{"id":11,"date":"2013-08-31T05:26:59","date_gmt":"2013-08-31T05:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/?page_id=11"},"modified":"2016-02-17T21:18:21","modified_gmt":"2016-02-17T21:18:21","slug":"teaching","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Upcoming Classes (Fall 2016)<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n
Eng 260: American Environmental Literature (Fall 2016, Fall 2014, Fall 2012 )\u00a0Syllabus<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
In English 260, we will explore American writers’ engagement with the environment from the nineteenth century wilderness movement through Superstorm Sandy. \u00a0We will consider how writers represent, reckon with, combat, and in some cases dispute environmental issues like biodiversity loss, toxicity, climate change, and problems with food production. \u00a0We will read from classic works of American nature writing like Walden<\/i>, A Sand County Almanac<\/i>, and Silent Spring.<\/i> \u00a0We will also read some works of contemporary environmental literature like Nathaniel Rich\u2019s 2012 climate change novel Odds Against Tomorrow<\/i>. \u00a0We will look at some paintings and we will watch some films. \u00a0We will consider how traditions and histories of relating to the natural world affect 21st century debates about conservation and sustainability. \u00a0We will talk about whether or not language and art can have any real effect on the earth’s problems. \u00a0We will pay special attention to Wisconsin writers and to places around Whitewater.\u00a0And we will go outside!\u00a0 As a special bonus this semester, English 260 will meet jointly with Dr. Gulig\u2019s History 190: North American Environmental History on six occasions throughout the term to talk about ways that the disciplines of history and literature engage the environment and can be used to help solve environmental problems.<\/h5>\n
Eng 226: American Literature Survey I (Fall 2016, Fall 2013)\u00a0Syllabus<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
\u201cA survey of American literature from the seventeenth century through the Civil War to acquaint the student with the foremost writers of our literary culture\u201d (UWW course catalogue description).<\/h5>\n

Current and Previously Offered Classes<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n
Eng 341: American Renaissance\u00a0(Spring 2016)\u00a0Syllabus<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
\u201cDemocratic nations . . . will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be useful . . . No longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant, and appearance is more attended to than reality.\u201d<\/h6>\n
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American<\/em>, Volume II, 1840<\/h6>\n
For quite some time UW-Whitewater\u2019s course catalogue has called the first of its two nineteenth-century American Literature classes \u201cAmerican Renaissance,\u201d presumably after F.O Mattiessen\u2019s 1941 work of the same name.<\/em> A renaissance is literally a \u201cre-birth,\u201d but it is also any \u201cperiod of exceptional revival of the arts and intellectual culture\u201d (eg. Italian Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance), and Matthiessen claims that the \u201chalf-decade of 1850-1855\u201d is unequalled in all of American literary history. It was, he observes, in this remarkably narrow span that Emerson\u2019s Representative Men<\/em>, Hawthorne\u2019s The Scarlet Letter <\/em>and The House of the Seven Gables<\/em>, Melville\u2019s Moby-Dick<\/em> and Pierre, <\/em>Thoreau\u2019s Walden<\/em>, and Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass <\/em>first \u201cappeared.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Matheissen raises three possible questions about this period\u2019s exceptional revival of the arts and intellectual culture: how<\/em> these books came out of American literary history, why<\/em> it happened at this particular moment in American economic, social, political and religious history, and what<\/em> these works were as works of art? Mathiessen focuses the following 655 pages of his book on the last question. We will consider all three, but rather than simply defer to the questions that were asked by a work of literary criticism that was published before many of your grandparents were born, we will ask other questions as well. Is this period exceptional? Does this period mark the birth of American art? Did these books have any effect on nineteenth-century readers, politics, religion, and art. Do they continue to exert pressure on our view of our history, our experience of the natural environment, and our politics (this is a presidential election year after all). We will not limit our investigation of nineteenth-century American literature to the first half of the decade before the Civil War and we will not limit our reading to the five readers that Mathiessen and the catalogue description list.<\/h5>\n
Hon 491: Honors Common Read \u00a0– The Good Food Revolution <\/em>(Spring 2016)\u00a0Syllabus<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
For this spring’s Honors Common Read, we will read\u00a0The Good Food Revolution,<\/em>\u00a0Will Allen’s book about establishing an urban farm in Milwaukee that has brought\u00a0fresh food, jobs, and hope to his community and to cities around the United States. \u00a0<\/em>The book will lead us into discussions of environmental justice, individual\u00a0liberty, multiculturalism, systemic injustice, agrarianism, and food culture. \u00a0Rather than merely talking and thinking about the good food revolution, we will participate in it by researching, writing, cooking, and eating. \u00a0The course will consist of six discussion sections, one field trip to Growing Power, and four lab sessions where we will select, prepare, and eat\u00a0the best food we can find and afford in Wisconsin in late winter.<\/h5>\n
Eng 342: American Realism and Naturalism (Spring 2015)\u00a0Syllabus<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
Realism and its close cousin, naturalism, get a bad rap. If twenty-first century Americans think about realism at all, they typically imagine fat books with lots of boring details about the everyday lives of ordinary people.\u00a0 Sandwiched between the raw emotion of Romanticism and the clever daring of Modernism, realism sometimes falls between the cracks of literary history.\u00a0 Yet realism was, and remains to this day, shocking.\u00a0 Realist authors wrote about political corruption, death, sex, racism, immigration, the concentration of wealth and power, ecological beauty and catastrophe, the possibility of a world without God, and the silliness of middle class life.\u00a0 Moreover, they wrote about this material \u201ctruthfully,\u201d in plain, descriptive English without hiding behind either romantic fancy or modernist obscurity.\u00a0 Forget, for a semester, Emerson\u2019s silly eyeball and the \u201ccurrents of the universal being circulating through him, blah, blah, blah.\u201d\u00a0 Leave the impenetrability of Faulkner\u2019s sound and fury (\u201cThen the barn wasn\u2019t there and we had to wait until it came back.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t see it come back.\u00a0 It came behind us . . .\u201d WHAT!?!).\u00a0 Instead, watch a woman go crazy after her physician (and husband) locks her in an attic.\u00a0 See what happens when a bored 18-year-old Wisconsin farm girl moves to Chicago and tries to sleep her way to the top.\u00a0 Now that you have seen\u00a0Lincoln,<\/i>\u00a0see how the Thirteenth Amendment worked after Reconstruction ended. Think about where food came from and what (or maybe even who) might have been wrapped up in a polish sausage casing.\u00a0 Dare to consider what does or does not separate us from our pets.\u00a0 Peer into factory life before OSHA and walk the back alleys of New York City before electric streetlights.\u00a0 Watch a boy rise from rags to riches.\u00a0 And light out for the Western Territories just as the frontier was closing.<\/h5>\n
Eng 372: Scientific and Technical Writing\u00a0Syllabus<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
“Practice in expository, descriptive, and report writing, with special application to technical and scientific subject matter”<\/h5>\n
(UWW course catalogue description)<\/h5>\n
<\/h5>\n
Eng101: Freshman English (Fall 2012, 2013)\u00a0<\/strong>Syllabus<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
Eng102: Freshman English (Spring 2013, 2014)\u00a0Syllabus<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/h5>\n
Eng 460: Major Authors: Herman Melville and his World (Spring 2014)\u00a0 Syllabus<\/a><\/strong><\/h5>\n
Everybody knows Herman Melville for Moby-Dick, <\/i>but as massive a world as that book imagines, Melville\u2019s world was even bigger.\u00a0 This major authors course will lead you into (and maybe out of) the terrifying depths of Moby-Dick, <\/i>but it will also allow you to pursue Melville and his characters around the world, from small town 1820\u2019s New York (pop. 150,000) to London, to the South Pacific, to the Galapagos Islands before Darwin made them famous, to the Holy Land, to a small farm in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, and back to New York in the 1880s (suddenly a metropolis of 2 million people). \u00a0As we pursue Melville around the globe, we will pay attention to how he, a nineteenth-century married, white man from a distinguished family reckoned with cultural difference in matters of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion; environmental degradation and devastation; and the place of his peculiar art in the international literary marketplace. \u00a0We will read Moby-Dick<\/i>, but we will read it at a sensible pace.\u00a0 We will also take breaks from it here and there to dive into Melville\u2019s writing process and source material.\u00a0 We will certainly look at the incredible true story of the whaleship Essex<\/i>, which sunk after being rammed by a whale and whose crew turned to cannibalism while adrift in a lifeboat.\u00a0 \u00a0This is a 400-level course; therefore, we will be attentive to Melville\u2019s works, to critical responses to the works, and to ways that literary scholarship is constructed.\u00a0 As you read, discuss, and write, you will have opportunities to experiment with innovative methods of literary research that draw on approaches from the humanities, social sciences, or the physical sciences.\u00a0 You will also have opportunities to see what happens when you bring Melville\u2019s works into contact with contemporary literary theory.<\/h5>\n
<\/h5>\n

<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Upcoming Classes (Fall 2016) Eng 260: American Environmental Literature (Fall 2016, Fall 2014, Fall 2012 )\u00a0Syllabus In English 260, we will explore American writers’ engagement with the environment from the nineteenth century wilderness movement through Superstorm Sandy. \u00a0We will consider … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3878,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"onecolumn-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-11","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3878"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11\/revisions\/209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}