501.001 OLD ENGLISH
T. Toon
MW 8:30-10
4211 AH (3 Credits)

Meets together with English 407

This course is an introduction to Old English, the language spoken by our forebears until the unpleasantness at Hastings — the Norman Conquest. Since Old English is so different from Modern English as to seem like another language, the greatest effort of this class will be to master the rudiments of the structure and vocabulary of the earliest attested form of English. The reward is being able to read an excitingly different corpus of prose and poetry. You will also develop a new appreciation of where our language, culture, and intellectual traditions come from. Course requirements: daily recitation, weekly quizzes, two hour exams, a term project (written and oral presentation). Written work also includes regular short modernizations and longer take-home modernizations.

516.001 LITERARY RESEARCH & THE COMPUTER
Research and Technology in the Humanities
E. Rabkin
TTH 1-3
G444B MH (3 Credits)

Meets together with English 415

This upperclass and graduate-level course fosters both sharpened general analytic and presentational skills and technical mastery of a broad range of modern computer-based technologies for collaboration and for gathering, manipulating, analyzing, and presenting electronic data in the humanities, both locally and via networks, with special attention to creating and publishing “compound documents” (e.g., Web sites and CD-ROMs). The course begins with five weeks of intensive technical training and proceeds to five weeks of discussion of works that question the impact of technology. By the middle of the semester, restrained only by time and their imaginations, students also will be working in self-selected groups on creating sophisticated multimedia products using a variety of techniques to address some substantial issue in the humanities. Technical topics include information gathering from digital sources, HTML authoring, hypertext documents or novels, collaborative technologies, the meaning of the digital revolution, text analysis, and image manipulation.

Prospective students may want to look at the course website for the last offering of this course, located at http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/RTHf00/415f00syl.html or click the link from Professor Rabkin’s homepage (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~esrabkin). Probably the most pertinent and interesting point on this site to check is the “Class Roster & Projects” page and the syllabus itself. Further queries can be addressed to Professor Rabkin, preferably by e-mail but also by phone or during his office hours. Check with the receptionist for contact information. Cost: 2

520.001 INTRODUCTION TO GRADUATE STUDIES
A. Pinch
TTh 10-11:30
B239 EH (3 Credits)

Course required for and limited to first-year Language & Literature and English & Women’s Studies students only.

This course is designed to introduce first-year PhD students to the forms of research, writing, and interpretation typical of graduate-level literary study and to the academic profession more generally. Through a combination of workshops, exercises, selected readings, and class discussions, we will assemble a toolkit of research methodologies, writing and speaking skills, and critical perspectives that should be broadly applicable in both subsequent courses and the dissertation-writing process. We will spend some time exploring the specific conventions and protocols of academic life, but we will also strive for a larger view, in which we consider the challenges and opportunities the profession can provide and its problematic status in contemporary society.

521.001 HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY
Doing Things With Theory
D. Thomas
TTh 8:30-10
4199 AH (3 Credits)

This course proposes that we should try to have an account of what we hope to “do” with theory even as we begin to learn theory. We will examine an array of theory styles with a guiding question in mind: what ideas about personal and social action are announced or implied there? This program bears on our work as a group and on the individual work of each student.

The group will work to develop a common sense of the breaking points in debates over some key theory concepts, such as agency, practice and ideology. In so doing, the course will cover many of the bases treated in most theory introductions — acquainting students with an array of problems, schools and vocabularies at hand in current literary study. Indeed, we will study a number of “schools” — cultural studies, new historicism, pragmatism, neoformalism, normativity theory, democratic theory — and the questions that tend to define schools — agency, the literary, sociality, and the relation of examples to general claims, to name a few. But our efforts will not be directed principally at rendering any comprehensive survey. Instead, the readings are ordered to facilitate our thinking about profoundly differing accounts of what, if anything, theory is able to “do.” Some likely authors: Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Appiah, Gallagher and Greenblatt, Fish, Nussbaum.

Students will be encouraged to cultivate a keener awareness of their specific concerns, locating those concerns within the terms provided by current theoretical conversations. Through discussions at once theoretical and meta-theoretical, our sessions aim to bring participants to clear-eyed and sophisticated understandings of where and how theory matters in the work they hope to accomplish as scholars.

526.001 LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Hybridities: Collaborative Investigations of the Verbal and the Visual Image
L. Gregerson
M 1:30-4:30
Room 2002 Art & Architecture Building

Meets Together with Art 600.002, InstHum 511.001

This studio seminar will explore the conceptual and logistical parameters of artistic collaboration and the public sphere. We are seeking collaborators from a broad spectrum of disciplinary and personal affiliation: visual artists, poets and prose writers, architects, filmmakers/videographers, performers, and those in analytic fields with a particular interest in hybrid forms of identity and expression. Hybridity, in other words, will be both our method and our subject.

Through a series of small-scale projects, students in varied and successive groups of two or three will identify issues of common concern and strategies for interdisciplinary/mixed media investigation. Issues will tend to draw upon the intellectual and affective identifications of class- or field-inflected. Methods will draw upon the various disciplinary competencies individual members of the seminar bring to our collaborations and will demand of us the shared acquisition of new skills.

Building upon this period of private and small-group explorations, the seminar will design and produce a collaborative public installation or installations at the end of the term. Installation is itself a hybrid medium; ours will be at once a culmination and a (very) preliminary report.

This course is the inaugural course in a series of interdisciplinary seminars founded to honor the legacy of former Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Nancy Cantor, with her cardinal commitments to diversity, interdisciplinarity, and public goods. The course may be used to fulfill the cognate requirement for students in English and Creative Writing, Art and Design, and other programs at the discretion of the individual departments. Enrollment by permission of the instructors. Contact gregerso@umich.edu or ewest@umich.edu.

549.001 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Some Forms of Contemporary Fiction
C. Baxter
MW 11:30-1
4175 AH (3 Credits)

This will be a course in which we’ll read and discuss some recent novels that present interesting formal properties or conditions to the reader. The discussions will, I hope, prove to be useful for practicing writers of fiction, but the seminar should not be seen to be limited to them alone. I am interested in a number of different matters, including (tonally) irony and its discontents, and other technical or formal features, such as effaced narrators, counterpointed narratives, collage and vignette-accumulations, obsessive voicings vs. improvisatory indirection, and texts with photographs, or texts that are, themselves, photographic in some manner. I am interested also in stories and novels that are slightly off the beaten track. Some of the writers whose work we may study would include Evan Connell, W.G.. Sebald, Elizabeth Hardwich, James Salter, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Lydia Davis, Donald Barthelme, Wright Morris, William Maxwell, and Paula Fox.

Weekly annotations on the reading and a final paper.

569.001 CREATIVE NON-FICTION WORKSHOP
T. Lynch
Th 6-9
4175 AH (3 Credits)

Permission of instructor required for registration.
See Jan Burgess about permission to register.

The traffic between poetry and prose is one that interests me and informs the workshop in non-fiction. Both creative non-fiction and poetry require a powerful sense of voice and rely on language to manage the wide range of subjects that may be addressed in either a poem or an essay. Accordingly members of the workshop will read and discuss poems as a way to understand the thematic, imaginative and structural range of the personal essay. Montaigne’s dictum, that “in every man is the whole of man’s estate”, is the organizing principle of the workshop. In order to better understand humanity, we must examine humans, through language, which seems among humankind’s defining gifts. Writing requirements will include 3 non-fiction project – one thousand words, two thousand words and three thousand words. There will be two required and several suggested texts.

Admission to this course is by writing sample only. All who are interested in 569.001 should submit a writing sample to Jan Burgess.

570.001 TEACHING WRITING
Introduction to Composition Studies
A. Gere
W 6-9
4199 AH (3 Credits)

Meets together with School of Education 621

This course offers an introduction to Composition Studies, a capacious and interdisciplinary field that has its roots in pedagogy. Accordingly, we will focus on the teaching of writing, beginning with our own experiences as writers, the writing of our students, and the relationship between what we do as readers and writers. This course will consider questions such as: “What can our own literacy narratives tell us about processes of writing and learning to write?” “How do race, gender and class figure in these processes?” “What is good writing?” “What considerations of value shape our thinking about the quality of writing?” “How can the history of composition studies, both inside and outside the academy, inform our teaching?” “How does composition studies situate itself in the academy?” “What do critical theorists have to say to composition teachers and vice versa?” We will look to our own experiences as students and as teachers; to theorists from the Classical period forward; and to contemporary writers as we explore these and related questions.

Because students typically bring a wide variety of experiences and interests to the course, there will be considerable opportunity for self-directed reading along with common course materials. Course requirements will include one long paper, several shorter ones, and a class presentation.

571.001 FICTION WORKSHOP
N. Delbanco
W 6-9
4175 AH (6 Credits)

This course is only open to current MFA Fiction students.

A workshop course in the nature and technique of prose fiction--both short and long. There will be readings assigned and close analysis of submitted work; classroom attendance and participation is mandatory. Each student is expected to produce a minimum of 10,000 words.

571.002 FICTION WORKSHOP
N. Reisman
W 6-9
4207 AH (6 Credits)

This course is only open to current MFA Fiction students.

The graduate fiction workshop is a studio course, designed to help MFA writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll discuss issues of form – the slippery and changing shapes of fiction, what is formally possible in a given work and the linked questions of architecture, narration and point of view, character, voice, language, image, music, etc. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? In what ways do we envision and construct character, relationship, place? Which conventions are most interesting to explore the limits of, to reinvent, to ignore? How might we think about the relationships between fiction writing and other arts? Between our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? Throughout the semester, graduate writers will produce and present new fiction, complete brief assigned projects, and read and respond to both fiction by workshop members and contemporary published work.

574.001 POETRY WORKSHOP
L Gregerson
T 4-7
4199 AH (6 Credits)

This course is only open to current MFA Poetry students.

PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED.

It will be our business to become an adaptable and rigorous critical readership for one another’s work-in-progress. We will use the workshop as an occasion to broaden formal and thematic range, to refine editorial skills, to share questions, enthusiasms, and generous skepticisms. Our primary focus will be on new work submitted by the members of the class, but we will also read selected work by other poets, generally contemporaries in mid-career.

574.002 POETRY WORKSHOP
L. Goodison
M 6-9
4207 AH (6 Credits)

This course is only open to current MFA Poetry students

627.001 CRITICAL THEORY AND CROSS CULTURAL STUDIES
Aesthetic Politics in the Literature of the Postcolonial Pacific
S. Najita
W 4-7
Room TBA (3 Credits)

Meets Together with American Culture 699.005

This course provides graduate students with an opportunity to read and analyze contemporary literature in English from the Pacific region, with special focus on writers from Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand, Fiji, and Australia. We will be reading recent fiction by Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Alan Duff, Leialoha Apo Perkins, Joseph Puna Balaz, Michael McPherson, Epeli Hau’ofa, Sia Figiel, Colin Johnson, Satendra Nandan, Sudesh Mishra, and Albert Wendt, among others. One of the central concerns of the course will be what some have taken to be the “influence” or translation of certain postcolonial aesthetics from the literatures from Latin America and India. In addition to examining historical and ethnographic accounts of these locales, we also will be looking closely at the aesthetic politics of works by these writers in conjunction with theories of colonialism, indigeneity, and postcoloniality. Requirements are two oral presentations and one 25-page essay due at the end of the term.

635.001 TOPICS IN POETRY
Renaissance Poetry
M. Schoenfeldt
MW 1-2:30
4199 AH (3 Credits)

In this course we will read a wide variety of poetry, largely lyric, from Wyatt and Surrey in the early sixteenth century through Milton, Dryden, and Katherine Philips in the later seventeenth century. We will work to situate poems amid the careers and the historical situations of their authors, but we will aspire to keep questions of form and genre well in our sights. Why, we will ask, might a writer choose to articulate desire in formally patterned language? Is literary form the necessary vehicle or the constricting straitjacket, of desire? How do issues of class and gender mark lyric utterance? How does the imagined audience of a poem alter its expression and meaning? Is there a politics of lyric form in the early modern period?

Requirements include attendance, participation, one short paper (4-6 pages) , one longer paper (8-12). and two in-class reports.

641.001 TOPICS IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
Representing Christianity, Judaism and Islam
T. Tinkle
TTh 2:30-4
4211 AH (3 Credits)

Anti-Judaic and anti-Islamic polemics accompany the preaching of the First Crusade in 1096, and violent action against Jews and Moslems follows the violent words. Narratives of violence and dangerous images of Jews and Moslems become naturalized in the centuries leading up to the Reformation – indeed, such representations become central to the formation of national and religious identity.

This course will investigate diverse representations of Judaism and Islam in this period and inquire into the cultural work they accomplish. Primary texts will likely include literature of the Crusades (sermons, romances, monastic polemics), travel literature (Mandeville’s Travels), selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (probably “The Prioress’s Tale”), drama (the plays of the Digby manuscript – The Conversion of Saint Paul and Mary Magdalene – and the Croxton Play of The Sacrament). We will conclude by examining Martin Luther’s contributions to polemical traditions. As we proceed through these texts, we will focus particularly on narratives of contact and conversion, and on dominant myths and stereotypes. Secondary texts will include recent historicist scholarship, including work by Rubin, Funkenstein, Signer, Greenblatt, Cohen, Fradenburg, Patterson, and Metlitzki.

Many of the primary texts on this syllabus invite consideration of manuscript and print incarnations: How, for instance, was the Prioress’s antisemitism received in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? To explore these issues, we will spend some time with manuscript and print versions in the Rare Book Room. Written assignments will include common academic tasks: a book review; a short analysis of a manuscript or print version of a text; a description, syllabus and teaching statement for an undergraduate course; and an annotated bibliography and grant application for projected research in the field.

646.001 TOPICS IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
M. Levinson
TTh 1-2:30
4175 AH (3 Credits)

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with texts central to Enlightenment thought and to the two principal critiques of that thought, one contemporary with Enlightenment (i.e., Romanticism) and one from the 20th century (i.e., materialist and poststructuralist critique). To establish some tenets and traditions of Enlightenment, we will read texts from the work of Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Paine, Kant and others; Romantic texts will be drawn from the work of Hegel, Burke, Fichte, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley. The third grouping – materialist and poststructuralist theory – will include Marx, Freud, Horkheimer/Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, and others. By end of term, students should be able to identify positions and implied commitments in the readings and arguments they encounter in the critical and cultural studies of their own time. The formal dimensions of critical thought (e.g., poetry vs. philosophy, manifesto vs. treatise) will also be considered. Class presentations required; a variety of short writing assignments will be made.

668.001 STUDIES IN AMERICAN AUTHORS
Tales of the Market: Some American Fictions 1890-1925
J. Freedman
TTh 8:30-10
4175 AH (3 Credits)

Meets Together with American Culture 699

In this course, we’ll read a number of novels and stories that take as their subject, or reflect in their method, changes in the US economic life and its concomitant rearrangements on the planes of gender, ethnicity, and race. Texts will include, James, The Golden Bowl; Howells, Hazard of New Fortunes; Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Wharton, The House of Mirth; Norris, The Pit (or perhaps The Octopus); Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky. We’ll also be watching some early films (e.g. Griffith, The Musketeers of Pig Alley) and reading some secondary texts, both critical and historical in nature.

Requirements: a short paper, an annotated bibliography, an in-class presentation, a longer paper.

668.002 STUDIES IN AMERICAN AUTHORS
Critical Approaches to African American Literature
A. Keizer
Th 4-7
4207 AH (3 Credits)

Meets together with CAAS #

This course will examine African American fiction, drama, and poetry in light of a range of literary and critical theories. Literary texts may include Our Nig, Passing, Native Son, The Street, Invisible Man, Funnyhouse of a Negro, Dutchman, “In The Mecca”, Middle Passage, The Intuitionist and Jazz. As we examine each literary work, we will read a number of essays representing different critical approaches: African American vernacular criticism, psychoanalysis, black feminist criticism, and theoretical works on geography, the body, and interpellation. Students will write three 10- to 12-page essays from three different critical standpoints (or a combination of approaches).

695.001 PEDAGOGY
A. Curzan
F 8:30-11:30
4175 AH (3 Credits)

This course is designed to provide guidance, support, and advice as you begin your teaching career at the University of Michigan—a challenging and exciting experience that can also be nerve-wracking for all but the most experienced instructors. The course aims to address both the practical questions that come with teaching and some of the broader theoretical issues involved in course design; our discussions should also help you develop a set of strategies for reflecting on your own development and practices as a teacher, now and in semesters to come. Throughout the term, the course will focus on many of the practical concerns of being a graduate student instructor: facilitating discussion, grading, negotiating your relationship with students and with professors, controlling your time, etc. These discussions will be complemented by selected readings from some of the thoughtful published material on teaching, often specifically within an English department. The second half of the course will turn more to issues of course goals and syllabus design (including specific writing assignments) to help you prepare for teaching 124 the following year. In addition, I will make regular visits to your classrooms so that I can give you specific feedback on your own strengths and weaknesses as well as the kinds of student interactions I can observe within the context of your class. One key to good teaching is collaboration, and in this course we will work together to talk through pedagogical questions and concerns, including how to apply pedagogical theory. Our weekly meetings as a community of professional teachers will be a forum where you can share teaching worries and successes, learn from each other’s experiences, and develop pedagogical strategies and skills that will guide you throughout your teaching career.

802.001 SEMINAR: ENGLISH LANGUAGE
The Revolution in the English Language, 1476-1776
R. Bailey
MW 2:30-4
4175 AH (3 Credits)

The cultural transformations of the renaissance and the long eighteenth century included major changes in the language. Britain went from a cultural backwater to a colonial power; complaints about the shortcomings of English were replaced by a growing sense of its glory. An oral society gave way to a literate one. Literary expression found an Anglo-American voice in a language vastly enhanced by borrowings from other languages, and the core system of English – its pronunciation and grammar – was transformed.

Cultural studies has broadened our perspectives on literature, and new methods of accessing the past gives richness to our scholarship. English 802 is a course in three centuries of the history of English, but it will also introduce students to the use of electronic databases, websites, and other “new” foundations for our discipline. It will be collaborative, hands-on, and fun.

Students will work in pairs to present information on assigned topics (e.g., loanwords from the Americas in the English of the period): these assignments are designed to provide experience in using databases and other sources of primary information. At the end of the semester, each individual will present a “conference paper” on a topic illuminating the language of this era.

821.001 SEMINAR: CRITICAL THEORY
Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory
S. Gikandi
T 3-6
4207 AH (3 Credits)

The fields of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory represent two of the most powerful developments in literary discourse in the last four decades, yet the relationship between them has been complex and contested. In this seminar we will be charting an alternative history and theory of these two movements and the intimate connection between them. Our operative premise is a tantalizing claim made by Robert Young in White Mythologies: “If ‘so-called poststructuralism’ is the product of a single historical moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 [the year of the student revolts in Europe] but rather the Algerian War of Independence—no doubt itself both a symptom and a product.” We will try to examine the historical and theoretical connections between the colonial event (and its literature) and the variety of theories that go under the rubric of poststructuralism and postcolonialism, most notably deconstruction and deconstructive feminism. Is it accidental that the central figures in these movements (Derrida and Cixous) were born in Algeria, France’s most prominent colony? Did a surreptitious critique of colonialism enable poststructuralism? What kind of theoretical and critical opening did postructuralism provide postcolonial writers, intellectuals, and critics? How have both movements transformed the nature of literature and its institutions of interpretation? And why have poststructuralism and postcolonial theory, despised or treated with suspicion in other disciplines, found sanctuary in literary and cultural studies?

In order to respond to these questions adequately, we will reject the tendency to see both poststructuralism and postcolonial theory as the study of either marginalized communities or cult figures. Instead we will look at both movements as a series of theoretical adventures driven by a cluster of questions whose primary goal has been to question some of the dominant concepts within the Western tradition while still embedded in its institutions of interpretation. In order to open poststructuralism and postcolonial theory to the kind of reinterpretation that will account for their influence in literary studies, we will take the foundational terms of the “posts” (colonialism and structuralism) as serious conceptual categories rather than mere labels. While the seminar will focus on the key theoretical texts in poststructuralism and postcolonial theory, we will pay particular attention to the “minor” and “hidden” discourses of this tradition such as Derrida’s and Cixous’ writings on race and Africa, Homi Bhabha’s “lost” essay on V. S. Naipaul, and Gayarti Spivak’s work in Marxism and feminism.

The seminar will start with a consideration of the relationship between phenomenology and the discourse of colonialism (Sartre, Memmi, Fanon, and Cesaire). It will then focus on the issues involved in the explosive debate between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss on history and historicism and the latter’s deployment of difference in the consolidation of structuralism. We will then turn to the figures of Derrida and Cixous and their critiques of Western metaphysics (either as “white mythology” or “pallocentricism”), which we will try to connect to their (post) colonial essays. Finally, we will explore how these debates led to the emergence of postcolonial theory and its radical rethinking of the nature of literature (especially English literature) and its criticism. Because this is a seminar in critical theory, we will be reading a good chunk of theoretical essays and chapters of books. But we will also read four fictional works that have been central to the emergence of postcolonial theory: Jean Rhy’s The Wide Sargasso Sea, Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Requirements for the seminar include active participation in class, a presentation, and a research/critical paper.

841.001 MODERNISM AND THE MATERIAL TEXT
Yeats, Pound, and Moore
G. Bornstein
TTh 10-11:30
4175 AH (3 Credits)

This seminar will study three major modernist writers – W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore – from a variety of perspectives normally kept discrete. Among them will be a construction of the text as a material object (editorial theory and bibliographic coding), as an historical object (at once political and postcolonial), and as an aesthetic object (both formalism and its alternatives). I hope that we will explore not only those various approaches but also a range of interrelations between them, by which modernism appears more as a process than a product, more as a shifting series of improvisations than as a fixed monument, and more as historically contingent than as ahistorical. For each writer we will begin with a week’s overview and then concentrate on in-depth study of a major work: probably Yeat’s Tower volume, Pound’s Cantos, and Moore’s Observations volume. The seminar will emphasize discussion, and will include both oral reports and preparation of a final seminar paper.

851.001 SEMINAR: AMERICAN LITERATURE
Documenting America: Realism, Photography, Modernity
S. Blair
W 9-12
4199 AH (3 Credits)

Meets Together with American Culture 801.001

This course will focus on the nature, literary and visual strategies, and cultural politics of the ‘documentary.’ More specifically, we’ll examine the aesthetics of realism and authenticity in contexts in which they’ve been instrumental to the making of a national culture (the immigration era, the red thirties, postwar liberalism, identitarian postmodernity). Toward that end, we’ll be looking at linked bodies of literary narrative and photographic images, spanning the 1980s to the present: Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan and Henry James; the WPA archive, New Deal and immigrant writing and noir modernism; collaborations across color lines (including Ralph Ellison and Aaron Siskind; James Baldwin and Richard Avedon); narratives by Gish Jen and Bharati Mukherjee and postmodernist documentary work by Dawoud Bey and Nikki S. Lee. A working acquaintance with visual culture studies is welcome but not at all required; among our critical guides to the question of how to frame relations between image and narrative, aesthetics and politics, narrative and history, will be Alan Trachtenberg, Maren Strange, bell hooks, Nathan Natanson, and Roland Barthes. Throughout, a central aim of the course will be to rethink key categories of cultural analysis – ‘modernism,’ ‘modernity,’ ‘realism,’ – with respect to the exigencies of US culture and experience. Requirements will be appropriate to the logic of a seminar, including intensive reading and participation; in class discussion leading; a culminating seminar essay or project.