Graduate of English Language and Literature
Fu Jen Catholic University

Curriculum: Spring 2006

Senior Thesis/4 credits

English Writing II/3 credits/Bro. Nichloas Koss

There is no description for this course.   Please feel free to contact the teacher if you have any questions.

The Bible as Literature/3 credits/Fr. Daniel Bauer

As its name implies, the course Bible as Literature will explore the rich spiritual text called The Bible as a single book in itself, containing two major divisions, the Old and the New Testaments. The course will not debate theological theories or controversial points of spiritual belief that are meaningful for Catholics, Protestants (various denominations such as Lutheranism, Methodism, the Baptist faith and so on) or Jews. Instead, the course will view the Bible as an interesting and at times inspiring collection of manuscripts that form their own logical whole as a story of salvation history for believers of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Students need not be spiritual believers similar to Catholics or other Christians to enjoy or learn from the course. The Bible as a literary work is our focus, not faith sharing or religious conversion.

To appreciate the Bible as literature, readers need an overall grasp of the movement of the text and its themes from its beginning in the Books of Genesis and Exodus in the Old Testament, all the way to the story of Jesus Christ (the gospels) and the closing letters of Paul, James and John and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. Members of the course will read selected portions of many of the individual “books” or sections of the Bible, such as Exodus, Genesis, the Psalms, the prophets, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes, and will focus on the New Testament in similar ways. In the New Testament, we will pay special attention to the way the three synoptic Gospels of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are different than the Gospel of John. We will read a variety of passages important in the literature of Paul, James, and John, and will view key scenes in the Book of Revelation.

At the present time, except for a copy of the English Bible, I have not decided on a textbook for the course. It is possible we will use The Bible As Literature (2nd edition), by John B. Gabel and Charles B. Wheeler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.) It is more likely that the course will use a workbook compiled from a number of books, including the work by Gabel and Wheeler. Background reading for the course will include chapters from books owned by the instructor, such as Interpreting the Parables (Craig L. Blomberg); The Death of the Messiah (Raymond E. Brown); How to Read the Bible (Steven L. McKenzie), and Thinking Biblically (Andre LaCocque an Paul Ricoeur, translated by David Pellauer).

Students in the course will be expected to participate actively in general class discussions and in 2 – 3 class presentations. Students will also write reflective journals every 3 – 4 weeks, and a final 15-20 page academic paper on a topic related to the Bible as literature.

Before the Chinese New Year break begins, students who wish to take the course will receive a reading list of the Bible passages we will use for class.

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Translation/3 credits/Fr. Daniel Bauer

The purpose of the course Seminar in Translation is to give students an opportunity to learn and practice skills useful in literary translation. The course more or less offers an 80 % class time focus on .translation itself, with the remaining 20% devoted to translation theory. Students can expect to translate up to two pages of literary work every week for use in class, mostly Chinese to English. Occasionally the movement of homework will be from English to Chinese, in which case we will expect classmates in the course to lead seminar discussion on the use of language and so on.

The instructor will provide a workbook with several articles on translation theory, at least one sample translation for class use, and a number of passages taken from a variety of authors. From the workbook, students can choose the passages they prefer to translate for class. Students may choose their own material for translation for one of the 10 minute presentations.

The instructor will correct English language homework by the use of a code, after which students will revise all manuscripts. The course offers a reasonable amount of personal coaching in the third period, depending on class size. Students are expected to participate actively in class, to make approximately 6 – 7 10 minute presentations based on their homework (having provided Xeroxed copies earlier for classmates), and to complete a translation project of 15 pages, which includes a section that discusses the process of translation and various insights the student draws from the experience of being a translator. The translation project may be from English into Chinese, but the paper and analysis must be in English.

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As an intellectual discipline as well as a political and theoretical intervention in contemporary literary and cultural studies, postcolonial studies has been firmly established in Anglo-American academic institutions, and more so in departments of English. However, “the postcolonial” as a key term in postcolonial studies has remained complex and might continue to evolve conceptually with the expanding concerns of the practitioners in the field. The complexity of “the postcolonial” arises from issues such as whether the umbrella terms ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ could be treated as two binary and chronologically distinct periods when we are dealing with heterogeneous historicities of colonization and decolonization; whether politically ex-colonized African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, Sri Lanka and the USA are now all equally postcolonial. In short, what is postcolonial? Besides, in an age which is now broadly fashioned as one of globalization, shouldn’t we say goodbye to postcolonialism and turn to focus on globalism?

In this course, we will venture to address the aforementioned fundamental issues. We will investigate a moderate number of recent critical essays and discuss what their authors mean or assume when they use the term “postcolonial” among other closely related concepts such as “colonial,” “anti-colonial,” “neo-colonial,” and “decolonization.” Critics whose works might be considered in this investigation include Aijaz Ahmad, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Deepika Bahri, Stuart Hall, Peter Hulme, Anne McClintock, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, Ella Shohat, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, etc. We will argue over the relevance of the concept of the postcolonial in our time and straighten out a little its conceptual complexity in juxtaposition with the concepts of globalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. We will then examine the idea of the postcolonial—whatever it turns out to be after a rigorous rethinking—in terms of the texts chosen for class discussion which will probably include those by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Earl Lovelace, Harold Pinter, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Benita Parry, etc.

Students taking this course will present in class weekly response papers (1-2 pages) on assigned readings and final research project proposals (5 pages each, with an annotated bibliography) for discussion.

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Independent Studies/3 credits/Dr. Raphael Schulte