Fall Syllabus #2: Grad Seminar, “American Literature after the American Century”!

I’m really excited about this one, too! This should be a great semester. I owe some thanks to Jodi Melamed and Priscilla Wald for this one.

GENERAL COURSE PLAN

WEEK 1: AMERICAN LITERATURE AFTER THE AMERICAN CENTURY

WEEK 2-4: CANONS AND TRIGGER WARNINGS: LOLITA

WEEK 4-6: POPULAR CULTURE(S): THE BODY SNATCHERS

WEEK 6-8: THEORIES AND IDENTITIES: DAWN

WEEK 8-9: POSTMODERNISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

WEEK 10-11: NATIONALISMS AND TRANSNATIONALISMS: TROPIC OF ORANGE

WEEK 11-12: ECOCRITICISM IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES

WEEK 13: AMERICAN LITERATURE AFTER EVERTHING

WEEK 14-15: CLASS SYMPOSIUM

DAY-BY-DAY SCHEDULE

M	Aug. 31	FIRST DAY OF CLASS Henry Luce, “The American Century” [D2L]
W	Sep. 2	American Literature after the American Century Henry A. Giroux, “Public Intellectuals against the Neoliberal University” [Web] Michael Bérubé, “American Studies without Exceptions” [D2L]
M	Sep. 7	LABOR DAY HOLIDAY—NO CLASS
W	Sep. 9	Canons and Trigger Warnings Lolita, Foreword and Part One
M	Sep. 14	Lolita, Part Two (first half)
W	Sep. 16	Lolita (whole book including afterword)
M	Sep. 21	Jay Caspian King, “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind” [newyorker.com] Malcolm Harris, “Western Canon, Meet Trigger Warning” [aljazeera.com] Ira Wells, “Forgetting Lolita: How Nabokov’s Victim Became an American Fantasy” [newrepublic.com] “A Portrait of the Young Girl: On the 60th Anniversary of Lolita” [Los Angeles Review of Books]
W	Sep. 23	Popular Culture(s) Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”
M	Sep. 28	Invasion of the Body Snatchers (whole book)
W	Sep. 30	Invasion of the Body Snatchers (whole book) Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” [D2L] Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary” [D2L]
M	Oct. 5	Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 film) Erika Nelson, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Gender and Sexuality in Four Film Adaptations” [D2L] Marty Roth, “Twice Two: The Fly and Invasion of the Body Snatchers” [D2L]
W	Oct. 7	Theories and Identities Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (first half)
M	Oct. 12	Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (second half)
W	Oct. 14	Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites (excerpts) [D2L] Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto” [D2L] Donna Haraway, Primate Visions [excerpt] [D2L]
M	Oct. 19	Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” [D2L]
W	Oct. 21	Postmodernism and Consumer Culture David Foster Wallace, “Octet” David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person”
M	Oct. 26	CONFERENCES—NO CLASS
W	Oct. 28	David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”
M	Nov. 2	Nationalism and Transnationalism Tropic of Orange (first half) FINAL PAPER PROSPECTUS DUE
W	Nov. 4	Tropic of Orange (second half)
M	Nov. 9	Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands [excerpts] [D2L] Junot Díaz, “Monstro” [D2L]
W	Nov. 11	Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (first half)
M	Nov. 16	We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (second half)
W	Nov. 18	Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” [D2L] McKenzie Wark, “Critical Theory after the Anthropocene” [D2L]
M	Nov. 23	American Literature after Everything Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [D2L] Giorgio Agamben, “What Is The Contemporary?” [D2L] Natalia Cecire, “Humanities Scholarship Is Incredibly Relevant, and That Makes People Sad” [Web]
W	Nov. 25	THANKSGIVING—NO CLASS
M	Nov. 30	Syllabus Workshop GROUP SYLLABUSES DUE
W	Dec. 2	Class Symposium (day one)
M	Dec. 7	Class Symposium (day two)
W	Dec. 9	Class Symposium (day three)
F	Dec. 18	FINAL PAPERS DUE BY 10 AM

Wednesday Links!

* Marquette English’s course offerings for summer and fall 2015, including my courses on Science Fiction as Genre, J.R.R. Tolkien, and American Literature after the American Century.

* Speaking of my courses, this is such an incredible answer to the last few weeks of my cultural preservation course I almost feel as though I somehow made it up.

* An amazing late comment on my Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis post, including some great commentary on the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

* My review isn’t coming for a few months, but I really loved Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. I can’t wait to talk to people about it. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll keep my mouth shut for now.

* If you want a vision of the future: Sweet Briar College, Citing ‘Financial Challenges,’ Will Close Its Doors in August. (More, more.) Clarkson U., Union Graduate College Explore Merger. It’s Final: UNC Board of Governors Votes To Close Academic Centers. Jindal cuts higher ed by 78%.

* Where has all the money gone? The decline in faculty salaries at American colleges and universities over the past 40 years.

* It’s always “the end of college.”

* “De-tenure.” Don’t worry, it’s just another regrettable drafting error!

* Why we occupy: Dutch universities at the crossroads.

* The academic-fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has focused largely on how fake undergraduate classes helped athletes maintain their eligibility to compete. In an article in The News & Observer over the weekend, a former UNC official says athletics officials also sometimes asked the university’s graduate school to bend the rules to admit athletes in order to extend their eligibility.

* This is the best Dean of Eureka Moments post yet. Maybe literally the best possible.

associate vice provost of failure successes

— Dean O. Eureka (@deaneureka) February 28, 2015

* College admissions and former inmates.

* Nine out of ten startups fail, which is why every institution in society should be converted to the startup model immediately.

* The Search for a Useable Past: An Interview with Paul Buhle on Radical America.

* The politicization of even the idea of knowledge.

* Michigan Frat’s 48-Hour Rager Wrecks Resort, Causes $430,000 in Damages.

* Le Guin vs. Ishiguo: “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

* The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s.

* US sea level north of New York City ‘jumped by 128mm.’

* A Major Surge in Atmospheric Warming Is Probably Coming in the Next Five Years.

* Vox considers the end of American democracy: 1, 2.

* Against the West Wing.

* Against “learning styles.”

* Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules. Hillary Clinton’s personal email account looks bad now. But it was even worse at the time.

* …whose frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things…

* Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

* When A Newspaper Gave Blade Runner‘s Replicant Test To Mayor Candidates.

* “An ode to Juiceboxxx, a 27-year-old rapper from Milwaukee no one’s ever heard of.”

* “When Your Father Is the BTK Serial Killer, Forgiveness Is Not Tidy.”

* Scott Walker Wants To Stop Funding Renewable Energy Research Center. Of course he does.

* Defense Bill Passes, Giving Sacred Native American Sites To Mining Company.

* The forgotten masterpieces of African modernism.

* Man gets life in prison for selling $20 worth of weed to undercover cop.

* Justice department determines Ferguson is a terrible place.

* Wrong way Obama?

* The Americans and austerity.

* Two ways of looking at income inequality.

* How a French insurer wrote the worst contract in the world and sold it to thousands of clients.

* Teach students about consent in high school.

* Vermont Town May Allow 16- And 17-Year-Olds To Vote In Local Elections.

* Crunching the numbers: How Long Can A Spinoff Like ‘Better Call Saul’ Last?

* What Marvel Characters End Up Being Called In Other Languages.

* Panpsychism’s Labyrinth.

* Careers of the future: professional dumpster diver.

* It’s where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son. After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson’s but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.

* The globalist sublime.

* Mars One colonists better off eating frozen pizza than local veggies.

* Local Lab In Berkeley Accidentally Discovers Solution To Fix Color Blindness.

* Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.

* How the MFA Glut Is a Disservice to Students, Teachers, and Writers.

But there’s another breed of MFA program out there, proliferating constantly. These programs have nearly 100% admittance rates, fund zero percent of their students, collect outrageously high tuition, and often pay their instructors very little. And because there are so many people (rightly or wrongly) clamoring for MFAs, they have no incentive for standards, either—no incentive to reject any person, no matter how badly they write. One person’s money is as green as the next, after all. If you’ve received an undergraduate degree and can type on a computer, you’re in.

* 10-Year-Old Math Genius Studying for University Degree.

* The Last Man on Earth really shouldn’t work. And yet…

* Officials at Arizona State University probably weren’t expecting the full Stormfront treatment when its English department advertised a spring semester class exploring the “problem of whiteness.”

* No shades of grey in teaching relationships.

* Pendulum keeps swinging: Now Americans Should Drink Much More Coffee.

* But not Keurig.

* It’s been so long so I posted one of these I haven’t even linked to anything about the dress yet.

* In 1971, William Powell published The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide to making bombs and drugs at home. He spent the next four decades fighting to take it out of print.

* Why Americans Don’t Care About Prison Rape.

* Robear: the bear-shaped nursing robot who’ll look after you when you get old. What could possibly go wrong?

* The invention of blue.

* In the 1800s, Courts Tried to Enforce Partnerships With Dolphins.

* The 16 Strangest Dragons In Dungeons & Dragons.

* Mark your everythings: Community comes back March 17.

* First the gorilla who punched the photographer, now this.

* Wes Anderson’s X-Men.

* Abra kazam.

* LLAP.

* And the arc of history is long, but: North Carolina Legalizes Call Girls For Politicians.

Meanwhile, in heaven … #LeonardNimoy #LLAP pic.twitter.com/kn1a6RiDuA

— Kirsten Heffron (@KirstenHeffron) February 27, 2015

Course Descriptions for Fall 2015 (Yes, Already!)

Course Number: 4610/5610
Course Title & Subtitle: Individual Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien
Course Description: This decade will see the hundredth anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s earliest writings on Middle-Earth (The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917) alongside the completion of Peter Jackson’s career-defining twenty-year project to adapt The Lord of the Rings for film (1995-2015). This course asks the question: Who is J.R.R. Tolkien, looking backward from the perspective of the twenty-first century? Why have his works, and the genre of heroic fantasy which he remade so completely in his image, remained so intensely popular, even as the world has transformed around them? Our study will primarily trace the history, development, and reception of Tolkien’s incredible magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings (written 1937-1949, published 1954-1955)—but we will also take up Tolkien’s contested place in the literary canon of the twentieth century, the uses and abuses of Tolkien in Jackson’s blockbuster films, and the ongoing critical interests and investments of Tolkien fandom today. As Tolkien scholars we will also have the privilege of drawing upon the remarkable J.R.R. Tolkien Collection at the Raynor Library here at Marquette, which contains the original manuscripts for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Major Readings: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and selected additional readings
Assignments: two shorter papers, one final paper, weekly forum posts, one presentation, class participation

 

Course Number: 6700
Course Title & Subtitle: Studies in Twentieth Century American Literature: American Literature after the American Century
Course Description: In 1941, Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce called upon the twentieth century to be “the first great American Century,” and it’s been ending ever since. This course takes up American literary and cultural studies from the post-everything standpoint of the “after.” What is it to study American literature today, after the American Century, after American exceptionalism, after modernity, after the university, after the idea of the future itself? Our shared investigation into contemporary critical and scholarly practices will focus on key controversies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary study, including the ongoing reevaluation of “the canon” (Lolita), popular culture studies (The Body Snatchers), identity and identity politics (Dawn), nationalism and transnationalism (Tropic of Orange), postmodernity and neoliberalism (the short stories of David Foster Wallace), and ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). Our reading will also draw heavily on recent scholarship in critical theory, especially “the new American studies” and the emerging discipline of critical university studies. Alongside weekly reflections and enthusiastic class participation, students in this course will produce a 15-20 page seminar paper on a subject of their choosing related to the themes of the course, as well as present their work to their peers in a conference-presentation format and develop a sample syllabus for an undergraduate course in American literary or cultural studies.
Readings: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers; Octavia E. Butler, Dawn; Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; the short stories of David Foster Wallace; selected additional readings
Assignments: weekly reflections, class participation, conference-style presentation, seminar paper (15-20 pages), sample syllabus

Me in TNI, Occupy MLA, Seven Short Stories about Drones, Wes Anderson’s ‘Godzilla,’ and More

* My piece on ecological science fiction and pessimistic despair from the “Weather” issue of The New Inquiry is online: Après Nous, le Déluge. Don’t let the title fool you; it’s in English!

Perhaps Lear would have thought it all a bit too on-the-nose—but now our suicidal urges and our selfishness and our sickening disregard for the future come back to us as hurricanes and heat-waves. Let a thousand science fictional panoramas bloom: the Statue of Liberty frozen over, toppled in the sand, neck-deep in water. Hollywood on fire. Texas cracked with drought. Hundred-year storms every other year. Après nous, la glace, le feu, le désert, le déluge.

* In case you missed it last night, my course this semester: “Thrill and Dread in the American Century.”

* Profhacker has a writeup from the people behind the Occupy MLA hoax for people who are still curious just what was going on there. If my Twitter timeline is any indication, it’s fair to say this was not well-received. Personally I think it’s very hard to argue this was about advancing cause of adjuncts and NTT faculty in any meaningful way, though I can see why they want to say so now. Nothing about the portrayal of the Occupy MLA participants either this year or last year cast critics of academic labor in a good light. Bérubé agrees! For a somewhat more nuanced take, see Noel Jackson’s timeline.

* Bad news for the for-profit education industry. But don’t worry! We’ve got the next revenue stream all queued up.

MOOCs are designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering. Public institutions of higher education then become shells for private interests who will offer small grants on the front end and reap larger profits on the back end.

* Wes Anderson’s Godzilla.

* But, in fact, we’ve got two grand experiments of her theory,” he said. “The first is the American South, where teachers unions are weak and the schools are not lighting the world on fire. The other is charter schools, which are 88 percent non-unionized. In charters, you can do everything that Michelle Rhee wants to do — fire bad teachers, pay good teachers more. And yet, the most comprehensive studies looking at charter schools nationally find mediocre results.”

* Teju Cole: Seven short stories about drones. Mirrored at TNI.

2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

* io9 tells you to set your DVR to Continuum, “the most intriguing new time travel show in years.”

* Supreme Court Justice Death Calculator. I’ll save you the trouble:

The probability of at least 1 conservative justice dying by 2017: 46.62%.

* While popular culture has for centuries reflected an older form of law and justice, its capacity to undermine the very pluralist and discursive openness which are its well-spring, demonstrates the dangers to which the rhetoric of urgency and the emotional power of medium and message are prone. In a world shorn of its faith in the traditional structures which sustained the moral economy and the moral legality, the appeal to simply trust in an inarticulable justice sustained by an emotional pitch which is in ‘24’ at every moment apparent, opens the prospect of legal terrorism.

* “Dean Kamen, inventor of the SegWay, has a new invention out! This one is for dieting, and it sucks food out of the stomach before the body can absorb it.” Well, that all checks out.

* Aaron Swartz Faced A More Severe Prison Term Than Killers, Slave Dealers And Bank Robbers.

* And a public service announcement: Harmontown comes to Wisconsin next week…

Spring 2013 Course: “Thrill and Dread in the American Century”

The new semester at Marquette begins tomorrow, and I’ll be teaching the second half of the American literature survey sequence. The full syllabus is on my website here, but you can see the course theme and provisional schedule below…

ENGLISH 2520-101:
INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE 2
Thematic Title: Thrill and Dread in the American Century
MWF 10:00-10:50 AM

“To be modern,” Marshall Berman wrote, “is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” This course traces the development of this tension between hope and disaster, between “thrill” and “dread,” in American literature since the Civil War. In this course we will examine and interrogate this explosive sense of what it means to be “modern” with respect to themes of history and futurity, identity and difference, politics, community, war, empire, and the environment. From the private lives of individuals and families to the very public relationships that exist in and between diverse communities to the nation’s assent to global superpower status in the context of a nuclear-powered Cold War, we will find America in the post-Civil-War period understands itself as a place where anything can happen—in good ways, and in bad.

PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE
Any changes to this schedule will be announced in class as they become necessary.

Students should come to class prepared to discuss the listed texts or chapters.

Monday	January 14	Introduction to the Course
Wednesday	January 16	NA-C: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Friday	January 18	NA-C: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-paper”
Monday	January 21	MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY—NO CLASS
Tuesday	January 22	DROP/ADD ENDS
Wednesday	January 23	NA-C: Pauline Hopkins, “A Dash for Liberty” NA-C: James Weldon Johnson, “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”
Friday	January 25	NA-C: Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
Monday	January 28	NA-C: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” NA-C: “The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee”
Wednesday	January 30	NA-D: “Modernist Manifestos”: F.T. Marinetti, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes
Friday	February 1	NA-D: Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, poems
Monday	February 4	NA-D: Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, poems
Wednesday	February 6	NA-D: William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” FIRST PAPER WORKSHOP DAY
Friday	February 8	Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” [ARES]
Monday	February 11	Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” [ARES]
Wednesday	February 13	James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” [ARES]
Friday	February 15	Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee” [D2L] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, foreword and chapters 1-5
Monday	February 18	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, chapters 6-13 FIRST PAPER DUE
Wednesday	February 20	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, chapters 14-23
Friday	February 22	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, chapters 24-33
Monday	February 25	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, part 2, chapters 1-7
Wednesday	February 27	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, part 2, chapters 8-16
Friday	March 1	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, part 2, chapters 17-24
Monday	March 4	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, part 2, chapters 25-31
Wednesday	March 6	Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, part 2, chapters 31-36
Friday	March 8	NA-E: John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
Monday	March 11	SPRING BREAK—NO CLASS
Wednesday	March 13	SPRING BREAK—NO CLASS
Friday	March 15	SPRING BREAK—NO CLASS
Monday	March 18	NA-E: Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”; “Footnote to Howl”; “A Supermarket in California”; America” [D2L]
Wednesday	March 20	NA-E: Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, poems
Friday	March 22	CLASS CANCELLED / CONFERENCES
Monday	March 25	NA-E: Donald Barthelme, “The Balloon” SECOND PAPER WORKSHOP
Wednesday	March 27	NA-E: Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”
Friday	March 29	EASTER HOLIDAY—NO CLASS
Monday	April 1	Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried” [ARES]
Wednesday	April 3	NA-E: Toni Morrison, “Recitatif”
Friday	April 5	CLASS CANCELLED / MOVIE NIGHT! TBA
Monday	April 8	NA-E: Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyaka, poems SECOND PAPER DUE
Wednesday	April 10	Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 1-5
Friday	April 12	CLASS CANCELLED / MOVIE NIGHT! TBA LAST DAY TO WITHDRAW
Monday	April 15	Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 6-9
Wednesday	April 17	Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 10-13
Friday	April 19	Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 14-16
Monday	April 22	Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 17-19
Wednesday	April 24	Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 20-22
Friday	April 26	Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 23-25
Monday	April 29	NA-E: Junot Díaz, “Drown”
Wednesday	May 1	Wells Tower, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” [ARES]
Friday	May 3	Joe Wenderoth, “Letters to Wendy’s” [D2L] FINAL PAPER WORKSHOP LAST DAY OF CLASS
Tuesday	May 7	FINAL PAPERS DUE BY DIGITAL DROPBOX BY 10 AM