Coleman Hutchison

Instructor:  Greiner, C            Areas:  IV / D

Unique #:  83740            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Summer 2013, second session            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: C L 315, E 603B, 316K, or T C 603B.

Description: We will create, analyze, and critique fiction, using contemporary models. This is an entry-level course, with a focus on short narrative fiction.

Texts: The Art of the Short Story, Dana Gioa, R. S. Gwynn, Longman (September 9, 2005); The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Mariner Books (September 19, 2003); The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tara Masih, ed., Rose Metal Press (May 13, 2009)

Requirements & Grading: Haibun—10%; one-smoke story—10%; flash fiction story—15%; short story—25%; revision of short story—10%; participation—30% (10% in-class comments and pop quizzes, 5% plot outline, 10% critiques, 5% attendance). Final grades will include a plus or minus if applicable.

The first half of the course will focus on in-depth discussion of character, setting, plot, style, tone, mood, literary elements (such as figurative language), voice, pacing, and theme. To demonstrate understanding of these concepts, students will write forms of “short-short” fiction.

Assignments will include:

• one haibun (a Japanese form of short fiction that incorporates haiku) of 300-400 words;
• a “one-smoke story” (a Native American/Chinese form of short fiction) of 400-600 words; and
• a flash fiction story of 900-1,000 words.

(These assignments will total approximately 2,000 words.)

Publication venues for “short-short” fiction will be discussed, and students will be encouraged, but not required, to submit their revised versions for publication.

The second half of the course will address longer, more complex short stories—with a concentration on developing plot and character (through conflict, motivation, tension, and other methods).

Students will create a detailed plot outline and a short story of 3,000-4,000 words. Each student’s story will receive feedback in a workshop format. We will discuss both copy-editing and deep revision. The final assignment will be a thorough revision of the short story. Publication venues for lengthier short stories will be discussed, and students will be encouraged, but not required, to submit their revised works for publication.

Throughout the course, readings from the textbooks will be used to enhance students’ understanding of and appreciation for short fiction. Supplemental readings will also be provided.

Instructor:  Hutchison, C            Areas:  I / H

Unique #:  35495            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Spring 2013            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  n/a

Prerequisites: Six semester hours of upper-division coursework in English.

Description: Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (and Others) --

This course studies the varied work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845). A master of a number of literary genres—poetry, short fiction, and criticism, to name but three—Poe remains one of most popular and perplexing figures in American literature. More than two centuries after his birth, he continues to exert an outsize influence on a number of literary traditions, including detective fiction, horror, science fiction, hoax, humor, and satire. Over the course of the term we will read many of Poe’s tales, a good deal of his poetry, select pieces of criticism, and his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837). In measuring Poe’s achievement, we will gauge his influence on subsequent generations of writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Roger Corman, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, and Mat Johnson. We will also catalog the strange places that Poe shows up in contemporary culture: midnight movies, rock operas, episodes of The Simpsons, even NFL franchises.  Finally, the course will take full advantage of UT’s Harry Ransom Center, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of Poe materials.

Texts: Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (Library of America; 978-1883011383)

Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories (Oxford, 978-0199536979)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage; 978-0679745426)

Mat Johnson, Pym: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau; 978-0812981766)

In addition, there will be a required course packet.

Requirements & Grading: Students will produce one 4-5-page essay (20% of the final grade for the course), a revision of the 4-5-page essay (10%), and one 8-10-page final project (40%). The remaining 30% of the final grade for the course will be based on participation in in-class and electronic discussions, including weekly Blackboard posts.

This course will expose students to a wide range of global literatures in literary and historical context, but with a thematic focus: love and human meaning.  How do people of different cultures and regions use discourses of love to make meaning in their lives?  What can literature teach us about the trans-historical and trans-cultural experiences of love?  To steal a line, what do we talk about when we talk about love?  Surveys of world literature are, by their nature, partial and idiosyncratic.  There is simply no way to represent in a single year the full diversity of the literatures (plural) produced in a given country or region – much less all over the world.  In compassing the globe this course will emphasize a common theme (i.e., love) and communal literary forms (e.g., narrative fiction, the sonnet).  This organizing principle will allow us to engage in a responsible cross-cultural analysis, one that is sensitive to differences in social and historical context.  This course will model methods of literary and cultural interpretation; help students to improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills; and underscore the complex, at times obscure nature of “talk of love.”

Texts/Readings:

The Song of Songs

Sappo, poems

William Shakespeare, King Lear (c. 1603)

William Shakespeare, Shake-speare’s Sonnets (1609)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Vladimir Nebokov, Lolita (1955)

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (2001)

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (2005)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (2010)

Supplemental Readings will be made available in a Course Packet

Note: Required Film Viewings – Stanley Kubrick, dir. Lolita (1962)

Assignments/Requirements:

Participation 25%

Short Essays 75% (3 total – 25% each)  

About the Professor: Coleman Hutchison (Ph.D., Northwestern, 2006) teaches and writes about U.S. literature and culture to 1900. He has abiding interests in poetry, print culture, regional and national literatures, popular and folk music, and histories of sexuality. His essays have appeared in American Literary History, Comparative American Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, and PMLA, among other venues. He recently published the first literary history of the Confederacy, Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America.

Hutchison is working on two books-in-progress: "The Ditch is Nearer: Race, Place, and American Poetry, 1863-2009" and a popular biography of “Dixie.” The former project studies the interpenetration of locality and racial consciousness in American poetry between Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Barack Obama’s inauguration; the latter tells the story of how a song gave a region a nickname, and how that nickname helped to shape the region’s cultural identity.

Hutchison's research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Huntington Library. In 2010 Hutchison received a UT System Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award.

Instructor:  Hutchison, C            Areas:  n/a

Unique #:  83600            Flags:  n/a

Semester:  Summer 2012, first session            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Literature in history --

This course offers an idiosyncratic sampling of the “masterworks” of American literature—that is, those texts from the rather messy literary history of the United States that have endured. Over the course of the term we will explore themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality; consider the relationship between literature and social change; and study the effects of industrialization, immigration, and globalization. In doing so, we will also address a number of urgent questions: How has American literature been shaped by history? And how, in turn, has this literature helped to shape American history? What does it mean to be “American” at any given moment? What allows a piece of literature to endure?

Texts: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter seventh edition, ed. Nina Baym (Representative authors include: John Winthrop, Samson Occom, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, and Li-Young Lee)

We will also read at least two of the following novels: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper.

Requirements & Grading: Three exams (75%); attendance, participation, & quizzes (25%).

Instructor:  Hutchison, C            Areas:  II / F

Unique #:  35451            Flags:  Writing

Semester:  Spring 2012            Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  n/a            Computer Instruction:  No

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) helped define American literature for generations of students and scholars. This course revisits and re-imagines the “extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression” that Matthiessen called the “first maturity” of American art and culture: 1845-1855. We will read the canon of “past masterpieces” defined by Matthiessen (i.e., Emerson’s essays, Thoreau’s Walden, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass) but we will read it alongside lesser-known, “popular” texts of the period (e.g., T.S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-room, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig). In so doing we will consider the formation and function of literary canons and engage a series of issues central to the literature of the antebellum United States: slavery and social reform; nationalism and empire; gender and sexuality; individuality, and community; originality and emulation.

Texts: T.S. Arthur, Ten Nights in a Bar-room (Applewood; 978-1557095084)

Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Yale UP; 978-0300087017)

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Selected Works. Lauter, ed. (Houghton Mifflin; 978-0395980750)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Person, ed. (Norton; 978-0393979534)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale. Parker and Harrison, eds. (Norton; 978-0393972832)

Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings. Thompson, ed. (Norton; 978-0393972856)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings. Rossi, ed. (Norton; 978-0393930900)

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855) (Course packet)

Harriet E Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. (Vintage; 978-1400031207).

Requirements & Grading: Students will be evaluated on the basis of participation, an essay, and midterm and final examinations.

Participation (i.e., attendance, discussion, Blackboard postings, peer review): 25%; Essay (6-8 pages): 30%; Take-home midterm examination: 20%; In-class final examination: 25%.

Prerequisites: Enrollment in or completion of at least one Honors section of an English course, admission to the English Honors Program, and consent of the honors adviser. Enrollment restricted by department.

Description: According to the Honors Thesis Manual, a thesis is “a sustained examination of a central idea or question, developed in a professional and mature manner under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and a second reader.” That sounds easy enough, but how does one get there from here? This course offers something of a roadmap. Over the course of the term we will examine literary criticism from the “inside out” and hone skills essential to a successful honors thesis.

Along the way, we will address a number of questions, both practical—How do I use the MLA Bibliography? What’s the difference between a footnote and an endnote?—and theoretical—What does it mean to make an argument about literature? Who has authority in an act of interpretation? This course will: first and foremost prepare students to write an honors thesis; interrogate methods of literary and cultural interpretation; consider what it means to make literary arguments and conduct literary research; help students to improve their research, critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Texts: Required Core Texts: William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Norton, 2003) #978-0-393-97819-3; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (W.W. Norton, 1996). #978-0393964585.

Required Secondary Texts: Wayne Booth, et al, The Craft of Research (Third Edition) (University Of Chicago Press, 2008). #978-0226065663; Marjorie Garber, A Manifesto for Literary Studies (University of Washington Press, 2003). #978-0295983448; Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2005). # 978-0393924091.

Optional Supplemtentary Text: Eviatar Zerubavel, The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, & Books (Harvard, 1999) #0-674-13586-5

Requirements & Grading: (assignment logistics, rationales, and approaches will be discussed at length during class)

Final Thesis Prospectus (4-6 pp.) & Annotated Bibliography (20-25+ items)            40%

Writing Sample (15-20 pp. section or sections of your actual thesis)            30%

In-Class Performance (quality & consistency of discussion; preparation; engagement;

informal writing; writing-process & bibliography tasks; peer feedback; Symposium)            30%

On-time Attendance (note: every absence beginning with #4 will reduce grade; NC at #9)            Required

On-time Completion of Reading, Writing-Process, Research, & Peer Feedback Assignments            Required

 Plus/minus grades will be assigned for the final grade of the course. The university does not recognize the grade of A+. Evaluation percentages approximate & subject to minor change.

English 340: The American Novel before 1920

Spring 2010 (#34800)
MW 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Parlin 206

Professor Coleman Hutchison
coleman.hutchison@mail.utexas.edu
Office: Calhoun 207
Office Phone: 512.471.8372
Office Hours: W 2:00-3:30 pm; F 3:30-5 pm; and by appointment

Course Description

This survey of the early American novel will emphasize the diversity—and the depravity—of the first one hundred years of novel writing in the United States. We will read both familiar and unfamiliar authors and pay particular attention to issues of popularity and reception. Why did these novels command such a large audience of readers? What social and cultural changes did these novels both respond to and help to produce? Along the way we’ll encounter an array of narrative techniques and great generic diversity. The eclectic reading list promises, among other things, the picaresque, the travel narrative, romance, realism, and sentimentalism; courtroom dramas, forensic evidence, race riots, and adultery; cannibalism, “deviant” sexuality, and America’s first spontaneous combustion.

Course Objectives

The course will: offer a survey of the American novel between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries; model methods of literary and cultural interpretation; help students to improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.

English 679HA: Honors Program Tutorial

Fall 2009 (#35270)
TTh 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
Parlin 105

Professor Coleman Hutchison
coleman.hutchison@mail.utexas.edu
Office: Calhoun 207
Office Phone: 512.471.8372
Office Hours: T 2-5 pm and by appointment

Professor Martin Kevorkian
mkevorkian@mail.utexas.edu
Office: Parlin 325
Office Phone: 512.471.8797
Office Hours: R 2-5 and by appointment

Course Description

According to the Honors Thesis Manual, a thesis is “a sustained examination of a central idea or question, developed in a professional and mature manner under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and a second reader.” That sounds easy enough, but how does one get there from here? This course offers something of a roadmap. Over the course of the term we will examine literary criticism from the “inside out” and hone skills essential to a successful honors thesis. Along the way, we will address a number of questions, both practical—How do I use the MLA Bibliography? What’s the difference between a footnote and an endnote?—and theoretical—What does it mean to make an argument about literature? Who has authority in an act of interpretation?

Course Objectives

This course will: first and foremost prepare students to write an honors thesis; interrogate methods of literary and cultural interpretation; consider what it means to make literary arguments and conduct literary research; help students to improve their research, critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

For more information, please download the full syllabus.