Special Topics - Spring 2013

HE360A: Bodies in Motion: Literature after 9/11
LT Jillian Danback
On September 11th, 2001, today's First Class Midshipman was approximately twelve years old. In the past decade since these attacks, the various discourses surrounding 9/11 have shaped the world in which they grew up. In this course, students will study a nascent genre of literature that both depicts and responds to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Students will also evaluate literature's strengths and limitations in depictions of the day's events and aftermath and address literature's interaction with various art forms, such as illustrations, photography, sculpture, and film. This course will rely heavily on theoretical analysis, subsequently providing students with a better understanding of these modern theories and discourses. We will discuss how theoretical discourses, such as Susan Sontag's theories on photography and relativism, Jacques Lacan's discussion on anamorphosis, and Sigmund Freud's collective forgetting, are no longer sufficient means of analysis with regards to post-9/11 literature; instead, we will explore how traditional theories portend and contribute towards the application of trauma theory, multiculturalism, and post-modern theories of space and temporality. However, how effective are these discourses? Ultimately, students will decide whether or not these new discourses effectively confront issues surrounding 9/11.
   In his 2001 article "In the Ruins of the Future", DeLillo describes 9/11 as the day when "the narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counter-narrative." A decade later, students will evaluate the effectiveness of this ongoing counter-narrative and determine if existing literature is up to the challenge of adequately exploring the 9/11 phenomenon.

HE360B: See What I Mean: The Art and Language of the Graphic Novel
LCDR Jason Salinas
Graphic novels represent one of the most exciting literary innovations of recent decades. Gaining increased acceptance as "serious literature" in the years following Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, graphic novels have rapidly evolved to encompass all manners of genre, including memoir (Blankets), biography (Feynman), mathematics (Logicomix), religion (Marked), and contemporary history (The Pride of Bagdad), and are now widely taught at universities across the country.
   One of the reasons for their extraordinary popularity is that graphic novels represent the height of the interactive literary experience. By combining words and pictures in complex, ever-changing relationships, graphic novels rely upon the reader's active participation in ways different from traditional prose narratives, graphic arts, and motion pictures. At the same time, graphic novels force readers to develop, and then constantly reassess their reading strategies. Thus, one of this course's central concerns will be to articulate, examine, and assess the soundness of how we read each text.
   Another central issue the course will deal with is representation. Indeed, many of the most important graphic novels of the past twenty years have grappled with the questions and consequences of how they choose to represent individuals, communities, history, contemporary events, memory, etc. For instance, in Maus, Art Spiegelman famously depicts Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Americans as dogs, and so on. As a result, much of the critical reaction to Maus responds to this choice. Thus, the course will, by necessity, frequently address the relationship of image to idea by focusing on the representational choices and consequences within each graphic novel.
   The course will begin by examining comic theory to explore how graphic novels combine the literary and the aesthetic to create a fundamentally unique artistic medium. This part of the course will give students the intellectual vocabulary and framework for discussing the works we subsequently read. We will then study a selection of the most critically-acclaimed and historically, politically, and philosophically important graphic novels, assessing how each combines and transcends genre to produce a complex synthesis of fiction and nonfiction, image and text, history and imagination.

HE467: American Theatre and Drama Before World War I
Associate Professor Jason Shaffer
This course will expose students to the rich traditions of dramatic literature and theatrical performance that developed in the United States between the colonial period and the turn of the twentieth century.  Students will read from a number of "pre-modern" dramatic genres popular in the United States from the colonial and early republican periods until the first decade of the twentieth century, from "high" genres such as the heroic tragedy and the comedy of manners to such great "middlebrow" or "low" genres as the mortgage melodrama, the temperance play, and the minstrel show, exploring the surprising complexity of these neglected texts. Because the pre-war American theatre, from the propaganda plays of the American Revolution to the great traveling spectacle of George Aiken's 1852 dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin, spoke directly to the popular imagination, students will study not only the formal components of these dramatic genres, many of which continue to influence our culture, but the ways in which the theatre culture of the United States both mirrored and influenced the changing nature of a variety of American identities--national, political, racial, and gender-based.

HE463: "The Quarrel with Ourselves": The Life and Work of W.B. Yeats
Associate Professor Temple Cone
"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry," wrote William Butler Yeats, arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century, who was himself a statesman, occult philosopher, folklorist, Irish nationalist, anti-democratic proponent of aristocracy, leader of the revival in Irish theater, Nobel Prize-winner, and self-proclaimed "wild old wicked man" who celebrated sexual passion even into old age. This seminar will address the entirety of Yeats' literary career, focusing principally on his poetry but also addressing his dramatic and prose writings, including his long occultist work, A Vision.  We will trace his work from its origins in Romantic literature and Irish myth to its Modernist fusion of autobiography, occult philosophy, and revolutionary politics, concluding with the startlingly intimate and moving meditations on age, desire, and mortality in his late work.  In order to make sense of the unifying vision of history Yeats articulates in A Vision, we will explore the occult writings and practices Yeats draws on, and we will also read from several histories of the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War, which both occurred while Yeats was elaborating his complex symbolic system.  And to get a better sense of the man himself, we will his correspondence and engagement with such figures as Ezra Pound, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Maud Gonne.  Our goal finally is to understand and accept how, as Yeats himself put it, we cannot know "the dancer from the dance."

HE504: Reading Too Much Into Renaissance Texts
Assistant Professor Thomas Ward
What does it mean to read too much into something?  When does interpretation become over-interpretation?  What are the allurements of over-reading, and what are its dangers?  This class will examine the idea of over-analysis both within and applied to texts from the English Renaissance, a period during which religious, social, and political forces were putting new kinds of pressure on traditional interpretive practices. Texts will include Renaissance readings that, to modern eyes, appear to be obsessive, paranoid, or even insane--as well as modern analyses (and crypto-analyses) that might have baffled the authors or original readers of the works being analyzed.