Coleman Hutchison

E 340  l The American Novel before 1920

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #: 35050

Semester:  Fall 2019

Cross-lists:  n/a

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

Description: This survey of the early American novel will emphasize the diversity—and the depravity—of the first 100-plus years of novel writing in the United States.  We will read both familiar and unfamiliar authors and pay particular attention to issues of popularity and reception.  Why did these novels command such a large audience of readers?  What social and cultural changes did these novels both respond to and help to produce?  Along the way we’ll encounter an array of narrative techniques and great generic diversity.  The eclectic reading list promises, among other things, the picaresque, the travel narrative, romance, realism, and sentimentalism; courtroom dramas, forensic evidence, race riots, and adultery; cannibalism, “deviant” sexuality, and America’s first spontaneous combustion.  In sum, the course will: offer a survey of the American novel between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries; model methods of literary and cultural interpretation; help students to improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Texts: Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple(1791) (Penguin: 978-0140390803) • Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, the Transformation(1798) (Penguin: 978-0140390797) • Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) (Penguin; 978-0140434880) • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1852) (Norton; 978-0393264890) • Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly(1852) (Penguin: 978-0140390032) • William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham(1885) (Penguin: 978-0140390308) • Kate Chopin, The Awakening(1899) (Penguin; 978-0142437322) • Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition(1901) (Penguin: 978-0140186864)

Requirements & Grading: 

Participation (30% of final grade)

Students are expected to be active participants in classroom and electronic discussions. Reading quizzes, informal presentations, and Canvas postings will be used to evaluate preparedness for class.  Attendance is mandatory; repeated unexcused absences will affect your grade.

Canvas postings: “Friday Night Lights”

Each week, between 11 am on Thursday and noon on Monday, students will post on Canvas brief responses to the previous week’s reading. These responses should pose a critical question, offer an interpretation of a passage, or rebut something said in discussion.  Alternatively, students may use their response to reply to another student’s question, interpretation, or rebuttal.  Responses should be formal and several substantive sentences in length.  Needless to say, you may post to Canvas more than once per week.  NB: You are responsible for checking our Canvas course site regularly; please be sure to read through each weekend’s discussion board postings before class on Tuesday: https://canvas.utexas.edu/.

Essays (70% of final grade)

Students will produce two essays for the course.  The first will offer a 4- to 5-page close reading and constitute 30% of the final grade for the course.  NB: There will be an opportunity to revise and resubmit the first essay.  The second essay will be a bit longer (i.e., 6- to 8-pages) and constitute 40% of the final grade for the course.  Essay assignments will follow shortly.

Note: the early American novel is not known for its brevity.  This will be a reading-intensive course.  Students are expected to have read and be able to discuss each day's reading assignment.

E 342S  l  Southern Literature

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #: 35055

Semester: Fall 2019

Cross-lists: n/a

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

Description: This course surveys the long literary history of the U.S. South, a notoriously diffuse and “deviant” region that has played an outsize role in defining the nation of which it is a part. Indeed, authors and readers alike have been obsessed with “The South” since the earliest attempts at producing a distinct and distinctive American literature.  In making sense of this obsession, we will compass the states of the South Atlantic, East South Central and West South Central regions.  Our tour will include stops in Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, and the Mississippi Delta, as well as cities like Atlanta, Georgia, and New Orleans, Louisiana.  Along the way, we will consider representations of plantation life, slavery, and the Civil War; religion and spirituality; rural poverty and “aberrant” sexualities; Civil Rights and interracial relations; and immigration and the remapping of the region.  Most urgently, we will ask, again and again, who defines the South and to what ends?

Course Objectives

This course will: offer an introduction to and survey of the literature of U.S. South; model methods of literary and cultural interpretation; help students to improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Texts:  Kate Chopin, Bayou Folkand A Night in Acadie(Penguin; 978-0140436815); William Faulkner, Selected Short Stories (Modern Library; 978-0679424789); Katherine Anne Porter, The Old Order (Mariner; 978-0156685191); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God(Harper Perennial; 978-0061120060); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men(Mariner; 978-0618127498); Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire(New Directions; 978-0811216029); Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories(HBJ; 978-0156364652); Cormac McCarthy, Child of God(Vintage; 978-0679728740); Randall Kenan, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead(Mariner; 978-0156505154); Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard(Mariner; 978-0618872657); Lila Quintero Weaver, Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White(Alabama; 978-0817357146)

Additional texts will be available via Canvas (C).

Requirements & Grading:Students will produce one 4-5-page essay (20% of the final grade for the course), a revision of the 4-5-page essay (10%), and one 8-12-page final project (40%).  The remaining 30% of the final grade for the course will be based on participation in in-class and electronic discussions, including weekly Canvas posts.

E s338  l  American Literature: from 1865 to Present

Instructor:  Hutchison, C & P Barrish

Unique #:  80784

Semester:  Summer 2019, second term

Cross-lists:  n/a

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

Description: In this course we will read important fiction and poetry from the late 19^thcentury to as near the present as we can get in a summer course.  Major movements in American Literature include Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism, and we will read major works in each of these categories.

Texts: Readings will be drawn from the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition, Volume 2 (Norton; ISBN: 978-0393264531). All texts available at the Co-Op, 2246 Guadalupe; additional materials are available via Canvas (C).

Requirements & Grading (subject to change):  two short explicative papers (15% each); occasional pop quizzes (30%); final exam (40%).

Instructor:  Carton, E & Hutchison, C

Unique #:  81595

Semester:  Summer 2017, first session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites:  One of the following: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 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 5; Unit 2 on June 12; Unit 3 on June 19; Unit 4 on June 26; and Unit 5 on July 3.  In order to receive credit, students must complete their graded assignments for each unit before the next unit opens.

SMOC

Instructor:  Carton, E & Hutchison, C

Unique #:  35060-35235

Semester:  Spring 2017

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Meeting Time:  MW 11:30a-1:00p plus one hour of discussion section on Th, or F.  Students are encouraged to visit http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tower/online/courses/ to test their computer and network connection and learn about the course structure.

Description:  This team-taught 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 online participation and poll responses (15%); discussion section quizzes (15%); discussion section participation (15%); and a final essay and close reading exam (25%).

The format of this class is an exciting and experimental “hybrid” of interactive online and in-person lectures and discussions. Lectures will be filmed and broadcast live from two adjoining studios in Mezes Hall.  Students may log in remotely from any computer for each 75-minute class session but will have participatory tasks to perform (including real-time quizzes, polls, questions, and comments).  And each class will feature different instructional components, including short lecture segments, debates, and interviews with writers and scholars, and live, in-studio seminar discussions with fellow students.  All students will also have face-to-face interactions with their classmates in weekly, required 20-person TA-led discussion sections.  Students will also have the opportunity to sign up for voluntary “Happy Hour with the Professors” conversations, which will be held weekly.

E 349S  l  15-Edgar Allan Poe

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #:  35440

Semester:  Fall 2016

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 studies the varied work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845).  A master of a number of literary genres—poetry, short fiction, and criticism, to name but three—Poe remains one of most popular and perplexing figures in American literature.  More than two centuries after his birth, Poe continues to exert an outsize influence on a number of literary traditions, including detective fiction, science fiction, horror, hoax, and satire.  Over the course of the term we will read many of Poe’s tales, a good deal of his poetry, select pieces of criticism, and his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837).  In measuring Poe’s achievement, we will gauge his influence on subsequent generations of writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Roger Corman, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, and Mat Johnson.  We will also catalog the strange places that Poe shows up in contemporary culture: midnight movies, rock operas, episodes of The Simpsons, even NFL franchises.  Finally, the course will take full advantage of UT’s Harry Ransom Center, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of Poe materials.

Texts:  Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (Library of America; 978-1883011383) • Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories (Oxford, 978-0199672066) • Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage; 978-0679745426) • Mat Johnson, Pym: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau; 978-0812981766).

In addition, there will be a required course packet.

Requirements & Grading:  Students will produce one 4-5-page essay (20% of the final grade for the course), a revision of the 4-5-page essay (10%), and one 8-10-page final project (40%).  The remaining 30% of the final grade for the course will be based on participation in in-class and electronic discussions, including weekly Canvas posts, and a presentation on a latter-day representation or reimagining of Poe.

E s321  l  Shakespeare: Selected Plays-GBR

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #:  82090

Semester:  Summer 2016, second session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  Oxford Program participants

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description:  This course offers an uncommon opportunity to study England’s great poet and playwright “on location.”  In addition to Shakespeare’s sonnets, we will study A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet.

Needless to say, we will take full advantage of our setting, touring Shakespearean heritage sites and seeing several performances of Shakespeare’s plays at venues like the Garrick Theatre (London), the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (Stratford-upon-Avon), and Shakespeare’s Globe (London).  In considering the relations between page and stage, the course will highlight the interpretive insights offered by present-day performances.  The course will also underscore the rather complicated textual histories of all of Shakespeare’s works.

Texts:  For ease of use and travel, we will use Pelican Shakespeare editions: 

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (978-0140714555) •
• Romeo and Juliet (978-0143128571) •
• Macbeth (978-0143128564) •
• Shakespeare's Sonnets (978-0140714531) •
• Hamlet (978-0143128540)

Requirements & Grading:  The primary written work for the course will be a journal that records student responses to the plays we are reading and the performances we are seeing (60% of the final grade for the course).  In-class participation will also be crucially important (30% of the final grade for the course).  Finally, students will be asked to memorize and perform one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (10%).

E 316M  l  American Literature

Instructor:  Carton, E & Hutchison, C

Unique #:  34180-34375

Semester:  Spring 2016

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Meeting Time: MW 11:30a-1:00p plus one hour of discussion section on W, Th, or F.  Students are encouraged to visit http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tower/online/courses/ to test their computer and network connection and learn about the course structure.

Description: This team-taught course in the American literary tradition will explore historical and thematic connections between writers and works from the 17th to the 21st 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 (20%); two in-class exams (40%); in-lecture quizzes and response exercises (15%); discussion section participation (15%); and a final reflection essay (10%).

The format of this class is an exciting and experimental “hybrid” of interactive online and in-person lectures and discussions. Lectures will be filmed and broadcast live from two adjoining studios in Mezes Hall. Students may log in remotely from any computer for each 75-minute class session but will have participatory tasks to perform (including real-time quizzes, polls, questions, and comments). And each class will feature different instructional components, including short lecture segments, debates, and interviews with writers and scholars, and live, in-studio seminar discussions with fellow students. All students will also have face-to-face interactions with their classmates in weekly, required 20-person TA-led discussion sections and in voluntary weekly “happy hour” conversations with the professors.

E 321  l  Shakespeare: Selected Plays

Instructor: 

Unique #:  34415

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Global cultures

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: This course examines select Shakespeare plays, some of the most celebrated works in the English language, and focuses on the organizing principle of family. In modern society we define “family” in complex and variable ways, but Shakespeare’s depictions of familial relationships are no less nuanced. The importance of lineage to nearly every aspect of life in Renaissance England—at court, in religion, in legal contexts, and class structures—will inform how we read the plays' parent-child, sibling, and spousal relations. Simultaneously we will consider how the Renaissance virtue of “self-fashioning,” as well as increasing opportunities for social mobility in Shakespeare’s time, began to challenge the primacy of one’s birth (or family) as the key social determinant. In light of such historical concerns, we will ask how family ties differ from or exceed biological ties. What do parents owe their children, and what do children owe parents? What determines one’s nature—birth or the will? Can a parent truly disown a child? Can a child disown a parent? Are children the property of their parents? Is a wife the property of her husband? What is incumbent on those who are married in the flesh or yoked by birth? We will also pay close attention to form in this class: characterization, style, and dramaturgy.

Texts: Readings may include: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, Henry IV, Part 1, The Tempest. Students must have a critical edition of each play (e.g. Arden, Oxford, Pelican, etc.).

Requirements & Grading (tentative): Participation (15%); Quizzes (25%); Short essay (25%); Long essay (35%).

E 316M  l  American Literature

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #:  34470-34515

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  Cultural Diversity in the U.S.

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

Description: Literature in history --

This course offers an idiosyncratic sampling of the “masterworks” of American literature—that is, those texts from the rather messy literary history of the United States that have endured. Over the course of the term we will explore themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality; consider the relationship between literature and social change; and study the effects of industrialization, immigration, and globalization. In doing so, we will also address a number of urgent questions: How has American literature been shaped by history? And how, in turn, has this literature helped to shape American history? What does it mean to be “American” at any given moment? What allows a piece of literature to endure?

Texts: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter eighth edition, ed. Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine. ISBN: 978-0393918854. (Representative authors include: John Winthrop, Samson Occom, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, and Li-Young Lee)

We will also read one novel, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Scribner,ISBN: 978-0743297332), and listen to one record, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA (Columbia Records, ASIN: B0000025UW).

Requirements & Grading: Two exams (60%); attendance, participation, & quizzes (40%).

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #:  35850

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  LAH 350

Flags:  Writing

Restrictions:  English Honors

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

Description: In the nearly 150 years since the defeat of the Confederate States of America more than 60,000 books and pamphlets about the American Civil War have been published. (To put this staggering figure in context, that is a publication rate of nearly one book per day every day since the cessation of hostilities.) For many, this persistent interest in the war speaks to the continued relevance of the issues raised by, and addressed in, America’s “great internecine conflict”: slavery, race, regional identity, political sovereignty, federalism, &c.  Several cultural historians have gone so far as to suggest that the Civil War is still being fought—not on the battlefields of Chickamauga, Manassas, or Antietam, but on the battlefield of American cultural memory. This course will consider the American Civil War (1861-1865) not in terms of its military or political history but in relation to the ways literary and cultural texts have remembered and rewritten it. Our discussion will focus on five periods of American cultural memory: the immediate postwar period (i.e., 1865-1867), the 1890s, 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s.  How did subsequent generations narrate the causes and effects of the war? How do contemporary events affect the way a given generation reads and rewrites the war? What agendas are being brought to bear on representations of this fierce and bloody conflict?

Required Texts:

Books

Alexander Gardner, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Dover [1866]), ISBN: 978-0486227313

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories (Penguin [1895]), ISBN: 978-0143039358

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage [1936]), ISBN: 978-0679732181

Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (Bison/Nebraska [1961]), ISBN: 978-0803298019

Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998),

ISBN: 978-0679758334

Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), ISBN: 978-0618872657

Required film viewings:

Victor Fleming, David O. Selznick, et al, Gone with the Wind (MGM, 1939)

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, South Park, “The Red Badge of Gayness” (Comedy Central, 1999)

Kevin Willmott, CSA: The Confederate States of America (IFC, 2004)

In addition, there is a coursepack (CP) of required primary and secondary materials, including poetry by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frances E.W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, and Derek Walcott; short fiction by Silas Weir Mitchell, Flannery O’Connor, and George Saunders; essays by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington; and songs by Bob Dylan and The Band.

All books are available at the Co-Op, 2246 Guadalupe; the coursepack is available at Jenn’s Copy & Binding, 2200 Guadalupe.

Requirements & Grading: Students will be evaluated on the basis of several short essays (3-4 pages), in-class participation, and a final research project.

Essays: 40%; Participation (i.e., attendance, in-class and electronic discussion): 20%; Final research project: 40%.

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #:  83135

Semester:  Summer 2014, first session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  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 in history --

This course offers an idiosyncratic sampling of the “masterworks” of American literature—that is, those texts from the rather messy literary history of the United States that have endured. Over the course of the term we will explore themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality; consider the relationship between literature and social change; and study the effects of industrialization, immigration, and globalization. In doing so, we will also address a number of urgent questions: How has American literature been shaped by history? And how, in turn, has this literature helped to shape American history? What values does this literature embody and at what point in time? What does it mean to be “American” at any given moment? What, finally, allows a piece of literature to endure?

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter eighth edition, ed. Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine (Norton; ISBN: 978-039398854) (NB: Representative authors include: John Winthrop, Samson Occom, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, and Li-Young Lee)

• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (Scribner; ISBN: 978-0743297332)

In addition, students will need an i>clicker (1, 2, or +): http://www1.iclicker.com/.

All texts and ancillaries are available at the University Co-Op, 2246 Guadalupe.

Requirements & Grading: Three examinations (80%); attendance, participation, & quizzes (20%).

Instructor:  Hutchison, C

Unique #:  35255-35290

Semester:  Spring 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

Prerequisites: English 603A, Rhetoric and Writing 306, 306Q, or Tutorial Course 603A; and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Literature in history --

This course offers an idiosyncratic sampling of the “masterworks” of American literature—that is, those texts from the rather messy literary history of the United States that have endured. Over the course of the term we will explore themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality; consider the relationship between literature and social change; and study the effects of industrialization, immigration, and globalization. In doing so, we will also address a number of urgent questions: How has American literature been shaped by history? And how, in turn, has this literature helped to shape American history? What does it mean to be “American” at any given moment? What allows a piece of literature to endure?

Texts: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter eighth edition, ed. Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine. ISBN: 978-0393918854. (Representative authors include: John Winthrop, Samson Occom, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, and Li-Young Lee)

We will also read one novel, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Scribner,ISBN: 978-0743297332), and listen to one record, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA (Columbia Records, ASIN: B0000025UW).

Requirements & Grading: Three exams (75%); attendance, participation, & quizzes (25%).

Re-Reading the American South in Literature and Film

Course Description

In recent years the study of the literature and culture of the U.S. South has been reinvigorated by a wholesale reassessment of the region’s place in the world. Drawing on the methodological tools of comparative cultural history, postcolonial and globalization theories, and indigenous, transnational, and global south studies, the “New Southern Studies” has reimagined both its objects of study and its fields of inquiry. This course seeks to re-read the South by the light of these new critical energies.

Although the course will revisit a number of foundational southern texts—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind, Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire,  Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction, and John Boorman’s Deliverance—its emphasis will be on recent and contemporary southern literature and film. Along the way, we will consider representations of plantation life, slavery, and the Civil War; rural poverty and “aberrant” sexualities; Civil Rights and interracial relations; and immigration and the remapping of region. Of both literary and filmic texts, we will ask, again and again, who defines the South and to what ends?   

Course Objectives

This course will: model methods of literary and cultural interpretation; help students to improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills; emphasize opportunities for research and pedagogical innovation; and offer an idiosyncratic survey of the literature of the twentieth- and twenty-first century U.S. South.

Course Requirements and Evaluation Method

• Participation (10% of final grade)

Students are expected to be active participants in class discussions. (This is, after all, a graduate seminar.) Among other things, they will be required to contribute to a course tumblr page.

• Book Review (30% of final grade)

Each student will produce a 4- to 6-page review of a scholarly book.

• Symposium Presentation (50% of final grade)

The course will culminate in a symposium in which students will make twenty-minute presentations of original research.

• Prospectus (10% of final grade)

Following the symposium, students will produce a short prospectus for an article-length expansion of their presentation.

Course Texts

NB: Readings will be drawn from the following list.

Books

• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
• Flannery O’Connor, The Collected Stories (1971)
• Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (1973)
• Ellen Douglas, Can’t Quit You, Baby (1988)
• Randall Kenan, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992)
• Oscar Casares, Brownsville (2001)
• Valerie Martin, Property (2003)
• Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (2006)
• Cynthia Shearer, The Celestial Jukebox (2005)
• Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (2009)
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

Films

• Victor Fleming, Gone With the Wind (1939)
• Elia Kazan, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
• John Boorman, Deliverance (1972)
• Ross McElwee, Sherman’s March (1985)
• Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)
• David Gordon Green, George Washington (2000)
• Kevin Willmott, CSA: The Confederate States of America (2004)
• Tate Taylor, The Help (2011)
• Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) 

Additional Texts

• Short fiction by Holly Farris, Barry Hannah, Chris Offutt, Breece D’J Pancake, and Ron Rash.
• Poetry by Rodney Jones, Judy Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maurice Manning, Ron Rash, C.D. Wright, Jake Adam York, and Kevin Young
• Essays by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Edward Ayres, Houston Baker, Martyn Bone, Michael Bibler, Thadious Davis, Leigh Anne Duck, Jennifer Greeson, Tony Horwitz, E. Patrick Johnson, Michael Kreyling, José E. Limón, V.S. Naipaul, Janisse Ray, Scott Romine, John Lowe, Emily Satterwhite, Jon Smith, Annette Trefzer, and Patricia Yaeger.

Recommended

• Amy Villarejo, Film Studies: The Basics 

Instructor:  Greiner, C            Areas:  IV / D

Unique #:  83740            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Summer 2013, second session            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: C L 315, E 603B, 316K, or T C 603B.

Description: We will create, analyze, and critique fiction, using contemporary models. This is an entry-level course, with a focus on short narrative fiction.

Texts: The Art of the Short Story, Dana Gioa, R. S. Gwynn, Longman (September 9, 2005); The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Mariner Books (September 19, 2003); The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tara Masih, ed., Rose Metal Press (May 13, 2009)

Requirements & Grading: Haibun—10%; one-smoke story—10%; flash fiction story—15%; short story—25%; revision of short story—10%; participation—30% (10% in-class comments and pop quizzes, 5% plot outline, 10% critiques, 5% attendance). Final grades will include a plus or minus if applicable.

The first half of the course will focus on in-depth discussion of character, setting, plot, style, tone, mood, literary elements (such as figurative language), voice, pacing, and theme. To demonstrate understanding of these concepts, students will write forms of “short-short” fiction.

Assignments will include:

• one haibun (a Japanese form of short fiction that incorporates haiku) of 300-400 words;
• a “one-smoke story” (a Native American/Chinese form of short fiction) of 400-600 words; and
• a flash fiction story of 900-1,000 words.

(These assignments will total approximately 2,000 words.)

Publication venues for “short-short” fiction will be discussed, and students will be encouraged, but not required, to submit their revised versions for publication.

The second half of the course will address longer, more complex short stories—with a concentration on developing plot and character (through conflict, motivation, tension, and other methods).

Students will create a detailed plot outline and a short story of 3,000-4,000 words. Each student’s story will receive feedback in a workshop format. We will discuss both copy-editing and deep revision. The final assignment will be a thorough revision of the short story. Publication venues for lengthier short stories will be discussed, and students will be encouraged, but not required, to submit their revised works for publication.

Throughout the course, readings from the textbooks will be used to enhance students’ understanding of and appreciation for short fiction. Supplemental readings will also be provided.

Instructor:  Hutchison, C            Areas:  I / H

Unique #:  35495            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Spring 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

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

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

Description: Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (and Others) --

This course studies the varied work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845). A master of a number of literary genres—poetry, short fiction, and criticism, to name but three—Poe remains one of most popular and perplexing figures in American literature. More than two centuries after his birth, he continues to exert an outsize influence on a number of literary traditions, including detective fiction, horror, science fiction, hoax, humor, and satire. Over the course of the term we will read many of Poe’s tales, a good deal of his poetry, select pieces of criticism, and his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837). In measuring Poe’s achievement, we will gauge his influence on subsequent generations of writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Roger Corman, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, and Mat Johnson. We will also catalog the strange places that Poe shows up in contemporary culture: midnight movies, rock operas, episodes of The Simpsons, even NFL franchises.  Finally, the course will take full advantage of UT’s Harry Ransom Center, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of Poe materials.

Texts: Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (Library of America; 978-1883011383)

Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories (Oxford, 978-0199536979)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage; 978-0679745426)

Mat Johnson, Pym: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau; 978-0812981766)

In addition, there will be a required course packet.

Requirements & Grading: Students will produce one 4-5-page essay (20% of the final grade for the course), a revision of the 4-5-page essay (10%), and one 8-10-page final project (40%). The remaining 30% of the final grade for the course will be based on participation in in-class and electronic discussions, including weekly Blackboard posts.

This course will expose students to a wide range of global literatures in literary and historical context, but with a thematic focus: love and human meaning.  How do people of different cultures and regions use discourses of love to make meaning in their lives?  What can literature teach us about the trans-historical and trans-cultural experiences of love?  To steal a line, what do we talk about when we talk about love?  Surveys of world literature are, by their nature, partial and idiosyncratic.  There is simply no way to represent in a single year the full diversity of the literatures (plural) produced in a given country or region – much less all over the world.  In compassing the globe this course will emphasize a common theme (i.e., love) and communal literary forms (e.g., narrative fiction, the sonnet).  This organizing principle will allow us to engage in a responsible cross-cultural analysis, one that is sensitive to differences in social and historical context.  This course will model methods of literary and cultural interpretation; help students to improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills; and underscore the complex, at times obscure nature of “talk of love.”

Texts/Readings:

The Song of Songs

Sappo, poems

William Shakespeare, King Lear (c. 1603)

William Shakespeare, Shake-speare’s Sonnets (1609)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Vladimir Nebokov, Lolita (1955)

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (2001)

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (2005)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (2010)

Supplemental Readings will be made available in a Course Packet

Note: Required Film Viewings – Stanley Kubrick, dir. Lolita (1962)

Assignments/Requirements:

Participation 25%

Short Essays 75% (3 total – 25% each)  

About the Professor: Coleman Hutchison (Ph.D., Northwestern, 2006) teaches and writes about U.S. literature and culture to 1900. He has abiding interests in poetry, print culture, regional and national literatures, popular and folk music, and histories of sexuality. His essays have appeared in American Literary History, Comparative American Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, and PMLA, among other venues. He recently published the first literary history of the Confederacy, Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America.

Hutchison is working on two books-in-progress: "The Ditch is Nearer: Race, Place, and American Poetry, 1863-2009" and a popular biography of “Dixie.” The former project studies the interpenetration of locality and racial consciousness in American poetry between Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Barack Obama’s inauguration; the latter tells the story of how a song gave a region a nickname, and how that nickname helped to shape the region’s cultural identity.

Hutchison's research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Huntington Library. In 2010 Hutchison received a UT System Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award.

Instructor:  Hutchison, C            Areas:  n/a

Unique #:  83600            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Summer 2012, first session            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 in history --

This course offers an idiosyncratic sampling of the “masterworks” of American literature—that is, those texts from the rather messy literary history of the United States that have endured. Over the course of the term we will explore themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality; consider the relationship between literature and social change; and study the effects of industrialization, immigration, and globalization. In doing so, we will also address a number of urgent questions: How has American literature been shaped by history? And how, in turn, has this literature helped to shape American history? What does it mean to be “American” at any given moment? What allows a piece of literature to endure?

Texts: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter seventh edition, ed. Nina Baym (Representative authors include: John Winthrop, Samson Occom, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, and Li-Young Lee)

We will also read at least two of the following novels: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper.

Requirements & Grading: Three exams (75%); attendance, participation, & quizzes (25%).

Instructor:  Hutchison, C            Areas:  II / F

Unique #:  35451            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Spring 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) helped define American literature for generations of students and scholars. This course revisits and re-imagines the “extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression” that Matthiessen called the “first maturity” of American art and culture: 1845-1855. We will read the canon of “past masterpieces” defined by Matthiessen (i.e., Emerson’s essays, Thoreau’s Walden, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass) but we will read it alongside lesser-known, “popular” texts of the period (e.g., T.S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-room, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig). In so doing we will consider the formation and function of literary canons and engage a series of issues central to the literature of the antebellum United States: slavery and social reform; nationalism and empire; gender and sexuality; individuality, and community; originality and emulation.

Texts: T.S. Arthur, Ten Nights in a Bar-room (Applewood; 978-1557095084)

Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Yale UP; 978-0300087017)

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Selected Works. Lauter, ed. (Houghton Mifflin; 978-0395980750)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Person, ed. (Norton; 978-0393979534)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale. Parker and Harrison, eds. (Norton; 978-0393972832)

Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings. Thompson, ed. (Norton; 978-0393972856)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings. Rossi, ed. (Norton; 978-0393930900)

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855) (Course packet)

Harriet E Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. (Vintage; 978-1400031207).

Requirements & Grading: Students will be evaluated on the basis of participation, an essay, and midterm and final examinations.

Participation (i.e., attendance, discussion, Blackboard postings, peer review): 25%; Essay (6-8 pages): 30%; Take-home midterm examination: 20%; In-class final examination: 25%.

Prerequisites: Enrollment in or completion of at least one Honors section of an English course, admission to the English Honors Program, and consent of the honors adviser. Enrollment restricted by department.

Description: According to the Honors Thesis Manual, a thesis is “a sustained examination of a central idea or question, developed in a professional and mature manner under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and a second reader.” That sounds easy enough, but how does one get there from here? This course offers something of a roadmap. Over the course of the term we will examine literary criticism from the “inside out” and hone skills essential to a successful honors thesis.

Along the way, we will address a number of questions, both practical—How do I use the MLA Bibliography? What’s the difference between a footnote and an endnote?—and theoretical—What does it mean to make an argument about literature? Who has authority in an act of interpretation? This course will: first and foremost prepare students to write an honors thesis; interrogate methods of literary and cultural interpretation; consider what it means to make literary arguments and conduct literary research; help students to improve their research, critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Texts: Required Core Texts: William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Norton, 2003) #978-0-393-97819-3; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (W.W. Norton, 1996). #978-0393964585.

Required Secondary Texts: Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research (Third Edition) (University Of Chicago Press, 2008). #978-0226065663; Marjorie Garber, A Manifesto for Literary Studies (University of Washington Press, 2003). #978-0295983448; Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2005). # 978-0393924091.

Optional Supplemtentary Text: Eviatar Zerubavel, The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, & Books (Harvard, 1999) #0-674-13586-5

Requirements & Grading: (assignment logistics, rationales, and approaches will be discussed at length during class)

Final Thesis Prospectus (4-6 pp.) & Annotated Bibliography (20-25+ items)            40%

Writing Sample (15-20 pp. section or sections of your actual thesis)            30%

In-Class Performance (quality & consistency of discussion; preparation; engagement;

informal writing; writing-process & bibliography tasks; peer feedback; Symposium)            30%

On-time Attendance (note: every absence beginning with #4 will reduce grade; NC at #9)            Required

On-time Completion of Reading, Writing-Process, Research, & Peer Feedback Assignments            Required

 Plus/minus grades will be assigned for the final grade of the course. The university does not recognize the grade of A+. Evaluation percentages approximate & subject to minor change.

English 340: The American Novel before 1920

Spring 2010 (#34800)
MW 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Parlin 206

Professor Coleman Hutchison
coleman.hutchison@mail.utexas.edu
Office: Calhoun 207
Office Phone: 512.471.8372
Office Hours: W 2:00-3:30 pm; F 3:30-5 pm; and by appointment

Course Description

This survey of the early American novel will emphasize the diversity—and the depravity—of the first one hundred years of novel writing in the United States. We will read both familiar and unfamiliar authors and pay particular attention to issues of popularity and reception. Why did these novels command such a large audience of readers? What social and cultural changes did these novels both respond to and help to produce? Along the way we’ll encounter an array of narrative techniques and great generic diversity. The eclectic reading list promises, among other things, the picaresque, the travel narrative, romance, realism, and sentimentalism; courtroom dramas, forensic evidence, race riots, and adultery; cannibalism, “deviant” sexuality, and America’s first spontaneous combustion.

Course Objectives

The course will: offer a survey of the American novel between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries; model methods of literary and cultural interpretation; help students to improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.

English 679HA: Honors Program Tutorial

Fall 2009 (#35270)
TTh 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
Parlin 105

Professor Coleman Hutchison
coleman.hutchison@mail.utexas.edu
Office: Calhoun 207
Office Phone: 512.471.8372
Office Hours: T 2-5 pm and by appointment

Professor Martin Kevorkian
mkevorkian@mail.utexas.edu
Office: Parlin 325
Office Phone: 512.471.8797
Office Hours: R 2-5 and by appointment

Course Description

According to the Honors Thesis Manual, a thesis is “a sustained examination of a central idea or question, developed in a professional and mature manner under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and a second reader.” That sounds easy enough, but how does one get there from here? This course offers something of a roadmap. Over the course of the term we will examine literary criticism from the “inside out” and hone skills essential to a successful honors thesis. Along the way, we will address a number of questions, both practical—How do I use the MLA Bibliography? What’s the difference between a footnote and an endnote?—and theoretical—What does it mean to make an argument about literature? Who has authority in an act of interpretation?

Course Objectives

This course will: first and foremost prepare students to write an honors thesis; interrogate methods of literary and cultural interpretation; consider what it means to make literary arguments and conduct literary research; help students to improve their research, critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.