Vassar College Department of English

I. Introduction to Literary Study

English Freshman Course Descriptions, Spring 2010

101.51

Mr. Laymon TR 9:00-10:15

Hip Hop and Critical Citizenship:

The American mainstream has a voracious appetite for various forms of subcultural black expression. Though varied, Black American cultural expression is often anchored in rhetorical battles or verbal jousts that place one character against another. From sorrow songs to blues, black music has always been a primary means of cultural expression and survival for African Americans, particularly during difficult social periods and transition. Black Americans have used music and particularly, rhythmic verse to resist, express and signify citizenship or belonging. Nowhere is this more evident than in hip hop culture generally and hip hop music specifically. One could argue that hip hop music, at its best, attempts to reveal and complicate ideas of citizenship while demystifying private and contested public American space. As Tricia Rose writes in Black Noise, "Hip Hop combines the improvisational elements of jazz with the narrative sense of place in the blues; it has the oratory power of the black preacher and the emotional vulnerability of Southern soul music." The result is a new vibrant American text that deserves exploration.

This course is a comprehensive freshman course that thoughtfully approaches hip hop as a meaningful, critical and ever-changing post-modern text. In addition to looking at some established hip hop rivalries and forming a complete hip hop timeline that begins in the belly of slave ships, we will look at hip hop as the epitome of metafictional post modernity. We will explore the connection between hip hop and West African chants, southern African American sorrow songs, gospel texts, blues texts, funk texts, punk texts, rock, texts and the texts from the Harlem Renaissance. One of the aims of the course is to encourage students and listeners to treat hip hop music as neither disposable commodity, nor cool art form, but as literary text, complete with hefty subtext and pointed democratic signifiers.

101.52

Ms. Zlotnick TR 10:30-11:45

A Room of One's Own:

This course is intended as an introduction to reading women's writing. It takes as its starting point Virginia Woolf's landmark work of feminist literary criticism, A Room of One's Own. Over the semester, we will take up many of the concerns addressed in Woolf's text, such as anger in women's literature, androgyny, and the importance of race and class in the construction of literary canons. Readings may include novels by Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Woolf as well as essays by contemporary feminist critics.

101.53

Mr. Sharp TR 9:00-10:15

Love, Death and the Gift of Art:

Unlike a commodity, according to Lewis Hyde, a gift must always be kept in motion: "The gift gets steeped in the fluids of its own passage." In this course we will study texts, drawn from a variety of cultures, periods, and genres, in which images of gift exchange play a vital role. We will explore the complex connections between human frailty, vulnerability, and mortality on the one hand and conceptions of love, beauty, and art on the other. Readings will include plays by Shakespeare, poems and letters by Keats, a memoir by Eli Wiesel, gift theory by Lewis Hyde, and novels by Helen Garner, Alex Miller, and Nicole Krauss.

I. Introductory Courses

170

Entitled "Approaches to Literary Studies," English 170 is designed as an introduction to the discipline of literary studies. While each section has a different focus (see description below), they have a common agenda: to explore the concerns and methods of the discipline. Topics range from specific critical approaches and their assumptions to larger questions about meaning-making in literature, criticism, and theory. Assignments will develop skills for research and writing in English, including the use of secondary sources and the critical vocabulary of literary study.

As an introduction to the discipline, English 170 is recommended, but not required, for potential majors. It is open to freshmen and sophomores, and others by permission. Although the ideal sequence of English courses for freshmen interested in majoring in English is English 101 in the Fall and 170 in the Spring, 101 is not a prerequisite for 170. Freshmen with AP English credit may take English 170 in the fall semester. Those freshmen who are not currently enrolled in 101 may choose to take 101 in the b-semester and 170 simultaneously; the English department, though, suggests that freshmen take the opportunity to explore other areas of study before committing to the major. Note that English 170 does not fulfill the Freshman Course requirement.

170.51

Ms. Kim            MR 3:10-4:25

Approaches to Literary Studies: Mapping Literary Geographies, Building Literary Spaces

In this class, we will examine how writers use geography and space to map out gender, class, and race in a range of literary texts. However, we will begin with some critical work including Aaron Betsky's book Building Sex and Mike Davis's Magical Urbanism. We will then examine how critical discourses of space in the fields of architecture, urban planning, and geography can give us a window into various works. We will read the Digby Mary Magdalene Play, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Mandeville's Travels, Edith Wharton's House of Mirth and The Decoration of Houses, Loida Maritza Perez's Geographies of Home, and some work from Virginia Woolf. We will take a field trip to the Mills Mansion to look at one of Edith Wharton's decorated rooms. We will also try to take a field trip to Edith Wharton's house "The Mount."

170.52

Mr. Chang         TR 3:10-4:25

Approaches to Literary Studies: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Text

The critical lens through which we read determines what we will (and will not) see. This course will introduce you to thirteen peculiarly penetrating and inventive readers, readers who have discovered new modes and objects of inquiry such as code-switching, heteroglossia, mimetic desire, homosexual panic, abjection, jouissance, gender performativity, intertextuality, supplementarity, profane illumination, the reality effect, the political unconscious, and the obscene object of ideology. Following the insights of these readers we will examine a handful of texts, including Dante's Inferno V, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," James' "The Beast in the Jungle," Yeats' "Among School Children," Eliot's The Waste Land, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the course of the semester you will be asked to customize these various theoretical optics to fit your own prescription. For the aim of the course is not to reproduce other critics' readings, but rather, through the startling force of their example, to create your own.

170.53

Mr. Perez             TR 12:00-1:15

Approaches to Literary Studies: Telling Secrets

Margaret Atwood describes secrecy as "a poppy made of ink" that "blooms" inside its subjects. She begins her poem with a correlation between blood and secrecy that resonates powerfully within the American imagination: "Secrecy flows through you,/a different kind of blood." This course investigates the primacy of secrets and confessions as modes of authenticity and self-knowledge in US cultural production. In particular, we consider how the secret provides a major constitutive and regulatory structure for the expression of sexuality and race in American life. We also examine the dynamic relationship of readers to what remains inexplicit in the literary. How is it that the unspoken in a text might provide a key moment defining not only that text but naming a particular readership? Peter Brooks contends (following Foucault, following Freud) that "the obligation to hide...is merely an aspect of the need to avow, to confess." As Atwood's poem suggests, secrecy is a matter of both blood and ink, an interiority shaped by dominant narratives and national symbology yet no less intimate, true and secretive to its subject. Do secrets foreclose speech or urge us toward confession? What are the different performative modes of confession (and secrecy) beyond speech and writing? Is it the role of the critic to make silences articulate and what are the ethical implications of such a project? We will read works by Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Anne Sexton and Michelle Cliff. Approaches include psychoanalysis, critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, narratology, new historicism, new criticism, reader-response, and deconstruction.

170.54

Ms. Yow              MW 12:00-1:115

Approaches to Literary Studies: The Violence of the Letter: Language, Literature and Power

In 1492, the Bishop of Avila presented a perplexed Queen Isabella of Castile with his Gramática sobre la lengua castella. Asked what it was for, he replied: "Your majesty, language is the perfect instrument of empire." More than four centuries later, in a tragic testimony to the bishop's prescience, the Haitian poet Edmond Laforest tied a Larousse dictionary to his neck and jumped from a bridge to his death. Laforest's gesture of mute but eloquent despair is but one of the ways colonial and postcolonial writers have protested the violence of linguistic imperialism. The aim of this course is to examine the roles of language and literature in the exercise of various forms of power. What is the relationship between aesthetics and ideology? How are tacit assumptions about value embedded in language? How have race, class, gender, nationality and sexuality shaped the stakes and meaning of literacy? What is the relationship of authorship to authority, of subjectivity to subjection? What does it mean to speak or write in the language of one's oppressor? In analyzing the linguistic and the literary as sites of domination and resistance, the course draws on feminist theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, speech act theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and queer studies. We will consider the particular social and historical contexts in which various literary and critical texts were produced. In addition, we will look at the origins of English Studies in colonial India and the Working Men's Colleges and Mechanics' Institutes of Britain to understand how this academic discipline has functioned historically as a mechanism of social control.

Authors may include Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Theresa Cha, Sandra Cisneros, Jacques Derrida, Frederick Douglass, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Stuart Hall, Barbara Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, Claude Levi-Strauss, Felix Mnthali, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Edward Said, Joan Scott, William Shakespeare, Sara Suleri, Gauri Viswanathan, Sherley Anne Williams.

170.55

Ms. Rose           MW 1:30-2:45

Approaches to Literary Studies: American Modernism

What was American modernism? Are all literary texts composed in the modern historical period necessarily modernist? If not, upon what basis did the prose and poetry of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Pound come to be recognized as representative of - if not synonymous with - the modern period? This course has a dual focus on 1) the prose and poetry of the modern period and 2) critical approaches to the concept of modernism itself. Issues include the rise of new criticism, modernism as a response to mass culture, race matters, and gender construction against the backdrop of world war. Primary works include those by Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neal Hurston. The subject of interpretive authority will constitute a central area of investigation for us as we examine the ways in which readers' ideologies - the beliefs, assumptions, and values with which they approach a text - play a crucial role in shaping our understanding of modernism. Along the way, we will arrive at a shared understanding of some of the key aspects of American modernism, and of our own ideological tendencies.

170.56

Mr. Whalan            TR 10:30-11:45

Approaches to Literary Studies: Theory and the Harlem Renaissance

Using a range of exciting texts and cultural forms from the Harlem Renaissance-including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, music, and cinema-this course will examine a series of critical issues and theories around race, literary canons, the politics of literature, and cultural value. What is a renaissance? What informs our value judgments on what makes a cultural work "great"? What are the differences between mass, folk, and high culture? How do forms of representation inform our ideas about race and identity? And how much can culture play a part in struggles for equality and civil rights? All these questions were raised by the writers and theorists of the Harlem Renaissance, and continue to be questions of vital importance today. The course will consider how these issues were in play both during the period and beyond, balancing close attention to texts from the time with insights from contemporary theorists and critics. Writers to be studied include Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston.

170.57

Mr. Whalan              TR 1:30-2:45

Approaches to Literary Studies: Theory and the Harlem Renaissance

Using a range of exciting texts and cultural forms from the Harlem Renaissance-including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, music, and cinema-this course will examine a series of critical issues and theories around race, literary canons, the politics of literature, and cultural value. What is a renaissance? What informs our value judgments on what makes a cultural work "great"? What are the differences between mass, folk, and high culture? How do forms of representation inform our ideas about race and identity? And how much can culture play a part in struggles for equality and civil rights? All these questions were raised by the writers and theorists of the Harlem Renaissance, and continue to be questions of vital importance today. The course will consider how these issues were in play both during the period and beyond, balancing close attention to texts from the time with insights from contemporary theorists and critics. Writers to be studied include Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston.