Transfer Student Courses in English (Division 361)

Fall Term, 1999 (September 8 - December 22, 1999)

To see what Transfer Student courses have been added or changed in English this week go to What's New This Week.

Section 018.

Instructor(s): Lutman

Prerequisites & Distribution: Completion of the Introductory Composition requirement. (3). (CE). May not be repeated for credit.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

"How can I know what I think until I see what I say?"
- E.M. Forster

In this workshop you will be encouraged to write poetry and fiction as a means of discovery. My goal is to help you help each other in the processes of creation, exploration, and revision, and so the majority of in-class time will be devoted to sharing ideas and offering responses to one another's work. Other class activities will include writing exercises and discussion of assigned readings of authors such as Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, ee cummings, Rita Dove, and Adrienne Rich. Always our emphasis will be on your writing, and by term's end you will have submitted 5-10 poems and 2-3 stories for a combined minimum of 30 pages. You will be required to submit midterm and final portfolios of your poetry and prose and attend an exit conference with me. Grades will reflect your commitment to achieving course and personal goals for your writing, and you will provide evidence of this commitment through the timely submission of work, care and effort in revision, active class participation, and completion of readings.

Section 001 – Television Discourse Analysis: Narratology, Cinematography, And Response.

Instructor(s): Barbra Morris (barbra@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

How does television mean? How does television create meaning? What are television viewers engaged with? In what significant ways do viewers differ about the meaning of a text? In what ways are symbols, signs, and forms that represent people’ lives, subcultures, and places in society made sense of through the articulation of values, priorities, and issues in the dynamic television landscape? Who and what rarely appear on the scene and how can we account for these absences? How do preference, pleasure, and creativity intersect with the forbidden, the dangerous, and censorship? There are three papers (5-6 pages of description and analysis, plus appended logging data) during the term; this includes two papers requiring content research and analysis, and one collaborative study which requires focus group research. At the end of the term each student designs and develops an individual content research and interpretation project of 8-10 pages. Oral reports on research findings are mandatory. Readings in the course pack accompany each of the projects; discussion of differing research methods and interpretive frameworks often require one page analytic critiques by class members, who lead discussion.

Section 002 – Research and Technology in the Humanities. Meets with English 516.

Instructor(s): Eric Rabkin (esrabkin@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/RTHf99/415f99syl.html

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 impacts of technology. By the middle of the term, 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 at least information gathering from digital sources, HTML authoring, hypertext documents or novels, collaborative technologies, the meaning of the digital revolution, text analysis, and image manipulation.

Section 004 – Literature in the Americas.

Instructor(s): Lem Johnson (eljay@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Senior concentrator in English. May not be repeated for credit. (4). (Excl).

Credits: (4; 3 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

The United States, Cuba, and Brazil, Argentina, Jamaica, and Mexico – as well as Haiti, Peru, and Colombia – these are places and cultures that have laid claim to and transformed the “New World” into various forms of “The Americas.” Is there anything that they share? Are there certain basic images, certain kinds of cultural features, that “New World-ness” imposed on the art forms that each one these places has produced? What about the differences? How much of, say, Walt Whitman’s “I hear America singing / The varied voices I hear” is there in Jose Marti’s “Our America”? What does the Japanese Brazilian of Karen Yamashita’s Brazil-Maru mean for the Japanese Canadian in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. And how does the Jewish America in Anzia Yezierska’s How I Found America mean in relation to the Francophone Caribbean of Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, the Witch, or to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior? Other writers, like Emily Dickinson and García Márquez, Arthur Miller and George Lamming (Barbados), will help us through a term of sorting these things out. The FINAL PROJECT for the term will involve a COMPARATIVE ESSAY, of about 15 pages, in which you deal deal with at least TWO of the cultural areas in “The Americas”.

Section 001.

Instructor(s): OyamO (oyamo@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: English 327. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

See Theatre and Drama 427.001.

Section 001 – Contemporary Gay Fiction. This course meets the New Traditions requirement for Englihs concentrators.

Instructor(s): David Halperin

Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (Excl).

Credits: (4; 3 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

A broad survey of novels and short fiction by and/or about gay men written in English since the Stonewall riots of 1969, with special attention to the last decade. Has the possibility of an “open” (uncensored, unexpurgated) gay male literature permitted a better or truer representation of gay men and gay male life? What experiences does this literature take in and what does it leave out? To what extent does it function as a means of defining or fashioning gay male identity and to what extent does it resist or refigure that identity? What literary structures does it employ, and what is the relation, if any, between gay male desire and literary form? Is this a minority literature or is it a universal literature that happens to be gay? What are the political or moral responsibilities, if any, of gay male writers in the age of AIDS? How do they write about sex, and why? Where are the happy endings that gay liberation promised us? Novels to be read will include Neil Bartlett, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall; Melvin Dixon, Vanishing Rooms; Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library; Mark Merlis, American Studies; V.S. Naipaul, In A Free State; Dale Peck, Fucking Martin; and Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded. Two short essays, a longer final essay, and a final exam. This course meets the New Traditions requirement for English concentrators.

Section 002.

Instructor(s): Leigh Woods (lawoods@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU).

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

See Theatre and Drama 321.002.

Section 004 – (Virginia Woolf and) Bloomsbury.

Instructor(s): Sara Blair

Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be repeated for credit with department permission.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

In a 1923 memoir, Virginia Woolf asks of the literary movement she has come to embody: “Where does Bloomsbury begin? And where does Bloomsbury end?” In this course, we’ll be concerned with the geographical, social, and imaginary place of Bloomsbury in metropolitan London and in modernity. Woolf’s fiction will be at the center of our study; we’ll also attend to the fiction, criticism, visual art, political writings and lifestyles of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Johyn Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster, in order to raise certain questions: How do these figures position themselves with respect to traditional high culture as well as new forms of urban mass culture? What’s the relationship between aesthetics and politics in their work and lives? How do the kinds of formal experimentation with associate with Woolf and Bloomsbury register or respond to the fluidity of urban or modern experience? Course requirements may include several short essays; a long final essay; midterm; active course participation.