Senior and Junior Seminars
This page will be devoted to keeping Lit Majors informed about required courses planned for the coming year, so that you can consider your choices now for Junior and Senior Seminars. Below find listed Junior Seminars (Englit 1900) and Senior Seminars (Englit 1909) proposed for the Fall 2010 and Spring 2009 terms. Please note that these descriptions are provisional and may undergo some changes: they are meant only to give you an idea of who will be teaching what seminars to help you plan your next year.
FALL 2009—Senior Seminars
Senior Seminar—“Alternative Real Pasts: Staging Revolution”—Professor Susan Harris Smith
We will explore the revolutionary and utopian potential of modern and
contemporary theatre considering dramaturgical strategies such as
resisting ethnic and racial stereotyping, "re-righting" history, staging
labor and gender revolutions, and adapting myth. To that end we will
consider a wide range of playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Edward Bond,
and Caryl Churchill and plays, performances and projects such as I Ain't
Yo' Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin, Insurrection:
Holding History, The Laramie Project, On the Verge or the Geography of
Yearning, Cloud Nine, Slaughter City, "I Don't Have to Show You No
Stinking Badges!", Freak, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, The Cheviot,
the Stag, and the Black Oil Well, Out Of Our Father's House, Re/Membering
Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show, A Beautiful Country, and the Antigone
Project.
Senior Seminar—“Thoreau and Frost”—Professor Michael West
Both among the best writers of their eras, Thoreau and Frost drew their material from New England--indeed, Thoreau was a substantial influence on Frost. But the appeal of each far transcends regionalism. Not that either author lacks detractors, for each had a rather prickly, eccentric personality, aspects of which are reflected in Thoreau's poetic prose and Frost's deliberately prosy poetry. What made Thoreau, once regarded as a minor disciple of Emerson's, perhaps the most widely translated American author in the world? How did Frost, who as a young man seemed headed for failure, end up as a national institution and America's most popular twentieth-century poet? Sentimental misinterpretation has both retarded and enhanced the reputations of two writers who were masters of dry, understated New England humor. In this seminar we will read a goodly sampling of major works by both, together with relevant criticism.
But a major part of our effort to understand these men will involve not so much immersing them in critical theory as reading their works against the background of their lives. Few if any Pitt seniors will become great writers, but all students confront the task of shaping the minutiae of their lives to realize their ideals. Although literary biography is the critical genre that tackles this subject most directly, it is seldom assigned in our department. To explore the relations between the private man and the public artist we will read an authoritative biography of each author in conjunction with his work.
Five years after Frost's death in 1963, Roland Barthes coined a famous critical slogan about "the death of the author" as part of a very influential collective critical effort to emphasize the importance of readers and history in constructing texts while moving biography to the periphery of literary studies. Now that Barthes himself has been a dead author for twenty-five years--and even more by his own lights--it should be interesting for students whose training has been shaped to some extent by his dictum to see whether they agree with this jaundiced view of biographical criticism. Do Thoreau's carefully crafted autobiographical memoirs and travel accounts render his biography superfluous? Are the personal lives of authors largely irrelevant to interpreting their works? "What worked for them might work for you," Frost drily observed in one poem about modeling your own on others' lives, but Thoreau was rather more skeptical about learning from the experience of his elders: "Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it." So this seminar offers seniors about to embark on the great experiment of life an opportunity to decide whether the tactics that Thoreau and Frost used in getting through it serve as useful examples or counter-examples today.
Senior Seminar--“Constructing Girlhood”—Professor Jean Ferguson Carr
Crosslisted as WOMNST 1140
This course will focus on the construction of girlhood-as it emerges in
children's literature, in educational and advice books, in periodicals and
other media, and in texts that articulate the status of females and
children. We'll consider the emerging distinctions about girlhood (vs.
boyhood) in English and American texts from the 19th-century. We'll then
move to the present, exploring how girlhood persists as a gendered category
in today's media, in cultural and educational institutions. How are girls
positioned in relationship to boys or to women? How are girls constructed
as readers, viewers, agents, consumers? Students will have a chance to work
with rich collections of archival materials: 19th-century literacy books for
children, children's periodicals and literature, advice books for girls,
19th-century series' books. And we will work with a range of contemporary
materials: films, TV shows, series books, children's books, educational
programs, commercial projects, and images. This course should be of
particular interest to those preparing to teach or work with girls, or those
with interest in children's literature or gender studies.
FALL 2009—Junior Seminars
Junior Seminar—“Political Visions”—Professor Shalini Puri
Junior Seminars are designed to expose students to a range of texts that
cross traditional literary periods. This one moves across several
centuries, continents, and genres to explore the questions: How can we
understand the relationship of aesthetics to politics? How has literature
participated in and deepened debates over what counts as political? What
have been the political claims made for different literary forms and
genres, such as tragedy, realism, modernism, magical realism, the
manifesto, etc.? We will read texts ranging from explicitly agitational
to deeply “personal” ones whose political relevance has been challenged.
We will also read several critical, theoretical, and philosophical
essays, and students will write critical essays of their own culminating
in a substantial research paper.
Junior Seminar—“Constructions of Deviance: Criminality, Madness, Perversion”—Professor James Kincaid
This class asks us to consider what uses we make of the monstrous among us, why we need them so badly, how we manufacture them, what uses we make of them. With a focus on three major categories of the criminal, the lunatic, and the pervert, we will ask questions which are both psychological (our need to understand our own virtue and normality) and cultural (creating otherness), but this is not so much a course on how scapegoating works as on how we define "the normal," "the virtuous," and "the safe." The fundamental idea we will test is that we so strenuously press on, focus our fascinations on, what we imagine we are NOT, since what we ARE is not much more than what is left over, a negative reflex of our horrors. We will read novels (The Stranger, Lolita, Deliverance, The Silence of the Lambs, Trainspotting, and others), non-fiction works (In the Belly of the Beast, Among the Thugs), watch some films, and spend a great deal of time on contemporary issues as they arise nationally, locally, and personally (in your own lives). Flexible writing assignments, no group singing (unless demanded), a possible weekend retreat (if we can work it out).
Junior Seminar—"Reading like a Critic, from Modernism to Shakespeare and In-between"—Professor Jonathan Arac
This seminar explores questions of history and value in the study of literature. It asks the question: ‘how does a critic read, and for what purposes?’ Eventually, students will answer this question with reference to their own ways of reading, but the course begins with a great work of modernist and feminist criticism, A Room of One’s Own (1928) by Virginia Woolf. The course proceeds by reading a number of the works or authors Woolf refers to, including a play by Shakespeare (ca. 1600), poetry by John Milton (ca. 1660), a novel by Jane Austen (ca. 1800), and critical writing by S. T. Coleridge (ca. 1800). Further enlargement of the conversation will encompass writings by Samuel Johnson (ca. 1750), William Wordsworth (ca. 1800), John Keats (ca. 1820), and Woolf’s own contemporary T. S. Eliot. Frequent short essays and in-class presentations will lead to a longer final paper (3500 words). There will be no final examination.
Junior Seminar— “The Transatlantic Novel and Fictions of National Identity”—Professor Courtney Weikle-Mills
It is a truism in literary studies that novels and nations are intimately connected; for instance, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, often known as the first American novel, was published in 1789, the same year that the Constitution was ratified. In the U.S., the idea that imaginative literature arises and operates within national boundaries and is characterized by uniquely national concerns has been furthered by political and historical assumptions of American exceptionalism. Yet, the novel arose within an Atlantic world characterized by European discovery; geographical mobility; the transatlantic circulation of books, goods, and persons; and a shared Anglo-American literary culture and reading public. Beginning in the 1990’s, there has been an effort among critics to reconsider the novel within the context of this transatlantic exchange of texts and cultures, as well as to trace the “fictions” of nation and national identity created
by imaginative texts. This emerging field of transatlantic studies asks questions such as: What shared ideas or points of contrast arise in literary texts that circulated within Britain and America during and directly after the period of colonization? How did rival empires and budding nationalisms struggle to distinguish themselves from a common culture of polished arts? To what extent is the nation, in the words of Benedict Anderson, an “imagined community,” and what other imagined communities did early readers inhabit? Because the novel also has been often tied to the rise of modern subjectivity, the genre also provides a site for thinking about the extent to which individuals are defined in relation to nations. How were the conduct, values, identities, and expectations of individuals living on both sides of the Atlantic fashioned by national and transnational codes?
In this class, we will consider these questions by reading a number of novels from both sides of the Atlantic from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also texts that push the boundaries of what could be considered a novel, whether by genre or time period, including personal narratives (such as John Smith’s sixteenth-century travel writing and Mary Rowlandson’s seventeenth-century Puritan captivity narrative) and children’s books (Sarah Fielding’s The Governess). We will situate our discussions of these texts within literary theories of the novel, transatlanticism, nationalism, reading, and interiority more broadly. We will ultimately think about how assumptions about nation shape the study of literature in general. What is at stake in national claims to literature, and the division of literary studies into national categories? What usefulness does “nation” have as a lens for understanding imaginative writing? What alternative ways are possible for organizing the study of literature?
SPRING 2010—Senior Seminars
Senior Seminar—“August Wilson: The Pittsburgh Cycle”—Professor Christopher Rawson
It's a special opportunity and privilege to study the work of August Wilson (1945-2005) in his native city, which functioned as the setting as well as the creative irritant and inspiration for the 10 plays with which he dramatized a century of black America's aspiration and catastrophe, honor and betrayal. We call Wilson's plays, one set in each decade of the 20th century, his Pittsburgh Cycle. It's a dramatic achievement that ranks with the best work of his great American peers, Miller, Williams, Albee and O'Neill. We'll spend the first half of the term in a quick reading of the ten plays, then we'll approach the cycle from different points of view, exploring its contrasting issues and themes. (Those interested in this course should try to attend what they can of the "Aunt Ester Plays"
at the August Wilson Center, Downtown, Nov. 10-22. Contact Rawson for details at cchr@pitt.edu.)
Senior Seminar—Professor William Scott
"Invisibility in the 20th Century African American Novel"
In this course, we will closely read Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible
Man, exploring his redefinition of the basis of modern consciousness as a
topographical, and particularly urban, phenomenon. We will also read
Percival Everett’s critically acclaimed 2001 novel, "Erasure," which (from
one point of view at least) can be interpreted as a contemporary revision
or rewriting of Invisible Man. With these as our core texts, we will
examine several of their authors’ social, historical, and cultural points
of reference, as well as Ellison’s related essays on fiction-writing,
literary form, improvisation, historical representation, performance, and
jazz (among other topics) collected in the volume Shadow and Act. The
course will devote special attention to the history of these novels’
critical reception and the debates that have surrounded them since their
publication, and so we’ll also be reading and writing about a selection of
critical essays pertaining to these two authors.
Senior Seminar—"Othello in Shakespeare’s Time and Ours” – Professor Marianne Novy
Once Othello was easily classified as a tragedy about jealousy, but recent critics have shown how it deals with idealization and mistrust of women, racial and religious prejudice (including their internalization by their objects), contrasting expectations of marriage, an outsider’s resentment and will to power, and many other issues. Both Shakespeare and classic British novelists later rewrote its basic jealousy plot with all white characters. Othello has been interpreted as a challenge to racism (most famously by Paul Robeson and the anti-apartheid activist director Janet Suzman) but some readings of it intensify racism. This play of eloquent language and theatrical power is still being rethought and transformed as well as stunningly performed. The playwright Paula Vogel has imagined a different Desdemona; Djanet Sears invents a Black woman Othello left behind. Post-colonial novelists Salman Rushdie and Tayeb Salih create male characters who ambivalently identify with Othello, with corresponding costs for the female characters. Film adaptations have relocated the story to an American high school (O) and in the British police force.
In this seminar we will study some exciting recent analyses of Othello, and contextualize it with some early modern texts and historical work, especially about changing attitudes toward gender, race, and religion in its own time and later. We will consider some various ways recent interpretations and transformations respond to the play and our society. Why has Othello so often been a starting point for reflections about gender and race? What important aspects of the play do these preoccupations leave out?
Senior Seminar—”Post-Print Fictions: Storytelling in Computational, Informatic & Algorithmic Modes—Professor Jamie Bianco
Digital technologies have made new forms of literary production possible such as hypertext and flash poetries, which rely on software computation, informatics and algorithms. However, long before we were writing with computers, writers have experimented with computation, informatics and algorithms in print texts, testing the limits of language and meaning. Writing under contraint or writing with language rules is one such mode. This course will explore both: print and digital fictions that rely on a mathematicization of language and storytelling. Print works may include selections from Borges, Stein, Cortazar, Sapporta, OULIPO, Pynchon, Plant, Coupland, Foer, Danielewski, Plascencia and Jackson. Digital texts may include hypertext, flash, and network fictions, multimediated narrative, videogames, webisodic video series, transmedia, and microblogged serial writing.
Senior Seminar—More information to come.
SPRING 2010—Junior Seminars
Junior Seminar—“Staging the Nation”—Professor Susan Harris Smith
Junior Seminars focus on a particular problem across a span of time; this
seminar will engage with the the problem of dramatizing American identity
and staging the nation. The plays, written between 1797 and the present,
will move from early work such as The Contrast by Royall Tyler (1787),
Metamora by John Augustus Stone (1829), The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault
(1859), and Shenandoah by Bronson Howard (1859) to modern work such as Old
Glory by Robert Lowell (1964), Indians by Arthur Kopit (1968), In White
America by Martin Duberman (1964), Slave Ship by Amiri Baraka (1969) and
to recent plays such as Anna Deveare Smith’s House Arrest (1997), Robert
Schenken’s The Kentucky Cycle (1992), and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The American Play (1995). We will conclude with whatever new, relevant work is available
and of interest, for instance Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert
Siguenza’s Culture Clash in America (2003).
Junior Seminar—"Women, Comedy, and Society"—Professor Marianne Novy
Comedy, says the novelist George Meredith, gives women free play for their wit. That wit often criticizes their society, though they may also embrace its restrictions. In this course we will consider plays and novels that use or take off from comic form—by female writers, such as Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill—and by male writers who create great female characters, such as Shakespeare, Congreve, Shaw, and Brecht. We will consider the plays and novels in relation to other writing about women in their societies, and explore, against that background, how they analyze marriage, economics, gender roles, and the meanings of success.
Junior Seminar—"Science Fiction, Gender, and Anamnesis"—Professor Kimberly Latta
Science fiction is speculation. The word “science” derives from the Latin scientia (knowledge) and means "the state or fact of knowing." The verb “to speculate” derives from the Latin speculat- “observed from a vantage point,” speculari, “to observe,” and from specula, “watchtower.” The s/f writer observes what is familiar from the watchtower of the unfamiliar, the strange, and the alien. She does this not in order to predict the future but rather to generate knowledge, scientia, about the present world, to see what we cannot see when we are looking from where we are now.
This junior seminar will explore a particular kind of science fiction. We will study stories that tell us something about gender relations in our culture by setting these relations in an alien or strange context. We will look for information about ourselves that we have always possessed but have forgotten in books by Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Leguin, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr., and Doris Lessing.
French feminist Pierre Bourdieu describes the difficult but necessary recovery of what we cannot remember when we look straight at ourselves anamnesis. We will be reading Bourdieu and some other theorists in order to see how science fiction reveals that our gendered identities are the product of deeply embedded and embodied sets of historical beliefs and practices. These inherited, culturally produced, “schemes of perception” privilege the masculine over that of the feminine. They therefore create distorted notions of masculinity and femininity that imprison men as well as women in self-destructive behaviors.
Students will be guided through a series of steps in the writing of the final seminar paper, which should discuss one or more s/f texts in terms of feminist theory and the historical context in which those texts were written. For example, a student writing about Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), might choose to write about the relationship between relations of masculine domination, totalitarianism, and racism or homophobia in the period just before the Holocaust.
