ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
SUMMER 2014
ENGL 506-61 (CRN 32730)MW 5:00-8:30pm
Old English Literature and Poetics of NostalgiaAnthony Adams
Is it possible to long for an era we have never experienced? Can modern readers ‘get’ an archaic masterpiece such as Beowulf? Can the Old English Seafarer, beloved by Pound, Tolkien, and Edwin Morgan, be successfully connected to the Mississippi blues? This course will attempt to answer these questions, as well as serve as an introduction to early medieval literature and culture, particularly Old English heroic literature; but we will also examine issues of reception, cultural history, and the use to which such literary and cultural artifacts have been put by contemporary poets and writers. The course will engage with memory studies, invented traditions, nostalgia, haunting, and translation theory. Texts will include Old English prose and poetry, John Gardner’s Grendel, Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, Seamus Heaney’s North, William Morris, Edwin Morgan, W. H. Auden, and Thom Gunn, and may include some medieval Irish, Welsh, and Icelandic texts. We will also consider cinematic and graphic adaptations and interpretations of ‘Dark Age’ culture. No knowledge of Old English required.This course has a 1.5 credit option available: ENGL 606-61 (CRN 32731).
FALL 2014
ENGL 500-61 (CRN 11780)W 6:00 – 8:40pm
Aims and MethodsAnthony Adams
This course will introduce graduate students to the most essential methods and standards for research in graduate literary studies. Students will be expected to demonstrably advance from amateur toward quasi-professional status during the scope of the course. Assignments will include historical and analytical bibliographies, state-of-the-field research presentations, digital projects, and appropriate editing projects. Students will be encouraged to pursue research in those fields they find themselves most motivated by; however, a range of literary and historical materials and methods will be covered, including manuscript culture, early printed books and book history, textual editing, the archive, the article, the review, and the critical assessment, production, and management of digital materials.
ENGL 511-61 (CRN 18938)T 6:00 – 8:40pm
Shakespeare and EthicsDanielle St. Hilaire
What do plays like King Lear and Othello have to tell us about justice? How might Titus Andronicus force us to rethink the value of family bonds? And what can we do with the fact that, though he announces from the beginning that he is “determined to prove a villain,” Richard III is so likeable? This class will consider Shakespeare’s plays in the context of larger ethical questions. Some critics have noted that Shakespeare’s work has tended to challenge both common and philosophical thinking about ethical categories. Over the course of the semester, we will take a closer look at some of these challenges, looking at some of the ethical debates that the plays have inspired among critics, and reading Shakespeare alongside several philosophical texts to show how the plays offer critiques of and alternatives to traditional ways of thinking about right action in the world. This course has a 1.5 credit option available: ENGL 611-61 (CRN 18939).
ENGL 549-01 (CRN 18832)TTH 4:30 – 5:45pm
Slave NarrativesKathy Glass
The slave narrative, one of the most important genres in the African American literary tradition, testifies to the dignity of the slave and the enduring power of the human spirit. Focusing on issues of race, gender, and sexuality, this course will examine the sociopolitical contexts in which African Americans constructed their own narratives, as well the formal features of their texts. Examining the genre from the eighteenth to the late nineteenthcentury, we will investigate its evolution, as well as its shifting spiritual, political, and economic concerns. Readings include theoretical essays, as well as primary texts by Frederick Douglass, Ellen and William Craft, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, Elizabeth Keckley, and many others. This course has a 1.5 credit option available: ENGL 649-01 (CRN 18833).
ENGL 554-61 (CRN 18936)TH 6:00 – 8:40pm
21st Century British FictionMagali Cornier Michael
This course will examine 21st Century British fiction’s engagement with issues such as living in an increasingly multi-racial/ethnic nation, the altered global position of Britain following the loss of empire, violence, class, and gender as well and the difficulties fiction faces in engaging such issues in the wake of the questioning of representation and language. Texts will be considered individually as well as in relation to their larger cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts. Some critical/theoretical reading will be required to help provide that context. The final selection of specific texts has not been finalized but will include texts such as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life: A Novel, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, and Zadie Smith’s NW, among others. This course has a 1.5 credit option available: ENGL 654-61 (CRN 18937).
ENGL 557-61 (CRN 18934)M 6:00 – 8:40pm
American Modernism and the Visual ArtsLinda Kinnahan
The first half of the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in forms of visual culture brought on by new ideas in art, new technologies, and a rise in mass media culture. Tapping into the interdisciplinary field of visual culture studies, this course will explore the relationship of literature and a range of visual forms emerging during the early to mid-century. Considering literature across genres, we will read writers like Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy in relation to modern art movements; writers like Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen in relation to visual representations of race; writers like John Dos Passos and H.D. in relation to modernist film; and writers like William Faulkner, Clifford Odets, and Genevieve Taggard in relation to documentary culture (especially emerging out of the 30s). We will consider the impact of changing technologies of vision, image production, and mass distribution as important contexts, ranging across levels of “high” and “popular” culture. Requirements will include active participation in discussion, probably 2-3 short essays, a reading journal, and a final project. This course has a 1.5 credit option available: ENGL 657-61 (CRN 18935).
ENGL 567-01 (CRN 18940)MW 4:30 – 5:45pm
Theories of CompositionJames Purdy
How can we understand and explain the processes and practices involved in writing? What ways of writing are most effective?
This course will explore theories of composition that try to answer these questions. We will discuss theories that seek to account for the complex and recursive nature of writing, new textual genres, and changing writing technologies. Together, we will consider the historical contexts in which these theories arose, how they respond to one another, and their educational and social implications. The course will be organized around roughly chronological units, from process theory to cultural-historic activity theory, that focus on particular theoretical perspectives and practical applications of them. Through discussion of course readings and writing projects, students will get a fuller picture of English studies by learning about one of its subfields, composition studies; learn—and enact—strategies for teaching yourself and others to write effectively; and become acquainted with the prevailing theoretical approaches that shape writing policies and pedagogies. This course has a 1.5 credit option available: ENGL 667-01 (CRN 18941).
ENGL 693-61 (CRN 17939)W 6:00 – 8:40pm
Subjectivity and Objectivity: Victorian Novels, Science, and Critical Perspectives
Anna Gibson
In this seminar we will explore the role of perspective – in particular the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity – in Victorian literature and in our own critical work. Our approach will be threefold. First and foremost, we will consider how and to what effect Victorian novels use narrative perspectives – omniscience, the first-person, multiple narrators – to experiment with ways of constructing human subjectivity. Secondly, alongside these novels we will look at how Victorian scientific and cultural theorists thought about the relationship between objective, detached knowledge and subjective, bodily sensation. Finally, we will reflect upon our own critical practices of detachment and attachment, distance and closeness, in literary study. We will explore theories of distance and totality offered by writers as different as Georg Lukács, Michel Foucault, and Franco Moretti, and we will consider alternatives to critical distance imagined by Michel de Certeau, affect theorists, and Victorian literary critics themselves. This seminar requires active engagement from all participants in our discussions, and you will build up a research project in stages.
Our reading will be selected from among the following potential texts and authors: novels such as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Charlotte Brontë’sVillette, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone; George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Bram Stoker’s Dracula; selections from John Stuart Mill’s political theory, George Henry Lewes’s physiological writing, E.S. Dallas’s literary theory, Matthew Arnold’s cultural theory, Charles Darwin’s natural history, and William James’s psychology; selections from histories of science and Victorian perspective such as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’sObjectivity and Jonathan Crary’sTechniques of the Observer; andcritical and theoretical readings by Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, and Nicholas Dam