Samuel
Cohen
Assistant Professor of English
University of Missouri-Columbia
Fall 2009
2309, Studies in English, 1890 to Present: The Cold War in American
Literature and Culture
In this course
we will engage with American literature and film from the Cold War and after in
various contexts, including the American use of the atomic bomb in World War II
and subsequent fear of nuclear apocalypse, connections between race and
sexuality and the ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, and the effects
of Cold War foreign and domestic policy on public and private life. (Syllabus)
3310, Survey of American Literature,
1865-Present
This course
will cover U.S. literature from 1865 to today. We will read works by writers
writing across a century-and-a-half of American history and dealing with the changes
through which American culture has gone. Rather than try to read every
important writer and moment in literary history, we will focus on a set of
themes centering on “America” as a place and as an idea. These
themes will include the special situation of America as a place apart,
geographically and culturally; America as a place that contains many different
places and cultures; America as an idea and a host of warring ideas. While we
think about the ideas and experiences explored in these works, we will also
spend equal time appreciating the literary achievements of this wonderfully
varied group of writers. (Syllabus)
Spring 2009
2309, Studies in English, 1890 to Present: The Cold War in American
Literature and Culture
In this
course we will read American writing from the Cold War and after in the context
of the social, political, and historical developments of the Cold War. These
developments include the development of youth culture; the impact of American
use of the atomic bomb in World War II and subsequent fear of nuclear apocalypse;
connections between race and sexuality and the ideological conflict with the
Soviet Union; the effects of Cold War foreign and domestic policy on public and
private life. Readings will include J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye; Ralph
Ellison, Invisible Man; Allen Ginsberg, Howl; Joan Didion, Democracy; Don
DeLillo, Underworld. (Syllabus)
8320:
Studies in 20th Century Literature: Political Fictions
Fredric
Jameson has famously argued that “everything is ‘in the last
analysis’ political.” While we will not be taking issue with
Jameson’s dictum in this course, there’s political and
there’s political, and the books we will read are not just shaped by the
political but expressly about politics. Focusing on writing in the U.S. after
WWII, we will examine American novels that engage with the world of politics
during and after the Cold War. Reading this work, we will discuss the nature of
the political novel, the challenges and possibilities presented by the topical
and polarizing world of politics, and conversely, the ways in which the
political—which in one formulation is simply the place where private life
and public life meet—is a natural subject for the novel, the genre
perhaps best-suited to telling personal and collective histories. Alongside
this reading we will also dip into the postwar career of the political in
literary criticism and theory, from Lionel Trilling to Jameson to Walter Benn
Michaels.
Primary readings will include Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night; Philip Roth,
Our Gang; Robert Coover, Public Burning; Joan Didion, Democracy; Don DeLillo,
Libra; Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods; Susan Choi, American Woman;
George Saunders, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil; Jess Walter, The
Zero. (Syllabus)
Fall 2008
4109/7109, Genres: Experimental
Fiction
In this
course, we will read a number of examples of experimental or nontraditional
works of fiction—novels and stories that play off of what we think of as
traditional notions about the elements of fiction and its representational
aims—and think about the issues such work raises concerning how fiction
has been written and read and concerning how literary innovation has been
described and accounted for. We will spend our time reading these works closely
and engaging with theoretical statements concerning literary experimentation. (Syllabus)
8001: Job Placement Workshop
This course is designed for graduate
students going on the job market this year or next. While we will focus mainly
on the academic job market, students interested in pursuing nonacademic jobs
will find much of use to them too. We will cover all aspects of the job search,
from the art of the dissertation abstract to the campus interview, including:
the crafting of arcane documents such as the job letter, the statement of
teaching philosophy, and the follow-up email; the reading of the Job
Information List; the managing of work and time during job season; the managing
of relationships with recommenders, loved ones, and pets during same; the
conduct of MLA interviews; and much more. We will workshop documents, read
about and discuss philosophies of the job search, and set up mock interviews
and job talks. (Syllabus)
Winter 2008
2000, Studies in English. Global History/World
Fiction
Much
post-WWII fiction from around the world has been interested in one way or
another in history—the past, but also the present as shaped by larger
movements and forces and the narratives people construct to deal with the past.
Much of this fiction has also seen history as something global, as crossing
national borders and narratives. In this course we will read examples of
fiction from around the world—from Japan, Kenya, Great Britain, South
Africa, Germany, the U.S.—that consider past and present in a way that is
both historical and global, and we will ourselves consider the way these
perspectives inform and influence each other. In doing so, we will get to enjoy
some interesting, powerful, entertaining stories that, while thinking about the
world and history, also at the same time explore the inner life of people and
of storytelling itself. (Syllabus)
4970, Capstone: History in Contemporary Fiction.
In this course we will be reading contemporary
fiction and thinking about its relation to history. We will examine the
problems and possibilities of historical representation in contemporary fiction
and historical criticism of contemporary fiction, and in doing so will
encounter contemporary arguments about the nature of history and of historical
understanding, arguments that that themselves are informed by contemporary
ideas about the nature of language, knowledge, and reality. Students will write
a substantial research essay; the essays will be produced in stages, with class
and conference time spent on the process of planning, researching, and writing.
(Syllabus)
4320/7320,
Twentieth Century American Literature: The Reality
Effect
The standard account of twentieth
century literary fiction, following the model of most histories of modern
art—holds that the realism characterizing the fiction of the latter part
of the 19th century was succeeded by modernism early in the
twentieth and that modernism was itself succeeded by postmodernism sometime
after mid-century. One implication of this account is that the history of
innovation in modern fiction can be understood as the increasing movement away
from realism. This seminar’s goal is to look at a sampling of fiction
from across the century in order to see how the standard account holds up and
how it doesn’t; in other words, we will (with the aid of some secondary
reading) examine the definitions of realism at work in this account and explore
their ramifications for understanding works of fiction. At stake will be
questions about the formal techniques and strategies of representation, the
reality effect as illusion and response, the politics of
representation—in short, our understanding of the relationship between
works of fiction and the world—as well as questions about the particulars
of a number of developments in the forms of modern fiction. (Syllabus)
8060, Seminar in Criticism and
Theory: Theory of the Novel
Theory of the novel—the study
of the novel as a genre, rather than a subset of narrative—offers a
number of advantages to the student of the novel. Unlike many areas of literary
theory, including narrative theory (all of which, of course, it is connected
to), it does not rule out of bounds discussions of aesthetic value, of the
writer’s subjectivity, of the act of writing—it views literary
creativity as inextricably part of the historical world rather than separating
literary products, the works, from the world that produces and consumes them.
Our survey of the field of novel theory will focus on three areas:
considerations of voice (of point-of-view, narration, perspective, mood), of
reference (of representations of reality, of the relationship of works to
world), and of innovation (of the reigning modernist/postmodernist account and
of other more helpful ways of conceptualizing invention in the forms of the
modern novel. Throughout the semester we will also engage with the history of
the genre from its roots to the present. (Syllabus)
On leave
8001: Job Placement Workshop
This course is designed for graduate
students going on the job market this year or next. While we will focus mainly
on the academic job market, students interested in pursuing nonacademic jobs
will find much of use to them too. We will cover all aspects of the job search,
from the art of the dissertation abstract to the campus interview, including:
the crafting of arcane documents such as the job letter, the statement of
teaching philosophy, and the follow-up email; the reading of the Job
Information List; the managing of work and time during job season; the managing
of relationships with recommenders, loved ones, and pets during same; the
conduct of MLA interviews; and much more. We will workshop documents, read
about and discuss philosophies of the job search, and set up mock interviews
and job talks. (Syllabus)
8050: Contemporary Critical
Approaches
This seminar is a survey of
contemporary literary and cultural theory from Saussure to the present. We will
read work from the major schools of contemporary theory, including
deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, postcolonialism, new historicism,
feminism, gender studies, and queer theory. As we read, we will examine the
larger questions theorists working within these groupings try to answer about
literature, language, representation culture, identity, and history. We will
also attend to the historical context out of which the theories themselves have
come, tracing the course of the theoretical conversation as it ran through the Twentieth
Century and continues today. The seminar’s aim (beyond the important
goals of familiarizing students with different theories and their relation to
each other and to history) is to help students find the theoretical approaches
most congenial to them in their own work. Students will be responsible for an
oral presentation and a seminar paper. (Syllabus)
4320/7320, 20th Century
American Literature: “Philip Roth”
Philip Roth is one of
This past August, The Library of
America released the first volume of his collected works. Roth is the youngest
living author to be so honored—Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty are the only
other writers whose volumes appeared in their lifetimes—and has written
so many novels that collecting them will take eight volumes, the last to be
released in 2013. This seems like a good time, then, to spend a semester with
Roth. We will devote our time to trying to get as full as picture as we can of
his work, from his early stories to his most recent novels. Readings may
include the novella and five-story collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959);
the infamous Portnoy’s Complaint (1969); the Nixon satire Our
Gang (1971); the Kafkaesque The Breast (1972); the
three-novel-plus-epilogue collection Zuckerman Bound (1985); the
metafictional The Counterlife (1986); the unorthodox autobiography The
Facts (1988); the memoir Patrimony (1991); the return-to-Portnoy Sabbath’s
Theater (1995); all or part of the three novel “American
Trilogy” of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist
(1998), and The Human Stain (2000); and the counter-history The Plot
Against America (2004). Secondary reading will include essays by Roth (such
as those collected in Reading Myself and Others (1975)) and about Roth. (Syllabus)
4996, Honors Seminar:
“Historicism”
This course is the first part of the
two-semester Honors sequence in the English Department, and is intended to lead
into the second part, the writing of the Honors senior thesis. The course will
include an inquiry into research and writing techniques within the discipline
(working with primary and secondary sources, using the library and its
reference materials efficiently, applying literary theory in interpretation);
an investigation of major critical, theoretical, and practical questions in the
field of English studies; and a workshop-oriented unit in which each student
will prepare a longer (12-20 page) research paper.
Our theme will be historicism, or
the approach to criticism based on the belief that historical context is
crucially important to interpretation. We will read Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction for background, Paul Hamilton’s Historicism for a history of
the idea and its applications, a few literary texts on which we can try out our
historicizing skills (may
include Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental
Education, Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening, T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jessica
Hagedorn’s Dogeaters,
and players to be named later), and a few examples of historical criticism. The
remainder of our time will be devoted to researching and writing twelve- to
twenty-page research papers (on literary texts of your choice) to be informed
in some way by historicism (i.e., a thoughtful, self-aware historical
consideration must be included, but this requirement does not preclude formal
or other considerations). The writing of these papers will begin early in the
semester and take place in stages to included proposals, outlines, annotated
bibliographies, and drafts. (Syllabus)
2000, Topics in English Studies: “The Problem
of Evil”
8320, Studies in 20th Century
American Literature: “Contemporary American Fiction and the Metafictional
Impulse”
Possible texts: John Barth, The
Floating Opera and “The Literature of Exhaustion”; Donald
Barthelme, 60 Stories; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones; Richard
Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America; Robert Coover, The Public
Burning; Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist; Linda Hutcheon, The
Poetics of Postmodernism; Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and
Consumer Society"; Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel; Toni
Morrison, Jazz; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Ishmael Reed, Mumbo
Jumbo; Thomas Pynchon, “The Crying of Lot 49”; William Spanos,
"The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary
Imagination"; Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of
Self-Conscious Fiction. (Syllabus)
4970,
Capstone Experience: “History and Contemporary Fiction”
In this
course we will be reading contemporary fiction and thinking about its relation
to history. We will examine the problems and possibilities of historical
representation in contemporary fiction and historical criticism of contemporary
fiction, and in doing so will encounter
contemporary arguments about the nature of history and of historical
understanding, arguments that relate to contemporary arguments about the nature
of language, knowledge, and reality. Students will write a substantial
research essay; the essays will be produced in stages, with class and
conference time spent on the process of planning, researching, and writing.
Readings may include novels picked from among the following: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow; T. C. Boyle, World’s End; J. M. Coetzee, Foe; Robert Coover, The Public Burning; Don DeLillo, Libra; Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Philip Roth, The Plot Against America; Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses; W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants. We will also read in theory of the novel and other work on history and literature and on historical criticism. (Syllabus)
Fall
2004
3310, Survey of American Literature,
1865-Present
This course
will cover American literature from 1865 to today. We will read short stories,
novels, poems, and essays by writers working across a century-and-a-half of
American history and dealing with the changes through which American culture
has gone. These include changes in industry, technology, demographics, in what
4320/7320, 20th-Century American Literature:
"Historical Trauma in Post-WWII American Literature"
An
important feature of Post-WWII American culture is the impact of historical
trauma--violent or otherwise catastrophic events that occur on a great scale or
for some other reason have a traumatic effect. Much Post-WWII literature
engages directly or indirectly with events of this kind; in doing so, it is
faced with the problems of understanding and representing such events and their
impact, problems that often lead to formal experimentation. We will also do
some secondary reading to help us think about our definition of historical
trauma and what it means to represent it, particularly in a postwar
.
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