English 490: Senior Seminar
Masculinity in Literature & Culture
Fall 2014 | Dr. Terry Lee McMurran 307 MW 4-5:15
Office: McMurran 201b | Office Hours: T Th 1:30-2:30, W 2-3
757-594-7686

tlee@cnu.edu

  This is the capstone class for the English Major. As such, the class demands initiative for sustained critical reading and research, as well as incisive, analytical writing. Your work must impress to succeed and dazzle to excel.

   Your critical thinking about masculinity begins now. We will use class to workshop your ideas and questions, and that is the time to raise questions, share problems and successes. This is a seminar, and you are expected to share your thoughts and research with the class actively, as a matter of course.

   Be aware that the Senior Seminar Paper is a work-in-progress from the first day of class. Have an opinion. Research. Finely tune an informed opinion. Write, write, write to find that elusive fellow, the focused statement of thesis. Again, a process that develops throughout the semester. The bar for success is relatively high: a paper with a diffuse thesis and weak support (e.g., much summary, little analysis) will not succeed.

 

Goals of the class

• To research and develop one's own critical interpretation and analysis of fiction, poetry, or nonfiction of a literary quality and/or analysis of trends in the culture, examining the work and/or culture from a position highly informed by contemporary literary theory or theoretical approaches from other scholarly fields, all with an emphasis on masculinity.

 

• To draft and refine a scholarly paper of 20-25 pages (5,000-6,250 words) that uses secondary research to help persuasively argue, evaluate and/or analyze primary texts in support of your own original thesis concerning masculinity.

 

 

Assignments

8/25 — Masculinity ... Masculinities

Manhood in America, Kimmel—"Preface" and "Introduction"

• "The Myth of Male Decline," New York Times, Stephanie Coontz

 

Suggested reading:

Kilmartin on "Frameworks for Understanding Men" in The Masculine Self

 

8/27

Manhood in America, Kimmel, Chapters 1 and 2

• "Masters of Their Domain: Seinfeld and the Discipline of Mediated Men's Sexual Economy," C. Wesley Buerkle (reserve)

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9/1 — Obeying the Cultural Father

Hamlet (brush up on the play: re-read it or see a good production/film)

Changing Fictions of Masculinity, Preface & chapt. 3 (on reserve)

 

9/3

• "The Things They Carried," O'Brien (Vintage Stories)

• "Introduction" in Chivalry to Terrorism: War & the Changing Nature of Masculinity, Leo Braudy ( book is on reserve)

 

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9/8 — Self-destructive Masculinity

Jarhead, Anthony Swofford (read most of the book)

 

9/10

Jarhead, (finish the book)

Chivalry to Terrorism,Braudy, Chapters 1-4 (reserve)

• "Second Thoughts on Gays in the Military," Gen. John Shalikashvili (Ret.)

• "from Homeric Hymn to Ares" (Rag & Bone 83)

• "The War Prayer," Mark Twain (Rag & Bone 215)

 

Suggested reading:

Chivalry to Terrorism, Braudy, Chapts. 5-8 (29-55) (reserve)

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9/15

Changing Fictions, chapt. 1 (on Beowulf) (reserve)

• "All the Way in Flagstaff" (Vintage Stories)

 

Suggested reading:

Beowulf  (a story summary)

 

9/17 — Black Masculinity

 Etheridge Knight

• "The Idea of Ancestry" (44)

• "The Bones of My Father" (125)

•  "On the Yard" (210)

• "Feeling Fucked Up" (344)

ª "Welcome Back, Mr. Knight: Love of My Life" (452)

• "Re/constructing Black masculinity in prison" M. Nandi.

 

Suggested viewing:

• "I Am A Man: Black Masculinity in America (DVD, 1998) (reserve)

• "Malcolm X" (VHS, 1992; DVD, 2000)

 

•Suggested reading:

We Real Cool, bell hooks

Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity & Ideality in African-American Men's Literature and Culture, Maurice Wallace (scholarly essays/book chapters)

Makes Me Wanna Holler, Nathan McCall (autobiography about growing up in Hampton, Va.)

Reaching Up for Manhood, Geoffrey Canada (Boys are socialized to ignore pain and to risk-taking behaviors and to practices of "consuming" masculinity)

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9/22

Poems in Rag & Bone...

Amiri Baraka

• "A Poem Some People will Have to Understand" (211)

Gwendolyn Brooks

• "We Real Cool" (204)

Claude McKay

• "The White City" (309)

Langston Hughes

• "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (101)

• "Necessity" (452)

• "Harlem" (310)

• "No More Auction Block," Spiritual (107) (Rag & Bone)

•He Is a "Bad Mother*S%@!#": Shaft and Contemporary Black Masculinity, Matthew Henry; African American Review, Vol. 38, 2004, Spring.

 

9/24—Gay Masculinity
• "Queer Musings on Masculinity & History," S. Maynard. Available on Proquest Online.

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9/29

"Comedy as Correction: Humor as Perspective by Incongruity on Will & Grace and Queer As Folk," Rachel Silverman in Sexuality & Culture (2013) 17: 260-274. (reserve and/or Iliad Interlibrary loan)

 

10/1 — Masculinity, Women & Work

The Hearts of Men, Ehrenreich (read about half)

Manhood in America, Kimmel, Chapt. 6, "Muscles, Money, & the M-F Test"

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10/6

The Hearts of Men (finish)

Manhood in America, Kimmel, Chapt. 5, "A Room of His Own: Socializing the New Man"

• "Men Not Working, And Not Wanting Just Any Job," Louis Uchitelle & David Leonhardt

• "Men at Work? Not These Men," NYTimes

• "Coming to Terms with the Men on the Corner," NYTimes, Fernanda Santos

 

Suggested reading:

• "In Hiding and on Display," from The Male Body, Bordo (reserve)

• "Who is the Perfect Man?" from Houdini, Tarzan & the Perfect Man, Kasson (reserve)

• "'Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in your Masculinity,'" Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Constructing Masculinity, eds. Berger, Wallis, Watson (reserve)

• "Performance Anxiety: Mehinaku," Gillmore, chapter in Manhood in the Making (in library stacks)

 

College Masculinity

10/8

Guyland: : "Welcome to Guyland" & "What's the Rush?" 1-43;  "Just Guys" 265-289

 

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10/13

Spring break

Suggested reading:

• "Oui" & "Earnest Money," Michael Dorris in Working Men (reserve)

 

10/15

Guyland: "Boys and Their Toys: Guyland's Media" 144-168

• "Girls in Guyland" 242-264

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10/20

Long Seminar Paper Proposal due

On the Brink & Hope

• "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Carver

• "Gazebo," Carver

• "Cathedral," Carver (in Vintage Short Stories)

• "After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps," Galway Kinnell (Rag & Bone 59)

• "Men and Birth: The Unexplainable," Haki R. Madhubuti (Rag & Bone 46)

• "Dance Russe," William Carlos Williams (Rag & Bone 6)

 

Suggested reading:

The Symposium, Plato

• "Mr. Coffee & Mr. Fixit," Carver

• "Why Don't You Dance," Carver

• "Killings," Andre Dubus, available in a Dubus short story collection in library

 

10/22

•Dr. Deborah Vick, a psychologist at the Hampton VA Medical Center

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10/27

• class does not meet: conferences, research & writing

 

10/29

• class does not meet: conferences, research & writing

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11/3

• class does not meet: conferences, research & writing

 

11/5

• class does not meet: conferences, research & writing

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11/10

Annotated bibliography due my office at 4 p.m.

 

11/12

• class does not meet: conferences, research & writing

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11/17

 • class does not meet: conferences, research & writing

 

11/19

Rough draft due in my office at 4 p.m.

 class does not meet

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11/24

• Class meets: conferences—sign up

 

11/26

Thanksgiving break

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12/1

Class meets: conferences—sign up

 

12/3

• class does not meet: writing & revision

 

12/5, Friday

Final Seminar Paper due at 5 p.m. in my office.