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Publication ENGL 485-02, Senior Research Seminar - Studies in the Novel, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Bigelow, GordonThis class will consider the novel as an artistic medium, with attention to several key concepts and problems, including realism, historicism, and postmodernism. In the first ten weeks of the term, we will study two significant works of fiction, Walter Scott’s Waverly (1814) and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). Waverly was Scott’s first novel; he was known to that point as a poet, and he published Waverly anonymously. Its tremendous popularity spawned many imitators and shaped the taste of the English reading public for a generation. It also created a new sub-genre, which we now call the historical novel, and which had significant impact on the evolution of the novel in broader terms. Mitchell’s very recent book is in part a playful return to the concerns of the historical novel—indeed it opens with scenes set roughly during the time of Scott. But Mitchell’s book moves much more widely and in this way comments on the movement of the novel as a medium of literary expression. While reading these texts, we will consult major critical statements on the novel as a genre, focusing on the issues most relevant to these two texts. The purpose of this course is to guide and support you as you develop an independent statement of your own on a major work of fiction, reading a novel both within the history of the development of its genre and within the history of its time and place. The first eight weeks of the term are designed to immerse you in one of contemporary literary criticism’s most vigorous and fascinating conversations, i.e. the ongoing debate about why the novel emerged as a distinctive genre in the eighteenth century, why it attained such dominance in the nineteenth, and why it changed so much in the twentieth. Our critical and theoretical readings all ask versions of these questions, trying to understand the way that literary genres experience and register historical change. The focus of the class will shift gradually from common readings to individualized study, as each student brings these questions to bear in the reading of a particular novel.Publication ENGL 485-01, Senior Research Seminar - "Infinite Jest" and American Fiction, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Boswell, MarshallWhen it was first published in 1996, David Foster Wallace’s 1079 page novel Infinite Jest was instantly recognized by critics as “the next step in fiction” (Sven Birkerts), though few critics could articulate what that “next step” was, exactly. Set in the future and focusing on a mythical film that is so entertaining that watching it leads to catatonia, the novel takes on such disparate issues as drug addiction, film theory, Alcoholics Anonymous, Jamesian pragmatism, existentialism, terrorism, game theory, theoretical mathematics, and tennis—lots and lots of tennis. Nearly two decades later, Infnite Jest remains the signature text for writers of Wallace’s generation. As its influence continues to deepen and spread, so, too, do the contours of the post-postmodern novel begin to clarify. In this course, we will read Wallace’s gargantuan novel as well as a selection of contemporary novels written under Wallace’s influence in order to trace the trajectory from modernism to postmodernism and beyond. The course will culminate in a major research project.Publication ENGL 385-01, Junior Seminar: Critical Theory and Methodology, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Richards, RashnaWhat is literature? How do we interpret it? What is its relationship to reality? How does it represent the self and the world? This course will take on such fundamental questions from multiple, sometimes contradictory, theoretical perspectives. We will examine major developments in literary criticism and critical theory and explore how they can be used for literary analysis. This course is designed to prepare English majors for advanced research.Publication ENGL 363-01, Topics in Twentieth-Century British Literature - Staging “The Troubles”: Politics and War in Twentieth-Century Irish Theater and Film, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Shaffer, Brian W.This course will explore selected theatrical and filmic treatments of the Irish “Troubles” of the past century. “The Troubles” has been used in Ireland for the past 125 years to denote the island’s political violence and attendant ethno-nationalist strife (in 1905, for example, Irish author James Joyce wrote of “the troubles in our native land”). Instances of this political strife include the struggle for Irish independence from British imperial rule (the failed rebellion of 1798, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21, for example); the Irish Civil War (1922-23); and the fight for civil/equal rights in Northern Ireland (1968-1998). This course will consider both canonical and contemporary Irish plays, films, and songs that depict, anatomize, and critique “the troubles” and its myriad sociocultural ramifications. It will explore the extent to which selected plays and films engage in a dialogue with various political movements and events, with each other, and with key articulations of Irish (and Northern Irish) national identity. The course will incorporate major critical readings/debates.Publication ENGL 361-01, American Realism and Naturalism, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Petty, LeslieAmerican Realism and Naturalism developed in part as a reaction against Romanticism brought on by post-Civil War disillusionment. However, there were other forces at work as well. Technological and scientific advancements, industrialism and urbanization, and a rapidly changing population of new immigrants, freed slaves and “new women” all led to an intellectual and aesthetic revolution that “came of age” in the writings of authors like Henry James, Kate Chopin and Charles Chesnutt. In this course, we will attempt to trace this intricate web of historical, cultural and aesthetic developments, considering how they grew out of the legacy of the Civil War but also how they propelled the nation toward modernity in the twentieth-century. Prerequisites: Any 200-level literature course or permission from instructor.Publication ENGL 343-01, London Calling: Studies in 18th Century British Literature, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Rudy, SethThe city that rose from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666 was only one part of the political, economic, and cultural capital that was eighteenth-century London. A magnet for people, products, and wealth, London dramatically increased in size and power over the course of the 1700s. This class will constitute a literary tour of its key locales: we will visit the stockjobbers of the Royal Exchange, the court and coffeehouses of Westminster, the hacks of Grub Street, the criminals of Newgate Prison, and the theaters of Drury Lane. We will also encounter a wide range of urban identities and social concerns, from authors and authorship to commerce and imperialism, gender and government to scandal and satire. Our course will examine the interrelation of these sites and subjects and the ways writers situated themselves within them as they represented and defined the complexities of London, its developing public sphere, and its relationship to changing conceptions of “Britishness.”Publication ENGL 325-01, Chaucer, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Garner, LoriWelcome to the class! Geoffrey Chaucer’s prolific body of work offers a fascinating and rewarding introduction to the range of genres and traditions in the medieval world. Through close and careful reading of Chaucer’s many and varied writings—all in the original Middle English—we will work to develop proficiency in and appreciation of the language written and spoken in fourteenth-century London. Unit One will be devoted to study of selected Canterbury Tales; in Unit Two, we will read the long narrative romance, Troilus and Criseyde, in its entirety; and Unit Three will treat representative works from Chaucer’s dream visions and short poetry. Throughout each of these units, we will examine the creative ways in which Chaucer combined tradition and innovation within his poetic compositions and explore Chaucer’s engagement with such issues as social class, philosophy, gender, and religion. To help fully contextualize Chaucer’s poetry, supplemental readings will include relevant works by Chaucer’s influences and contemporaries as well as recent scholarly interpretations of his writings. All assigned readings, including supplemental texts, are included in the Norton Critical Editions that are required for the class. Course requirements include active class participation, a series of papers culminating in a substantial research project, three examinations, oral recitations of Chaucer’s poetry, and daily graded assessments.Publication ENGL 320-01, Medieval Literature of the 12th-15th Centuries - Dante's Divine Comedy, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Haas, Judith P.This course will focus on the work of Dante Allighieri, the fourteenth-century Italian poet who translated his vision of the Christian afterlife into his epic poem The Divine Comedy, and whose work has had a profound influence on English writers from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot. We will read a few of the works that Dante read—including parts of Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustine’s Confessions—and we will follow the thread of one of Dante’s preoccupations: the body and its relation to love, language, sin, and salvation. All readings and discussion will be in English.Publication ENGL 301-01, Intermediate Fiction Workshop, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Boswell, MarshallIn this class we will read, discuss, write, and revise literary short fiction. Literary fiction discloses truths about human experience in a moving and artful way. It strives for seamless mimesis while simultaneously making resourceful and aesthetically sound use of all the various aspects of storytelling, including language, point of view, plot, character, setting, metaphor, symbolism and tone. In short, you will endeavor to write literature. For the purposes of the class, you cannot write genre fiction—that is, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, children’s fiction, young adult fiction, and so on.Publication ENGL 290-01, How to Write: Academic Writing and the Pedagogies that Support It,Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Finlayson, RebeccaIn this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the myriad ways that students learn to write and how they write to learn. The readings and guest lecturers will offer theoretical frames from the fields of composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, cognitive psychology, philosophy, gender studies, and education. As we consider this range of approaches to writing, learning, and teaching, we will focus especially on collaborative methods, as collaborative learning occupies an important place in Rhodes writing courses as well as in the Writing Center. With this emphasis in mind, students in the course will move beyond our own classroom and into a Memphis public high school to collaborate in the establishment of a peerled writing center. Because this course offers focused attention to writing, along with analytical writing assignments, as well as a service learning experience, it fulfills two Foundation Requirements: F2i (writing intensive) and F11 (integrative community).Publication ENGL 285-01, 02, Text and Context, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Richards, JasonThis course emphasizes the close reading of literary texts in relation to their cultural contexts. In order to expose students to a variety of texts/contexts, our readings will cover a wide range of American literature and literary genres. We’ll begin by analyzing how Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables record the horrors of historical haunting, antebellum racial anxieties, and aristocratic decline. Then we’ll read Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig—the first novel published by an African American woman—which exposes the brutalities of indentured servitude in the North. Next we’ll consider how the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson reflects the gendering of the national body before turning to Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, an icy meditation on primitive life and environmental determinism. We’ll then read Edith Wharton’s Summer, a gripping story of female isolation and paternalism, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a devastating critique of the American Dream. After that, we’ll tackle Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, a tale of depravity and violence in rural Tennessee, and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a fast-paced portrait of decadence in 1980s New York. A few other texts will be sprinkled in along the way. Note: This course assists prospective majors and minors in acquiring the necessary tools for middle- and upper-division classes in English.Publication ENGL 265-03, Special Topics: Seventeenth-Century British Comedy, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Brady, JenniferThis course treats British comedy from the Renaissance and Restoration periods, including plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, the most influential of the early modern playwrights, and, from the later period, after the theaters reopened in the early 1660s, comedies by Dryden, Wycherley, Etherege, Aphra Behn, and Congreve. We will consider the various kinds of comedy developed over the seventeenth century; the influence of the earlier playwrights on their successors; and aspects of staging, production, casting, and acting, including the significant introduction of the professional actress in lieu of the boy actors who had played women’s roles, in the 1660s. We will have as a special resource Nick Hutchison, an English actor and director, who will be visiting class in October, as well as a symposium on Friday, October 23rd., on Shakespearean comedy, which will include presentations by Nick Hutchison and scholar Fiona Ritchie, speaking on Shakespeare and women in the eighteenth century.Publication ENGL 265-02, Special Topics: What Is Ethnic Literature?, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Dykema, AmandaThis course will study the emergence of the category of “ethnic literature” in the United States—a vital, shifting, contested, incomplete, political, artistic site from which conceptions of literary expression are expanded and interrogated. To ask “What is ethnic literature?” presumes other questions: what is literature? What do we mean by the term “ethnic”? In this class, we will analyze these works for how they represent the cultures about which and within which they were written, being careful not to assume that these works tell the entire story about a culture or the experience of people of color in the United States. Ultimately, this course will not attempt to cover the history of ethnic literature in the United States – this would be impossible in fifteen weeks. Instead, we will begin with the rise of ethnic literature as an object of study in the U.S. academy. Tracing the canon debates and creation of ethnic literature anthologies in the 1980s, we will examine the political and cultural contexts out of which Latino/a, Asian American, African American, and Native American texts were incorporated into the study of American Literature. We will analyze several exemplary early works, including Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, to consider the formal and political qualities that made them so attractive for study. We will investigate why literary canons matter—how they index not only questions of taste and value, but of power—and consider the stakes of including or excluding a given text from a canon. Finally, we will read 21st century works like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, considering how contemporary writers formally and politically negotiate the canons of American literature and ethnic literature in light of the legacies of the 20th century. Under the Rhodes College Foundations curriculum, this course satisfies the F2 and F4 requirements. This means that our official learning outcomes include reading and interpreting literary texts and developing excellence in written communication. In more concrete terms, this course is designed to facilitate your practice of critical thinking, writing and reading to interpret texts, your skill in making arguments supported by textual evidence, and your familiarity with both the political histories that contextualize ethnic literature and various literary strategies U.S. ethnic writers employ in the 20th and 21st centuries.Publication ENGL 265-01, Special Topics: Shakespeare & Classical Comedy, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Newstok, Scott L.Mocking authority figures, kissing your brother’s wife, whacking someone upside the head – what sounds like the latest episode of Saturday Night Live is actually part of a comedic tradition running all the way back through Shakespeare to the Roman and Greek theatre. This seminar surveys the history of staged humor, reading a play a week, ranging from Aristophanes’ ribald jokes and Plautus’ hijinks to the Elizabethan theatre’s clowning. We’ll also explore philosophical and historical reflections upon why we laugh. The seminar will include a month-long residency from British director Nick Hutchison, with whom we will workshop scenes from Comedy of Errors. Students must perform scenes for the symposium on Comedy (October 23, 2-5pm, McCoy) and report on at least one local production (e.g. Chimes at Midnight, November 8).Publication ENGL 260-01, Survey of British Literature I, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Newstok, Scott L.A (roughly) chronological survey of British Literature from Anglo-Saxon England to the 18th Century, wherein we sample a wide range of representative authors and genres. We will attempt to keep in mind historical periods as well as traditional forms that carry across periods.Publication ENGL 230-01, Shakespeare, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Newstok, Scott L.A close-learning seminar on Shakespeare’s works, with special attention to the problem of genre. We begin by closely reading and memorizing selected sonnets. We then examine representative Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies from across his career, concluding with the generically mixed Two Noble Kinsmen. While we concentrate our efforts primarily on the texts of the plays, along the way we explore the greater context of Shakespeare, from the historical meanings of individual words to the continued influence of his works today, including contemporary performance practices. The course gives you extensive practice in critically exploring Shakespearean craft, and preparation for enjoying Shakespeare throughout your life. Students must attend the symposium on Comedy (October 23, 2-5pm, McCoy) and report on at least one local production (e.g. Chimes at Midnight, November 8).Publication ENGL 224-01, 02, Survey of African American Literature, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Gibson, Ernest L.This is a READING INTENSIVE course that seeks to highlight important concepts and themes within African American literature. This course will survey the African American literary tradition from the 1600s to the present, with a particular focus on how the musings of African Americans capture, engage and critique the American narrative. Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, Charles Chesnutt, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, et cetera. The course will also examine popular literary movements such as the New Negro Harlem Renaissance and the Blacks Arts Movement.Publication ENGL 202-01,02, Introduction to Cinema, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Richards, RashnaWhile the cinematograph was a product of scientific innovation, film quickly became the most popular and influential cultural medium of the twentieth century. Only a decade after its invention, cinema had spread to all parts of the globe, and the motion pictures became a way of telling our stories to ourselves while simultaneously transporting us away from our lives to what Maxim Gorky called "the Kingdom of Shadows." Since then, films have intrigued and frustrated, perplexed and inspired billions of viewers worldwide. The issues that preoccupied the earliest film critics continue to puzzle later generations: What is cinema? Is it an art? Is it a language? What do movies reveal about the underlying ideologies of the cultures that produce them? How do they address, exploit, and satisfy various audience desires? This course offers an introduction to film analysis. We will learn and practice close reading of films through an examination of various cinematic elements, such as mise en scène, cinematography, sound, lighting, editing, and so on. Using different interpretive approaches, we will also consider questions of film styles, genres, and industrial contexts as well as issues of ideology, race, gender, sexuality, and representation. By focusing on its formal and social contexts, we will develop an understanding of cinema as an art and an industry, an imaginary pleasure and a symbolic language. Overall, we will acquire critical tools to analyze cinema's aesthetic and cultural significance.Publication ENGL 201-02, Introduction to Fiction Writing, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Wilkinson, CatherinePublication ENGL 201-01, Introduction to Fiction Writing, Fall 2015(Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College, 2015-08) Baker, RaquelThis course is designed to develop individual fiction writing skills, emphasizing process and elements of craft rather than product. In this course, we will practice the craft of fiction while also thinking about the broader significance of literature. This course aims to help students develop critical reading skills so we might read as writers, paying close attention to the text. Writing is risk, revision, and imaginative creation, which is itself a moral act. As such, our goal as a class will be to develop generative ways to describe and analyze literary texts, their elements, and their implications. The literary texts we engage with will allow students to explore how writers achieve certain effects using elements of craft as well as how texts help us to understand ourselves and the world around us. Through the reading of literary texts and through the workshop process, we will practice the craft of reading generously, engaging with an author’s intent, and discussing our responses to texts.