Course Information

Preview: Special Topics Courses, 2009-10

While many English courses have the same general content, as described in the OSU Course Bulletin, the content of the courses listed here varies each time the course is offered. These courses draw upon the special research and teaching interests of the instructors and are usually offered one time only.

Summer 2009 | Autumn 2009 | Winter 2010 | Spring 2010

Summer Quarter 2009

English 378: Special Topic
Instructor: Paul McCormick (mccormick.150@osu.edu)

Course Number: 20501

Class Description: This course studies how twentieth century novels reacted to cinema in its various forms, including early ("primitive") cinema, Classical Hollywood Cinema, New Hollywood, and Bollywood. Over the course of the twentieth century, both novels and films changed as consumer products, cultural artifacts, and artistic creations. In this course, we will focus most of our attention on one side of their media relationship with two questions. First, how does cinema change over the twentieth century as a commodity and art? Second, how do novelists respond to the ways that cinema changes? To answer these questions, we will study three historical periods in the twentieth century by first studying a film and then a short novel from that period. After an introduction to Pre-Hollywood times, the films and novels we will study include: Double Indemnity, The Day of the Locust, Chinatown, Running Dog, The God of Small Things and Slumdog Millionaire. Student requirements include participation in class and on Carmen, quizzes, and two papers.

English 520.02: Late Shakespeare
Professor Luke Wilson (wilson.501@osu.edu)

This course will concern itself with late Shakespeare, which I am defining as 1607-08 (c. Coriolanus) to The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1613), a period which saw a pronounced shift in play design and subject matter, as well as (in 1609) the occupation of a new, indoor theater, The Blackfriars, by the King's Men (Shakespeare's company). These were Shakespeare's last plays, and they're a mix of the little-read and often flawed by always interesting (Timon of Athens, Pericles) with the absolutely canonical (The Tempest, The Winter's Tale). We'll consider the plays themselves as examples of Shakespeare's mature art and technique, as well as the contexts (in the theater business, in audience expectations, in politics) that accompanied and helped shape that art and that technique.

English 581: Asian American Visual Cultures
Professor Joe Ponce (ponce.8 @osu.edu)

This course will focus on what might be called Asian American visual cultures . We will read a range of texts (including drama and graphic narratives), view several recent films, and take a look at somehistorical and contemporary art. Our goal will be to reconsider the politics of visibility and invisibility through the politics of form. To what extent does seeking visibility in the public sphere reinscribe racialized notions of Asian Americans? In what ways do non-realist modes of expressive practice offer alternative ways of thinking about the politics of representation?

English 592: The Female Tradition in Literature
Professor Natalie Tyler (tyler.1 @osu.edu)

We will read some of the finest fiction and poetry written by women. Possible readings include works by Jane Austen, one or more of the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison.

English 596: Literature and the Visual Arts in the 20th Century
Professor Jessica Prinz (prinz.1@osu.edu )

We will discuss the major art movements of the twentieth century (cubism, dadaism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism, minimalism, The New York School, and more), drawing connections between visual artists and writers. We will ask: who influenced whom and why? Among the authors we will study are William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, A.S. Byatt, and Nick Hornby.

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Autumn Quarter 2009

English 275: Special Themes in Literature
"All That Weird Stuff": Introduction to Science Fiction Professor Maura Heaphy (heaphy.8@osu.edu)

A popular science fiction writer was once asked, "Why do you write all that weird stuff?" "All that weird stuff" that SF is known for - the rockets and robots, the moon maidens and mad scientists, Venusian swamps and Martian invaders - are not just devices that contribute to an exciting tale. Science Fiction defamiliarizes the present, allowing the reader to see the world in a fresh and wholly unexpected light.

In this class, we will use classic and modern SF texts to develop close reading skills and critical analysis, as well as to consider how these texts reflected the concerns of the time in which they were written - and why they continue to resonate today. At the end of this course, students should be able to analyze SF texts confidently, and comment intelligently upon the narrative choices made by the author. Able, in fact, to answer the question, "Why do you read all that weird stuff?"

List of Authors, Books and Films that will be used: H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds, Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Visions of Wonder. Ed. David G. Hartwell and Milton T. Wolf. New York: TOR. 1996. Course Packet and Carmen with stories and excerpts by, among others (subject to availability and second-thoughts...) Brian Aldiss, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Samuel R. Delany Jr., James Patrick Kelly, Neal Stephenson, James Tiptree Jr. War of the Worlds. Dir. Stephen Spielberg. 2005. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1982. Responsibilities of students: 3 short response papers (2-3 pages each) 20% , Expanded response paper (6-7 pages) 20%, Mid-term 20%, Final 40%.

English 378: Special Topics in Film and Literature
Professor Frank Donoghue (donoghue.1@osu.edu)

This course will focus on the film adaptations of a selection of mid-twentieth-century American novels. We'll look in close detail at five novels: James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce (1941), Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Walter Tevis' The Hustler (1959), and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). We'll examine these novels side-by-side with their film adaptations (each film has the same title as the novel that inspired it except DoAndroids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted as Blade Runner. In each case we will consider the film as an interpretation of the novel, posing questions about screenwriting, characterization and acting, and direction. You will be required to write two 5-page papers analyzing two different novel/film pairings on the syllabus. Comprehensive final exam.

English 560: Poetry/Alternative: The History of Poetry and Alternative Music
Professor Elizabeth Renker (renker.1@osu.edu)

Prior to the twentieth century, poetry was as popular as music is today. The close links between these genres date back to the ancient world. Our term "lyric poetry" comes from a stringed musical instrument, the lyre; one of poetry's oldest terms for itself is "song." This experimental class explores the intersections between these sibling art forms. Our method will be to pair poems from the past four centuries with recent songs from the alternative/indie tradition that explore similar themes or formal experiments (for example, Radiohead and postmodern poets; The Decemberists, The Flaming Lips, and Robert Frost; Weezer and Edwin Arlington Robinson; The Postal Service and Sarah Piatt; The National and T.S. Eliot). Students will create the content for several class sessions--you pick the songs, I'll bring the poems.

English 561: Fictional Kids
Professor Jill Galvan (galvan.8@osu.edu)

This course will focus on novels, and probably a few films, featuring kids as main characters. We will investigate thematically and formally complex works targeted to adult readers; in other words, this is not a course in young adult or children's literature. Some questions we'll likely ask: How do these narratives speak to the sympathies and interests of adults? In works tracing the gradual psychological maturity of the protagonist (i.e., bildungsromans), what is supposed to constitute maturity, and is that definition ever complicated or contested? What aspects of the childhood experience are dramatized in works set in schools-for example, boarding schools? How do stories about kids' lives provide a particular lens for viewing different cultures' values? What various genres or formal conventions do works about kids draw on? How do works with first-person child narrators differ from those with third-person narrators? What happens when narrators are looking back on their younger years—how does memory shape narrative, and how does the adult self differ from the childhood one? Some of our texts will be nineteenth-century or older, while many others will date from the last few decades. The text list is still very tentative, but some possibilities are Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire. Course requirements will resemble the following: regular and enthusiastic class participation, three or four brief analytical responses, one longer critical essay (5-7 pp.), and a final exam.

English 564.01: John Gower
Professor Ethan Knapp (knapp.79@osu.edu)

This course will focus on the works of John Gower, the friend and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. During his lifetime Gower was nearly as well known and admired as Chaucer. Like Chaucer, he was famous as a great story-teller, drawing stories from classical mythology, Biblical parable and popular legends. His work has all the literary complexity of the Canterbury Tales, but adds to it a remarkable meditation on the nature and purpose of literature. We will spend most of our time with Gower's poetry, but we will also use him as a window onto the broad scene of medieval culture, reading him alongside three of his most important source texts -- Ovid's Metamorphoses, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, and Alan de Lille's Anticlaudianus. This course should thus provide both a picture of one of the most fascinating of medieval poets as well as a general introduction to late medieval philosophical and literary culture.

English 569: Composing Digital Documentaries
Professor Cindy Selfe (selfe.2@osu.edu)

In this course, students will compose media documentaries on a topic of their own choosing. Assignments may include photographic, audio, or video documentaries. Students will also complete several minor assignments such as defining documentary, looking at/listening to documentaries, analyzing short documentary texts, reflecting on their own texts, reading about documentary as a medium of social activism. The course begins with readings about documentary as a genre. Students will also look at/listen to a range of short sample documentaries, identifying what makes a "good" documentary topic and characterizing the elements that contribute to a compelling documentary text. Participants in the class will learn how to use digital audio recorders, digital still cameras, and digital video cameras, as well as various editing software (probably iMovie, Audacity, Photoshop).

English 575: North
Professor Merrill Kaplan (kaplan.103@osu.edu)

Where is North? This course is about the idea of North in prose, poetry, folklore, and the cultural imagination. Students will spend time with etymologies, ancient geographers, Seamus Heaney, William Morris, Jose Luis Borges, Nazi mystics, William Longfellow, the Finnish Kalevala, and Conan the Barbarian, among others.

English 578: Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s in Film
Professor David Brewer (brewer.126@osu.edu)

The Valley, Beverly Hills, South Central, Downtown, the Sunset Strip. This course will examine the peculiar investment that American films of the 1980s and 1990s had in Los Angeles--as an object of both utopian yearnings and dystopian anxieties, as a place in which the very notion of "place" was both highly loaded and curiously hard to pin down. In so doing, we will be thinking about film's investment in place more generally: the ways in which particular kinds of stories not only get associated with particular locales, but are able to use those locales as a sort of shorthand with which to conjure up a whole host of associations and expectations. Obviously, such techniques are hardly limited to film. But film's visual qualities (the ways in which every film has to be set somewhere and that somewhere has to be shown) give place a power which it is hard for other forms and media to match. We'll try to account for that power as we figure out why Los Angeles, of all places, should have come to epitomize the (then) future of America.

English 578: Mexico in Cinema
Professor Frederick Aldama (aldama.1@osu.edu)

In this course we will explore how contemporary Mexican films (within the last decade) creatively texture racial, sexual, ethnic, and gender identities and experiences. We will explore issues of representation by focusing on how directors use a variety of techniques--genre, point of view, tempo, mood, style, characterization, for instance--to complexly cue, trigger, and even re-direct viewer's cognitive and emotive schemas of Mexican subjects.

English 582: The African American Autobiographical Tradition.
Professor Ryan Friedman (friedman.193@osu.edu)

In this course, we will explore how African American writers have used and transformed the autobiographical mode, creating stylistically-diverse literary texts and linking the task of writing the self to a range of representational projects. These projects include: witnessing and offering testimony of collective experiences (enslavement, resistance, flight); dramatizing the process of self-education and/or religious conversion; commenting on and revising popular American texts or literary genres; framing social critiques and political arguments; and rendering the experiences of migration and modern urban life.

English 583: Imagining India: Literature and Film Since the 1920's
Professor Pranav Jani (jani.4@osu.edu)

Indians and non-Indians have long participated in imagining India, portraying it as everything from an exotic, spiritual paradise to a model for peaceful protest and pluralistic democracy, to a hell on earth, filled with oppression and violence. In this course, we will examine how literature and film by and/or about Indians have provided a basis for these representations, reimagining the subcontinent in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion in the process of serving the social and political interests of particular groups and classes. In the process, the course will delve beyond both Orientalist and nationalist representations of India and introduce students to the multiplicity of perspectives that have developed since the 1920s.

English 592: Gender, Nature, and Women's Poetry
Professor Jeredith Merrin (merrin.1@osu.edu)

Notions of "Nature" change with our changing understanding of the world in which we live. In this course we will read twentieth- and twenty-first-century Nature poetry by American women poets. Do women look at Nature differently from men? For what purposes do different poets deploy natural imagery? Is nature poetry stuck in Romanticism, or can it address contemporary science new understandings of the Cosmos and our place in it? These are just a few of the questions we will consider in this course, in which we will also practice attentive and informed close reading of poetry.

English 593:Human Rights Law, Literature, and Film
Professor Wendy Hesford (hesford.1@osu.edu)

This course will focus on international human rights law and contemporary human rights literature and film, with a particular emphasis on the tensions that arise when representations of crimes against humanity and humanitarian interventions are written and marketed for primarily Western audiences. Topics under consideration include representations of genocide (Darfur; Cambodia), apartheid and reconciliation ( South Africa), child soldiers ( Sierra Leone), and the War on Terror ( USA and Iraq).

English 597.01 Disability in Relationships: Representations in Literature and Film
Professor Brenda Brueggemann (brueggemann.1@osu.edu)

Representations of disability throughout (literary) history have most often placed it as a mirroring condition or experience in relation to non-disabled others. Some of the relational questions we will explore through literature, memoir, Hollywood film, and documentary film include: How is disability used as metaphor and "narrative prosthesis" in literature and film? How does disability change and shape one's love and sexual opportunities and experiences? How does disability matter in friendship and romantic relationships? How do siblings, parents, children write about their experiences with disabled family members?

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Winter Quarter 2010

English 275: Ways of "Knowing": Health, Illness, and Identity
Professor Sheila Bock (bock.42@osu.edu

This course explores the complex and dynamic nature of health beliefs as they relate to individual and group identities. Using a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts, we will examine critically the multiplicity of health beliefs in American culture and the complex ways ideas about health interact with how people identify themselves and others. Central questions we will address include: Where do people learn what they "know" about health and illness? In what ways do individuals (both patients and health professionals) draw upon a variety sources of knowledge as they strive to make sense of health and illness? Which beliefs are given the most credibility in American culture today and why? Which beliefs are most often marginalized and why? How do individuals respond to the ways others categorize their beliefs? Ultimately, students will use the readings and class discussions to inform their understandings of their own experiences with/ perspectives on health and illness. Students will also become familiar with different critical approaches to analysis and interpretation (literary, rhetorical, and folkloric) by examining a variety of textual representations of the human experience.
Fulfills Arts & Humanities GEC Requirement!
English 367.01 (Special Section): Literacy, Memory, and Community: Collecting Life Histories and Digital Literacy Narratives in Black Columbus
Professor Cindy Selfe (selfe.2@osu.edu)

In this course-which welcomes community members and volunteers associated with the African American and African Studies Community Extension Center (AAASCEC)-students will learn about collecting and preserving the life-history narratives of Black Columbus, focusing specifically on narratives having to do with literacy practices occurring in the home, church, community, and schools.

Participants in this course will read about the importance of undertaking life-history and literacy narrative projects, with a particular focus on preserving the history of African-American communities. Guest speakers who have participated in similar projects will also be invited to speak to the class. Class members will learn about interviewing techniques, look at/listen to life history/literacy narrative recordings, and reflect on such digital texts as a medium of social activism.

Participants will learn how to use digital audio recorders, digital still cameras, and digital video cameras to record the stories of community members in Black Columbus, and all participants will conduct a series of life-history/literacy narrative interviews with members of the community. All OSU students, community members, and volunteers are welcome in this class. The course will draw on the AASCEC's extensive relationships with community partners in the Columbus area. Participants who enroll in this course must be able to attend class at the AASCEC ( 905 Mount Vernon Avenue).

English 378: Film and Literature of the Jazz Age
Professor Ryan Friedman (friedman.193@osu.edu)

This course examines the construction of the American 1920s as a historical "age" with its own distinct sensibility and culture. We will trace the origins of these notions about the 20s through the (mostly silent) film and literature of the period, focusing on the cultural fascination with youth and the "younger generation," the rise of consumer society and advertising, and the popularity of satire as a mode of representation. We will also explore dissident constructions of the 20s, which dispute some of the period's emergent myths, such as the idea that individual alienation and rebellion rendered collective political projects or movements irrelevant. In order to see how these representations continue to shape our understanding of the period, we will also look at a few contemporary films and literary texts set in the 20s.

English 405: Writing about Science
Professor Jonathan Buehl (buehl.7@osu.edu)

This course will prepare students to approach professional writing tasks that engage scientific discourses, such as accommodating science to non-specialists and editing technical scientific prose. Knowledge of or proficiency in science is not required. Objectives: to develop familiarity with the discourses of science communication; to learn strategies for editing technical prose; to learn strategies for accommodating science for non-expert audiences; to practice a range of verbal and visual styles used to communicate science in different contexts. Probable Texts: A Field Guide for Science Writers (paperback), Blum, Knudson, and Henig. The Best American Science Writing of 2007, Kolata and Cohen. The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2007, Preston and Folger. Student Responsibilities: Students will complete assignments in which they will (1) edit technical prose, (2) accommodate science for different audiences, (3) develop metaphors and analogies, (4) create explanatory visuals, and (5) analyze technical and popular science publications. This course counts as a Group A elective for the CSTW's minor in writing.

English 520.02: Weird Shakespeare
Professor Hannibal Hamlin (hamlin.22@osu.edu)

One might argue that every play by Shakespeare is weird in its own way (think of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the marriage play about rapists, amazons, and bestiality, or Hamlet, the revenge play without revenge). But some are weirder than others. Certainly some are less familiar than others, which makes their particular weirdnesses seem all the more weird. This course will focus on plays less often read and performed: Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Cymbeline. We will explore complexities of genre, character, style, and tone, in original as well as contemporary contexts. We may come out of the course thinking that some of these plays are ignored for good reason, but we may find in others neglected gems.

English 564.04: Salman Rushdie
Professor Pranav Jani (jani.4@osu.edu)

This section of "Major Authors" will introduce students to Salman Rushdie, one of the most celebrated writers in the English language in the past twenty-five years. Rushdie's novels and essays have been widely recognized as putting postcolonial literature on the map of Western literary studies. Besides appreciating Rushdie's dazzling magical realism and his foregrounding of cultural hybridity, we will study the larger social impact of his politically-engaged career from Bombay to London to New York. Our study of four important novels and several essays will lead us through the tumultuous aftermath of decolonization in India, the disjointed experience of immigrants and exiles in the postcolonial diaspora, representations of Islam and the turmoil around the Iranian fatwa against Rushdie, rising South Asian communalism in the 1990s, and the turmoil of war and terrorism in the 21 st century. Rushdie's work shows us how literature is entwined with its historical contexts: how writers can shed a powerful light on the great themes of our times, pushing beyond the boundaries of history even as they are shaped by it.

English 573.02 : Literate Lives -- Oral Histories of Literacy
Professor Lewis Ulman (ulman.1@osu.edu)

Drawing upon the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives ( http://daln.osu.edu), a publicly available, online archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio), English 573.02 will examine the cultural history of literacy through the lens of oral history and personal narrative, paying particular attention to the various roles that oral histories can play in community life. Students will explore theories and methods of capturing and analyzing oral histories in digital formats; compare oral history to other kinds of data about literacy; and compose their own literacy narratives.

English 575: The American Counterculture
Professor Manny Martinez (martinez.202@osu.edu)

This course will examine both the cultural production and the sociopolitical causes and ramifications of 1960s dissent. We'll begin with an examination of Beat literature, Civil Rights literature and manifestoes, culminating with the anti-war, feminist, and Chicano movements in order to better understand the definition of "counterculture" and the complexity of the constituencies that made it up. Authors will include Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Abby Hoffman, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Oscar Acosta, Malcolm X, MLK, Cesar Chavez. Their will also be a significant film component.

English 576.03: Issues and Movements in Critical Theory
Professor Sandra MacPherson (macpherson.4@osu.edu)

No description is available at this time--please contact the instructor for more information about this course.

English 577.01 Oral History and Narrative in Everyday Life
Professor Amy Shuman (shuman.1@osu.edu)

We will explore the role that narrative plays in everyday life, including family stories, stories about illness, veterans' stories, stories about first love, first jobs, and other firsts (just some examples). Students will collect stories and study them from different perspectives, from how they are put together to how they are used to make meaning in social interaction.

English 578: The Noir Decade in Film
Professor Mark Conroy (conroy.1@osu.edu)

This course will focus on 1940s film noir (Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, etc.), along with a couple of "neo- noir" or retro-style films from the late century (Chinatown, etc.).

English 578: Ideology and American Cinema After World War II.
Professor Ryan Friedman (friedman.193@osu.edu)

This course examines the ways in which Hollywood films made in the years following World War II reflect, expose, and/or scrutinize the period's ideologies-its collectively-held assumptions about what is desirable or "natural" in the social sphere. Moving chronologically from the war era to the late 1950s, we will trace the emergence of specific ideologies (of class, race, gender, and sexuality) from post-war developments such as: the "reconversion" of the industrial economy, the rise of consumer culture, the homecoming of veterans, the abandonment of war-related political projects, the rise of the corporate "organization," and fears of Communist infiltration and atomic catastrophe. We will explore how the Hollywood cinema responded to and negotiated these developments, paying particular attention to changes in film genres, visual aesthetics, narrative strategies, and even film technology (the emergence of widescreen formats, for example).

English 580: Queer Modernism
Professor Debra Moddelmog (moddelmog.1@osu.edu)

This course will explore the relationships of modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (literature written from approximately 1915-1930) to developing notions of sexual identity and sexual orientation. It will start with the recognition that the "science" of sexology-which gave us terms such as "homosexuality," "sexual inversion," and "heterosexuality"-was central to understandings of self and desire advanced by many modernist and Harlem Renaissance writers, a number of whom had same-sex attractions and/ or wrote about them: e.g., Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman.

English 583: Literatures of Oceania
Professor Chad Allen (allen.559@osu.edu)

This course will introduce students to contemporary indigenous literatures of Oceania, in a variety of genres and media, and to relevant ways of understanding the Pacific Islands. In particular, we will compare and contrast contemporary texts produced by Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiians) with those by Maori from Aotearoa/New Zealand and by Pacific Islanders from places such as Tonga, Samoa, Rotuma, Niue, the Cook Islands, and Fiji.

English 585.02 The History of Literacy
Professor Harvey Graff (graff.40@osu.edu)

Taking a historical approach, we will seek a general understanding of the history of literacy mainly but not only in the West since classical antiquity, with an emphasis on the early modern and modern eras. At the same time, we examine critically literacy's contributions to the shaping of the modern world and the impacts on literacy from fundamental historical social changes. Among many topics, we will explore communications, language, expression, family and demographic behavior, economic development, urbanization, institutions, literacy campaigns, political and personal changes, and the uses of reading and writing. A new understanding of the place of literacy and literacies in social development is our overarching goal. (Note: this course is cross-listed in the History Department and the Department of Comparative Studies.)

English 587 Henna and Hip-Hop: South Asians in America
Professor Pranav Jani (jani.4@osu.edu)

Slumdog Millionaire 's triumph at the Oscars is just the tip of the iceberg. From Bollywood to bhangra, from novelists to software engineers, from Kal Penn to Apu of The Simpsons , images of India and South Asia saturate American life. How has this popularity shaped the identities and lives of South Asians in the US, and how does it compare with the past? What notions of race, religion, gender, nation, class, and sexuality govern these identities? How have ideas about the "exotic" or "spiritual" East and the "materialist" West shaped the image (and self-image) of this group? This course investigates literature, film, music and essays by and about South Asian Americans, providing students with an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the diverse and often conflicting ways through which desi experiences are portrayed and understood.

English H590.02: Spenser and Milton
Professor John King (king.2@osu.edu)

This course explores the interrelationship between Edmund Spenser and John Milton, the greatest epic poets in the English language. Milton himself acknowledged that Spenser exerted a direct influence on his verse. Both poets exerted a profound influence upon Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats. Our reading will focus upon Books One and Three and other selections from Spenser's Faerie Queene, the whole of Milton's Paradise Lost, and other brief selections as time permits. Class discussion will consider the nature of epic as a literary genre; the handling of romantic love and relationships between the sexes; ideological connections between these poets; and other important topics including relationships to allied developments in Renaissance culture, society, religion, and thought.

English H590.03: Novelistic Pleasure and the Market
Professor David Brewer (brewer.126@osu.edu)

In recent decades, scholars have tended to discuss the eighteenth-century novel in terms of its ideological effects: the ways in which it supposedly produces (or attempts to produce) gendered selves or compliant workers or imperialist fervor. No doubt it often did have such effects. But the presumption that the ends of fiction are ultimately and necessarily ideological has had the odd and unintended consequence of obscuring one of the most defining features of the form: namely that, especially in the eighteenth century, novels were bought or borrowed for pleasure in a marketplace. This course will attempt to take both novelistic pleasure and the novelistic market seriously in order to provide a fuller account of how novels actually worked in and over the period we still credit with the invention of the form as we know it.

English H590.06: 1925 and Modern Culture
Professor Brian McHale(mchale.11@osu.edu)

This course will explore the modern period through the literary products and cultural contexts of a single year, 1925, arguably the highwater-mark of modernism in the English-speaking world. Nineteen twenty-five was the year of Alain Locke's The New Negro, William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, Hemingway's In Our Time, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Yeats's A Vision, and Nancy Cunard's Parallax - not to mention, farther afield, Andre Gidé's The Counterfeiters and Kafka's The Trial (published posthumously). We will read or sample from these texts, and will also reflect more generally on the opportunities and limitations of treating a year as a period.

English 576.03: Issues and Movements in Critical Theory
Professor Sandra MacPherson (macpherson.4@osu.edu)

No description is available at this time--please contact the instructor for more information about this course

English H591.01: Generating Language for Poetry and Prose
Professor Kathy Fagan (fagan.3@osu.edu)

We'll look at modes of utterance in verse and prose and study writerly strategies in order to generate lyrical or narrative language of our own. Likely texts include but are not limited to those by Tim O'Brien, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Carole Maso, James Joyce, TS Eliot, Toni Morrison, and Robert Frost. This course is open to those with Creative Writing workshop experience and those who have no previous workshop experience. It is a hybrid literature/workshop course.

English 592: Women and Science Fiction
Professor Sharon Collingwood (collingwood.7@osu.edu)

In this course you will come across aliens, amazons, cyborgs and avatars. You will visit fantastic planets, witness frightening visions of the future, and study bizarre societies. It's all good fun, but underlying the fantasy is a serious unease about our own world, and an anxiety about what is to come in the future. The texts for this course are primarily written by women, and they deal with issues of gender, race and sexual orientation, as well as with the moral difficulties women face in an increasingly technological society. Many of these writers are also concerned over the threat that technology poses to the natural world, and they point out the ties between the destruction of nature and the oppression of women. Other writers put forward the idea of technology as the ultimate liberator of women, and still others see the possibilities of the "metaverse," an alternate cyberspace existence, where identity and gender can be cast off like an old coat. In her groundbreaking essay "A Cyborg Manifesto," Donna Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. She argues that we can be responsible for machines and not allow them undue power over us, choosing instead to use them to enhance our social connectivity and to live better lives. But what is lost in becoming a cyborg? This is the ultimate question brought forward by this course, one that demands a personal response from each student.

English 595: Literary Locations: London
Professor Jennifer Higginbotham (higginbotham.37@osu.edu)

London is: an " Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn" (T.S. Eliot); "a populous and smoky city" (Shelley); "a modern Babylon" (Benjamin Disraeli). The Literary Locations program offers students the opportunity to view the "Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples" of England's capital city with Wordsworth and then walk along the banks of Stratford's Avon River with Shakespeare. Students will spend the quarter getting to know London through literature, after which we will take a 10 day trip to England to see for ourselves the streets that Mrs. Dalloway walked in Woolf's classic novel and the house that Shakespeare bought with the money he made writing for the London theater. We will find out why Samuel Jonson said that "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life."

(Note: because of the international travel associated with this course, if you are interested, you should contact the instructor and/or the Office of International Education as soon as possible.)

English 596: Virginia Woolf and the Other Arts
Professor Sebastian Knowles (knowles.1@osu.edu)

A course that begins by reading Virginia Woolf's work in relation to music: The Voyage Out and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde , The Waves and Debussy's La Mer . We will then study the presence of other art forms in her work: Jacob's Room and Cubism, Mrs. Dalloway as a ballet, To the Lighthouse and its connections to multiple forms of art such as impressionism and symphonic form. We will conclude with a study of Orlando as a work written for cinema and Between the Acts as a work written for the stage. The course is restricted to 20 students, who will each be expected to contribute to the interdisciplinary theme of the course in one way or another.

English H597: Narrative and Emotion
Professor Frederick Aldama (aldama.1@osu.edu)

From the study of emotion and cognition to the study of the neurology of narrative fiction, including phenomena such as music, dreaming, theory of mind, aggression, and cruelty the trajectory of the course is meant to complete an arch that begins in the socially and historically conditioned mind/brain as producer and consumer of fiction as art and ends in the analysis and experiencing of certain significant works of art.

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Spring Quarter 2010

English H296: Literature and Racial Justice
Professor Lynn Itagaki (itagaki.5@osu.edu)

This course will examine the way literary and filmic texts are used to attempt to heal deep political, economic and social rifts in American society, especially regarding issues of racial justice. We will look at the controversial beginnings of race and racism and how it was manifested in American history in policies of removal, exclusion, and containment. In the last thirty years, we see the increasing emergence of formal apologies and monetary reparations in United States politics and examine how these political developments are reflected in contemporary American literature: how tensions are resolved, reconciled, or even remain marginal and overlooked. We will consider novels, short stories, poetry, music, films, and essays that publicized or responded to redress and reparations for slavery, Japanese American internment, WWII sexual slavery, Native Hawaiian sovereignty, and Native American territories.

How do writers and filmmakers attempt to resolve long-standing political, social and economic issues regarding racial justice? We will examine these creative works in relation to recent debates in political philosophy, trauma theory, and critical race studies.

English 364: True Crime and Popular Culture
Professor Elizabeth Hewitt (hewitt.33@osu.edu)

This course will study the long and varied tradition of true crime narratives. Beginning with the stories of witches, murderers, and sexual vandals that so captivated their 17th century audiences, to Victorian serial murderers like Jack the Ripper, to modern celebrity crimes and criminals (the Black Dahlia, the Manson murders), we will ask why readers so often turn to blood, violence, and malfeasance as the stuff of entertainment. We will read in a wide variety of genres (confession narratives, novels, exposes, nonfictional novel, genre fiction) and in a wide variety of media (books, comics, television, film, internet) as we traverse the huge history of this literary and cultural form. Authors we will study are likely to include: Edgar Allen Poe, Truman Capote, Janet Malcom, James Ellroy, and Vincent Bugliosi.

English 372: Science Fiction and/or Fantasy
Professor Maura Heaphy (heaphy.8@osu.edu)
Office: DE 501 (Mailbox: 421 Denney )
Phone: 292 2168

Science Fiction is not just about zap guns and interstellar rockets. Science Fiction also tells us that the past could have been different; the present isn't what it seems; and the future will not be what you're expecting.

This course will explore the strategies involved in reading science fiction, as well as examining the genre's common themes and metaphors. No prior knowledge of science fiction is assumed, though a willingness to jump in and experience the genre on its own terms will be helpful.

By examining major influential SF works in their literary, social, and cultural contexts, this course will offers students an opportunity to enhance their communication skills, to promote discussion and critical thinking, and to discover different ways to think about the past, the present, the future - and themselves.

Texts assigned are likely to include works by authors such as: Octavia Butler, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick and Kate Wilhelm.

English 378: Shakespeare and Film
Professor Alan Farmer (farmer.109@osu.edu)

In this course, we will study how Shakespeare's plays have been imagined and re-imagined in film since the early-20th century, how they have been historicized and modernized, politicized and aestheticized. This is a literature and film course, so we will both read specific plays (Richard the Third, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and Macbeth) and view films that cut across dramatic genres, time periods, countries, and cinematic styles, by such directors as Reinhardt and Dieterle, Olivier, Kurosawa, Almereyda, Pacino, and Taymor. We will focus on how directors and actors have chosen to adapt Shakespeare for performance, but also consider how these films have shaped, and continue to shape, the cultural meaning of "Shakespeare" for modern audiences.

English 564.02: Jane Austen
Professor Robyn Warhol-Down (robyn.warhol@uvm.edu)

We will study Jane Austen's six completed novels, considering their place in literary history, their narrative innovations, and their insights about gender. Course readings will include current and classic critical essays on Austen, as well as biographical information. We will also discuss at least one contemporary film adaptation of an Austen novel.

English 564.04: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
Professor Tommy Davis (davis.3186@osu.edu)

The course will focus on Virginia Woolf's major novels alongside the writings of other major figures in the Bloomsbury Group. We will pay close attention to the way the Bloomsbury Group's aesthetic innovations relate to the eruption of two world wars, changing gender roles, the slow wane of the British empire, and the various political projects (the League of Nations, feminist ideas of the state, working class politics) that drew the interest of Woolf and her cohorts. Alongside Woolf, we'll read fiction by E.M. Forster and Leonard Woolf, art crticism by Clive Bell and Roger Fry, treatises by J.M. Keynes and Leonard Woolf, and perhaps some non-fiction essays by Virginia Woolf.

English 569: Digital Media and English Studies
Professor Scott DeWitt (dewitt.18@osu.edu)

No description is available at this time--please contact the instructor for more information about this course.

English 573.02: Disability as a Civil Rights and Human Rights Movement
Professor Brenda Brueggemann (brueggemann.2@osu.edu)

No description is available at this time--p lease contact the instructor for more information about this course.

English 576.03: Issues and Movements in Critical Theory

Professor Jon Erickson (erickson.5@osu.edu) No description is available at this time--p lease contact the instructor for more information about this course.

English 577.03: Traditional Ballads
Professor Richard Green (green.693@osu.edu)

This course will study development of the traditional folk ballad from its origins in the European Middle Ages down to its continuing presence in contemporary North America. The primary focus will be thematic (Tragic Ballads, Supernatural Ballads, Outlaw Ballads, Humorous Ballads, etc), but there will some opportunity to discuss the traditional ballad in relation to related types like the broadside, and the literary ballad. There will be a strong emphasis upon the ballad in performance throughout, and wherever possible the ballad tunes will also be included.

English 578: Stanley Kubrick
Professor Morris Beja (beja.1@osu.edu)

The films will be Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket , and Eyes Wide Shut. Assigned readings will include two novels: Nabokov's Lolita and y Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.

English 578: Romantic Comedy
Professor Debra Moddelmog (moddelmog.1@osu.edu)

This course will examine the genre of romantic comedy beginning with the film that many view as its origin--It Happened One Night (1934). A central concern will be to track the conventions of the genre over time as they reflect changing notions about relationships between the sexes, relationships across a spectrum of racial identities, same-sex relationships, marriage, and citizenship.

English 581: Jewish American Fiction
Professor Steve Fink (fink.5@osu.edu)

The course will focus on either "Jewish American (post-) Holocaust Fiction," or "Jewish American Immigrant Literature," or "Jewish American Fiction of the Past 25 Years." Please contact the instructor for more information.

English H590.04: Multimodal Romanticism
Professor Les Tannenbaum (tannenbaum.1@osu.edu)

The topic for this course is Multimodal Romanticism, which means that we will examine how and why artists, writers, and musicians of the Romantic period were interested in integrating more than one medium as a means of artistic expression. This impulse led to the production of such works as the illustrated poems of William Blake and Thomas Hood, J. M. W. Turner's poems that accompanied his paintings to create The Fallacies of Hope, and Richard Wagner's epic music drama, The Ring of the Nibelung (the forerunner of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). We will also study the ways in which contemporary historical events-particularly the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars -influenced this impulse and the artistic products that resulted, as well as the relationship between Romantic and current multimodal theory and practice. The class will meet in a computer lab, where we will be actively learning by using digital media, such as The William Blake Archive .

English H590.08: Nineteenth-Century Serial Fictions in American Literature
Professor Jared Gardner (gardner.236 @osu.edu)

No description is available at this time--please contact the instructor for more information about this course.

English 586: American Indian Literatures and Cultures
Professor Chad Allen (allen.559@osu.edu)

This course will introduce students to 20th- and 21st-century American Indian literatures, in a variety of genres and media, and to relevant ways of understanding Indigenous self-representation in its historical, cultural, and political contexts. We will examine works of prose fiction (short stories and novels), poetry, memoir, drama, nonfiction (journalism, activist writing, and scholarship), film (documentary, feature, and animation), and music ("traditional" and contemporary), as well as relevant web-based materials.

English H591.02: Children's Human Rights and Narrated Lives
Professor Wendy Hesford (hesford.1@osu.edu)

This course will focus on the memoir boom in the last decades of the twentieth century, a period during which human rights activists lobbied for the United Nations Convention for the Rights of the Child, with particular attention to memoirs published for Western audiences about children's human rights around the globe.

English 592: Shakespeare's Sisters
Professor Jennifer Higginbotham (higginbotham.37@osu.edu)

Sometimes celebrated as a proto-feminist and sometimes decried as the patriarchal bard, Shakespeare exerts an undeniable influence on the history of women's writing. From his female contemporaries to his later readers, women have long been responding to his plays and poems. How does Shakespeare represent women, and what does he represent to women writers? Why do so many women return to Shakespeare's stories and rewrite them in their own work? We will read Shakespeare along with a few of his female contemporaries, as well modern women writers who have been influenced by and rewritten Shakespeare's work.

English 595: Literary Locations Venice
Professor Alan B. Farmer farmer.109@osu.edu
Course will examine the representation of Venice in works of English and European literature from the 16th to the 20th century. Ten-day trip to Venice follows in June. Students will earn 10 upper level English credits (595 and 697). Cost to be determined.

(Note: because of the international travel associated with this course, if you are interested, you should contact the instructor and/or the Office of International Education as soon as possible.)

English 597.01: Disability and Stigma in Everyday Life
Professor Amy Shuman (shuman.1@osu.edu)

Erving Goffman defined stigma as the management of spoiled identity. We will look at how disability is represented in folklore, literature, and the media to understand how stigmas are constructed and how they are refuted or changed.

English 597.02: American Regional Cultures and Global Transition: Appalachia, Louisiana, and the Texas Border Country
Professor Ray Cashman (cashman.10@osu.edu)

This course introduces you to the folklore of three American regions. Imagined as different from a supposed American norm, each region is both attractive to outsiders and stigmatized by them. In each region, a dynamic vernacular culture has emerged out of complex race and class relations. In each region, both government policy and economic forces have powerfully transformed local lifeways and the physical environment, and vernacular political expression has been subject to violent repression. Each region has also been strongly marked by in- and out-migration. We'll look at historical change through the prism of celebrated folklore forms such as Louisiana Mardi Gras, Appalachian fairy tales, and the Tex-Mex corrido. We'll also explore the impact of recent events: Hurricane Katrina and the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, mountaintop-removal mining in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, and the proposed border fence across the US-Mexican border to halt undocumented migration.

English 597.03: Environmental Citizenship
Professor Lewis Ulman (ulman.1@osu.edu)

This course encompasses both "reading" and "writing" the environment (i.e., learning to interpret the physical, social, and cultural forces that shape environments and assuming an active role in shaping environments) through reading and discussion, weekly lab sessions, and a course project. One component of this class consists of a case study of human-environment interaction in a local landscape-the Olentangy River Watershed. The interdisciplinary approach of this cross-listed course will help students incorporate the multiple kinds of knowledge necessary for understanding environmental problems and shaping comprehensive environmental values.

(Note: this course is cross-listed in the Geography Department)

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