Courses
LIT 2110, Introduction to Literature
The Rules of the Game
Each day we’re bombarded by dozens or hundreds of written texts,
from freeway signs to designer clothing labels to English course descriptions.
Our usual impulse, when we don’t just ignore them, is to derive
whatever useful information we can get from these texts and move on.
Sometimes, however, we have the privilege of discussing more enduring
texts with other interested people, pausing to think critically about
what these texts mean, about how we work with them to produce a range
of possible meanings, and about why these meanings might make a positive
difference in our everyday lives. In this class, in addition to mastering
a set of necessary literary terms, you can expect to become proficient
in the practice known as “close reading,” in which the critic
s l o w s d o w n in order to pay the closest possible attention to
the effects a writer has achieved by putting words on a page in a certain
way. You can also count on testing your own ways of reading against
those of other students and critics, improving your skills in the process.
By learning to think and write critically about poetry, drama, and fiction,
you won’t just enhance your appreciation of books, but will become
a smarter and more active inhabitant of the world of language. (Plan
on a moderate reading load, three papers, two presentations, and a short
final exam).
LIT 2932, Themes and Types
Wild Encounters: Uncaging the Beast in Modern Literature
Why do “trained” wild animals turn on their human masters?
Why do good pets go bad? What happens when humans give expression to
“the beast within”? Our airwaves and movie houses in the
U. S. have long been full of sensationalistic or simply trivial answers
to problems like these. Meanwhile, generations of writers and theorists
have been dealing with animal behavior, human/animal interactions, and
questions of human/animal identity in ways that challenge our most fundamental
assumptions about who we are, what—or who—“they”
are, and how “we” ought to be treating “them.”
In this class we will not just encounter some of the most famous beasts
in modern literature, from Melville’s white whale to Faulkner’s
Old Ben to James Dickey’s nightmarish backwoodsmen in Deliverance,
but will frame our encounters with them by means of critical engagement
with leading animal rights philosophers, biologists, ecocritics and
ecofeminists, and other participants in the growing field of what might
be called animal studies. Rather than advocating a particular political
agenda, our goal will be to create an open and informed dialogue about
the functions nonhuman animals and “beastliness” serve in
American culture, and, more broadly, about the roles literature plays
in helping humankind make sense of its place in a world full of other
life forms.
AML 3041, Periods in Later American Literature
Placing American Literature
For many years, questions relating to the functions of place, region,
landscape, and built and unbuilt environments in literature were largely
relegated to scholarly discussions of “setting.” In an influential
1942 essay Eudora Welty, for instance, describes place as one of the
“lesser angels” that “watch over the racing hand of
fiction.” What really mattered in literature, Welty and many other
authors and critics argued, were elements like character development,
plot, symbolism, and other explicitly anthropocentric but also seemingly
placeless and ahistorical concerns; the idea was to transcend issues
of mere local, regional, or even national interest in search of what,
in one truly international context (the 1950 Nobel Prize ceremony),
Welty’s fellow Mississippian William Faulkner called the “old
universal truths” of the “human heart in conflict with itself.”
To identify oneself and one’s art too closely with a particular
place (especially with regions historically considered strange or “backward,”
like the U.S. South) was to court misunderstanding and marginalization
both in the minds of common readers and critics and on the shelves of
bookstores and libraries. The so-called globalization of the world’s
economies and, with them, its languages and cultures, greatly contributed
to the sense that the particularities of place in literature, as in
daily experience, were on their way out, minor victims of our collective
march to a global future of boundless convenience and prosperity.
And yet allegiance to specific places, as to the concept of place
in general, has stubbornly refused to die, in part because modernity’s
utopian dreams of placelessness have been shown to create a host of
disastrous and often unforeseen consequences for local human communities
and ecosystems. Literature and literary studies have become more and
more concerned with the fate of languages, lifeways, and human populations
and nonhuman species that have been dislocated and otherwise endangered
by the forces of globalization. At the same time, the explosive growth
of literature and literary scholarship by members of formerly silenced
minority communities in the U.S. has forced mainstream literary criticism
to grapple with such difficult place-related questions as, What does
it mean to inhabit stolen property? What responsibility might the current
inhabitants of a place have to atone for genocide, forced internment,
environmental devastation, and other atrocities committed by their ancestors—or
unrelated previous inhabitants? How do present constructions of place
(both physical and intellectual) perpetuate, or possibly remediate,
past injustices? How do literary devices and values like “metaphor”
and “irony,” along with such literary topoi as the “Garden
of Eden” and “cyberspace,” shape our perceptions of
and behaviors towards our environments? How does a region’s sense
of itself change as new waves of immigration upset old demographic—even
spiritual—balances? What does it mean in the twenty-first century
to be a Floridian? a Southerner? a Midwesterner? an American?
As up-to-the-minute as these issues might seem, and as vociferously
as writers like Welty and Faulkner might have denied the centrality
to their work both of real places and of something like what Harvard
scholar Lawrence Buell has called the “environmental imagination,”
the commitment to interrogating “place” that underwrites
these questions is actually nothing new. The writers we will encounter
in this class—Faulkner and Welty among them—are all positively
obsessed with similar problems, from the role nonhuman nature plays
in an unsatisfied woman’s struggle to find artistic and sexual
autonomy (The Awakening) to a Mississippi family’s tragically
comic attempts to take their dead wife/mother to the cemetery where
her birth family is buried (As I Lay Dying) to a Native American veteran’s
quest to bring healing to his own stricken life and that of his village
(Ceremony). In examining these authors’ often tangled approaches
to real places and to notions of local, regional, and national ownership
and belonging, we will not only gain a richer understanding of the workings
of American literature and criticism, but will begin to come to terms
with some of the most vexing problems relating to where, and how, we
live today.
Required reading: Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Norton Critical Ed.);
Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Penguin); Jean Toomer, Cane (Norton
Critical Ed.); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage Int’l);
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (New Directions); Jack Kerouac,
On the Road (Penguin); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Plume); Leslie
Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin).
LIT 4934/5930
The Text in the Garden: American Environmental Writing and Ecocriticism
The Text in the Garden: American Environmental Writing and Ecocriticism
aims to enhance students' understanding of American writers' literary
responses to their nonhuman and built environments in a number of ways.
First of all, the class will introduce students to some of the most
provocative environmentally-oriented nonfiction, fiction, and poetry
written in the U.S. since the appearance of Thoreau's Walden
in 1854. Often relegated to the corners of bookstores and the margins
of English departments as "nature writing," the tradition
Thoreau helped usher in has included and inspired a vast number of books
that do far more than celebrate mystical communion with trees and rocks.
Rather, the best environmental writing—including Walden—raises
profound questions about the nature of language, about what it means
to be human in a world full of other species, and about the functions
of literature and other cultural productions in times of ecological
crisis. To help make sense of these issues we will approach our primary
readings from a set of vantage points afforded by the growing school
of thought generally known as ecocriticism. And by reading and writing
ecocritically about environmental literature—in other words, by
ourselves practicing ecocriticism—we will strengthen our ability
to contribute in clear and forceful ways to ongoing debates on the present
condition and possible futures of our planet.
LIT 4930/5934
Faulkner and Film
You've probably heard something about the novels and short stories
of William Faulkner (1897-1962), the high school dropout from Oxford,
Mississippi who grew into one of the undisputed giants of twentieth-century
literature—and one of the most challenging and exciting authors
you'll ever encounter. Innumerable scholarly articles and books have
been written about his fiction, which is taught regularly in high school
and college classes around the world. Much less attention has been paid,
however, to Faulkner's long association with the movies, from his early
experience viewing films like the racist epic The Birth of a Nation
(1915) to his work as a screenwriter on nearly four dozen Hollywood
features over a series of stays in California that totaled roughly ten
years. What impact did this extensive Hollywood experience, and the
new ways of seeing ushered in by the rise of film in general, have on
Faulkner's writing? How did the writer Faulkner's modernist aesthetics
and obsession with questions of family and national history, race, gender,
environment, regional identity, community life, and privacy translate
to the movie screen? What do literature and film gain, lose, and contribute
to each other through the kinds of "translation" required
to bridge these different technologies of expression? Students can expect
to learn more not only about Faulkner's life and written work, but about
the fascinating connections between two art forms that have come to
dominate how we perceive and structure reality today.
Requirements: Regular attendance and serious engagement with both the
books and articles we read and the films we watch, as demonstrated through
quality classroom participation (at least one problem or question raised
by each student per class), one formal presentation (8-10 minutes),
and two papers (3-4 and 5-6 pages). Graduate students will also give
research presentations on Faulkner scholarship, and will learn how to
create a conference proposal.
Texts: By Faulkner (all Vintage International [New York] editions):
The Sound and the Fury, 1929; Sanctuary, 1931; If
I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms], 1939; Intruder in
the Dust, 1948 ; and other short stories and texts to be posted
as Adobe documents on our Blackboard site. By Gene D. Phillips: Fiction,
Film, and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1988).
AML 6455, Special Topics
Mapping American Modernism
This course will concern itself with—and participate in—at
least three modes of modernist literary/critical cartography at once.
The first of these modes embraces current efforts in the academy to
understand U. S. literary modernism in its transnational, hemispheric,
and even global contexts, to interrogate and redefine the traditional
coordinates of the “American”—perhaps even to rename
“American literature”…something else! Critics to be
discussed include Donald Pease, Debra Cohn, Walter Benn Michaels, Amy
Kaplan, and others. A second kind of mapping involves a critical attempt
to redefine American modernism as, in large (and largely forgotten)
part, both a reaction to the popularity of earlier regionalist genres
and conventions and a struggle to patch together new and more viable
regionalisms from the fragments of the old, even as what would become
the leading school of American modernism rejected close affiliation
with particular geographical locations—beyond, of course, New
York, London, and Paris. The third and most central subject of the course
will be the drive among a wide spectrum of literary artists to employ
modernist techniques in constructing conceptual maps of such rapidly
changing American territories, literal and figurative, as questions
of regional identity, the relationship between urban and rural areas
and populations, the ever-heated debate over immigration and Americanization,
and constructions of public and private space in the post-World War
I and post-Great Migration American city and countryside. How did Whitman’s
literary descendants contribute to the “gigantic and generous
treatment” of the United States that he encouraged them, in 1855,
to produce? How does modernist form both reflect and shape not just
the reader’s experience of modernity but the concrete facts of
modern life itself? What sense can we make of our American modernists’
literary maps in a post-post-modernist era? Answering these questions
will help students construct durable conceptual maps of their own in
the form of new understandings of literature, exciting research projects,
and path-breaking essays.
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