Zoran Kuzmanovich
Professor of English; Editor, Nabokov Studies
560 Pine Road PO Box 1377 Davidson , NC 28036
(Office: 704 892-2237); (Fax: 704 892 2005 ) ; (Home: 704 892 9575)
ZoKuzmanovich@davidson.edu
These are some of the
courses Dr. K. has taught:
|
Course: |
|
|
Subversive Pleasures |
|
|
Requirements: Curiosity and Good Memory |
|
|
“On the
surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth” Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Course: |
|
|
|
Joyce/Nabokov
Seminar |
|
Requirements: Imagination, Discipline, Persistence, Ten Journals, One Class Presentation, One 20-page paper; A Sense of Humor, High Threshold of Sensitivity, Insomnia |
|
|
This course includes the infamous non-stop twenty-six hour reading of Ulysses, Joyce's enormously long and wickedly funny novel. At the urging of the drop-in crowd, the next time we do it, there will be a fifteen-minute shower break per participant. |
|
|
Course |
|
|
|
The Mystery and Romance of the West |
|
Designed primarily for English majors who prefer to ground or extend their knowledge of American literature through thematic, theoretical, and genre-oriented courses rather than surveys. This course may be taken instead of English 280.
|
|
|
This is not a course on the Western. It is a course that concentrates on the West as place, space, idea, and feeling in American literature. Variously conceived as wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men, a source of immense wealth for the intrepid and the lucky, a site teeming with souls in need of saving, a place of rest for the persecuted, the almost metaphysical realm of USA's Manifest Destiny and the rapacious engine of that destiny, the West, for all its conflicts, is still a millennial landscape of imagination, still a promise of new physical and spiritual horizons. The task of this course is to unravel from the larger cultural and historical context the streams of verbal and visual rhetoric by which the West sparked and still fuels the dreams of such mystery and romance. |
|
|
|
|
Course |
|
|
|
Literary
Criticism |
|
Horror stories notwithstanding, students who do really well in this class recover sufficiently to go on and attend Graduate School. |
|
|
Description: A 2000-year jog over Western philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, and power lines. |
|
|
Course |
|
|
|
Literature and The Visual Arts |
|
This is not a course for the fainthearted literalist. It requires some familiarity with art as well as the prerequisite, English 293. |
|
|
The Tall Figures of Giacometti We move by means of our mud
bumps. The products of excruciating purges If we exude a stench it is petrified
sainthood. solid like anvils. Ugly as truth is ugly and shudder without motion that dart between our bodies May Swenson |
|
|
Course |
|
|
|
Film as a Narrative Art |
|
We'll be examining the relations among the course title's three terms: film (visual language of mise-en-scene, camera work, editing, plus sound), narrative (as verbal or visual languages of story and discourse), and art (process of adaptation, expression of vision, representation of space and time, historical object, object of criticism, object of beauty, etc.). I hope that our examination of those relations may suggest some reasons for the curious power of visual and literary images to console and chastise us, hurt us and heal us, move us to tears, dreams, eloquence, action, teach us self-evasion or self-confrontation. |
|
|
"The only English course with two labs." |
|
|
Course |
|
|
|
American Literature to 1870 |
|
Historical survey treating the development of American letters from early Puritanism through Dickinson. (In other words it covers everything from the Puritans to the Civil War until you think to yourself : "If I can just get past the Puritans, the Civil War won't be so bad") |
|
|
Such a thematic
focus generates questions which can serve as the general outline of this
course: (1) "What is American literature and what special problems does
it present for its readers?" (2) "What attitudes to space and time
does being an American entail?" (3) "What problems and conflicts
confront American literary heroes and heroines?" (4) "What is
heroic about American literary heroes and heroines in the way they react to
those conflicts?" (5) "How if at all have these definitions and
conflicts changed over the historical period we are covering in this
course?" (6) "What are the contingencies that define the relations
between American writers and the frameworks (geographical, cultural,
economic, etc.) in which they functioned?" and, finally, (7) "Have
the modes of imagination our writers employed and the images they have
produced been adequate to the American experience?" |
|
|
Course |
|
|
|
Literary Analysis |
|
A Gate to the Real Depths of the English Dept. |
|
|
Designed for majors. Emphasizes theoretical approaches and critical strategies for the written analysis of poetry, fiction, drama/film. Writing intensive. Required for the major. |
|
|
Course |
English 372 |
|
|
British Fiction from Dickens to the Present |
|
Affectionately known as the "Monster Books Course"--just Middlemarch is well nigh 1000 pages. |
|
|
It would probably work better as a course called "Nineteenth Century Words and Twentieth Century Images"that would study the cinematic interpretations of Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, etc. and try to answer the question: How (if at all) do movies made from these novels evade being bubblegum for the brain? |
|
|
|
|
|
Course |
|
|
|
English Composition |
|
Instruction in expository writing and the research paper.. |
|
|
That "that" that that that-lover uttered should have been a "which." |
|
|
Course: |
English 491 |
|
|
Contemporary Literary Theories |
|
This course produces high anxiety of the right kind. |
|
|
A critical look at contemporary critical theories that have virtually transformed the way we read and teach literature. Its questions include those about the coherencies we find or think we find in ourselves and our culture. |
|
|
Course |
|
|
Short Fiction |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
