Spencer Brownstein ’18
And just like that, December is upon us. As both finals and the new year loom ever closer, let’s turn our minds from inevitable ends to new beginnings!
For the Spring 2018 semester, the English department is offering a variety of wonderful topics courses covering a wide range of subject matters and practices. The Words has been lucky enough to learn more about each of these courses from the lovely professors who will be teaching them.
Beyond the Pale: Irish-Caribbean Connections with Professor Amy Elkins
Professor Elkins’s course promises to be an incredibly interesting reversal of the phrase “so close, yet so far.” Those of you most interested in thinking about literature transatlantically should definitely consider this course.
From Professor Elkins: “I started to develop my course, Beyond the Pale: Irish-Caribbean Connections, after reading numerous works from the Caribbean (Jamaica, mostly) and Ireland that spoke to the ideas of hybridity, history, language, and the experience of living in a small, island, post-colonial nation. In particular, Jamaica’s poet laureate, Lorna Goodison, writes explicitly about her Irish and African ancestry and how the Irish presence in Jamaica has shaped everything from place names to the circulation of folk lore. I recently wrote to Goodison to tell her about the class, among other things, and she sent me some unpublished ‘Irish poems’ to teach this semester.
One of the poems begins, ‘My friend Dan O’Riley Kelly’s skin is the colour of a glass of Guinness.’ Exactly half of the writers on the syllabus are from the Caribbean and half identify as Irish. I’ve paired each work (or set of poems) with a corresponding text from the other culture. So, for example, we’ll read James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ alongside Marlon James’s ‘The Last Jamaican Lion.’ I’ve paired the famous Irish play, ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ by J.M. Synge with ‘Playboy of the West Indies’ by Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura. And we’ll read Irish poet Eavan Boland’s ekphrastic poems alongside Grace Nichols’s poems from Picasso I Want My Face Back. Other topics include fairies, murder mysteries, revolution, community, race, sexuality, and the ideas of nationality, freedom, and hybridity from global modernism to the present.”
From the Course Description: “A historically small area of Ireland—called the Pale—was held under British rule in the late-medieval period. To be ‘beyond the pale’ is to cross over some invisible, often arbitrary, boundary, to be inconveniently and antisocially out of line. Many postcolonial Irish and Caribbean writers have been forced to exist beyond the pale politically and in terms of their access (or lack of it) to the literary establishment. This idiomatic connection to Ireland has a more concrete resonance in Jamaica, where the Irish are the second largest ethnic group after people of African descent, and many of Jamaica’s placenames derive from Irish locations. Taking up these fascinating links, this course will explore the significance of Irish-Caribbean literary and cultural connections in art, dance (live Irish musicians and a céilí dance instructor will visit our class!), poetry, theatre, and fiction. We will ask what it means to be from a small island in a globalizing world by reading authors such as Claude McKay, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Marlon James, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, Frank McCourt, Eavan Boland, Grace Nichols, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and Sara Baume.”
Young Adult Literature with Professor Peter Bognanni
Last month, The Words’s Senior Editor Zeena Fuleihan shared a fantastic article about Professor Bognanni’s new YA novel, Things I’m Seeing Without You. Now you have the opportunity to learn the craft from the English Department’s freshest author!
From Professor Bognanni: “For the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what makes a Young Adult novel. And now that I’ve been out promoting my own book and talking to YA writers, I feel like I finally have some answers that I want to share with students.”
From the Course Description: “In her recent article ‘If Fiction Changes the World, It’s Going to Be YA,’ journalist Emily Temple states that young adult books are primed to do work for the social good because of their timeliness, their willingness to take on big political issues, and their wide readership. In the last few decades, the young adult genre has been growing in scope and in ambition, and much of it is being written by exciting new authors, closer to the age of their protagonists. In this class we will study some new and foundational texts of the genre, discussing subjects like depiction of mental illness, the political implications of fantasy novels, and the ‘We Need Diverse Books’ campaign. Meanwhile, you will be working on your own YA projects, learning for yourself what makes these books tick.”
Eccentricity and Mediocrity in Modern Prose Fiction with Professor David Martyn
Finally, we have an option from Professor David Martyn, who is a member not of the English, but of the German Department here at Mac. If you’ve ever wanted to stick your toe in the waters that are Critical Theory, I’d highly recommend this course.
From Professor Martyn: “I was looking for a framework in which to teach Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, one of the great modernist novels but seldom taught to undergraduates. As the title indicates, the novel does away with what we generally expect a novel to do: paint ‘round characters’ we can relate to as though they were real people. The protagonist, Ulrich, makes a conscious decision not to develop any character traits. He’s basically a characterless character. While that sounds weird, in fact it allows for all kinds of great things: the most outrageous metaphors and similes, leitmotivs that take on a life of their own (buttons, for example), ungrounded irony that puts you as a reader into a kind of free fall. Reading this novel is a bit unsettling at first, but it really changes the way you read—not just the way you read this novel but everything else, too. My idea is to set us up to read this amazing book by tracing the way European prose authors started to focus on really mediocre characters and situations, the most prominent example of this being Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. One way they did this was through the use of eccentricity as a way of making unremarkable characters interesting: think, for example, of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, which we read in tandem with what I see as its 18th-century equivalent, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. My advice for students: just make sure to have a comfortable chair where you can turn off your phone, zone out of everything around you and lose yourself in what you’re reading. Then come share impressions about what you found.”
From the Course Description: “Tiring of heroism, modern prose fiction invented a new kind of figure beginning in the late 18th century: the mediocre protagonist whose distinguishing characteristic was not prowess or virtue but eccentricity, both real and imagined. What in Germany is called ‘the middle hero,’ in France ‘le bovarysme,’ and in Russia ‘poshlost’ (trivial bourgeois ordinariness) all designate aspects of this new literary space of the mediocre in which individuality depends increasingly on forms of deviance. The course traces this development from the dawn of romanticism to high modernism in German, French, and Russian fiction with the goal of understanding the way literature negotiates the tension between the need to be ‘different’ and the injunction to be ‘normal.’ Readings from Goethe (‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’), Flaubert (‘Madame Bovary’), Gogol (‘The Nose,’ ‘The Overcoat’), Goncharov (‘Oblomov’s Dream’), Huysmans (‘Against the Grain’), Musil (excerpts from ‘The Man without Qualities’), Nietzsche (excerpts from ‘The Gay Science’), Kafka (‘Letter to his Father,’ ‘The Cares of a Family Man,’ ‘The Metamorphosis’); theory and criticism by Erich Auerbach and Foucault. Requirements: regular reading reactions, three mid-length essays.”
Registration may have ended, but if your interest is piqued, it’s never too late to contact these professors about waitlists. Add/Drop is just around the corner, and a spot in any of these amazing courses could be yours.
On behalf of Professors Elkins, Bognanni, and Martyn, we all look forward to seeing you in class!