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ENGL 480 - DIE
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Dr. Kenneth Sherwood Sherwood@iup.edu www.chss.iup.edu/sherwood Office: Sutton 340;
Hours;
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Thematic Overview Named diversely as the “everyday,” “quotidian,” or “ordinary,” the thematic ground of this course enables students to develop projects that engage a variety of issues and to work with texts of their choice from the range of periods, styles, and genres. The emerging field of everyday life studies-- influenced by sociology as well as marxist theory--tends to look at habitual practices, background phenomena, and the generally unarticulated ground upon which meaning is made. Thus Erving Goffman distinguishes the front and back regions of everyday life, observing the front-room practices of restaurant wait-staff and contrasting them with the generally unseen back room. Transposed to the fields of literary and cultural studies, the everyday is a pregnant concept for a number of reasons. In an undergraduate context, it opens up questions about art and life or high vs. low art as articulated in a traditional aesthetics that may even define the literary (or poetry at least) as that which is not “ordinary.” Students may investigate classic scenes of reading and writing in literary texts--Queequeg’s reading of the whale skin in Moby Dick, Charles Reznikoff’s poems from court transcripts, or Bernadette Mayer’s single-day journal Midwinter’s Day .
At the same time, the “everyday” invites us to look at ordinary uses of literature: library reading groups, poems read at funerals, the epigraph chosen for a love letter or yearbook entry, the open-mic night, narration of self through journals and diaries, etc. Pushing further into the space of the everyday, we might reflect upon textual, performative, and symbolic practices that we don’t normally consider literary (the restaurant menu, bumper stickers, a fashion magazine, the place of the fashion magazine in the hair salon, the discourse conventions of stylist and cutomer, etc. ) or those transpiring in emerging digital spaces. Such attention should self-reflexively permit us a new awareness of how texts place themselves, how we allow or resist, how we would like to place them in our lives.
As readers, whether we are English majors, prospective teachers, or English professors—there are all kinds of backroom phenomena which, (even as workers with backroom clearance) we may often not be aware of. In this sense, our ultimate purpose in the class will be to embark on projects that make the familiar strange. To this end, generous use of cross-disciplinary readings will assist us in doing literary studies with a difference.
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