course will consider a variety of examples of meta-dramatic moments in scripts, concentrating primarily on the 20th-century stage, and to a lesser degree on the English renaissance stage, while we read theory and criticism on the various concerns of meta-fiction, meta-drama, and meta-theatre. Playwrights will range from Shakespeare to Suzan-Lori Parks, from Beaumont and Fletcher to Brecht. Assigned work will likely include response papers, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper.