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Theme: Divergent and Oppositional Poetics
In this course we will read modern and contemporary poems by Bay Area and West Coast poets in
contrast to poems by their (mostly) East Coast peers who represent the more dominant,
academically-sanctioned canon -- what poet/critic Charles Bernstein refers to as "official verse
culture." To better understand a contemporary view of prosody and poetics, we will read Robert
Pinsky's The Sounds of Poetry. We will then examine the difference between poetry that is
grounded in the early Modernist impulse toward open form and the later Modernist poetics that
finds virtue in a return to a more formalist poetics. To examine the differences (and overlaps) in
these two modes of poetics, we will read selected works from a number of Bay Area poets from
Robinson Jeffers in the early 20th Century to Robert Hass and Sandra M. Gilbert in the 21st
Century. We will read selected poems -- mostly in anthologies and online -- from a number of poets
(West and East Coast) including: Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden,
Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Oppen, Robert
Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Denise
Levertov, Bob Kaufman, Frank O'Hara, William Everson, Carolyn Kizer, Diane di Prima, Gary
Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Adrienne Rich, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Mark Doty,
and Sandra M. Gilbert. Each class member will give a seminar presentation during the semester on
one or more of these poets, complete an essay of 2500 - 5000 words (based on the same topic as
the seminar presentation), and complete another project which could either be a small series of
original poems with annotations examining your poetics and/or a second shorter essay 1500 - 2500
words that closely reads a few poems by another poet(s). Class members will also each take a turn
leading part of the seminar discussion of the assigned readings.
The Russian Formalists argued that what made literary language different from other forms of
language was that literature defamiliarizes, making us see the world in a new way. One could
argue that the literary theory and criticism of the twentieth century has, in turn, made us see
literature in new ways. The semester will be spent in examining various ways critics and theorists
have come to see the way literature works, and to form the questions we must ask of texts, of
readers, of authors, and of how literature continues to shape the way we see the world around us.
We will read and discuss many challenging critical and theoretical readings, mostly from The
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. The class will mix lecture and discussion on key issues
and background of the various kinds of theory with hands-on application of the theories in a
workshop environment.
If nations are "imagined communities," how is the nation called "India" imagined? With this
fundamental question in mind, we will examine the relationship between nation and narration
through an in-depth study of selected literature and film from the Indian subcontinent. Our
examination will be placed within the larger historical context of decolonization in the sense not
only of formal independence from European rule, but also of contemporary struggles against
persistent forms of imperialism and internal colonization. We will focus on three key moments that
highlight the process of nation formation on the Indian subcontinent: (1) the nationalist struggle
against British colonial rule, (2) the partition of the subcontinent by the British at the time of
independence, and (3) the independent modern liberal nation-state in the era of globalization. By
analyzing key texts of literature (in English/in English translation) as well as film, we will attempt
to understand how nationalism mobilizes religion, gender, caste, and class in an attempt to produce
an image of a people.
We will treat the major metrical poets of the modern era--Hardy, Yeats, Auden, Frost--as well as
key poets of the counter-tradition-- Pound, Eliot, and Lowell. Two in-class presentations and one
significant research paper will comprise the graded evaluation for the course.
Beginning with Aeschylus' Agamemnon (458 B.C.E.) and concluding with Miller's Death of a
Salesman (1949 C.E.), this course will engage and explore "Tragic Vision and Form" as manifest in
ten plays and two (very) short novels, and as defined, discussed, and dissected in several critical
essays. Requirements: close, careful, and productive reading of all assigned texts; weekly reader
responses; two presentations, with accompanying two-page handouts for all seminar members; a
research-informed critical pager.
This seminar will examine significant literary works written circa 1830 to 1900. We will
supplement our readings with important pieces of Victorian art and music. We will read
Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure, and the Victorian section of The Norton
Anthology. One short essay, one seminar research project and two class presentations are
required.
“Estrangement” and the Art of Poetry:
This graduate verse-writing workshop will focus on poetic discoveries made through what literary critics call “defamiliarization” or what might also be called “the alienation effect”–that is, the strategy (deployed by a number of contemporary poets) of defamiliarizing or distancing the ordinary so as to reveal that which is extraordinary within it. We will read and discuss models drawn from the latest Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry as well as works by Rilke, Neruda, and others (available in Xeroxed handouts). Participants in the workshop will write weekly “exercise” poems based on these models but we will also “workshop” any other verses people in the group wish to submit for class discussion.
Course requirements:
A portfolio of weekly “exercise” poems based on these readings and/or others in the same mode, together with at least three revisions of poems we’ve workshopped and any number of independently conceived poems that participants choose to submit.
Texts:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3d edition (2 volumes), eds. Ramazani, Ellmann, O’Clair, and Xeroxed handouts.
This course is a graduate fiction writing workshop. Participants will submit work on a regular
schedule, with each student having his or her work discussed at least twice over the course of the
semester. Students will submit a substantial revision in lieu of a final exam. Regular assigned
readings of published work will supplement our discussion.
English 241 is a course required for students in the MFA program whose primary or secondary
genre is fiction. Students in the MA program who write fiction at the advanced level may also be
admitted (space permitting) with the instructor's permission. The course may be repeated twice for
credit. Conditionally classified graduate students must also obtain the instructor's permission to
enroll in the course.
Their residence in 1920a Paris is legendary: Hemingway slouching in cafes, Stein hosting artists
and writers. "Paris was where the twentieth century was," she declared. Exiles from their country,
each writer gained through dislocation an extraordinary perception of self, of place, of modern
experience. In this course we will read works by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude
Stein and Djuna Barnes, all written either during the writers' residence in Paris or after their
departure, when place and meanings are reimagined. Texts include In Our Time, The Sun Also
Rises, A Moveable Feast, The Garden of Eden (Hemingway); Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald); The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein); and Nightwood (Barnes).
An examination of the genre of Science Fiction, including an historical perspective on its
development in the nineteenth century, its codification in the mid-twentieth century, and its
deepening importance for writers of all kinds of fiction in the new century. We will discuss
important themes and motifs of Sci-Fi, including space and time travel, robots, artificial
intelligence, the post-apocalyptic ("last man") moment, viruses and disease, utopian and dystopian
worlds, and gender-bending. We will also consider Sci-Fi in relation to the theory of "genrefiction."
Writers of short stories and novels to be considered include Atwood, Bester, Asimov,
Butler, Bradbury, Card, Clarke, Dick, Gibson, Herbert, Heinlein, Kress, Le Guin, McIntyre, Moore,
Niven, Pohl, Russ, Stephenson, Stewart, Tiptree, Van Vogt, Vonnegut, and Wells.
In this seminar-style class, we will read the key texts of rhetoric in the Western tradition, from the
ancient Greeks to 21st century rhetoricians. Because so many (re)discovered texts by female
authors have been published recently, we will be able to read many texts by women alongside the
more well-known canonical rhetorical texts. Students will be expected to read 150-250 pages per
week, turn in short response texts, write a longer paper at the end of the semester, and lead class
discussion from time to time. The study of rhetorical texts is very uncommon at the undergraduate
level; therefore, no knowledge of the history of rhetoric is assumed. The professor will give minilectures
to set the context for each week's reading. WebCT or a class wiki may be employed. Texts:
The Rhetorical Tradition, 2nd ed. Edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg
Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric. Edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald.
You may take a limited number of undergraduate upper division courses for graduate credit. Please
look over the entire department schedule of classes for courses that may be of specific interest to
you but which we are not offering at the graduate level in the spring semester (for example, English
165: Asian American Literature and English 148: British Literature 1660-1800).
Graduate students should also consult the Department of English & Comparative Literature Newsletter which has listings of upper division undergraduate courses that may be of interest to you.
English Department Office
Phone: (408) 924-4425
Fax: (408) 924-4580
english@sjsu.edu
Faculty Offices 102
One Washington Square
San José, California, USA, 95192-0090
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