Here’s a brief rundown of what I’m taking this semester. For those of you not in the know, I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at UW-Milwaukee, having finished my MA there last August.

The classes with brief descriptions and reading lists after the break:

ENG 778 – Contemporary Native American Novel
ENG 782 – Contemporary Lit: Visual Narratives
ENG 815 – Fiction Workshop

Overall, I have to say I’m really excited about this semester. All of these classes look great.

ENG 778 – Contemporary Native American Novel
We’re reading pretty much what the title says. In addition, the course has the following three goals, as outlined in the syllabus:

* to help students be prepared for field examinations, dissertation chapters, and teaching American Indian classes.

* to help students prepare for the job market by being able to offer courses in or related to American Indian literature

* to help provide the basics for a record of publication

Which is awesome. I feel strongly that grad classes should be geared towards professional ends, and the professor definitely has this on the agenda. Native American literature is probably going to be one of my minor areas of concentration, or a significant part of my major area (which is likely going to be Modern Fiction). As we discussed in class, we’re going to be dealing with question such as: what makes a work “authentically” Native American? Who can write such a work? (aside: we’re reading Education of Little Tree which was written by a white, former Ku Klux Klan member) What does a Native American novel look like? And lots more interesting stuff.

There’s a good amount of work here. We need to do a book review outside of the below novels, a survey of academic research in one area, and a final paper. Really looking forward to this class.

Here’s the ordered reading list:

House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
Fools Crow, James Welch
Tracks, Louise Erdrich
Mean Spirit, Linda Hogan
The Beet Queen, Louise Erdrich
Education of Little Tree, Forrest Carter
The Translation of Dr Apelles: A Love Story, David Treuer
Green Grass Running Water, Thomas King
Landfill Meditations, Gerald Vizenor
Tonto and Lone Ranger, Sherman Alexie
Wild Indians and Other Creatures, Adrian Louis
Black Eagle Child, Young Bear
PermaRed, Debra Earling

And the following critical articles:
Sequoyah – “How! Is an Indian�
Landrum – “The Shattered Modernism of Momaday’s House Made of Dawn�
Rice, “Witchery, Indigenous Resistance, and Urban Space in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremonyâ€?
Allen, “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremonyâ€?
Cook, “A Tapestry of History and Reimagination: Women’s Place in James Welch’s Fools Crowâ€?
Treuer, “Plain Binoculars�
Gross, “The Trickster and World Maintenance: An Anishinaabe Reading of Louise Erdrich’s Tracksâ€?
Babcock, “A Tolerated Margin of Mess�
Warrior – “Review Essay: Deaths of Sybil Bolton�
Krasteva – “The Politics of the Border in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spiritâ€?
Castillo – “Post-Modernism and Referentiality: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy�
Silko – “Review of the BQ�
Gates – “’Authenticity’ and the Lessons of Little Tree�
Huhndorf – “The Making of an Indian�
Justice – “A Lingering Miseducation�
Treuer, “Some Final Thoughts on the Non-Existence of Native American Fiction�
Parker, “Tradition, Invention, and Aesthetics in Native American Literature and Literary Criticism�
Ibis-Goméz – “Subverting the ‘Mainstream� Paradigm Through Magical Realism�
Chester – “GGRW: Theorizing the World of the Novel�
Flick – “Reading Notes for Thomas Kings’ GGRW�
Blaeser, “Intersections with the Oral Tradition�
Ruoff, “Gerald Vizenor: Compassionate Trickster�
Evans – “Open Containers: Sherman Alexie’s Drunken Indians�
Coulombe: “Approximate Size of His Favorite Tumor�
Wilson — Review and Interview
Jung – “The Psychology of the Trickster Figure�
Beard, “Society Based on Names: Ray Young Bear’s Black Eagle Child�
Salzer, “Young Bear’s Cantaloupe Terrorist”

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ENG 782 – Contemporary Lit: Visual Narratives

Right, I can’t sum up this class any better than the description in the syllabus, so here goes: This graduate seminar is designed to facilitate a deeper understanding of relationships between image and text within contemporary narrative forms including hypertext, multimedia and 20th Century experimental literary and art movements such as DADA, Oulipo and Fluxus, and to see how these movements anticipate and configure creative web content. We will focus upon narrative structure in “post-realistâ€? literature.

Because this language is all new to me, I can’t comment on the specifics of the course other than to say the professor is a visual artist and really wants to push creative boundaries. Hybridity is the key word, and we’re going to be bending/blurring the boundaries of genre and disciplines (fiction, poetry, film, painting, etc.) Sounds awesome, dunnit? We read Roussel’s Locus Solus for the first class and it was awesome. No doubt that it would be considered either fantasy or sci-fi or both or neither in today’s world.

We need to write response papers every few weeks, and we have two projects where the creative ones among us are encouraged to try our hand at multimedia storytelling (the non-creative can write an academic paper, poor chaps and chappettes), and a final academic paper. This course appears to be the perfect blend for the creative-minded academic.

Book list:
Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction, David Hopkins
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, George Perec
This Is Not a Pipe, Michel Foucault
Networked Art, Craig Saper
Writing Machines, Katherine Hayles

E-Texts and Criticism
Locus Solus (excerpt), Raymond Roussel (chapters 1-3)
The DADA Reader: A critical Anthology, Dawn Ales-editor (various)
Women In DADA, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse-editor (chapter on Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven)
Oulipo Compendium , Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotchie (various)
Oulipo – A Primer of Potential Literature, Warren Motte Jr. (various)
Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau, (excerpt)
Ways of Seeing, John Berger (Chapter 1)
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer As Cartographer (excerpt: A Rigorous Geometry)
Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin
Wanderlust (Chapter 12: Paris, Or Botanizing On the Asphalt), Rebecca Solnit
Fluxus Experience, Hannah Higgins (excerpt)
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges (various)
Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler (chapter 1)
Database Aesthetic, Victoria Vesna-editor (various)
The Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem-editor (Murakami story, Worth story)
House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski (excerpt)
The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative, Sergio Cicconi (on web)
Incidence, Daniil Kharms (excerpt)
The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan & Fiore
Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium (chapters 12 & 14)

And films:
The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes (VHS video) (Golda Meir media, Episode 2)
Experimental Avant Garde Series (various) (English Department Film Library) (various)
The Five Obstructions, Jorgen Leth & Lars Von Trier (DVD)
Powers of Ten, Charles and Ray Eames (VHS video)
How To Draw a Bunny, John Walter & Andrew Moore (DVD)
Memento, Christopher Nolan

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ENG 815 – Fiction Workshop
And the fiction workshop. There are very few rules, except we need to turn in two stories and have a bit more rigorous job for providing feedback for other workshoppers. We’re required to do some line-level copy editing for each story, and we need to provide commentary in a more systematized way rather than just willy-nilly. For my money, this is a good thing.

The only rule is no stock genre fiction. No space opera, no fellowships with one wizard, one elf, one dwarf, etc. Which is fine by me. The emphasis for the workshop is on taking chances, which is also good. Two stories totaling around 40 pages is the only requirement. No mandatory outside reading since this is the upper-level workshop, which is focused solely on the students’ work. Lots of good writers in the room too, so I’m looking forward to it.

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That’s it! Overall, I’m really enthusiastic about this semester. It’s going to be a ton of work, perhaps the most yet, but it’s so much better when you’re excited about what you’re learning.