Department of english
Graduate course
Descriptions
Fall 2014
For more information about the Department of English
visit our Website at
http://english.buffalo.edu
ENG 501 – INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
PROF. CARRIE BRAMEN
Tuesday 9:30-12:10, Clemens 1032
Registration Numbers: (A) 18928 (B) 21848
ENG 502 – INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY
PROF. MING QIAN MA
Wednesday 9:30-12:10, Clemens 1032
Registration Number: 20041
ENG 545 – LITERATURE OF FIRST WORLD WAR
PROF. STACY HUBBARD
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A1) 23595 (B1) 23596
ENG 545 – MODERN LITERATURE
PROF. JOSEPH VALENTE
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A2) 23597 (B2) 23598
ENG 547 – FICTION WRITING COLLOQUIUM
PROF. CHRISTINA MILLETTI
Wednesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 1032
Registration Number: 23636
ENG 549 – POETRY WRITING COLLOQUIUM
PROF. MYUNG MI KIM
Wednesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 23637
ENG 576 – LITERATURE & SOCIETY (TRANSLATION)
PROF. WALTER HAKALA
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 1032
Registration Numbers: (A) 23606 (B) 23607
ENG 586 – CRIME FICTION
PROF. DAVID SCHMID
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 22501 (B) 22502
ENG 599 – PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
PROF. ALEX REID
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 18455
ENG 609 – STUDIES IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
PROF. KENNETH DAUBER
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 23609 (B) 23610
ENG 645 – MULTIMODALITY IN THE NOVEL
PROF. JOSEPH CONTE
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A ) 23614 (B) 23615
ENG 651 – THEORIES OF FEELING: AFFECT THEORY
PROF. RACHEL ABLOW
Friday 12:30-3:10, CLEMENS 1032
Registration Numbers: (A) 23616 (B) 23617
ENG 656 – SOCIAL DOCUMENTATION
PROF. BRUCE JACKSON
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 610
Registration Numbers: (A) 23620 (B) 23621
ENG 698/APY 515 - CROSSCULTURAL POETICS
PROF. DENNIS TEDLOCK
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 23622 (B) 23623
ENG 501 – INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARLY METHODS
PROF. CARRIE BRAMEN
Tuesday 9:30-12:10, Clemens 1032
Registration Numbers: (A) 18928 (B) 21848
All new students in the English Department’s Masters Program are required to take
English 501, which is designated Introduction to Scholarly Methods. This course is in turn
divided into two sections, A and B, which have different formats: the A section is a conventional
seminar, whereas the B section does not have a common meeting time, but instead consists in
individual advisement tailored to your specific needs. All new M.A. Program students must
enroll in the A section, and full-time students should also enroll in the B section. (Full-time
students can enroll in the A section on-line, and they will be automatically enrolled in the B
section.)
English 501 A is intended to enhance our familiarity and facility with the kinds of
questions literary scholars ask today and their strategies for answering them. We will therefore
study various critical approaches and gain a grounding in research methods. Research into the
composition, publication, and critical history of a text of your own choosing (in consultation with
me) will form the basis of writing assignments and an oral presentation.
(Please note that while the A and B sections of this course can count toward your
eight-semester requirement for the M.A. and while the A section is required for all new
M.A. students, neither the A nor the B section of this course counts toward the four
intensive seminars required for the degree.)
ENG 502 – INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY
PROF. MING QIAN MA
Wednesday 9:30-12:10, Clemens 1032
Registration Number: 20041
Designed as a survey class, English 502 is intended to introduce students to the critical theories
of the 20th- and 21st-Centuries, with an emphasis on the post 1960s period. Chronological in
approach, it will study the founding or representative texts of various schools or types of theories
and criticisms, focusing on their working assumptions, grounding perceptions, constitutive
concepts, paradigmatic formations, and corresponding methodologies. The objective of this
course is to further prepare students for their more advanced studies at the graduate level by 1)
providing an overview/review of the critical and theoretical discourses fundamental to literary
and interdisciplinary studies; 2) offering an intensified learning process aiming at cultivating an
intellectual rigor in the accuracy of understanding and articulation, and in cogency of thinking
and writing; 3) presenting opportunities to practice literary criticism by applying these theories to
readings of literature for the purpose of learning a range of interpretative methods; and 4)
improving and refining a diacritical sensitivity toward not only the significance but also the
limitations of each type of critical theories.
Course assignments include one 40-minute presentations, weekly response papers, three short
papers of literary criticism, and a term paper.
Textbooks required for the course:
Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.
Blackwell, 2004.
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Tales, by Herman Melville; with a new introduction by
Joyce Carol Oates. Signet Classics, 1998. (Other editions are acceptable.)
Supplementary reading materials will be distributed in the form of handouts.
ENG 545 – BLASTING AND BLESSING:
THE LITERATURE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
PROF. STACY HUBBARD
Thursday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 23595 (B) 23596
According to Vincent Sherry, modernist studies has barely begun to take account of the central
event of the early twentieth century---the First World War (which began 100 years ago this August). This
is in part because of the continuing tendency to disjoin the more radical aesthetic experiments of the war
period from historical reference, and to cede the ground of testimony to realist memoirs and genteel
poetry. In this course, I’d like to reopen the question of where the First World War is to be found in
modern (and modernist) writing. We will read some of the more famous memoirists—such as Robert
Graves, Ernst Junger and Vera Brittain—and the soldier poets—Blunden, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg—
but we’ll also look at works by non-combatants--such as Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and
W.C.Williams--who were actively engaged in processing (and sometimes anticipating) the shock of the
war aesthetically and psychologically. In addition to addressing how the war and the influenza pandemic
that followed impacted social and psychological life between 1914 and 1919 and during the decade that
followed, we’ll also think about the profound influences of the war experience on visual paradigms,
theories of force and violence, representations of sound, machine culture, landscape, body consciousness,
memory and trauma, cosmopolitanism and gender. We will read the “high modernists” next to the realists
and the social protest writers, the Edwardian and Georgian poets together with the imagists, Vorticists,
Futurists and feminists. And, importantly, we will examine not only anti-war writers and elegists, but also
those writers, such as Wyndham Lewis and Ernst Junger, who were exhilarated and energized by battle
and developed aesthetics that celebrated force, dynamism and machine culture. Time permitting, we will
also give some attention to visual art and film.
Among our readings will be selections from historical materials about the war and its aftermath by G. J.
Meyer (whose A World Undone: The Story of the Great War provides an excellent, readable overview of
the war years), Modris Eksteins, Hew Strachan, Jay Winter, and others.; theoretical materials on trauma,
memory, and violence by Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, Klaus Theweleit and others;
and a wide range of critical materials about modernism and the war.
Literary readings will include novels, stories, memoirs, poems, plays and manifestoes from among the
following: Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (excerpts), Ernst
Junger’s Storm of Steel, Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering and Blast I & II, Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (and/or Jacob’s Room), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Willa
Cather’s One of Ours, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, John Dos Passos’s 1919, Edna St. Vincent
Millay’s Aria de Capo, Franco Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” and poems by Gertrude Stein, H.D.,
T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.B.Yeats, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac
Rosenberg, W.C. Williams, e.e. cummings, D.H.Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska, Tristan Tzara, and others. We will make use of the university’s Special Collections for
poetry materials, manifestoes and little magazines and spend some time exploring the extensive Robert
Graves papers. Additional archival work will be possible using on-line materials available through the
Oxford First World War Poetry site and the Imperial War Museum site.
Requirements include diligent attendance and participation; frequent discussion board entries; several
brief oral presentations; a short review essay; and an end-of-term essay appropriate for presentation at an
academic conference.
ENG 545 – QUEER IRISH MODERNISM
PROF. JOSEPH VALENTE
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 23597 (B) 23598
If English language modernism primarily enacts a spirit of literary experimentation, manifest in a series of
formal and stylistic breaks with the conventions of nineteenth century realism, then it might be said to
have its origins, as Vicki Mahaffey has argued in States of Desire, with the Irish writer of the fin-de-siecle
and the early Celtic Renaissance—with Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, George Moore, Augusta Gregory,
W.B. Yeats, John Synge, and the young James Joyce. This Irish vanguardism is most often attributed to
the social and political contradictions, the internal divisions and antagonisms and the instabilities of
national identity formation attendant to Ireland’s long, unevenly developed colonial occupation and its
more recent, more intensive metrocolonial assimilation. An advanced Irish Modernism, in short, has
typically been viewed through a postcolonial lens with a distinctively ethnic point of emphasis.
Without departing entirely from that approach, this course will examine how the Irish response to and
intervention in the evolving sexual codes, mores and understanding at century’s turn not only
accompanied but entailed new strategies of literary representation. The winds of sexual change (the
emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis, the prominence of music hall culture, the trials of Oscar Wilde
and the “discovery” of homosexuality, birth control, the new woman, eugenics, etc.) inspired a certain
ambivalence on Irish shores blowing East to West, from the European and specifically the English
metropole, these winds could be, and often were, interpreted as a foreign incursion into the Catholicidentified, familialistic native culture. Relieving certain of the most repressive aspects of that culture,
however, these winds could also be, and sometimes were, treated as a most welcome guest. We will be
looking at how some of the signature authors and works of the period stage this conflict between sexual
defensiveness and sexual dissidence and in the process invented (Irish) modernism.
ENG 547 –FICTION WRITING COLLOQUIUM
PROF. CHRISTINA MILLETTI
Wednesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 1032
Registration Number: 23636
ENG 549 – POETRY WRITING COLLOQUIUM
PROF. MYUNG MI KIM
Wednesday 7:00-9:40, Clemens 436
Registration Number: 23637
In this unique Colloquium course, we will examine a broad array of aesthetic techniques
deployed in poetry and fiction in order to explore and reassess question of genre to which we’ve
become anaesthetized. Specifically, we will think through what function the concept of genre
performs, what kinds of writing activity genre allows us to pursue, and how mobilizing the
question of genre itself may help writers foster innovative sites of practice.
Predominantly exploratory in nature, the Fall Writing Colloquium is designed to investigate the
limits and boundaries of poetry and fiction by negotiating three interrelated spheres of activity:
1) Sharing student projects in writing.
2) Reading a wide range of texts in order to become familiar not only with contemporary
writing, but also critical and theoretical concepts that will augment writing practice.
3) Participating in several Colloquia sessions during which the two sections of the class will
meet to prepare for and discuss visits by an exceptional roster of writers: poets, novelists,
short story writers, and writers of cross-genre and inter-genre forms.
ENG 547: Fiction Writing Colloquium
Students who are currently working on projects in fiction are invited to register for ENG 547
with Prof. Christina Milletti.
ENG 549: Poetry Writing Colloquium
Students who are currently working on projects in poetry are invited to register for ENG 549
with Prof. Myung Mi Kim.
ENG 576 – LITERATURE & SOCIETY (TRANSLATION)
PROF. WALTER HAKALA
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 1032
Registration Numbers: (A) 23606 (B) 23607
Translation: Theory and Practice
ENG 576 - Lit & Society (Translation) M 12:30-3:10 pm
Prof. Walter N. Hakala (English and Asian Studies)
“I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of
this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and
eternity.”
Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems in Translation: Onegin in English.” Partisan Review 22, no. 4
(1955): 512.
This seminar will examine the theories and practices associated with translation in
European, African, and Asian languages. As such, it will also serve as a pedagogy proseminar
for those intending to teach world literatures. We will examine major works, ancient to
contemporary, pairing each unit with an exercise in literary translation. We will begin with
theories of translation and the methods of textual criticism that emerged from Greek, Latin, and
Hebrew literary traditions. Diglossia and the relationship between so-called “cosmopolitan” and
“vernacular” languages shall be the focus of our investigations into the medieval and early
modern periods. We will move to discussions of the politics of translation, cultural identity, and
pragmatics in our study of colonial and post-colonial translation practices.
Readings for the course may include selections from:
• Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd or 3rd eds
• including works by Jerome, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Nabokov, Jakobson, Appiah,
Derrida
• George Steiner, After Babel
• Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus
• Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic
Traditions and Vernacular Texts
• Daniel Heller-Roazen and Muhsin Mahdi (eds.), The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain
Haddawy
• Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion
• Simon Digby, Richard Burton: The Indian Making of an Arabist
• Christi Merrill, Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession
• Vijayadānna Dethā, Chouboli and Other Stories
Seminar participants will be responsible for leading a classroom discussion and preparing
a synthesizing “cheat sheet” for one set of readings. Additional brief written exercises may
include:
(a) an application of methods of textual criticism to the source text(s) of a verse (or set of
verses) in a non-English edition of the Christian New Testament
(b) the genealogy of a passage or section drawn from a non-English version of The Arabian
Nights. If there is sufficient interest, we may schedule a trip to the Cleveland Public Library
to view its massive collection of Arabian Nights translations.
(c) drawing inspiration (and caution) from Ezra Pound’s Cathay, participants may attempt to
transcreate a poetic genre (e.g., the Urdu ghazal or Somali heello) in English using literal
translations and scholarly commentaries
(d) an exploration of how various “world Englishes” (such as Salman Rushdie’s “chutnefied”
prose) resist translation into other languages
Intensively enrolled students are also required to complete a practical translation project by
preparing
(e) a prospectus and oral presentation of a proposed final project (due in early October);
(f) a translation as part of the approved project (due at the end of the semester); and
(g) a final paper on any aspect of translation. Participants are encouraged to connect this
paper with the practical translation project described above.
A working knowledge (i.e., adequate to carry out translation projects for this course) of at least
one language other than English is a prerequisite for the course. Feel free to contact me
(walterha@buffalo.edu) with any questions.
ENG 586 – CRIME FICTION
PROF. DAVID SCHMID
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 22501 (B) 22502
The consummate ‘guilty pleasure’ of academics, crime fiction was for many years dismissed as
not worthy of serious critical attention while also consumed avidly behind closed doors.
Recently, however, there has been an explosion of critical work about crime fiction that helps
explain the resilience of this diverse and complex popular genre. As Glenn W. Most and William
W. Stowe put it in their introduction to The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary
Theory, “[T]he criticism of detective fiction has never been healthier or more wide-ranging than
it is today. Taking advantage of their popularity, their relative simplicity and their clear position
as a model for other kinds of narrative, contemporary literary critics and theorists have used
detective novels as test cases and examples for all sorts of literary speculation, from
investigations of narrative techniques to discussions of the social function of literature, its
psychological effects, and the philosophical systems it assumes and promotes.” The aim of this
seminar is to survey a selection of both the most important examples of mystery writing and the
most influential examples of recent criticism. Our focus throughout the semester will be on the
narrative techniques used by crime fiction writers to create character, structure plot, and maintain
suspense. As we can tell a lot about a society from the way it discusses crime and punishment,
we will also study how these novels and short stories provide miniature social histories of the
periods in which they were written.
Course Texts
Edgar Allan Poe
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Agatha Christie
Dashiell Hammett
Raymond Chandler
Dorothy Hughes
Cornell Woolrich
David Goodis
Mickey Spillane
Patricia Highsmith
Chester Himes
Jim Thompson
Sara Paretsky
Umberto Eco
The Murders in the Rue Morgue: the Dupin Stories
Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories
The Sign of Four
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep
In A Lonely Place
Rendezvous in Black
Shoot the Piano Player
Kiss Me, Deadly
Strangers On A Train
Cotton Comes to Harlem
The Killer Inside Me
Blood Shot
The Name of the Rose
Course Requirements
Students taking the class extensively are required to write short (2-3 page) response papers for
each of our meetings, and a 5-7 page mid-term paper. Students taking the class intensively are
also required to write a 20-25 page research paper.
ENG 599 – PRACTICUM IN TEACHING
PROF. ALEX REID
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Number: 18455
This course is designed to support and develop TA pedagogy in the composition program
at UB. The course will examine foundational and contemporary scholarship and research in
rhetoric and composition that addresses first-year composition pedagogy. The course will serve
as a forum for the discussion of classroom practices and issues as they arise during the semester
and situate those discussion within the context of composition theory. We will investigate the
historical development of first-year composition, the current debates regarding such courses, and
the potential futures of writing instruction.
ENG 609 – NINETEENTH -CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
PROF. KENNETH DAUBER
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 436
Registration Numbers: (A) 23609 (B) 23610
Theory of American Literature. This course is designed to give you a roadmap of the
variety of ways of talking about classic American literature through readings in the literature of
the period and, especially, through a thorough immersion in a wide range of theories about how
that literature is to be approached. Reading will be heavy, about two books a week—one a
primary text and one a secondary text on the nature of American writing in which that primary
text plays a central role.
We will read deconstructions, works of cultural criticism, ordinary language criticism,
feminism, new historicism—some oldies (like Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American
Novel or D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature), some newies (Stanley Cavell
on Thoreau and Emerson, Donald Pease on cultural critique), some in between, some as yet to be
determined. The list will be chosen on the basis of what seems current, what seems enduring,
and what I haven’t read yet but meant to because it seems promising.
Primary texts will include Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
alongside some slave narratives (probably Douglass and Jacobs), some novels of Hawthorne,
(especially The House of the Seven Gables), some of Melville (especially Pierre), a chunk of
Emerson’s best, a few of the earliest American novels (Brockden Brown, maybe Fenimore
Cooper), and others (Poe? Thoreau?).
By the end of the course, if you are faithful, you will have an extraordinary sense of how
the founding period in American literature lays itself out, what the debates about it are, what
works and what doesn’t. I tend to be very opinionated about such matters. The course is
designed to enable you to form your own (hopefully different) opinions, as well.
ENG 645 – MULTIMODALITY IN THE NOVEL
PROF. JOSEPH CONTE
Wednesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 23614 (B) 23615
In this seminar on innovative fiction, we will examine the contraindicated persistence of
multimodality in print novels; or, books you can’t read on a Kindle™. Alison Gibbons
defines multimodality as “the coexistence of more than one semiotic mode within a given
context.” We experience multimodality as the environment of our daily life, in various platforms
that include the urban streetscape, art galleries, digital “desktops” and other electronic media.
Multimodality is as new as the iPhone with its app
icons and voice assistance, but as old as the New
England Primer’s abecedarium. Multimodal literature
may be regarded as both the resistance to and the
appropriation of digital technology in the print
medium. Most literary works are monomodal and
language-centered; they call on the reader’s store of
linguistic competency and comprehension of the
symbolic mode, but they subordinate or exclude the
iconic and indexical modes. But multimodal literature
exhibits polysemiosis: the reader encounters two or
more semiotic modes and recognizes that they are not
autonomous meaning systems but semantically
interrelated. The experience of reading a multimodal
text requires that the reader—in the broadest sense of
the word—negotiate between systems of meaning, not
merely within the rule of one mode. The relation
between the verbal text, visual icon and indexical design is one that is cognized rather than
decoded. So the study and reception of multimodal literatures requires the development of a
cognitive poetics.
Each of the multimodal books that we will peruse exhibits a “set” toward a dominant mode while
retaining reference to all others: the book can trend toward a. transparency, or the set toward
narrative, mimesis or character; b. opacity, or the set toward the form of the novel; c. code, or the
set toward the visual appearance, the icon; or d. base, or the set toward the form of the book. We
will want to examine the effects of multiple reading paths on narrative structure; the physical
manipulation required to read one or more of these books; the relationship between the semiotic
modes of the graphical and textual in all of these books; the “self-conscious” reading that is
required by works that call attention to themselves as books; or the metafictive reflexivity of
these works as fictions; etc.
Works for extended discussion will include: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006);
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010); Alison Gibbons’s Multimodality, Cognition, and
Experimental Literature (2011); B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (2009); Emily McVarish’s
The Square (2009); Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) (2008); Art
Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (2011); and Steve Tomasula’s VAS:
An Opera in Flatland (2004). Other literary and critical readings will be available through UB
Learns or on graduate course reserve.
Course requirements will include a twenty-minute seminar presentation by all enrolled students
and a twenty-page research paper from those students registered intensively.
ENG 651 – THEORIES OF FEELING
PROF. RACHEL ABLOW
Friday 12:30-3:10, Clemens 1032
Registration Numbers: (A) 23616
(B) 23617
This course has three principal aims. The first is to define the range of meanings that are
commonly attached to “affect” and “affect theory.” Although lots of theorists and critics invoke
these terms, they are often drawing on extremely different philosophical traditions. We will thus
compare Spinozist understandings of the “affect” with those offered by sylvan Tomkins—and we
will consider both in relation to neuro-scientific work that is currently being popularized, and to
the “new materialisms.”
The second aim of the course is to consider the question of why affect has recently
become such a hot topic: what kind of theoretical, political, social, or aesthetic work is the term
being used to do that seem substantially different from what has come before. Specifically, we
will consider why affect has proven so appealing to theorists and critics considering a wide range
of issues having to do with the body: sexuality, disability, gender, race, nationality, migration,
biopolitics, necropolitics, the carceral state, environmentalism, the relation between human and
non-human animals, etc. We will also ask how that work is related to pre-existing movements,
theories, or problematics. Here we will focus in particular on the ways in which affect has come
to be bound up with critiques of poststructuralist approaches to power and the subject. How has
affect come to be identified with the conditions of possibility for positive political
transformation? What is its relation to the subject—and so, too, with questions of identity and
agency?
Related to these questions is the third goal of this course: that of attempting to determine
the limits of affect. We will attempt to determine exactly what gets left out of discussions of
affect: what kinds of political problems can it not help us approach, and what kinds of sensations,
emotions, experiences, intensities, etc. have to drop out of the conversation.
Writers for the course will include Sarah Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Lauren Berlant, Teresa
Brennan, Wendy Brown, Veena Das, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Domasio, Michael Hardt, Ruth
Leys, Brian Massumi, Sianne Ngai, Jasbir Puar, Eve Sedgwick, Rei Terada, Michael Warner,
and others. Please note that this course will not duplicate Prof. Judith Goldman’s spring 2014
course on affect.
ENG 698 ~ APY 515 – CROSS-CULTURAL POETICS
PROF. DENNIS TEDLOCK
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens 538
Registration Numbers: (A) 23622 (B) 23623
Office hours – T W 9:30-noon and by appointment
dtedlock@buffalo.edu
All things vivid in history, all the different cultures, are no longer obstacles that separate us from the
essential and the Intelligible; rather, they are the paths by which we can reach it. Furthermore, they are
unique pathways, the only possible paths, irreplaceable, and consequently implicated in the Intelligible itself!
—Emmanuel Levinas
The cross-cultural world is a decolonizing world, horizontal more than hierarchical, simultaneous or
anachronistic rather than divided into stages of development. Cultures (and languages) are
themselves heterogeneous more than homogeneous. And so with poetry and poetics, by which we
mean the verbal arts in general.
Our tracing of poetic paths through this cross-cultural world will be guided, in part, by strategic
reversals. We will listen to oral performances that are or once were guided by texts, and we will read
texts that are or once were guided by oral performances (a problem not laid to rest by the literature
on the Homeric texts). Our questioning of the notion of a “definitive text” in the literate world will
bring us up against performances that aim at verbatim reproduction in the oral world. Along the
way, we might want to reconsider Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus.
Following a poetics widely practiced in the contemporary West, the poet, even when freed from
rhyme and meter, aims at finding exactly the right words and avoids paraphrase. At the opposite
extreme is a poetics widely practiced in most of the rest of the world, whereby paraphrase (or
intralingual translation) is the main method by which a poem is constructed in the first place. The
former poetics belongs to the same tradition as the notion of an original language in which words
and their objects had an essential connection, while the latter poetics continuously celebrates the fact
that anything and everything can be said in more than one way. But lest we go too far in the antiessentialist direction, the notion of the arbitrariness of signs runs up against the fact that every
language abounds in ideophonic words. Especially bird names.
Readings will include translations of verbal arts in various African, Asian, and Amerindian languages,
along with an avant-garde American poet’s epic. There will also be listenings that bring in a wide
range of recorded performances, some of them matched (or mismatched) to transcripts. Some of
our meetings will involve experiments in the re-oralizing of texts, or experiments in the transcription
of oral performances. Weekly one-page response papers will be required, along with a project that
may take the form of a term paper—or, alternatively, a transcription and/or translation and/or
performance.
Reading and listening: David Antin, selected talks and essays from Radical Coherency; Matsuo Basho,
The Narrow Road to the Interior, translated by Sam Hamhill; Ed Dorn, Gunslinger; Steve Feld, Voices of
the Rainforest: A Day in the Life of the Kaluli People (Papua New Guinea, audio CD); Isidore Okpewho,
Once upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity (Igbo epic); Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the
Sacred; Dennis Tedlock, selected essays and Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller.
Recommended reference works: Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, edited by
Richard Bauman; Key Terms in Language and Culture, edited by Alessandro Duranti.