MA American Literature
2016-17
HANDBOOK
MA in American Literature
2016-17
The MA in American Literature is a one-year postgraduate degree, which focuses on
the literature of the United States of America. The aim of the MA is to enable students
to engage with contemporary critical debates about the interpretation and
contextualisation of American literature.
The MA includes a module on Research Methods in which the skills required
for postgraduate study will be addressed in detail. Modules 2-5 offer seminar-style
classes, and students may be expected to present papers to the class and participate in
discussions. In addition, students are required to develop an independent research
project (5,000-word essay) for each module. These elements of the modules provide a
framework of structured study in which students define and develop their areas of
interest, and learn and apply the conceptual and methodological skills necessary for
postgraduate study.
Students will undertake a programme of five taught modules (10 credits each)
and one research project (40-credit dissertation):
! Module 1: Research Methods is a series of lectures and workshops, and is
assessed by a bibliography assignment and end-of-semester examination. This
is a core requirement for all new postgraduate students in the School.
! Modules 2, 3, 4 and 5 will be assessed by essays (5,000 words in each case).
! Module 6: students develop a research project and write a dissertation on a
special topic of their own choice (subject to the agreement of the MA Coordinator), and under the supervision of a member of the supervisory panel
(one supervisor per student).
! The average of the five grades for Modules 1-5 will account for 50 of the 90
credits required.
! The grade for the dissertation (15,000-20,000 words) will account for 40 of the
90 credits required.
!
IMPORTANT NOTICE: “Required Reading”:
" All “Required Reading” should be available in the Campus Bookshop in UCD.
" Students should seek the permission of individual module conveners if they
wish to purchase/make use of editions other than those listed for the modules.
GUEST LECTURES / RESEARCH SEMINARS / CONFERENCES:
" During the year, we will seek to arrange additional classes led by guest
lecturers/seminar leaders. These will not be offered for credit.
" The UCD School of English, Drama and Film schedules weekly research
seminars on a broad range of topics (Wednesdays, 4pm-6pm in J208).
" Students are invited to become members the Irish Association for American
Studies. The IAAS organises conferences, sponsors an essay prize,
offers support for travel to conferences, and publishes an online
journal.
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
SCHEDULE FOR MODULES
MA in American Literature: Introduction
Wednesday 14th September 2016
Room J207 (4pm)
Modules (Semester One)
Module 1: Literary Research Methods (ENG40760)
Module 1 begins:
Thursday 22nd September Room A105 (12noon-2pm)
Module 1 ends:
Thursday 24th November
Bibliography assignment: Thursday 10th November by 12pm
(Dr Nerys Williams’s postbox and by email attachment)
End-of-semester Examination: 1st December, 2016.
Module 2: American Theatre: Structure and Strategies (ENG 40900)
(includes Clinton students)
Module 2 begins:
Reading Week:
Module 2 ends:
Essay due:
Tuesday 4th October
Room J207 (4pm to 6pm)
31st Oct-4th November
Tuesday 22nd November
Friday 9th December by 12pm*
Module 3: American Lyric: Document and Memoir (ENG41840)
Module 3 begins:
Reading Week:
Module 3 ends:
Essay due:
Thursday 6th October Room J207 (4pm to 6pm)
31st Oct-4th November
Thursday 24h November
Friday 16th December
Modules (Semester Two)
Module 4: Contemporary American Writing (ENG 41670)
Module 5 begins:
Module 5 ends:
Essay due:
Tuesday 24th January Room J207 (4pm to 6pm)
Tuesday 7th March
Tuesday 21st March by 12pm*
Module 5: Nineteenth-Century American Writing (ENG 40880)
(includes Clinton students)
Module 5 begins:
Module 5 ends:
Essay due:
Thursday 26th January
Room J207 (4pm to 6pm)
th
Thursday 9 March
Thursday 6th April by 12pm*
*5,000-word Essays: Deliver to post-box (outside J201) and enter on Safe Assign
on or before listed dates.
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
Extended Deadlines for Essays and Dissertations:
• Applications to Module Convener:
o on receipt of medical certificate or relevant documentation: no penalty;
o late essay or dissertation without documentation: penalty of two grade
points per week
SCHEDULE FOR MODULES (continued)
Module 6 (ENG40920): Dissertation:
Proposals Due:
Friday 10th March
Dissertation Due:
Tuesday 1st August
Dissertation (15,000-20,000 words)
Proposals for Dissertations: Friday 10th March: email to Dr Williams
List of Supervisors:
Friday 17th March: email notification to students
Supervisory Panel: Includes Dr Katherine Fama, Dr Clare Hayes-Brady, Dr Maria
Stuart and Dr Nerys Williams.
Dissertation Meetings (Supervision should follow the following schedule):
First meeting with supervisor in the week beginning
Monday 27th March
Chapter 1 draft:
Second Meeting with supervisor in the week beginning
Monday 17th April
Monday 24th April
Chapter 2 draft:
Third Meeting with supervisor in the week beginning
Friday 19th May
Monday 29th May
Chapter 3 draft:
Fourth Meeting with supervisor in the week beginning
Friday 23rd June
Monday 3rd July
Submission of dissertation:
Tuesday 1st August
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
MODULE DETAILS
MODULE 1 (Lectures and Workshops):
ENG 40760 Introduction to Literary Research Methods
Co-ordinator: Dr F. Dillane ([email protected])
Time and Place: Thursdays 12-1.30pm, A105 (ART)
Start Date: Thursday 22nd September, 2016
This module introduces students to the advanced methods and skills required for your
postgraduate studies. It is taught through a course of lectures and/or workshops which
will address research resources, textual criticism, approaches to literature,
methodology, critical writing and argumentation, methods of information retrieval and
evaluation, evidence in literary scholarship, and practical issues of research and thesis
writing. This module is core for the following programmes: MA American Literature,
MA Anglo-Irish Literature, MA, Gender, Sexuality and Culture, MA Medieval
Literature, MA Modern and Contemporary Literature, and MA Renaissance
Literature. It is also core for new doctoral students who have not had prior experience
of literary research
On completing this module, students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate a clear grasp of key issues in literary research methods including
literary citation, bibliographical skills, proofreading, literary terminology, and the
2. Understand the theory and practical implications of literary editing.
3. Retrieve information about resources, methods, and skills necessary to their chosen
specialised field of postgraduate studies in English.
4. Understand the skills and techniques required for the writing of research proposals,
dissertations, and other career oriented applications.
5. Identify their own needs in terms of the pursuit of advanced literary research.
Course Schedule
22 Sept. Introduction to Postgraduate Research (Dr Anne Mulhall)
29 Sept. Defining Literary and Critical Methodologies (Dr Anne Mulhall)
6 October Editions and Anthologies (Dr Lucy Collins and Dr Naomi McAreavey)
13 October Electronic Resources (Jenny Collery)
Note this session will take place in the Health Sciences Library. Meet at the
Information Desk in the Health Sciences Library where you will be directed to the
Information Skills Room (D111).
20 October UCD Library and Special Collections (Evelyn Flanagan)
27 October Preparing Your Topic and Proposal (Dr Sharae Deckard)
3 Nov Reading week – no classes
10 Nov. Digital Humanities I: Theories and Methodologies (Prof. Margaret Kelleher)
17 Nov. Digital Humanities 2: Projects in Practice (Prof. Margaret Kelleher)
24 Nov. Exam Advisory Session (Dr Fionnuala Dillane)
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
1 December 2016: In-Class Exam
Assessment:
The module will be assessed by means of:
1. A bibliographical exercise (50%) specifically related to the programme students are
taking, which must comply fully with MLA style, and explain what and how
bibliographical sources were used, to be submitted on 10th November 2016 and
2. A two-hour examination on 1 December 2016 (50%)
3. Lecturers may also set pass/fail exercises as part of workshop sessions which you
are required to pass in order to complete the module.
MA IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Wednesday 19th September Room: J207 (4pm)
MODULE 2 (Seminars)
ENG 40900: American Theatre: Structure and Strategies
(Professor Frank McGuinness)
This module will examine key texts from the history of twentieth-century American
theatre. It will focus on the reading of plays as practical pieces of theatre craft,
designed primarily for performance. Each play will be investigated for its possibilities
of staging. (No previous experience of acting or directing is expected.)
Seminar Schedule:
Tuesdays
Dates:
4-6pm
Room: J207
4th October to 22nd November
Assessment:
The module is assessed by essay (5,000 words) on a topic related to the course
content. (Please list word-count at the end of your essay.)
Additional shorter written pieces and presentations to the class may also be
required.
Required Reading:
Albee, Edward. The Goat or Who is Sylvia?
Guirgis, Stephen Adly. Our Lady of 121st Street
Guirgis, Stephen Adly. Jesus Hopped the “A” Train
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun (Methuen)
Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross
Miller, Arthur. All My Sons
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman
Norman, Marsha. ’Night Mother
Norris, Bruce. Clybourne Park
O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night (London: Cape)
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
O’Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire
Wilson, August, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. (London: Plume)
Additional Reading will be listed in class.
Module 4 (Seminars)
ENG41840 American Lyric: Document and Memoir
(Seminar Leader: Dr Nerys Williams)
The American poet Juliana Spahr suggests that ‘poetry helps me think because it is a genre
that is so open right now. There are so many rules about how to write poetry, that there
might as well be not any at all.’
This module considers how ideas of the lyric poem has been adapted and reconfigured by
American poets over a period of 60 years. It proposes that 21st Century experiments with
ideas of document and memoir can be traced to a second generation of American modernist
poetic experimentation. The module begins with Lorine Niedecker’s innovative sequences
of lyric writing, which combines personal memoir with a representation of region. We will
examine how subsequent generations of poets consider the relationship between the
personal and public, language and politics in tandem with ethical responsibilities.
Focusing primarily on the key ideas of document and memoir, the module considers the
representation of war, race and the everyday through a diversity of lyric forms. We will
reflect upon the influence of digital technologies upon ideas of form and community.
Finally, the module examines how the reception and manipulation of data and found web
material (particularly in conceptual writing procedures) challenges more established ideas
of knowledge and poetic originality.
Seminar Schedule:
Thursdays
Dates:
4-6pm
Room: J207
October 6th-24th November
Assessment:
The module is assessed by essay (5,000 words) on a topic related to the course content.
Poetry, Document and Archive
Lorine Niedecker Lake Superior (originally published 1966, republished with archive
documentation 2013).
AND from Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1965) and Holocaust (1975)
Inscribing Autobiography – Rejecting Closure
Lyn Hejinian My Life (1987) Further versions published 2002/ 2013.
Tradition, the Individual Talent and War
Yusef Komunyakaa poems from Neon Vernacular (1993)
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
‘Nobody’s Voice’: Writing with Nothing at its Centre
Michael Palmer from The Lion Bridge: Poems 1972-1995 (1999)
Found Document and Cross-Genre Writing
Claudia Rankine Please Don’t Let me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004)
AND excerpts from Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary (2009)
Representing the Maternal Everyday
Laynie Brown Daily Sonnets (2007)
Collectivity, Data and Document
Juliana Spahr this connection of everybody with lungs (2005)
AND excerpts from Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the
Digital Age (2011), Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013) The Body of Michael
Brown (2015).
Additional Reading will be listed in class.
MODULE 4 (ENG 41670) Contemporary American Writing
(Seminar Leader: Dr Katherine Fama)
Seminar Schedule:
Tuesdays
Dates:
4-6pm
Room: J207
24th January to 7th March
Assessment:
The module is assessed by essay (5,000 words) on a topic related to the course
content. (Please list word-count at the end of your essay.)
Additional shorter written pieces and presentations to the class may also be
required.
Our understanding of the “contemporary” is informed by academic narratives of
globalization, neoliberalism, and late capitalism; as well as the events of 9/11 and the
escalation of racial, economic, and environmental crises and protests. This module
focuses on related developments in the American novel around the turn of the twentyfirst century. Within our set of contemporary texts, we will encounter a diverse group
of writers and their experiments with popular forms, images, and expectations.
The course will employ primary and critical texts to build a collaborative discussion
of the American literary and social moment. We will concentrate on novels by
canonical contemporary authors that employ the images and structures of what is
conventionally considered to be “genre” or “popular” fiction, from science fictions to
dystopian narratives and graphic novels. Together, we will consider the ways in which
contemporary novels forge narrative acts of historical transgression, speculative
remaking, disaster, and renewal.
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
For better and worse, we will encounter texts that are rarely fully critically digested or
contextualized. Thus, the module will ask you for flexibility and creativity in pursuing
the new, changing, and uncertain definitions of the present period.
Required Reading
Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)
Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (2006)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Amy Waldman, The Submission (2011)
Kiese Laymon, Long Division (2013)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)
Additional primary and critical readings will be listed in class.
They will include shorter pieces and excerpts from Chris Ware, Sherman Alexie,
Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Annie Proulx, Gish Jen, Lydia Millet, and
others.
MODULE 5 (Seminars)
ENG 40880: Nineteenth-Century American Writing
(Dr Maria Stuart and Dr Clare Hayes-Brady)
Beginning with texts emerging during what F.O. Matthiessan has dubbed “The
American Renaissance,” this module explores key themes in American literature from
the mid nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. We will look at
the ways in which American writers imagine and fashion an American subject
position, against a backdrop of Western expansion, slavery, the threat of civil war, and
the emergence of women as a literary and political constituency. We will look at
writers’ engagement with freedom and creativity in their literal and literary forms. As
well as the thematic issues that hold centre stage–for example, the relationships
between art, race and gender; the formulation of the democratic social contract; the
relationship with romanticism and the gothic; violence and citizenship; regionalism,
exoticism and difference–we will also be examining the degree and kind of formal
innovation to be found in nineteenth-century American poetry and prose.
Seminar Schedule:
Thursdays
Dates:
4-6pm
Room: J207
26th January to 9th March
Assessment:
The module is assessed by essay (5,000 words) on a topic related to the course
content. (Please list word-count at the end of your essay.)
Additional shorter written pieces and presentations to the class may also be
required.
Required texts:
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, 1899 (any edition)
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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MA in American Literature
2016-17
Dickinson, Emily. A handout of selected poems from The Poems of Emily Dickinson:
Variorum Edition, edited by R.W. Franklin (The Belknap Press of Harvard UP,
1998), will be circulated in advance of this class.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
Written by Himself, 1845 (any edition).
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, 1892 (any edition)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance, 1852 (any edition)
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861 (any edition)
Melville, Herman. ‘Benito Cereno’, 1855 (any edition)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852 (any edition)
Whitman, Walt. Collected Poems (Wordsworth)
Secondary Reading: to be announced in advance of seminars.
Additional Reading will be listed in class.
MODULE 6 (ENG40920): DISSERTATION (15,000-20,000 words)
Proposals Due:
Friday 10th March
Dissertation Due:
Tuesday 1st August
oOo
Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.
Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature)
email: [email protected]
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