Evan B Carton

E f316M  l  American Literature - Web-based

Instructor:  Carton, E & C Hutchison

Unique #:  80615

Semester:  Summer 2019, first session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites: One of the following:E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Meeting Time: Taught online with established deadlines.  Online activities and exams may be scheduled.  Go to http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tower/online/courses/for additional information and to test your computer and internet connectivity.

Description: This team-taught, self-paced course in the American literary tradition will explore historical and thematic connections between writers and works from the 17^thto the 21^stcenturies.  In doing so, the course will also provide a variety of opportunities for students to increase their enjoyment of and engagement with literature, as well as their skills as analytical readers and writers.  After an introductory unit in which students will be introduced to some key terms and methods for reading literature more skillfully and enjoyably, the course will be organized historically and divided into five units. Although the readings will proceed more or less chronologically, each unit will include one or more recent or contemporary work.  Students will be encouraged throughout the course to make thematic connections between the literature and historical circumstances of earlier periods and the cultural products and social issues of contemporary life.

Requirements & Grading: Course grades will be based on the following components: short, weekly critical or creative reading response exercises (20%); weekly unit quizzes (20%); weekly online tutorial participation (20%); and a final examination (40%).

The recorded lectures and assignments will open at 12:01 am on the five Mondays of the summer session: Unit 1 on June 10; Unit 2 on June 17; Unit 3 on June 24; Unit 4 on July 1; and Unit 5 on July 8.  In order to receive credit, students must complete their graded assignments for each unit before the next unit opens.

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  35275-35350

Semester:  Spring 2019

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisites: One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description:  This course in the American literary tradition will explore historical and thematic connections between writers and works from the 17^thto the 21^stcenturies.  In doing so, the course will also provide a variety of opportunities for students to increase their enjoyment of and engagement with literature, as well as their skills as analytical readers and writers.  The course readings are organized around a central tension in American political, cultural, and imaginative life—to quote the nation’s two founding documents, the tension between the personal claims of individuals to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the collective interests of “we the people” in “a more perfect union.”

Requirements & Grading: Course grades will be based on the following components: short, weekly critical or creative reading response exercises, to be submitted every Sunday on Canvas (30%); in-lecture i-clicker poll question responses (15%); discussion section quizzes (15%); discussion section participation (15%); and a final essay and close reading exam (25%).

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #: 35715

Semester: Spring 2019

Cross-lists: n/a

Restrictions: n/a

Computer Instruction: No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course will focus on the contemporary American novel in its various cultural, material, historical, and literary historical contexts.  By the end of the class, I hope that students will feel that they have gained a greater knowledge and appreciation of the contemporary American novel and of the contemporary United States, in all the richness and complexity of its internal and global relations.  Another course objective is to help each student increase his or her interest, skills, and pleasure in interpreting literature and language more generally.  Finally, I also hope that the students will feel that the format of the class has encouraged them to connect the literature we read to their lives, to share their insights and feelings about the readings with their peers, and to learn from each other as well as from the readings and me.

Course Format: The principal format forthis class will be discussion.  Some class periods will be devoted to general discussion, prompted by a question or series of questions posed by the instructor or posted (prior to class) by one or more students.  These general discussions may be organized around close attention to a particular passage or around questions of character, theme, context, or formal design in the novel we are reading.  Other general class discussions will be introduced by a student presentation on an issue, passage, character, episode, or context that s/he found interesting, important, and/or affecting in that day’s assignment.  Roughly once a week, we will break the class down into small discussion groups to explore different elements of or perspectives on the day’s reading and to encourage the students in the class to get to know, communicate directly with, and learn from one another.  A few classes, usually at the beginning of our study of each new novel, will be lecture-discussions devoted to the presentation and consideration of biographical and contextual frameworks for reading the upcoming work.

Texts: The required course texts will consist of 8 novels SUCH AS (but not necessarily) the following: Melanie RaeThon, Sweet Hearts; Russell Banks, The Darling; Chang Rae Lee,Native Speaker; Dinaw Mengestu,All Our Names; Joseph O’Neill, Netherland; Dave Eggers,A Hologram for the King; William Gibson, Pattern Recognition; Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Requirements & Grading: Student performance will be evaluated on the following bases:  Class Attendance and Participation (including Discussion Board Posts)--25%; 1 in-class oral presentation--15%; 2 short (1250-1500 word) analytical essays, one of which may be rewritten for credit--30% (15% each); and one take-home final essay exam (30%).

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  81225

Semester:  Summer 2018, first session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Meeting Time:  Taught online with established deadlines.  Online activities and exams may be scheduled.  Go to http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tower/online/courses/ for additional information and to test your computer and internet connectivity.

Description:  This team-taught, self-paced course in the American literary tradition will explore historical and thematic connections between writers and works from the 17^th to the 21^st centuries.  In doing so, the course will also provide a variety of opportunities for students to increase their enjoyment of and engagement with literature, as well as their skills as analytical readers and writers.  After an introductory unit in which students will be introduced to some key terms and methods for reading literature more skillfully and enjoyably, the course will be organized historically and divided into five units.  Although the readings will proceed more or less chronologically, each unit will include one or more recent or contemporary work.  Students will be encouraged throughout the course to make thematic connections between the literature and historical circumstances of earlier periods and the cultural products and social issues of contemporary life.

Requirements & Grading:  Course grades will be based on the following components: short, weekly critical or creative reading response exercises (20%); weekly unit quizzes (20%); weekly online tutorial participation (20%); and a final examination (40%).

The recorded lectures and assignments will open at 12:01 am on the five Mondays of the summer session:  Unit 1 on June 11; Unit 2 on June 18; Unit 3 on June 25; Unit 4 on July 2; and Unit 5 on July 9.  In order to receive credit, students must complete their graded assignments for each unit before the next unit opens.

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  34570-34645

Semester:  Spring 2018

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 303C (or 603A), RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 303C (or 603A).

Description:  This course in the American literary tradition will explore historical and thematic connections between writers and works from the 17^th to the 21^st centuries.  In doing so, the course will also provide a variety of opportunities for students to increase their enjoyment of and engagement with literature, as well as their skills as analytical readers and writers.  The course readings are organized around a central tension in American political, cultural, and imaginative life—to quote the nation’s two founding documents, the tension between the personal claims of individuals to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the collective interests of “we the people” in “a more perfect union.”

Requirements & Grading:  Course grades will be based on the following components: short, weekly critical or creative reading response exercises, to be submitted every Sunday on Canvas (30%); in-lecture i-clicker poll question responses (15%); discussion section quizzes (15%); discussion section participation (15%); and a final essay and close reading exam (25%).

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  34955

Semester:  Spring 2018

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  New York Times columnist, and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Tom Friedman began his November 5, 2008 column like this: "And so it came to pass that on November 4, 2008, shortly before 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended."  Arguably, more recent events have proved him wrong. This course examines the literature of the United States in the context of American social and cultural history from the nominal ending of the Civil War in 1865 to the present moment.  This period encompasses the violent dislocations of black and white communities in the South and of Native American communities in the West, America's rise as an imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It also encompasses the transformative influx of immigrants between the 1880s and the 1920s, women's suffrage, the advent of the automobile, the modern and postmodern city, suburbanization, the Civil Rights and environmental movements, and globalization.  And it is shaped, culturally, by the explosion and rapid obsolescence of various electronic media, by modernism and abstract expressionism in the visual and verbal arts, by psychoanalysis, and by blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll.  This survey will sample literary expressions of, and engagements with, these historical moments and cultural forces that have been crafted, over the past century and a half, by some of our country's most skilled users of language and deft observers of life.  Our objectives in reading and discussing these works will be pleasure, intellectual and ideological challenge, sharpened analytical skills, deepened historical consciousness, and expanded interpretive repertoires.

Texts:  The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1865 to the Present, shorter 9^th edition

(Possible addition of one recent American novel or work of literary nonfiction)

Requirements & Grading:  You will be allowed four unexcused absences during the semester.  Additional absences will result in a lowering of your course grade.  Course grade will be based on class participation (15%), reading quizzes (15%), three short writing assignments in response to class readings (45%), and a final essay and close reading exam (25%).

Instructor:  Lesser, W

Unique #:  35570

Semester:  Fall 2017

Cross-lists:  LAH 350

Restrictions:  English Honors, Plan I Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisite:  Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:  Don DeLillo in Conversation with Contemporary Women Writers --

Upper-division English courses are predominantly organized according to literary-historical and thematic rubrics.  In literary-historical courses, the issue of “influence” is addressed by tracing the effects of earlier literary forms and historical contexts upon the composition and ambitions of later texts.  In “theme” courses, “influence” is addressed by tracking the history of an idea as it is engaged over literary and cultural time.

This English Honors course engages an alternative approach to discussing the relations among texts.  This approach, which puts texts into “conversation” with one another, is widely employed in doctoral dissertations that aspire to investigate the aesthetic, political, and material conditions of textual production and the generation of a national self-consciousness.  This course, then, is meant to cultivate the interpretive perspective and skills for those interested in writing honors theses that can be used in a graduate application, or for students who want to explore another way to work comparatively among several texts.

Our goals can be framed by two questions:  What does it mean to put two novels into conversation with one another? How does one read a novel by regarding it as part of a conversation, not just an author’s singular realization of an aesthetic and political vision?

To explore these questions, we will pair each of four Don DeLillo novels with a topically identical or adjacent novel by a contemporary woman writer.  Although only one of these women novelists is (to date) as celebrated as DeLillo – Marilynne Robinson – all are National Book Award winners.

The Aftermath of 9/11: (DeLillo) Falling Man; (Lorrie Moore) A Gate at the Stairs

Strange Environments: (DeLillo) White Noise; (Marilynne Robinson) Housekeeping

Women in Crisis: (DeLillo) The Body Artist; (Jaimy Gordon) Lord of Misrule

Big Concepts: (DeLillo: Language) The Names; (Jennifer Egan: Temporality)

                                                      A Visit from the Goon Squad

Requirements & Grading:  Final grades will be based on participation (in class, in formal class presentations, and in weekly discussion board posts) (30%); one five-page essay (30%); and one eight-ten-page essay (40%).  Attendance is mandatory.  More than three absences may result in a lowering of the student’s the final grade.

This course will explore issues--and changes in the construction--of place, identity, nation, faith, and form in the American novel over the course of the U. S.’s entrance into, and emergence as a hegemon within, the global cultural and political economy. Though the predominant focus will be on novels of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries that involve transnational settings and themes and/or are produced by writers with bi- or multi-national origins and commitments, the course will include two short touchstone novels from earlier pre- or proto-imperial periods in American literary history.

We will begin with several recent framing essays on transnationalism, globalization, and their implications/opportunities/challenges for literary studies in the 21^st century. Our primary readings after these opening classes will include the following novels: Herman Melvile’s Benito Cereno, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Joan Didion’s Democracy, Don DeLillo’s The Names, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Joseph O’Neill’s, Netherland, Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The reading assignment for the last class period on each novel will include selected two or three recent journal articles (available as pdfs on the class Canvas site) on that author/text. Collectively, these critical readings will provide a sampling of current scholarship on American literature that is engaged with questions of nationhood, globalization, and cultural/political identity and a vehicle for returning our discussions to the course’s overarching themes, issues, and questions of disciplinary method and scope. Each student will be responsible for presenting  short in-class summary and written commentary on one of these journal articles.

The second in-class presentation that will be required of each student follows from my desire to conduct the course in a way that offers individual students--and the class as a whole--the chance to assemble, configure, and debate a canon of novels under the “global American novel” rubric as well as to resist or revise that rubric in ways they find productive for, or compatible with, their particular interests. Accordingly, each student will be asked to choose, read, and present to the class one additional novel that s/he will be responsible for putting in dialog with the common novels on the syllabus and the issues of the course. (This individual selection may be a novel by a U. S. writer or one by a foreign respondent to “global America”—as, in fact, two of the authors on the syllabus, O’Neill and Hamid, themselves are. The 20-minute class presentation on the chosen novel a critical plot and thematic synopsis, and a 10-15 page excerpt, which documents will be made available to the class in advance. The two presentations described above and a final seminar paper on a topic/text(s) of each student’s choosing will comprise the formal course requirements.

E 377M  l  The American Novel after 1960

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  34665

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Writing

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

E 324 (Topic: American Novels after 1960) and 377M may not both be counted.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: This course will focus on the contemporary American novel in its various cultural, material, historical, and literary historical contexts. By the end of the class, I hope that students will feel that they have gained a greater knowledge and appreciation of the contemporary American novel and of the contemporary United States, in all the richness and complexity of its internal and global relations. Another course objective is to help each student increase his or her interest, skills, and pleasure in interpreting literature and language more generally. Finally, I also hope that the students will feel that the format of the class has encouraged them to connect the literature we read to their lives, to share their insights and feelings about the readings with their peers, and to learn from each other as well as from the readings and me.

Course Format: The principal format forthis class will be discussion. Some class periods will be devoted to general discussion, prompted by a question or series of questions posed by the instructor or posted (prior to class) by one or more students. These general discussions may be organized around close attention to a particular passage or around questions of character, theme, context, or formal design in the novel we are reading. Other general class discussions will be introduced by a student presentation on an issue, passage, character, episode, or context that s/he found interesting, important, and/or affecting in that day’s assignment. Roughly once a week, we will break the class down into small discussion groups to explore different elements of or perspectives on the day’s reading and to encourage the students in the class to get to know, communicate directly with, and learn from one another. A few classes, usually at the beginning of our study of each new novel, will be lecture-discussions devoted to the presentation and consideration of biographical and contextual frameworks for reading the upcoming work.

Texts: The required course texts will consist of 8 novels SUCH AS (but not necessarily) the following: Melanie RaeThon, Sweet Hearts; Russell Banks, The Darling; Chang Rae Lee, Native Speaker; Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names; Joseph O’Neill, Netherland; Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King; William Gibson, Pattern Recognition; Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Requirements & Grading: Student performance will be evaluated on the following bases: Class Attendance--10%; Class Participation (including Discussion Board Posts)--20%; 1 in-class oral presentation an annotated bibliography--15%; 2 short (1250-1500 word) analytical essays, one of which may be rewritten for credit--30% (15% each); and one take-home final essay exam (25%).

E 349S  l  Banks and Twain

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  34755

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Flags:  Writing

Prerequisites: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: Russell Banks and Mark Twain--

In an essay entitled “Who Will Tell the People?” that appeared in the 150th anniversary issue of Harpers magazine in 2000, novelist Russell Banks argues that the single most important element of the American narrative and the defining feature of U. S. history and culture has been the African diaspora—the forced transport of Africans to the Americas, and that transport’s complex legacy. “From the start,” Banks writes, invoking the voice of James Baldwin before him, “the central theme in the American drama has been race, and, therefore, violence, and [this theme] shapes every American’s life.” Certainly, this is the central theme of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Ernest Hemingway and many others have regarded as the initiator and exemplar of the social realist tradition in the American novel, and of most of Twain’s other major writings. This class will examine the novels of Twain and Banks--major U. S. novelists of the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, respectively, and writers who offer some of the most challenging explorations of the entanglements of race, violence, nation, personhood, and history in our literature. Both writers begin their careers in the aftermath of epic historical events (the Civil War in Twain’s case; the Civil Rights Movement in Banks’s) that fail to deliver on the radical changes in racialized power relations that they promise; and both chronicle eras of dramatic and controversial national transformation, as the late 19th century U. S. becomes a modern industrial and imperial power and th elate 20th century U. S. becomes a, or the, global superpower.

Texts: Primary readings will include six novels, three by each author, which we will pair and compare. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be followed by Banks’s contemporary rewriting of Huck’s odyssey in his novel Rule of the Bone. Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court will be followed by Banks’s modern day novel of a well-meaning American abroad, The Book of Jamaica. And, finally, Twain’s novel of abortive interracial and transnational relations, Puddn’head Wilson, will be followed by Banks’ novel of Liberian-American familial relations, The Darling. Critical and historical essays will be collected in a packet that will supplement and contextualize our reading of the six novels.

Requirements & Grading: The components of the course grade will be as follows: attendance and participation—15%; two short (4-5 pp.) analytical essays—30%; one in-class presentation—10%; weekly (paragraph-length) discussion board posts or responses—15%; final (8-10 pp.) essay—30%.

E 377K  l  The American Novel after 1920

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  34955

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Flags:  Writing

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: The forty-year period between 1920 and 1960 marked the emergence of many of the central features of the modern social structure, global influence, and literary landscape of the United States. Including the spiritual disillusionment and commercial boom of the first world war’s aftermath, the 1930s depression, the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to northern cities, the second world war and the dawn of the nuclear age, and the postwar consolidation of corporate and consumer capitalism as the nation’s economic and ideological engine, this period also gave rise to a variety of formally and thematically ambitious American novels. We will study seven of these classic mid-20th century novels--three clustered in the mid-1920s, two at the turn between the 1930s and the 1940s, and the final two bookending the 1950s--in their historical and cultural contexts, which will be represented by short historical and journalistic selections and by additional bibliography that students will select in preparing one in-class presentation.

Texts: The seven assigned novels are: Hemingway, The Sun also Rises (1925); Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); Cather, The Professor’s House (1925); Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath (1939); Wright, Native Son (1940); O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952); Heller, Catch-22 (1961).

Requirements & Grading: The principal class format will be discussion. Students will be evaluated on two short papers, one of which may be rewritten for credit, a class presentation and annotated bibliography pertaining to one of the novel’s historical contexts, participation--both in class and in between-class discussion board posts, and a final essay exam. Regular class attendance will also positively factor into the final course grade.

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  35410-35455

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Cultural Diversity

Prerequisites: One of the following: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description: Literature and History--

This course will survey American literature in English from the writings of early European settlers in the 17th century to the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of our own time. The goals of the course are multiple: to offer students an overview of the literary history of the United States and, necessarily, of the larger social and cultural histories in which American literature is produced; to examine several different thematic traditions in American literature and life; and, perhaps most importantly, to provide students with a well-stocked “toolbox” of interpretive tools and methods (and with opportunities to use them) that will help them read not only American literature but any form of cultural expression more actively, more insightfully, and more pleasurably. The class won’t be organized as a continuous chronological survey but rather will retrace the course of American literary history through the lenses of several different organizing themes, each represented by one of the founding phrases of the American political imagination: “The Pursuit of Happiness”; “In God We Trust”; “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death”; and “The Last Best Hope of Earth.”

Texts: The texts for the course will include a large, customized readings packet and one paperback novel.

Requirements & Grading: Students will be responsible for all reading and lecture materials and for regular attendance at lecture and sections. Final grades will be based on lecture and section attendance (20%); three short passage analysis tests (15%); reading quizzes (10%); two out-of-class writing and one out-of class videography assignment (30%); and a final exam (25%). Regular participation and/or energetic engagement in discussion sections may earn up to four extra credit points at the discretion of the Teaching Assistant.

Instructor:  Carton, E

Unique #:  35295-35350

Semester:  Spring 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Literature and History--

This course will survey American literature in English from the writings of early European settlers in the 17th century to the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of our own time. The goals of the course are multiple: to offer students an overview of the literary history of the United States and, necessarily, of the larger social and cultural histories in which American literature is produced; to examine several different thematic traditions in American literature and life; and, perhaps most importantly, to provide students with a well-stocked “toolbox” of interpretive tools and methods (and with opportunities to use them) that will help them read not only American literature but any form of cultural expression more actively, more insightfully, and more pleasurably. The class won’t be organized as a continuous chronological survey but rather will retrace the course of American literary history through the lenses of several different organizing themes, each represented by one of the founding phrases of the American political imagination: “The Pursuit of Happiness”; “In God We Trust”; “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death”; and “The Last Best Hope of Earth.”

Texts: The texts for the course will include a large, customized readings packet and one paperback novel.

Requirements & Grading: Students will be responsible for all reading and lecture materials and for regular attendance at lecture and sections. Final grades will be based on lecture and section attendance (20%); three short passage analysis tests (15%); reading quizzes (10%); two out-of-class writing and one out-of class videography assignment (30%); and a final exam (25%). Regular participation and/or energetic engagement in discussion sections may earn up to four extra credit points at the discretion of the Teaching Assistant.

Instructor:  Carton, E            Areas:  n/a

Unique #:  35155-35170            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Fall 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Literature and History--

This course will survey American literature in English from the writings of early European settlers in the 17th century to the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of our own time. The goals of the course are multiple: to offer students an overview of the literary history of the United States and, necessarily, of the larger social and cultural histories in which American literature is produced; to examine several different thematic traditions in American literature and life; and, perhaps most importantly, to provide students with a well-stocked “toolbox” of interpretive tools and methods (and with opportunities to use them) that will help them read not only American literature but any form of cultural expression more actively, more insightfully, and more pleasurably. The class won’t be organized as a continuous chronological survey but rather will retrace the course of American literary history through the lenses of several different organizing themes, each represented by one of the founding phrases of the American political imagination: “The Pursuit of Happiness”; “In God We Trust”; “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death”; and “The Last Best Hope of Earth.”

Texts: The texts for the course will include a large, customized readings packet and one paperback novel.

Requirements & Grading: Students will be responsible for all reading and lecture materials and for regular attendance at lecture and sections. Final grades will be based on lecture and section attendance (20%); three short passage analysis tests (15%); reading quizzes (10%); two out-of-class writing and one out-of class videography assignment (30%); and a final exam (25%). Regular participation and/or energetic engagement in discussion sections may earn up to four extra credit points at the discretion of the Teaching Assistant.

Instructor:  Carton, E            Areas:  VI / I

Unique #:  36025            Flags:  Independent Inquiry; Writing

Semester:  Fall 2013            Restrictions:  English Honors, Plan I Honors

Cross-lists:  LAH 350            Computer Instruction:  No

Topic previously offered as E 379S (embedded topic: Literature of American Warfare).

Prerequisites: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: This class will explore the circumstances, practices, collective beliefs and personal experiences of American wars and warfare as represented in fictional and nonfictional accounts, in prose and poetry, and in battlefield and home front representations. Though the course will not be organized chronologically, it will include accounts of and responses to a broad historical array of conflicts from the 17th century wars between the earliest English settlers and the Native American tribes of New England through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the young current century. These conflicts will be examined in light of America's changing self-images and position in the world, in light of the U. S.'s westward (and eastward) territorial and imperial expansions, and in light of the powerful and abiding American ideology of perpetual innocence, righteousness, chosenness, and manifest destiny among the nations and of that ideology's equally abiding critique. Contestation over questions of masculinity and femininity, patriotism and treason, and racial identity and otherness will also, inescapably, be matters of concern, as will be questions of the politics and poetics of different media, forms, and genres of war's representation.

Texts: Course readings will likely include short and occasionally longer works by some of the following writers: William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Dalton Trumbo, Joseph Heller, Adrienne Rich, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Herr, Myra McPherson, Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Helena Maria Viramontes, Philip Gourevitch, Helen Benedict, and Kevin Powers.

Requirements & Grading: Students will be evaluated on the basis of class attendance and participation, Blackboard discussion posts, two analytical essays, and a final research paper.

Blackboard discussion posts, 25%; Analytical essays, 30%; Attendance and participation, 20%; Final Research Paper, 25%.

Instructor:  Carton, E            Areas:  III / U

Unique #:  35685            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Spring 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: A survey of responses by 20th and 21st century American novelists to the terrors and pleasures, marvels and commonplaces, determinisms and freedoms, erotics and ethics of modernity. This course will take up 6-8 novels by regionally, ethnically, aesthetically, and ideologically diverse writers.

Texts: I have not yet chosen readings. My aim is to select novels that, in addition to offering the sorts of range suggested above, will each give some combination of pleasure, provocation, and challenge.

Requirements & Grading: The principal class format will be discussion. Students will be evaluated on two short papers, one of which may be rewritten for credit, a class presentation, occasional unannounced reading quizzes, and a final essay exam. Regular class attendance and participation in discussion will be positively factored into the final course grade.

Instructor:  Carton, E            Areas:  I / H

Unique #:  35475            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  n/a

Prerequisites: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: In the decades following American independence, political and intellectual leaders in the U. S. sought out and promoted examples of American literary talent in order to make the nationalistic argument that the young country was developing a culture commensurate with its growing economic and political status in the world. Nathaniel Hawthorne--the son of a Massachusetts sea captain and the descendant of original Puritan settlers in the New World, including a prominent judge who sent 19 accused witches to their deaths in the 1692 Salem witch trials--was an attractive representative of American literary talent, both for his artistic skill as a fabricator of mysterious plots, rich symbolic motifs, and complex moral dilemmas, and for his American historical subject matter. Hawthorne’s canonization as one of the most illustrious representatives of a new American tradition in English-language literature was somewhat ironic, however, since he tended to take a skeptical, or at least an ambivalent, view of many of his countrymen’s leading articles of faith In an optimistic, expansionistic, future-oriented, outward-looking nation that was both entranced with scientific and industrial progress and convinced of its own virtue and piety, Hawthorne often looked backward and looked inward, drawing lessons from American history and from human psychology about some of  the darker dimensions—self-deception, self-righteousness, egotistical overreaching, emotional and physical violence toward others--of economic, political, intellectual, and religious ambition. Yet, it is his very equivocal perspective on the nation’s formative years, circumstances, and principles that makes Hawthorne’s fiction such a revealing and challenging portrait of America.

Texts: Our readings in this class will include all four of Hawthorne’s novels—The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, plus a selection of his short stories, passages from his campaign biography for President Franklin Pierce, and his Civil War essay “Chiefly About War Matters, by a Peaceable Man.

Requirements & Grading: Students will write three short (3-4 pp) analytical or bibliographical essays during the semester plus a longer (8-10 pp) research paper. These four pieces of written work will comprise 70% of each student’s course grade. The remaining 30% will be based on attendance and participation and performance on occasional reading quizzes.

Instructor:  Carton, E            Areas:  n/a

Unique #:  34755-34800            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Spring 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Literature and History--

This course will survey American literature in English from the writings of early European settlers in the 17th century to the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of our own time. The goals of the course are multiple: to offer students an overview of the literary history of the United States and, necessarily, of the larger social and cultural histories in which American literature is produced; to examine several different thematic traditions in American literature and life; and, perhaps most importantly, to provide students with a well-stocked “toolbox” of interpretive tools and methods (and with opportunities to use them) that will help them read not only American literature but any form of cultural expression more actively, more insightfully, and more pleasurably. The class won’t be organized as a continuous chronological survey but rather will retrace the course of American literary history through the lenses of several different organizing themes, each represented by one of the founding phrases of the American political imagination: “One Nation, Under God, Indivisible”; “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death”; “The Pursuit of Happiness”; “The Last Best Hope of Earth”; and “e pluribus unum.”

Texts: The texts for the course will include a large, customized readings packet and two paperback novels.

Requirements & Grading: Students will be responsible for all reading and lecture materials and for regular attendance at lecture and sections. Fifty percent of the course grade will be based on the midterm and the final exams. The other fifty percent will be based on attendance, participation, and several short analyses of passages from the readings that students will write in discussion section and have an opportunity to revise and resubmit for a higher grade.

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: A survey of responses by 20th and 21st century American novelists to the terrors and pleasures, marvels and commonplaces, determinisms and freedoms, erotics and ethics of modernity. This course will take up 8-10 novels by regionally, ethnically, aesthetically, and ideologically diverse writers. 

Texts: I have not yet chosen readings. My aim is to select novels that, in addition to offering the sorts of range suggested above, will each give some combination of pleasure, provocation, and challenge. 

Requirements & Grading: The principal class format will be discussion. Students will be evaluated on two short papers, periodic unannounced reading quizzes, and a final essay exam. Regular class attendance and participation in discussion will be positively factored into the final course grade.

Religion and American Literary History (revised course description)

Sixteen years after Jenny Franchot’s challenge in the pages of American Literature that  “religious belief has become the ‘unthought’” of a discipline ostensibly focused on the shaping aesthetics, ideologies, institutions, and personal and collective subject positions  of literary production and reception in the U. S., a renewed scholarly conversation about the forms and presence of religion in American literature and American literary history has commenced. One strand of this conversation revolves around re-examinations and re-formulations of the “secularization thesis”—the expectation of a progressively rational, worldly, and “disenchanted” modernity—in light of its arguable refutation by, or at least uncertain and uneven applicability to, the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Another seeks more particularly to (re-)think religious belief in the U. S. (historically, one of the most anomalous countries in the world in the apparent non-correlation of prosperity’s increase with faith’s decline among its citizenry) by examining what, in her recent study, Tracy Fessenden calls the “unmarked Christianity” that, often evacuated from its institutional locations, takes up “its presence ‘everywhere,’ not least in secular guise.” “Religion and American Literary History” proposes to engage graduate students in these conversations, in the potential literary historical reorientations or shifts in emphasis that they invite, and in the pursuit of the timely and trans-disciplinary publication opportunities that they afford.

The opening three-week unit of the class, “Critical Frames and Textual Points of Reference,” will juxtapose critical readings in the history of American religion (by William James, Mark Noll, Amanda Porterfield, Eric Schmidt, Stephen Prothero, Vine Deloria, and Harold Bloom) and in the history and theory of American literature (by R. W. B. Lewis, Sacvan Bercovitch, Richard Poirier, Jane Tompkins, Joanna Brooks, and Elisa New) with classic instances of religion’s cultural work in writings by John Winthrop, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, David Walker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William Apess. Three subsequent units will cluster around three fertile literary and religious historical “moments”—circa 1850, 1950, and 2000—and examine selected poems across this 150 year range as well as prose texts by: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Joseph Smith; Baldwin, O’Connor, Malamud, and Paul Tillich; Marilynne Robinson, Annie Dillard, and Tim LaHaye.

The course aims in this manner to provide students with a broad critical and historical framework and some resonant textual touchstones for their individual scholarly examinations of any aspect or instance of religion in/and American literary history that they wish to pursue. The final two class sessions will be devoted to the presentation and class discussion of each student’s prospectus for a 20-page final paper. This final essay, along with class participation, and occasional Blackboard postings of short reading responses will comprise the basis for each student’s course grade.

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Course Description: Religion and American Literature--

In Democracy in America, which nearly two centuries after its publication remains one of the most insightful and influential portraits of the character of American political and cultural life, the French social analyst Alexis de Tocqueville writes: “On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye. . . . [In Europe], I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another; they reigned together on the same soil.” From the 17^th century emigration of English religious dissenters to the colony of Massachusetts to 21^st century debate over Barack Obama’s religious beliefs, religion has provided a defining context for Americans’ and America’s ways of being in the world and has shaped many of the defining contests (psychological and cultural contests as well as social and political ones) of American life. This course will examine the religious contests and contexts of American literature across a number of literary genres and across four centuries of the nation’s history. Course goals include: a) deepening and broadening student understanding of the two terms of the course’s title (religion and American literature) and their linkages; and b) improving students’ skills as critical readers of, researchers on, and writers about literature.

Texts: In the first half of the course, we will read scriptural selections from The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, and The Book of Mormon, and personal histories, treatises, sermons, and short stories by William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Tom Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. In the second half of the course we will read: Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware; John Niehardt, Black Elk Speaks; James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain; Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel, Flannery O’Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge; and selected essays by Marilyn Robinson.

Grading: Attendance and Reading Quizzes: 20%; three short (3-4 pp) papers, one of them an annotated bibliography: 45%; peer editing: 10%; 7-8 pp. final research paper: 25%.

The Modern American Novel

Carton
E. 377K, Unique # 35040
TT 8:00-9:30 in GAR 1.126

Office Hours:

I will hold office hours in Parlin 223 between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm on Wednesdays. I am also happy to schedule an appointment to meet at another time if a student requests a meeting and my regularly scheduled office hours are not convenient. The best way to reach me between classes for any reason is by email: e.carton@mail.utexas.edu

Graded Work & Grading Policy:

Your course grade will be based on attendance (20%), 5 five-minute reading quizzes (20%), two short critical essays (30%), and a final essay exam (30%).

Attendance and participation:

If you have no more than three absences, you will receive the full 20 points for the attendance portion of your grade. Each absence over three will lower the attendance portion of your grade by 10 points. Missing more than 5 classes will result in an automatic F for the course. Late arrival after attendance has been taken will count as an absence; early departure will also count as an absence. Regular and thoughtful participation in class discussion may earn you up to 10 extra credit points.

Reading Quizzes:

I will give six unannounced reading quizzes over the course of the semester—usually at or near the beginning of the class hour. Each quiz will consist of 4 short answer questions worth one point apiece. Your five best quiz results will make up your 20% quiz grade. No missed quizzes may be made up.

Critical Response Papers:

There are two short critical essays, each worth 15 points, due in my office (Parlin 223) by 5:00 pm on March 11 and on April 22, both Thursdays. Each response paper should examine one novel—or compare some aspect of a pair of novels—assigned during the period preceding the paper due date. In other words, the first paper may examine any novel or pair of novels among our first four assigned texts:Winesburg, Ohio; Light in August; Wise Blood; and Catch-22. The second paper may examine any one or pair of the next three assigned novels: Housekeeping; Philadelphia Fire; and Gain. Each short critical response paper must be submitted in a word-processed or typed hard copy and should be 3-4 pages (or roughly 1000 words) long. Students are responsible for selecting which novel or novels they wish to write about and what the focus of their paper will be. All short critical essays, however, must take one of the following three approaches:

• Approach #1 (formal): A close reading of an individual novel that shows how some formal aspect or element of the text—its style, its structure, a particular metaphor, motif, passage, or literary device—contributes to its signification (its overall meaning, purpose, or theme).
• Approach #2 (comparative): A comparison of two novels that makes an argument about how the two connect and/or where they differ and about why that connection or difference is worth drawing, what it illuminates or reveals about the two works, their authors, or the concerns or circumstances they share.
• Approach #3 (historical/contextual): An exploration of the novel’s response to or position in some larger historical or social context that is pertinent to its moment in time, its setting, the community or purpose to which it is addressed, or some real world issue with which it deals.

Note: Irrespective of their approach in these response papers, students may not consult any outside critical sources on the authors and novels they write about. Students who take Approach #1 or Approach #2 must develop and support their ideas only by means of their independent and original reading and thinking about the primary text(s) they are discussing. Students who take Approach #3 must use and reference in an attached bibliography no less than three and no more than five outside sources of information on the historical or social context (not on the novel itself) that they are expounding in relation to the work they have chosen to consider.

Final Essay Exam:

The final exam will consist of two broadly thematic essay questions. Students must choose six novels from the syllabus to discuss in their final exam essays—three different novels for each question—with the exception that one question will require every student to use The Magician’s Assistant as one of the three discussion texts.

Students with Disabilities:

Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, 471-6259.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.

Literature of American Warfare

Carton
E. 379S, Unique #35150
TTH 11:00-12:30 in PAR 210

Syllabus and Course Information

Office Hours:

I will hold office hours in Parlin 223 between between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm on Wednesdays. I am also happy to schedule an appointment to meet at another time if a student is unable to meet with me during my regular hours. The best way to reach me between classes is by email: e.carton@mail.utexas.edu

Graded Work:

Your course grade will be based on attendance (20%); Blackboard discussion posts (20%); a one-page (single-spaced) response to a selected reading assignment, presented in class (15%); a 1000 word out of class essay (15%); and a 2500-3000 word final paper (30%).

Attendance and participation:

If you have no more than three absences, you will receive the full 20 points for the attendance portion of your grade. Each absence over three will lower the attendance portion of your grade by 10 points. Missing more than 5 classes will result in an automatic F for the course. Late arrival after attendance has been taken will count as an absence; early departure will also count as an absence. Regular and thoughtful participation in class discussion may earn you up to 6 extra credit points.

Students with Disabilities:

Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, 471-6259.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.