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

We begin by studying the growing-up experiences of two writers of very different backgrounds, selections from Annie Dillard’s memoir, An American Childhood, and Native American writer Zitkala Sa’s autobiography, American Indian Stories. These two disparate accounts offer us the opportunity to ask what childhood means in different cultures, and to look at how the lives of others may intersect with our own.

Week Two: Mothers and Daughters

Here, we will explore that important relationship and its ramifications with a reading of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s account of her mother’s life, A Woman’s Story, and its effect on Ernaux’s choices. We may find that Ernaux’s biography is also her own autobiographical account. In addition to this short biography, we’ll read poetry that reflects on the often loving, sometimes fraught relationships between mothers and their daughters.

Week Three: Women Alone and Together

We’ll read excerpts from a variety of women writers and poets who have chosen solitude over partnership and others who have powerful relationships with other women. Excerpts from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude and Sue Hubble’s A Country Year will offer a glimpse of women who have chosen, or have been forced to choose, a life that moves in its own orbit. And we’ll look at ways that women have joined together to claim autonomy and power, including poetry and prose by Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver, plus a portion of Ntozake Shange’s stage performance of “For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.”

Week Four: Growing: Older

We explore a topic that is on the minds of many of us as we age. How does one navigate the unknown territory of ageing? How does that personal experience overlap and affect the lives of others? Readings will include selections from John Leland’s interviews with two women over ninety in his book Happiness is A Choice You Make, as they discuss frankly the challenges and yes, joys, of old age. In addition, we’ll read an essay by Caroline Heilbrun, “On Mortality,” in The Last Gift of Time:  Life Beyond Sixty, and a selection of poems—some humorous, some grieving—on the topic of personal ageing and the ageing of loved-ones.

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

TBD

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.