These are courses offered in Literature, Social Justice, and Environment since fall
2006:
Green Literature and Cinema, Scott Baugh & Sara Sprugeon
In the mid 1970s Marshall McLuhan famously invoked “ecology” to explain how various
media can be arranged so that they support one another without canceling one another
out. In this spirit, Green Literature & Cinema critically engages the ways environmental
issues, “nature,” and concepts of the natural are reflected, constructed, and deployed
in American fiction and fictive-narrative cinema. Some questions that will guide our
inquiries: How do notions of environment and constructions of identity correlate?
How is the idea of the “natural” used to construct categories of gender, race, ethnicity,
class, and sexuality? Where do environmentalism and multiculturalism intersect? What
are the origins for various American myths about nature, and what might the consequences
be for the environment? How have notions about frontiers and empire impacted the way contemporary cultures
view nature? Where, in fact, does “nature” begin and where does it end? How have human beings grown
into and through or in spite of our technologies and literacies?
Studies in Native American History, Ethan Schmidt
This course is intended to give graduate students a thorough introduction to the major
themes and interpretations of American Indian History from the pre-contact era to
the present day. We will achieve this goal via an intense examination of the major works in the historical
literature of this topic. We will focus on Native culture, Native Interactions with whites, as well as US Federal
Indian Policy in an effort to gain as complete an understanding of the contours of
the field of Native American history as we can. Additionally, as my training lies
in the techniques of Ethnohistory, we will pay particular attention to the development
and components of that particular Native American History methodology.
Post-Modern American Fiction, Yuan Shu
This course investigates postmodern American fiction in terms of literary responses
to the radical social, political, cultural, and technological changes in America since
the 1960s. We begin by examining how the meta-fiction of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs,
and Donald Barthelme breaks the narrative frame and creates new dimensions of reality.
Moreover, we also reconsider how the works of Gloria Anzaldua, Jessica Hagedorn, Ishmael
Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Karen Tei Yamashita engage the issues of history and tradition,
and represent the diverse and multiple perspectives of racial minorities and women
in America. Finally, we read the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson,
and the writing of Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy in the changing social and technological
context in America. During our discussion of these primary texts, we invoke and contest
various critical notions of postmodernism as articulated by Ihab Hassan, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Jean Baudrillard, Donna Haraway, Katherine
Hayles, bell hooks, Trinh Minh-ha, and Antonio Negri.
Enlightenment, Revolution, and Early American Literature, Michele Currie Navakas
This course surveys American literature and culture during the decades leading up
to and including the early national period (c. 1750 to 1820). Our readings will come
from classic legal, literary, political, religious, scientific, and visual texts that
reflect on the meaning of Enlightenment, Revolution, and America's movement from colony
to nation and empire. We will consider what Revolutionary I deals and post-Revolutionary
politics meant for women and men, free and enslaved, Indian and white, rich and poor,
urban and rural; examine the meaning and limitations of "Enlightenment" in the Atlantic
world; explore the formation of the "republic of letters" in its transatlantic context;
and investigate the multiple geographies and cultures that shaped national identity
as it emerged. The course will chart the rise of literary forms of expression in America
-- such as the slave narrative, autobiography, and novel -- as well as examine critical
responses that continue to shape the field of early American literary studies. Readings
will include works by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah
Equiano, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, and Robert
Montgomery Bird.
Literature, Science, and Posthumanism, Bruce Clarke
The field of literature and science has developed over three decades as a scholarly
response to the increasingly specialized and technical languages that enclose separate
disciplinary spheres. Under modern conditions of knowledge production, cross-disciplinary
contact has to become a discipline in its own right. In addition, the field of literature
and science has taken the lead in forming a scholarly conception of posthumanism.
Current work in this field has delineated a “critical posthumanism” that stresses
the range of the concept beyond the cyborg imaginary, as well as an ethical posthumanism
that rethinks the humanist rejection of nonhuman or animal subjectivity. Finally,
posthumanism is the philosophical counterpart of the visionary notion of the posthuman,
a conceptual trope conveying images of biotechnological or cybernetic hybrids, especially
as literary and cinematic narratives have imagined technoscientific vectors beyond
the human. This seminar will focus an introduction to the field of literature and
science through the discourse of posthumanism and the literature of the posthuman.
The syllabus as I currently conceive it is my Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and
Systems; Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern;
Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction; Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?;
Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan, Death & Sex; Paul di Filippo, A Mouthful of Tongues:
Her Totipotent Tropicanalia; and Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement.
Transnational Feminisms, Kanika Batra
Chandra Mohanty's conceptualization of feminism without borders is premised on intersections
between women's movements, activism, and analysis on a global scale. As a method of
enquiry encompassing biological, kinship, and work-related categories that span cultures
and continents -- women as unwaged, white, blue, or pink collar workers performing
corporate, academic, manual, domestic, or sexual labor -- transnational feminist studies
has emerged as an important branch of globalization theory. Following Nancy Fraser,
we can identify struggles for recognition of new identity categories and redistribution
of economic, social, and political power as the major strands in transnational feminist
analysis. Redistribution' and ‘recognition' are keywords in the feminist philosophical,
anthropological, and historical accounts we will read in this course. Some of the
issues the course will address are: emergence of new categories of work such as ‘higglers'
and ‘migrant sex workers' in the Caribbean; transnationalization of labor practices
such as those in the export processing zones all over the world; women's responses
to their changing public and private roles including an increase in domestic and social
violence; new forms of affective intimacy in late capitalism including the adoption
of a global vocabulary of identity politics such as ‘gay', ‘lesbian' or ‘queer' in
places which prohibit expression of erotic autonomy outside the heterosexual matrix.
While we will examine these issues in a transnational framework, the course includes
a special focus on the political, social, and cultural economies of the global South
as manifested in gender studies scholarship and curricula in the Euro-American academy.
Between East and West: The American Transcendentalists, James Whitlark
In at least three senses, the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist Movement
was between East and West. First, it constituted the first large encounter of American
literature with Asian culture. Second, it bridged European Idealism and American pragmatism.
Third, it came primarily from an East Coast sufficiently settled so that it could
begin to see the negative effects of civilization (e.g., environmental deterioration
and the massacre of Native Americans); thus, it appreciated what was being lost there
but still persisted in the American West. In other words, it was less a series of
fixed principles than a commitment to dialogue between regions of the world still
relatively separate. It was thus a precursor of present globalism, and like any precursor,
helps us to see more clearly the current condition by observing its roots. All the
required texts are free on the web. We shall commence with selections from such Transcendentalists
as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Then, we shall explore
the impact of the movement by reading a little poetry by two authors influenced by
it (Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman) as well as fictions by two who reacted against
it, but in a very ambivalent manner (Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne).
Gender, Race, and Nature in American Environmental Literature, Sara Spurgeon
This course will help students think critically about the ways “nature” and concepts
of the natural are reflected, constructed, and deployed in American literature and
culture, and how ideas about the natural differ historically and across ethnicities,
gender and class boundaries. We will read some “classics” of nature writing as it
has been traditionally defined, as well as novels, journals, poetry, and critical
texts that challenge commonly held notions about this genre. Some questions that will
guide our inquiries: How is the idea of the “natural” used to construct categories
of gender, race, class, and sexuality? What are the origins for various American myths
about nature, and what might the consequences be for the environment? How have notions
about frontiers and empire impacted the way contemporary cultures view nature? Where,
in fact, does nature begin and where does it end?
Place, Space, and Mestizaje in Chicana/o Cultural Production, Priscilla Ybarra
From the lost land grants of the nineteenth century to the imaginary homeland of Aztlán
and the endless fields of migrant farmworker horizons, place and space play key roles
in Chicana/o cultural production. Much of Chicana/o literature elaborates the feel
of a particular space and the deep history of a specific place, or environment. Yet,
Chicana/o literature is also deeply invested in a culture of mestizaje and draws critical
strength from this hybrid background, especially as it allows for an ever-shifting
identity. How does Chicana/o cultural production and critical theory reconcile the
“root-edness” of space and place with the mixture and movement that defines mestizaje?
This course will explore the relationship among place, space, and mestizaje by reviewing
some of the foundational texts in Chicana/o literary studies as well as some of the
most recent studies on place and mestizaje. Primary readings will include recently
recovered texts from the nineteenth century by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Jovita
González, as well as more contemporary works by John Rechy, Ana Castillo, Jimmy Santiago
Baca, and Helena María Viramontes. Secondary works include The Chicano Studies Reader,
which selects from the first 30 years of landmark articles in the journal Aztlán,
Rafael Pérez-Torres' Mestizaje, Ramon Saldívar's The Borderlands of Culture, and Mary
Pat Brady's Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies.
"Soul/Post Soul": African American Literature, Popular Culture, and Civil Rights (1960
- 2000), Michael Borshuk
Writing of connections between African American literature and grassroots civil rights
activity in 1968, the black intellectual Hoyt Fuller announced: “The black revolt
is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.” Indeed, the 1960s and 70s are
commonly remembered as a period in which African American progressive politics, literary
expression, and popular culture complemented each other in an organic network of collective
action and racial pride. However, as cultural critic and journalist Nelson George
has argued, by the late 1970s, African American culture—at least in its various popular
manifestations—had entered a “post-soul” period, in which the assertive Afrocentrism
of the civil rights era had diminished or vanished from view. This course will compare
two generations of African American writers and artists to consider the soul/post-soul
shift that George and Neal map. We will consider aesthetic differences between these
two periods, with special attention to the relationship between African American art
and politics in the final decades of the twentieth century. As well, we will consider
the commodification of “soul” and blackness in popular culture between the 1960s and
the present, attentive to how this commodification complicates the idealized vision
of black cultural revolution described by figures like Hoyt Fuller. While this is
primarily a course in African American literature and intellectual trends, we will
also look in detail at various popular culture phenomena, including the blaxploitation
film genre, the birth and rise of hip-hop culture, and changes in African American
television programming between the 1970s and the 1980s.
Multicultural American Cinema, Scott Baugh
“Multicultural American Cinema” offers an introduction to critical media studies for
graduate students. However, the seminar also fosters investigations into the extent
to which the aesthetics of film represent and express American multiculturalism. With
special attention to the dynamics of “mainstream” and independent/alternative fictive-narrative
feature films, the course covers a diverse range of issues involved in the formulation
of American multiculturalism in cinema, including race and ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, class and socio-political status. Students, then, not only practice analytical
reading skills through film interpretation, but also explore and identify significant
aspects of our American culture. Films for the semester include: Birth of a Nation
and Intolerance (Griffith); El Norte, Mi Familia/My Family, and Selena (Nava); High
Noon (Zinneman); Shanghai Noon (Dey); Windtalkers (Woo); Rush Hour (Ratner); Manhattan
(Allen); Heartland (Pearce); Across the Moon (Gottlieb); Old Gringo (Puenzo); New
York, New York (Scorsese); Boyz-N-the-Hood and Shaft (Singleton); Shaft (Parks); Do
the Right Thing and Malcolm X (Lee); Powwow Highway (Wacks); Mi Vida Loca/My Crazy
Life (Anders); Glory (Zwick); Mississippi Masala (Nair); El Mariachi and Desperado
(Rodriguez); The Godfather trilogy (Coppola); Blade Runner (Scott); Philadelphia (Demme);
Amores Perros and 21 Grams (González-Iñárritu ); Y Tú Mamá También and Children of
Men (Cuarón). Textbooks for the course include: Ella Shohat and Bob Stam's Unthinking
Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994/2001) and Margo Kasdan, Christine Saxton, and Susan
Tavernetti's The Critical Eye (3rd ed., Kendall-Hunt, 2002). Supplemental readings
on reserve include articles by Stam & Spence, Mulvey, Silverman, Mellencamp, Fregoso,
among others. Course requirements will include assigned readings and screenings; one
short (approx. 5 pp.) critical essay; one class presentation; a (“green-light”) term
project; and one article-length research essay.
Gender, Race, Class, and the Victorian Novel, Ann Daghistany Ransdell
English 5352, "Studies in Fiction," is a comparative literature course that may be
arranged in various ways. This fall the students will read the English Victorian Novel,
in order to compare the treatment of issues dealing with race, gender, and class.
Students will understand in greater depth the origin of American social attitudes
in the Victorian period. History and criticism of the period will be utilized. Specific
attention will be paid to the Victorian concepts of education, and institutions such
as the boarding school and the workhouse will be compared as microcosms of social
policy. The impact of gender and class attitudes upon learning will be highlighted.
Contemporary films of three novels that we read will be shown in the class to provide
a novel/film comparison of character and theme. There will be three short papers,
a long paper, an oral presentation of that long paper, and a final. We will read the
following texts: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist;Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charlotte
Brontë, Villette; Charlotte Brontë, The Professor; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights;
and George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.
Language and Gender, Mary Jane Hurst
Our main goals in English 5337 will be to learn at a graduate level some basics of
language study, to explore the relationship between gender and language, to examine
competing theories about language and gender, and, overall, to understand the context
of gender studies from the perspective of linguistics. Aside from some introductory
background lectures, the first three-fourths or so of the semester will be arranged
around discussions of specified readings. The last part of the semester will be devoted
to student presentations applying course concepts in the analysis of specific texts.
For details about how this class has been taught in a previous semester, visit the
course information section of Dr. Hurst's website (www.faculty.english.ttu.edu/hurst).
This course would be appropriate for students in any subfield or combination of subfields
in English (linguistics, literature, technical communication, rhetoric, film, creative
writing, etc.) as well students with interests in language and/or gender from programs
outside English (CMLL, Psychology, Anthropology, Education, HDFS, etc.). The books
for Fall 2007's English 5337 have not been selected as of 1/19/07.
Studies in Criticism: Redistribution and Recognition in Global Times (Transnational
Feminism), Kanika Batra
Chandra Mohanty's conceptualization of feminism without borders is premised on intersections
between women's movements, activism, and analysis on a global scale. As a method of
enquiry encompassing biological, kinship, and work-related categories that span cultures
and continents--women as unwaged, white, blue, or pink collar workers performing corporate,
academic, manual, domestic, or sexual labor--transnational feminist studies has emerged
as an important branch of globalization theory. Following Nancy Fraser, we can identify
struggles for recognition of new identify categories and redistribution of economic,
social, and political power as the major strands in transnational feminist analysis.
'Redistribution' and 'recognition' are keywords in the feminist philosophical, anthropological,
and historical accounts we will read in this course. Some of the issues the course
will address are: emergence of new categories of work such as 'higglers' and 'migrant
sex workers' in the Caribbean; transnationalization of labor practices such as those
in the export processing zones all over the world; women's responses to their changing
public and private roles including an increase in domestic and social violence; new
forms of affective intimacy in late capitalism including the adoption of a global
vocabulary of identity politics such as 'gay,' 'lesbian' or 'queer' in places which
prohibit expression of erotic autonomy outside the heterosexual matrix. While we will
examine these issues in a transnational framework, the course includes a special focus
on the political, social, and cultural economies of the global South as manifested
in gender studies scholarship and curricula in the Euro-American academy.
British Literature and Science, Bruce Clarke
This seminar will introduce students to the interdisciplinary specialization of literature
and science with a survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British texts: excerpts
from Charles Darwin's seminal works off scientific prose, a parade of science-fictional
or science-conversant prose narratives, and for good measure, a recent science-inflected
work of British drama. As we sample historical and theoretical approaches to the study
and cultural interplay of literary and scientific discourses, we will incorporate
some review of pertinent scientific developments over the last several centuries.
In this period, scientific theories of evolution, energy, entropy, and relativity
accompany a host of social schemes and concerns, powerfully refracted in the storyworlds
under narration: eugenics, degeneration, political order vs. cultural chaos, the possibility
(or not) of individual and social renovation, of global utopia or planetary catastrophe.
Studies in Multicultural American Literature: Chicana Feminisms, Priscilla Ybarra
This course focuses on prose, poetry, theory, and activism as ways to encounter Chicana
feminisms. Aída Hurtado writes that, “Chicana feminisms were born out of acts of disruption.”
We will take this standpoint of oppositionality and “misbehaving” as a way to experience
the texts in this course, especially emphasizing disruptions of gender, sexuality,
feminist activism and theory, ethnic/national identity, globalization issues, class,
and environmental imagination. We will engage with definition of Chicana feminisms,
encounter the particular disruptions the work(s) enact, and formulate our own working
characterization of this dynamic field of inquiry.
People and the Land in the American West, Mark Stoll
The graduate seminar will focus on the topic, “People and the Land in the American
West.” The course will offer students the opportunity to examine the ways that humans
have interacted with the natural environment, and the historical consequences and
implications of this interaction. A multidisciplinary approach will allow new perspectives
on many aspects of human history.
Studies in American Fiction: Literatures of the American Southwest, Sara Spurgeon
This course focuses on a variety of texts from the region currently referred to as
the American Southwest, questioning the ways ideas about region get created, altered,
and re-imagined by authors. We ask why “authenticity” continues to be a yardstick
by which writing from this region is measured. We ask why Native American, Anglo American,
and Chicana/o authors are quickly identified as Western/Southwestern, while Maxine
Hong Kingston (who self-identifies as a Western writer first, Asian American second)
is rarely read as a “real” Westerner. In addition, we consider essays and articles
engaging current theoretical and critical debates in the field of regional studies,
post/decolonialism, ecocritical theory, and race and gender studies. Some questions
that will guide our discussions: What common threads run through these works? Where
do the visions and voices of authors collide or overlap? How is the sense of this
region imagined across cultures, histories, and into a globalized present? How were
various “Southwests” produced by works of fiction and how have contemporary writers
embraced, resisted, or reimagined those images?
Chicana/o Environmental Thought, Priscilla Ybarra
Ecocriticism has been a growing field of literary study since the 1990s. Initially
focused on U.S. nature writing, ecocriticism combined a concern about the environment
with an emphasis on the role of cultural production in addressing environmental issues
historically and in our own time. However, its early emphasis on U.S. nature writing
largely limited ecocritical studies to narratives of privilege and anti-anthropocentrism,
and therefore has left out a diverse, global array of voices ranging from ethnic minorities
to urban dwellers to queers and women. Through the study of Chicana/o environmental
thought, this course will explore the ways that diversifying ecocriticism revitalizes
and reinvents this important field of literary study. Although the course emphasizes
Chicana/o environmental thought, readings and discussions will offer students ecocritical
tools that can be applied to a wide-array of literatures. Texts will include Chicana/o
environmental theory as well as primary texts from contemporary environmental writers
such as Cherríe Moraga, Ray Gonzales, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Pat Mora, and Patricia
Preciado Martin.
Studies in Post-Colonial Literature: Shadows, Ghosts, and Nervous Conditions (Nationalist
and Post-Nationalist Hauntings), Kanika Batra
The Indian writer Mahasweta Devi's evocation of the ‘pterodactyl', a pre-history bird
that miraculously appears in the famine stricken area of Pirtha, a region left out
of the promises of national development, is perhaps one of the most poignant symbols
of the passing away of an indigenous civilization. The pterodactyl represents the
unfulfilled promises made to the tribal people, a dying race that finds itself anachronistic
in the modern, progressive nation-state. This is a state that has left the indigenes
out of the promises of development and progress made to all citizens at the time when
the nation gained its independence from colonial rule.
Postcolonial studies as a body of critical and creative work implicitly or explicitly
refers to European colonialism and/or forms of neo-colonialism practiced by postcolonial
states in league with Western capitalist interests. Some of these writings are, in
a sense, ‘possessed' by the memory of the nationalist ideals that provided the impetus
for anti-colonial resistance; all are aware that there are new variants of imperialism
that demand new forms of exorcism. We will read a selection of literature and theory
from India, Jamaica, Rhodesia, and Sri Lanka, originating in the now discredited but
still used descriptor, ‘Commonwealth Literature', its transformation into ‘New Literatures
in English' and since 1986, with the publication of The Empire Writes Back, ‘Post-colonial
Literatures.'
American Environmental History, Mark Stoll
This course is a graduate level introduction to significant scholarship in American
environmental history, from the pre-colonial era to the present. We will meet for
weekly discussions, focusing on historical interpretations, themes, and conceptualizations,
with special attention to sources, argumentation, and methods employed in research
and exposition. By the end of the semester you will have a solid foundation in the
field.
Studies in Literary Criticism: Ecocritical Theory, Sara Spurgeon
This course explores the broad spectrum of critical and theoretical approaches to
examining the ways “nature” and concepts of the natural are reflected, constructed,
and deployed in American literature and culture, and how ideas about the natural differ
historically and across ethnicities, gender and class boundaries. We will read some
of the foundational texts of this contentious field, as well as newer works challenging
definitions of ecocritical theory. We explore how the idea of the “natural” used in
literature to construct categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality, what the
origins are of various literary myths about nature, and what the consequences might
be for the environment.
Studies in Literary Criticism: Sexuality and its Discontents (Queer Theories), Kanika Batra
Michel Foucault's claim about the proliferation of discourse on sexuality in Victorian
England is equally applicable to globalized world we inhabit at the beginning of the
twenty first century. Representations of sexual diversity are considered by some as
the recent fashion trend in the literary and cultural marketplace. The increased acceptability
quotient of such representations have also led to charges that they glamorize ‘sinful'
and ‘unnatural' desire. These polarized reactions sometimes obscure the long, arduous
decades of activism supported by research and publishing that created the conditions
for public discussions of sexuality. Our focus in this course will be on the proliferation
of queer discourse through a selection of texts – historical, literary, filmic, anthropological,
and legal – to examine the institutionalization of Queer studies as a mode of critique
from the late 1970s since the publication of Foucault's seminal History of Sexuality,
Volume 1 to the present moment marked by its conjunctions with Black studies and Postcolonial
studies. One of the central concerns governing our enquiry will be the relationship
between academic and the social. To this end, we begin by examining key moments in
the global histories of gay and lesbian organizing, including organizations such as
the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the US and the Gay Freedom Movement
in (GFM) in Jamaica. We will then discuss the emergence of the category ‘queer' marked
by a conjunction of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender concerns. The final section
of this course will focus on modes of analysis that point to the exclusions in queer
activism and theory and call for theoretical and social engagements across race, class,
sexual and geographical differences.
Global and Comparative Environmental History, Mark Stoll
The graduate research methods seminar will focus on the topic, "Global and Comparative
Environemtal History," The course will offer students the oportunity to examine the
international aspects of the ways that humans have interacted with the natural environment,
and the historical consequences and implications of this interaction. One theme of
the course involves the environmental ramifications of globalization.
