01    TTH6   CAC  68930  WALKOWITZ  MU-204

02     MW8    CAC  69247   ROGERS   SC-219

03    MW5   CAC    73068    IAN    SC-119

01- Vernacular Fictions: Joyce and After

This course will introduce students to several practices of "vernacular fiction" in twentieth-century narrative, film, and drama: the vernacular of spoken idiom and dialect; the vernacular of popular culture and everyday life; the vernacular of explicit sexuality and unflinching description; the vernacular of local experiences and multicultural identity.  We will develop our analytic vocabulary through close attention to James Joyce’s Ulysses in the context of modernism and theories of vernacular culture. After devoting several weeks to Joyce, we will turn for the remainder of the semester to post-World War II figures such as Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Caryll Churchill, Udayan Prasad, Claire Messud, John Updike, and Ian McEwan.  We will supplement these materials with essays by Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, M.M. Bakhtin, Michel de Certeau, and Hanif Kureishi.  Note: While the study of Ulysses will be crucial to our work, the course is not focused exclusively on this text; some aspects of Ulysses will be given more treatment than others. No previous knowledge of modernist literature is assumed or necessary, but students should be prepared to devote considerable time to the reading, especially at the beginning of the course.  Assessment will be based on participation in discussion, three short papers, and a take-home final exam.   

02- Modernist Poetry: Deceptive Simplicity and Conspicuous Complexity

Modernist poetry—it is strange, difficult, wildly experimental stuff.  As a summary view of the poetry written in the first half of the twentieth century, this is true enough.  But it is true, as we say, only as far as it goes.  In fact, much of the period’s canonical poetry displays a vernacular style that is—at least on its surface—simple, direct, and relatively unassuming.  On one hand, the modernist period confronts us with the philosophical labyrinths of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, the dense allusions of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the mind-bending syntax of Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore’s experimental approach to both prosody and sentence logic.  On the other hand, modernism has given us the ballad forms and folk narratives of Sterling Brown, the colloquial free verse of William Carlos Williams, the plainspoken blank verse of Robert Frost, and the blues prosody of Langston Hughes.  In this course, we will build comparisons between these two strands of American modernist poetry by tuning in to the workings of individual poems.  As we study the second strand, we will give special attention to the technique of “deceptive simplicity,” by which a poem’s promise of ease and familiarity gives way, via careful reading, to the surprise of its underlying complexity and richness.  And as we study the first strand, we will look closely at the techniques by which modernist poems brandish their complexity: persistent allusion, formal experimentation, and philosophical speculation.  Students can hope to gain a sense of the variety of modernist poetry and to practice careful, attentive reading.  Writing requirements are six short response papers (1-2 pages each) and a long final essay (10-12 pages).

03- Invisible Man
We will devote the entire semester to reading one modernist novel, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This novel is fascinating, powerful, and paradoxical. In fact, the narrator, who “writes” the novel as a kind of long flashback, declares it from the start to be a multiple paradox: a “compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white” and “thus an urge to make music of invisibility.” It is also a tale of African-American experience that reveals African-American identity to be the result of that experience, and reveals race, seemingly a matter of physical appearance, to be the product of our “inner eyes.” Furthermore it is a masterpiece of modernist experimentation that at the same time equates reality with dream and dream with history.

The plan is to read the novel twice, once at the start and again at the end of the semester. In between, to help us appreciate and understand the novel’s layered complexities, we will read texts by as many as we can of authors referred to by the novel itself. This list includes Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Richard Wright.

Requirements:
Attendance: Three unexcused absences are permitted; more than five is grounds for failure.

Required writing: Two papers (6-8 pages worth 30% of grade; 10-12 pages 50% of grade).

Participation is the essence of a seminar. Everyone is required to present at least one reading to the class for discussion. I hope everyone will participate in general discussion. I do not grade the content of what you say in class; the point is to talk with each other about the readings. Participation will count for 20% of your grade.