Description

In this course we will examine novels by Southern writers from 1942 to 2011, exploring how each novel represents evolving understandings of identity, culture, race, and gender at crucial times in American history and letters. We’ll start with The Bear, a novelette by William Faulkner, first published in 1942, looking at the relationships of humans to the land and wilderness, representations of masculinity, and the ways Faulkner uses the coming-of-age literary form to unpack legacies of racial violence and injustice. We’ll move from there to Carson McCullers’ 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding, asking how McCullers uses literary forms to explore racial inequality, strict roles for white men and women, and other complexities of Southern life as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old child. The following week, we’ll dive into religious belief and fanaticism in a rapidly changing world in Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel The Violent Bear It Away. In the final week, we’ll catapult into the 21st century with Jesmyn Ward’s powerful 2011 novel Salvage the Bones. We’ll explore how poverty affects family relationships in the novel and how family members, including children, struggle to love and care for one another despite struggle and deprivation. We’ll return to themes raised in Faulkner as we look at Ward’s portrayal of the role of nature, animals, and the natural landscape in the daily lives of characters as well as in their struggle to find meaning.

Each class will begin with a bit of lecture offering historical context and scholarly reception for each work but the main part of class will be discussion as we consider passages from each novel as well as the larger themes each author is addressing. We’ll look at literary techniques as well as thematics, thinking about point of view, character development, representations of time and memory, use of place and landscape, just to name a few. Your only homework will be reading each novel in time for our discussion each week and coming to class with any observations, question, or ideas you may have as well as a willingness to listen to the thoughts of others.

SCHEDULE

Week One: The Bear (1942) by William Faulkner

Week Two: The Member of the Wedding (1946) by Carson McCullers

Week Three: The Violent Bear It Away (1960) by Flannery O’Connor

Week Four: Salvage the Bones (2011) by Jesmyn Ward

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Mary Wood is a semi-retired professor of English at University of Oregon, where she has taught American Literature for over thirty years. She regularly teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-century American literature, American modernism, and memoir and autobiography and always makes sure to include Southern writers. She has directed several dissertations and honors theses on 20th- and 21st-century American writers. She has published two scholarly books on memoir, fiction, and mental illness—The Writing on the Wall (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and Life Writing and Schizophrenia (Brill, 2013)—as well as several articles on American fiction writers.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

Prophetic in 1985 and winner of the National Book Award, White Noise is a laugh-out-loud perfect example of a humorous postmodern literary satire. That said, the topics narrated –rampant consumerism, the loss of reality in a world of representations, information overload, overreliance on the media, plus environmental problems–are all serious matters for current debates. Although some may feel these topics simply describe our technologically inundated current lives, it will be my job to suggest more is going on. I will bring a bracing social critique, analysis to all of these issues and discussions.

This course will mostly treat the affect, media, and personal elements of postmodernism rather than its theoretical assumptions. That is, my postmodernism is not primarily a doctrine but a felt condition—a lived atmosphere of anxiety, irony, saturation, distraction, and simulated meaning. Using White Noise as its central text, the course examines how postmodernity is experienced emotionally, bodily, and existentially: fear of death, background dread, media noise, consumer comfort, and the strange calm of abstraction. That said, we will also discuss theories with the accompanying Butler text.

Before the first session, please read through the first 105 pages of White Noise, up to the section titled, "The Airborne Toxic Event."

COURSE MATERIALS

For pagination and organizational purposes, sourcing these particular editions is strongly encouraged. In addition, the instructor will provide handouts as a supplement.

• White Noise: Text and Criticismby Don Delillo; Mark Osteen (Editor/Introduction). Viking Critical Library, 1998, 9th edition, 560 pgs. ISBN-13: 978-0-14-027498-1 (REQUIRED)
• Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, by Christopher Butler. Oxford University Press, 2003, 152 pgs. ISBN-13: 9780192802392. (REQUIRED)

SCHEDULE

Week One: White Noise: “Waves and Radiation,” chapters 1-20, pgs. 3-105; Butler, chapters 1 and 2

Week Two: White Noise: “The Airborne Toxic Event,” chapter 21, pgs. 109-163; Butler, chapters 3 and 4

Week Three: White Noise: “Dylarama,” chapters 22-33, pgs. 167-256; Butler, chapter 5

Week Four: White Noise: “Dylarama,” chapters 34-40, pgs. 257-326

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Lou Caton is a professor emeritus at Westfield State University. He has taught a variety of literature courses at the University of Oregon, Auburn University, and Westfield State University. Along with articles that have been published in newspapers and journals, he has two books: an edited collection (with Emory Elliott), Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, 2002, (available from Oxford University Press), and Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel, 2008, (available through Palgrave-McMillan).

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

In this seminar, we will read four key works of fiction written by women writers in England, New Zealand, and America during the famed “Modernist Movement” of the first half of the twentieth century. How did these authors, writing from different places, different moments, and different perspectives respond to their shared belief that the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented change and modernization which demanded new kinds of fiction—fictions that not only told new kinds of stories about the realities of living in a new, modern century, but that also told those stories in innovative modern forms?

COURSE MATERIALS

All are required; please use these editions if possible:

• Rebecca West, Return of the Soldier (1918; Penguin, ISBN: 9780141180656)
• Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922; Penguin, ISBN: 9780141937182)
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN: 9780156907392)
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; Harper Collins, ISBN: 9780060838676)

SCHEDULE

Week One: West, Return of the Soldier

Week Two:Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories

Week Three: Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Week Four: Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Paul Peppis is a professor emeritus of English at UO. An award-winning teacher and scholar of modernism, Dr. Peppis is an expert in early twentieth-century literary works and cultural productions whose teaching and writing examine modernism’s diverse engagements with the social, political, scientific, and popular movements of its time. The author of two books, Sciences of Modernism:  Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (Cambridge 2014) and Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde (Cambridge 2000), he has also contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007), and the Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster (2007), and published numerous articles on a range of modernist authors and topics.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

Midway upon the journey of our life
   I found myself within a forest dark,
   For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
   What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
   Which in the very thought renews the fear.

“The Inferno,” Dante

Comedy and tragedy blur in this course that takes comedy both joyously and seriously, in poetry, drama, fiction, fairy tale, memoir, film, song, and jokes. Dante’s epic beginning does not sound very comic, yet the full title of Dante’s work is The Divine Comedy. It has a happy ending—spoiler alert, as the trembling narrator ends up in the Light. Still, its journey into darkness and even hell is a tale that has captured the imaginations of writers throughout history, from epic retellings in Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, to references ranging from Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Dolly Parton, Les Mis, the inspirational Poet Laureate Tennyson, awe-inspiring James Joyce, and Oxford’s genius of Alice in Wonderland. As we inquire into the meaning of “The Divine Comedy,” we get into the brain and terrain of comedy itself, the Greek yin to tragedy’s yang. We will celebrate comic literature, film, Disney’s remakes of classic fairytales, Richard Feynman, and even jokes, as we explore the comic perspective in our doomed and struggling but triumphant immortal lives.

SCHEDULE

(Readings provided via instructor handout)

Week One: Glorious Happy Endings from Deepest Grief

Lecture, Handouts, Close reading, Journal writing, Discussion

Reading:

• Dante’s “Inferno,” Cantos 1 and other excerpts from The Divine Comedy (2 pp.)
• T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (2 pp.)
• William Carlos Williams (“To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” excerpt, 1 p.)
• Henry David Thoreau, Excerpts from Walden (2 chapters)
• Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Can’t Escape from You” (1 p.)

Week Two: What Was I Made For?

Lectures will refer to and provide illustrations to the texts below. Discussion.

Reading:

• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
• Film Excerpts, Pinocchio, Wizard of Oz, Barbie

Week Three: Who Am I?

Lecture, Handouts, Discussion, Group Work, Class Reading.

Reading:

• Homer, The Odyssey (Cyclops), Euripides (Cyclops), Excerpts (4 pp.)
• From Shakespeare, King Lear
• Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody” (1 p.)
• Les Mis (song and plot through line of Jean Valjean)
• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

Week Four: I Wanted to Be a Comedian But I Thought People Would Laugh At Me; “You Don’t Laugh Unless It’s True,” “Divine Comedy Endings”

Lecture, Comedy Theory, Joke Repertoire and Analysis, Stand-Up Examples, Groupwork, Film Excerpts, Discussion

Reading:

• Stand-Up excerpts
• A collage of literary “happy endings” (2 pp.)
• From The Thurber Carnival (“The Dog That Bit People,” “The Day the Dam Broke”)
• From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
• From Henry David Thoreau, Walden’s ending

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Barbara Mossberg is a professor of practice at the UO Clark Honors College. Over the past forty years, Dr. Mossberg has published poetry and literary and interdisciplinary studies on leadership of ecology and the human spirit, creativity and identity, resilience and sustainability in the natural and social worlds, and learning. She teaches memoir for the Thoreau Society Write Connection, Pacific Grove Public Library, John Muir High School Alum, Wild Acorns, and other groups. Her most recent memoir won the Provost's Recognition Award from the University of Oregon.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

What does it mean to age well? How might the arts help us explore that question in meaningful, personal ways?

Participate in a shared process of reflection, creativity, and dialogue. Together, we will explore how engagement with the arts can support health, well-being, and a sense of purpose. Participants will engage in conversation, respond to works of art, and take part in creative activities. No prior artistic experience is required.

COURSE MATERIALS

Provided by instructor.

SCHEDULE

Week One: What is the role of the arts in a well-lived life? What is "creative aging”?

Week Two: How are older adults participating in the arts? Are there untapped opportunities?

Week Three: How can we deepen our connection to community through the arts?

Week Four: How can we continue to grow creatively across the lifespan?

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Doug Blandy is a professor emeritus in the University of Oregon College of Design/School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management. He is also associated with the UO Folklore and Public Culture Program. Doug's scholarship explores the intersections of art, civic engagement, and healthy aging, with a focus on how participatory arts contribute to individual and collective well-being. He is the co-author of Arts in Healthy Aging (Oxford University Press, 2024) and co-editor of Promoting Civic Engagement through Art Education (Routledge, 2025), among numerous other publications.

Over his career, Blandy has served in leadership roles within national arts education organizations, contributed to the development of interdisciplinary curricula, and worked extensively with museums, cultural agencies, and community partners. His recent work examines cross-sector collaborations in the arts, health, aging, and lifelong learning.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

Oscar Wilde is not only the one great English playwright of the nineteenth century; he is also a major modern presence and an example of a wit whose sayings, expressed in stories, a novel, poems and general conversation, changed how we see the world. He turned conventional morality upside down in such remarks as “I can resist anything but temptation.” In this course, we will read two of his classic satiric plays, The Importance of Being Earnest and the lesser known but equally profound An Ideal Husband. We will also give close examination to his famous gothic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, highlighting the texts that were brought into his court trial for “gross indecency,” which was nothing more than his gayness. Throughout the seminar, we will look at how his unconventional life imbued his work, a life so unconventional he went to prison for it.

Scenes from his work will come alive through student recitation, clips from popular film renditions of his plays, and we have a continuous look at the drama of the trials which eventually precipitated his tragic fall. Class will be highlighted by lecture, discussion in breakout groups and collective reports from the students as a whole. The assigned text is rich in an assortment of his writings and will invite further reading once the seminar is over.

COURSE MATERIALS

Oscar Wilde. The Major Works. Edited by Isobel Murray. (Oxford World Classics).

SCHEDULE

Week One: Background on the Life of Wilde. The literary novel and the Gothic novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Part One. Chapters 1-10. The forms of comedy and tragedy.

Week Two: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Part Two. Chapters 11-20. The trials surrounding the novel. Wilde’s importance in the gay literary tradition. The foreshadowing of a cultural hero.

Week Three: An Ideal Husband. Wilde’s biggest achievement. The need for generosity in one’s relationships. How Wilde became the greatest English dramatist since Sheridan.

Week Four: The Importance of Being Earnest. The definition of satire. Comedy revisited. Three films of the play and key scenes. George Bernard Shaw’s criticism that the play is “farcical comedy” and is “heartless” versus biographer Hesketh Pearson’s assertion that “the perfect fusion of the immature emotional side of Wilde’s nature with the over-mature intellectual side produced a masterpiece. The Importance of Being Earnest is that masterpiece.”

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Henry Alley is a Professor Emeritus of Literature and Writing Specialist at the University of Oregon's Honors College and is a winner of the Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching. He taught previously, as an Associate Professor, at the University of Idaho and the College of the School of the Ozarks. His publications include The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot, seven novels, a short story collection, a handbook on teaching creative writing, and articles on the work of Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams and D. H. Lawrence. His shorter fiction, which has appeared since 1969, has been nominated for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes. He has taught in the University of Oregon's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute since 2017.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

Two of the texts we will be reading are probably familiar to many of the participants; they have often been novels of our own youth. To Kill A Mockingbird has been a frequent assignment in English classes and is familiar to many of us through the 1962 film. The Catcher in the Rye became an iconic account of growing up for many who were coming of age during the transitional period of the l950s and 60s. Tim O’Brien’s memoir, The Things They Carried,  may be less familiar. Published in 1990, his account of his platoon’s experiences in the Vietnam War offers readers an intimate understanding of maturation within a war zone.

Our goal will be to complete each text prior to the week scheduled for our discussion of it, around 200 pages per week. This may seem daunting, but the reading goes quickly, not because the novel/memoir is an “easy read,” but because their stories and characters are compelling and the writing style of each is uniquely aligned with the story being told: each work is narrated in first-person, so we are privy to the characters’ individual responses to their story’s environments. As such, each week will provide opportunities for our conversations about how the characters we encounter interact with each other and with the larger questions the stories raise about the influences on them of a variety of “cultures.” One of our tasks will be to define what we mean by “cultural influences,” which include societal mores and environments and the political forces that shape those environments; and, equally important, how those public influences interact with the characters’ personal growth. Our final week will consider how all three texts interact:  How might the influences of one set of cultural psychologies and behaviors affect those of the next generation?

These questions (above and below) are a sample of our discussion. At the same time, we will focus on these three texts as literary creations, tracing how the authors use their art to tell stories that call for multiple readings. Like the protagonists we will encounter, we too have experienced the transition from childhood to adulthood; the stories we thought we knew change as we grow older, reflecting our own maturation process within culture as we reencounter them. Our Seminar will explore both the artistry of these texts and the interweaving patterns among them.

Given our four-week schedule, participants are encouraged to have read “To Kill a Mockingbird” prior to the first session.

COURSE MATERIALS

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) byHarper Lee
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
• The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O’Brien

SCHEDULE

Week One: We’ll begin with Mockingbird. Set in the 1930s, the novel was profoundly relevant when it was published in 1960. It’s a story of childhood within an environment of small-town intimacy and established mores and prejudices, told through the eyes of Scout, the eight-year-old daughter of Atticus Finch, the principled town lawyer. The film focuses primarily on the racial prejudice of the time and the trial of Tom, a black man accused of rape, and this is of course also a focus of the novel. But as we read, we’ll find more complexities of culture that affect Scout, her older brother Jem, and their out-of-town friend Dill. What are this environment’s expectations of these children?  How do they respond to those expectations?

Week Two: Mockingbird, continued.

Week Three: The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, may seem more than years away from Mockingbird’s culture of Maycomb, Alabama. Salinger’s novel is set in big-city New York; its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is a child of economic privilege and emotional deprivation. At around l5, Holden is twice Scout’s age, and his relationship with what he sees as the “phoniness” of his culture is one of alienation bordering on despair. His only authentic relationship is with his sister, Phoebe, who seems to embody the innocence that Holden has lost. Will this be Scout and Jem’s fate as they move into adulthood? If we imagine a cultural relationship between the two novels, how might we describe its trajectory?

Week Four: In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien sets his remembered self and fellow soldiers within the cultural upheaval of the Vietnam War. This is not an account of battles. but rather a series of episodes of young men connected to each other through emotions and experiences that range from humorous to tragic. These young adults are only steps away from the adolescence that Holden embodies, but they inhabit a cultural moment that has sent them into a world of conflict and death. If we imagine Jem or Holden on the battlefield with O’Brien’s platoon, can we find cultural relationships that form patterns that link these three novels? Do the diverse cultural influences and experiences of all these young people have common threads that shuttle them from innocence to experience?

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Delia Fisher is a retired associate professor of English and Coordinator of the English Education Program at Westfield State University in Westfield, MA (2001-2010). Prior to work at WSU, Dr. Fisher was a full-time instructor at Auburn University in the English Department’s Great Books Program, and in the University of Oregon’s Office of Multicultural Affairs.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1997.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

Through the novel Things Fall Apart by the Man Booker International prize winner, Chinua Achebe, the play Death and the King's Horseman by the Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka, the semi-autobiographical novel Nervous Conditions by the winner of the PEN Pinter Prize, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and a few select poems by African women, this course will explore how narrative and poetry become sites of cultural/colonial resistance, identity formation, and ethical/ethnic conflict.

Achebe’s novel is one of the few to show precontact Igbu tribal life on the brink of transformation and/or elimination. Soyinka’s play reimagines a true incident from 1946 where, under British rule, Yoruba ritual obligation and colonial authority collided. Dangarembga’s coming-of-age narrative shifts the focus inward, tracing the psychological and gendered dimensions of colonial modernity with its Shona woman first-person narration. These works reveal how colonial systems reshape not only institutions but also consciousness, producing internalized conflict, alienation, and fractured identities. Our course culminates in some select readings of contemporary African women poets, such as Liyou Libsekal, Harriet Anena, Ladan Osman, and others.

Course emphasis is placed on close readings alongside theoretical engagement with postcolonial thought, encouraging students to interrogate how narratives tackle metaphysical themes as well as reflecting and resisting historical forces.  

Before the first session, please read all of the novel “Things Fall Apart.”

COURSE MATERIALS

For pagination and organizational purposes, sourcing these particular editions is strongly encouraged. In addition, the instructor will provide supplemental handouts of poetry.

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Norton Critical Edition (2009) ISBN:978-0-393-93219-5, Editor, Simon Gikand.
• Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka. Norton Critical Edition (2003) ISBN: 0-393-97761-7, Editor, Francis Abiola Irele.
• Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Seal Press, (2004) (other dates might also work), ISBN: 1-58005-134-0

For further reading (optional): The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fannon (any edition or publisher)

SCHEDULE

Week One: Read all of Things Fall Apart. We will focus on the following topics: Community, Masculinity, and Colonial Rupture. What are the causes of destruction? Why can’t the Igbo community maintain its coherence under colonial rule? What are the limits of heroic resistance? How is Okonkwo a tragic figure even before the British arrive? How does colonialism exploit existing tensions within the community rather than simply imposing itself from outside?

Key Concepts: Tradition and change. Masculinity, honor, and fear. Colonial law versus customary authority

Week Two: Read all of Death and the King’s Horseman. Topics to be covered: Ritual, Tragedy, and Cultural Dissociation. How is colonialism as tragic misunderstanding rather than moral contest between good and evil? Why does Soyinka reject interpreting the play as a simple “clash of cultures”? Does this leave room for a more philosophical perspective? Why might that be what Soyinka desires? What kind of failure is Elesin’s—and is it caused by the British intervention or by his own weakness? How do ritual, duty, and myth structure the Yoruba worldview in the play?

Key Concepts: Tragedy beyond Aristotelian models. Ritual obligation and cosmic order. Colonial authority as interruption rather than origin of crisis.

Week Three: Read all of Nervous Conditions. Topics to be covered: Gender, Education, and Internalized Colonialism. What are colonialism’s psychological and bodily effects, especially on women navigating education and family authority? How does colonial education function as both opportunity and domination? Why is Nyasha’s breakdown a philosophical rather than merely psychological crisis? Is Tambu a trustworthy first-person narrator? How does her narrative voice negotiate gratitude, resentment, and awakening?

Key Concepts: Internalized oppression. Gender and colonial modernity. The body as a site of political struggle.

Week Four: Review all three works, plus we consider the poetry via instructor handout. Comparative Synthesis: Colonialism, Resistance, and Ethical Failure. We will have a unified discussion of shared themes and divergent strategies across all three texts. Some comparative themes may include the following: Forms of Resistance, Okonkwo’s violence, Elesin’s ritual duty, Tambu’s education and narration, Authority and Responsibility, Patriarchy and tradition, Colonial governance, Moral failure within colonized societies. Tragedy vs. Survival, Death as cultural rupture (Things Fall Apart, Horseman) Survival as ambiguous liberation (Nervous Conditions).

Some overall questions might include the following: Is resistance portrayed as noble, futile, or self-destructive? How do genre differences (novel vs. drama vs. Bildungsroman) shape political meaning? What ethical demands do these texts place on postcolonial readers?  Is colonialism primarily an external force, or does its greatest power lie in how it reshapes internal values and self-understanding?

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Lou Caton is a professor emeritus at Westfield State University. He has taught a variety of literature courses at the University of Oregon, Auburn University, and Westfield State University. Along with articles that have been published in newspapers and journals, he has two books: an edited collection (with Emory Elliott), Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, 2002, (available from Oxford University Press), and Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel, 2008, (available through Palgrave-McMillan).

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene