ENGL 639: Syllabus

Note: Your "Probes and Insights" each week should account for all the readings. You are not required to submit probes and insights for the class period when you give your seminar presentation.

1/8 Course Description: Goals, Expectations, Requirements

The Aesthetics and Politics of Woolf and Morrison

Audio Presentation: Morrison's Nobel Lecture available on course web site; available on Nobel Prize Web Site

Video: Woolf's A Room of One's Own

1/15 Woolf and Morrison as Literary Critics: The Politics of Aesthetics

Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Morrison, Nobel Lecture (download, print, and read);

Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" (in Readings) OR "Black Matters" (in Readings). Choose one to read; we'll discuss both in class (with a little help from our friends)

Taylor-Guthrie "Conversation with Alice Childress and Toni Morrison" (in Taylor-Guthrie 3-9)

Christina Davis, "An Interview with Toni Morrison" (in Taylor-Gutherie 223-233)

1/22 The Politics that Ground the Aesthetic in Woolf and Morrison

Morrison, "An Interview with Bill Moyers" (in Taylor-Gutherie, Conversations with Toni Morrison, 262-274)

Morrison, "On the Backs of Blacks" (download, print, and read)

Woolf, Three Guineas

Seminar Presentation: Group or individual presentations on: the rise of fascism in Europe (Spain, Italy, Germany); Spanish Civil War and the use of aerial bombings; Woolf's diary entries on the Spanish Civil War and fascism

1/29 Morrison's Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Black) Woman

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Morrison, "The Pain of Being Black" (in Taylor-Gutherie, Conversations with Toni Morrison, 255-261)

Jill Matus, "Shame and Anger in The Bluest Eye" (in Readings)

Recommended Reading (if you have time): Jill Matus, "Contexts and Intertexts" (in Readings)

Seminar Presentation: Group or individual seminar presentations on race, the beauty industry, the "silver screen," and the dominant culture's images of beauty in the 1950s U.S. Some possibilities: the shift in the black beauty products industry from the 1920s to the 1960s; what happened to Madame C. J. Walker's concept of the black beauty industry by the 1950s; images of beauty and the "ideal" family in 1950s text books; popular images of "the normal family" in 1950s popular culture (movies, magazines, ads, etc).

2/5 Woolf's Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Lesbian) Woman

Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (in Readings)

2/12 The Trauma of War/The Trauma of Personal Loss

Morrison, Sula

Jill Matus, "Sula: War and Peace Traumas" (in Readings)

Yvonne Atkinson, "Language that Bears Witness" (in Readings)

Robert Stepto, "Intimate Things in Place" (Taylor-Gutherie, 10-29)

Thomas LeClair, "The Language Must Not Sweat" (Taylor-Gutherie 119-128)

Recommended Reading (if you have time): Barbara Christian, "The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison" (in Readings); Gay Wilentz, "An African-Based Reading of Sula (in Readings).

Seminar Presentation: individual or group presentation on: 1) the role of Black soldiers in World War I (the 369th, 370th, and 371st regiments); 2) Violence against Black soldiers in Houston; 3) violence against returning Black soldiers after the war, etc.;

2/19 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women" (in Readings)

Recommended Reading: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936 (in Readings)

Seminar Presentation: individual or group presentation on: 1) The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses of sexuality and the pathologization of same-sex relationships (female and male); Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and Havelock Ellis's work on sexual inversion and homosexuality. For an excellent source, see the scholarly work of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in Disorderly Conduct and "Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity" (in Readings); 2) The classification of "shell shock" as a psychopathology after World War I, Freud's theories on shell shock and "male hysteria"; 3) The use of technology in W W I (tanks, planes, gas, etc.) and its relationship to both devastating carnage and "improved" commodity capitalism after the war; 4) Woolf's Diary entries during the years she was working on Mrs. Dalloway (called also The Hours, and other tentative titles. See volume 2 of the Diaries and also Hermione Lee's biography of Woolf).

2/26 Morrison, Tar Baby

Charles Ruas, "Toni Morrison" (Taylor-Guthrie 93-118)

Marilyn Sanders Mobley, "Narrative Dilemma: Jadine as Cultural Orphan in Tar Baby" (in Readings)

Roberta Rubenstein, "Pariahs and Community" (in Readings) OR Morrison, "Memory, Creation, and Writing" (in Readings). Read one or the other.

Seminar Presentation: individual presentation on the Tar Baby story and its variations especially in relation to Morrison's novel

3/5 Woolf, The Waves

Jane Marcus, "Britannia Rules the Waves" (in Readings)

Seminar Presentations: group or individual seminar presentations on: 1) The British Empire in India and Africa; 2) British Colonial Administration of India; 3) British Education and the Empire (Joseph Bristow's Empire Boys); 4) The British Empire and Gender (Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather); 5) Woolf's Diary entries while working on The Waves (also called The Moth. See volume Three of Diaries and also Hermione Lee's biography of Woolf).

3/19 Morrison, Song of Solomon

Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" (in Readings)

Claudia Tate, "Toni Morrison" (Taylor-Guthrie 156-170)

Nellie McKay, "An Interview with Toni Morrison" (Taylor-Gutherie 138-155)

Recommended Readings: Susan Willis, "Eruptions of Funk" (in Readings); Valerie Smith, "Song of Solomon: Continuities of Community" (in Readings);

3/26 Morrison, Jazz

Seminar Presentations: 1) Jazz, the stylistic and formal qualities of jazz music, and Duke Ellington's development of the genre; the "Great Migration" from the South to Northern Cities, particularly Harlem; 2) Harlem in the 20s; 3) the East St. Louis attacks by whites upon the Black community and protests against this violence in Harlem and D.C.; 4) Madame C.J. Walker and her creation of an African-American women's controlled beauty industry

4/2 Morrison, Beloved

Morrison, "The Site of Memory" (in Readings)

Marilyn Sanders Mobley, "A Different Remembering: Memory, History, and Meaning in Beloved" (in Readings) OR Marsha Darling, "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison" (Taylor-Guthrie 246-254)

Seminar Presentations: 1) The Margaret Garner story; 2) the Fugitive Slave Law; 3) the Underground Railroad; 4) slave rebellions in the U.S.; 5) Presentation on The Black Book compiled by Middleton Harris, et al. (edited by Toni Morrison)--particularly on the history of slavery and emancipation.

4/9 Morrison, Paradise

1) the Gnostic gospels especially their stories of female Christian gods (use Elaine Pagel's book, The Gnostic Gospels). Relate these to Morrison's novel; 2) the migration of Blacks westward after emancipation into Kansas, Oklahoma and elsewhere; homesteading of Blacks; Black towns and communities in the West

4/16 Woolf, Between the Acts

Woolf, "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (in Readings)

4/23 Scholarly Essay Due

Video: Toni Morrison Uncensored