by Erika Murphy
Give me the splendid silent sun
with all his beams full-dazzling
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
in Just—
spring when the world is mud—
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
e.e. cummings, Chansons Innocentes
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.
Emily Dickinson, No. 1333
Here in the English department, spring means the arrival of flowers bright, sun warm, and classes new for the fall. Professors share what to expect from their courses:
Fr. Hannon on his section of ENG 311: Advanced Writing
What are some the writing skills students can expect to gain in this course?
Students will demonstrate the ability to write clear, cohesive, daring, sentences. They will be able to write the kind of creative nonfiction that will delight the reader. Also they will be able to use the elements of fiction to tell true stories.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
I love how students take risks in their thinking about writing and in their willingness to stretch themselves and even astonish themselves by going to dark and unfamiliar places. And by dark I don’t mean sad or depressing or scary, but daring. To me this class is about the adventure of writing and how to get to really great writing sometimes we have to have real guts to go where our thinking takes us. So maybe writing is supposed to be a little unnerving!
Anything else you’d like students to know?
To fall back on a (somewhat) tired cliché: the destination is the journey. I love student/writers who are serious AND PLAYFUL, gutsy and appreciative of the tradition, and more than anything else, who love to stretch themselves.
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Prof. McDonald on his section of ENG 311: Advanced Writing
What are some the writing skills students can expect to gain in this course?
Students will gain insight into their own writing process, become more aware of their own styles, and think about language critically.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
I get a chance to participate in the workshops with my own writing, and get writing done when we do in-class writing. I love going to class on writing days knowing I will be sitting there, thinking and writing, and possibly sharing.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
I hope it encourages them to get in a regular habit of writing.
Anything else you’d like students to know?
You have to share your writing with large and small groups!
Prof. Victoria Olivares will also be offering a section of ENG 311.
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Dr. Hersh on ENG 317: Composition Theory and Practice
What are some the writing, and perhaps tutoring, skills that students can expect to gain in this course?
This course provides concepts, practice, and experience to assist in the improvement of others’ writing. We not only discuss the qualities of effective writing, but explore the best ways to inspire effective writing in others. The class melds theory with practice as we discuss debates on how to teach writing and experiment with and hone these techniques ourselves.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
I love the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the course. Students who take English 317 come from every nook of UP’s academic world and are really invested in good writing. We all thus work together and share best practices for teaching writing. I learn a ton about writing myself from the students in this class!
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
I hope that students not only benefit from the knowledge that they are teaching others how to write effectively, but are self-reflective about their own writing strategies and learn about themselves as writers from the course.
Anything else you’d like students to know?
A majority of the students who take this course are nominated Writing Assistants, but we encourage anyone who is interested in the learning how to teach writing or edit writing to enroll in the course.
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Newly Hired Dr. Swidzinski on ENG 325: Eighteenth Century British Literature
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
The 18th century invented the thing we call the novel, so we’ll spend some time studying early experiments in the form. These will include Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which set off a firestorm of controversy about the morality of fiction when it was first released. (Pamela was greeted by many readers as something comparable to Fifty Shades of Grey.) At the same time, the 18th century was a golden age for satire (in prose and verse), so we’ll study some of the most famous satirical writings of the period, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.
What are some of the major themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
One major theme has to do with experiments. Benjamin Franklin described his period as an ‘age of experiments’ and he meant this in the broadest of senses: not only were there scientific and political experiments, but literary and cultural ones too. So we’ll explore how this culture of experimentation gave rise to new literary forms; and, perhaps more importantly, we’ll ask how it made room for traditionally marginalized voices to write about gender, class, and race in exciting new ways.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
The 18th century is a beautifully messy century. No one kind of writing (novel, poetry, drama, etc.) stands apart and reigns supreme; instead, they all jostle and compete with one another, as well as with other, more ephemeral kinds of writing (essays, farces, sermons, diaries, etc. etc.). I love that the course compels us to embrace this messiness and to draw meaningful connections across vastly different genres and disciplines.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
I hope they’ll develop an appreciation for the rich diversity of 18th-century literature, and that they’ll discover new ways to think about the Enlightenment and its continuing (political, cultural, and literary) relevance.
Anything else you’d like students to know?
I have been known to bring cookies to class.
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Dr. Brassard on ENG 338: European Literature in Translation
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
The authors and texts will be among my all-time favorites, and from France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia primarily. Must-reads include Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves, Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Chekhov’s stories, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Mann’s Death in Venice, and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
What are some of the major themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
I taught a version of this course over ten years ago in graduate school, and the title was “Love, Sex, and Death in European Literature,” so you should expect gender and class to be prominent as major themes. The texts range from the 17th to the 20th Century, and involve much social and cultural change on the Continent, so we will trace such changes trans-nationally and across periods.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
I’m thrilled to offer this course at UP for the first time, in part because it allows me to share the “French” part of my culture and interest with students who may not be familiar with French classics. I also think these books and authors may not be typically taught in American high school and college but are well worth the time and attention. I read most of these books on my own (outside a traditional classroom setting) because they were recommended by friends or mentors, and they made a lasting impact on me, so I hope some of them at least may have a similar impact on students here.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
English Majors at UP have often said in the past that they wish to read literary works outside the more traditional British and American canons, so I see this new course as a direct response to past student demand and I hope students will come away with an expanded sense of what classical literature can be, beyond the Anglophone canon.
Anything else you’d like students to know?
Take this class! If you like fiction (the primary genre covered), texts with compelling and maddening characters, and authors internationally recognized as significant and timeless, you will enjoy European Literature in Translation.
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Dr. Weiger on ENG 363: Environmental Literature
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
We’ll begin in the nineteenth century with authors including William Wordsworth and John Clare, and move from those British Romantics to some American ones including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau. Walden (by Thoreau), will be a centering point for us, from which many of our other texts radiate. Other major authors of study will include twentieth and twenty-first century writers Rachel Carson, Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry.
What are some of the major themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
Like many writer-naturalists before us, we will allow ourselves to wander through the boundaries of our subject in an approach that opens up the various thematic, contextual, and theoretical possibilities within each text. We will consider questions including: What makes a text an example of “nature writing”? Is there a particularly “environmental” way of reading and writing? How do race, class, and gender inflect environmental literature? What does environmental literature offer us in thinking through and attempting to resolve environmental crises? These questions bear on many of the College of Arts and Sciences core questions, including: How do relationships and communities function? What is the role of beauty, imagination, and feeling? What is a good life? and, finally, What can we do about injustice and suffering?
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
One of my favorite things about this course is that it attracts English majors as well as students from other disciplines, notably Environmental Studies. I love what happens when we put our minds together!
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
In this course, I try to make sure that contemporary environmental writing has a strong presence, so our feature research and writing assignments incorporate current writing on the environment in major environmental publications (both print and online). My hope is that students can inhabit the roles of literary scholars, writers, and difference makers simultaneously — that they really become a part of important conversations regarding the environment.
Anything else you’d like students to know?
Hikers, naturalists, and outdoor-enthusiasts are very welcome, but you can definitely be an indoor-type and enjoy this course!
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Dr. Larson on ENG 470: City Life in American Literature
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
We’ll cover American writers from the past two centuries during a time when the nation went from rural to radically urban. The best writers invented a vocabulary to articulate those cultural changes: short works by Walt Whitman, Ed Poe, Nate Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Anzia Yezierska, Frank Norris, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, and Nathanael West usually fill the first half of the semester. Then a number of larger, more contemporary works put us in dialogue with our own times. Haven’t decided on those yet, but in past years we’ve read such works as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex, Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, etc. Throughout, a number of theoretical texts will provide concepts to help bridge the primary works.
What are some of the major themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
The course uses our urban desires and fears to explore the politics of identity, the politics of growth, and the politics of power. In other words, we’ll be asking how cities shape who we are, who we can be, and what we can do. We’ll also expand the notion of the urban, to find how inextricable it is from other spaces like the rural or suburban.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
Teaching this course is one of my favorite experiences. Just as I like walking around in order to get my mind in motion, I love the spaces literature allows us to think through. Since we happen to live in a vibrant city, the course invites us to bring together our experiences with Portland(ia) — the local, the immediate, the now and here — with the worlds and words on the page. We’ll open a dialogue between our own sharp experiences/ bewilderments, and those of these gifted literary observers.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
Even though many of us come from rural backgrounds, the urban is now a part of us (given our current location) and will continue to influence us in the future, now that over half of our human species lives in cities. This is both good news and bad news; we’ll explore why. The course is a blend of American history, sociology, linguistic ferment, and wicked good storytelling.
Anything else you’d like students to know?
We’ll be looking at American authors and mostly American settings so as to work with a relatively familiar context. But having spent the past half year in India, and having read up on various international cities, I hope to connect our studies with the planetary dimension, so the course can inform the scale that matters most: our global urban future. Ultimately, I think we come away from a course like this better equipped with strategies to feel at home in the universe.
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Dr. Hiro on ENG 473: African American Literature
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
Quite a few of the African American authors we’ll read students may never have heard of–Charles Chesnutt from the late 19th century; Nella Larsen from the 1920s; Ann Petry from the 1940s. But the familiar big names will be there too–Frederick Douglass (slave narrative), Langston Hughes (poetry), and of course Toni Morrison (Beloved).
What are some of the major themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
Well, the class is quite deeply connected to American history of the period: we need to learn something about slavery while reading slave narratives; about the failures of Reconstruction when reading late 19th-century literature; about contemporary ways of framing race by the end of the class. So thinking about race relations and what it’s meant to be African American through all of these moments is a key part of the class.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
First, I’ll say that this is probably my favorite of all the upper-division courses I teach. There are a couple of reasons for that (beyond the simple fact that I love African American literature): one, I like the self-reflexive nature of this body of literature; African American authors are always thinking about what it means to write African American literature–what should this literature be, look like, do? Second, because it’s a 400-level class, we work on the skills involved in conceiving, drafting, and revising a research paper, and I love supporting students as they refine these skills.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
An admiration, even passion, for African American literature, and a more nuanced, complex, historical way of thinking about race, racial identity, and racism.
Anything else you’d like students to know?
If you’ve never taken a 400-level class before, this is a great one to begin with. I first conceived of it as a research course for first-year students, so it definitely does not presume you already know everything you need to know about doing research in English.
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