ENGL 345, Fall 2009
M W F 3-3:50
Dr. Patricia Hopkins
African-American Literature and Culture
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This class is designed to introduce you to the African-American literary
tradition, including slave narratives, political rhetoric, poetry, prose,
drama and the novel. By reading texts in a range of genres spanning three
centuries, you will attain a foundation in the early African-American
tradition and gain some sense of how African-American writers addressed
issues of race, gender, nation, slavery, and citizenship. The course will
move back and forth between careful, rigorous close readings of these texts
and more general discussions about the texts and their position within U.S.
political philosophy and America's legal, social, and cultural history.
This course is, moreover, designed both to introduce students to key issues,
themes, and methods in African American Studies as well as to pique interest
in an effort to encourage further study of the discipline; thus, the course
is comprised of important texts, but also of those which have proven to have
"high appeal" in the past. We will use the readings as entry points into a
discussion of the historical period and cultural moment, which informed
their creation. I have, therefore, selected both traditional and
nontraditional texts in order to provide students with a solid foundation in
those that they might most commonly be expected to know following an
introductory course in African American studies.

ENGL 462, Fall '09
Dr. Terry Lee
W 4-6:45 p.m.
Community Storytelling & Documentary Studies
Enrollment / Prerequisites: ENGL 308 or permission of instructor

More about this course:
This is a course about storytelling, above all else. Storytelling with narrative reporting, with photographs, with documentary video. It is also about 21st-century technology for storytelling and about collaboration in the production of multi-platform, multi-media publishing.
We will produce a multi-media online publication as a collaborative effort that taps each individual's skills and interests. We will focus our documentary reporting on a topical issue affecting the Newport News community. More on that later.
All will study methods of documentary reporting and storytelling. Early in the course, we will take up roles that suit our interests and skills to form a flexible, responsive and collaborative team. Documentary team roles will include writers, photographers, videographers, and web developers. You don't need to be an expert in any of these skills. But you will need an active interest in storytelling, in documenting community stories and in polishing old skills and developing new ones. Interested? For examples of narrative journalism and SoundSlide shows, you can check out the English department's online creative nonfiction magazine, Lookout, at www.cnu.edu/lookout. For examples of some of the instructor's documentary work, you can check out www.risingpress.org.

ENGL 490-W1, Fall 2009
Dr. Jean S. Filetti
Senior Seminar—Writing Trauma
MWF 1300-1350
Prerequisites: ENGL 308 with minimum grade of C-; senior standing.
Required Readings:
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Eli Wiesel’s Night
Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone
Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

Course Topic Description:
The course title comes from Dominick LaCapra’s theoretical distinction between writing about trauma, which is reconstructing the past objectively and is the realm of history, and writing trauma, which “indicates some distance from trauma [ . . . ] .  Trauma indicates a shattering break or cesura in experience which has belated effects.  Writing trauma [ . . . ] involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to the past—processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experience,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different  combinations and hybridized forms” (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 186).
Course readings include both fiction and nonfiction accounts of trauma and discussion will cohere around such questions as the following:

• Why study the literature of trauma in a post-9/ll world?
• In what ways is the literature of trauma a marginalized literature?
• What purpose does recounting the horror serve?  Are these purposes the same for the survivor and for society?
• How might trauma be further interrogated by examining the roles of perpetrators, collaborators, profiteers, bystanders, resisters, rescuers, and those who fall into what Primo Levi calls, “a gray zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge,” a reference to “the prisoner-functionary,” the Jewish prisoner, for example, who, albeit a victim, turned on other prisoners and became a perpetrator? (The Drowned and the Saved, 42).
• Regarding trauma, what is ethical to tell and who should do that telling?
• What does it mean to survive trauma?
• Who is the survivor’s audience?
• In what ways does the survivor’s sense of community shape his or her testimony?
• How is the survivor’s account accessed and influenced by the non-traumatized reader?
• What messages in our society conspire to keep the survivor’s voice silent?

ENGL 490-W2, Fall '09
Dr. Terry Lee
T R 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Senior Seminar—Masculinity in America
Prerequisites: ENGL 308 with minimum grade of C-; senior standing.

This seminar examines versions of the masculine ideal that the culture makes available to men. Senior seminar research projects will investigate understandings of masculinity from varying theoretical positionings, (e.g., sociology, psychology), especially as represented in literature. Research may include masculinity as contextualized by cultural practices, but will focus on literary representations of men, manhood and masculinity.
Click here for a look at the Fall 2008 syllabus. The reading and assignments may change, but you'll get the idea: http://faculty.users.cnu.edu/tlee/490aF08.html.