Spring 2012 Graduate Cross-Listed Courses

ENGL 522: Studies in English Language - Gender & Writing

(3 credits) T 5:30 - 8:00 p.m. with Kathleen Dixon

Does language bear the traces of gender, sexuality, race, and class? How about literary language?
In this course, we will consider both ordinary language and the literary variety, in an attempt to determine if the differences we find are merely individual, or at least in part, expressive of larger social and political differences. We will be operating in the experimental mode or subjunctive mood, as any hypothesis we might put forward is highly debatable. I remember one time hearing a black soprano muse
about whether there was such a thing as a "black voice" in opera. "Good question!" she replied, not only to her interlocutor, but to herself.
We will begin with some books on stylistics and articles on sociolinguistics, but almost immediately we will move to textual application. Students can choose to study conversation or literature for their major projects. In class, we will do both, although the emphasis will probably lie with the literary. We will read some novels (or, in the case of Joyce, part of a novel) by contemporaries to see if we can make some rudimentary comparisons. It could be said that Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday wrote the same book, but quite differently (both feature a male protagonist returning to the Southwest after WWII). Maxine Hong Kingston wrote both the Woman Warrior and China Men—during the same period of time, as she told us at the most recent Writers Conference. Does the prose style change? And so on. But we'll also look at some scholars' analyses of various shorter texts, or texts that perhaps we can assume we all share in common.

SWK 560: Family Violence

(3 credits) Online with Dheeshana Jayasundara

Description TBA