Graduate Courses

11903 4:00p-5:15p TR

The topic this semester will be the Middle Welsh language. Welsh is a Celtic language, a lineal descendant of the language spoken in most of Britain when the Anglo-Saxons invaded the island in the fifth century. Middle Welsh is the form that the language took from the middle of the twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth, the period during which for the first time a corpus of literature in Welsh is preserved—as opposed to the rare, stray glosses and names that comprise nearly all of the small corpus of Old Welsh. Some Middle Welsh texts, however, are plainly redactions of much earlier compositions, some perhaps as old as the sixth century. The language is something like English in structure, as it is syntactically isolative and not heavily inflected, though the word order is different and syntactic functions are frequently indicated by initial consonant mutations (as in Old Irish, though Welsh is much easier to learn and pronounce). Our approach to the language will be text-oriented, so that we will learn much of our grammar from the process of translating texts (much as one learns, for example, Old Norse reading the texts in Gordon’s Introduction to Old Norse). Depending on availability, the texts to be studied will include Branwen Uerch Lyr from the delightful, fairy-tale-like Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi ‘Four Branches of the Mabinogi’, as well as the tale Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys and selections from the older heroic-elegiac verse, particularly Canu Llywarch Hen. There will be two examinations and some shorter exercises.

33024 9:30a - 10:45a TR

This course is designed to expose students to research engagement as a heuretic (inventive) rather than strictly hermeneutic (interpretive) practice. In so doing, it will attempt to open students to the inventive aspects residing at the core of our methodological practices and critical analyses, and to pursue choragraphical rather than topical modes of inquiry. Meaning, this course will be an attempt to prepare students for humanistic (and post-humanistic) methods of research that not only appropriate media (and their ordering principles) to study a critical object (or even post-critical objects [c.f., Ulmer]), but that also work with those media to produce a discourse on that research (i.e., a "writing of the paradigm" [c.f., Vitanza]).

Further, this course will be performed in the key of A: that key, working on tropical fashion (White), will be our scaffolding. To this end, the course will be divided into 6 units:

• Archives (memory and invention work);
• Archeology (frivolity and etymological mining);
• Anthropology (cultural invention and the differend);
• Architectonic Arts & Algorithmic Inquiry (structure, paradigm, and methodological invention);
• Adaptation and Augmentation (hybrid methodology and subjective rhetorics); and
• Aleatory Procedures (conductive logic and autoethnography).

The key guiding our inquiry in this course, and its performance as part of the course, will be central to the questioning at stake for us (and to our engagements with the literary/cultural artifacts fundamental to that questioning). Additionally, our practices will be aided by digital technologies, with the last unit focusing on the affordances (and the shifts in inquiry) that arise when digital media come to bear on the human condition.

Students should be prepared to do considerable reading in this course (with selections ranging from rhetoric and [continental] philosophy to anthropology and cultural studies). Additionally, students should expect to use digital media authoring technologies to produce discourse (and to engage in research practices) for this course.

13772 1:00p - 2:15p MW

This course is a Practicum in Writing, focusing on how to write a great review — of books (academic and otherwise), films, music, performances, exhibits, or careers. Members of the class will be asked to select 2 periodicals known for their reviews (e.g. NYRP, LRB, N+1, The New Yorker, The Critical Flame, Three Percent, The Millions, etc.) and read their reviews regularly. Other readings will be assembled by the instructor. We will look at the history of reviews as well as the changing outlets for reviewing. We will read or share together a few texts to test our responses against those of professional reviewers/writers (e.g. James Wood, John Updike, Laurie Moore, Julien Barnes). Our main concern, though, will be to arrive at principles for producing the best sorts of reviews; develop clarity about our own criteria for evaluating scholarly and creative works; and cultivate a voice and style appropriate to the task. For the first half of the course we will be occupied mostly with reading and judging models and experimenting with different styles and approaches. The second half will be devoted primarily to writing assignments. The goal of the course is to have you send off at least one review for publication. Be prepared to write and share your work often.

33025 4:00p-5:15p TR

This course will explore how Shakespeare, and Milton after him, represent the grounds of agency and “will” during the years preceding and immediately following the English Civil War. Foregrounded by Reformation theology and enabled by emergent print culture, early modern writers after Luther, especially figures such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Milton, effectively theorize the uses and limits “the will,” pitted against other modes of agency, including fancy, or the imagination, desire, appetites, humors, compulsions, well as circumstances and events. The role of contingency, accident, clashing or opposing agendas made consensus about agency and will impossible; but there are remarkable similarities between how Shakespeare and Milton conceived of the role of individual will in the formation, and deformation, of character. We will concentrate on several of Shakespeare’s problem plays and tragedies, laying our conceptual terrain before moving on to Milton’s political writings and, in the last third of the term, Paradise Lost, an epic poem that both trumpets free will and demonstrates its inevitable failures. I’ve chosen these two authors for the remarkable ways they pose cognition and affect against each other, forming the basis in their work for modern conceptions of character as well as providing representational models for psychoanalysis, ethics, and political psychology. Plays will include Hamlet; Antony and Cleopatra; Othello; Coriolanus and The Tempest. Milton’s writings will include Areopagitica; other selected political and poetic writing, and Paradise Lost in its entirety. Critical and secondary texts—both early modern and contemporary--will be assigned as well, most of them available through Oncourse.

Requirements: Students will write informal weekly response notes, and two papers of roughly 10-12pp each.

29474 1:00p-2:15p TR

This course is designed for anyone interested in modern literature, journalism, rhetorical studies, culture, and publishing. We will study the history and influence of The New Yorker, which since its founding in 1925 has been one of the United States’s preeminent magazines. We’ll analyze short stories and nonfiction by several of its major contributors over its nine-decade span. In doing so, we’ll consider not only its fans’ devotion, but also recurring charges that the magazine is too enamored of middle-brow taste and moderate liberal rhetoric. Writers studied will likely include five famous Johns (Updike, Cheever, O’Hara, McPhee, and Hersey) along with E. B. White, Janet Malcolm, Irwin Shaw, Ann Beattie, Donald Barthelme, Rebecca West, Janet Flanner, Joseph Mitchell, Jamaica Kincaid, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Arlene Croce, Alice Munro, and William Trevor. Suggestions are in advance are welcome.

Writing will consist of (1) several short responses to the readings, and (2) three 4-page papers, the last one being part of an oral presentation you will make on a specific writer or school of writers you have chosen. Some of the course texts will be book collections drawn from the New Yorker archives. But you’ll also need to have access to the archives themselves, which are available online to digital and print subscribers. If you don’t currently subscribe to the magazine, please obtain at least a six-month digital subscription by the beginning of the semester. You can find more information at the magazine’s website (www.newyorker.com).

Please note, too, that the course will begin with discussion of Ben Yagoda’s excellent and highly readable history of the magazine, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. I recommend that you read the book beforehand, especially because it’s such a terrific overview of our subject.

13474/13512 5:45p-8:30p R

This course is cross-listed between English and Cultural Studies and meets the core requirement for the Ph.D. minor in Cultural Studies. It is open to all interested graduate students.

This introduction to cultural theory has two aims: 1) to read the foundational texts and intellectual history of contemporary cultural studies, and 2) to consider the challenge posed by the move from subject- to object-centered theories to a field that takes the dialectic of culture and consciousness as its foundational concern. Beginning with the Frankfurt School’s turn toward cultural Marxism, we will proceed to the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies’ incorporation of structuralism, and thence to the challenge of poststructuralism. In this history we see the division that expresses itself in the debate, ubiquitous in contemporary cultural studies, between post-Marxism and various theories of the public sphere. As we follow the trajectory of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century breaks with Cartesian humanism to the anti-humanism of subsequent theories of subjectivity, we will discuss how the latter have influenced analyses of popular and expressive cultural practices. Finally, we will ask what happens to the subject and to attendant questions of agency as we move to object-centered and post-humanist speculations.

How is culture defined and what is its relationship to economic and political structures? How are cultural meanings produced, circulated and consumed? What is the relationship between high, mass and popular cultural productions? How do cultural formations produce patterns of individuated subjectivity and social relationships, and how do we think about agency? With such questions to guide us, we will examine both the methods and the objects of cultural studies scholarship.

Assignments likely will include two short essays and a class presentation. We may close the semester with a look at some contemporary scholarship chosen by students. Primary readings will be drawn from the following list:

• Marx, from The German Ideology
• Theodore Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth
• Louis Althusser, from For Marx
• Walter Benjamin, from Illuminations
• Antonio Gramsci, from The Prison Notebooks
• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society
• Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis
• Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, v.1
• Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
• Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
• Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
• Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
• Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics
• Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer
• Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers
• Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman
• Karan Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
• Veena Das, Life and Words

Further essays by Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Stuart Hall, Clifford Geertz, Matthew Arnold, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michael Denning, Simon During, Frederic Jameson, Henry Jenkins, Janice Radway, and many others.

33026 2:30p-4:45p TR

Hope. It is a small word but one that has tremendous consequences in British and American political and cultural life. What does it mean to desire a better tomorrow? How is the belief in political and social change communicated? When does literature and associated media play a role in pushing or defining calls for change against an entrenched status quo? This course addresses the role that 20th century American and British literature has played as a repository of hope, as an expressive medium through which calls for reform and social renewal is channeled. A central theme will be how contemporary writers, to paraphrase Kim Stanley Robinson, recapture a utopian tradition often dismissed as dead or irrelevant, and use it to intervene in contemporary political discourses around race, gender, capitalism, and the environment.

The seminar will cover topics such as the foundation of contemporary utopianism in the work of Morris, Wells and Bellamy, the effect of utopian literature on politics and aesthetics, the persistence of political hope generated by new sciences and expressed in the creation of technological utopias, and the connections between literary utopias and developments in architecture and environmental science. We will also consider the role that literary dystopia has played in both continuing the utopian tradition and challenging it. A substantial secondary literature of historical and critical work will provide context for our reading, research and discussion during the seminar. This course will also involve a visual component through the screening of signal utopian/dystopia films such as H.G. Wells’ Things to Come (1936) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985).

This course also engages contemporary scholarship in utopian literature and speculative fiction. Carl Freedman, Tom Moylan, Darko Suvin, and Peter Fitting are among the critics and scholars who will provide critical context and theoretical perspective for our reading, research and discussion during the semester. Authors to be considered may include Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Margaret Atwood, Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Aldous Huxley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

33027 9:30a-10:45a TR

This course will study the essay both historically and formally. Possible essayists include Montaigne, Johnson (and maybe Addison), Lamb, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, George Eliot, Woolf, Orwell, MFK Fisher and more recent writers including Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, James Wood, and Adam Phillips. (I'll certainly be open to suggestions from students.) One of my aims will be to encourage students to consider their own prose as critics, and so we are likely to pay special attention on critical essays. I plan to begin the semester by asking students to analyze a current article of academic literary or cultural criticism; and I also am likely to assign Verlyn Klinkenborg's new, strange, and fascinating book titled Several Short Sentences about Writing. Writing assignments for the course will be subordinate to our reading and conversation; they will also vary, and include (I am now thinking) an imitation of an admired essayist. If you have questions, don't hesitate to get in touch.

11434 9:05a-12:05p W

PLEASE CONTACT BEV HANKINS (bhankins at indiana.edu OR 855-1543) FOR PERMISSION.

This course surveys the most influential criticism and theory of the novel, from Henry James to the present. The first part of the course examines the novel within numerous critical methodologies, including but not limited to formalism, structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, new historicism, feminism and queer theory, and postcoloniality. The second part of the course examines contemporary discussions of crucial concepts within novel studies, including character and subjectivity, realism, time and temporality, and space. Readings will come mostly from anthologies of criticism edited by Michael McKeon, Dorothy Hale, and Franco Moretti.

Because this course concentrates on theoretical and critical readings, we will not read any actual novels during normal class weeks. However, those enrolled are strongly advised (though not required) to have read Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: the former because it crystallizes the novel’s engagement with previous forms of storytelling, and the latter because it exemplifies realism, perhaps the primary contribution made by the novel to modernity. This reading should ideally be completed over the summer and therefore before the first week of classes.

Assignments will likely include in-class presentations and a longer seminar paper.

13620 12:20p-3:20p W

PLEASE CONTACT BEV HANKINS (bhankins at indiana.edu OR 855-1543) FOR PERMISSION.

Camelot, Carlyon, and Winchester; Inglewood Forest, the Wirral, or the Terne Wathelyn; the land of faerie, or the Green Castle. Insular Arthurian texts are filled with references to places, factual and fictional, real and imaginary. Throughout the Middle Ages, Arthur’s court had associations with diverse, if specific, locales in Wales, Scotland, and England, from Northumbria to Cheshire, London to Winchester, Cornwall, and outward toward Rome. This course engages current research in medieval geography and the rhetoric of place to examine the political meaning and imaginative power of the preoccupation with landscapes both real and imaginary regularly found in medieval Arthurian Romance. What does it mean that the insular Arthurian tradition is both more specific with regard to place than is its continental analogues and sources, and more interested competitive dynamism of action within and across landscapes? What can theories of place and politics, space and gender, biopower and landscape teach us about the wide-ranging, regionally inflected, interest in tales of Arthur in the British Middle Ages? While continental Arthurian romances will be of interest, the primary focus of this course will be traditions of Middle English Arthuriana. Readings may include, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s, Historia regum Brittaniae; Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium; ME Arthurian tales, particularly those related to the figure of Gawain: The Avowing of King Arthur; The Adventures of Arthur at the Terne Wathelyn; Sir Gawain and Gallergos; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; The Alliterative Morte Arthure; The Stanzaic Morte Arthur; Malory’s Morte Darthur, selections from The Mabinogi (in translation). Expect to read theories of place and space, especially excerpts from Foucault, de Certeau, Lefebvre, Alaimo, and the work of various scholars on medieval geography and place.

Students should be prepared to be actively involved in the seminar discussion; written and oral work will be designed to assist in the development of individual research projects related to the general topic. We will, at times, pay rather close attention to the style of critical essays read, and, accordingly, to our own styles of writing. Previous familiarity with Arthurian romance is welcome but not expected; students with interests in later historical periods and literatures will be encouraged to develop seminar projects in line with those interests. Suggestions for readings, or other inquiries about the course are also welcome: pingham at indiana.edu

33028/33039 11:15a-12:30p TR

This course will consider the genealogy and future of Victorian Studies as a scholarly enterprise. We will focus our investigations around the founding moments, analytical categories, and future directions for this field of study as it has been engaged by scholars working in and with the disciplines of English, History, and, to an extent, Art History. Taking advantage of our location at Indiana University, we will use the journal Victorian Studies as a primary archive to guide many of our investigations. The course design will foreground the past practices and future possibilities of Victorian Studies, but students will become acquainted with the following topics as well: the broad content of nineteenth century British history, the general concerns of literary criticism, and the overarching contours of the twentieth and twenty-first century American academy. The course will also foreground the journal article as a scholarly form. In these portable capacities, the course should be of interest to students working beyond and outside of the Victorian period. We will begin the course with an examination of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and move from there to grapple with a wide variety of articles and essays. The reading load will be ambitious, yet flexible; the same can be said for the course design. In terms of writing, students should expect, through the course of the semester, to do a variety of assignments that will aim to introduce them to various genres of academic writing and thinking.

5838 1:00p-2:15p W
7745 1:00p-2:15p R

This course has two main purposes: 1) to provide Associate Instructors teaching W131 for the first time with various strategies for connecting reading and writing, preparing assignments, and evaluating student writing; 2) to engage new instructors in reflective practice through readings, speakers, and discussion of a variety of approaches and materials.

Requirements include regular attendance of proseminar and consultant meetings; observations of other W131 teachers, and a portfolio of teaching materials and a reflective essay.

Texts: A collection of materials will be made available.

This proseminar, required of all AI's teaching W131 at IU for the first time, is offered for three credits on a Satisfactory/Non-satisfactory basis; the three credits for the course may be applied for the doctoral degree, but not for the M. A.

2741 3:35p-5:35p M

PLEASE CONTACT MONICA NEES (neesm at iu dot edu OR 855-9539) FOR PERMISSION.

W554 is a practicum course in teaching creative writing at the undergraduate level. Through reading and experience we will explore the creative process as well as the assumptions and practices unique—and not so unique—to creative writing classes. We will consider invention, revision, and assessment; craft and content; various approaches to workshop; the role of reading in a writing life; authority; and writer-teacher / student-writer dynamics. We will reflect on the changing concerns of the maturing writer, exploring how teaching and writing lives coexist at the graduate level and beyond as well as explore current takes on the writer in the academy. Work for the course includes several brief response papers to course texts; a written review and presentation of a writing text of your choosing; developing several annotated lesson plans and writing exercises for W103 sections; making observation visits to two creative writing classes; and developing a syllabus and supporting materials for a 200-level undergraduate creative writing course.

8758 2:30p-5:30p T

PLEASE CONTACT MONICA NEES (neesm at iu dot edu OR 855-9539) FOR PERMISSION.

This is a fiction writing workshop for students enrolled in the graduate creative writing program. We will be writing approximately 60-75 pages of fiction (about three to four short stories) during the semester. We will also be reading books of fiction for insights into how stories are made. You will give a presentation on a topic that’s of interest and relevance to your own writing. All fiction writers enrolled in the graduate creative writing program are automatically admitted to the workshop, but you must contact the Creative Writing Program secretary for authorization to register. Contact Samrat Upadhyay at supadhya at indiana.edu for more information.

7677 2:30p-5:30p R

PLEASE CONTACT MONICA NEES (neesm at iu dot edu OR 855-9539) FOR PERMISSION.

W613 is a workshop in the writing of poetry for students in the MFA Creative Writing Program. The focus of this class will be on the poems students write during the semester, revision, active workshop participation, book presentations, prosody and poetics. There will be optional and required writing assignments and exercises based on our discussions, readings and the particulars of your work. Students enrolled in the graduate creative writing program are automatically admitted to the workshop, but you must contact the Creative Writing Program secretary for authorization to register. Contact Catherine Bowman cabowman at indiana dot edu for more information.

33471 1:00p-2:15p TR

PLEASE CONTACT MONICA NEES (neesm at iu dot edu OR 855-9539) FOR PERMISSION.

In the last part of the 20th century and early 21st century, there was an explosion of poetic work based on historical figures and events from the African-American writing community. It began with Rita Dove’s (auto-)biographical Thomas and Beulah, but projects like Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts and A. Van Jordan’s MacNolia showed that archival work and research could produce imaginative and engaging creative work.

The work of Young, Jordan, and others highlighted the fact that creative projects with a relationship to history both clarify and mythologize those historic moments. As the scholar Emery Neff said, “History nears perfection in so far as knowledge and art work in harmony.” This historically creative phenomenon isn’t limited to African Americans or poets. Historic fiction is as old as fiction itself and contemporary prose writers including Leslie Epstein and Michael Ondaatje have published recent novels that modernize the tradition.

In this course, we will examine books that use a history as the catalyst for creating art. We will focus on multi-genre texts from the past 35 years including:

• Catherine Bowman, The Plath Cabinet
• Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica
• Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful
• Leslie Epstein, King of the Jews
• Margaret Gibson, Memories of the Future
• Mat Johnson, Incognegro
• A. Van Jordan, MacNolia
• Quraysh Ali Lansana, they shall run
• Toni Morisson, Beloved
• Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter
• Art Speigelman, The Complete Maus
• Kevin Young, To Repel Ghosts

Assignments will include a 20-minute presentation on a creative historic text and one 18-25 page essay or creative project.