Ryan's Fall 2010 schedule

I finally enrolled in my classes for the upcoming semester! As a full-time student, I'll be taking three different classes, each of them meeting once per week and lasting two and half hours. I'm excited!

Most of my classes will be in the Norlin Library (pictured below). The following course descriptions are taken from the department's website:

Introduction to Literatures of the United States: "American" Identity
Professor Mary Klages
Tuesday 12:30-3:00 pm


Is there an "American" literature? If so, how do we study it? What connections does literature have with an emerging and evolving nationalist identity? If not, how do we explore "literatures of the United States"? This course will use the American 1850s—a period of tremendous literary production, nationalist sentiment, political upheaval, and international diplomacy—as a case study to examine a variety of methods and critical perspectives relevant to literary scholarssip. These will include using archival sources, using digitized sources, applying different theoretical models and frameworks, and researching social and cultural contexts as modes of literary investigation. The course focuses on literary methodology as well as on important literary texts; readings will include primary works by Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Stowe, and Douglass and secondary works by Americanists from the past 50 years.


Contemporary Literary Theory
Professor Karen Jacobs
Wednesday 9:30-12:00 pm


This course is intended to introduce graduate students to the most significant theoretical movements that have influenced literary studies over the last several decades, with an emphasis on the ways in which the activity of interpretation has been conceptualized and practiced. Organized as a survey, the course will work towards a breadth of coverage, rather than undertaking in-depth analyses of any particular school. We will examine works drawn from structuralist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic theory; Marxist, historical and postcolonial theory; and feminist, racial and queer theory. We will intermittently apply these approaches to a selection of films and a novella.


Studies in Poetry: What good is Poetry in a Time Like This?: Poetics and Politics, 1790 to the Present
Professor Julie Carr
Thursday 1:00-3:30 pm


In this course we will read canonical poetics texts from the eighteen, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Poets philosophers, and scholars have long felt called to defend the work of the poetry against attacks of irrelevancy or elitism, to make a case for its political uses, or, in some cases, for its freedom from the practical demands of the political. We will examine these defenses and claims in their historical context, and will explore the explosive, contentious, outrageous, and sometimes deeply moving assertions that poets have made for their art and its place in the larger social and political spheres. We will begin with excerpts from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, move from there to classic Romantic texts, such as Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Keats’s letters, and Shelley’s Defense of Poetry. We will then examine key works from the latter half of the nineteenth century by poets such as Matthew Arnold, Charles Baudelaire, Mallarme, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Moving into the twentieth century, we will read essays by poets such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, and Amiri Baraka, and works by philosophers such as Adorno, Kristeva, and Agamben. As we move closer to the present, we will study the claims of Language Poetry, and we will consider how identity politics, feminism, and queer theory have informed contemporary poetics. This will be a heavy reading course, and will require two papers.