LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

The title of our course has a three-fold meaning. It is a course that highlights the work of writing women as they explore their own lives. With a slight change of emphasis, it also becomes a course about the act of writing about the lives of women. And with a subtle shift in the order of the words, the course title becomes Women’s Writing Lives, a celebration of the endurance of women who write and engage with the world through language. This course will explore all three aspects of this title by engaging with biography and memoir, poetry and dramatic performance. 

In addition, this course begins with the assumption that being a “writer” is not limited to a professional pursuit but includes anyone who takes pen to hand and puts thoughts on paper.  Thus, our class will engage with the act of writing itself, in the form of short reflections, memories, and random musings as part of each class’s format.

Combining lecture and discussion, we will often work in groups that will then report to the larger class for general discussion. The course will also contain a writing component: each week, participants will be asked to compose a short “free-write” on a topic related to that week’s discussion, which volunteers may share with the class.

SCHEDULE

Week One: Childhood Memoirs

Week Two: Mothers and Daughters

Week Three: Women Alone and Together

Week Four: Growing: Older

Course Materials

Course reader packet (PDF format), provided by instructor

A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux (required text)

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Delia Fisher has taught various high school, community college, and university English courses over a long career as a teacher. She moved to Eugene in 1984 to teach in the University of Oregon departments of English and Multi-Cultural Affairs. Returning to graduate school, she completed her PhD at the University of Oregon in 1997, focusing on American literature and women writers.

In the years following, she and her husband (also a literature professor) taught at Auburn University in Alabama until 2001, and then at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. Delia taught a variety of classes at WSU and then was selected to coordinate the English Education Program, teaching and mentoring students who sought teacher certification. In 2010, she retired and came home to Eugene. Since 2018, Delia has taught literature courses through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Oregon.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

Naturalists, explorers, and scientists have a unique understanding and appreciation for the natural history of the American West. This course is a journey through this complex region, drawing on geography, geology, evolution, and ecology. We explore the history and inter-relationships of the physical landscape and the biological organisms that inhabit this unique area. While the course emphasizes broad principles, the examples given will be drawn from the Western landscape and the plants and animals that dwell there. This educational series enables students to appreciate the West better through follow-up field trips, vacations, and general sightseeing. However, it is crucial to acknowledge humans' significant impact on this region, with species extinctions, habitat loss, and climate change becoming increasingly prevalent. To that end, class participants may be inclined to work towards conserving these precious natural resources.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Jeff Hart, a California native, has studied and photographed nature throughout North America, South America, and Europe. His explorations have taken him backpacking in western mountains, creeping through wetlands of lush valleys, careening along windy coastal roads, photographing sunflowers, sunsets, and wildlife, and romping through rustic pastoral vistas. His curiosity finds him sifting among intellectual gems of philosophical thought, natural history, human relationship with the environment, and human nature. Jeff’s formal education includes B.A. (environmental biology) and M.A. (ethnobotany) degrees from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Harvard University. His extended education comes from his marvel of daily living, reading, and companionship with nature and people.

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

The idealistic, prophetic voices of essayist Ralph Emerson and poet Walt Whitman helped to push the growing materialistic culture of 19th century America toward the higher principles of reverence for nature, spirituality, and individual responsibility. Considered radical by many of their peers, and viewed even today as intellectual revolutionaries, these writers continue to urge us to rethink our assumptions in favor of more holistic, democratic relationships with each other and even with the environment. It is no exaggeration to call them founding figures of American philosophy and poetry. Although different in personality and style, they partner in their unswerving commitment to a profound faith in what they considered universal truths.

Our class will read these writers as spiritual soul-mates, exploring how philosophy (Emerson) and poetry (Whitman) comingle. Even though only sixteen years separate them, Emerson and Whitman form a father-son relationship; the child emulates as well as disturbs the parent, fostering growth and intellectual intimacy. We’ll tackle many of their romantic themes: perception, mind/body dualism, freedom, and the like. However, we’ll also investigate the "Transcendentalist" movement, a type of thinking that has roots both in American Puritanism and the Enlightenment. In addition, we’ll take time to reflect on each writer’s views on aging—an area of interest to many of us.

Our texts hold an embarrassment of riches, much more than we can intelligently consider in four weeks. In reading selectively, a sampling of these two influential voices of American history will generate an appetite for deeper banquets of ideas.

BOOKS

Required

Selected Essays of Emerson (Penguin Classics Edition), by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Introduction by Larzar Ziff.

Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition) (2nd Edition), by Walter Whitman, E. Sculley Bradley (Editor), Harold W. Blodgett (Editor), Paul Whitman.

Optional

Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Dover Thrift Editions). This is a facsimile of the very first edition of Leaves of Grass, the one that Whitman sent to Emerson.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Lou Caton has a PhD in literature from University of Oregon and has taught at the University of Oregon, Auburn, and Westfield State University, where he has professor emeritus status. He has published numerous articles and papers as well as two books, Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (a collection of edited essays with Emory Elliott, Oxford, 2002) and Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008)

LOCATION

UO Baker Downtown Center, Eugene

DESCRIPTION

We will explore three different ways of telling a story—the epic, comic and tragic. We will begin with the greatest epic poem English, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), a work which changed the way we see the world. We will look at the larger-than-life characterizations of God, Satan, Adam and Eve and the carefully constructed Renaissance cosmos of earth, heaven and hell that they live in. The celebrated comedy we will examine is Richard Sheridan’s brilliant The School for Scandal with its humorous characters Snake and Lady Sneerwell and the dueling brothers Joseph and Charles Surface. That the play served as one of the models for Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen played one of the characters) will come as no surprise, for it is also “light, bright and sparkling.” Our final work will be from the twentieth century master American short story writer Katherine Anne Porter. With imagery reminiscent of the King James Bible, “Noon Wine” brings what Lady Byrd Johnson saw as Greek myths governing the lives on a south Texas farm. We will look at the tragic marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, who eventually house the mysterious stranger, Mr. Helton, bringing them to undergo the outcome of his doomed past. In each narrative structure of epic, comic and tragic, we will discuss the identifying characteristics of each form and apply them to other works students have read.

In terms of pages, the reading is relatively light, but the content is both surprising and challenging, especially when it comes to the Miltonic free verse, which is so akin, in words to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

The course will be a balance of lecture and discussion, punctuated by clips from videos and by passages being read aloud for close analysis. Discussion questions, as a ballast to the class and the breakout groups, will be supplied for the works.

Books

John Milton, Paradise Lost (2011), Signet. Editors Edward Le Comte, Edward Cifelli.

Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal (2004), Penguin. Editor Eric Rump.

Katherine Anne Porter, “Noon Wine,” in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1979), Harcourt Brace.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Henry Alley is a Professor Emeritus of Literature and Writing Specialist at the University of Oregon's Honors College and is a winner of the Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching. He was an Associate Professor of Literature at the School of the Ozarks (1972-1975) and the University of Idaho (1975-1982) before arriving in Oregon. His publications include The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot, six novels, a short story collection, a handbook on teaching creative writing, and articles on the work of Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and E.M. Forster. He has an essay forthcoming on Tennessee Williams and D. H. Lawrence in The Mississippi Quarterly, as well as an article forthcoming in the MLA Approaches to Teaching the Odyssey.His shorter fiction, which has appeared since 1969, has been nominated for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes. He has taught in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Oregon since 2017.