Graduate Course Offerings

Spring 2009

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little east of Kansas.  I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.  The reviews, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.
--John Updike

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
--Gertrude Stein

Welcome!! 

This course is designed as a multi-genre creative graduate writing workshop.  Students will have the opportunity to write and submit for critique poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction, as long as the writer has had substantial experience with the genre of his/her choosing.  The course is intended for graduate students who have learned about their chosen genre as well as about the workshop approach in 300- and 400-level creative writing classes and who have a sense of their directions as writers.  The emphasis will be on student writing: “workshopping” and revising new work students produce for this course.  However, I will assign a variety of contemporary texts in the three genres (depending on the distribution of genre interests among the students). 

This course seeks to be useful to writers producing work that is serious and ambitious, and to those having familiarity with reading and discussing serious, ambitious creative work in a workshop environment.  We will consider theoretical and craft issues as they come up in our discussions of your work as well as in the assigned readings. 
    
Depending on the size of the class, each student will be required to submit two full-length stories or essays, or the equivalent amount of poetry, plus considered revisions.  Students will participate in discussions of writing submitted to workshop as well as assigned readings.  Students will provide each other typed critiques of writing discussed in workshop. 

Prerequisites: English 420 or 421 or the equivalent, or instructor permission.  If you haven’t taken 420 or 421, please contact me early and have a portfolio of work ready to show me. 

Please contact Jeanne E. Clark (jeclark2@csuchico.edu) if you have questions or would like to know more about the course.

 

English 644	18th Century British Literature
#4316	John Traver
Day and Time:	R 3:30-6:20
Location:	TALR 204

“Religion and Ridicule in the Long Eighteenth Century”

“When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.”  -Stanley Fish

 “Sacred cows make the best hamburger.”  -Mark Twain

If Fish’s prediction is to be believed, literary studies will become increasingly pre-occupied with the interplay between religion and secularism.  How should one approach the diversity of belief-systems found within the classroom?  How should values such as “toleration” and “freedom of speech” shape our response to texts which may not only deride other viewpoints, but advocate violence against their holders?  We will consider how eighteenth century literature itself responds to such issues, examining the use of satire and comedy in the depiction of religious institutions, Christian theology, and the clergy.  Though Anglicanism gave British religious identity a stable institutional form through a national church, the voices of the Catholics, “religious enthusiasts,” dissenters, and “free thinkers” residing in England inevitably raised questions and challenges to this established form.  Both the critics and defenders of England’s national church contested over their religious differences through satire, often using laughter not only to attack opposing viewpoints but to explore the tensions and apparent inconsistencies in their own religious beliefs and actions.  This class will explore the subversive tendencies and ambiguities of laughter in different “funny” works of the eighteenth century as they engage seriously with issues of religious belief, tolerance, and behavior in the shaping of England’s national and religious identity. 

In addition to delivering an in-class presentation and directing part of class discussion, students will be expected to write a major research paper (including a preliminary draft) and an optional book review.  Our course reading will involve a diversity of texts, including novels (e.g., Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews), poetry (e.g., Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees”), plays (e.g., Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem and British adaptations of Moliere’s Tartuffe), philosophy (e.g., Paine’s The Age of Reason, Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis), eighteenth-century sermons on laughter (e.g., Isaac Barrow and John Tillotson), and graphic art (e.g., Hogarth).

 

English 646	British Victorian Literature
#5901	Teresa Traver
Day and Time:	T 3:30-6:20
Location:	OCNL 123

“At Home in the World: national, domestic, and international affairs”

“But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in this life—no true home—nothing to be dearer to me than myself, and by its paramount preciousness, to draw from me better things than I care to culture for myself only?”— Charlotte Brontë, Villette.

This seminar asks poses a question: what was “home” for British Victorians, and how did it fit into a larger world? As we read through a range of novels, essays, and poetry, we’ll examine Victorian domesticity as it relates to the construction of both national and international identities. Along the way, we’ll take a look at recent critical work on cosmopolitanism, variously described as an affiliation that goes beyond the nation, an ethical approach for life in a global community, or a search for some degree of objectivity. We won’t pretend to completely define the cosmopolitan—since, after all, two critics employing the term seldom agree on precisely what it means—but we will get some sense of how various forms of the cosmopolitan might relate to domesticity and English national identity in a broad range of nineteenth-century texts. 

Primary texts include Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Anthony Trollope’s Is He Popenjoy? and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, along with poetry and essays by Felicia Hemans, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Coventry Patmore, etc. We will also look at secondary readings by the likes of Nancy Armstrong, Linda Colley, Amanda Anderson, Lauren Goodlad, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Kenneth Burke called rhetoric “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation.”  As a field, rhetoric has a 2500-year history that reveals much of our changing beliefs about truth, expertise, the act of writing, and the role of education.  This course, which is meant to be an introduction to rhetoric and its history, will start with ancient texts by Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and others in order to map major issues in the study and practice of writing and speechmaking in the Classical period.  Then we’ll jump ahead to consider modern and postmodern reconsiderations of these ideas, examining how rhetorical study today informs a broad range of disciplines and approaches in the humanities. 

Possible course texts: Bizzell and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present; Ritchie and Ronald’s Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s); Lipson and Binkley’s Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks; maybe others?  Work: regular reading responses, a paper proposal, and a final longer paper.  Students will be actively encouraged to apply issues in the history of rhetoric and rhetorical theory to their own scholarly interests and to look for overlaps among rhetoric and literature, linguistics, education, literacy, communication, and/or creative writing.

 

For more information, please contact

Department of English
Taylor Hall
California State University, Chico
Chico, CA  95929-0830
530-898-5124

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