New Mexico Courses, Summer 2013

 

Group I (Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy)

 

7000a   Poetry Workshop/S. Ortiz/M, W 2–5:00

Speaking, telling, conveying, writing are all voice in the immediate here and now, which is where we're really present. Poetry from deep within the self is necessary; our resource is ourselves personally and socially. Writing as expression is voice from within that joins with voice outside the self. Students are expected to have experience with self-expression by speaking, conversing, dialoging, shouting, laughing, and to put that self-expression into written form. Weekly assignments will be expected, culminating in a 20-page manuscript by the last week of the summer session.

Texts: Simon J. Ortiz, from Sand Creek (Arizona); Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon); Sherman Alexie, War Dances (Grove); Mark Turcott, Exploding Chippewas (Triquarterly); Esther Belin, From the Belly of My Beauty (SunTracks/Arizona); James Welch, Riding the Earthboy 40 (Penguin). 

  

7006   Creative Nonfiction/P. Powell/T, Th 2–5:00

This course will explore the techniques and characteristics of creative nonfiction. Writers will workshop their works of autobiography, memoir, family history, biography, personal essay, writing about travel and place, and letters. Particular attention will be placed on research, historical reconstruction, truth versus memory, and the development of voice.   

Text: Brenda Miller and Susanne Paola, Tell It Slant (McGraw-Hill).

  

7115   Engendering Rhetorical Power/C. Glenn/T, Th 9–12:00

Traditionally, the most powerful rhetors have been public, political, virile, aristocratic males—not females, not the working class, not the aged or the young, not people of color. In this seminar, we will examine gender at the scene of rhetorical display to determine just how some rhetors establish themselves as “masculine,” while Others, often just as eloquent, are considered to be “feminine.” Gender, a term borrowed from grammar, signifies culturally constructed relations of power, with positions of dominance and subordination inscribed by such identity markers as biological sex, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, religion, age, and physical and intellectual ability. These culturally gendered positions play out in every rhetorical situation, affecting who may/not speak, who is/not listened to, who may/not listen, what must/not be said, and what those listeners can/not do. Students will read, analyze, and write across various literary and rhetorical genres. They will develop their rhetorical expertise in analysis while simultaneously applying their ever-growing disciplinary knowledge to their (reading, writing, and speaking) pedagogies and practices.  

Texts: Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (Plume); H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman, ar∙tic∙u∙late while black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (Oxford); Cheryl Glenn, The Harbrace Guide to Writing: Comprehensive 2nd Ed. (supplied by Cengage upon arrival at Bread Loaf); Brendan McGuigan, Rhetorical Devices: A Handbook and Activities for Student Writers, ed. Paul Moliken (Prestwick); Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition (Southern Illinois); Jacqueline Jones Royster, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells (Bedford); Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (Plume; out of print, but used copies available from online sources); Simon Ortiz, Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing (Sun Tracks/Arizona); Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible (Norton); course pack, to be purchased through the Middlebury College Bookstore.

  

7681    Reading and Writing the Body/P. Powell/T, Th 9–12:00 

See the description under Group IV offerings; this course carries Group IV credit.

 

Group II (British Literature through the Seventeenth Century)

 

7244   To Catch the English Crown: Shakespeare's History Plays/S. Sherman/M, W 9–12:00

Shakespeare's first great hit was a series of history plays about the kings who ruled and the wars they waged a century and more before his birth. The eight plays, produced over the course of eight years, gave London audiences then—and will give us now—a chance to watch Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare: to see him learn how to pack plays with pleasure, impact, and amazement, scene by scene and line by line, with a density and intensity no playwright before or since has ever managed to match. For our peculiar purposes, you will need to own and use the specific editions listed below (other readings will be supplied during or before the session). 

Texts: Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3; Richard II; Henry IV, Part 2, all in the Folger Shakespeare Library series, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (Simon & Schuster);  Richard III,ed. John Jowett (Oxford); Henry IV, Part 1,ed. David Bevington (Oxford); Henry V,ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford); An Age of Kings (DVD boxed set; BBC Video). 

 

7290a  Teaching, Reading (and Enjoying) Poetry/K. Flint/M, W 2–5:00

“Poetry,” English poet W. H. Auden famously claimed, “makes nothing happen.” This course takes issue with that remark, exploring a large number of things that poetry can bring about—and asking how it does so. It can produce emotional responses—moving us to tears, or anger. It deepens our knowledge of people, and times, that are not our own. Indeed, it can stop time, helping us see the world more attentively. Poetry can make us look at other art forms—paintings, photographs, films—in new ways.  It can rouse us to political or social action. Above all, it transforms language—sound, rhythm, form, imagery—and empty white pages, in order to defamiliarize the world. Whether we’re reading poetry written in the sixteenth century or last year, we will be looking for writing that shocks us into new understanding. We will look at poetic examples ranging from ancient ballads, Elizabethan love poetry, and seventeenth-century religious mysticism through to contemporary hip hop. We’ll pull poems apart to see how they are made, read them aloud, imitate their forms. We’ll consider how one might best incorporate poetry into one’s classroom, and how to help students understand poetry’s power. One particular thread running through the course will be the theme of the environment, and the social—and poetical—construction of the natural world. Assessment will be by means of a weekly journal entry (which will incorporate a close reading of a poem or pair of poems) and a final project, which might be a critical essay, a teaching plan, a critical assessment of a portfolio of your own work, or a multimedia exercise that integrates poetry with some other art form or new media platform. 

Texts: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Jon Stallworthy, and Mary Jo Salter, Shorter 5th Ed. (Norton); Dear World and Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK, ed. Nathan Hamilton (Bloodaxe); The Ecopoetry Anthology, ed. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street (Trinity University); essays on poetic theory on the Poetry Foundation’s website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essays.Supplementary texts (not required):Alfred Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (Copper Canyon); Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (Mariner); Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology (Norton).

 

Group III (British Literature since the Seventeenth Century)

  

7290a   Teaching, Reading (and Enjoying) Poetry/B. Smith/M, W 2–5:00

See the description under Group II offerings. The course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement.

  

7390   The Essay and Its Vicissitudes/J. Nunokawa/M, W 2–5:00

This course will introduce students to the range of the essay form as it has developed from the early modern period to our own. The class will be organized, for the most part, chronologically, beginning with the likes of Bacon and ending with some lustrous contemporary examples of, and luminous reflections on, the form. We will consider how writers as various as Bacon, Hume, Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Woolf, Baldwin, and Elizabeth Hardwick define and revise the shape and scope of those disparate aspirations in prose that have come to be called collectively The Essay. The writing assigned for this course will seek to enlist the essays not only as objects of analysis but also as models for our own essays in the essay form.  

Texts: The texts are available in a reader, which can be purchased through the Middlebury College bookstore.

  

7403   Laugh, Cry, Hum, Quake: Comedies and Tragedies, Musicals and Melodramas, London 1737–1979/S. Sherman/T, Th 2–5:00

Over the course of two centuries, British playwrights and players hit upon a huge new panoply of ways to trigger in their audiences the responses tagged above; many of their methods are still at work in the entertainments we seek and savor now. By close readings of the plays and their contexts (cultural, theatrical, social, political) we’ll track the development of those techniques, seeking to make sense of how they worked and why they matter.  

Texts: For our peculiar purposes, you will need to own and use these specific editions: John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera,ed. David Lindley and Vivien Jones (New Mermaids/Methuen); George Lillo, The London Merchant, ed. William McBurney (Nebraska); Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer,ed. James Ogden (New Mermaids/Methuen); Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd (Applause). Additional play texs will be supplied during or before the session.

 

Group IV (American Literature)

 

7512   Race and the Nineteenth-Century American Novel/J. Alemán/T, Th 9–12:00

This course examines the construction of race in relation to the rise of a relatively new genre in nineteenth-century America—the novel. We’ll be reading foundational or transformative narratives that self-consciously experimented with the novel’s form to convey or critique prevailing racial ideologies about Native, African, or Mexican America. There are two main goals for the course: we’ll work to understand and analyze the construction and circulation of racialist discourses that emerged around issues of expansionism, slavery, and citizenship in the nineteenth century, and we’ll study how the emergence of the novel, with its many forms of romance, sensationalism, sentimentalism, and realism, became one of the most powerful cultural tools used to construct and circulate ideas about race. Secondary sources on theories of the novel, U.S. literary and social history, and criticism will be available online before the summer session as required reading. Please purchase editions of texts listed. 

Texts: James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Penguin); Jesse Alemán and Shelley Streeby, Empire and the Literature of Sensation (Rutgers); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Penguin); Harriet Wilson, Our Nig (Vintage); Mark Twain, Puddn’head Wilson (Norton Critical); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (Penguin); Frances Harper, Iola Leroy (Oxford).

  

7670   Native American Literature: Indigenous Fiction and Poetry/S. Ortiz/M, W 9–12:00

The course will focus on contemporary themes dealing with Indigenous issues largely having to do with liberation and de-colonization in the twenty-first century. By reading Indigenous American literature, we're going to deal with the realities of the U.S.A., with its substantial history of violence, Manifest Destiny, invasion, and occupation, and the present-day threat its socio-industrial-economic-political complex poses to the world. Much seminar style discussion and dialogue is expected. At least two seven-to-eight-page essays will be assigned. 

Texts: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin); Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy (Grove); Richard Van Camp, The Lesser Blessed (Douglas & McIntyre); Janice Gould, Earthquake Weather (Arizona); Esther Belin, From the Belly of My Beauty (SunTracks/Arizona); James Welch, Riding the Earthboy 40 (Penguin); Louise Erdrich, Shadow Tag (Harper Perennial).

  

7674   Southwestern Literature and Film/J. Alemán/T, Th 2–5:00

To it, through it, or back to it again, the Southwest has long been associated with travel, and travel accounts often narrate contact, conflict, alienation, trauma, and regeneration. So for those trekking to Santa Fe, this course examines the Southwest as a travel point. We’ll begin with accounts that collapse the autobiographical “I” with the “eye” of ethnography to imagine the region through a discourse of otherness. We’ll then spend some time in the modern era, when Anglo and Native artists cultivated competing representations of the region. Finally, we’ll examine contemporary travel accounts in literature and film. The goal of the course is to study how travel to or through the greater Southwest alleviates or generates forms of personal and cultural conflicts about displacement, modernity, and nostalgia. Shorter texts will be available on e-reserve. Please view films before the start of the summer session and purchase editions of texts listed. 

Texts: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Relación/The Account, trans. Martin Favata and José Fernández (Arte Publíco); Susan Magoffin, Down the Santa Fe Trail (Bisson); Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert (New Mexico); Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage); Oscar Zeta Acosta, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (Vintage); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin); Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Vintage). Films: Tombstone; Pow-Wow Highway; Smoke Signals; Route 666; Clips: Easy Rider; Thelma and Louise, and The Hills have Eyes.

  

7681   Reading and Writing the Body/P. Powell/T, Th 9–12:00

This course will explore the body as the site of multiple representations of difference (gender, sexuality, race and class, disability) and identity. Readings will explore the conflicts between embodiment or the lived experience of difference and the culturally inscribed analysis of what it means to be different. In addition to the required texts and two films, one on race, the other on hybridity, a packet of secondary readings will be made available. These essays, written by writers such as Butler, Halberstam, Anne-Fausto Sterling, Gunn-Allen, Minh-ha, Alison, Lorde, Mura, Gomez-Pena, and Morrison, among others, will provide a diverse range of perspectives on the body, exploring gender and conformity, the construction of sexualities, whiteness, and race, documented/undocumented, abled/disabled, social class and culture, and more. Students will engage with these essays and produce weekly creative and critical offerings of their own. 

Texts: Susan Bordo, The Male Body (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter (HarperOne); Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Alyson; out of print, but used copies are available from online sources); Kathryn Sockett, The Help (Berkley); Carol Maso, Aureole (City Lights).

 

Group V (World Literature)

 

7753   The Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel in the Old World and the New/M. Katz/M, W 9–12:00

In the broadest critical sense the term “realism” refers to artists’ attempts to represent or imitate nature with truth and adequacy. The critic M. H. Abrams has defined the realist novel as one that seeks to convey the effect of realism by presenting complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a developed social structure, interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible modes of experience. This course will focus on the changes that took place in the themes and forms of “realism” as it moved from Europe across to the Americas. We will first explore the meaning of the concept; then we will read novels representing the Old World (England, France, and Russia) and the New (America and Brazil), comparing these works in terms of characterization, plot development, thematic statement, and stylistic technique. 

Texts: Pam Morris, Realism (Routledge); Jane Austen, Persuasion (Norton); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Norton); Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children (Norton); Henry James, The American (Norton); Aluísio Azevedo, The Slum (Oxford). 

 

Group VI(Theater Arts)

 There are no Group VI courses in New Mexico this coming summer.