ENGL 4685

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 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 4685-001: Special Topics in American Literature, Spacetime in the US Millennial Novel (Spring 2019)

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:47:25 +0000

ENGL 4685-001: Special Topics in American Literature, Spacetime in the US Millennial Novel (Spring 2019) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/03/2018 - 14:47

Professor Karen Jacobs

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