will be offered by Professor Laura Soldner in Winter 2010 to interested graduate students and upper-class English majors or minors.   This course would especially pertinent for individuals on the pedagogy track in the graduate program as well as for students planning to teach or go on to graduate school. 

In EN 511/495 students will study current, as well as foundational, research in the field of reading and explore its applicability to classrooms, learning centers, or other educational settings.  Students will also learn about as well as practice prereading, comprehension, retention, vocabulary, and metacognitive strategies in order to strengthen their own approaches to reading as well as to understand and implement methods in their instructional planning and delivery.

Interested students in EN 511/EN 495 will also be invited to participate in the preparation and delivery of a conference presentation with Prof. Soldner at the International Reading Association’s annual conference in Chicago, Illinois at the McCormick Place April 25 to 28th, 2010.

EN 495/EN 595: Special Topics

Professors:  Russell Prather (English), James Phegan (Art and Design)

4 Credits

Words and images have a long, complex and fascinating relationship going back at least as far as Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the combination of word and image has never been as prevalent, nor attracted as much popular and critical attention, as in the present day.  This course, offered jointly by the English Department and School of Art and Design, investigates word-image relationships from historical, theoretical and practical perspectives.  The second half of the semester will foreground contemporary forms of word-image combination, particularly comics and graphic novels.

This interdisciplinary course is designed to bring together students from the English MFA and MA programs, as well as upper division undergraduates from both Art and Design and English.  Assignments are likely to include a short critical paper and a research presentation, and will place special emphasis on students’ own creative experiments combining word and image, culminating in a final creative project.  Drawing ability is not required to take this course; curiosity about literature and art is.

Issues for study may include: medieval illuminated manuscripts (eg. the Aberdeen Beastiary), the tradition of Ut Pictura Poesis (“as in painting so in poetry”), 18th-century engraving (eg. William Hogarth, William Blake), modernist and avant-garde experimentation (eg. Mallarme, Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp), concrete poetry (eg. Ian Hamilton Finlay), children’s books (eg. Maurice Sendak, Maria Kalman), “outsider” art (eg. Adolph Wolfli, Henry Darger, Howard Finster), contemporary artist’s books, graphic novels (eg. Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware), contemporary visual art (eg. Mel Botchner, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger), hypertext and digital art, editorial illustration, theoretical works (eg. John Berger, Scott McCloud, W. J. T. Mitchell), among others.

EN 430/EN 530: Major Authors

Salman Rushdie:

Rushdie’s novel Midnight Children received a Booker Prize in 1981.  He was appointed a Knight Bachelor for services to literature in June 2007; he holds the highest rank — Commandeur — in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.  He began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007.  In May 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  In July 2008 Midnight's Children won a public vote to be named the Best of the Booker, the best novel to win the Booker Prize in the award's 40-year history.

Rushdie’s texts reflect a broad area of cultural and literary debates regarding postmodernity and postcoloniality.  His novels and essays critique social and cultural borders, and explore race, hybridity, and intertextuality in a postcolonial context. Critical perspectives addressing social, cultural and political influences of his work will provide students analytical tools for them to develop their own methods of inquiry.

One of the questions that will be asked in this course is: What is postcolonial literature?  There are many arguments regarding the exact meaning of the term—postcolonial—yet most will agree that postcolonial literature includes writers from the former colonies of the British Empire. This literature can be considered the writings of the empire and writing back to the Empire.  Produced by the interaction of Britain with colonized countries and their resistances to it, postcolonial literature brings up interesting issues for discussion, such as nationalism, transnationlism, identity politics, place and space, exile and alienation, power and knowledge, and resistance and complicity. 

We'll focus on contemporary narratives from one major author: Salman Rushdie.   The readings will explore the lasting artistic and political impacts of colonization. We will also examine ideas such as resistance and complicity and work toward understanding issues of globalism and cosmopolitanism from a well-known author residing in the West. 

Texts:  Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Shame.

Theoretical Texts will include Ashish Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery Under Colonialism; Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, and The Postcolonial Studies Reader.