Weekly Readings/ Paper Deadlines
LINKS
HANDOUTS
ON LINE:
1. Readings – Yeats, Tagore, Eliot
2. Assignment 1
LECTURES
and NOTES ON LINE:
Course
Requirements:
attendance, participation, 3 short (5 page) papers and a term paper. The term
paper will be a substantial (10-15 pages) piece of criticism. Expectations for
graduate students and undergraduates will vary.
Required
Texts:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
E.M. Forster, Passage to India
Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable
Aime Cesaire, Collected
Poetry
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the
Dark
Additional
texts, including criticism, will be made available as photocopies. There may be
a photocopy fee. Some of the photocopied materials (such as, for instance, T.S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land) are readily available in various anthologies.
Policies:
Late
papers. I
do not like late papers. If a paper is going to be late unavoidably, tell me in
advance, preferably in writing (i.e., over email). If I do not hear about it in
advance, I will automatically deduct a half-grade per day the paper is late.
The deadline for the final paper will be non-negotiable.
Papers
by email. At
this time, I do not accept papers by email except under extreme circumstances
(i.e., you are away from campus for a family emergency or an authorized
athletic trip). This may change as the semester progresses.
Attendance
and participation. This course is a seminar, which means it only works if everyone shows
up consistently, does all of the reading, and participates. I have avoided
overloading the syllabus with gigantic books, but that means I need people to
read carefully. Come into class every day with questions and issues you wish to
discuss.
From time to time I will assign
(rather informal) one-page response papers to ensure that everyone is keeping
up with the reading.
Creative
Writing.
The grade for this course is based primarily on your in-class participation and
the strength of your analytic writing. That said, I’m happy to take a look at
creative efforts of various sorts, but I cannot consider them as part of the
grade for the course.
Your
input and ideas. I have intentionally left a little room in the syllabus for
additional readings. If you have ideas about short texts that might add to the
class discussion (literary or critical), let me know.
Additional
reading on your own: We are barely scratching the surface of many of these authors’ careers.
If you find that you’re especially interested in the writings of one author or
another, of if you’ve already read the text I’m assigning for a particular
week, I would encourage you to read beyond the assignments for class. This
would be especially helpful with the poets whose work we are engaging (i.e.,
T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Aime Cesaire, W.B. Yeats), but it is also true of
novels.
Grade
Components:
40% Short papers and response papers
30% Final paper
30% Class attendance and participation
Instructor: Prof. Amardeep Singh Office Hours: Wednesday
2-5 (or appointment)
Sept
3-7: Heart of Darkness
Excerpt from Said, Culture and Imperialism
(photocopy)
Woolf on “Modern Fiction” (photocopy)
Sept.
10-14: Yeats, Eliot, Tagore
Yeats: Poems from Responsibilities, Wild
Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer; “Preface” to Tagore’s Gitanjali
(photocopy)
Eliot: The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash
Wednesday
Tagore: Gitanjali (excerpts)
[Monday 9/10: Last day for
fall registration; last day to drop a course w/out a W]
Sept.
17-21: To the Lighthouse
Sept.
24-28: To the Lighthouse
Essays by Deleuze/Guattari on the “Rhizome”; Lacan
on the Symbolic (photocopies)
Oct.
1-5: Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man
Oct.
10, 12: Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man
Oct.
15-19: Tender Buttons
Essays by Saussure, Jakobsen, Gass (photocopies)
[Friday Oct. 19: I will
likely be absent]
Oct.
22-26: A Passage to India
Oct.
29-Nov. 2: A Passage to India
Essays by Sharpe, Baucom, Jameson
Excerpt from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (photocopy)
Forster’s “Kanaya” memoir
Nov.
5-9: Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable
Preface by E.M. Forster
Nov.
19-21: Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
Nov.
26-30: Manifestoes: Wyndham Lewis’ Blast (photocopy)
Essays by Benjamin (“Surrealism”), Rabinbach (from The
Human Motor), Selzer (from Bodies and Machines)
(Possible films: M,
Metropolis, Modern Times)
Dec.
3-7: Continue from previous week; synthetic discussion (re-reading).
Possibly introduce new materials