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English
Courses English 338 Contemporary Novel and Narrative Theory English 301 Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry English 244 The Novel IS THERE CLOSURE TO CLOSURE On a ROAD? English 338 Contemporary Novel and Narrative Theory Course Description: This course is dedicated to the exploration of contemporary novel. We will start with two Modernist novels as a segue to experimental and Postmodernist fiction. In this course we will discuss such concepts as closure, genre blend, as well as open and closed texts. We will scrutinize the concept of closure and non-closure in a large historical and cultural context in order to disclose the diachronic division of closural and anti-closural texts and present the theoretical attempts to destabilize the concept of closure. We will engage in discursive conversations with such critics as Frank Kermode, Barbara Herrnstein–Smith, Roland Barthes, Ihab Hassan, Umberto Eco in order to discover what is open and closed text and how various writes complicate this binary. We will finally examine what happens to closure in Postmodernist texts. We will discuss, for example, whether a reader in the face of a nontraditional text, which does not easily reveal any schema of closure, generates his/her own sense of closure or rather gives up the attempt to formulate or substitute any closure. Finally we will also focus on the concept of genre blend in contemporary novel. We will have a few shorter and some longer written assignments. I will ask you to keep a journal in which you will write several responses to our readings. We will have two longer written assignments that will be a record of the discoveries you made while reading, discussing and writing about reading. I will also encourage you to perform in this class: present works you like, read aloud your journal entries and papers. Click here to download full course syllabus in PDF format. back to top English 301 Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry  Course Description: Wrt 301 is designed for writing of poetry, that is to say, re-awakening the sensitivity, imagination, and the sense of wonder (vide the photo), as well as the refining of craft and the capacity for focus, risk, and revision. This class is also concerned with submissions for publications, so we will practice writing the successful submission letters. On the top of it, I will ask you to research a literary magazine that fits your aesthetics and try your hand at submitting there. Our classroom will revolve around various texts: both canonical and experimental, as well as various channels of communication: visual, electronic, hypertextual, performative, and literary discourse. We will write palimpsests of traditional forms, but will also play with syncopating, disjuncting, desubjecting and de-familiarizing them. We will also have a fractal poetry project in which you will be asked to recognize patterns within the seemingly random and chaotic text. Then, you will study in groups the frequency and patterns of alliterations, repetitions, number of sentences in each paragraph and number of paragraphs. We will display the results on graphs and spreadsheets. After that we will see how and if our examples can be a fractal poem. Finally, you will come up with the idea of your own fractal poem. In this course fall in love with words. Words have been often equated with breath, which is the origin of all creation. In tribal societies breath was considered to be the most powerful and life-giving force. As Edmund Carpenter pointed out, in Eskimo language the word designating the art of poetry is tantamount to breathing. Both words derivate from anerca, the soul, that which is eternal—the breath of life. “A poem is words infused with breath or spirit. Let me breathe of it, says the poet-maker and then begins: I have put my words in order on the threshold of my tongue” (Carpenter, “Breath”). For Trobrianders, the word nanola means both intelligence and larynx. For society Islanders, thinking is “speaking in the stomach” and “thoughts are words in the belly.” We will discuss what nanola and words in the belly are. Edward Hirsch says, “the reader of poetry is a kind of pilgrim setting out, setting forth” and “poetry is a way to inscribe the feeling of awe” (2-3). Without the sense of surprise, bewilderment and discovery there is no literature; there is no learning. If we think we already know what to write, we never encounter the subject of a poem or a story that should “write us.” Likewise, if we already know what we are reading, we never learn anything about literature. To write a good poem, Jorie Graham claims, one has to make contact with the subject of a poem (Graham, Personal Interview). The opening up of a subject is what Graham calls the“poem’s occasion”— when we let ourselves meander and encounter the subject which changes us (Graham, Personal Interview). Such writing is an event because through language it leads to an encounter with the other/Other which points beyond the limitations of language. Paul Celan says, “Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality” (Celan 396). Reading and writing is an encounter (vide Montale encountering a hoopoe) which activates “the radical self in its uninhibited freedom”—the self discarded of all the layers of ego and super-ego,” a radical and uninhibited self which makes its owner capable of choosing his/her own life (358). I hope that by the end of this course you will have experienced at least once or twice your inmost center, that scintilla animae, that “apex” or “spark.” Click here to download full course syllabus in PDF format. back to top English 244 The Novel IS THERE CLOSURE TO CLOSURE On a ROAD?  The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been. (T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets) Course Description: This course is dedicated to the exploration of the genre of the novel with the overarching theme of the road and closure. We will analyze the metaphor of the road and see how this metaphor has been conceptualized in the listed novels. We will discuss a basic conceptual metaphor: “life is a journey” and we will examine how this metaphor has been expanded in the given literary texts. Has it been conceptualized as a linear, circular, or non-linear trajectory? Is there a sense of ending, cessation or conclusion in these road trajectories as presented in the novels under discussion? What kind of ending is it? Is it a happy ending? Is it an apocalyptic ending? Is it an open-ended closure? We will investigate the concept of closure and discuss what is an open and closed text and how various writers complicate this binary. We will examine the relationship between closure, epiphany and apocalypse in the listed novels. Will have a few shorter and some longer written assignments. I will ask you to keep a journal in which you will write several responses to our readings. We will have two longer written assignments that will be a record of the discoveries you made while reading, discussing and writing about reading. I will also encourage you to perform in this class: present works you like, read aloud from your journal entries and papers. Finally, we will have one field trip to the exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll manuscript at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell National Historical Park. Click here to download full course syllabus in PDF format. back to top For questions or comments email me at echrusc@gmail.com |
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