Heather Houser

E 343G  l  Global Environmental Literature and Film

Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #: 34940

Semester:  Fall 2020

Cross-lists:  n/a

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

Description:  Environmental change is everyone's concern, but different people in different parts of the world—and, even different parts of the U.S.—experience this change differently.  This course has two main premises.  First, that we cannot understand changes to the planet within a purely nationalist framework.  Second, that we cannot understand environmental threats through facts and data alone and must turn to stories.  We'll examine the environmental issues facing nations, communities, and individuals through novels, memoirs, and film from these regions: The Caribbean, East & West Africa, South Asia, and East Asia.  We'll approach fiction as a form of environmental inquiry that:

• addresses large-scale ethical challenges through individual experiences;
• introduces multiple, sometimes conflicting, perspectives on environmental threats;
• uses the conventions of fantasy, realism, documentary, memoir, the coming-of-age story, and science fiction to stage environmental and social dilemmas.

You'll develop skills necessary for making ethical decisions in your professional and everyday lives, and develop an independent project going through the stages of proposal, revision, final product, and presentation.  Additionally, by the end of the semester, you'll be able to:

• read analytically across a range of literary genres that integrate knowledge from environmental studies.
• understand the complex ethics of environmental issues as cultural works portray them.
• create compelling responses to course texts by reading/watching closely and effectively using evidence and media (textual & visual).
• analyze works of fiction and nonfiction using major environmental concepts and formal categories such as environmental justice, wilderness, coming-of-age story, and speculative fiction.
• conceive of an independent project and carry it through to completion.

Texts may include books and films by Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Michiko Ishimure, Jamaica Kincaid, Zacharias Kunuk & Ian Mauro, Wangari Maathai, Hayao Miyazaki, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Indra Sinha.

Essays by Rachel Carson, Ramachandra Guha & Juan Martinez-Alier, Rob Nixon, Vandana Shiva, and Kyle Powys Whyte.

Visual media integrated into class discussion.

Requirements & Grading:  Participation: 15%.  Brainstorming journal: 10%.  One midterm: 15%.  One in-class presentation: 10%. Independent Inquiry proposal: 10%.  Independent Inquiry: 30%.  Independent Inquiry presentation: 10%.

E 349S  l  14-David Foster Wallace-HONORS

Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #:  35110

Semester:  Fall 2019

Cross-lists:  LAH 350.29

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

Description: This course covers the truncated career of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), one of the most obsessed-over and lauded authors of his generation. We will read selected essays and short stories by Wallace and all of his novel, Infinite Jest (1996). The following questions will motivate the course: 1. What is Wallace's place in US literary history? Has that shifted in the #MeToo moment? 2. What is his project for a new fiction? 3. What are his polemics about 20^th-century US culture and media? Can particular novels and reading practices intervene in these domains? 4. How can fiction enter into and change our lives?

We will avail ourselves of the Harry Ransom Center's rich Wallace archive which includes his manuscripts, letters, and personal library. The course culminates in a final project of the student's own design. Students are encouraged to use HRC resources in developing their project questions but are not required to do so.

Texts: Infinite Jest, and selections from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Consider the Lobster,Oblivion, Girl with Curious Hair, andThe Pale King. Selected essays of literary scholarship on Wallace.

Requirements & Grading: 15% participation (including discussion leading), 10% blog posts, 30% 2 short essays, 5% project proposal, 30% final project, 10% project presentation.

The environmental humanities—and its literary arm, environmental criticism—is a burgeoning field of inquiry. This course examines the origins of the field and thrilling new developments. It highlights the concepts, questions, methods, and materials that have shaped the development of environmental criticism (a.k.a. ecocriticism) since its emergence in the 1990s. We'll build a vocabulary for the study of environmental culture, beginning with contested meanings and experiences of "nature." From there we'll work through challenging theoretical, critical, and creative texts that establish debates about: the meaning of "environment" in the humanities, globalized risk, postcoloniality and race, petroculture, new materialisms, biotechnology, and climate change (historical and new). The genres of creative texts span prose fiction, poetry, film, memoir, visual art, interactive documentary, science fiction, and digital visualization.

This course has several aims: to introduce you to trends in environmental criticism and identify opportunities for research within the field; to model methods of cultural interpretation under the "eco-" rubric; to give you experience writing in different genres and media; to make you more comfortable receiving and incorporating feedback.

Possible Syllabus Units:  

[N.B. In Summer 2019, I'll request info on students' research interests and mold the course to address those interests to the extent possible. Therefore, units and texts may change significantly.] 

Concept Debates

Whose Nature?

Petroculture
Tourism and Plantation Colonialism
Risk & Toxicity in the Global South

Materialisms, Agencies, & Corporeality
Biotech Imaginaries

Climate Change, Then

Climate Change, Now

Possible Texts:

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Cherríe Moraga, Heroes & Saints

Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Indra Sinha, Animal's People

Brenda Longfellow, Offshore (interactive documentary)

Maya Lin, What Is Missing? (digital memorial)

Other essays, poems, visual material posted on Canvas 

Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #:  81430

Semester:  Summer 2018, second session

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  Oxford Summer Program participants

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description:  Novelist Zadie Smith (1975- ) is not only an award-winning chronicler of 21^st-century life—from multiracial identity and female friendship, to texting and genetic engineering—she's also a leading chronicler of London as a diverse, global city.  Her novel NW (2012) takes its title from the North-West London postcode while the vibrant and vast cast of characters in White Teeth (2000) crisscross the city on foot, by bus, and by car.  In this course, we'll study three of Smith's novels—White Teeth, On Beauty (2005), and NW—and essays from her nonfiction collections published in 2009 and 2018.  Learning about her contributions to contemporary fiction, we'll also explore the sites in London that feature in and influence her novels.

Requirements & Grading:  Final grade determined by participation (30%), regular blog posts (40%), and a final reflection paper (30%).  Students may use e-book versions of the novels but can only do so if they have a tablet (Kindle, iPad, etc.).  No laptops or phones permitted in class.  Essays will be posted to Canvas.

Course Theme: "Earth, Sea, and Sky: The Natures of World Literature"

Description:
In this course we will read, think, write, and converse about literature and life, as we survey some innovative and bewildering engagements with the most elemental features of our surroundings: the earth, the sea, and the sky. Our studies in the natures of world literature will feature, among other locations, ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia; modern England, Italy, and France; and contemporary India, Nigeria, Japan, and America. We will traverse genres including poetry, realist fiction, Gothic horror, the bildungsroman, documentary film, anime, the travelogue, the memoir, and science writing. To help develop our literary imaginations and our cross-disciplinary analytic skills, we will familiarize ourselves with campus resources including the Harry Ransom Center, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Perry-Castañeda Library, and James Turrell's Skyspace installation.

Texts:
Fiction: tales from The Arabian Nights; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Melville, "Benito Cereno"; Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"; Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Ghosh, The Hungry Tide; Habila, Oil on Water

Nonfiction: Marco Polo, Description of the World;James Cook, Voyages; Carson, The Sea Around Us; Cousteau, The Silent World; Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir

Poetry: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things; Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics; Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; Dunbar poems

Films: Painlevé science films; Miyakazi, Princess Mononoke; Rivera, Sleep Dealer; Planet Earth

N.B.: Students will select most of the texts for Spring 2018 in the fall, based on our course themes and a few other parameters.

Assignments:
Students must attend class and participate. Throughout the year, there will be regular blog posts. In the fall, students will write two 3-page essays and a 6-page essay. In the spring semester, students will work on essays of about the same length requiring more collaboration and research. Some of the essays will undergo peer review and revision.

About the Professor:

Heather Houser works on contemporary literature, with an emphasis on the U.S. novel and the environmental humanities. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and majored in English as an undergraduate at Reed College. Along the way, she wrote an undergraduate thesis on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses; worked odd jobs; lived in France, Italy, and Spain; traveled around Central Europe and Latin America; and received several national fellowships that supported her work on her dissertation & first book, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. 

This course is designed for students prepared to revise a seminar paper, Master's report, or dissertation chapter into a publishable article that they will submit to a peer-reviewed academic journal in Summer 2018. We will demystify the editorial process of academic journals and decode the specialized conventions of the article genre, focusing specifically on the methodological, argumentative, and stylistic moves that successful authors make. Students will develop strategies of "radical revision" to turn their polished essay, report, or chapter into a finely wrought article that makes an identifiable contribution to its field/s. The course will begin with several introductory weeks in which we all read and discuss materials concerned with the process of turning essays into articles and students identify appropriate journals for their essays. Students will then occasionally consult with the professors and work closely in small rotating writing groups as they revise their essays. Admission to the course is by Graduate Adviser approval.

The title of this course, "American Fiction Now," derives from a book series at Columbia University Press, "Literature Now," which is just one of many efforts (Post45, ASAP, among them) to specify the now of American literary production. The course approaches this task through readings of American novels, short stories, and criticism from the past decade. Emphasis will be on the genres fiction now fuses, the publics fiction now addresses, and the political debates fiction now engages. Rubrics organizing the course may include race relations, climate crisis, the global city, and portraits of home. We will also read recent cultural criticism and examine the interplay between the methodologies and questions literary scholars bring to "the extreme contemporary" and the fiction itself. Possible authors: Chris Abani, Lydia Davis, Siri Hustvedt, Marlon James, Maira Kalman, Rachel Kushner, Keise Laymon, Elizabeth McCracken, Lydia Millet, Ruth Ozeki, Jeff VanderMeer, Joy Williams, Nell Zink. Likely assignments: regular blog posts (~250 words), one blog synthesis + class facilitation, short book review, syllabus or other pedagogical document, annotated bibliography, seminar paper (with prospectus and peer-reviewed draft), paper presentation.

Scholarly Publications

Heather Houser and Wayne Rebhorn

This course is designed for students prepared to revise a seminar paper, Master's report, or dissertation chapter into a publishable article that they will submit to a peer-reviewed academic journal in Summer 2017. We will demystify the editorial process of academic journals and decode the specialized conventions of the article genre, focusing specifically on the methodological, argumentative, and stylistic moves that successful authors make. Students will develop strategies of "radical revision" to turn their polished essay, report, or chapter into a finely wrought article that makes an identifiable contribution to its field/s. The course will begin with several introductory weeks in which we all read and discuss materials concerned with the process of turning essays into articles and students identify appropriate journals for their essays. Students will then occasionally consult with the professors and work closely in small rotating writing groups as they revise their essays. Admission to the course is by Graduate Adviser approval.

Instructors: Heather Houser (Fall) & Sam Baker (Spring)

Course Theme: "Earth, Sea, and Sky: The Natures of World Literature" 

Description:
In this course we will read, think, write, and converse about literature and life, as we survey some innovative and bewildering engagements with the most elemental features of our surroundings: the earth, the sea, and the sky. Our studies in the natures of world literature will feature, among other locations, ancient Greece and China, modern England and France, and contemporary India and America. Where genre is concerned, we will traverse what the Greek philosopher Aristotle defined as the three main areas of literary endeavor—lyric poetry, drama, and narrative—while encountering modern forms such as realist novels, science fiction stories, and avant-garde films. To help develop our literary imaginations and our cross-disciplinary analytic skills, we will familiarize ourselves with campus resources including the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Perry-Castañeda Library, James Turrell's Skyspace installation, and live theater productions.

Texts/Readings/Films:
Possibilities for Fall:

Aristophanes, The Clouds; Ballard, Drowned World; Butler, Parable of the Sower; Atwood, The Year of the Flood; Carson, The Sea Around Us or Silent Spring; Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K; Ghosh, The Hungry Tide; Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman; Habila, Oil on Water; Langston Hughes, poems from The Weary Blues; Le Clézio, The Desert; LeGuin, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"; Lucretius, De rerum natura; Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir; Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus.

Possibilities for Fall or Spring:

Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Hayes, The Rime of the Modern Mariner; James Cook, Voyages; Jacques Cousteau, The Silent World; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Melville, "Benito Cereno"; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; Lisa Robertson, The Weather; Ruskin, "The Storm-Cloud of the 19th Century"; Petrarch, various sonnets and "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux"; Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics; modern pastoral and georgic poetry by Heaney and others.

Possibilities for Spring:

Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"; Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air; Classical Chinese poetry by Qu Yuan, Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu; Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan; tales from The Arabian Nights; Shakespeare, various sonnets and Romeo and Juliet (as text and as performance); Milton, Comus; Cavendish, The Blazing World; Austen, Persuasion; Stendhal, The Red and the Black; Proust, "Combray"; poetry by Percy Shelley; fiction by Mary Shelley.

Films for either Fall or Spring:

Varda, The Gleaners and I; Kiarostami, The Wind Will Carry Us; von Trier, Breaking the Waves or Melancholia; Miyakazi, Princess Mononoke; Reidelsheimer, Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and Tides; Walker, Waste Land; Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World

Assignments/Requirements:
Students must attend class and participate. There will be regular brief writing assignments and quizzes, a series of short (2-3 page) essays, and more substantial (5 page) papers. Some of the essays will undergo peer review and revision.

About the Professors:

Heather Houser (Fall 2016) works on contemporary literature, with an emphasis on the U.S. novel and the environmental humanities. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and majored in English as an undergrad at Reed College. Along the way, she wrote an undergraduate thesis on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses; worked odd jobs; lived in France, Italy, and Spain; traveled around Central Europe and Latin America; and received several national fellowships that supported her work on her dissertation & first book, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect.

Samuel Baker (Spring 2017) specializes in the study of British literature, in particular “Romantic” literature from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was a Comparative Literature major as an undergraduate at Columbia University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In addition to his academic pursuits, he has worked in publishing and in the museum world. His first book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture, appeared in 2010; more recently he has been developing a media theory of gothic literature.

E 368H  l  Honors Tutorial Course I

Instructor:  Houser, H & C. Hutchison

Unique #:  35505

Semester:  Fall 2016

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  n/a

Restrictions:  English Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

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.

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 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:  Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research (Third Edition) (University of Chicago Press, 2008), ISBN #978-0226065663.

Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2005), #978-0393924091.

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.

This course will introduce students to the questions, methods, and materials that have shaped the development of environmental criticism (a.k.a. ecocriticism) since its emergence in the 1990s. Students will build a vocabulary for the study of environmental literature and media as they discover the history and futures of the field. We’ll focus on key concepts such as wilderness, risk, and biopolitics and their function in approaches central to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities more generally: ecofeminism, environmental justice, science studies, and animal studies, among other. We’ll begin with debates about the meaning of “nature” and the tension between social construction and realism. The course will then investigate environmental critics’ and writers’ stances on urban, scientific, and technological development; the place of social justice in environmental dilemmas; and evolving understandings of the boundary between the human and nonhuman.

Critics and theorists may include Alaimo, Buell, Carson, Cronon, Guha & Alier, Hayles, Heise, Latour, W.P. Marsh, Morton, Nixon, Phillips, Solnit, Soper, and Raymond Williams. Literary and other cultural works selected from among the following: Thoreau’s Maine Woods, Sinha’s Animal’s People, Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been, Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl, Haynes’s Safe (film), Chang’s Up the Yangtze (film), Rockman (visual art), Kac (bioart).

Students will write in multiple genres (blog, book review, annotated bibliography, seminar or conference paper with prospectus) and put their papers through peer review. They’ll facilitate discussion and present their final projects in an in-class or department-wide symposium.

E 679HA  l  Honors Tutorial Course

Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #:  34670

Semester:  Fall 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Flags:  n/a

Restrictions:  English Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

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.

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 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: Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research (Third Edition) (University Of Chicago Press, 2008), ISBN #978-0226065663.

Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2005), #978-0393924091.

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.

E 314J  l  Reading Graphic Narratives

 Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #:  34075

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Flags:  Writing

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

Description: This course surveys American comics and other graphic narratives (GNs) as a form of literature. We will begin at mid-20th century with the "Golden Age" of superhero/ine comics and then move into the contemporary period when GNs become a reputable literary art form. Students will learn methods of literary analysis as they apply to the hybrid image-text genres of GN and practice those methods in conversation and in frequent informal and argument-based writing assignments. We will focus on the formal features of GNs; how to read the verbal and the visual; the different media in which comics appear (strip, book, and online); and how GNs respond to social, political, and cultural changes in the U.S.

The primary aim of this course is to develop and improve the critical reading, writing, and thinking skills needed for success in upper-division courses in English and other disciplines. Students will also gain practice using online research tools and print resources that support studies in the humanities. They will learn basic information literacy skills and models for approaching literature with various historical, generic, and cultural contexts in mind.

This course contains a writing flag. Writing assignments are arranged with a focus on invention, development through instructor and peer feedback, and revision; they will comprise a major part of the final grade. 

Tentative texts: Artists may include: Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, Eric Drooker, William Moulton Marston/DC Comics, Scott McCloud, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, Joe Sacco, Chris Ware, and Gene Luen Yang.

Requirements & Grading: 20% participation, 10% blog posts, 40% short papers (including mandatory revisions), 30% final writing project, which may require working as part of a team. The class is a discussion-based seminar and attendance is mandatory.

E 377M  l  American Novels after 1960

Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #:  34965

Semester:  Spring 2015

Cross-lists:  n/a

Restrictions:  n/a

Computer Instruction:  No

Flags:  Writing

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

Description: What is U.S. fiction now? How does postmodernism fit into our story of literary production since 1960? How is contemporary fiction in dialogue with social, technological, and political developments of the past 50 years? These questions will guide the course, and we'll answer them by examining American novels and film from the 1960s to the present. We'll begin with works in the canon of literary postmodernism and define for ourselves what this elusive but pervasive cultural concept means. The majority of the course then traverses less charted terrain: the contemporary. We'll consider innovations in storytelling that have emerged over the past decades. Throughout the course, we'll cross novelistic genres and engage issues central to post-1960 fiction: technological and media change, pop culture, globalization, and forms of memory/forgetting and belonging/alienation.

Texts: Authors may include Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed,Renata Adler, Toni Morrison, Ridley Scott (film), David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, Marilynne Robinson, Ruth Ozeki, Gary Shteyngart, and Alison Bechdel. And just maybe some digital fiction…

Requirements & Grading: The class will be run as a seminar. 15% participation; 10% reading exercises; 30% team multimedia project; 45% two 3- to 6-page essays.

Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #:  35800

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  LAH 350

Flags:  Writing

Restrictions:  English Honors

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: This course covers the truncated career of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), one of the most obsessed-over and lauded authors of his generation. We will read some of Wallace's essays and short stories, and all of Infinite Jest. The following questions will motivate the course: 1. What is Wallace's place in US literary history? What is his project for a new fiction? 2. What are his polemics about 20th-century US culture and media forms? Can particular novels and reading practices intervene in these domains? 3. How can fiction enter and change our lives?

We will avail ourselves of the Harry Ransom Center's rich Wallace archive which includes his manuscripts, letters, and personal library. The course culminates in a final project of the student's own design. Students are encouraged to use HRC resources in developing their project questions but are not required to do so.

Texts: Infinite Jest, and selections from Broom of the System, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Consider the Lobster, Oblivion, Girl with Curious Hair, and The Pale King.

Requirements & Grading: 15% participation (including discussion leading), 10% blog posts, 30% 2 short essays, 5% project proposal, 30% final project, 10% project presentation.

Instructor:  Houser, H

Unique #:  35890

Semester:  Fall 2014

Cross-lists:  BDP 329

Flags:  Ethics and Leadership; Writing

Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: Environmental change is everyone's concern, but populations in different parts of the world—and, indeed, within the U.S.—bear different burdens associated with it. This course approaches the environmental issues facing nations and individuals through novels, memoirs, and film from North America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. We will examine fiction as a unique form of environmental inquiry that:

• addresses large-scale ethical challenges through individual experiences;
• introduces multiple, sometimes unresolved, perspectives on environmental threats;
• uses age-old narrative forms such as fantasy, realism, the coming-of-age story, and science fiction to stage environmental and social dilemmas.

A central question of the course is how the books and films balance human justice, especially for the poor, and the welfare of the more-than-human world.

We begin by studying the place of nature and social justice in "First World" environmentalism and "the environmentalism of the poor" since the mid-20th century. We then focus on literature and film of the past thirty years, when globalization, resource extraction, technology, and environmental risks have spread in tandem. Possible units on food systems and politics, waste and toxicity, climate change, and resource wars. Across these topics we'll be concerned with how artists use narrative strategies, images, and generic conventions to shape global environmental consciousness.

Texts may include books and films by Margaret Atwood,J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh,Helon Habila, Keri Hulme,Michiko Ishimure, Hayao Miyazaki, Louie Psihoyos, Alex Rivera, Indra Sinha, Lucy Walker, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

Scholarly essays by Rachel Carson, William Cronon, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Ursula Heise, Ramanchandra Guha and Juan Martínez-Alier, Rob Nixon, and Vandana Shiva.

Visual art integrated into class discussion.

Requirements & Grading: Participation: 15%. Course blog posts: 10%. Two 3-5-page writing assignments: 40%. One final project: 35% (collaboration may be required).

Instructor:  Houser, H            Areas:  Elective / U

Unique #:  35327            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Spring 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

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

Description: What is U.S. fiction now? What are the recent literary traditions and social and cultural changes with which it's in dialogue? These questions will guide the course, and we'll answer them by examining American novels and short stories from the 1960s to the present. We'll begin with works in the canon of literary postmodernism and define for ourselves what this elusive but pervasive cultural concept means. The majority of the course then traverses less charted terrain: the contemporary. We'll consider the legacies of postmodernism and innovations in storytelling that have emerged over the past decades. Throughout the course, we'll cross novelistic genres and engage issues central to post-1960 fiction: technological and media change, pop culture, globalization, and forms of memory/forgetting and belonging/alienation.

Texts: Authors may include Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed,Donald Barthelme (stories), Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Ursula Le Guin, David Foster Wallace (stories), Richard Powers, Colson Whitehead,William Gibson, Marilynne Robinson, Gary Shteyngart, and Alison Bechdel (graphic memoir). And just maybe a digital/hypertext fiction…

Requirements & Grading: The class will be run as a seminar. 20% participation; 10% reading quizzes; 40% 2 four-page text explorations; 30% eight- to ten-page argumentative essay.

This course will introduce students to theories and practices of US postmodern fiction and will develop an account of where US fiction stands now. The first part of the course will focus on the formal and thematic signatures of American "high" postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the social, cultural, and technological developments it engages. We'll then read up to the present and assess how contemporary fiction carries postmodernism's legacy forward and how it innovates other ways of storytelling. To concentrate our inquiry, we'll examine works that don't only present worlds but that also theorize how we come to know our worlds (rationality and empiricism, affect, the body, place, religion, historical and cultural memory, media and technology).

Authors may include: Donald Barthelme (stories), Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, William Gibson, Ursula Le Guin, Tom McCarthy, China Miéville (non-US outlier), Lydia Millet, Toni Morrison, Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace (stories), Colson Whitehead, and Karen Tei Yamashita. We'll also read theoretical and critical texts by Elias, Gates, Harvey, Heise, hooks, Hutcheon, Jameson, Lyotard, McHale, and others. Evaluation based on participation, short writing assignments for blog and class meetings, prospectus, presentation, and longer writing assignment.

Instructor:  Houser, H            Areas:  I / H

Unique #:  35465            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Fall 2012            Restrictions:  English Honors

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

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

Description: This course covers the truncated career of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), one of the most obsessed-over and lauded authors of his generation. We will read some of Wallace's essays and short stories, and all of Infinite Jest. The following questions will motivate the course: 1. What is Wallace's place in US literary history? What is his project for a new fiction? 2. What are his polemics about 20th-century US culture and media forms? Can particular novels and reading practices intervene in these domains? 3. How can the novel and the individual navigate the onslaught of information in the 20th/21st centuries?

We will avail ourselves of the Harry Ransom Center's rich Wallace archive which includes his manuscripts, letters, and personal library. The course culminates in a final project of the student's own design. Students are encouraged to use HRC resources in developing their project questions but are not required to do so.

Texts: Infinite Jest. Possible selections from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and Girl with Curious Hair, and The Pale King. Short critical readings and prose comparisons.

Requirements & Grading: 20% participation, 10% discussion leading, 15% 5-page close textual analysis, 5% prospectus, 15% bibliographic essay, 35% 12-15 page essay.

Instructor:  Houser, H            Areas:  VI / I

Unique #:  35520            Flags:  Writing; Independent Inquiry

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: Environmental criticism—or, ecocriticism—is a vibrant area of literary scholarship that seeks to understand the cultural origins of environmental relations and responses to ecological threat. This course starts from the premises that 1) to understand emerging environmental issues, we must look beyond facts and data to the stories that literature tells and 2) to understand contemporary cultural production, we must analyze texts' environmental imagination. Thus, we'll explore the role of fiction—on page and screen—in creating environmental consciousness in the late 20th and 21st centuries. As we develop a critical vocabulary for interpreting recent eco-fiction, we'll sort out recent trends in environmental representation and criticism.

The following questions motivate our study: How do the ways that stories are narrated affect understanding of environmental issues? Are there more or less "successful" genres and formal strategies for addressing eco emergencies? What stance do contemporary authors take towards scientific developments? Towards activism? How do writers and filmmakers balance the demands for human justice and the welfare of ecosystems? Students will explore these questions and others in seminar discussions, and informal and formal writing assignments, including a self-defined research project.

Texts: Novels: Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Powers, Gain; Silko, Ceremony; Sinha, Animal's People

Films: Dunn, The Unforeseen; Kennedy, The Garden; Stanton, Wall-E

Essays & scholarship by: William Cronon, Annie Dillard, bell hooks, Kate Soper, Evelyn White.

Requirements & Grading: participation (20%), course blog (10%); project prospectus (5%); 2 short essays (25%); bibliographic essay (10%); research essay (25%); presentation (5%).

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

Description: Environmental criticism—or, ecocriticism—is a vibrant literary research area that seeks to understand the cultural origins of environmental relations and responses to ecological threat. This course will introduce you to the cultural and political contexts within which recent environmental thinkers have defined "nature" and expanded our understanding of the environment. Debates about whether to embrace or reject modernization and science, and about the proper modes for mediating the environment inform ecocriticism. We will analyze the terms and stakes of these debates along with the currents that cut across them: gender, race, and class positioning; the category of the human vis-à-vis the machine and animal; post- and neocolonialism; and urbanism.

The following questions motivate our study: How do literature, film, and cultural theory shape environmental issues? Are there more or less "successful" narrative strategies for addressing environmental decline? How do eco-thinkers and -artists balance the demands for human justice and the welfare of ecosystems? Students will develop a critical vocabulary for the study of environmental fiction as they sort out the history and futures of environmental representation.

Texts: Texts may include fiction by: Susanne Antonetta, Philip K. Dick, Barbara Dowdy, Amitav Ghosh, Alexis Rockman (painter), Ridley Scott (filmmaker), Vincenzo Natali (filmmaker), and data visualization artists. Key theorists may include: Giorgio Agamben, Raymond Williams, Lawrence Buell, Rachel Carson, Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Bruno Latour, and Peter Singer.

Requirements & Grading: participation, including course blog (20%); project prospectus (5%); short essay (15%); source annotations (10%); research essay (40%); presentation (10%).