By Ana Fonseca
As registration for the Fall 2014 semester approaches, rather than trying to interpret the brief catalog entry offered on Self Serve or asking your English major friends for feedback, check out this scoop on upper division English courses, straight from the source. I asked professors a few questions about the courses they will be teaching in the fall, and got their useful (and funny!) input on what to look for next semester.
Dr. Hersh on English 323- Chaucer
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
This is one of the only English classes that spends the entire semester reading a single author and a single text; we will be reading Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales together.
What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
What themes won’t we be tracking? Chaucer tackles almost every issue imaginable (ok, maybe he doesn’t write about iPad use or Facebook) and we’ll be discussing issues such as gender, religion, politics, sexuality, economics, and race, while also taking a self-reflexive look at the role of literature in the world.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
As I mentioned before, it’s rare that one gets to spend an entire semester getting to know the work of a single author and text in such depth. As an added bonus, each tale of Chaucer’s text is very different so you never get bored (and you only have to buy one text!). Chaucer is deliciously ambiguous so it’s super fun analyzing his writing and it’s amazing how he can tell us so much about the Middle Ages and still speak to us as modern readers.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
We will be reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which can be a little intimidating at first. But I believe that tackling a text that forces students to slow down because it is linguistically different actually teaches close reading and attention to detail. This class will thus give all participants the tools to become better, more nuanced readers of any text they pick up.
Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?
If you like fart jokes you will like The Canterbury Tales.
Professor McDonald on English 337- Modern/Contemporary Arabic Literature
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
Distant View of a Minaret, Alifaa Rifaat (Egyptian)
Saddam City, Mahmoud Saeed (Iraqi)
For Bread Alone¸ Mohamed Choukri (Moroccan)
Hunters in a Narrow Street, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Palestinian)
The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al Aswany (Egyptian)
Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, Ghassan Kanafani (Palestinian)
Arabic Short Stories, Roger Allen ed.
What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
The theory of unhomeliness (by critic Homi Bhabha), “Forced Migration” (Palestinian displacement and the diaspora), gender, women and marriage, Bedouin culture, tradition and progress in Arab culture, Post-Colonialism, occupation and dissent.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
I love Arab culture. It is so diverse, rich, and complex. We tend to oversimplify it here in the West (something the late Edward Sa’id addresses in his classic book Orientalism. Also, I think it is a rare experience for students to get a literature course like this at UP; though now that the course is “official” (permanent in the course bulletin) it will be offered somewhat regularly.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
I hope students will understand how complex Arab culture is and appreciate the diversity of the literature. Also, students, I think, will realize how Arab/Islamic cultures have contributed to global culture. Ideally, I hope students will visit an Arab country at some point in their lives.
Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?
The readings cover a period from the mid-20th century-early 21st century. Arabic literature is political (as is all literature). You will learn a little Arabic by taking the course.
Dr. Weiger on English 345- Victorian Literature
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
In addition to poetry by authors including Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, we’ll be reading brief prose fiction and nonfiction by Victorian writers including John Ruskin, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and Rudyard Kipling.
We’ll feature full-length narratives and plays by Charles Dickens (Great Expectations), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Isabella Bird (A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains) and Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest).
What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
Victorian culture is distinguished by a rapid proliferation of material things. Due to the crowding of people into cities, widespread exploration, and leaps in its manufacturing prowess, Britain “discovered,” made, consumed, celebrated, and discarded more material things and objects than it had at any other time. These material things included printed texts, made accessible to a rapidly expanding, literate middle-class. In this survey of Victorian literature and culture, we will investigate the ways Victorian literature was shaped by its materials and how Victorian literature itself shaped the way the materials of culture and the natural world were imagined and represented. Topics we will consider include childhood, the country and the city, industrialization, natural history and evolution, gender, and transatlantic literary currents.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
My favorite thing about this course, which I’ve subtitled “Curious Materials,” is the strange, even bizarre nature of many of the texts we read. They keep readers delightfully off-balance!
I also enjoy reading Dickens’ Great Expectations as readers first encountered it: in serial form (over the course of the semester, we read sets of chapters, only completing our reading of the novel in the term’s final days).
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
My hope is that students will gain an appreciation of Victorian literature and culture that goes beyond the stiff petticoats and stiff upper lips commonly associated with the period.
Dr. Orr on English 471- American Romanticism
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
A couple of Hawthorne novels—Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. The second one is very different from other Hawthorne that people have read. The poetry of Whitman and Dickinson. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Probably some Poe. Stowe for sure, but I might not do Uncle Tom’s Cabin this time around. And, of course, Moby-Dick!
What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
In Europe in 1848 there were several failed revolutions, and that revolutionary fervor appears in many of the works we will be reading. As well, we’ll spend lots of time looking at Romantic ideology and the ways that these authors play off of it. It’s an interesting time period because the US is moving towards a war over race, yet race is relatively speaking absent from many of the works.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
Often, it’s the research that the students do. I genuinely learn from them as they have become experts in some area.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
I hope they get through Moby-Dick! I’ve threatened to make certificates for the students who actually read the entire novel. These are some of the great works in our literary heritage, so I hope that students come away with a greater appreciation for the American literary tradition.
Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?
This is why you come to college! Challenge yourself with some hard but very rewarding books.
Dr. Brassard on English 480- Postcolonial Literature & Culture
What are some of the major authors/works that you will be teaching?
I typically select from countries in Africa and from India, in other words authors from former British colonies, like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Nigeria), Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat (Kenya), Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (India/Pakistan), and Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe).
What are some of the themes and ideas that you will be tracking?
The themes vary between texts but key concerns include colonial history, gender identity, education, language(s), religion, violence, nationalism, and sexuality.
What’s one of your favorite things about this course?
Favorite things include introducing students to authors and texts they usually find a refreshing departure from familiar/canonical British or American authors, and encouraging students to develop an expertise (through research and writing) on a subject inspired by the literature.
What’s something you hope students will get from this course?
I hope students come away from this course with an open-minded view of cultures and traditions quite different from the Western canon and also curious to find out more about the impact of imperialism and history on literature and culture.
Anything else you’d like students to know about this course?
For students who sometimes lament the lack of diversity in course offerings, this is your chance to experience the shock of difference but also, ultimately, the recognition of our common humanity across cultures and ethnicities.