New Courses for 2009-2010
ENG 341—Literature of the Great Plains
Fall 2009
TR 12:30 to 1:45, ADM 238
Our literary journey will take inspiration from the Great Plains, with a special emphasis on our own immediate region of the High Plains, in authors--traditional to contemporary-- whose poems, stories and prose explore their relationships with this landscape, history and culture. A fundamental question that we will be addressing all semester is how does “place” affect who we are as people, and the art (in this case, literature) that speaks to those concerns.
Readings: Plains Fiction: Goodnight, Nebraska by Tom McNeal; Ceremony in Lone Tree by Wright Morris; Augusta Locke by William Haywood Henderson; short selections from Willa Cather & Mari Sandoz
Plains Prose: (Memoirs, Reflections, Essays) Great Plains by Ian Frazier; The Giving Earth: A John G. Neihardt Reader; Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O’Brien; Local Wonders by Ted Kooser; The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley; Hostiles & Friendlies by Mari Sandoz
Plains Poetry: The Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry
Facebook: Become a member of "Literature of the Great Plains" by searching in the GROUPS area. You will find a full reading list, course descriptions and useful links.
For more info contact:
Dr. Matthew Evertson
308-432-6462
mevertson@csc.edu
ENG 342—Literature Across Borders
Spring 2010
TR 12:30-1:45, MIL 301
This new course will offer an exploration of writers and works that confront and cross borders—geographical, cultural and ethnic—throughout American history. Our literary will take a multicultural approach, focusing upon works and authors from the “margins” of society, or upon the environment in which people find themselves moving between the mainstream and the marginal, the rich and the poor, the majority and the minority, the American and the foreign, from one political arena to another, from one socioeconomic reality to another, and from one cultural landscape to another. We will focus special attention on those borderlands of the American Southwest and surrounding the various demarcations of American Indian territory and/or reserved lands, past and present.
While the reading list for this course is not yet determined, we will likely be exploring some multi-cultural anthologies or readers related to Black, Native, Latino/A and Asian American prose and poetry, focusing primarily on those shifting cultures and communities in the "borderlands" communities of the American West. These readings will be complemented by longer explorations from noted writers who have addressed this theme: Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday, So Far From God by Ana Castillo, Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Austin, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, American Indian Stories, Legends and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa.
ENG 431—Irish Literature
Fall 2009
TR 2:00-3:15, ADM 238
Come to the Land of Heart’s Desire and read the work of four great writers of the Anglo-Irish Renaissance: Yeats, Synge, Joyce, and O’Casey
Readings: The Poetry of W. B. Yeats; Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses; O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars
Performance Screenings: Synge, Riders to the Sea, The Well of the Saints, and Playboy of the Western World
For more info contact:
Dr. George Griffith
308-432-6306
ggriffith@csc.edu
HUM 330—Arms and Men: Crisis and Conflict in the Humanities
This course will investigate notions of human conflict and aggression in the Western world. We will determine whether human conflict is an inevitable part of the human condition. We will begin by studying antiquity and progress to the modern world, analyzing ancient themes, theories, and rationalizations for human conflict and determine whether such ideas are relevant today.
Readings: Iliad, Homer; Agamemnon, Aeschylus; Hamlet, William Shakespeare; Othello, William Shakespeare; A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway; In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway; The Waste Land, TS Eliot; “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr.
Films Screenings: The Mission (1986), Cold Mountain (2003), 4 Little Girls (1997), and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
HUM 332—Love and Desire in the Western Tradition
Fall 2009
MWF 9:00-9:50, ADM 242
This course will explore the development of Western notions of romantic love from the classical age to the present. We will read and discuss a selection of important and influential literary and philosophical texts on love, marriage, romance, sex, and gender politics to trace the changing significance of these subjects throughout different time periods in Western history. We will also investigate some of Western culture’s most persistent and influential male and female icons and stereotypes to speculate about what remainders of these are implicit in contemporary thinking and practices regarding love and romance.
Readings: Plato’s The Symposium, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, The Romance of Tristan and Iseule, Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Freud’s The Pleasure Principle, Breton’s Nadja, and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality
For more info contact:
Dr. Thomas Deane Tucker
308-432-6309
ttucker@csc.edu