New Mexico Courses, Summer 2012
Group I (Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy)
7005a Writing Fiction/P. Powell/T, Th 2–5:00
This writing workshop is meant to help you realize your goals as a writer and reader and critical thinker. 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 (Longman). Any edition of this book will do.
7113 Rhetoric: Principles and Pedagogies/C. Glenn/M, W 9–12:00
Rhetoric has long been a teaching tradition, the pedagogical pursuit of good speaking and writing. “A rhetor of speech and a doer of deeds,” Achilles sparked a rhetorical consciousness that the Greeks, Romans, Europeans, and Americans would all come to embrace and teach. Thus, pedagogy has always been (at) the heart of the rhetorical tradition, with rhetors placing themselves at the nexus of politics, culture, humanities, and pedagogy in order to “find out” and then “put across” the differences among “truth,” “probability,” and “belief”—and to teach their students to do the same. We will launch this course with a study of the rhetorical principles that best guide the successful reception and production of texts, whether the purpose of those texts is to teach, please, or move (persuade). We will work on big things and small: from rhetorical and literary analysis to stylistic possibilities and pedagogical practices. Students will read, write, and analyze across various genres: the essay, memoir, novel, and rhetorical treatise, fiction and nonfiction alike. They will develop expertise in rhetoric and rhetorical analysis to complement their skills in literature and literary analysis while simultaneously applying their ever-growing disciplinary knowledge of rhetoric to their own (reading, writing, and speaking) pedagogy and practices. With Cicero’s famous admonition in mind—“Wisdom without eloquence is of small avail…but eloquence without wisdom is…never a help”—we’ll strive to develop both. Please be prepared to discuss A Taco Testimony on the first day of class.
Texts: Denise Chávez, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture (Rio Nuevo); Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric (Blackwell); Cheryl Glenn, The Harbrace Guide to Writing: Brief Edition (this and the next text will be supplied by Cengage upon arrival at Santa Fe); Cheryl Glenn and Loretta Gray, Harbrace Essentials (supplied by Cengage); Brendan McGuigan, Rhetorical Devices (Prestwick); Jimmy Santiago Baca, Breaking Bread with the Darkness, Book 1: The Esai Poems (Sherman Asher); Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible (Norton); Quintilian on the Teaching and Speaking of Writing, ed. James J. Murphy (Southern Illinois); Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown); Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, 4th ed. (Oxford); Andrea Lunsford, Writing Matters (Georgia).
Group II (British Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
7260 The Merchant of Venice on the Page and Stage/A. MacVey/M, W 9–12:00
In this course we will explore a single great play, The Merchant of Venice. We will spend some time on critical interpretations and on the play's cultural history to help us make decisions about how to stage the work. But our primary focus will be on the text as a blueprint for performance. We will examine its language to be certain that we know what is actually being said, to whom it is being spoken, and why the speaker might be saying it. We'll explore the poetry and consider its rhythm, imagery, and structure; we will make use of tools such as scansion to help us fully understand the verse. We will examine every scene from a theatrical point of view, exploring structure, action, events, reversals, and ways of staging that will bring that scene to life. We will stage the play very simply, script in hand, and present it at the end of the term. All students in the class will participate in the reading. (Students who have taken either of Mr. MacVey's courses on The Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream should not register for this class.)
Texts: William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Arden); Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Touchstone); selected articles and reviews on reserve.
7290 Teaching, Reading (and Enjoying) Poetry/B. Smith/T, Th 9–12:00
Anyone who likes music ought to like poetry; yet students (and sometimes, secretly, their teachers) often approach poetry with anxiety, if not downright hostility. This course is designed to change such attitudes. We shall begin by locating sound and rhythm in the body. Grounding ourselves in those physiological sensations, we shall proceed, period by period, to read, discuss, and enjoy some of the English language’s greatest designs on our bodies and imaginations. Participants in the seminar will be asked to carry out three writing projects: an essay in criticism, a plan for teaching one or more of the poems, and some poetry of their own devising. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement.)
Texts: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Shorter 5th Ed. (Norton); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Keith Harrison (Oxford); Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Group III (British Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
7290 Teaching, Reading (and Enjoying) Poetry/B. Smith/T, Th 9–12:00
See the description under Group II offerings. The course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement.
7360a The Social Character of the Victorian Novel/J. Nunokawa/M, W 2–5:00
In this course, we will read a range of more or less familiar works in a variety of theoretical, historical, and critical contexts. Our general aim will be to study the social character of the Victorian novel in ways that take full measure of literary form and affect. We will be guided by big and little questions such as these: How do Victorian novels transform the pursuit of economic interests into dramas of romantic and erotic desire? How do they transform dramas of romantic and erotic desire into stories of economic interest? How are fascinations and anxieties about foreign races brought home to the domestic scene? How are questions of social class and individual character handled? What is the relation between verbal facility and social class in the Victorian novel, and how is this relation represented? How does the form of the Victorian novel extend, intensify, and expose the systems of social surveillance that developed in the nineteenth century? Why and how does the Victorian novel labor to produce bodily discomfort, both for those who inhabit it and for those who read it? How does the culture of capitalism haunt the Victorian novel? How does the Victorian novel imagine its relation to other fields of knowledge, for example, to the social sciences emerging at the same period and, like the novel, taking society itself as their object?
Texts: Jane Austen, Emma (the one technically non-Victorian novel); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White; George Eliot, Middlemarch (all in Penguin editions).
Group IV (American Literature)
7516 Nineteenth-Century American Gothic/J. Alemán/T, Th 9–12:00
This course focuses on the emergence of the American gothic in nineteenth-century literature and culture. The course begins with Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, a tale about a man who kills Indians while sleepwalking, and concludes with Henry James’ ghost-story thriller, The Turn of the Screw. In between, we’ll read short stories by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charles Chesnutt, to name a few, and we’ll study several examples of the gothic in American culture, including art and architecture, the rise of the asylum and cultures of the dead, pseudo-science, and slavery. The readings will balance literary and cultural studies with theories of the fantastic, grotesque, uncanny, and supernatural to come to an understanding of the American gothic—its tropes, forms, and characteristics—as it emerges out the nation’s racial fears, sexual codes, class anxieties, religious history, and westward expansion.
Texts: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (Penguin); American Gothic, ed. Charles Crow (Blackwell); Empire and the Literature of Sensation, ed. Jesse Alemán and Shelley Streeby (Rutgers). The following will be included in a course reader available through the Middlebury College Bookstore: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat” and “Berenice”; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Birth-Mark,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno”; Louisa May Alcott, “My Contraband”; Charles Chestnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine”; Samuel Clemens, “A True Story”; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; selections from Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side; Phoebe Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture; and theories about the gothic.
7650a Contemporary American Short Story/P. Powell/T, Th 9–12:00
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: Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians (Grove); Helena María Viramontes, The Moth and Other Stories (Arte Público); Pam Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness (Norton); Andre Dubus, In the Bedroom (Vintage); Carole Maso, Aureole (City Lights); T. C. Boyle, The Human Fly and Other Stories (Viking); Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Vintage); Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger (Norton); Charles Johnson, The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (out of print, but used copies available from online sources).
7674 Southwestern Literature and Film/J. Alemán/T, Th 2–5:00
This course surveys Southwestern literature and film to analyze how Native, Mexican, and Anglo Americans imagine life in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, or the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. We’ll consider the region through history, visual culture, folklore, the environment, and horror. The class begins with a photographic overview of Santa Fe and its power of representation; we then move to mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century folk and written material before turning to modern literature and movies; and finally, the class culminates with a sequence on Southwestern horror, which narrates the transformations that the region undergoes during modern and contemporary periods. The class will also examine and discuss the craft of cinema—from film production to scene analysis—as well as some aspects of film theory. Please view all films in their entirety before the start of the summer session.
Texts: Mary Anne Redding, Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe (Museum of New Mexico); John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (Oklahoma); Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain (Modern Library); Jimmy Santiago Baca, Spring Poems along the Rio Grande (New Directions); A. A. Carr, Eye Killers (Oklahoma); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin); Norma Cantú, Canícula (New Mexico). Films include: Young Guns, The Searchers, No Country for Old Men, The Prophecy, and The Devil Never Sleeps, with clips from The Mask of Zorro, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, From Dusk till Dawn, The Hills Have Eyes, and Tremors.
Group V (World Literature)
7740a Opera at 7,000 Feet/B. Smith/M, W 9–12:00
In terms of space, 7,000 feet is the vertical dimension of the Santa Fe Opera. Horizontally, we shall get as close as we can to three of the productions in the Opera’s 56th year of bringing singers, instrumentalists, and listeners together under the high-desert stars: Giacomo Puccini’s historical tragedy Tosca, Georges Bizet’s romance The Pearl Fishers, and Giachino Rossini’s rarely seen tragedy Maometto Secondo. The number of deaths in this season’s offerings will be offset by our study of one of Mozart’s comic masterpieces, The Marriage of Figaro. 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 Tosca 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 three dates: Saturday, June 26 (Tosca, opening night of the season, tail-gate parties are traditional—bring a costume); Wednesday, July 11 (The Pearl Fishers); and Wednesday, July 18 (Maometto II). An additional fee of $170 will be charged to cover the cost of tickets; attendance at all three performances is a requirement of the course.
Texts: Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (Routledge), plus additional critical readings that will be available in Santa Fe. Recommended CDs (with texts) or mp3 downloads (no texts—you’ll need to purchase the texts separately or find them online): Giacomo Puccini, Tosca, dir. Kurt Adler, with Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli (Sony); Georges Bizet, The Pearl Fishers, dir. Jean Fournet, with Pierette Alarie and Léopold Simoneau (Philips); Giachino Rossini, Maometto Secondo, dir. Claudio Scimone, with June Anderson and Samuel Ramey (Philips).
7809 Exploring Drama through Acting/C. MacVey/M 3–6:00; W 2–5:00
See the description under Group VI offerings. This course can be used to satisfy a Group V requirement.
Group VI (Theater Arts)
7260 The Merchant of Venice on the Page and Stage/A. MacVey/M, W 9–12:00
See the description under Group II offerings.
7809 Exploring Drama through Acting/C. MacVey/M 3–6:00; W 2–5:00
Samuel Beckett wrote that a stage is an area of maximum verbal presence and maximum corporeal presence: the two most powerful tools used to release the energy of a dramatic text are speaking and moving. Using the actor’s basic tools, we will study Antigone, Hamlet, The Seagull, and The Glass Menagerie and focus how meaning is embodied on the stage. The course culminates in a presentation of a scene written by one of the four playwrights we will study. No previous acting experience is required. (This course can be taken for Group V credit.)
Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet (any edition); Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, trans. Carol MacVey (photocopy available first day of class); Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, trans. Tony Kushner (New Directions); Sophocles, The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone, trans. Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Michael Shurtleff, Audition (Walker).
