American Literature

ENGL 4685: Special Topics in American Literature

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 17:33:06 +0000

ENGL 4685: Special Topics in American Literature Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/24/2020 - 11:33

Reading, Response & Self-Reflection in American Literature

A word is dead, when it is said,
Some say—
I say, it just begins to live
That day —Emily Dickinson

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. . . . What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world, I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and weft of that web.
--Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

This course will study selected works not as self-contained texts but in the interactive process of making meaning between texts and readers. Conceptually, the course leans on insights from Reader Response criticism and Constructivism in philosophy and education, but a main focus will be on our own responses, forming the basis for our own discoveries and theories. The “self-reflection” in the title refers both to the nature of the texts we read and our own processes of exploration. We will begin with our responses to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and move from that to Melville’s Moby-Dick, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. We will also attempt to develop approaches to learning and teaching that are more empathic, democratic, and community-building; of necessity, the course will involve more writing of various kinds and more active discussions. It will be like no other English course you have ever taken. Prospective students are encouraged to speak and/or write to the instructor before the class begins: bickman@colorado.edu.

Explores a special topic in American literature. May be repeated for a total of 9 units for different topics.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: American Literature

Taught by Marty Bickman.

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ENGL 3675: Major Authors in American History - Toni Morrison

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 17:27:54 +0000

ENGL 3675: Major Authors in American History - Toni Morrison Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/24/2020 - 11:27

This course takes a deep dive into the writings of Toni Morrison, the foremost African-American novelist of our time. Winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for Literature, Toni Morrison’s works probe vital questions about race, gender, and power in our contemporary culture. Starting with The Bluest Eye and going through the Beloved trilogy, we will read Morrison’s novels, as well as her critical writings on race and American literature and culture. Students can expect discussion-based classes, a fairly heavy reading load, two to three critical essays, and a final project of their choosing.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: American Literature

Taught by Mary Klages.

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ENGL 3235: American Novel

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:57:01 +0000

ENGL 3235: American Novel Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/24/2020 - 10:57

This course examines how what we have come to think of as “the canon” is entwined with the US’s ethnic literary tradition. We will explore how the two are not only inseparable but in fact mutually constitutive, marking the major shifts in US literary history. Authors may include Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, John Rollin Ridge, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, and Leslie Marmon Silko.

Surveys the American novel. Covers the early development of the American novel, its rise in the 19th- and 20th-centuries, and its contemporary expressions. Students will be introduced to theories of the novel, the major movements and authors, as well as the characteristics that define the American novel as unique.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: American Literature

Taught by Maria Windell.

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ENGL 3005: Literature of New World Encounters

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:53:32 +0000

ENGL 3005: Literature of New World Encounters Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/24/2020 - 10:53

Explores American literature as a site of cultural intersection between European settlers and indigenous peoples.

Taught by Ramesh Mallipeddi.

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ENGL 3245: American Poetry (Spring 2020)

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 21:17:40 +0000

ENGL 3245: American Poetry (Spring 2020) Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/14/2019 - 15:17

For this semester the subtitle of American Poetry will be “The Visionary Tradition.”

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
—Hart Crane

There’s one great vein of religious feeling that expresses contempt for the world and pity for mortal man; it stresses the transience and tragedy of life and the constraints of the human condition. It counsels stoicism and otherworldliness and exhorts us to rise above the temptations of the flesh, hinting that we can attain spirituality and transcendence in a purely mental sphere. . . But there’s another strain of religious thinking that is utopian rather than tragic. In line with a long heretical tradition, it tells us that we can achieve spiritual and moral victories even in the fleshpots of the world, through what Blake called “an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” It encourages us to make exorbitant, apocalyptic demands upon life and tells us that we can break through the joyless forms of everyday existence toward a radiant communality and wholeness. It insists that we and the world we live in are more malleable, more alive with possibility, less restricted by circumstance, than society or the notion of original sin would have us believe —Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden

The visionary creates, or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism. This is quite consistent with art, because it never relinquishes the visualization which no artist can do without . . . This suggests that mysticism and art are in the long wrong mutually exclusive but that the visionary and the artist are allied. —Northrop Frye

This course will trace what has become the dominant tradition in American poetry. Its keynote address is Emerson’s “The Poet,” which urges the following guidelines: 1) form should be an extension of content, not a pre-existing Platonic structure [ “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, -- a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”] 2) A language that restores sensuousness and specificity to our poetry [“But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.”] and 3) the subject matter of a poem should be immediate consciousness living its quotidian existence [“I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.”]

This course will explore this tradition through the following poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Rita Dove, and spoets of your choice. There will be writings and analysis for each class period on Canvas and a final project which has both a teaching and a written component.

Taught by Dr. Martin Bickman.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: American Literature

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ENGL 3005: The Literature of New World Encounters

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 21:11:08 +0000

ENGL 3005: The Literature of New World Encounters Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/14/2019 - 15:11

This course explores American literature as a site of cultural intersection between European settlers and indigenous peoples. We will read early American texts in conversation with films portraying those encounters, bringing a critical and historical lens to both. For example, we will read Jacques Cartier with Hochelaga: Land of Souls (2017), the Jesuit Relations with Black Robe (1991) Guaman Pomo de Ayala, Hernan Cortés, and Mayan codices with Apocalypto (2006). The course requires standard English reading and writing requirements while teaching film analysis as well.

Taught by Dr. Penny Kelsey.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: American Literature

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ENGL 4685-002: Special Topics in American Literature, Writing Civil Rights (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:08:04 +0000

ENGL 4685-002: Special Topics in American Literature, Writing Civil Rights (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 15:08

Instructor: Prof. Cheryl Higashida

Course on literature and culture of the "long civil rights" movement spanning the twentieth century to the present. A central question we'll explore: what is and should be the relationship between art and activism? We will study the relationship between social and cultural movements such as modernism and labor organizing; the Harlem Renaissance and anti-lynching; the Asian American literary and social movements; the Native American Renaissance and the American Indian Movement; and poetry and personal essay of #BlackLivesMatter. We will think about how social activism was manifested in literary themes and forms, and how the arts shaped the content and meaning of activism.

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ENGL 4685-001: Special Topics in American Literature, Spacetime in the U.S. Millennial Novel (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:04:47 +0000

ENGL 4685-001: Special Topics in American Literature, Spacetime in the U.S. Millennial Novel (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 15:04

Instructor: Prof. Karen Jacobs

Positioning itself at the crossroads of contemporary literature, geography, and new materialist philosophies, this course will explore how American millennial fictions map and navigate, construct and alter, inhabit and evacuate spacetime; and in tandem it will consider how theoretical texts on space and time (re)conceptualize these categories. In the wake of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene (in which the divisions between nature and culture, human and extra-human scales have been destabilized) we will grapple with the emergent spacetime of “postnature”—a category that considers the escalating contamination, homogenization, and mediation of the natural, often through posthumanist and post-anthropocentric lenses. Beginning with the premise that posthumanist theory sees itself as a philosophical corrective to poststructuralism’s overemphasis on language (to the exclusion of pressing political, environmental, and ethical considerations), we will consider the degree to which American millennial fictions are responsive to such concerns as we investigate literal and imaginative spacetimes and the ways they inevitably overlap. We will ask how millennial novels approach the challenge of representing spaces and timeframes from the largest planetary scales to the tiniest scales of living bodies, from the attenuated gradualism of slow violence to the instantaneity of events. We will also take account of the “spacetime of the text” and the ways it shapes, echoes, and contradicts its internal depictions of spacetime. We will read a selection of the following: Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985); Robert Coover, Pinocchio in Venice (1991); William T. Vollmann, The Atlas (1996); Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (1997); Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (1997); Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000); Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead (2002); Percival Everett, Watershed (2003); and Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).

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ENGL 4665-001: Studies in American Literature after 1900, Personal Writing in Modern America (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:00:54 +0000

ENGL 4665-001: Studies in American Literature after 1900, Personal Writing in Modern America (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 15:00

Instructor: Prof. Ed Rivers

This course studies modern American writers writing about their own lives, and students will have a chance to do their own personal writing. Texts will include not only autobiography and memoir but also fiction based on the writer’s own life. We will study essays and stories by Norah Zeale Hurston, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nancy Mairs, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriquez, Loren Eiseley, and E. B. White plus three longer works: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak. Memory (often cited as one of the best modern autobiographies); Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (a landmark in modern American nature writing); and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life (the book behind the film of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio). In discussing This Boy's Life, we will also study the film version and consider the problems of turning personal writing into film. Requirements (subject to change): five short papers (2-3 pages), including (if the student so chooses) at least one piece of original personal writing; mid-term; final. For further information, contact the instructor: ed.rivers@colorado.edu.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: American Literature

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ENGL 2655: Intro to American Literature (Fall 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 21:58:53 +0000

ENGL 2655: Intro to American Literature (Fall 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/20/2019 - 14:58

Chronological survey of the literature from Bradford to Whitman.

Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: American Literature

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