Ann Cvetkovich

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A

Unique #:  35070

Semester:  Spring 2018

Cross-lists:  LAH 350

Restrictions:  English Honors, Plan I Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description:  This course will focus on contemporary fiction inspired by the archival remains of actual historical events, with the larger aim of exploring literature’s value as a forum for cultural memory and public history.  We will begin with the use of fiction to explore the Holocaust (via Sebald’s Austerlitz) and the absent archive of slavery (via Toni Morrison’s Beloved).  The course will also draw significantly on the role of fiction in the historical archive of queer sexuality, through texts such as Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, which imagines the queer life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Indochinese cook, and Alison Bechdel’s graphic narrative, Fun Home.  We will also take up the literature of 9/11 through Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as well as how histories of colonialism and the Americas are represented through a specific focus on the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean in Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  We will consider how this literature’s historical concerns are also global ones that touch on a range of geopolitical regions beyond the U.S., including Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Another aim for the course will be to provide honors students with critical tools and frameworks, including historical and archival research, for writing theses about contemporary fiction.  The course will also look at the role of contemporary writers as public intellectuals who help create counterhistories and new public cultures, and students will report on additional literary texts of interest to them and their representation in the popular media.  In addition to reading the novels themselves, we will likely do some secondary reading in the areas of archive theory, affect theory, history of the novel, and narrative theory.

Texts (tentative):  Toni Morrison, Beloved; W.G. Sebald, Auschwitz; Monique Truong, The Book of Salt; Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Requirements & Grading:  35%, 1 long research paper (10-15 pages, including proposal, draft, revision, and peer review); 35%, 3-4 short assignments (a report on a contemporary novel, an archive assignment, short papers on the readings in preparation for the longer paper); 30%, regular discussion posts to Canvas} and class participation.

Approaches To Disciplinary Inquiries

NOTE: This is the required cohort class for entering first-year grad students in English.

This course will allow students to gain a fuller sense of the complexity and variety of research methods available to literary scholars. We will spend the semester thinking about literary and cultural criticism from the inside out—that is, we will be reading and discussing the methodological and argumentative moves that scholars make. Along the way we will ask a number of urgent questions: How do scholars read now—and how did they read then? What is the status of theory in twenty-first century literary studies? How does the fall out from the so-called “culture wars” inform and inflect current practices? What do we talk about when we talk about archival research? What would it mean to “always historicize”? Finally, what are the relations between our roles as writers and professionals? The course will also: introduce the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and other collections-based resources; offer a shared, “cohort” experience for all first-year graduate students; help students further orient themselves to both the department and the profession.

Description:        

This course will explore the role of archives in documenting and transforming LGBTQ histories and histories of intimacy and sexuality.  We will consider the history of grassroots archives, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives, as well as new LGBTQ collections in universities and public libraries.  The course will also foreground the creative use of archives by writers, filmmakers, and visual artists seeking to address historical absences and invent new forms of history and documentation. 

The course will make use of resources in the UT Libraries, such as the Gloria Anzaldua collections in the Benson library and the diverse LGBTQ holdings of the Harry Ransom Center, as well as LGBTQ archives elsewhere that can accessed online or by other means.  Moving between archival collections and literature, film, video, and visual art, the course will take up queer theory and research methods  as it explores activist approaches to archiving, knowledge production, and art-making.

The course is designed to meet the needs of students who already have some background in gender and sexuality studies (such as WGS 303 Intro to LGBTQ Studies) and are looking for more advanced coursework, but it is open to all who are interested and committed.

Archival Collections: 

• University of Texas Libraries (Benson and Harry Ransom Center)
• ACT UP Oral History Project
• OUTHistory.org
• Lesbian Herstory Archives
• June L. Mazer Collections
• other LGBTQ collections as available

Film, Video, and Visual Art:

• The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye (film)
• History Lessons, Barbara Hammer
• Not Just Passing Through,  Jean Carlomusto, et al
• Herstory Inventory, Ulrike Muller

Literary Texts:

• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
• Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
• Jackie Kay, The Trumpet
• Theoretical texts by Carolyn Steedman, Saidiya Hartman, and others

Requirements:

• Regular attendance, class participation, and discussion posts: 25%
• Two short Review essays on the readings: 25%
• Two short Report essays on original archival research: 25%
• One final essay based on one of the Reports: 25%

Creative Non-Fiction as 21^st Century Literature

This course will explore the rise of creative non-fiction as a 21^st-century literary genre that reflects recent developments:  the mainstreaming of queer and women writers and writers of color; the construction of global and transnational literary cultures and markets; the predominance of memoir and other affective genres; the role of writing in cultures of testimony, archiving, and public memory.

We will consider how the challenges of documenting the affective experience of everyday life under neoliberal capitalism, including ordinary racisms and new genders and sexualities, requires new forms of documentation that have put pressure on conventional genres such as fiction and poetry, especially as literary genres also respond to visual cultures and new media.  One of the guiding questions this course asks is:  what can 21^st century writing (both literature and criticism) do?

Another aim of the course will be to read experimental writing practice as theory – and hence to read literary texts alongside recent queer theory, affect theory, and archive theory.  For further context, we will try to read some contemporary fiction that has documentary and archival aims, or at the very least put creative non-fiction in dialogue with fiction, as well as poetry.   Most of the writers we will read are women, and we will seek to articulate feminist and queer accounts of creative non-fiction.

Readings will be selected from among the following:

Critical Backgrounds:

John D’Agata, ed. The Next American Essay and The Making of the American Essay

David Shields, Reality Hunger

David Lazar and Patrick Madden, eds. After Montaigne

Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, eds., Bending Genre:  Essays on Creative Non-Fiction

Essays by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, David Foster Wallace

Feminist and Queer Lineages:

Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays

Joan Didion,  Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years and/or A Xicana Codex

Contemporary Writers:

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Eula Biss, Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays

Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My Bed

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina

Eden Robinson, The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols and Modern Storytelling

Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work

Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Leanne Shapton, Swimming Lessons

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

Eli Clare, Pride in Exile:  Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

Mary Cappello, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life and/or Swallow

Monique Truong, Ravenous (NY Times food column)

Assignments: 

Regular discussion posts to Canvas; 2-3 brief writing assignments including a book review; final seminar paper.

E 370W  l  Feminism and Creative Non-Fiction

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A

Unique #:  35520

Semester:  Fall 2016

Cross-lists:  WGS 345

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description:  This course will explore the increasing visibility of creative non-fiction in fostering public debate and making social and political interventions.  Since “creative non-fiction” may be unfamiliar to many students, our work will entail exploring the recent use of the term to describe creative and literary forms of non-fiction writing that encompass and combine the prose essay, memoir, fiction, poetry, and experimental writing.  But more so than producing definitions, the course will ask why truth-telling of various kinds might demand creative modes and why writers interested in social and political justice, including feminists, have sought to invent new forms of writing.

As a “Gender, Literature, Culture” offering, the course will also focus on women writers in order to consider how creative non-fiction has been shaped by feminist work and how it promotes feminist concerns.  Many of the writers we will read also work in literary genres such as fiction and poetry, and we will consider why they also practice forms of creative non-fiction.  We will explore the feminist history of creative non-fiction in Virginia Woolf’s essays; the innovative prose formats used by women of color feminists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde; and the new journalism of Joan Didion.  Building on that background, we will explore the many ways that women writers are documenting global histories and cultures through creative non-fiction, including subjects such as the following:  postcolonial tourism (Kincaid), ordinary racisms (Biss and Rankine), queer families and bodies (Nelson, Hernandez, Clare), Hurricane Katrina (Trethewey), environmentalism (Solnit and Roy), multiculturalism (Smith), AIDS and migration (Danticat), and food, exercise, and the body (Shapton, Truong, Jamison).  Although not all of this work is explicitly concerned with women and gender, we will consider how feminist sensibilities inform its concern with the relation between local experience and global cultures and economies (reflecting the Global Cultures flag).

In keeping with the course’s Writing flag designation, students will be encouraged to write in a range of forms, including discussion questions, personal narrative, and ethnographic observations, and there will be a chance to practice writing their own forms of creative non-fiction.  The final project will include opportunities for revision and peer review.

Readings:  Required books to purchase (available at UT Co-Op):  Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988, 978-0374527075) • Joan Didion, Where I Was From (Vintage, 2004, 978-0679752868) • Eula Biss, Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf, 2009, 978-15555975180) • Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf, 2015, 978-1555977078) • Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Graywolf, 2014, 978-1555976903) • Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (Penguin, 2014, 978-0143125495)

Readings will also include selections from some of the following:  Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, eds., Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Non-Fiction • Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider • Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem • Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza • Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years and/or A Xicana Codex • Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays • Leanne Shapton, Swimming Lessons • Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams • Eli Clare, Exile in Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation • Daisy Hernandez, A Cup of Water Under My Bed • Mary Cappello, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life and/or Swallow • Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work • Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina • Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Requirements & Grading:  Attendance, class participation, twice weekly discussion posts to Canvas, in-class writing, required office hour visit, 25%; two 5-page essays, 25% each (total 50%); one 6-8-page substantial revision of a 5-page essay, including peer review and class presentation, 25%.

E 338E  l  British Literature: The Victorian Era through World War II

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A

Unique #:  34560

Semester:  Spring 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 surveys British literature of the Victorian and Modern period with attention to how literary forms – the novel, poetry, and the essay – engage with social and cultural transformations in this important period of British and world history. We will pay particular attention to Britain’s status as a global colonial empire, to shifts in gender and sexuality, including the rise of feminism and modern homosexual identities, and to Britain’s role in the development of modern forms of urban life, consumer capitalism, and visual culture.

In addition to reading some longer novels in detail, we will also read some clusters of poetry and essays. We will also access archival and online museum resources (including the Harry Ransom Center Collections) in order to read British literature alongside material culture. We will pay particular attention to gothic and sensation genres as a lens through which to read the period, as well as to the work of women writers.

Tentative Readings: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Victorian Era (Volume 5, 2nd edition) • The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (Volume 6a: From 1900 to World War II) • Bram Stoker, Dracula  (Broadview) • Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (HBJ)

Note:  The two Broadview anthologies plus Dracula will be available as a single package from the UT Co-op.

Requirements & Grading: (Note: +/- grading will be used)

Two 5-page essays  -- 60% total; One 6-8 page substantial revision of a 5-page essay, including peer review and class presentation – 20% total; Attendance, class participation (quality and quantity), in-class writing, required office hour visit -- 20% total.

This introductory course will provide basic skills in theory, history, and research methods relevant to LGBTQ studies.  Beginning from the premise that sexual identity has a history rather than being a universal category, we will explore concepts of gender and sexuality, as well as related categories of race, class, religion, nation.  We will also briefly survey the making of modern understandings of sexual and LGBTQ identities in the last one hundred years and the implications of this history for broader understandings of gender and sexuality. 

The course will be oriented around key questions and debates, including as many of the following as possible: being “born that way” vs. social construction of identity; recent public debates about gay marriage and civil rights; new constructions of family, intimacy, and sociality; critiques of “normativity” and the meaning and uses of the term “queer”; LGBTQ identities and same-sex sexualities in a transnational and global context;  controversies around religion and LGBTQ identities;  transgender activism and new constructions of gender and gender politics; sex, including feminist sex-positivity, cruising cultures, and new social media; the impact of HIV/AIDS and AIDS activism;  the role of art, culture, and representation in LGBTQ culture.

 The course is open to all and aims to encourage self-reflection and dialogue around gender and sexual differences and to promote the work of being an ally to LGBTQ-identified people.

Consent of Instructor required.

E 370W  l  Feminism and Creative Non-Fiction

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A

Unique #:  34625

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  WGS 345

Flags:  Global Cultures; Writing

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: This course will explore the increasing visibility of creative non-fiction in fostering public debate and making social and political interventions. Since “creative non-fiction” may be unfamiliar to many students, our work will entail exploring the recent use of the term to describe creative and literary forms of non-fiction writing that encompass and combine the prose essay, memoir, fiction, poetry, and experimental writing. But more so than producing definitions, the course will ask why truth-telling of various kinds might demand creative modes and why writers interested in social and political justice, including feminists, have sought to invent new forms of writing.

As a “Gender, Literature, Culture” offering, the course will also focus on women writers in order to consider how creative non-fiction has been shaped by feminist work and how it promotes feminist concerns. Many of the writers we will read also work in literary genres such as fiction and poetry, and we will consider why they also practice forms of creative non-fiction. We will explore the feminist history of creative non-fiction in Virginia Woolf’s essays; the innovative prose formats used by women of color feminists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde; and the new journalism of Joan Didion. Building on that background, we will explore the many ways that women writers are documenting global histories and cultures through creative non-fiction, including subjects such as following: postcolonial tourism (Kincaid), ordinary racisms (Biss and Rankine), queer families (Nelson), Hurricane Katrina (Trethewey), environmentalism (Solnit and Roy), multiculturalism (Smith), AIDS and migration (Danticat). Although not all of this work is explicitly concerned with women and gender, we will consider how feminist sensibilities inform its concern with the relation between local experience and global cultures and economies (reflecting the Global Cultures flag).

In keeping with the course’s Writing flag designation, students will be encouraged to write in a range of forms, including discussion questions, personal narrative, an ethnographic report, and a critical review, some of which will enable them to practice writing their own forms of creative non-fiction. The final project will include opportunities for revision and peer review.

Texts will be selected from among the following: Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas • Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a Luxury” and “The Uses of the Erotic” • Cherrie Moraga, from Loving in the War Years and/or A Xicana Codex • Gloria Anzaldua, from Borderlands/La Frontera • Joan Didion, from Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

     *******

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Island • Joan Didion, Where I Was From • Eula Biss, Notes from No Man’s Land • Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina • Maggie Nelson, Argonaut • Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby • Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying • Claudia Rankine, Citizen • Arundhati Roy, from Capitalism:  A Ghost Story; Zadie Smith, from Changing My Mind; Edwidge Danticat, from Create Dangerously.

Requirements & Grading: Attendance, class participation, twice weekly discussion posts to Canvas, in-class writing, required office hour visit, 25%; two 5-page essays, 25% each (total 50%); one 6-8 page substantial revision of a 5-page essay, including peer review and class presentation, 25%.

This course will allow students to gain a fuller sense for the complexity and variety of research methods available to literary scholars. We will spend the semester thinking about literary and cultural criticism from the inside out—that is, we will be reading and discussing the methodological and argumentative moves that scholars make. Along the way we will ask a number of urgent questions: How do scholars read now—and how did they read then? What is the status of theory in twenty-first century literary studies? How does the fall out from the so-called “culture wars” inform and inflect current practices? What do we talk about when we talk about archival research? What would it mean to “always historicize”? Finally, what are the relations between our roles as writers and professionals? The conversation engendered by such questions will better position students to embark on Master’s Report and dissertation research. The course will also: introduce the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and other collections-based resources; offer a shared, “cohort” experience for all second-year graduate students; help students further orient themselves to both the department and the profession.

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A

Unique #:  35965

Semester:  Spring 2014

Cross-lists:  n/a

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

Description: This course surveys British literature of the Victorian and Modern period with attention to how literary forms – the novel, poetry, and the essay – engage with social and cultural transformations in this important period of British and world history. We will pay particular attention to Britain’s status as a global colonial empire, to shifts in gender and sexuality, including the rise of feminism and modern homosexual identities, and to Britain’s role in the development of modern forms of urban life, consumer capitalism, and visual culture.

In addition to reading some longer novels in detail, we will also read some clusters of poetry and essays. We will also access archival and online museum resources (including the Harry Ransom Center Collections) in order to read British literature alongside material culture. We will pay particular attention to gothic and sensation genres as a lens through which to read the period, as well as to the work of women writers.

Tentative Readings:

Novels:  Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

Poetry by Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Browning, “Michael Field,” W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and others.

Prose by George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris, and others.

Requirements & Grading: Regular discussion questions posted to Blackboard (4-5 posts): 15%; 2 short (2-3 pages) writing assignments (close reading and historical research essay): 20%; Take-home exam essay: 15%; Final (7-8-page) essay, including proposal, peer review, and revision: 30%; Attendance and participation: 20%.

This introductory course will provide basic skills in theory, history, and research methods relevant to LGBTQ studies.  Beginning from the premise that sexual identity has a history rather than being a universal category, we will explore concepts of gender and sexuality, as well as related categories of race, class, religion, nation.  We will also briefly survey the making of modern understandings of sexual and LGBTQ identities in the last one hundred years and the implications of this history for broader understandings of gender and sexuality. 

The course will be oriented around key questions and debates, including as many of the following as possible: being “born that way” vs. social construction of identity; recent public debates about gay marriage and civil rights; new constructions of family, intimacy, and sociality; critiques of “normativity” and the meaning and uses of the term “queer”; LGBTQ identities and same-sex sexualities in a transnational and global context;  controversies around religion and LGBTQ identities;  transgender activism and new constructions of gender and gender politics; sex, including feminist sex-positivity, cruising cultures, and new social media; the impact of HIV/AIDS and AIDS activism;  the role of art, culture, and representation in LGBTQ culture.

The course is open to all and aims to encourage self-reflection and dialogue around gender and sexual differences and to promote the work of being an ally to LGBTQ-identified people.

Consent of Instructor required.

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A Areas:  V / G

Unique #:  35940 Flags:  Global Cultures; Writing

Semester:  Fall 2013 Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  WGS 345 Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: This course will explore the increasing visibility of creative non-fiction in fostering public debate and making social and political interventions.  We will consider whether the genre of “creative non-fiction” differs from non-fiction prose or the essay, as well as how it overlaps with memoir, fiction, and experimental writing.

As a “Gender, Literature, Culture” offering, the course will focus on women writers in order to consider how creative non-fiction has been shaped by feminist work and how it promotes feminist concerns.  We will explore the feminist history of creative non-fiction in Virginia Woolf’s essays; the innovative prose formats used by women of color feminists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde; and the new journalism of Joan Didion. Building on that background, we will explore the many ways that women writers are documenting global histories and cultures through creative non-fiction, including subjects such as following:  histories of slavery (Hartman), lesbian modernisms (Cohen), South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Krog), a husband’s death (Didion), postcolonial tourism (Kincaid), Hurricane Katrina (Trethewey), democracy (Roy), environmentalism (Solnit), multiculturalism (Smith), the Haitian earthquake (Danticat).  Although not all of this work is explicitly concerned with women and gender, we will consider how feminist sensibilities inform its concern with the relation between local experience and global cultures and economies (reflecting the Global Cultures flag). 

In keeping with the course’s Writing flag designation, students will be encouraged to write in a range of forms, including discussion questions, personal narrative, an ethnographic report, and a critical review, some of which will enable them to practice writing their own forms of creative non-fiction.  The final project will include opportunities for revision and peer review.

Texts will be selected from among the following:

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a Luxury” and “The Uses of the Erotic”

Cherrie Moraga, from Loving in the War Years and/or A Xicana Codex

Gloria Anzaldua, from Borderlands/La Frontera

Joan Didion, from Slouching Toward Bethlehem

     *******

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Island

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Antje Krog, Country of my Skull

Lisa Cohen, All We Know

Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina

Essays by Rebecca Solnit, from Storming the Gates of Paradise; Arundhati Roy, from Field Notes on Democracy; Zadie Smith, from Changing My Mind; Edwidge Danticat, from Create Dangerously

Requirements & Grading: Discusssion questions posted to Blackboard every other week, 10%; 4 short writing assignments: personal narrative, ethnographic report, review of additional author; critical reading, 10 each%; final essay (7-8-page paper, including proposal, rough draft, peer review, group presentation), 30%; class attendance and participation, 20%.

Approaches To Disciplinary Inquiries

Course objectives.  This required, one-semester course will:

• Allow students to gain a fuller sense of the complexity and variety of research methods available to literary scholars
• Better position students to embark on Masters Report and dissertation research
• Introduce students to the Harry Ransom Center and other collections-based resources
• Offer a shared, “cohort” experience for all second-year graduate students
• Help students further orient themselves to both the department and the profession.

Method of Instruction.  This course will be organized into 3-5 modules, each of which will center on a specific mode of research or criticism. Modules will be organized around major methodological issues, which may include:

• Archives (e.g., book history; bibliography and textual studies; digital humanities)
• Cultures (e.g., multiculturalism; cultural studies; observational methods)
• Histories and historicisms
• Professions (e.g., history of the profession; humanities in the 21st century)
• Readings (e.g., close reading; deconstruction; translation; reception)
• Theories (e.g., the life and “death” of theory)

Texts.  Required texts may include:

• Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research Third Edition (Chicago, 2008) ISBN: 9780226065663
• Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (California, 2002) ISBN: 9780520231436

NB: Although the course is scheduled for a three-hour block, we will meet for only two hours each week. This will allow students to visit on-campus archives, conduct research, attend talks, &c.

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A            Areas:  II / G

Unique #:  35655            Flags:  Cultural diversity; Writing

Semester:  Spring 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  WGS 345            Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: This course will explore how literature and culture have played a role in creating LGBT identities, public cultures, and social movements. We will do some background reading in histories and theories of sexuality and modern notions of sexual identity. We will explore key moments in the history of “homosexuality,” including modernist cosmopolitanisms, the radical literatures of the gay liberation movements of the 1950s-70s, the culture of AIDS and AIDS activism, the explosion of queer visibility in the 1990s and beyond, transnational gay and queer cultures. Our aim will be to provide a “history of the present,” that is, to consider how knowledge of previous generations of culture and activism can inform the present. Another of the primary goals of the course will be to consider the ongoing role of alternative culture in an era of marriage equality and neoliberal sexual politics.

It will be useful for students to have taken at least one course in women's studies or have equivalent background in women's studies or gay and lesbian studies. If you're not sure about your preparation, please consult with me.

Texts [tentative]: Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, David Halperin, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (essays by Gayle Rubin, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, David Halperin, John D'Emilio, and others); Oscar Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W.H.”; Radclyffe Hall, “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself”; Lisa Cohen, All We Know; Audre Lorde, Zami:  A New Spelling of My Name; Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy; Dorothy Allison Two or Three Things I Know for Sure; Tony Kushner, Angels in America; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home.

Requirements & Grading: Writing Portfolio (includes Discussion questions every other week; and 4 short writing assignments: personal narrative, queer ethnography, review of a cultural event; critical reading), 50%; Final Project (7-8-page paper, including proposal, rough draft, peer review, group presentation), 30%; Class attendance and participation, 20%.

Queer Affect, Queer Archives

This course will explore the combined impact of the affective turn and the archival turn in literary and cultural studies with particular emphasis on queer studies.  We will read theoretical texts in these areas alongside selected primary texts that will serve as case studies.  The course will also involve some work in the HRC with the aim of exploring the queer dimensions of its collections and the study of them. The course will also concern itself with questions of documentary form and the role of fiction, literature, and experimental genres in representing archival and affective histories.  We will also focus on creative interventions with existing archives to create counterarchives.

We will focus on writing affect and archive through a series of texts (both fiction and creative non-fiction) to be read as case histories alongside of relevant theory.  These texts will represent areas such as the histories of slavery and colonialism, the Holocaust, histories of 9/11, histories of sexuality and AIDS activism, everyday life.   Topics to be explored will include archive theory; queer temporalities; oral history, testimony, and memoir as documentary genres; ephemera and theories of the ordinary and everyday; photography and visual archives; the current state of LGBT archives; indigenous approaches to the archive; artists working with archives.

Tentative Texts

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Cheryl Dunye, The Watermelon Woman (film)

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul and/or Museum of Innocence

Lisa Cohen, All We Know

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?

Art projects by Zoe Leonard, Tammy Rae Carland, Allyson Mitchell, fierce pussy, Ulrike Mueller, Catherine Lord, Onya Hogan-Finlay

Essays by Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Gayatri Spivak, Ann Stoler, Antoinette Burton, Anjali Arondekar, Marianne Hirsch, Diana Taylor, Beth Freeman, Carolyn Dinshaw, Jose Munoz, Heather Love

Archives

ACT UP Oral History Archive

September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project Archive

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and other UT archival resources

Assignments

40% Writing exercises, including a report from the archives, a review of a related novel or non-fiction, a close reading, a piece of documentary writing.

40% An 8-10 page conference paper to serve as the basis for presentation at a symposium to be organized by the class for the end of the semester.

20%  Attendance and participation, including discussion questions posted to Blackboard

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A            Areas:  V / G

Unique #:  35545            Flags:  Global cultures, Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  English Honors

Cross-lists:  LAH 350            Computer Instruction:  n/a

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

Description: Focusing on contemporary fiction inspired by actual historical events, this course will explore literature’s value as a forum for cultural memory and public history, with particular emphasis on how it articulates affective histories. A key point of departure for the course will be the use of fiction to explore the absent archive of slavery, in works such as Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and Saidiya Hartman’s combination of memoir, field work, archival research, and speculative imagination in Lose Your Mother. The course will also draw significantly on the role of fiction in the historical archive of queer sexuality, through texts such as Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, which imagines the queer life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Indochinese cook, and Alison Bechdel’s graphic narrative, Fun Home.  It will consider the literature of the Holocaust and 9/11 through Sebald’s Austerlitz and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as well as how histories of colonialism and the Americas are represented through a specific focus on the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean in Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We will consider how this literature’s historical concerns are also global ones that touch on a range of geopolitical regions beyond the U.S., including Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The course will also take up the history of historical fiction, turning back to Sir Walter Scott and/or Nathaniel Hawthorne to consider the intersections of history and fiction in the formation of the novel as a genre. This historical perspective will inform our discussion of the contemporary relation between fiction and creative non-fiction, including anxieties about memoir’s claims to truth and its usurpation of the novel.

With its focus on how literature produces counterhistories, the course will encourage students in the honors program to explore the role of contemporary writers as public intellectuals. We will, for example, look closely at how the novels we read are situated within popular media, and students will practice writing reviews. Students will also be encouraged to develop critical tools for writing about contemporary fiction, including historical and archival research, so that those who want to write theses in this area can develop a critical relation to the fiction and popular criticism that interests them. In addition to reading the novels themselves, we will likely do some secondary reading in the areas of archive theory, affect theory, history of the novel, and narrative theory.

Texts (tentative): Toni Morrison, Beloved; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother; W.G. Sebald, Auschwitz; Monique Truong, The Book of Salt; Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Requirements & Grading: 35%, 1 long research paper (10-15 pages, including proposal, draft, revision, and peer review); 35%, 3-4 short assignments (a review of a contemporary novel, a historical research assignment, an archive assignment, a report on a public on-campus event); 30%, 3-5 short responses to readings and class participation.

Instructor:  Cvetkovich, A            Areas:  V / G

Unique #:  35620            Flags:  Cultural diversity, Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  WGS 345            Computer Instruction:  No

Only one of the following may be counted: Asian American Studies 320 (Topic: Gender, Sexuality, and Migration), E 370W (Topic 9), 370W (Topic: Cultures of Immigration and Dislocation).

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

Description: Contemporary literature in the U.S. has been transformed by a new generation of writers who address the diverse cultures produced by histories of migration. We will consider how literature, with its attention to the relation between personal and historical experience, provides an especially valuable document of migration and intervenes in public discourse about it. We will read contemporary fiction, mostly by women of color, with particular attention to how migration is shaped by gender and sexuality. Regions and cultures to be explored include the Mexican borderlands; African diaspora in the Caribbean; indigenous cultures in Canada; Vietnamese and South Asian diaspora and exile in the context of war; and gay migration from the rural to the urban. Issues to explored include how personal narrative articulates the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and nation; how diaspora transforms notions of home and ancestry; and how history and memory shape the present. We will also consider the role of the contemporary writer as public intellectual in contributing to cultural and historical understanding.

The course will also provide students with an opportunity to reflect critically on their own national identities as residents and/or citizens of the United States – what does it mean, and what can it mean, to be “American”? Through critical readings and written assignments that construct a range of archival sources (the personal, the historical, the ethnographic), students will be encouraged to situate their own experience within a broader historical and transnational context.

Texts: Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo; Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ; Monique Truong, The Book of Salt ; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis I; Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach ; Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman.

Requirements & Grading: (Note: +/- grading will be used for portfolio assessment and for the longer paper and group presentation and the final grade will be averaged based on those grades.)

Writing Portfolio:            40%

1) Statement of Goals; Mid-term Self Assessment; Final Self-Assessment

2) Discussion Questions posted to BB every other week

3) 3 short writing assignments: Personal Narrative; History; Ethnography

Final Project: Personal/ Critical Essay            40%

            (includes rough draft, peer editing, group presentation)

Attendance and class participation            20%

Only one of the following may be counted: Asian American Studies 320 (Topic: Gender, Sexuality, and Migration), E 370W (Topic 9), 370W (Topic: Cultures of Immigration and Dislocation).

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

Description: The history and culture of the United States and the larger Americas have been profoundly shaped by migrations: colonization by European peoples and the resulting displacements of indigenous peoples; the African diaspora forced by slavery and the Great Migration from South to North; the shifting and unstable border between the U.S. and Mexico; the arrival through Ellis Island and other ports of Eastern and Southern Europeans; the long and multiple histories of immigrants from East and South Asia; the movement of gays and lesbians to urban centers; the arrival of refugees from war and genocide; and contemporary transnational and diasporic connections with nations and regions around the world. Although migration is sometimes represented as a threat to the integrity of the nation, it is, in fact, at the center of it.

We will explore the impact of this history by reading contemporary literature mostly by women, with particular attention to how migration is shaped by gender and sexuality. We will consider how literature, with its attention to the relation between personal and historical experience, provides an especially valuable document of migration and intervenes in public discourse about it. The course will also provide students with an opportunity to reflect critically on their own national identities as residents, and in some cases, citizens of the U.S. – what does it mean, and what can it mean, to be “American”? 

Texts: Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo; Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ; Monique Truong, The Book of Salt ; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis I; Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach ; Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman.

Requirements & Grading: (Note: +/- grading will be used for portfolio assessment and for the longer paper and group presentation and the final grade will be averaged based on those grades.)

Writing Portfolio:            40%

1) Statement of Goals; Mid-term Self Assessment; Final Self-Assessment

2) Discussion Questions posted to BB every other week

3) 4 short writing assignments: Personal Narrative; History; Ethnography; Report on Outside Reading

Paper: Personal Narrative as Critical Essay            20%

Group Presentation and Critical Reflection            20%

Attendance and class participation            20%

Methods of Literary Research

Course objectives

This required, one-semester course will:

• Allow students to gain a fuller sense of the complexity and variety of research methods available to literary scholars
• Better position students to embark on Masters Report and dissertation research
• Introduce students to the Harry Ransom Center and other collections-based resources
• Offer a shared, “cohort” experience for all second-year graduate students
• Help students further orient themselves to both the department and the profession.

Method of Instruction

This course will be organized into 3-5 modules, each of which will center on a specific mode of research or criticism. Modules will be organized around major methodological issues, which may include:

• Archives (e.g., book history; bibliography and textual studies; digital humanities)
• Cultures (e.g., multiculturalism; cultural studies; observational methods)
• Histories and historicisms
• Professions (e.g., history of the profession; humanities in the 21st century)
• Readings (e.g., close reading; deconstruction; translation; reception)
• Theories (e.g., the life and “death” of theory)

Texts

Required texts may include:

• Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research Third Edition (Chicago, 2008) ISBN: 9780226065663
• Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (California, 2002) ISBN: 9780520231436

NB: Although the course is scheduled for a three-hour block, we will meet for only two hours each week. This will allow students to visit on-campus archives, conduct research, attend talks, &c.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

Please check back for updates.

Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

Please check back for updates.

Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

Please check back for updates.