Course Listings

Group I (Writing and the Teaching of Writing)

7005c Writing Fiction/Ms. Powell/M, W 2-4:45
Although this workshop involves quite a bit of reading, it is primarily a writing workshop. Each class will be spent examining stories submitted by its members. These stories, fragments, portions of a novel will have been copied by the authors and made available several days prior to each session. Everyone should provide extensive written comments on each submission in addition to giving honest, detailed, and tactfully phrased criticism in class.

Texts: Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 7th ed. (Longman).

7105 Writing Race, Writing Culture, Writing Identity/Ms. Dixson/M, W 2-4:45
In this course we will examine the ways that people engage in writing about race, culture, and identity. We will explore ways of writing that can also engage us in thinking about how we are raced, cultured, and identified, and also how we can use those social phenomena to race, culture, and identify ourselves. We will use a variety of texts and genres—novels, autobiography, poetry, essays—to frame our work in this course. Students in this course will participate in a variety of speaking and writing events in an effort to think both more broadly and substantively about the nuances of literacy more generally and writing more specifically. We will spend a significant amount of time thinking about and discussing how these issues can inform and even transform our pedagogy.

Texts: Teresa Redd, A Teacher's Introduction to African American English: What a Writing Teacher Should Know (NCTE); The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity, ed. J.L. Carlacio (NCTE); Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Plume); Danling Fu, "My Trouble Is My English": Asian Students and the American Dream (Boynton/Cook); What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies, vol. 2), ed. Jabari Mahiri (Peter Lang); photocopied materials available at Bread Loaf.

7110 Writing and Urban Popular Culture/Ms. Dixson/T, Th 2-4:45
This course will draw on multigenre writing that situates writing within the urban context and the experiences of African Americans and Latinos. Students in this course will have opportunities to explore the ways in which urban popular culture can inform and enrich writing and the teaching of writing.

Texts: Geneva Smitherman, Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans (Routledge); Elaine Richardson, Hip Hop Literacies (Routledge); What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies, vol. 2), ed. Jabari Mahiri (Peter Lang); Steven Goodman, Teaching Youth Media: A Critical Guide to Literacy, Video Production, and Social Change (Teachers College); photocopied materials available at Bread Loaf.

7111 Rhetorics of Silence/Ms. Glenn/T, Th 9-11:45
Silence has long been considered a trope for oppression, passivity, stupidity, or obedience. Speaking out, on the other hand, is thought to be liberating and powerful, especially given our talkative Western culture, where speech is synonymous with civilization itself, and where silence is too often regarded only as obedience. Although the form of silence is always the same, the function of specific acts of silence—that is, its interpretation by and effect upon other people—will vary according to the social and cultural context in which it occurs. “Rhetorics of Silence” will demonstrate how silence “speaks” across a good number of settings and situations, particularly in the Southwest. The course will work to demonstrate that like the zero in mathematics, silence is an absence with a function, helping to shape language and relations in dynamic and generative ways. The class will begin with an overview of Western rhetorical principles. Then we will examine various sites where silence and silencing reside: religion, gendered communication (from family and classroom situations to national politics and race relations); Native cultures; and imaginative literature. Our readings, writing, and classroom discussions will bring us to an informed appreciation of silence, whether it is an imposition or a strategic rhetorical choice. You should read Cather for our first class meeting.

Texts: Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage); Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken (Southern Illinois); Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (New Mexico); Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (Arcade); Demetria Martínez, Mother Tongue (One World/Ballentine); Nora Naranjo-Morse, Mud Woman (Arizona); Laura Tohe, No Parole Today (West End); Beyond Silenced Voices, ed. Lois Weis and Michelle Fine, rev. ed. (SUNY); Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman (HarperTorch).

Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)

7231 Spenser and Renaissance Culture/Ms. Miller/M, W 2-4:45
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Sidney, wrote a “defence of poesie,” and Spenser wondered “Oh peerless poesy, where is then thy place?” “Poesy” referred not simply to verse, but to fiction in general. Why did poetry and/or fiction need defending during the Renaissance? Where was its “place” in Renaissance culture? How did the reign of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen,” inform the problems and prerogatives of writers? This course’s centerpiece will be the major poem/fiction produced during this period, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a work that has elicited divergent responses: Milton labeled Spenser “our sage and serious poet”; Yeats called him “a poet of the delighted senses”; Virginia Woolf advised readers to “make a dash for The Faerie Queene and give yourself up to it.” We’ll explore the imaginative world of Faeryland Spenser creates (populated by egalitarian giants, cross-dressed female warriors, noble savages) in relation to the world he inhabits; we’ll attend to his complex representations of power and gender, ethics and politics, in their literary and cultural contexts, and consider his probing of the very possibility of writing poetry in the last half of the sixteenth century. We'll contextualize Spenser’s works (pastoral, sonnets, epic) by reading from major documents of Renaissance literary criticism (Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie; Sidney's Defense); Queen Elizabeth’s speeches; Renaissance debates about the nature of women; theories (and practice) of allegory and pastoral; and some of Spenser's contemporary poets (e.g., Sidney, Marlowe, Raleigh). Students should read Sidney’s Defence for the first class.

Texts: Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (Penguin); The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram, et al. (Yale); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. (Longman, 2nd ed.; the first ed. is also fine); The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge). Additional material will be available at Bread Loaf in the form of a coursepack, handouts, and on reserve in the library.

7252 Shakespeare and Performance/Mr. B. Smith/M, W 9-11:45
Body, space, time, and sound—the four components present in every dramatic performance—will provide the coordinates for our study of Shakespeare’s works for the stage. We’ll begin by analyzing and discussing each of the elements in turn, paying attention to what philosophers said about them in Shakespeare’s time, how they were deployed in the physical spaces Shakespeare wrote for, what changes have overtaken them in modern production practices and in the media of film and video, and where they stand in relation to contemporary critical theory. The selection of plays will include The Tempest, Richard II, As You Like It, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida. In the happy event that a Shakespeare play is being staged in Santa Fe, a substitution for one of these plays is possible, and a group trip to a performance will be arranged. Other performances that we’ll view and discuss include Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, a videotape of a live performance of Richard II at the restored Globe Theatre in London, and Kenneth Branagh’s film of As You Like It. You’ll be asked to develop four projects for the course: a four-page review of one of the films or performances, a live performance of a scene with a group of your colleagues, and two eight-page analytical papers.

Required Texts: John L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge) and Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (California), plus a course reader to be made available at the beginning of the seminar. Recommended Text: William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Norton).

Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)

7401 The Country House in English Literature/Ms. David/M, W 9-11:45
From Ben Jonson to Ian McEwan, the country house figures prominently in the English literary imagination. Whether romanticized as a panegyric to a lost world of rural and social harmony, fashioned as a monument to the political and cultural power of its inhabitants, or mapped in the construction of national identity, the country house provides a fertile setting for English writers. Our emphasis will be upon the twentieth century as we place our readings in the historical context of imperial decline, World War II, and shifting ideas about social class and gender. We will also analyze the growth of the British heritage industry in the 1980s (the popularity of Masterpiece Theatre, Country Life magazine, visits to country houses, Victorian fashion, etc.). Where appropriate, we will also view film adaptations of our novels. Students can expect to write two short response papers and one longer critical essay. If you have questions about the course, contact Professor David at ddavid@temple.edu.

Texts: Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” (1616, available in anthologies); Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House” (1650-52, available in anthologies); Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813, Penguin); E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910, Penguin); Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945, Back Bay); Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989, Vintage); Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993, Faber & Faber); Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001, Doubleday).

Group IV (American Literature)

7515 American Renaissance/Mr. Alemán/T, Th 9-11:45
This course understands the American renaissance broadly as a historical moment during the mid-nineteenth century (1830s–1850s) that saw radical changes in everything from literature and print culture to domesticity and democracy. It was a time teeming with excitement and energy for the United States, as it developed into a national power and self-consciously struggled to generate its own national literature. Normally we associate this era with canonical authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, but the writings of marginal authors such as Douglass, Fuller, Buntline, and Lippard demonstrate the diversity of American literature (some good and some not so good) that boomed from the 1830s to the 1860s. This course will thus survey and analyze the key texts and authors of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. It will focus on major movements such as transcendentalism and romanticism; major literary forms such as essays, short stories, novels, and poetry; and major socio-historical factors such as Indian removal, slavery, domesticity, and the rise of market capitalism and industry; but we’ll also read and discuss lesser-known writings and authors to experience the variety of texts that the American renaissance fostered and fueled in the years preceding the Civil War.

Texts: The American Transcendentalist: Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Buell (Modern Library); Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, ed. Richard Kopley (Penguin); Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction, ed. Jesse Alemán and Shelley Streeby (Rutgers); Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Signet); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Penguin); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Signet); Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings (Oxford). Assigned readings will also include selections from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Jacobs, and others made available online before the summer session begins.

7650b Contemporary American Short Story/Ms. Powell/M, W 9-11:45
This course looks at the major trends in contemporary American short fiction, with particular attention to the various strategies writers employ when designing the short story and the collection.

Texts: Junot Díaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead); Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger (Penguin); Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner); Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Vintage); Andre Dubus, Selected Stories (Vintage); Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians (Grove); Charles Baxter, Believers (Vintage); Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Charles Johnson, The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (Plume).

7674 Southwestern Literature and Film/Mr. Alemán/T, Th 2-4:45
This course surveys Southwestern literature and film to analyze how Native, Chicana/o, and Anglo Americans imagine life in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, or the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The course begins with mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century depictions of the Southwest in popular fiction and film; moves to modern literature and movies; and concludes with contemporary Southwestern artistic production. We’ll consider how cultural conflict, modernization, landscape, gender, and westward expansion, among other themes, shape Southwestern genres, such as westerns, adventure narratives, regional novels, mysteries, and horror flicks. The class will also examine and discuss the craft of cinema—from film production to scene analysis—especially in the context of film adaptations of literary texts. Most movies will be viewed in their entirety before class, with some clips used during class sessions to highlight a theme, but all class meetings will involve active participation, critical analysis, and student interaction.

Texts: John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, ed. Joseph Henry Jackson (Oklahoma); Miguel Otero, The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War, ed. John-Michael Rivera (Arte Público); Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Vintage); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin). Films include: The Mask of Zorro (1998), Young Guns (1988), The Searchers (1956), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Prophecy (1995), Pow-Wow Highway (1989), and The Tao of Steve (2000).

Group V (World Literature)

7740 Opera at 7,000 Feet/Mr. B. Smith/T, Th 9-11:45
In terms of space, that’s the vertical dimension. Horizontally, we shall get as close as we can to two of the productions in the Santa Fe Opera’s fifty-third year of bringing singers, instrumentalists, and listeners together under the high-desert stars: Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In terms of time, we shall frame our encounter with these two operas by studying one of the earliest operas, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), and one of the most recent, John Adams’ Doctor Atomic (2007), which is set in New Mexico. A selection of theoretical and critical readings, along with narrative sources, will give us a range of reference points for studying the literary sources, dramatic structure, musical design, and production history of each opera. Participants in the seminar will undertake two projects: a five-page review of La Traviata and an eight- to ten-page interpretative essay drawing on one or more of the critical readings and engaging three or more of the operas. Blocks of group tickets have been purchased for two dates: Friday, July 3, La Traviata (opening night of the season, tail-gate parties and costumes in the spirit of that night’s opera are traditional) and Saturday, July 18, Don Giovanni. An additional fee of $108 will be charged to cover the cost of tickets, and attendance at both performances is a requirement of the course.

Required Texts: Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (Routledge); Alexandre Dumas, Camille (Signet); Jean-Baptiste Molière, Don Juan, trans. Richard Wilbur (Harvest). Recommended DVD: John Adams, Doctor Atomic, dir. Peter Sellars, with G. Finley, J. Rivera, E. Owens, R. Fink, and J. Maddalena (BBC/Opus). Recommended CDs (with libretti): C. Monteverdi, L’Orfeo, dir. J. Gardiner, with A. Johnson, L. Dawson, A. von Otter (Archiv.); G. Verdi, La Traviata, dir. C. Giulini, with M. Callas, G. di Stephano, E. Bastianini (EMI); A. Mozart, Don Giovanni, dir. W. Furtwängler, with A. Dermota, C. Siepi, D. Ernster, E. Grümmer, E. Schwarzkopf (EMI).

7781 The Work of Fiction in an Age of Terror/Mr. Cartelli/M, W 9-11:45
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, V.S. Naipaul claimed that reality had begun to trump fantasy and that writing fiction was no longer either necessary or possible. Focusing on the facticity of what was formerly delegated to fantasy, Naipaul did not take into account the crucial cultural work that fiction has long performed in its negotiations with the nightmares of history: work that Naipaul himself had modeled in A Bend in the River (1980), which, in addition to reimagining the horrors of Joseph Mobutu’s reign of terror in the former Belgian Congo, put those horrors into conversation with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (another fiction based on notorious facts), while anticipating the internecine conflicts that would turn vast tracts of Africa into killing fields for the next 30-odd years. In this course, we will explore how Naipaul and other writers of fiction have assimilated and transcribed the many forms that terror has taken in this same span of time, from its state-sponsored manifestations in Africa and Latin America to civil murders and massacres in Sri Lanka to the kidnappings, suicide bombings, and videotaped executions orchestrated by media-savvy Islamic extremists. We will also consult and discuss recent theoretical writing on the politics and poetics of terror by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio among others. Students should read Waiting for the Barbarians for the first day of class.

Texts: J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin); Walter Abish, How German Is It (New Directions); Uwe Timm, The Snake Tree (New Directions); V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (Vintage); Don Delillo, Mao II (Penguin); Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Vintage); Orhan Pamuk, Snow (Vintage); Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harvest).

Group VI (Theater Arts)

7807 Drama in the Classroom/Ms. MacVey/T, Th 2-4:45
This course is intended for teachers who want to incorporate drama into their classrooms. We will study and practice various approaches, including improvisation and Viola Spolin's theater games, but the main focus will be on process drama, an approach that stresses collaborative creation of material rather than formal productions of scripts. No previous theater training is necessary.

Texts: Ellen McLaughlin, The Greek Plays, intro. Tony Kushner (Theatre Communications Group); any anthology of William Shakespeare's plays; Viola Spolin, Theater Games for the Classroom: A Teacher's Handbook (Northwestern); Structuring Drama Work, ed. Jonothan Neelands and Tony Goode (Cambridge); Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New Directions). Please bring copies of short stories and poems that you teach in your classroom.