2008 Seminar Topics

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2008 Seminar Topics

Professor Randy Nelson
                       This is an interdisciplinary advanced fiction-writing course.  It will call upon poetry, cinema, computer games, architecture, music, and art as well as short stories and novels.  The aim of the course is not to produce metafiction or coded texts but rather to help the individual develop his or her own fiction at a level and with a detail that cannot be done in introductory courses.  We will examine intertextual theory and paired texts in order to understand the depth and breadth of choices required of an author.  There will be short weekly writing assignments which may be used in building the portfolio that will be graded at the end of the course.  English 404 will feature workshops, close reading of texts, and occasional field trips & “design problems” outside the classroom.  By far the greatest emphases will be on close reading, originality, and what those terms mean to writers, editors, and readers.  Some attention given to writing for publication.


Professor A.M. Parker
The origins of this seminar may be traced to a statement made by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837 in an address to the Phi Beta Kappa society in Cambridge, MA, a speech entitled “The American Scholar”: “There is then creative reading, as well as creative writing.” Fundamentally, the activities of reading and writing tend to be distinct, at least in educational practices; our goal in this course will be to foment disciplinary revolt, that is, to blur the lines between reading and writing. The work of this course will ask you to respond beyond your assumptions, and to trust in what may seem to be nothing at all—so as to risk those assumptions at every turn.

Part creative writing, part literary analysis, part workshop, part aesthetic inquiry, “Creative Reading” is designed to find the reader in the writing, and the writer in the reading.


Professor Onita Vaz-Hooper
In this seminar, we will question our (pre)conceptions of the Romantic canon.  The literature of what is now called the Romantic Period was aesthetically revolutionary in its day.  Nobody can quibble with that fact.  But there are many other aspects of the period that we can challenge.  Is it the Romantic or the romantic period?  And what does “R/romantic” really mean, anyway?  Are all authors who wrote in this period R/romantic?  If not, how do we classify them?  Periodization is also a point of contention.  Traditionally, the Romantic period is said to have begun in 1798 when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads.  If so, why designate as quintessentially Romantic, writers who published before that date?

These are some of the issues that will inform our study of the canonicity/non-canonicity of authors writing in this period.  For the longest time, the Romantics only seemed to consist of the Big Six – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats.  Their work is undoubtedly important in literary history, but what about the other writers in the period?  Some of them were best sellers in the literary marketplace, and greatly admired by poets now considered canonical.  Despite the traditional focus on the poetry of the Big Six, the period was also plentiful in its prose output and had many accomplished women writers.  By attending to such concerns, we will investigate the processes by which the Romantic canon was formed and is being reformed.  During the course of the seminar, I also want us to ask ourselves the different ways in which the seminar title operates: what does it mean to “fire” the Romantic canon?  How would you deploy it?  How would you eliminate or reshape it?


Professor Suzanne Churchill
Little magazines made modernism happen. These daring, low-budget periodicals allowed for the publication of new ideas and forms by unknown writers. T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" first appeared in Poetry in 1915, where he was introduced as "a young American poet resident in England, who has published nothing hitherto in this country.” James Joyce's Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review (before the magazine was censored by the Comstock commission). In 1921, a stirring poem entitled "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," by the 19-year-old newcomer, Langston Hughes, appeared in The Crisis. Little magazines were not the only periodicals to bring modernism into the public sphere, however. Willa Cather edited McCall's women's magazine, and William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote stories for the popular Saturday Evening Post. By the 1920s, many modernist writers had become fashionable celebrities, commented on in the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The rise of modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century coincided with an explosion of magazines of all sizes and formats: between 1885 and 1905 alone, 7,500 new periodicals were established in the U. S., and thousands more in Great Britain. This course will explore modernism as it happened in magazines, ranging from radical, low-budget “little magazines” such as The Little Review and The Egoist to mass market periodicals such as The Saturday Evening Post and Vogue. Our research will be supported by readings from the emerging field of periodical studies. Because of the vast amount of material available for study, students will form groups and engage in a collaborative research project. Students will also contribute to the expansion of the web-site, Little Magazines & Modernism: a select bibliography: http://aristotle.davidson.edu/little/

Pre-requisites: a good attitude, willingness to take risks, and team spirit. ENG 220 and/or upper-level English course experience desirable.


Professors Gail Gibson, Annie Ingram, and Randy Ingram
This course investigates some of literature’s most famous and hideous creations: humans, beasts, and the wild things in between; what lurks under the bed and out on the moors.  Scrutinizing texts from Anglo-Saxon England to the American West, the course considers what monsters show (de-monst[e]r-ate) about the anxieties and preoccupations of the cultures that create them and about the generations of readers drawn to them.  Primary texts include Beowulf, The Tempest, Moby-Dick, Frankenstein, Dracula, and Blood Meridian.  Literary Monsters will be team-taught in a modified seminar format, alternating plenary sessions and lectures with small group discussions.  The course is limited to 36 students, divided into three sections of twelve students each.

Literary Monsters is designed for advanced English majors and fulfills one of the two seminar requirements for the major.  Students interested in the course should register for one of the three sections taught by Profs. Gibson, A. Ingram, and R. Ingram.  Course registration is limited to seniors until the first day of class; if there are still spaces available after that, the professors will grant permission for junior English majors to enroll in ENG 495.

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