Graduate Course Archive Fall 2013

6100.10 Introduction to Literary Theory
Cook
M 6:10-8:40 pm

6130.80 Popular Music Cultures
Wald
W 3:30-6 pm

(Cross-listed with AMST 6190.81)

This course provides an overview of the field of U.S. popular music studies for graduate students interested in cultural theory, cultural studies, and media studies. It grounds its inquiry in influential texts of popular music studies—from the 19th century writings of Frederick Douglass on the slave songs to Zora Neal Hurston’s anthropological studies of the “sonic archive” of the Negro folk to Theodor Adorno’s definitive Frankfurt-School takedown of the music industry to Dick Hebdige’s seminal study of British punk (the book Subculture: The Meaning of Style) to musicologist Christopher Small’s theory of “musicking.” We will supplement such canonical, field-defining work with case studies drawn from the range of excellent literature on music cultures.

Our inquiry will focus on questions of identity (how are identities articulated in musical expression? what struggles over identity are staged in—or sounded through—popular music?); audience (what is the relationship between musical texts and listeners?); and affect (how does music communicate and mediate affect, including “political” emotions?). We will also be interested in the mediation of popular musical expression (through recordings, radio, television, music videos, digital files, and the like) and in the discourses of musical genre.

Although our focus will be on the United States, we will be interested in the ongoing transnational and/or African diasporic circulation of sound, and in popular culture’s refusal to be bound by national borders. Depending on the interest of students, we may also investigate the relationship between popular music studies and the burgeoning field of sound studies. Students will do annotated bibliographies, try their hand at experimental music writing (the “Critical Karaoke”), and pursue research into a question of their choice. The goal will be the production of either a conference paper or draft of an article to be submitted for publication.

6240.10 Literature of the British Archipelago
Cohen
M 3:30-6 pm

Ecologies of Conquest: This version of "Literature of the British Archipelago" will gather polyglot texts (in translation) from Britain's postcolonial past around the theme of "Ecologies of Conquest." We will be interested in what happens in contact zones not only among diverse peoples, but among humans and the legions of animal, vegetal, mineral, climatic and topographical nonhumans forming the roiled environment. Primary texts include Beowulf, Gildas, The Life of St Columba of Iona, Voyage of St Brendan, Gerald of Wales (Irish and Welsh writings), Wace, Marie de France, Grettir's saga, and perhaps The Tempest. Secondary texts will be readings in environmental criticism and ecotheory.

This course is open to anyone who wishes to take it, including those whose focus is in later periods. The pedagogy is multimodal and experimental.

6240.10 Nineteenth Century
DeWispelare
R 6:10-8:40 pm

Dispatches from Globalization’s Infancy: Romantic Literature and the “Empire of English”

“There is no mother tongue,” proclaim Deleuze and Guattari, “only a power seizure by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.” Written in 1980, this claim subverts Enlightenment ideologies that had governed thinking about the relationships between vernacular language, nation, and empire for more than two hundred years (the notion of the “mother tongue,” for instance). In this class, we will

track the development of language and translation theory alongside late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century anglophone literature. Specifically, we will interrogate the problematic and global rise of what critic Alok Yadav has called the “Empire of English,” and in so doing, we will ask questions about how imperial politics pursuing compulsory linguistic standardization could exist alongside an irrepressible zeal for authentic displays of linguistic “naturalness,” which is an aesthetic phenomenon that permeated much of the period’s literature and theater. The goal is to think through the way discourses of proto-linguistics—which include language theories, linguistic ethnography, literacy guidebooks, and translation manuals—mediate anglophone literature of this period while also

creating spectacular new expressive and political possibilities for arts made of language as they unfold in public. More generally, we will work through the theoretical problem of how to account for

discourses mediating one another, and this is a critical skill students can deploy in various humanistic research projects.

In our specific study of discursive mediation, however, our attention will continually be drawn back to the paradoxical weight and yet contingency of linguistic power, which Deleuze and Guattari highlight when they assert, “Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital […] It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.” In addition to the institutional, geographic, and circulatory patterns alluded to here, our focus will be on the way writers configured and normalized certain types of relationships between language and community, language and nation, language and class, language and ethnicity, language and gender, and of course, the coup de grâce, language and the literature, which was increasingly evaluated, made exemplary, or canonized based on the presence or absence of “linguistic propriety.” Course readings will include a transnational and transgeneric list of likely and unlikely suspects from the global nineteenth-century—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, Phillis Wheatley, John

Horne Tooke, Maria Edgeworth, Sir William Jones, Thomas Spence, Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Hannah More, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, the Schlegels, Charles Dickens, Laetitia Landon—all of these and more alongside a hitless of contemporary theorists working to historicize and parse one of our contemporary period’s most pregnant and philosophically troublesome contronyms: “World English.”

6451.10 Twentieth Century
Chu
R 3:30-6 pm

Introduction to Asian American Literature: Asians have been coming to America since 1849, but the writings of the immigrants and their descendents didn’t become “Asian American” until the discipline as such was formally recognized as a response to student strikes in 1968. In fact, there was no such racial group in 1878 when the United States Congress created a new legal category, “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” just for Chinese, and then began to pass laws that also excluded other Asians and Pacific Islanders from immigration and citizenship—setting them apart from Europeans and placing them into a middle category, neither white nor black.

Asian Americanist scholars argue that the treatment of Asian Americans in America has always been shaped by U.S. foreign policy objectives, by the Orientalist perception of Asians as unassimilable aliens, and by a suspicion of “orientals” borrowed from European colonialism and re-framed just for America. In response, Asian American writers have turned from writing only about their efforts to claim identities as fully American citizens to questioning American “exceptionalism” and to reconceiving themselves as citizens of the world. Or have they?

This course introduces Asian American literature as a tradition that questions mainstream constructions of Asian American race and ethnicity and provides alternative accounts of Asian American experiences. We’ll discuss the political roots of the terms “Asian American” and “Asian American literature”; nineteenth-century East-West encounters; Chinese immigration and exclusion; Japanese American internment narratives; feminist, national, and postcolonial influences; adoption; transnational migration; theories of narrative, genre, mourning, and loss.

Primary authors include Anita Desai, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Michael Ondaatje, and other writers of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, and Sri Lankan descent. Critics include Lisa Lowe, Elaine H. Kim, Margaret Homans, Susan Koshy, and David L. Eng.

6720.10 Independent Research
Huang

6720.11 Independent Research
Huang

6810.10 Folger Institute Seminar
Huang

6998.10 Thesis Research

6999.10 Thesis Research

8998.10 Advanced Reading and Research Huang

8999.10 Dissertation Research