February 8: Studying Objects

French literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes, whose Mythologies (1957)
sets the stage for modern critiques of material culture

As we think about the field of English studies in the late 20th and early 21st century we're at home with the idea that our work might focus on subjects other than traditional written texts — audio recordings, videos, photographs, and other art objects, for example, as our work over the last several classes have revealed — but on the esoteric and interdisciplinary fringes, where innovative creative work is being done, there's something even more abstract (and, simultaneously, concrete): the object. Interdisciplinary is the key word here, since the way in which one addresses a given object might touch upon any number of other subject areas, from history to philosophy, economics to sociology, psychology to religion.

We'll start with a few selections from Roland Barthes' Mythologies, a book of brief essays that originally ran as a column in Les Lettres Nouvelles and explore the greater resonances of everyday things. In the second part of the book, Barthes explains the motivation behind his observations, offering the notion of "second-level signification," which builds upon the basic linguistic transaction (i.e. a signifier and a signified combining to form a symbol), moving from denotation to connotation. Still, even if that sentence doesn't make any sense to you at all, the ideas behind Barthes' seductive prose will.

Roland Barthes, from Mythologies [PDF]

• Soap-powders and Detergents
• Toys
• Wine and Milk
• Steak and Chips
• Plastic

We'll stay in France for our next brief reading, Georges Perec's, "Notes Concerning the Objects That Are on My Work Table" [PDF] — a short portion of the larger series published as Species of Spaces, which is concerned with everyday materiality.

Next, we'll shift gears from the literary mode to something more journalistic, with two examples of contemporary historical writing about objects. I've already talked in class about the Cooper Hewitt Museum's excellent "Object of the Day" column, which takes a brief look at interesting objects from the museum's vast archives, and we'll start by looking at a few selections from there:

• Think Different
• Pluck 'Em!
• Come, All Ye Weary
• Mini-Maglite
• Tea, Anyone?
• Juwel for a Tool
• A Dandy of a Camera
• Sweetheart Toaster

Then, just as records have the 33 1/3 series, and there are numerous similar series dedicated to individual films, objects have now gotten into the act with the "Object Lessons" series of books and essays. So far, full-length books have been released on objects as diverse as the remote control, the golf ball, bread, glass, the phone booth, hair, dust, and doorknobs (among other titles), and The Atlantic has partnered with the series to publish essays in a similar vein. We'll take a look at three such essays for Friday:

• Mary Niall Mitchell, "The Piano That Can't Play a Tune" [link]
• T. Hugh Crawford, "Where Have All the Axes Gone" [link]
• Josh Giesbrecht, "How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive" [link] 

Lydia Burkhalter's collection of gray sweatshirts (from WiC)

We'll close with two selections from the ambitious collection Women in Clothes. Edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton, with contributions from more than 600 other women, this wide ranging book "explores the wide range of motives that inform how women present themselves through clothes, and what style really means" via questionnaires, interviews, short essays, photo galleries and many other hybridized forms. 

Were this book not so big and not so expensive, I'd have used it in this class, but hopefully this little taste will spur your interest to explore further:

• Tavi Gevinson, "Color Taxonomy" [PDF]
• Amy Fusselman, "The Mom Coat" [PDF]

February 3–6: Studying Video

Just as spent our time working with audio largely meant reading music criticism, our time spent on video will focus mostly on writing about film (and to a lesser degree, television), though it could encompass a far wider range of topics, from cartoons and video games to music videos, YouTube clips, and even GIFs. Still, the ideas and techniques employed in our readings below could just as easily apply to those other disparate media.

In terms of film criticism, there's perhaps no more esteemed figure than the late Roger Ebert (above), who practically revolutionized the field, along with colleague Gene Siskel, through their popular eponymous television show, and that's why we're starting Friday with a selection of his work.

Folks who tuned in on any given week could hear serious, well-considered (if often disagreeing) viewpoints on contemporary movies — from the finest new releases to mainstream dreck — and be exposed to independent productions, foreign films, and cinema classics that might not get coverage in their daily newspapers (though both Siskel and Ebert wrote for competing Chicago newspapers for much of their careers).  The good-natured competition between them, along with their passionate perspectives, often resulted in compelling television, and off-screen they could be even more lovingly vicious:

We'll start with one of Ebert's favorite films of all time, and then move on to a few more recent films that you might be familiar with. In most cases, I've linked both his original review and a later analysis for his "Great Movies" series:

• Citizen Kane (1941) ["Great Movie" appraisal]
• Star Wars (1977) [original review] ["Great Movie" appraisal]
• Lost in Translation (2003) [original review] ["Great Movie" appraisal]
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) [original review] ["Great Movie" appraisal]

Even Ebert's most scathing reviews are fine examples of critical writing and perhaps even more so than his praise for classic films reveal the depths of his love and respect for the medium. Here are two of his most infamous pans. You don't necessarily need to read these, but it is quite pleasurable to do so:

• North (1994) [link]
• Baby Geniuses (1999) [link]

Pauline Kael at The New Yorker in 1985.

Aside from Gene Siskel, one of Roger Ebert's few true peers was Pauline Kael, The New Yorker's film critic from 1968–1991. Kael's highly individual voice — frank and brazen, while unapologetically passionate about films that deeply moved her — won her as many enemies as friends, and while her tenure was relatively brief (she retired after twenty-three years due to Parkinson's disease), her influence was long-lasting, most notably through the "Paulettes." This group of young critics that Kael took under her wing in the 1970s (including A.O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell, David Edelstein, and the two men who'd take her place at The New Yorker, Anthony Lane and David Denby) continue in her footsteps to this day.

We'll look at a few pieces from throughout her career that vary in length and tone, from French New Wave and American Auteur to one of Scorcese's earliest masterpieces and Dustin Hoffman in drag:

• Masculin Féminin (1966) [link]
• Bonnie and Clyde (1968) [PDF]
• Raging Bull (1980) [PDF]
• Tootsie (1982) [PDF]

On Monday the 6th, we'll switch gears to focus on television and video-based installation art. While the film critic has long been held in high esteem, her peers writing on the small screen have not always received the same respect. Nonetheless, just as we find ourselves overwhelmed by excellent scripted television choices in this day and age, a new class of insightful critics have risen to the challenge of writing about this unique medium. While we don't have the time to cover their work as thoroughly, I'd like to offer up a few interesting examples, and also happily point you towards Matt Zoller Seitz's article "There Has Never Been a Better Time for TV Criticism" in Vulture, which highlights some of the very best writers in this field.

Let's begin with Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker's television critic. Given the high-profile nature of that role, I found her reversal of opinion on the Cinemax series The Knick, to be a refreshing act of critical transparency that also made clear some of the challenges TV writers face vs. their film reviewer peers:

• "Surgical Strikeout: Steven Soderbergh's Disappointing 'The Knick'" (8/11/14) [link]
• "I Changed My Mind About 'The Knick'" (10/2/14) [link]

Next, I thought I'd offer up two contemporaneous articles covering very similar ground: the topic of race on one of my favorite recent TV series, 30 Rock. Given the disparate profiles of the two venues and the authors' individual styles, there's as much in common between these pieces as there are differences:

• Wesley Morris, "30 Rock Landed on Us: Identity Politics and NBC's Most Subversive Show" in Grantland (1/31/13) [link]
• Alyssa Rosenberg, "Liz Lemon's White Guilt, The Black Crusaders, and Grizz and Dot Com: Why '30 Rock' Mattered On Race" in ThinkProgress (1/29/13) [link]

Finally, because writing about the moving image can imply more than film or television, I'm also giving you two 2012 pieces by Daniel Zalewski from The New Yorker on Christian Marclay's 2010 installation/film The Clock (you can view an excerpt from The Clock above):

• "The Hours" [link]
• "Night Shift with 'The Clock'" [link]

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As I've done with the previous posts, here's a glossary of film terminology from the British Film Institute that might be a useful resource if you choose to write about the moving image. Another useful resource is Roger Ebert's (abridged) glossary of movie terms.

January 30 – February 1: Studying Audio

The record shelves of legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

When we think of doing audio, our mind most readily thinks of music, though, as last week's class on poetry suggested, sound can be a part of our conception of that genre, and sound can be a critical component of our analysis of film (which we'll be discussing later this week) as well. As we did with the visual arts, we'll spend two days on approaches to audio.

We'll start on Monday by thinking critically about listenership with two pieces that should provide a solid foundation upon which to build. First up we have "The Three Listening Modes," an excerpt from French composer and sound theorist Michel Chion's book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. [PDF]

I'm pairing that with "How We Listen," a chapter from composer and conductor Aaron Copland's iconic book, What to Listen For in Music. Just as Chion proposes three listening modes (causal, semantic, and reduced), Copland offers us three planes on which we listen to music (the sensuous, the expressive, and the sheerly musical). [PDF]

Lester Bangs, patron saint of rock critics, in 1977.

We'll wrap up the day with a few selections from a pioneering, one-of-a-kind rock critic: the late, great Lester Bangs. During his tenure at Rolling Stone and Creem from the late 60s to the mid-70s, and later as a freelance writer, Bangs tirelessly championed artists he deemed worthy — effectively conceptualizing the genre of punk rock, and later advocating for heavy metal and new wave acts — in a rapturous, free-wheeling style that displayed considerable musical knowledge along with an admiration for authors like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson. Here's a taste of his ornery style:

You'll be reading a few excerpts from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll, a posthumous collection of Bangs' best assembled by Greil Marcus in 1988: [PDF]

• "Kraftwerkfeature" (on Krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk)
• "The Greatest Album Ever Made" (on Lou Reed's notorious Metal Machine Music)
• "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Music" (a brief list-piece on noise music)

The first 50 (of 118 total) books in the 33 1/3 series. I've read 22 of these and 29 altogether (click to enlarge).

As is the case in other genres, there's a tension in music criticism — as in many other fields — between the maximal and the minimal: talented authors who are capable of writing book-length explorations of complex topics banging their heads up against the strictures of popular journalism (where 300 word reviews are considered a luxury). One of my favorite venues for the former over the past decade has been the 33 1/3 series, which has released more than a hundred books on important albums from ABBA to Neil Young, which address their subjects with startling insightfulness through a diverse array of approaches.

We'll start Friday off with a few selections from Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan's recent volume, How to Write About Music: Excerpts from the 33 1/3 Series, Magazines, Books and Blogs with Advice from Industry-leading Writers, which, among other things, contains exemplary reviews of very contemporary albums you're more like to be familiar with. I've also included a few bits of advice and a useful writing prompt from the book: [PDF]

• "Expert Advice from Our Writers"
• Ann Powers on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories
• Jim DeRogatis on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends
• Lou Reed on Kanye West's Yeezus
• "Writing Prompt: The Blind Review"
• "The Five Things Every Music Writer or Editor Needs"
• Marty Davis on Black Flag

Next, for the sake of comparison, we'll look at a trio of reviews of David Bowie's triumphant final album, Blackstar, from three very different sources, NPR, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone:

• "David Bowie's 'Blackstar' Is Adventurous To The End" by Barry Walters: [link]
• "David Bowie, Blackstar" by Ryan Dombral: [link]
• "David Bowie: Blackstar" by David Fricke: [link]

Finally, also from NPR, here's Linda Holmes' "The Individualism And Fist-Pumping Of George Michael's 'Freedom '90,'" a tribute published after the singer's death that focuses on what's perhaps the late singer's most iconic track. While reading this piece, I was genuinely struck by the facile way in which Holmes balances the audio and video elements of the track and works on both macro and micro levels. It's an excellent piece of criticism and one worth thinking about analytically: [link]

January 25–27: Studying Visual Arts

Visitors appreciating the unique architecture of New York City's Guggenheim Museum.

Much like the other disciplines we'll be looking at over the next few weeks, the visual arts are a remarkably broad and complex subject that's not really all that easy to encapsulate briefly. Nonetheless, we shall do our best over the next two classes with a handful of foundational texts and an opportunity to look comparatively at a little contemporary art criticism.

For Wednesday, we'll start with two short pieces by Susan Sontag, originally published in the New York Review of Books in the fall of 1973. They'd later appear as the first two chapters in her landmark essay collection, On Photography (1977):

• "Photography" (later titled "In Plato's Cave"): [PDF]
• "Freak Show" (later titled "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly"): [PDF]

The former deals more generally with the medium of photography while the latter is a review of two collections of photos by Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, which frames its argument through the ideas of Walt Whitman. You should easily be able to Google some of the specific images Sontag describes for the sake of comparision.

Next, we'll read the first chapter of Ways of Seeing (1972), by recently-deceased critic John Berger, which starts with the provocative assertion that "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." As he openly acknowledges, many of his ideas are shaped by Walter Benjamin's iconic essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": [PDF]

For Friday, we'll begin with the first two chapters of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (1993) — a book that (alongside pioneering works like Art Spiegelman's Maus) helped convince the general public that graphic narratives were more than capable of being legitimate literature. Here, we'll find a wide-ranging discussion of the comic artform and its implications, as well as a very useful introduction to the genre's lexicon: [PDF]

Keith Haring poses with one of his graffiti pieces in the NYC subway system.

Finally, we'll take a comparative look at several pieces of art criticism written in response to the same body of work: specifically "Keith Haring: 1978–1982," a wonderfully-constructed 2011 show highlighting the early development of the celebrated pop iconographer, which was co-curated by Cincinnati's own Contemporary Arts Center and later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum (where most of these reviews are from):

• Karen Rosenberg, "A Pop Shop for a New Generation: 'Keith Haring: 1978-1982' at Brooklyn Museum," The New York Times [link] (related slideshow [link])
• Rachel Wolff, "Where the Radiant Baby Was Born," New York Magazine [link]
• Matt Morris, "You Don't Know Keith," CityBeat [link]

Mon. January 23 — Studying Poetry

As we've discussed in class already, there's a certain bias inherent to our contemporary canons privileging prose — and specifically fiction (and even more specifically, the novel) — over all other genres. This was not always the case. If you were to take a traditional literary criticism course (i.e. one using a venerable text like Hazard Adams' Critical Theory Since Plato) most of your readings would be what might reasonable called explorations of poetics up until well into the 19th century, since that was dominant literary genre.

Nonetheless, poetry does occupy a somewhat marginalized place in the present, and is somewhat unfairly notorious for being both intimidating and impenetrable. As a poet, I'm disheartened by this characterization — which often, I think, is rooted in the disjuncture between traditional verse and more adventurous modern poetic forms, along with the misconception that you can "answer" this sort of poetry as if it was a riddle. Instead of there being one correct interpretation, there's a lot of room for individual response, but that can be a scary prospect, particularly when you're not very comfortable or familiar with the genre. So, for the sake of making you more comfortable, I present the following resources:

First, I've put together a basic set of Tools for Analyzing Poetry, which I often give to classes as a resource, that offers two approaches for readers to make their way through a poem: the first, a very rudimentary, brick-by-brick method that works its way from the most basic details to overall understanding; the second an excellent set of questions borrowed by poet and critic Ann Lauterbach. There are also some general instructions regarding the proper quotation and citation of poetry in academic writing.

In addition to that, I'd like you to read a few short poetics essays by a handful of notable 20th/21st century American poets, and in each case I've provided a few representative poems from each so that you can explore the relationship between their ideas as expressed in their prose vs. those in poetic form:

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

• "Someone is Writing a Poem" [link]

• "Diving Into the Wreck" [link] [video] [MP3]
• "What Kind of Times Are These" [link] [MP3]
• "Delivered Clean" [link]

Frank O'Hara

• "Personism: a Manifesto" [PDF]

• "A Step Away from Them" [link]
• "Personal Poem"[link]
• "Poem ['Lana Turner Has Collapsed']" [link] [audio]
• "The Day Lady Died" [link] [video]
• "Ave Maria" [link]

Charles Bernstein

• "The Difficult Poem" [link]
• "Against National Poetry Month As Such" [link]

• "Self-Help" [link] [MP3]
• "Thank You For Saying Thank You" [link] [MP3]
• "Morality" [link] [video]

Finally, because the sonic aspects of poetry, whether performed or recorded, are an oft-neglected but important characteristic of the medium, I humbly offer up my observations on Charles Bernstein's 1976 tapework piece, "Class" (this excerpt is taken from a longer article, with the opening paragraphs followed by my discussion of this specific piece). I do so not because it's particularly brilliant, but rather because it's close at hand. 

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One last tool, not to be read for Wednesday, but rather filed away for future use — the Poetry Foundation's excellent glossary of poetic terms that covers five basic categories: forms and types, rhythm and meter, schools and periods, techniques and figures of speech, and theory and criticism.

Some Resources on Canonization and Prize Culture

You might ask yourself why UC thinks it worthwhile to put vinyl transfers
of great authors on its fine corrugated temporary learning spaces.

Aside from the formal canon-building described in today's reading, there are more subtle processes that enshrine (and exclude) works of literature from various field ands eras.

One of the more common methods, inside and outside of academia, is the simple act of list-making, from the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World series, first published in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica, to more recent lists like the Modern Library 100 from 1998 (with separate lists for fiction and non-fiction), the BBC's "The Big Read" List from 2003, and Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Novels (published in 2010, and, despite its name, only covering books published since Time's launch in 1923).

More idiosyncratic versions of this phenomenon show up on our newsfeeds all the time: cf. Flavorwire's recent "A College Curriculum on Your Bookshelf: 50 Books for 50 Classes" or Buzzfeed's "How Well Read Are You?" quiz.

Another sort of list-making  is tied to prize culture. In the US we typically recognize three major literary prizes given annually in various genres: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Britain has the Man Booker Prize, which recently (and controversially opened to non-UK authors), Canada has the Griffin Poetry Prize, and there are many other national and/or regional prizes, grants, etc.

One might also consider career-long awards such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, the MacArthur Foundation Prize (colloquially known as the "genius grant"), and Guggenheim Fellowships, along with literature grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

If you're interested in reading more about this process — which has generated a lot of ink over the past several decades from both sides of the debate — here are a few titles worth looking into:

• Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students
• Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars
• James Atlas, Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America
• Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory
• Jim English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value

Weeks 1–2: Studying English

(not) Robert Eaglestone and (not) Jonathan Beecher Field bask in the adulation of English majors

Robert Eaglestone and Jonathan Beecher Field's Studying English: A Guide for Literature Students is the newly-updated version a book that has a lot of traction within our English department, particularly in this course, because it does an excellent job of providing a thoughtful foundation for work in the field and a sense of how that field has changed over time. While I'll miss Doing English, the book it's supplanted — largely for its title's strange and somewhat untoward phrasing — I'm grateful I'll no longer have to read long tangents about British secondary education. Nonetheless, Eaglestone's original introductory note offers some key ideas we don't want to miss.

"People usually set off 'doing English' without thinking about what they are doing in the first place and, perhaps most importantly, why they are doing it," he observes, continuing, "While it sometimes looks as if English is simply the discussion of literature, it is a subject, or a discipline, and this shapes ideas that are often 'below the surface' or taken for granted and are not discussed." Thus the key notion here is for the reader to be actively and mindfully engaged in their navigation of the world of English language and literature. We'll follow his example and consider how we might actively "do" other sorts of related discourses (like audio, video, and visual arts) within the realm of English studies after we finish with his book.

In essence, the book offers three main aims:

• to orientate* you, by explaining what you are doing when you are doing English;
• to equip you, by explaining basic key ideas;
• to encourage you, to explore newer ways of doing English.

And this will be carried out over the book's four sections — which are concerned with how and what we read; the relationship between reading, writing, and meaning; and the ever-changing and growing realm of English studies — before concluding with a consideration of the importance of English. 

Here's our reading schedule for Studying English:

• Wednesday, January 11: Part 1, Ch. 1–3
• Friday, January 13: Part 1, Ch. 4–5; Part 2)
• Monday, January 16: No Class — MLK Day
• Wednesday, January 18: Part 3
• Friday, January 20: Part 4 + Conclusion

* this is the sort of amazing British parlance that's no doubt been purged from the book entirely

Welcome to Our Class

As its name implies, Introduction to English Studies is a foundational course that will help provide you with many of the tools you'll need as you pursue a major (or minor) in English here at the University of Cincinnati — and thankfully, many of you are taking this class as sophomores (or juniors) rather than waiting until your last year.

While this is an important class, it's one with a bit of an identity crisis: it's not a theory course, or a composition course, or a lit course, though it touches upon all of those areas. As a result, each professor who teaches it puts their own personal spin upon it depending on what they see as the necessary skills they'd like their students to carry with them.

Since 2010, I've been co-editor of Jacket2, an online journal of poetry and poetics journal that carries on and builds upon the groundbreaking work of Jacket Magazine (1997–2010), one of the world's first online venues for serious poetic discourse. In that role I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking with my colleagues about the evolving role of criticism in the 21st century as we move from a print-centric culture into a bustling 24/7 world of online discourse. That brave new world that you, as budding scholars, find yourself in is very different than the one I knew when I was in your shoes a generation ago, and it's vital to understand how to make your way through it, regardless of whether you plan to be an English professor, a high school English teacher, or to enter into any number of other fields.

Our semester will break down into three segments, each serving as a foundation for the next and building towards your final essay. We'll start by taking a brief look at the English language and the history of English scholarship, then explore other sorts of analytic literacies and disciplines that will broaden our sense of where the field is going in the 21st century. Next, we'll apply those skills to a trio of groundbreaking and much-lauded recent books by female authors — Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and Lauren Redniss — that incorporate a hybrid approach to both structure and subject. Finally, you'll try to work in this same sort of mode, workshopping two short pieces that will fold into a larger final essay.

I first taught this course in the fall of 2015, and thanks to both wonderful feedback from my students and intensive evaluation alongside several peers who also taught 3000 that year, I've made some changes that I think will be very beneficial. We'll have a lot more time to sort out the details of our shared work as the semester progresses, but for now, welcome to the class! I hope you're as excited as I am for what we have in store.