ENGL 524 Studies in Southwest Literature: Space, Place, and Identity in the Southwest
001 In Person
W 3:30-6:00 PM
Instructor: Jennifer Jenkins
We will explore the greater US Southwest/Borderlands as image, motif, and location in oral narrative and texts, in still and moving images, and in material culture from 1000 BCE to the present. We will examine how understandings of place shape identity through depictions of the land; social and cultural deserts and borders; boom/bust cycles; the mirage of the “land of enchantment;” and representations of indigenous and insurgent cultures. The class will take advantage of the rich array of primary sources available in local archaeological and historical sites, archives, and repositories, and explore literary geography as both concept and digital expression. Students will choose a research topic for the semester in consultation with me. Writing requirements: abstract; research bibliography; lit review; all leading to a conference presentation or journal article draft. Viewing, reading and research time are considered homework and are the student’s responsibility.
Pandemic allowing, there will also be four “field trips”: off-campus visits to Casa Grande National Monument and Mission San Xavier del Bac; and on-campus visits to the Arizona State Museum and UA Special Collections.
Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes
• Understanding of the history and cultural expressions from indigenous, colonial, and settler cultures
• Analysis of visual, material, and textual representations of peoples and cultures in the region
• Familiarity with the array of primary sources and secondary literature on the region
• Synthesis of research and analysis in appropriate scholarly form as a research paper, journal article, archival exhibit or installation, or creative work of academic standing.
ENGL 531 Shakespeare & Company
001 In Person
Th 3:30-6:00 PM
Instructor: Frederick Kiefer
From the very beginning of his career, Shakespeare collaborated with other dramatists. This is hardly surprising, since the demand for new scripts led playwrights to pool their talents. So, for example, Shakespeare collaborated with Christopher Marlowe on Henry VI. Later, Macbeth would profit from the additions crafted by Thomas Middleton. Pericles was written with George Wilkins. All the late plays of Shakespeare were co-written with John Fletcher.
In order to understand Shakespeare, it’s important to see him as an actor and playwright immersed in the theatrical scene of Elizabethan London. He knew everyone and learned from his fellow dramatists as they learned from him. He was not a lonely giant, as many people imagine today. In fact, he was surrounded by other giants of the theater whose works are seldom performed in America but often staged in England.
We shall look at plays by various contemporaries and see how they compare with Shakespeare’s work. For instance, we’ll read Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice together. We shall consider other pairings too: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet (Kyd was the author of the first Hamlet, Shakespeare’s source); Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and Othello (these two plays, written at the same time, dramatize a marital relationship gone wrong); Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II; King Lear and Webster's Duchess of Malfi.
From this course you will gain an understanding of Shakespeare’s place in his culture. You will gain a new appreciation of Shakespeare’s theatricality. And you will read plays that you may never have read previously. You may be surprised to discover that these plays are just as good as Shakespeare’s.
Students are expected to attend and contribute to all classes. Three research papers are required.
ENGL 555A Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Victorian Literature and Culture
001 Live Online
T 1:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Instructor: Lynda Zwinger
Our readings will center on selected classic 19th century British novels read together with contemporary and current criticism and theory, with a view to a deep dive into our novels’ historical, cultural, contextual engagements with and incitements to communities, non-duality, and continuities on the human/not-human spectrum. The genre of necessity and by its nature inscribes varied communities (both explicit and implied, human and non-human, subject and other, homo sapiens and “nature”) which in turn are generate or connect to culturally/socially embedded readerly communities. We will think together about questions such questions “how is it that words on a page can produce effects in the physical body of the social and the reader?” and “what produces the sense of readerly embeddedness in a fictional object and vice versa?” and “to what uses have these transactions been put and to what uses might we put them?” We will start the course an essay by Andrea Weber,
“Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, culture and politics,” https://www.boell.de/en/2013/02/01/enlivenment-towards-fundamental-shift... (This text is also available as a slightly revised book; the download from this url is free.)
Weber proposes that living beings are not biological machines but living, creative agents fueled by meaning and expression; he calls for the development of a “poetic ecology” which intimately attaches our species to every being. We will explore reading and readings of the 19th century novel from this perspective, leaving behind the customary analysis of subjectivity within and around the text for one that centers on explicit and implied interdependence.
We will read our novels with the view of working with each both intensively and broadly. We will start with a precursor late-18th century novel, Ann Radcliffe’s (1794) The Mysteries of Udolpho (selected chapters). Our move to the 19th century is likely to start with excerpts from Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), followed by another, later Dickens novel (tba); Emily Bronte,Wuthering Heights; George Eliot, Silas Marner; a later Eliot novel (tba), and Henry James, The Europeans. Other readings, theoretical/critical/enlivening, tba.
Your work will include doing all the readings and coming to classes prepared to participate in seminar discussions, writing weekly detailed notes to be posted to the class D2L site (templates provided), and submitting 3 short papers or 1 short paper and a term paper (of a length to qualify as your pandemic MA essay if you choose).
This course is in development; if you would like to suggest readings you can reach me at lyndaz@arizona.edu(link sends e-mail).
ENGL 596G Comparative Literature: Travel Narratives, Travel Fictions
001 Live Online
M 1:30-4:00 PM
Instructor: Daniel Cooper Alarcon
This seminar will provide an opportunity to read, consider, and discuss a diverse array of texts we might broadly categorize as travel literature. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between travel narratives and fictional accounts of travel, and the ways in which these travel fictions have often anticipated ideas central to critical studies of travel, tourism, and migration. I also use the term travel fictions to indicate the ways in which so-called factual accounts of travel often fabricate useful mythologies of people and places. Thus, another focal point of the course will be the different kinds of cultural work that travel literature performs at different historical moments. For example, travel narratives often played a key role in sustaining and promoting colonial and imperial enterprises. More recently, travel narratives and travel fictions have played an important role in creating both an itinerary for travel to particular destinations and a set of criteria by which to evaluate a site’s authenticity. Simply put, travel literature helps to shape the ways in which travelers perceive and respond to the places they visit, and the people and cultures with whom they interact. As we take up travel literature since World War II, we will consider tourism as a discourse deeply implicated in the formation of cultural identities and vital to the economies of many developing nations, as well as tourism’s mirror image: the migration from Third World to First, driven usually by economic necessity.
The reading list for the course is still taking shape, but will probably include travel narratives written by Cabeza de Vaca, John L. Stephens, Jack London, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as the novels The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles), Jasmine (Bharati Mukherjee), Volkswagen Blues (Jacques Poulin), and Motion Sickness (Lynne Tillman). Theoretical works will include Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, MacCannell’s The Tourist, and Kaplan’s Questions of Travel, as well as shorter works by Paul Fussell, R. Tripp Evans, Heidi MacPherson and Jonathan Culler.
To sum up, this course will be helpful to anyone with interests in post-colonial studies, the long relationship of travel writing and empire, attempts at cross-cultural representation, issues of diaspora and migration, and the impact of migration and travel upon cultural identities.
ENGL 595A First Year Colloquium
001 In Person
W 12:00-12:50 PM
Instructor: Lauren Camille Mason
Required for first year students; meets every other week. “How to graduate-student.”
ENGL 595A Job Workshop
002 In Person
W 12:00-12:50 PM
Instructor: Lauren Camille Mason
Meets every other week; preparation of application materials, approaches to the process, all career paths.
ENGL 595A Writing Workshop
005 In Person
W 1:30-4:00 PM
Instructor: Lauren Camille Mason
Please see instructor for updates.