Spring 2012 Graduate English Course Descriptions
ENGL E550/LING E521 Advanced English Grammar
Disterheft
TTh 5:30-6:45
(crosslisted LING E521)
Advanced English Grammar is a course designed to enhance students’ abilities in analyzing the
structure of spoken and written English. Emphasis is placed on restrictions on word formation and
sentence structure, and the relations between sentence structure and meaning. Both Standard
American English and its regional and social varieties will be used in the examination of how intended
meaning is conveyed through sentence structure. Advanced English Grammar is geared towards the
needs of present and future teachers of English. It will provide students with both the skills necessary
to explain why English works the way it works, and opportunities to apply those skills into the practical
analysis of the English language.
ENGL 566S
Split Screens: Hollywood in the ‘50s & ‘60s
Courtney
TTh 12:30-1:45
(Screenings – Tuesdays 7:30-9:30)
This course examines two significant decades of rupture and change, at the movies and in American
culture at large. While popular U.S. mythologies like to imagine the 1950s simply as the years of
“Father Knows Best” and white suburban splendor, even popular Hollywood texts reveal a more
unstable and contested cultural landscape—especially with regards to matters of race, gender, and
sexuality. The 1960s, too, were more of a mixed cultural bag than popular memory often would have
it. Provocative combinations of change and convention are particularly evident in Hollywood cinema in
these decades, registered by the eruption of contemporary conflicts in plots and characters, but also
bysubtle and dramatic transformations of “classical Hollywood” style itself. This course considers
ruptures of both kinds, social and aesthetic, and particularly how they interact in this period of
American cinema. What, for example, does the disruption of conventional Hollywood codes allow to be
said, and not said, about shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality? What can we learn about the
ongoing significance of the Civil Rights Era, its “successes” and its “failures,” by interrogating popular
culture’s own attempts to imagine racial progress? And how might the analysis of popular fantasies of
mid-20th century life and change help us understand our own 21st century investments in selectively
remembering and forgetting the past? Questions like these will guide our readings, screenings, and
discussions.
ENGL 601
Seminar in Verse Composition
Madden
M
5:30-8:15
This course in the writing of poetry will be structured as a weekly writing workshop, with readings in
contemporary poetry. We will read 6-8 books of poetry (to be selected). Grades will be based on a
portfolio of creative work written during the semester, short response papers on readings, and
participation (including electronic and peer reviews). Our goals for this course will be: to explore
different strategies, prompts, and sources for writing; to develop a self-awareness of technique, style,
and voice; to demonstrate an awareness of some contemporary poetry; to discuss elements of poetry
writing and publishing; and in the process of the workshop, to gain some understanding of how to
teach creative writing. By the end of the course, students should be able to discuss poetic strategies
and practices in relation to their own work; to demonstrate in conversation some sense of
contemporary poetry; to write an effective peer review of a colleague. Most importantly, by the end
of this class students will have written and revised a substantial collection of poems and drafts.
ENGL 602
Fiction Workshop: Short Story
Blackwell
Th
5:30-8:00
This is an intensive workshop in the art and craft of the literary short story or novel chapter. Students
will spend the majority of their time writing original fiction and analyzing the fiction submitted by other
workshop members. Our discussion will focus on each writer’s aesthetic decisions and the elements of
fiction, including language and motif as well as plot, character, and temporal structure. We will also
give some general consideration to narrative—its definitions, limits, variations, and possible futures.
Prerequisite: admission to the MFA program in fiction.
ENGL 701B-1 Teaching of Literature in College
ENGL 701B-2
Gehrke/Hawk MW 10:45-12:00
MW 12:20-1:35
ENGL 702
Gwara
Old English
TTh
12:30-1:45
ENGL 711
Shakespeare I: The Comedies & Histories
Levine
MW 2:30-3:45
This course examines Shakespeare’s comedies and history plays in conjunction with recent theoretical
and critical work. We’ll look closely at seven or eight plays—to include A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Twelfth Night—taking up questions of
politics, social order, family and gender relations, theatricality, and performance. Each week we’ll also
look closely at a related critical or theoretical essay. Assignments will include short analytical responses
to critical essays, a close reading paper (6 pages), a longer critical paper (approximately 12-15 pages), a
final exam, and research in primary materials using Early English Books Online (EEBO).
ENGL 723
English Poetry of the Romantic Period
Feldman
TTh 2:00-3:15
The British Romantic poets lived and wrote during a period of rapid social change and violent political
upheaval. We will examine some of the most innovative poetic works written within this context—
works conceived in revolutionary terms, which sought both personal and political transformation. In
so doing, we will attempt to come to terms with the concept of “Romanticism” as redefined within an
expanded canon. Poets include William Blake, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary
Robinson, John Keats, Mary Tighe, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth, Helen Maria
Williams, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, and others.
ENGL 734
Modern Literary Theory
Sheehi
M
2:30-5:00
(crosslisted CPLT 702)
This course discusses the development of modern literary theory through three major, inter-related
prisms: Marxism, psychoanalysis and structural and post-structural semiotics. While the class
admittedly does great disservice to complimentary and competing cultural and literary theories (such
as gender theory, queer theory, continental philosophy, etc.), the focus on three major trends and
development in modern literary theory allow us to touch on a multitude of topics and theories
endemic to modernity and post-modernity. In this regard, we will sacrifice depth for breadth. The
course will read books or extensive selections from thinkers starting with Marx, De Saussure and Freud
ending with Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak, all the while critically reflecting how these works speak to
cultural and literary production. Students will write a 15 page final paper, be responsible for bi-weekly
reading responses and a class presentation of the week’s reading.
ENGL 738C
20th Century U.S. Women Writers
Keyser
MW 12:20-1:35
(crosslisted WGST 738C)
This course will provide graduate students an introduction to literature by 20th century American
women writers in fiction and poetry. We will examine the formal strategies modern American women
writers employ to represent femininity within, through, and against community. These writers vex the
relationships between the sexes and between women. They also pose probing questions about the
place of women in their homes, families, communities, professions, nations, and global contexts.
Through critical articles and theoretical readings linked to the assigned texts, this seminar will also
provide an introduction to feminist literary criticism. Assignments will include weekly response papers
and a final 15-20 page seminar paper.
ENGL 742
American Colonial & Federal Lit.
Shields
TTh
9:30-10:45
ENGL 745
American Realism & Naturalism
Davis
TTh 12:30-1:45
Classic Texts, Fresh Takes
Probably the two most celebrated movements in American literary history ("The American
Renaissance" and Modernism) bracket the period we will study in this class. Dating roughly from the
end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I, our period represents a time of literary
experimentation and social engagement. Known as realists and naturalists, the writers of this period
believed literature should reflect the varieties of American life. This course aims to recall that variety
and to examine our authors´ individual and collaborative struggles to come to terms with it. Writers
studied include Davis, Howells, James, Twain, Crane, Norris, Jewett, Freeman, Gilman, Chopin, Dreiser,
Wharton, Chesnutt, and Stein. Assignments include three short papers and either an article-length final
paper or a shorter final paper along with a mock comprehensive exam.
ENGL 753
The American Novel Since World War II
Cowart
MW 10:45-12:00
Students will be asked to read (and write a short report on) a relevant critical book of their own
choosing. In addition, they will be asked to write three short papers and read fourteen contemporary
fictions, augmented with optional readings in theory. Though we will proceed at a rate of one novel a
week, we’ll alternate the heftier ones (Powers, McCarthy, Eugenides) with quicker reads (Pynchon,
Gardner, Barthelme, Nabokov). Books go into and out of print--I welcome suggestions for books to
include. Such suggestions can often be incorporated when problems develop with book orders.
Updike, Rabbit Run
Gardner, Grendel
Palahniuk, Choke
DeLillo, Point Omega or White Noise
Powers, The Gold Bug Variations
Lee, Chang-rae, Native Speaker
Naylor, Mama Day
SEMESTER GRADE:
10% Daily writing
10% Review/precis (of a book on postmodernism)
60% Three papers
20% Final exam
Smiley, A Thousand Acres
Patchett, Ann, Bel Canto
Barthelme, The Dead Father
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Nabokov, Pnin
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
ENGL 765
Advanced Film Study: Cinema & the Archives
Cooper
T
2:30-5:00
(meets with HIST 700F)
Motion pictures are archival objects as well a technology for archiving. This coincidence has something
to teach us about archives themselves as well as about cinema and the histories in which it has
participated. This seminar will ask, first, how, and to what ends, is knowledge produced by means of an
archive? We will consider some of the answers philosophers, historians, and film scholars have given to
that question. We will next ask about cinema’s participation in the history of the archives. To what
projects of archiving has cinema seemed useful? When, how, and with what effects did archiving
movies (along with associated documents and objects) become a project in which museums, libraries,
and corporations invested resources? To what extent are definitions of cinema as art, as politics, as a
business, as news, etc. archive-depedent? The final units of the class will be devoted to the possibilities
for research afforded by two world-class archives in our own backyard: the Irvin Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections Department and the Moving Image Research Collections. Students will
write seminar papers drawing on the resources of one or both. Projects might engage the archives in
the investigation of particular topics in cinema history. Alternatively, they might provide examples for
theoretical and/or historical considerations of archiving as a practice.
ENGL 776
Intro Bibliography & Textual Studies
Scott
T
9:30-12:15
(crosslisted SLIS 716)
The way that literary (and other) texts are migrated between different formats or are replicated within
a single format raises significant research and interpretative issues. Every reformatting changes a text,
with revisions, errors, uncategorizable variants, and the recoding of the text’s materiality. Very similar
issues arise for the reformatting or replication of texts from manuscript or typescript or digital file to
print, from one printed edition to another, and from print to some variety of digitized text.
This course, alongside a basic survey of the history of the printed book, explores two modes by which
researchers investigate these issues: it begins with (1) the analysis and interpretation of textual
variance [a.k.a. theories and practices for scholarly editing], and then explores (2) the study of a book
or other text through close examination of the physical format of variant copies [a.k.a descriptive and
analytical bibliography].
The course meets in Hollings Library, so that participants can handle items from a variety of historic
periods, both as originally experienced by their first readers and as subsequently reformatted. Over
the past two hundred years, the library’s Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections has
acquired significant materials from most periods of the print era, ranging from fifteenth-century
incunabula and Renaissance maps to world-class collections of John Milton, Robert Burns, Charles
Darwin, Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.
For students in English, this course provides a broad overview of book history and an understanding of
the methods and approaches through which scholars now research the material text. For SLIS students,
it provides an introduction to older materials and to the particular issues they raise for librarians and
library users, in the context of increasing availability of digital surrogates. In addition to regular
attendance, and reading of assigned material, the course requires: (1) a series of short practical
exercises (some in class) involving textual comparison, bibliographical description, or the interpretation
of bibliographical descriptions from standard sources (25%); (2 and 3) two short exams based directly
on material covered in class, one exam on textual editing and using scholarly editions, the other on
interpreting bibliographical descriptions from differing descriptive traditions (25%, 25%); (4) a casestudy, either bibliographical or editorial, on a book or short text chosen by the student after discussion
with the instructor (25%, with possible additional weighting).
ENGL 791
Intro to Research on Written Composition
ENGL 793
Rhet Theory & Practice, Medieval to Modern
(crosslisted SPCH 793)
Hawk
T
5:30-8:15
Ercolini
Th
6:00-8:30
ENGL 800A The Virtues of Gender in Late Medieval Lit.
Crocker
W
5:30-8:15
This course will focus on writings from the fifteenth-century—not only Lydgate and Hoccleve, but also
saints’ lives, spiritual guides, mystery plays, travel narratives, and conduct books—to explore gender’s
social and moral construction in late medieval literature. Does gender difference gain power from
moral categories, especially if we see it as “socially constructed”? How does the late medieval Church
relate to the moral or social production of gender? For instance: although Lydgate and Hoccleve have
long been associated with the political interests of the Lancastrian court (Henry V and VI in particular),
their poetry explicitly depends on notions of moral goodness mined from a religious register. How are
“secular” and “sacred” notions of goodness combined in the fifteenth century (especially in light of the
Lollard heresy), and how do these ideals inflect genders? While focusing on the “hottest” era in
medieval literary studies (the fifteenth century!), we will also move discussions of gender beyond any
simple identification of roles or expectations according to a discrete divide between religious or secular
cultures. Assignments will include weekly response papers (to the primary texts or the secondary and
theoretical writings we will discuss) and a final 15-20 page seminar paper.
ENGL 825J
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Rice
W
2:30-5:00
This course will focus almost entirely on a close reading of James Joyce’s masterwork, Ulysses,
beginning with a quick overview of his earlier works of fiction, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, in the first week’s class. We will be using the Hans Walter Gabler edition of Ulysses
(Random House 1984, 1986), which has line numbering throughout; even if you already own another
edition of Ulysses, you should buy this one. I will also ask the bookstores to stock Stuart Gilbert’s
classic introduction to the book, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ and have the library place on reserve a few
copies of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated and Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book—a helpful
running explication, keyed to the Gabler and a few other editions.
I will also schedule for a collectively convenient evening 4 screenings: (1) the 1982 centennial
documentary, (2) Joseph Strick’s 1968 film adaptation of Ulysses, (3) Nora (2001), and (4) Fianoula
Flannagan’s James Joyce’s Women (1983). Should there be sufficient interest and demand, we may also
watch the second film adaptation, Bloom (2004). Requirements:
1. Course paper (c. 10-15 pp.), suitable for conference presentation, due at the end of the term.
2. Review essay on major work of Ulysses criticism.
3. Active participation in class discussion and on a course discussion board (Blackboard).
ENGL 830N Foucault and Gender Theory
Guo
T
5:00-7:30
(meets with CPLT 880 and WGST 796N)
This course focuses on Michel Foucault’s impact on contemporary gender theory. We start with several
key works by Foucault, i.e. the first volume of The History of Madness, Discipline and Punish, and,
importantly, the first volume of The History of Sexuality, with emphasis on a number of questions –
subject, subjectivity, subjectification/subjection, power, life, biopower, the body, etc. – that are also
critical in the study of women, gender, and sexuality. We then turn to some of the most influential
works of gender theory, seeking to explore first, the role of Foucault’s work in the development of
contemporary gender theory; second, gender theorists’ responses to Foucault; and third, new
directions after Foucault
ENGL 840E
Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem
Adams
M
2:30-5:00
Dubbed “Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem” by the novelist Charles Waddell Chesnutt, the period from the Civil
War up through WWI was a time of political, economic, and social transition for black Americans and
U.S. race relations. It was also an enormously active period for black writers, performers, artists,
organizers, and intellectuals. We will read and look at examples of work from all of these groups and a
few others. Authors will probably include Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Pauline Hopkins,
W.E.B. Du Bois, Frances Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Albion Tourgée, Mark
Twain, Sutton Griggs, and Anna Julia Cooper. Among the issues and historical contexts we will consider
are the following: black citizenship, black responses to U.S. imperialism and domestic racial violence,
the expansion of the black press, the black women’s club movement, black historiography, black racial
self-definition, and black racial theorization. In conjunction with our work on this period of African
American literary and cultural production, we will read theory on racial formation, black cultural identity,
and global blackness
12/8/11