Spring 2016 600-Level Courses
ENG 631: Reading David Foster Wallace
John Young
Sec. 201
Wednesday 6:30-9
This graduate seminar will meet during the spring semester, Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar. In
an ideal world, we would read all of Wallace’s fiction and non-fiction. In the actual world, we
will settle for reading Infinite Jest, selections from Wallace’s stories and essays, and his
unfinished novel, The Pale King, a title conferred after his death for the project Wallace typically
referred to as “The Long Thing”—a semi-ironic appellation given its relatively slender albeit,
again, unfinished status alongside the “encyclopedic behemoth” of the 1,079-page predecessor;
along with a sprinkling of scholarship on Wallace and contemporary fiction, a category which is
to some degree curiously undeveloped, considering DFW’s nearly unquestioned reputation as
one of the most influential and original fiction writers of his generation, but which will
nonetheless provide plenty of grist for the seminar-paper mill without, let us hope, sliding along
in sciolism.1 Wrt2 previous knowledge of Wallace’s work, none is required. If the prospect of
reading Wallace for the first time gives rise to the howling fantods for you, you should note that
the best way to do so is likely in the safe environment of a graduate seminar. If you are already
an experienced Wallace reader—getting all the jokes here; rest assured at least some in the class
itself will be funnier—you will be well aware of the benefits of rereading Wallace’s fulgurant
insights into and exemplification of the information overload that has come to seem systemic in
much of 21st-century American culture.3
. Apparently one of Wallace’s favorite words, or at least one found circled in his dictionary.
Wallace’s typical abbreviation for “with respect to.”
3.
Obviously it would be the height of reductiveness (not to mention reductionism) to regard
Infinite Jest or any of Wallace’s work as simply or primarily responding to contemporary
culture’s supersaturation with information. In addition, his fictions and essays respond
throughout to popular culture, from rap to pleasure cruises to David Lynch to Roger Federer and
beyond; to Wittgensteinian philosophy, both in terms of the limits of language as examined in
the Tractatus and of the language games as pursued in the Investigations; to poststructuralism,
especially the Derridean notion of the supplement but much else besides; to the cultural and
social roles of and causes for addiction, from the old-fashioned pharmaceutical kind and its later
innovations to figurative but no less real addictive behaviors; and even to the insights made
possible through sustained concentration in the face of unrelenting boredom, the subject of much
of Pale King, but in a much more complicated and interesting way than it might sound like from
that all-too-quick sketch.
1
2.
ENG 632: Taming the Land: Wilderness & The Frontier in Early American Literature
Dr. Jana Tigchelaar
Section 201
M 4:00-6:20
This course will examine literary portrayals of the American landscape, using notions like
“wilderness,” “frontier,” and “region” as lenses through which to examine the formation of
national identity during the colonial, early republic, and nineteenth-century time periods. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European-American settlers saw the wilderness as a
spiritual and physical void which had to conquered and civilized in the name of Christianity and
progress. Later, pioneers no longer needed to battle wilderness for day-to-day survival, and the
land became a potentially valuable resource for human consumption—and exploitation. And in
the nineteenth century, depictions of regional communities worked at times in opposition to
dominant national narratives of land use and masculinity.
Our emphasis will be on texts portraying or examining wilderness, the frontier, and regionalism,
including Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers,
Carolyn Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Maria
Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the
Pointed Firs. We will examine our primary texts through multiple critical lenses, including
ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and feminism. We will also briefly survey canonical critical works
by Henry Nash Smith, Annette Kolodny, Roderick Nash, Lawrence Buell, and others.
English 636: Dante and Medieval Europe
Gwenyth Hood
T 4:00-6:20
CH 339
This course centers on Dante Alighieri’s famous Divine Comedy, an epic dream-vision in three
parts, interpreting the universe--past, present and future--through the perspective of one soul,
Dante. As author and protagonist, Dante makes himself an Everyman, yet he is still an
individual with particular tastes, quirks and ambitions. Love, however, is his ultimate
motivation, and desire for his beloved Beatrice impels him to follow the poet Virgil through Hell
and Purgatory, until he again meets Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. From there, Beatrice guides
him through Paradise. John Ciardi’s translation and commentary will be our focal text. Dante’s
youthful love poetry, particularly, La Vita Nuova (The New Life) provides further context for his
ideas, as do other medieval poems, such as Gottfried of Strasburg’s Tristan and the Middle
English dream-vision Pearl. Modern response is provided by C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.
Class activities involve discussions and freewrites, two short essays and one longer research
paper on a subject of the student’s choice.
ENG 640: Composition Pedagogy
Dr. Kelli Prejean
Section 201
Wednesdays 4-6:20
PR: ENG 560 or permission from instructor
This course is for students interested in teaching college composition, or what is commonly
referred to as first-year writing. The course will prepare beginning writing teachers for the
practical, pedagogical, and rhetorical considerations of teaching academic reading and writing to
beginning college students. Students taking this course should expect to both read about and
apply best practices to the development of their own teaching materials, and they will become
knowledgeable of the practice of teaching by observing experienced instructors as well as
participating in various teaching demonstrations during the semester. By the end of the course,
students will have accumulated knowledge and resources to put together a comprehensive
portfolio that demonstrates readiness for teaching. More specifically, students will learn how to
design and scaffold writing assignments, how to respond to student drafts, and how to assess
student writing.
ENG 660: Literary Theory (“Feminist Film Theory”)
Walter Squire
Section 201
R 4-6:20
This course will expose students to the history and complexities of Anglo-American feminist
film theory over the past four decades. Particularly, the class will focus upon images of women,
the gaze, female/lesbian spectatorship, the body, and ethnicity/race. Representative theorists will
include Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, Teresa De Lauretis, Mary Ann Doane, Molly Haskell,
bell hooks, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, and
Linda Williams. Students will view documentaries, melodramas, musicals, science fiction,
thrillers, and horror films which correspond to theorists’ articles, and some attention will be paid
to notable women film directors. The two required textbooks for the class are Feminism and
Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, and Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham.
Assignments will include viewing responses to assigned films, a class presentation, and a
researched analysis of a film which applies or contests a specific feminist theory.