New Courses Spring 2008
Department of English, Linguistics and Communication
New course descriptions
Spring 2008
First-Year Seminar FSEM100A4
Disability Studies: Autism in Contemporary Literature and Film
Dr. Chris Foss
This seminar is a writing-intensive course in which you will explore representations of autism and autism-spectrum disorders such as Asperger's Syndrome in contemporary literature and film. Class discussion and writing assignments will allow you to engage in an intensive study of such representations of autism and/or to apply insight drawn from our more narrow focus either toward a comparable consideration of other specific disabilities or a broader understanding of disability in general.
English 329 -- Literature and Nation-Building in the American Republics
Dr. Antonio Barrenechea
This course examines literature from North America, South America, and the Caribbean in relation to the establishment of independent republics and the process of nation-building during the nineteenth century. We focus on comparative literary traditions that help to shape national and transnational constructions of identity in multilingual contexts. Selections are based upon parallel development across two or more parts of the western hemisphere or direct cultural exchange across national borders. Topics covered include the sublime in American nature, the emergence of national literary traditions, Native Americans and the conquest of the west, race and miscegenation, democracy and dictatorship, Southern-Caribbean plantation economies, the experience of modern industrial development, and the transcultural foundations of Hispanic Border literature.
English 375QQ -- Eliot, Pound, and the Italian Trecento
Dr. Teresa Kennedy
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were two powerful influences in the development of Modernism. Yet, they both were fascinated by the Italian lyric poets of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, including Dante, Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, and Petrarch. This course explores how and why Pound and Eliot might have found a model for modernism in these writers of the "sweet new style."
English 375RR--The Novels of Toni Morrison
Dr. Gregg Stewart
For this course, we consider the eight novels (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, and Love) of the Nobel Prize-winning author, Toni Morrison. In addition to her novels, we will read her one published short story, “Recitatif,” and portions of her critical work as well as seminal critical essays on her writing. Beyond the assigned reading, students will annotate a novel for its references to domestic space as the major semester project, complete a critical writing assignment, and take a midsemester and comprehensive final examination. The opportunity to study one of America’s contemporary authors provides a survey of the literary movements of which Morrison is a part and raises questions on her curious position within the African American, Southern, and women’s traditions; much of our discussion will explore those queries as well as the sociopolitical consequence to her work.
English 376JJ: Women and Modernism
Dr. Mara Scanlon
The period commonly called Modernism (roughly 1890-1945) produced an intensely difficult and fascinating body of literature that responded to the chaos of the time. But critics have rightly suggested that our very definition of literary Modernism may be unconsciously gendered masculine, that our descriptions of Modernist aesthetics and trends are based too rigidly on readings of the High (Male) Modernists such as Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, or Hemingway and tend to marginalize Modernist experiences and literatures of women and people of color.
This course will focus most centrally on questions of gender and Modernism; our task might be articulated by Rita Felski’s questions, “How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary or marginal status, were given a central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity?” Among other things, we will consider women writers’ relationship to language and form; to history, political engagement, war, structures of power, and the everyday; to the body and sexuality; to models of selfhood, the psyche, and voice; and to one another.
Our course material will include primary texts by women writers (a list of Likely Contenders would include H. D., Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Rebecca West, Willa Cather, Mina Loy . . .) and secondary materials that include gendered theories of the traditional Modernist aesthetic as well as sociohistorical or biographical information on women’s communities and roles in the world of art and literature.
Modernist literature is not easy, and neither is the workload for this class. Serious sojourners in literary history very welcome.
English 447L: Seminar - Comic Romance
Dr. Mathur
This class brings together two popular genres of the English Renaissance: chivalric romance and comedy. At first glance, the two styles present a study in contrasts. Romance is frequently thought of as a “high” genre, which focuses on aristocratic protagonists and heroic quests, while comedy is considered a “low” form and is associated with country bumpkins or “clown” figures. You can certainly see the convergence of these disparate modes in books like Miguel Cervantes’s, Don Quixote, and in films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
This course examines similar incarnations of comic romance in Renaissance poetry and drama. In the spring, we will be looking at three phases in the life of this hybrid genre: first, we will investigate romance narratives in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Second, we will consider how these genres are recreated - and parodied – in dramas like Shakespeare’s I Henry IV and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. Finally, we will consider theatrical imitations of the genre in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. As these reading materials suggest, the seminar will use the thematic focus of comedy and romance to explore the hybrid and multifarious literature of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.
Linguistics 375 F – Sentence Processing
Dr. Heidi Lorimor
Prerequisite: LING 101. Most adults can produce and understand speech at rates up to 180 words per minute, and with near-flawless accuracy. This course will focus on the mechanisms involved in language perception, comprehension, and production that allow us to process speech so quickly. We will use psycholinguistic methodology to explore how we perceive speech sounds, understand spoken and written words, comprehend sentences, and interpret them appropriately in a context, and also how we turn our thoughts into words and sentences. While focusing primarily on spoken language, we will also explore issues involved in processing written text and will consider bilingualism, signed languages, and language disorders in the context of language processing.
Linguistics 470J -- Accents of American English
Dr. Paul D. Fallon
Who says to-may-to and who says to-mah-to? Let's not call the whole thing off, but examine it in a linguistic light.
This course examines and analyzes the characteristics of a variety of accents of English. We will concentrate on accents of North America, but will also touch upon developments in other parts of the English-speaking world. A major focus will be on the formal phonological properties which characterize each accent, and the consequences of this on the different mental grammars and lexicon of each accent. Complementing this theoretical emphasis will be an examination of the sociolinguistic variability of features of accents. Our readings will include a careful examination of a major new linguistic atlas, Labov et. al.'s Atlas of North American English, as well as scholarly articles and chapters on various accents. Besides the readings, students will also hear audio samples and will participate in phonetic ear training. In addition to accents, we will explore related issues, such as the social meaning of various accents, whether it is possible to change, suppress, or disguise accents, and how accents are portrayed in film and popular culture. As a seminar, students will be expected to conduct research on a project of their choice. This seminar will require Institutional Review Board training and approval in dealing with human subjects.
Course objectives:
On completion of the course, you should be able to:
• distinguish between accent and dialect
• understand and identify the major characteristics of a variety of accents
• use standard lexical sets in description and typological comparison
• appreciate the impact of accents on phonological systems and mental grammars
• explain why accents arise and change
• detail the social implications of accent differences