Fall 2009 Graduate Courses
ENGL 90013
Graduate Fiction Workshop
Valerie Sayers
M 6:30-9:00
The major work of the semester will be analysis, critique, appreciation, and discussion of our own fiction and nonfiction manuscripts. Because we work in two major genres (as well as hybrid and in-between forms), we’ll certainly examine the aesthetic and even ethical implications of labeling work ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction,’ and we’ll be particularly interested in the innovations that cross-pollination might encourage. Our outside reading list will include contemporary stories by Aleksandsar Hemon, Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich, Annie Proulx, and Roberto Bolaño; memoirs by J.M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel; graphic memoirish narrative by Art Spiegelman; and novels by Melanie Rae Thon, Lily Hoang, and Zadie Smith, whose On Beauty is a reconsideration of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. We’ll get a jump on Smith and Forster over the summer; look for an e-mail describing the first class assignment. All semester long, we’ll commiserate over the state of contemporary mainstream publishing, but we’ll also celebrate and encourage against-the-odds and alternative success
ENGL 90038
Graduate Poetry Workshop
Joyelle McSweeney
MW 4:30-5:45
Our chief business will be to give attention to the work of the writers in the class, but we will also consider such questions as the relationship of literary production and publication to local, regional, national and global communities; the concept of textuality; the relationship of an individual poet to the language(s) in which he or she works; the co-implications of form, genre and media on the creation and the exchange of texts; and other issues for the contemporary poet. Our reading and viewing list will be extensive, and class members will be responsible for presentations and short assignments in addition to preparation for workshop and the submission of single poems and groups of poems for class discussion
ENGL 90101
Intro to Graduate Studies
Jesse M. Lander
MW 1:30-2:45
Introduces students to research techniques, literary theory, and the scholarly profession of literature. Frequent guest lectures by the English faculty will enable students to become acquainted with research activities taking place in the department.
ENGL 90118
Introduction to ME Manuscript
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
W 4:30-7:00
This course will examine the culture of the book in late medieval English, including the important literary writers who made it a national literary language, the scribes who transmitted and often transformed their works, and the wide range of readers they reached. Among the writers to be studied will be Julian of Norwich, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe and James I of Scotland; among the topics to be discussed: literacy, book illustration, marginalia, social conditions of authorship, the rise of heresy, women and book production, nun’s libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at official censorship. Students will also learn both editorial theory and practice, and have a chance to transcribe and edit for publication in a forthcoming anthology of Middle English writings restored to the their manuscript context.
ENGL 90224
Old English Seminar: The Exeter Book
Thomas Hall
TR 9:30-10:45
The Exeter Book is the largest collection of Old English poetry to survive in a single manuscript, a tenth-century anthology containing some of the best-known poems in Old English (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, the Exeter Book Riddles) as well as others drawn from multiple literary traditions. We will read as much of this poetry as we can set against the background of the shaping events and concerns of tenth-century England, especially those set in motion by the Benedictine Reform and by contemporary developments in Anglo-Latin and Hiberno-Latin literature and Old English prose. A secondary goal of the course will be to introduce students to methods of research in several of the disciplines essential to the study of Old English poetry, including the liturgy, hagiography, eschatology, cosmology, biblical exegesis, mythology, and folklore of the early medieval West.
ENGL 90251
Early Modern Devotional Literature
Susannah Monta
MW 8:00-9:15
This course will examine Reformation-era devotional prose and poetry in liturgical, political, literary, and theological contexts. We will place special (but not exclusive) emphasis on the development of devotional lyric in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
ENGL 90255
Langland and Allegory
Katherine Zieman
MW 11:45-1:00
This course will examine concepts and uses of allegory, focusing primarily on the seminal yet difficult poem, Piers Plowman. Though a significant amount of time will be spent deciphering Langland's 14th century work, our focus will always consider the larger implications of Langland's writing for our understanding of literary history and allegorical writing more broadly conceived. Comparisons to allegorical writings by other writers and from other periods will be encouraged.
ENGL 90317
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats
Henry Weinfield
TR 11:00-12:15
One of the things that draws Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats together is that all three poets are responding to what might be called the post-Enlightenment religious crisis, the loss of what had been a shared belief in the immortality of the soul and the Christian afterlife. These poets are responding not only to Milton’s Paradise Lost but to the “loss of paradise” symbolically articulated by Thomas Gray in the eighteenth century. Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth’s two most important followers in the second generation of English Romantics, are also responding to the “program” for poetry (I borrow this term from M. H. Abrams) that Wordsworth enunciates in response to the religious crisis, a program aimed at recuperating a sense of hope and restoring faith in the meaningfulness of human existence. Our readings will include philosophical and narrative poems in blank verse (e.g., Wordsworth’s Prelude, Shelley’s Alastor, and Keats’s Hyperion fragments) as well as odes, sonnets, and poems in stanzaic forms of various kinds. In addition, we shall read Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, and a substantial selection from Keats’s letters. Our emphasis will be on developing close readings of the primary material and on coming to grips with the philosophical perspectives on poetry that the three writers delineate, but attention will also be given to recent theoretically oriented criticism focused on the Wordsworthian tradition. Requirements will include several oral reports and a substantial research essay.
ENGL 90318
Reading Revolutions: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century
Christopher Fox
M 6:30-9:00
The eighteenth century is often seen as an age of revolution--a revolution in the ways people looked at themselves, at their relation to society and at, with the discovery of the Pacific, the new, "global" world around them. It was also a time to attempt to come to terms with the implications and aftershock of the great revolutions of the seventeenth century. Chief among these were the Civil Wars of 1642-1646--which wiped out a larger percentage of the population than
World War I--and the so called "bloodless" or "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. As a class, we will examine how these earlier revolutions influenced later writers, how the eighteenth century "read" the seventeenth. The writers we will look at include Marvell, Dryden, Behn, Defoe, Swift, Pope, and Johnson. Expect a short paper, a review of scholarship, and a longer paper.
ENGL 90425
Modernism
Maud Ellmann
T 3:30-6:00
This course surveys the major trends in Anglophone modernism (circa 1908-1948) centered in London and Paris. We will be focusing on “high modernism,” including such figures as Eliot, Conrad, Pound, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, and Woolf, in relation to so-called “middle-brow” writers of the period, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Patrick Hamilton, E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Rebecca West. There will also be opportunities to discuss modernist art in relation to literature. Contextual themes to be considered will include imperialism, feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Students will be expected to lead many of the discussions, and to experiment with innovative modes of presentation.
ENGL 90621
Hemispheric Approaches
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
TR 2:00-3:15
What does it mean to study American history, literature and culture from a hemispheric perspective? From the 1994 publication of Carolyn Porter’s seminal essay, “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies,” scholars and critics have continued to engage in a lengthy, often contentious, broadly interdisciplinary debate over the relation between conventional approaches to the study of American literature and culture and what many have come to call the “transnational turn.” While the study of American literature has traditionally concentrated on the exploration of several centuries’ worth of literary expression in the U.S., the study of literature of the Americas emphasizes the interrelationships between U.S. literature and the literatures of other cultures and countries contained within the appellation “New World”--and often, through historical interconnections (as well as the larger significance of the notion of the Western Hemisphere)--even those of countries and cultures that lie beyond this spatial construct. In this course, we will study the origins of the hemispheric perspective in the work of the early 20th-century historian Herbert Bolton and his subsequent debate over its terms with the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman, as a foundation for our examination of the cultural, historical, literary and institutional implications of this line of inquiry, in addition to historical accounts of the beginnings of the Americas. Because the scope or our examination is potentially quite broad, this course is meant to serve as an introduction to this fascinating and emergent field. Our goal in this course, then, will be to study important issues in the historical development of the debate from the 1940s to the present, as well as the theoretical underpinnings and impact of the hemispheric perspective, with an eye toward helping you to establish your own particular approaches to, and within, its vast terrain.
Course texts are to be determined, but will probably include texts and/or excerpts from Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas: A Hemispheric History; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other; Herbert Eugene Bolton, “The Epic of Greater America”; Edmundo O’Gorman, “Have the Americas A Common History?: A Mexican View”; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; José Martí, Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
ENGL 90716
Avant-Garde American Poetries
Stephen Fredman
TR 12:30-1:45
To look at American poetry as an avant-garde enterprise is to see it participating in aesthetic trends that span all of the arts. From this perspective, the most defining trend in the arts of the past hundred years has been the dissolution of fixed genres and the ascendancy of collage. Collage develops from early cubist experiments and continues in Dada and surrealist disruptions of the boundary between art and life, in mid-century assemblage and Happenings, and in late-century appropriationism and the present ubiquity of sampling. American poets have sometimes pioneered and other times responded to these methodological breakthroughs, making poetry a key participant in the avant-garde remaking of cultural life. Figures or works we will likely consider: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Lorine Niedecker, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, John Cage, Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, Laurie Anderson, Susan Howe, Laura Mullen, and D.J. Spooky. Requirements include a class presentation and a seminar paper.