Course Listings

Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)

7210a Chaucer/Ms. Sponsler/M, W 9-11:45
This course will study the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s extraordinary story collection. Among the topics we will consider are: Chaucer’s literary influences and his cultural context in fourteenth-century England, his stylistic innovations and his importance for the English language, the pleasures of his poetry, the many interpretive issues raised by the Tales (including questions of perennial interest involving gender, class, and religion), his canonization as a major author, his literary legacy, and his continued appeal--including his place in the curriculum and his relevance for modern readers. Our approach to these topics will emphasize close reading, which will help us explore how Chaucer creates his dazzling effects. Selected historical and critical essays will enrich and contextualize our discussions, as will the occasional film. No prior experience with medieval literature is needed to enjoy and profit from this class.

Texts: The Canterbury Tales: Complete, ed. Larry D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin, paperback) [or The Riverside Chaucer (hardback: Houghton Mifflin) from which the paperback Tales is excerpted]; The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. P. Boitani and J. Mann, rev. ed. (Cambridge).

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 work 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, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and Measure for Measure. 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 will view and discuss together will include Peter Greenaway’s film fantasy Prospero’s Books, a videotape of a live performance of Richard II at the restored Globe Theatre in London, and Trevor Nunn’s film of Twelfth Night. You’ll be asked to develop four projects for the course: a four-page review of one of the performances, a live performance of a scene with a group of your colleagues, and an eight- to ten-page analytical paper on one of the four elements body, space, time, or sound.

Required texts: Trevor Nunn, Screenplay: Twelfth Night (Methuen, available through www.amazon.co.uk); Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (California); John L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge); plus a course reader to be made available at the beginning of the seminar. Recommended text: William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norton).

Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)

7360 Victorian Narratives/Ms. Flint/M, W 2-4:45
This course explores a variety of ways in which Victorians told fictional stories—in novels, short stories, poetry, and paintings. We will look at narratives that are delivered in a number of ways—whether through first-person voices, multiple narrators, or authoritative third-person commentary—and at their conclusions, whether decisive or, more often, ambiguous. In our exploration of narrative, we will consider how the reader’s emotions, desires, and responses are directed or frustrated, and think about what it meant to be a reader during the Victorian period, and the difference made by various modes (magazine serials, publication in parts, volumes borrowed from libraries) of encountering fiction. The works that we will be discussing open up questions relating to the treatment of gender, identity, class, ambition, science, nationhood, the city and the country, and the verbal representation of art—and we will look, too, at how certain Victorian painters (Holman Hunt, William Powell Frith, Robert Martineau) told stories on their canvases. Please note that the final class will be held on Friday, July 18.

Texts: George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (Oxford World’s Classics); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (any edition with line numbers is fine); Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Penguin); Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Penguin); Mary Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford World’s Classics); George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin); Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Penguin); and short stories by James, Rudyard Kipling, and Charlotte Mew (handouts at Bread Loaf).

7410 Ulysses: Homer, Joyce, Walcott/Ms. Keen/T, Th 9-11:45 This course frames a careful reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses with brief encounters with other versions of the story first recorded in Homer’s Odyssey. We will begin (on the first day of class—bring your book) with Homer’s Odyssey (in translation) and conclude with a viewing of the film Bloom. Along the way we will read Derek Walcott’s stage version of the Odyssey. The central purpose of the course, however, is to read Joyce’s Ulysses steadily. We will work together to understand Joyce’s narrative techniques; interpret his major characters and track their movements through space; analyze patterns of allusion to Homer, Shakespeare, and other writers; and explicate passages of Joyce’s peculiar language. Some of these broader topics will inform our discussions: the publication history of Ulysses; censorship and the law; Joyce and religion; the controversies about the textual editing of Ulysses; Joyce and Irish nationalism; gender in Ulysses; Joyce and Orientalism; postcolonial Joyce. Please prepare for the course not by reading Ulysses on your own, but by reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Homer’s Odyssey, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet prior to the start of classes.

Texts: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Hackett); James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (Vintage); Derek Walcott, The Odyssey: A Play (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Students may find it convenient to own Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge) and Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, revised and expanded ed. (California). Course Web page with suggestions for further preparation: http://home.wlu.edu/~keens/blulysses.htm.

7440 The Moderns according to the Contemporaries/Ms. Keen/T, Th 2-4:45
In recent years contemporary authors have turned to their earlier twentieth-century predecessors for inspiration and productive aggravation. Until recently, as Lawrence Rainey writes, “the modernists were giants, monsters of nature who loomed so large that contemporaries could only gape at them in awe.” In the last years of the century, however, contemporary writers have overcome their reticence about these vigorous experimenters and originators, subjecting them to rewriting, revision, playful pastiche, and brisk updating. While it is a commonplace of postcolonial literary criticism to notice the vigorous revising of canonical Victorian texts by postcolonial contemporary writers (Jean Rhys taking on Charlotte Brontë, for instance), or to study how contemporary film adapts older fiction, less often do we consider how contemporary writers re-examine their immediate literary heritage. This course pairs writers: Michael Cunningham with Virginia Woolf; Ian McEwan with Elizabeth Bowen; Zadie Smith and Merchant-Ivory (British filmmakers) with E.M. Forster; John Le Carré and Mohsin Hamid with Joseph Conrad (and Hitchcock); and David Mitchell with Aldous Huxley. A close study of novelistic subgenres and narrative techniques will accompany the course readings.

Texts: For the first class meeting, read and bring Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest); thereafter, we will use Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form (Palgrave) and, in this order: Michael Cunningham, The Hours (Picador); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford World’s Classics); John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Scribner); Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt); Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (HarperPerennial); David Mitchell, The Cloud Atlas (Random House); Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (Anchor); Ian McEwan, Atonement (Anchor); E.M. Forster, Howards End (Penguin); and Zadie Smith, On Beauty (Penguin). Course Web page with links and syllabus details: http://home.wlu.edu/~keens/blmodcontemp.htm.

7450 Cinema and the Modern Novel/Mr. Porter/M, W 2-4:45
What does it take to turn a novel into a good movie? This course aims to answer that question by exploring the complex interplay between cinema and modern fiction. We’ll focus on six film/novel pairs ranging from Kafka’s The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962) to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998) that reveal why the study of literary films is attracting so much critical attention. What films and novels have in common that draws filmmakers to the challenging art of adaptation is the capacity for narrative, a condition that is all the more interesting in light of the fact that translating fiction into film requires that the formal linguistic devices of narrative—point of view, tense, voice, metaphor, plot, and symbolic structure—must be realized by other means. Our chief aim will be to read the two media closely in order to figure out the kinds of shifts that are made in the process of adaptation, outlining the differences in what each says about the other. What a movie borrows from a book matters; but so does what it gives back. Our discussion will also consider key modernist problems, including alienation, loss of self, disenchantment, the crisis of enlightenment, and the challenge of indeterminacy—all of which are at heart problems of adaptation. Assignments will include a presentation and two analytical papers. Please try to read as many of the books as possible before class. We will set up a schedule of weekly film screenings at the beginning of the session. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

Texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Oxford); James Joyce, “The Dead” from Dubliners (Norton Critical Ed.); Franz Kafka, The Trial (Schocken); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Vintage); Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (Vintage); Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage).

Group IV (American Literature)

7435 Memory/Ms. Flint/M, W 9-11:45
How do we remember? What do we remember—and what do we forget? What might we wish to remember? How does writing explore the ways in which the past may haunt the present, whether bidden or unbidden? This course will examine a number of twentieth-century texts—poetry, fiction, and memoir—and range over many aspects of memory and memorializing. We will look at works that themselves puzzle over the nature of memory and its operations, those that seek to evoke a very particular time and place, and those that explore the relationship between language and memory. We will ask what is at stake in writing memoir, and the relationship between memoir and fiction. We will consider the ways in which the dead are remembered, whether through elegiac writing, or through their ghostly presence. Other works will lead us to discuss issues of exile and of trauma, of the differences and intersections between personal and communal memory, of amnesia and false memory, and of nostalgia. At least one film (Memento) will be shown; we will think about the place of memory in non-linguistic media (the photograph, the souvenir, the public memorial, the heritage industry, in graphic fiction, and in texts that include photographs. Additional readings (available in New Mexico) will include poems, short stories, and essays. Please note that the final class will be held on Friday, July 18.

Texts: Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (California); Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage); Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (Penguin); Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Place You Love Is Gone (Norton); Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Hill and Wang); Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster); Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand (Grove).

7450 Cinema and the Modern Novel/Mr. Porter/M, W 2-4:45
See description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.

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, 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 Classic); 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.

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 Publico); Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Vintage); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin); Lucha Corpi, Crimson Moon (Arte Publico). Films include: The Mask of Zorro (1998), Young Guns (1988), The Searchers (1956), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Prophecy (1995), Pow-Wow Highway (1989), The Tao of Steve (2000).

Group V (World Literature)

7710 The Bible as Literature/Mr. V. Smith/M, W 2-4:45
In this course we will study both the history, or histories, of the Bible and its literary characteristics, asking how particular features of it have reflected its larger purpose, including the question of authorship; the structures and modes of the Biblical books; the formation of the canon, including the development of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, and the history of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books; translation from the Septuagint to the present; literary genres of the Bible; histories of exegesis, interpretation, and commentary; the redaction, division, and ordering of biblical texts; the cultural, political, and intellectual worlds within which these texts were written.

Texts: The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha, ed. M. Jack Suggs (Oxford); The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Belknap/Harvard).

7740 Opera at 7,000 Feet/Mr. B. Smith/T, Th 9-11:45
That’s the vertical dimension. Horizontally, we shall get as close as we can to three of the productions in the Santa Fe Opera’s fifty-second year of bringing singers, instrumentalists, and listeners together under the high-desert stars: Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff (1893, based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (1786, based on Pierre Beaumarchais’ play of the same name), and Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (1951, based on the novel by Herman Melville). A selection of theoretical and critical readings will give us a range of reference points for studying the literary sources, dramatic structure, musical design, and production history of each opera. Before turning to the three operas in production, we shall try out those reference points on Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello (1887), comparing Verdi’s ways with passion to Shakespeare’s Othello. Participants in the seminar will undertake two projects: a five-page review of one of the three performances and an eight- to ten-page interpretative essay drawing on one or more of the critical readings. Blocks of group tickets have been purchased for these three dates: Friday, June 27, Falstaff (opening night of the season, tail-gate parties and costumes in the spirit of that night’s opera are traditional); Wednesday, July 9, Figaro; and Wednesday, July 16, Billy Budd. An additional fee of $156 will be charged to cover the cost of tickets, and attendance at all three performances is a requirement of the course.

Required texts: Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (Routledge); William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. William Green (Signet/Penguin) and Othello, ed. Alvin Kernan (Signet/Penguin); Pierre Beaumarchais, The Figaro Trilogy, trans. David Coward (Oxford); Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales (Signet). Recommended CDs (with libretti): G. Verdi, Otello, dir. Tullio Serafin, with J. Vickers and L. Rysanek (RCA); G. Verdi, Falstaff, dir. Herbert von Karajan, with T. Gobbi and E. Schwartzkopf (EMI); W. A. Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, dir. Karl Böhm, with D. Fischer-Dieskau and H. Prey (DG); Benjamin Britten, Billy Budd, dir. B. Britten, with P. Pears and P. Glossop (Decca).

7795 African Literature/Mr. V. Smith/T, Th 2-4:45
Just over 25 years ago, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya began to write in Kikuyu rather than English, and President Banda of Malawi founded a school that prohibits the teaching of African literature and the use of any African languages. Both were responses to the legacy of European colonialism, but both also assume that language is determinative of identity and political orientation. This course will trace how, in the sixty years between Amos Tutuola’s 1946 The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 2006 The Book of Not, African literatures have been positioned against a literary tradition that is synonymous with colonialism and traditions that represent “indigenous” or “precolonial” modes of thinking and writing. More than that, these works question the very usefulness of thinking in terms of a literary tradition at all: can a continent made up of 47 countries be said to have a single tradition? Does the idea of a nation merely replicate colonial and neocolonial forms and structures? Our readings will include some of the most important and electrifying writing from a number of countries in Africa, focusing particularly on Nigeria and South Africa. Critical readings will be available online.

Texts: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Penguin); J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Penguin); Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (Random House); Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Seal) and The Book of Not (Lynne Rienner); Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to our Hillbrow (Natal); Njabulo Ndebele, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (Ayebia Clarke); Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew (Vintage); Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman, ed. Simon Gikandi (Norton); Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood (Penguin); Amos Tutuola, Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Grove).