Past Course Offerings
Autumn 2007
ENGLISH 270: Introduction to Folklore
Sheila Bock (smbock99@yahoo.com)
MW 9:30 – 11:18
#08696-8
This class explores forms of traditional, vernacular culture—including verbal art, custom, and material culture—shared by men and women from a number of regional, ethnic, religious, and occupational groups. At the same time, we will consider various interpretive, theoretical approaches to examples of folklore and folklife discussed, and we will investigate the history of folklore studies and the cultural contexts in which this field has flourished. Recurring central issues will include the dynamics of tradition, the nature of creativity and artistic expression, the construction of personal and group identity, and the relationship between folklore and worldview.
ENGLISH 367.05: US Folk Experience: Writing About Culture
Amy Shuman (shuman.1@osu.edu)
MW 1:30-3:18
#08739-4
We will explore a variety of ways to write about culture and will read the best examples of writing about culture as an insider, an outsider, from a first-person personal perspective, and a third-person distanced perspective, for example. We will read both essays and a complete ethnography and will view documentary films and examine other visual representations of culture. Students will write and revise three essays during the term.
ENGLISH 577.02: Legend
Merrill Kaplan (Kaplan.103@osu.edu)
TR 1:30–3:18
#08769-3
This course introduces students to the legend, one of the three major genres of folk narrative. Is legend, as the Grimms wrote, “more historical” than folktale? Is this form of traditional narrative always “told as true,” as other scholars have maintained? Is it a narrative genre at all? This course explores these questions and examines the structure and subject matter of legend, the relationship between legend and personal experience, the place of legend in social discourse, and possibilities for interpreting legend as a meaningful expression. Examples will be drawn from several places and periods including the contemporary US and 19th-century Scandinavia. There are no prerequisites for this course. Assignments will include a class presentation, a term paper, and a final exam. Readings will be made available in a course packet and/or on electronic reserve.
ENGLISH 596: Studies in Literature and the Other Arts: The Poetry and Music of Bob Dylan
Patrick Mullen (mullen.4@osu.edu)
MW 3:30-5:18P
#08778-4
Bob Dylan’s songs are a mix of literary and vernacular influences, from Arthur Rimbaud and the French symbolists to Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry; from Frank Hutchison, Mississippi John Hurt and other 1920s and early 30s artists on the Anthology of American Folk Music to Alan Ginsberg and the Beat poets of the 40s, 50s and 60s; from gospel, blues, country, and rock n roll to protest and pop. We will look closely at selected Dylan songs within the cultural and historical context of both the poetry and the music, from the earliest demos to the latest CD but with a concentration on the crucial years of the 1960s. Requirements: mid-term exam, term research paper, and final exam. Texts: Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Neil Corcoran, ed. Do You, Mr. Jones?: Bob Dylan With the Poets and Professors, course packet of analytic essays and selected song lyrics.
COMPARATIVE STUDIES 677.02: Cultures of Waste and Recycling
Dorothy Noyes (noyes.10@osu.edu)
TR 1:30-3:18
#05638-9
This course explores the notion of the residual: what is leftover, useless, unclassifiable. Starting off from Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I (2000), we will explore the customary management of communal resources, both human and material. We’ll examine the creation of waste (and its converse, deprivation) with the codification of custom in modernity, and look at strategies by which waste is recuperated as a matter of necessity, aesthetics, or ideology. We’ll look at how different kinds of leftovers move in and out of systems of value: for example, the labeling of things as “junk” or “antiques,” people as “trash,” or ideas as “folklore.” Finally, we’ll think about the status of residues in social and cultural theory. Readings will be eclectic, including classis selections from symbolic anthropology (Douglas, Leach, Lévi-Strauss, Thompson) and sociology (Weber, Veblen), folktales, the Book of Ruth, Benjamin Franklin, and ethnographic articles on stereotyping, outlaws and outsiders, collecting, folk art, and popular protest. Students will write a few short response papers and a research paper.
ENGLISH 770.01: Intro to Grad Study in Folklore 1: Genres and Interpretation
Merrill Kaplan (kaplan.103@osu.edu)
TR 1:30-3:18
#08766-7
How do you interpret traditional forms and the cultural practices that create them when there are multiple versions, none of them authoritative? How do you read cultural expression as text within the context of its performance? This course provides a lightning introduction to folklore and the intellectual wellsprings of its study. It then moves on through several canonical genres of traditional expression such as festival, fairytale, legend, folk belief, jokes, and foodways with an eye towards developing the tools necessary for their interpretation. Assignments will include class presentations and a term paper.
ENGLISH 870: Seminar in Folklore: The Ethnography of Performance
Dorothy Noyes (noyes.10@osu.edu)
TR 9:30–11:18
#08952-5
Since the 1970s, the performance turn in folklore, anthropology, and related disciplines has illuminated our understanding of agency and efficacy in cultural production. In a major revision of the modern culture concept, it focuses on cultural forms as process and practice: not texts exemplifying a static shared worldview but historically situated, conventional transactions among persons. As part of the philosophy of language's critique of reference, it looks at how language is used to construct reality; reacting to the focus on deep structure in most grand theory, it insists on the significance of material and interactional surfaces. Today it is newly relevant as a corrective to the mystique of "values" and/or identities in contemporary cultural politics. This seminar, one of the three core theory courses in the graduate folklore curriculum, will examine both programmatic texts and selected case studies in the ethnography of performance: that is, an approach based in "thick description" of instances. While theory in the field has tended to develop within genre specializations, we will examine verbal art, cultural performance (ritual, festival, spectacle) and the performance of self together in the attempt to illustrate common issues and a general paradigm.
The reading will be intensive and eclectic, including various journal articles online as well as a coursepack and probably three books:
- Bauman, Richard 1984 (2d ed.). Verbal Art as Performance Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.
- Basso, Keith. 1979. Portraits of "the Whiteman." Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
- Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Students will share in preparing for discussion and write a research paper: literary and historical topics are welcome as well as field-based projects.
ENGLISH 872: Critical Discourse Analysis (Seminar in the English Language)Galey Modan (modan.1@osu.edu)
T R 3:30 - 5:18
#08953-1
Critical Discourse Analysis is the study of how power is enacted and contested through language.Drawing from research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, we will examine the "manufacture of consent", the ways that people use language to gain, keep, or fight against power, and how forms of language can promote and privilege certain points of view while masking others. We will explore such topics as ethnoracial discrimination, gender relations, discursive constructions of space, and government policymaking within domains such as media communication, political discourse, and everyday conversation.
Requirements: Presentation of CDA concepts applied to your data
2 short papers of 3-4 pages
Final presentation
15 page final paper
ENGLISH 890: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School
Amy Shuman (shuman.1@osu.edu)
MW 9:30–11:18
#08955-1
This course explores the development of the concept of cultural critique through the work of the Frankfurt School theorists, especially their debates about the role of the arts in strategies for political change. Many of their arguments focused on the role of mass culture (television, film, the music industry—understood as "the culture industry") either as a tool of Fascism or as offering possibilities for critique. We will explore the fundamental concepts of the culture industry and cultural critique and then turn in depth to the work of Walter Benjamin, who was arguably a minor figure but whose essays on mass produced art, tradition, and history continue to be significant for research on the relationship between high and low culture.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Essays by Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and others. ASSIGNMENTS: Seminar Paper and Presentation
CHINESE 879 NATURE IN YI LITERATURE
Mark Bender (bender.4@osu.edu)
TR 1:30-3:18
#05028-3
The course will concern oral and oral-connected narrative poems, rituals, and folk culture of the Yi ethnic group of southwest China. The focus will be on emic attitudes towards Nature and the environment.
