LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

Readings and Overall Plan

Week 1: Background on the epic form. A brief history of ancient Rome. Life of Virgil. His vision of work and hardship. Book 1 of The Aeneid. Major motifs in the opening lines. The evolving character of Aeneas. Virgil’s use of point of view. The grandeur of Dido. The Olympic hierarchy.

Week 2. The Aeneid continued. Books 2-4, 6-7. Virgil’s vision of the fall of Troy. Greek vs. Roman. Aeneas vs. Odysseus. Virgil’s magnificent use of imagery and moodlandscaping. The tragedy of Dido. Descent and recognition as applied to the underworld. The importance of father-son. Juno as a source of chaos. Queen Amata’s tragedy.

Week 3. The Aeneid continued. Books 10, 12. The degeneration of Aeneas, the tragedy of Turnus. The abruptness of the ending and its critical controversies.

Week 4. Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The basic structure of tragedy. The character of Hamlet. The ambiguities of his dilemma. How the Aeneid transforms Act 2, Scene 2, and therefore the entire tragedy. It is a play within the play.

Learning outcomes

The course will be a balance of lecture and discussion, punctuated by clips from videos and by passages being read aloud for close analysis.  Discussion questions, as a backbone to the class, will be supplied for the works.

Hopefully you will want to read more of these authors. Encouragement will be given to write on your own about them. I will present various rhetorical strategies.  Also, through the discussions in the breakout groups, you will see how very much alive these works are in engaging your curiosity. With the first class, a sheet will be circulated allowing you to volunteer to read aloud in class. In the breakout groups, there will be an opportunity to volunteer to be secretary to the discussion and to report back to the class as a whole. This experience will be a chance to develop your writing skills. Throughout the month, good attendance is expected, and student engagement will be encouraged

Books

• Virgil (70-19 B.C.). Aeneid. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum (Bantam Classics).
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library (Simon and Schuster)

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. 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, six 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

“Rectify the names. If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible – and therefore, all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible.” (Confucius)

This seminar surveys China’s cultural history through brief excerpts of significant literature well known to Chinese, and key to understanding the context of current Chinese thought. The student will acquire a knowledge of and appreciation for major literature from critical periods of Chinese history that shape or reflect the thinking of contemporary educated Chinese. The classical period set patterns of hierarchy, as well as the role of personal meditation, attachment to place and social networks. Revolutionary period work reflected the struggles of encounters with the West and national identity adjustments, from self-mocking pain at foreign repression to assertive nationalism. The major work of Mao (a classically trained librarian) continues the transitional struggle in both a practical and more strategically violent way, echoing some of the hubris of a legendary semi-hero. The final globally distinguished selections combine major elements of this literary heritage playing out in the present.

SCHEDULE

Week 1: Dynastic China

Selections from the Confucian Analects (475-221 BCE), Dao De Jing (Laozi, 4th c BCE), the Art of War (Sunzi, 5th c. BCE), poems of Li Bo (early 700s CE) and Du Fu (mid-700 CE)

Week 2: Revolutionary China

Selections from The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, 1881-1936)

Week 3: Maoist China

Selections from “Quotations from Chairman Mao” (1964), and “Monkey King” (Wu Cheng’en, 1592)

Week 4: Post-Mao Contemporary China

A chapter each from Nobel Prize for Literature winners Gao Xingjian (2000) "for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama" (Soul Mountain) and Mo Yan (2012) "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary" (Red Sorghum).

COURSE MATERIAL

All material will either be sent to class members as attachments to email, or as recommended on the syllabus for low cost.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. Susan Walcott has a B.A. in History from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in Chinese history from Rutgers University, a PhD. in Geography from Indiana University, and was a Ford Foundation scholar in Chinese at Princeton University. She headed the China Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers and founded Asia Research Centers at two universities. She is now a Professor of Geography Emerita at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Her principal research interests concern regional economic development, particularly in rapidly transitioning areas throughout Asia. Books, numerous chapters and articles from grant-supported overseas research focusing on high technology parks and industry clusters (life science, furniture, tea) across the U.S. and China, modernization in Bhutan, and immigrant entrepreneurs. Active in many aspects of OLLI, she finds that giving presentations is the most fun.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

In this seminar, we will read four key works of fiction written in Ireland, England, 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?

Schedule:

Week 1: Joyce, Dubliners

Week 2:Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Week 3: Larsen, Passing

Week 4: Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Course Texts (required; please use these editions if possible):

• James Joyce, Dubliners (1914; Dover, ISBN: 978-0486268705)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; Collins Classics, ISBN: 978-0007934409)
• Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; Dover, ISBN: 978-0486437132)
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930; Vintage, ISBN-13: 978-0679732259)

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. Paul Peppis is a UO Professor of English Emeritus. 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

SUBJECT AND TOPICS BY CLASS

Week One—Writing Immigration

Readings:

• Abraham Cahan, “Circumstances” (1898)
• Anzia Yezierska, “The Fat of the Land” (1918)
• Elizabeth Graver, Kantika (2023), novel excerpt

In-class topics:  Immigration in turn-of-the-century Jewish American Ashkenazi (Eastern European) fiction. Influence of Russian literature and culture. Changing Jewish identity in relation to immigration to America. Class identity and Jewish workers’ movements in America. Relationship of Yiddish to Russian and English. Influence of modernist Yiddish literature. Contrast with Sephardic (Spain and Turkey) immigration and its representation in autobiographical fiction.

Week Two—Gender in Changing Worlds

Readings:

• Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” (1962)
• Grace Paley, “The Used-Boy Raisers” (1959)

In-class topics: Representations of gender in “Yentl,” a story translated from Yiddish to English and widely read in America (as well as made into both a play and a film). Reception of film (a brief film excerpt will be shown in class) and differences between film and story, as well as differences between original Yiddish and English versions of the story. Jewish concepts of masculinity and femininity in contrast to those in mainstream American culture. Changing gender roles as portrayed in Paley’s story. Changing attitudes towards marriage and parenthood in Paley’s story. Humor in Paley’s writing and American Jewish culture writ large.

Week Three— Faith, Doubt, Reason, and Community in the 20th century

Readings:

• Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi” (1971)
• Bernard Malamud, “The Silver Crown” (1972)
• Poems by Muriel Ruykeser, Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz

In-class topics: Existential questions raised in Malamud and Ozick after the Holocaust. How to write at all after the Holocaust, how to say the unsayable. Religion and reason after the Holocaust. Representations of memory and lost worlds. The pain and possibility of Yiddish language and culture. Contrast with Cahan and Yezierska stories read earlier in the course. The ways that poetry represents trauma, history, memory, silence.

Week Four— Memory, History, and Identity in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature

• Reading: Amy Kurzweil, The Flying Couch (2016)

In-class topics: Differences between first-generation (such as Elie Wiesel’s Night), second-generation (such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus), and third-generation Holocaust memoir (Kurzweil’s Flying Couch). Impact of survivor-grandparents’ memories and the imaginative worlds of the third generation. Benefits of graphic memoir for representing third-generation experience. Challenges of reading graphic forms and terminology and concepts that can help. Kuzweil’s use of maps and bird’s-eye views. Interplay of humor and anxiety.

COURSE READING MATERIALS

• Most will be available from the instructor.
• It is recommended that participants purchase their own copy of Amy Kurzweil’s 2016 graphic memoir Flying Couch, which may be available from used copies in local bookstores or through online outlets.
• Additional details will be available, on request.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. Mary Wood is a semi-retired Professor of English at University of Oregon, where she has taught American Literature for over thirty years. She teaches a Jewish Writers  course every year for UO undergraduates and regularly includes Jewish writers in her courses on 19th- and 20th-century American literature, American modernism, and memoir and autobiography. She has directed several dissertations and honors theses on 20th- and 21st-century Jewish 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, including Jewish American writers. She is currently working on a project that connects short stories by Jewish writer Grace Paley to writing by early 20th-century Jewish labor activists.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

What can we learn from musicals, a beloved Saturday entertainment? The course explores musicals as a lens into history, a way artists in the past 100 years have grappled with the most profound challenges facing humanity in uplifting and resonant messages. Through works such as Oklahoma, Show Boat, West Side Story, Hair, Rent, Hamilton, The Color Purple, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, and Into the Woods—as well as your own favorite, we examine the way serious individual and social issues are captured in catchy and poignant lyrics, and lively dance numbers. We will see clips, watch entire musicals, read scripts and lyrics, and experience the oldest form of human knowledge, when voice and instruments were developed to tell each other what we know so that we can keep going, sadder and wiser, inspired, and hopeful.

Dr. Mossberg will also workshop with the class her own latest musical, a historical correction about John Muir and his unknown wife Louie Wanda, their transformational love story, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creating a musical out of recorded history and one's own imagination.

COURSE READING MATERIALS

Details will be provided from the instructor, in the future.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. 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

First Session: Intro to course. Please read as much as possible Sartre’s “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” PDF, Michael Tanner’s “Introduction,” Flynn, Chapter 1, “The Rise of Postmodernism” and chapter 2, “New Ways of Seeing the World,” Nietzsche’s “Preface,” and “Part One.” This is approximately 100 pages of difficult material. Take your time and take notes, if possible. We’ll begin with the two major questions that open this book: first, “What in us really wants ‘truth’?” and second, “Why not rather untruth? … uncertainty? even ignorance?” (BGE 1).

Second Session: Read Kierkegaard’s short “Diapsalmata,” PDF. For Flynn, Chapter 4, “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Optional: Hannah Arendt’s “What is Freedom?” PDF. For Nietzsche, read Part Two, about 40 pages. What is a “free spirit”? How is the symbol of the “mask” important? Why should we “mistrust thinking itself” (sec 34)?

Third Session: Flynn Chapter 3, “Politics and Identity” and chapter 5, “The Postmodern Condition”. Optional: M. Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth” PDF. For Nietzsche, Part Four. Part Five is optional, approximately 50 pages. Big themes here will be maxims, morals, and scholars. What makes his views on these topics provocative? Consider pros and cons of Nietzsche’s aphoristic style, which offers short essays, ranging from a single line to a few pages. How is style important to Nietzsche?

Fourth Session: Optional: Beauvoir’s “Second Sex” PDF. Optional: Flynn, Chapter 6. For Nietzsche, part Nine, approximately 40 pages. He claims moral judgement is a form of revenge (sec 219). How? Later he makes comments about the “spiritualization of cruelty” (sec 229). What is it? He begins Part Nine with a comment on slavery. Why? His last topic is nobility. Why might he feel that this is the perfect way to end his book? Please also read his poem “From High Mountains: Epode.”

COURSE READING MATERIALS

• The instructor will use the widely available Penguin Classic text of Beyond Good and Evil, introduction by Michael Tanner, 240 pages, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. ISBN-13: 978-0-14-044923-5, ISBN: 0-14-044923-X. or ISBN-13: 978-0-14-044513-8, ISBN: 0-14-044513-7. Please try to buy this particular edition. Having the same pagination will make everything easier.
• Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, by Thomas R. Flynn, Oxford UP, ISBN: 978 0 19 280428. This is a more than adequate, relatively inexpensive brief account.
• In addition, the instructor will provide various PDF files.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. Lou Caton is 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

Week One: Beginnings of the modern short story in Russia and France

Reading

A chapter from George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (2021)

Anton Chekhov, “In the Ravine” (1900)

Guy de Maupassant, “The Necklace” (1884)

In class: History, form, and influence of the Russian and French short story. Discussion of Saunders, Chekhov, and de Maupassant.

Week Two: From Russian Masters to Jewish American Writers

Reading:

Abraham Cahan, “Circumstances”

Anzia Yezierska, “The Fat of the Land”

Grace Paley, “Conversation with my Father”

In class: Historical context for American Jewish short stories, influenced by Russian authors as well as writers of the European Yiddish Renaissance. Historical contexts for Cahan and Yezierska (1880s to 1930s) and Paley (late twentieth century). Short stories and the spread of literacy through newspapers and magazines.

Week Three: Reinvention of the Short Story in Modern America

Reading:

Charles Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine”

Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat”

Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”

Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants”

In class: Adaptation and innovation in the short story by American writers from 1887 to 1955.  Discussion of various contexts, including racial injustice in the post-Civil War period and changing social norms after WWI.

Week Four: The Contemporary Short Story Across Borders

Reading:

Clare Kegan, “The Forester’s Daughter.”

Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies”

Ha Jin, “A Tiger Fighter is Hard to Find”

Alejandro Zambra, “Reading Comprehension Text No. 2” (Granta 134 Feb 2016).

In class: Late- 20th- and 21st-century experiments with the short story form by Irish, Indian-American, Chinese, and Chilean writers.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. Mary Wood is a semi-retired Professor of English at University of Oregon, where she has taught American Literature for over thirty years. She teaches a Jewish Writers  course every year for UO undergraduates and regularly includes Jewish writers in her courses on 19th- and 20th-century American literature, American modernism, and memoir and autobiography. She has directed several dissertations and honors theses on 20th- and 21st-century Jewish 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, including Jewish American writers. She is currently working on a project that connects short stories by Jewish writer Grace Paley to writing by early 20th-century Jewish labor activists.