also,
English 790,
the English MA Exam Preparation Seminar |
The
G. Pitt and Virginia Warner Lecture
Series, Spring 2003
A Master of Arts and
Letters Exam Preparation
Class for Graduate Students in the Department
of English and Comparative
Literature, SDSU, and a Lecture Series, Open
to the Campus Community and
the Public |
Required
Works with LECTURING SPEAKERS and Editions
nota
bene: graduate students enrolled in the
class must enter the seminar
room having carefully READ the entire
selection for that day.
Professor
Laurel Amtower
(R)
BORROFF -- SIR GAWAIN & GREEN KNIGHT
WITH PATIENCE
(R)
CHAUCER -- CANTERBURY TALES (HIEATT TR)
(BANTAM)
Professor
Priti Joshi
(R)
CONRAD -- HEART OF DARKNESS (OXFORD
WORLD CLASSICS
Professor
William Nericcio
(R)
FUENTES -- AURA (FARRAR)
Professor
Carey Wall
"Woman
Emerges from the Margins: Charismatic
Hester Evokes New Life from the
New
World"
(R)
HAWTHORNE -- SCARLET LETTER (PENGUIN)
Professor
Mary Galbraith
(R)
JOYCE -- PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A
YOUNG MAN
March
24, 2003
Professor
June Cummins
(R)
WOOLF -- TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Professor
Lynda Koolish
(R)
MORRISON -- BLUEST EYE (NAL)
Miguel-Angel
Soria,
Head Librarian
(R)
RIVERA -- Y NO SE LO TRAGO LA TIERRA/
& EARTH DID
Professor
Irene Lara
(R)
SHAKESPEARE -- TEMPEST (WASHINGTON
SQUARE PRESS)
Professor
Gerald Butler
(R)
SWIFT -- GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (CRITICAL
ED)
Professor
Jerry Griswold
(R)
TWAIN -- ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
: CASE ST
|
LECTURE SCHEDULE
Unless
otherwise noted, ALL lectures begin at 7pm
in Adams Humanities 4176 |
January
27
"What is an
MA in English?: An
Introduction to the Class, the Logistics of
the Exam, and the Plan of the
Semester"
William A.
Nericcio, course director |
February
3
"Carlos
Fuentes's Aura:
Image, Text, History and Desire in the Pages
of a Modern Mexican Masterpiece"
William A.
Nericcio
Biography
Dr.
William A. Nericcio is presently an
Associate Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at San Diego State
University. He has also taught
literature, cultural studies and critical
theory at The University of Connecticut
and at Cornell University where he completed
his doctoral degree in Comparative
Literature (1989). A native son of
Laredo, Texas, with ancestors
hailing from Mexico, Sicily and (it is
whispered) Great Britain, Nericcio
has published articles on Orson Welles as an
ethnically cross-dressed Chicano
movie director, the chameleon-like nature of
Octavio Paz’s political thought,
and the heady encounter of deconstruction,
electrolysis and celebrity in
the life of Rita Hayworth. His essay,
“Artif[r]acture: Virulent Pictures,
Graphic Narrative, and the Ideology of the
Visual” appeared in the Mosaic:
A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study
of Literature. His primary
works, a comparative study of alien-ation in
Latin American and Chicana/o
Literature, and an illustrated history of
Latina/o stereotypes in 20th
cen-tury US mass culture, are forthcoming.
More here.
|
February
10
"On Swift's
Gulliver's Travels"
Gerald J.
Butler
Biography
Dr. Gerald
Butler is A. B. California,
Berkeley, 1963. With Honors; Phi Beta Kappa;
Ph. D. Washington, 1969. He
is Professor of English and Comparative
Literature, San Diego State University
and has taught also as professeur invité,
Université Rennes
2, on exchange at the Université d'Orléans
(I. U. T. Bourges),
1990-1991 (exchange), and as maître des
conferences (invité)
at the Université de Nice. He belongs to the
British Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Modern
Language Association of America,The
Voltaire Foundation,The Dickens Society,The
D. H. Lawrence Society of North
America,The New Canterbury Literary Society
(Richard Aldington Society).
Butler has published four scholarly books:
Fielding's Unruly Novels (Salzburg:
Universität Salzburg, Insitüt für Anglistik
und Amerikanistik,
1995); Henry Fielding and Lawrence's "Old
Adam": A Reading of British Restoration
and Eighteenth Century Literature (Lampeter,
Wales, and Lewiston, New York:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1992); Love and Reading:
An Essay in Applied Psychoanalysis
(New York: Peter Lang, 1989); "This is
Carbon: A Defense of D. H. Lawrence's
The Rainbow Against His Admirers (Seattle:
Genitron Books, 1986). He is
also well-known for his work on the great
modern French novelist, Louis-Ferdinand
Céline.
He
has also published numerous scholarly
articles. Some recent work includes
"Fielding's Amelia; Or, Justice Exposed,"
Crime et châtiment dans
les îles britanniques au dix-huitième
siècle, RuBriCa:
Russko-Britanskaya Cathedra 7, Moscow
(2001); "Fanny as Sexual Being: the
"Alien Meaning" of Fielding's Joseph Andrews
in Mentalities/Mentalités
16.1-2 (2001); "The Real Versus the
University Branch of the Culture Industry:
the Academic Institutionalization of the
Eighteenth-Century British Novel,"
in Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical
Theory, Vancouver, B. C.: Talonbooks,
2001; "Making Fielding's Novels Speak for
Law and Order," reprinted in
Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century
Literature, ed. David H. Richter,
Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999;
"Ann Radcliffe's Novels: Peace
and War, Sublimity and Maiden Fears," in
Guerres et paix: la Grande-Bretagne
au xviiie siècle, Tome II, ed.
Paul-Gabriel Boucé.
Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle,
1998; "Print Eroticism, the 'Canonical'
English Novel, and European Enlightenment:
An Essay in Criticism," La Grande-Bretagne
et l'Europe des Lumières, ed. Serge Soupel
(Paris: Presses de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996; "Fielding's Panzaic
Voice: Enlightenment as Critique
of the Mythical," La Grande-Bretagne
et l'Europe des Lumières,
ed. Serge Soupel (Paris: Presses de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996); "Sexual
Desire and the Ages of Women in Fielding's
Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones,"
Les Ages de la vie en Grande-Bretagne au
XVIIIe siècle, ed. Serge
Soupel (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne
Nouvelle, 1995); "On the Role of
'Theory' in American Academic Censorship,"
Revue française d'études
américaines 52 (1992). He has given papers
on eighteenth-century
subjects not only in various French and
North American universities, but
in Dublin and Oxford as well.
He has
published creative work in
Hudson Review, Chicago Review, New York
Quarterly, West Coast Review, Pacific
Review, the Doubleday anthology Aging
Quickly Here, and various literary
magazines; comments on his poetry are in
Josephine Miles, Poetry, Teaching,
and Scholarship and in Richard Kostelanetz,
Literary Politics in America.
He is editor of Recovering Literature: A
Journal of Contextualist Criticism,
1972-present. He is currently at work on a
study of the relationship of
the novel to the Enlightenment, and he is
completing a novel of his own.
|
February
17
"Reading the
Middle Ages: The
Canterbury
Tales and Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight."
Laurel
Amtower
BIOGRAPHY:Laurel Amtower
is Associate Professor
of English at SDSU and specializes in medieval
literature. She is the author
of "Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in
the Later Middle Ages."
|
February
24
"The Bluest
Eye" TBA
Lynda
Koolish
Biography:
LYNDA
KOOLISH (B. A: University of
California, Berkeley, with honors; M.A.:
San Francisco State University, with a
thesis on James Joyce'sUlysses;
interdisciplinary Ph.D.: Stanford
University, Modern Thought and
Literature, 1981, with a dissertation on
American feminist poetry) is a
Professor of English and Comparative
Literature, San Diego State University.
She also currently directs the undergraduate
honors program in English,
comparative literature, and creative
writing. Professor Koolish has
taught or lectured at the Goddard Graduate
Programs; College of Marin;
University of the Pacific; Sonoma State
University; California State University,
Sacramento; San Francisco State University;
University of California, Berkeley;
U.C. Berkeley Extension; University of
California, Davis; University of
California, Santa Cruz; Stanford University,
and Kansas University.
Most well
known for her work on
Toni Morrison (essays published in African
American Review and MELUS),
she is also the author of African American
Writers: Portraits and Visions
(University Press of Mississippi, 2001), a
collection of sixty photographic
portraits of African American writers, with
accompanying literary bio-bibliographies,
a book that won the 2001 American Library
Association award. Donna Seaman,
the ALA reviewer, had this to say about
Portraits and Visions:
Koolish's
elegant black-and-white
photographs of African American writers seem
empathic, as though the camera
channeled more than mere light and shadow to
drink in the writers' thoughts
and feelings, the hum of their minds and
thrum of their bodies. Each studied
yet dynamic portrait is accompanied by a
brief essay in which Koolish,
a professor of literature as well as a
photographer, describes with precision
and zest the timbre of the writers' voices,
the spirit of their work, and
the significance of their contribution to
the canon. Here's Wanda Coleman
standing at a mike poised for action yet
arrested in contemplation, one
of 12 writers holding their hands to their
heads, a thinker's habit. August
Wilson and Haki R. Madhubuti smile; Lucille
Clifton and Edwidge Danticat
are about to. Clarence Major, Albert Murray,
Yusef Komunyakaa, Paule Marshall,
and Sonia Sanchez are serious, reflective,
receptive. Koolish's absorbing
portraits, most of recent vintage, some from
the 1980s, document 60 writers
essential to American letters and, in a very
real sense, to a richly imagined
life.
She has
lectured widely on contemporary
African American writers, and has had
numerous one woman exhibitions of
her photographs of African American writers
at such places as the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture (the
Harlem Branch of the New York
Public Library), the San Francisco Public
Library, the Salt Lake City Public
Library, and the Doreen B. Townsend Center
for the Humanities at U.C. Berkeley.
Twenty-four of her photographs have been
acquired by San Diego State University
and are on permanent display in the SDSU
Library.
Her work
on nineteenth century African
American literature is represented by an
essay on Iola Leroy in Tricksterism
in Turn of the Century American Literature,
and among her many essays on
American poets is "The Bones of This Body
Say, Dance: The Theme of Self-Empowerment
in Contemporary Poetry by U.S. Women of
Color," included in A Gift of Tongues:
Critical Challenges in Contemporary American
Poetry. She has also
been a contributor to the Oxford Companion
to African American Literature,
American Literature, Contemporary Literary
Criticism, American Book Review,
The Women's Review of Books, and Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and
Society. A volume of her poetry was
published by Ariel Press, and her poems
have appeared in several anthologies and
literary journals, including Berkeley
Poets Cooperative, Mosaic , Epoch ,
and Yellow Silk..
She is
currently at work on a book
and exhibition (scheduled to be shown at
UCSD in 2005) called "'The Common
Woman is as Common as the Best of Bread/ and
Will Rise': A Celebration
of Three Decades of Feminist Presses,
Broadsides and Poets," for which
she is curator, collector, and photographer.
The exhibition will contain
one hundred broadsides, and photographs of
each of the poets whose work
is represented by the broadsides, as well as
histories of the feminist
presses which created the broadsides.
|
March
3
Caliban's
Curses and Beyond: (Post)colonialism,
Feminism, and The Tempest
Irene
Lara
Biography
Irene Lara
is an Assistant Professor
at San Diego State University's Women's
Studies Department. She received
her BA in American Studies with a Focus on
Race and Ethnicity at Stanford
University and will soon receive her Ph.D.
in Ethnic Studies at the University
of California, Berkeley with a Designated
Emphasis in Women, Gender, and
Sexuality. At Berkeley, she co-founded
the Chicana and Latina Studies
Working Group, co-organized the
"Oppositional Wetness: Mujeres Living
Theory"
and "Latinas Coming of Age" conferences, and
co-facilitated the "Healing
and Spirituality" panel and talking circle
for the "Practicing Transgressions:
Radical Women in the 21st Century," a
conference celebrating the 20th anniversary
of the publication of This Bridge Called My
Back: Writings By Radical Women
of Color. Her essay "Healing Sueños for
Academia" appears in this
bridge we call home: radical visions for
transformation edited by Gloria
Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. She
has two forthcoming publications:
the co-authored "Fiera, Guambra, y
Karichina! Transgressing the Borders
of Community and Academy" in Chicana/Latina
Feminist Pedagogies and Epistemologies
of Everyday Life and "Interview of Gloria
Anzaldúa." in EntreMundos/InterWords:
New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa.
|
March 10
"An Image of
Conrad: Adventure,
Empire and Heart of Darkness"
Priti Joshi
Biography:
coming soon.
|
March
17 (St. Patrick's Day)
"Portrait of
the Artist as a Little
Boy: James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man"
Mary
Galbraith
Biography
Mary
Galbraith teaches children's
literature at SDSU. She concentrates
on the representation of childhood
self in novels and picture books. In
exploration of this topic, she
has done close readings of early chapters in
Henry James, Charles Dickens,
and Charlotte Bronte, and of picture books
by Ludwig Bemelmans, Margaret
Wise Brown, and Maurice Sendak. She
argues that certain outstanding
books featuring a fictional child self carry
the weight of their creators'
own primal experiences, and she (dimly as
yet) conceives a complex but
mappable relationship between implicit
memory and artistic creation.
|
March 24
"Virginia
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
and the Dynamics of Desire"
June Cummins
Biography
With a
Ph.d from Columbia and a
home in Chicago and San Diego, the English
Department's most famous frequent
flyer presently travails in the fields of
Children's Literature and British
Lit.
|
March
31
CESAR CHAVEZ
DAY/SPRING BREAK
NO LECTURE |
April
7
"Mousetraps
in the Epic Theater
of William Shakespeare's Hamlet: An
Alienation Effect that Offers
Insight into What Lies Nearest by Way of
Astonishment at What Lies Farthest"
Monika
Hubel
Biography
Monica
Hubel spent twenty years
in the publishing business in Europe before
landing on our shores and establishing
herself as a West Coast Literati--beginning
with a BA from National University
and recently completing her MA in English
and Comparative Literature from
SDSU with a thesis on Joyce. When not
composing long, ponderous and enigmatic
titles for the Warner Lecture series, Hubel
awaits word from Doctoral Degree
Programs on both coasts in the field of
Comparative Literature and Translation
Studies.
|
April 14
"What You
Need to Know About Huck
(& Jim & Pap & Judith Loftus) to
Pass the MA Exam"
Jerry
Griswold
Biography
Sometimes
mistaken for Mark Twain,
Jerry Griswold has created a new edition and
introduction for the Penguin
Classics' The Prince and the Pauper and
written about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn in chapters of his Audacious Kids
(paperback edition titled The Classic
American Children's Story). An occasional
contributor to the Los Angeles
Times, Senior Fulbright Lecturer for a year
at the National University
of Ireland in Galway, he teaches American,
Irish, and Children's Literature
at SDSU. Like the impish Huckleberry Finn,
Griswold is an American child
of Irish descent.
|
April 21
"Channeling
Tomas Rivera's Y
no se lo trago la tierra..."
Miguel-Angel
Soria
Biography
A
post-movimiento xicano poet,
performance artist, elementary school
teacher and now, hi-tech Aztec Librarian,
Soria's work has been showcased on HBO and Salon.com.
|
April 28
"Woman
Emerges from the Margins: Charismatic Hester
Evokes New Life from the New
World"
Professor
Carey Wall
Biography
forthcoming
|
May
3 MA EXAM DAY SATURDAY
8:30am to
10:30am, Question 1
break
11am to
1pm, Question 2
lunch
2pm to
4pm, Question 3
|
|
EXAM
Saturday
May
3, 2003
AH
4176
no paper
necessary; bluebooks provided
by the Department
schedule:
8:30am
to 10:30am, Question 1
break
11am
to 1pm, Question 2
lunch
2pm
to 4pm, Question 3
|
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