Graduate Course Offerings

Fall 2008

Required of all MA students, this course is designed to be both an introduction to graduate study and methods (i.e., a seminar in Bibliography and Methods of Research and as a forum to explore scholarly resources and techniques for the study of English language and literature.  We will examine closely the types of criticism appearing in academic journals, and will spend time considering what it means to embark on a career in the Humanities.  Students will be responsible for a number of writing exercises that will help prepare them for the kinds of reading, writing and research that graduate study in English demands: annotated bibliography, conference paper abstract, journal book review, and thesis. Other assignments include an intellectual autobiography, a journal review, and a review of a professional organization (e.g., MLA, NCTE, AWP, etc.).

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.

In this course we consider how reading and writing are actually practiced-- how reading and writing practices are situated in the stream of life and how they are distributed among the social and material contexts in which they occur.  The course will begin with readings from social and situated models of learning and cognition (Vygotsky, Lave and Wenger, Engstrom, etc.).  We will then examine case studies of distributed cognition, in particular considering educational environments such as schools and after school programs  (Cole, McDermott, etc.)  Students will do their own studies of literacy as distributed cognition as a part of the course.  

English 634	Teaching Composition
#5097	Lois Bueler
Day and Time:	W 6-8:50
Location:	TALR 208

English 634, Teaching Composition, prepares its students to teach first–year college composition, including our ENGLISH 130: Academic Writing.  In this course we will read about and discuss various theoretical approaches, course models, and best teaching practices for freshman composition.  We will particularly consider 1) how to help students develop topics and conduct inquiries; 2) how to sequence reading and writing assignments to foster richness and clarity in thinking and writing; 3) how to read, respond to, and assess student writing; and   4) how to think about classroom activities and practices that encourage student learning. Students of 634 will end the course with a syllabus designed for English 130 and a portfolio of information about teaching reading and writing.

In addition to our weekly seminar meetings, each student in English 634 will intern in an English 130 class where you will observe and participate under the guidance of the instructor. Some of your writing assignments for 634 will consist of observations made in English 130.

This seminar is designed to be appropriate for and useful to all English M. A. students who intend to teach, at whatever level and in whatever courses. Though our specific focus will be English 130, you will have the opportunity to practice much that will be useful wherever you teach. Students with questions about counting the course toward their degree requirements should consult the Graduate Adviser.

Please note: English 634 is required in order for you to be eligible to apply to teach English 130.  It does not guarantee you such a job, however. Teaching Associates are chosen by means of an application process that includes but is not limited to their work in 634.

English 647	20th Century British and Continental Literature
#6172	Roger Kaye
Day and Time:	R 3:30-6:20
Location:	TALR 204

In this seminar, we will read and then discuss together some of the undisputed great writers of the past century form Great Britain and the European Continent. These works are primary nourishments for writers worldwide who seek out the finest of their predecessors from whom to learn. Our reading will sample the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. Aside from their supremacy as masters of their craft, these writers appear together for no thematic and stylistic purposes. Let’s just say that we will read them to re-invigorate our sense of having souls.

Fiction:

Franz Kafka, METAMORPHOSIS and other stories, tr. Pasley
Thomas Mann, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, tr. John Woods
D.H. Lawrence, WOMEN IN LOVE
Virginia Woolf, THE WAVES
Bruno Schulz, THE STREET OF CROCODILES
Wyndham Lewis, SELF-CONDEMNED
Henry Green, Loving

Plays:

Luigi Pirandello, SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR
Garcia Lorca, BLOOD WEDDING
Samuel Beckett, ENDGAME

Poetry:

Rainer Rilke, “Duino Elegies,” tr. Stephen Mitchell
Osip Mandelshtam, SELECTED POEMS, tr. James Greene
Gertrude Stein, TENDER BUTTONS
Selection of short poems by Paul Valery; Montale; Machado; Cavafy; and Attila Jozsef

 

English 656	Themes/Genres/Problems in Lit
#5164	Andrea Lerner
Day and Time:	T 3-5:50
Location:	BUTE 327

Rogues, Miscreants, and Ne’er- Do-wells: Bad Boys and Naughty Girls in
20th Century American literature.

We have heard again and again that American is a culture obsessed with violence or in the words of writer Charles Bowden, “a nation of drivers who slow down to look at the wreck, a culture so devoid of passion that we idolize those who slip the bounds of the law…” From its earliest inception American literature has proven an arena to witness the evil and grotesque whether it come in the form of a  maniacal ship captain like Ahab, the Indian savagery depicted by Mary Rowlandson, or the Machiavellian musings of Poe’s mad scientists.

In the twentieth century American literature has no shortage of scoundrels and ne’er-do’ wells. How do these texts function as a social a barometer for the culture at large? How do these American nightmares exorcise ghosts and fantasies that continue to plaque us? And why are these characters so appealing to us?

This semester we will read the following texts:

Richard Wright: Native Son
Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Ken Kesey:  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Tim O’Brien: In the Lake of the Woods
Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
Norman Mailer: The Executioner’s Song
Flannery O’Connor: Selected short stories

 

This seminar will focus on a body of texts that chronicle and contemplate the interaction between European cultures (especially that of England) and the peoples of the 'New World.' The course posits that a coherent study of such texts will produce a better understanding of this epoch-making and cataclysmic aspect of early modernity. 'Encounter' is a reciprocal experience and indicates that various peoples came into contact with one another and not that one group 'discovered' another. These texts represent a series of paradigms that have repeated themselves many times in the long history of the European invasion of and immigration to the western hemisphere. Authors such as Raleigh, Harriot, Hakluyt, Bradford, Eliot, Williams and Rowlandson will be read in conjunction with a variety of recorded responses from Native American sources. Critical readings will also accompany each week's seminar.
Last year's MLA job information list featured a few keywords that kept repeating in the texts of many of the job descriptions. One of them was "transatlanticism" or "transatlantic studies." In the interest of offering a pre-1900 American literature seminar to fulfill our program requirements and in responding to recent trends in demands for "transatlantic" preparation in the field of literary studies, I am offering a version of a course I took as a doctoral student at Arizona State University. I took this course with a scholar who specializes in British 17th century literature as well as Native American literature (Scott Stevens, Ph.D. Harvard) and who now teaches this course regularly at SUNY Buffalo. Below is his description of the course which can be found at:

http://wings.buffalo.edu/academic/department/AandL/english/courses/gradSp02/gradSpring2002.htm.

I will model my course after the seminar I took from Professor Stevens, but I will adapt it to fit my current interest in the field (and I will include more "American" and international accounts as his list is heavily British). Specifically, although the majority of the course will focus on pre-1900 texts, I intend to offer at least one text from twentieth century or contemporary literature that picks up one of the major themes of the encounter. For instance, I am considering pairing the list of pre-1900 readings below with Laura Esquivel's contemporary novel La Malinche about the mistress of Hernán Cortés and also with twentieth century writings by Octavio Paz on the same figure. Also, we will be reading Eduardo Galleano's contemporary reimagining of the indigenous perspective on the encounter in his work Memory of Fire. I have not yet made the final decisions about the reading list so if any graduate student who intends to take the course is interested in requesting a particular text that fits into the goals of the course I am open to such suggestions (email me at lmhouston@csuchico.edu). Finally, the "critical readings" referred to below in Professor Stevens' description are theoretical works from French poststructuralism (semiotics and narrative theory), New Historicism, and Postcolonial Studies, among others.

P.S. If you like talking about cannibalism, you'll like taking this course.

The goal of this course is to provide a solid grounding in recent developments in literary theory and criticism. Our primary emphasis will be on familiarizing ourselves with major thinkers, central texts, critical terminology, and common approaches. A secondary aim of the class is the evaluation of what each thinker has to offer us as readers and critics of literature and culture. The final step will see us applying these theories to the reading and explanation of literary texts. Theory isn’t meant to provide easy answers, but rather to offer us new and interesting questions to pose to the works we read. Ultimately, this is a “toolbox” course designed to make us better equipped and more informed critics and readers—not just of literary texts, but also of other theoretical texts we may encounter in the future. So, we will learn some contemporary theory, but we will, more importantly, learn how to read contemporary theory and scholarship that deploys contemporary theory, which is of course constantly evolving and can’t all be covered in this class.

Readings, which are of course subject to change before the start of Fall 2008, will include essays and excerpts by most if not all of the following:
Formalisms:Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, Mikhail Bakhtin, Wimsatt and Beardsley, Cleanth Brooks
Structuralism and Semiotics:Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes
Post-structuralism and Deconstruction:Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault
Reader-Response Theory:Wolfgang Iser, Peter Rabinowitz
Psychoanalytic Theory:Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Slavoj Žižek
Feminism: Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Nina Baym, Julia Kristeva
Gender Studies and Queer Theory:Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Judith Butler
Marxism and Critical Theory:Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson
New Historicism and Cultural Studies:Stephen Greenblatt, Clifford Geertz
Postcolonial Theory and Ethnic Studies:Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

Required text:

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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