English Department

Graduate Course Descriptions

Spring 2010

Graduate Fiction Workshop

W 3:30-6:00

ENGL90011

William O’Rourke

Limited to students in the Creative Writing M.F.A. Program, the workshop’s major emphasis is on analysis, criticism, and discussion of participants’ fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid manuscripts.  Assigned readings in contemporary prose further the discussion of literary movements, critical schools, and publishing realities, as well as the aesthetic and philosophical implications of genre, style, and subject.  

Graduate Poetry Workshop

MW 4:30-5:45

ENGL 90081

Orlando Menes

This course is for candidates in the MFA program in poetry.  The course places its main emphasis on student writing and will be run as a week-to-week workshop of student work. The objective of the course is to provide students with meaningful feedback on their work, as well as to build students’ facility in the critical, constructive discussion of peer and published work. All other course activities, including readings, will vary from section to section.

English for Non-Native Speaker

MW 11:45-1:00

ENGL90110

Noreen Deane Moran

This is a class/workshop designed for the non-native speaker in a teaching, research, discussion, living situation. Primarily, this course is designed to improve spoken English of non-native speakers, at the intermediate level, with a specific goal of increasing communication skills for teaching, research, and discussion purposes. Mastery of English pronunciation, spelling, idiomatic expression, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and sentence structure will be the focus.

Emphasis will be placed on learning to command clear and accurate spoken English for the purpose of classroom instruction and participation. To this end, we will stress phonology, stress placement, intonation, juncture, accent, tempo, general pronunciation, linguistic posture and poise (kinesics), conversational diction, presentation of material, handling questions, and other matters of instruction related to language arts. Active and continued verbal participation will be required. There will be some quizzes and worksheet assignments in and out of class, as well as some oral presentations.

The main textbook will be Manual of American English Pronunciation, 4th ed., by Clifford Prator and Betty Wallace Robinett (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). An additional recommended text is Two-Word Verbs in English, by J. N. Hook (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc). Both are available in the Bookstore.

Advanced English for Non-Native Speakers

MW 4:30 – 5:45

ENGL90111

Noreen Deane Moran

This course is designed to teach increased skill in listening and speaking as a continuation of ENGL 90110. Having had the previous course is not in itself a prerequisite, but fairly high-level skills in clear speaking and understanding the conversational speech of the native speaker are necessary. Assuming an intermediate mastery of native English vowel and consonant sound systems, intonation patterns, and junctures of speech, we will review and attempt to perfect these, while expanding on conversational interactive speech. To facilitate this, we will use magazines, some poetry, and short stories to focus and enliven our discussions. Idiomatic symbolic usage embedded in the texts will be discussed. These conversations will be aimed at creating greater ease and clarity in speaking; an opportunity for honing true listening skills; and feeling more competent in American English discourse.

Medieval Theories of Cosmic Harmony

MI 40371/60371CRN 40371/28221

ENGL 90258 (crosslisted from the Medieval Institute)
Stephen Gersh
TR 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.

From ancient times until around 1700, it was widely assumed that music was not only a practical art of combining sounds but a theoretical discipline of studying the proportional structure of reality, and that the former depended on the latter for its ultimate value and efficacy.  This course will study the origins and development of the musica disciplina as a conceptual model applicable to the study of God, the human soul, the angelic, and the physical worlds from the end of antiquity until the beginning of the Renaissance in all the various literary genres -- philosophical-theological writings, encyclopedic texts, and music- theoretical treatises – in which it is articulated. Works to be studied include Augustine’s De Musica and Boethius’ De Institutione Musica together with their respective medieval glossing traditions, and commentaries and treatments on the harmonic material in Plato’s Timaeus. Knowledge of Latin is desirable but not essential.  Written requirement: one final paper (ca. 20 pp.)

Tobias Boes
Wednesdays 6:30 to 9:30
ENGL 90133 /LIT 73566-01 Cross-list from LIT)

Introduction to the Practice of Comparative Literature: Fictions of Development

A practical introduction to comparative literary analysis through intensive focus on a single genre, the Bildungsroman, or “novel of development.”  By concentrating on some of the many different meanings of the term “development” (personal, literary, historical, economic) we will investigate how literature has been conceptualized as a vehicle of personal formation on the one hand, and as a mirror of social transformation on the other.  Primary readings of novels from the late eighteenth century to the present will be accompanied by a number of critical and theoretical texts.  Students will also work to create a joint bibliography mapping recent trends in the discipline.  Authors may include Goethe, Balzac, Joyce, Rizal, Macgoye, Swarup and others.

Gender and Space

TR 2:00-3:15 / Lab 5PM-7PM Tuesday (for film screenings)

ENGL 90412-01 /GSC 63500-01 (cross-listed from GSC)

Also requires Lab 91001-01

Pamala Wojcik

This course will investigate the many intersections and problematics of gender, place, and space.  Space, place and gender have been key topics in areas such as architecture, law, history, sociology, urban studies, area studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, film studies, and gender; and the class will draw from those various disciplines.  Students will address the issue of gender, place and space through a variety of disciplinary approaches, investigating a wide range of real and imagined places and spaces, including  masculine spaces, feminine spaces, queer spaces, or virtual spaces; spaces such as the home, the office, the railroad, the apartment, the skyscraper, the museum, the store, the church; the urban, the rural, the suburban; spaces as represented in various texts and discourses; uses of space; theories of space, and more.   The course will pay particular attention to how space and place are produced and negotiated as spaces of fantasy in mid-20^th century American films and popular literature, including the films Baby Face, How to Succeed in Business, The Boys in the Band, The Killing of Sister George, All That Heaven Allows, That Funny Feeling, The Lady Vanishes, and Rear Window; and the novels, The Girls in 3B, The Women’s Room, Fear of Flying, The Fountainhead, The Best of Everything.

Practicum: Teaching Creative Writing

Time TBA (1.5 credit hours)

ENGL 90092

Steve Tomasula

Issues in the teaching of creative writing, from course design to the job search. This is a special course devoted to supporting creative writing MFA students as they move towards careers in teaching, both here at ND or after graduation at other institutions.  Most of our meetings will take up practical matters, such as writing the application letter, interviewing, or creating a course curriculum.  But an equally important part of the course will address issues such as what it means to be a writer in the academy, the influence of creative writing programs on literature, or thinking about what it means to teach writing as an art form and how to translate aesthetic principles, or teaching philosophy, into pedagogy.

Postmodernism

3/14/10-4/2/10 T-TH 12:30-1:45 (1 credit course)

ENGL 90132

Terry Eagleton

The course will look at the reasons for the emergence of post-modernism, and at a number of central post-modern topics.  It will also offer a critique of the phenomenon.

Beowulf
TR 11:00 – 12:15
ENGL 90201

Thomas Hall

An intensive study of Beowulf and the critical literature surrounding it.  We will first read the poem in translation, then move slowly through the text in Old English, addressing the key problems and questions that have dominated recent scholarship. Previous experience reading Old English will be necessary.  Requirements include regular reading and contribution to class discussion, a lexicography project, a translation exercise, and a research paper.

Anglo Saxon Hagiography

TR 9:30 – 10:45

ENGL 90253

Thomas Hall

A substantial part of the corpus of pre-Conquest British literature, in both Latin and Old English, consists of Lives of saints and related texts (such as calendars, martyrologies, legendaries, miracle tales, litanies, and accounts of relics) concerned with the exploits and exemplary behaviors of holy men and women from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.   In this seminar we’ll survey the whole territory with a broad flourish before narrowing in to examine the careers of some of the most accomplished hagiographers writing in England between the eighth and the eleventh century (especially Ælfric, Bede, Byrhtferth, Folcard, Goscelin, and Wulfstan of Winchester).  From that point we will narrow in even further to undertake close readings of a core set of texts (Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, the Old English Martyrology, and selections from Ælfric’s Lives of Saints), and we will give special attention to the literary dimensions of the cults of four prominent native English saints:  Cuthbert, Guthlac, Æthelthryth, and Edmund. Requirements include regular reading in Latin and Old English, weekly response papers, a bibliographical essay, and a research paper.

Shakespeare: Editing & Performance

Thursday 2:00-4:30

ENGL90257

Peter Holland

You pick up a copy of Shakespeare - but what is the object you are holding? This course will explore the history, theory and practice of editing Shakespeare as an example of the complex issues in editing literary/dramatic texts. From the work of early modern printers, through the tradition of 18^th century editions (Rowe to Malone), towards current, 21^st century editorial practice and the future of online/print editions, we will investigate how practice has shaped theory and vice versa. In particular, we will be concerned with the problematics of the representation of performance (early, recent, possible) in text/paratext/commentary. Work required will include editing segments of Shakespeare plays (generating text, collation, commentary), attending performance(s) as well as experimenting with possible new ways in which a Shakespeare edition might be conceived and, of course, writing a substantial research paper.

The Long Fourteenth Century and the Rise of English Literature

W 5:30 – 8:00 p.m.

ENGL 90259

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

Even Richard II, the king under whom literary giants like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet produced their mature works, owned no books in English. When he was deposed in 1399, English literary texts were still a minority interest among the educated, the majority as yet preferring to read in Latin or French. This was to change dramatically within a generation. This course traces the rise of English as a “national” literature (a literature read across England, in colonial Ireland and lowlands Scotland) by uncovering the reading circles that nurtured it. From its Early Middle English beginnings through the ‘Alliterative Revival,’ to the now famous London reading circles at the turn of the century, the course follows the trajectory of “the Long Fourteenth Century.” Beginning with selections from Early Middle English works that continued to be actively read after 1300, such as Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group texts, the Arundel Bestiary, and moving on to early fourteenth century masterpieces like the Harley Lyrics, the “Kildare” Poems, and the key romances of the Auchinleck manuscript, the course will attempt to link these achievements to the Ricardian ‘Golden Age’ they heralded. By considering the less studied works of the late Edwardian era (such as The Chorister’s Lament, Winner and Waster, Julian’s Short Text, and the strange, abbreviated version of Piers Plowman known as “Z”), the course will provide a fuller historical context for Ricardian London reading circles. It will conclude with works by the Pearl Poet, a small selection of some of Chaucer’s early and ‘most English’ poetry, and new women writers from the London Charterhouse. In particular, we will examine the role that the legal community, the civil service, and the pastorate played in the early development of post-Conquest English, its relations with the literature of the “French in England,” and the trilingual contexts of the book production. Other key topics will include court culture, social and political dissent, literary colonialism and writing for women as a key spur to the rise of English. We will look at various historicist approaches to the study of regional and developing reading communities, along with aspects of medieval literary theory and newer methodologies, such as the history of book culture. The course will involve a good deal of close reading of earlier and more difficult English prior to Chaucer’s (designed in part as good preparation for candidacy exams).

Texts:

Old and Middle English: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Trehearne (Blackwells)

Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages, ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre (Routledge)

Medieval English Prose for Women, by Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Piers Plowman: the Z text, ed. A.G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer (Toronto)

Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Waldron and Andrew (Exeter)

The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Penn State Press)

Bodily Fear, Fantastic Fiction

Tues. 2:00-4:30

ENGL 90280

Margaret Doody

This course deals with the body’s fearful and fascinated consciousness of change in relation to organic and inorganic beings. In short stories and novels we see the development of relations with animals, ghosts, fairies, demons, angels and goblins. But the human or humanoid can also identify itself with an inanimate object, or even merge with it. Compelling clutter abounds. “Character” becomes a questionable concept as beasts, material objects and spirits become quasi-humanoid.

The course reading centers in the late 18^th and 19^th century, but we start with The Golden Ass, that profoundly influential novel written by a North African member of the Roman empire who offers us a destabilizing fiction of metamorphosis, a story exhibiting the instability of all sorts of boundaries and classes, including formal boundaries between human and animal. Theoretical material includes work by Freud and Darwin, as well as commentary by Bakhtin, Todorov, de Certeau, and Haraway, but it is nowhere assumed that the critics are superior to the novelists and story-writers, who are also powerful theorists in their own way.

Victorian Literature

MW 11:45-1:00

ENGL 90340

Chris VandenBossche

This course will explore the Victorian concern with the ways literature seeks to act on its readers as well as the ways it portrays agency, the capacity for action, transformation, and reform. We will focus in particular on the period between the two great Reform Bills, of 1832 and 1867, during which recurrent debates about reform shaped conceptions of gender, class, and nation. The course will cover the range of major authors and genres, including works by Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Alfred Tennyson. Students will complete a series of assignments (bibliography, prospectus, etc.) leading up to completion of a substantial research essay.

Modern Irish Drama and the World Stage

MW 3:00-4:15

ENGL 90513

Susan Harris

When W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn decided to launch their first effort at an Irish theater in 1897, they were responding not only to a reawakening of Irish national feeling, but to the phenomenon of radical and often national "free theaters" springing up all over Europe during the preceding decades. In this course, we will consider the Irish dramatic revival in both its national and international contexts. While investigating the relationship between the major Irish revival dramatists and the Irish cultural and national politics that so often shaped their plays' reception in Ireland, we will look at how Irish playwrights responded and contributed to international developments in twentieth-century theater. We will also consider whether or how transformative events in international politics--possibly including but not limited to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Spanish civil war, the second world war, the Holocaust, the beginning of the cold war and the development of nuclear weapons--should be considered part of the story of twentieth century Irish drama. As part of this investigation we will read Irish playwrights who have been traditionally overlooked, and study some of the 'alternative' Irish theatres that competed with the Abbey Theater. The theoretical questions about gender, sexuality, and the body that are always raised by theatrical performance will be foregrounded in our discussions of all this material.

Students will be required to make at least one in-class presentation, to keep a reading journal, and to produce a 20-30 page seminar paper at the end of the term.

Twentieth-century Poetry and Theory: Convergences between philosophy, theology, socio-linguistic theory and poetics.

F 9:30-12:00

ENGL 90530 (T- Theory)

Romana Huk

Yeats famously suggested that “poetry and religion are the same” – and while many might have thought such ideas died with him in 1939, or even much earlier, changing conceptions of what both poetry and religion are (or might be) have recently reopened the debate in rather spectacular ways. My interest is in bringing students into the increasingly busy intersection between these once opposed modes of thinking (and into the site of my own current book project). The course will introduce students to several of the major movements in philosophy and literary theory that most powerfully impacted poetics – among them phenomenology, Wittgensteinian linguistics (or his “philosophy of religion,” as some have described it), and deconstruction (which Derrida late in life admitted had been “structured like a religion”); it will also demonstrate the ways in which traditional histories of twentieth-century poetic innovation and development are currently being re-read. Starting with (Lutheran convert) Edmund Husserl and his students Martin Heidegger and St Edith Stein (as well as with Husserl’s claim that the whole point of his phenomenological project was to discover a “path back to God”), the course charts collisions between essentially Christian existential phenomenology and, for example, the Jewish thought of its later critics by focusing on how poets on both sides of the Atlantic absorbed and continued to process such ideas. Neo-Thomist thinking as put forward by figures like Jacques and Raïssa Maritain will also be studied, alongside various mystical and Gnostic alternatives. A very small number of poets will be picked for attention and close-reading; major figures like T.S. Eliot will be studied alongside small-press figures like Brian Coffey, and the course will end with living poet-thinkers Fanny Howe and Hank Lazer who have contributed much to our understanding of how all these fields of inquiry fruitfully overlap.

Two presentations and two papers (as well as attendance at one or two poetry readings and lectures) will constitute the requirements; students may instead opt to write one longer essay (with an eye towards possible publication) if they so desire.    

Forms of Democracy in Nineteenth-century U.S. Literature

MW 1:30-2:45

ENGL 90606

Sandra Gustafson

This course will explore two central concerns in American literary studies:  what is “democratic” about literature written in the United States?  And how does the problem of representative politics influence literary and textual representation?  From F.O. Matthiessen’s definition of a canon of five authors who shared a “devotion to the possibilities of democracy” in American Renaissance (1941); to the efforts to broaden that Cold War canon to be more democratically representative in the anthology projects and multicultural criticism of the 1980s; to the New Americanist project of decoupling “democracy” and “America” in order to critique U.S. imperial hegemony in the 1990s, democracy has been a central concept in the study of U.S. literature.  One emphasis of this course will be on historical and contemporary theories of democracy as they relate to literary texts. A second emphasis will be on textual forms as they figure in democratic theory.  The possibilities of democracy today are frequently tied to new media, notably the Internet, which for some promises to realize ideals of participation and transparency.  New media enthusiasts of the 19th C saw similar democratic possibilities for immediacy and the diffusion of knowledge in the electric telegraph. An older tradition dating at least to the Reformation, with important exponents in the antebellum U.S., identifies democracy with print culture and literacy.  Yet another view saw the “logocracy” of public speech and the emergent popular, participatory forms of the drama and the spectacle as essentially democratic.  Specific literary genres – the novel; free verse – have also been characterized as “democratic,” while critics have vigorously debated the political effects of particular literary styles, notably sentimentality.

Media, Technology, Aesthetics

M 4:30- 7:00

ENGL90717 (T-Theory)

Kate Marshall

The study of media – including novels, technologies, processes, and social forms – has been changing the way humanities disciplines conceive of the work they do, and reconfiguring the fields of American literary study. Through the shared texts of media philosophy and the now-canonical works of interdisciplinary media studies, a common critical vocabulary has emerged for discussing media across disciplines, and for situating American literature within that tradition. Moreover, institutional investment in humanities and social science computing is producing new forms of scholarly collaboration and critical practice that demand a reconsideration of established models of intellectual production. Opportunities for critical thought and computational innovation circulate around the interdisciplinary cluster of studies related to media. Media thus form crucial objects and concepts through which to observe potential futures of literary study, the structures of the disciplines that inform current approaches to media, and in some cases, the reassertion of disciplinary autonomy in the face of these transformations.
            This course will examine the current debates in media theory and media studies in the context of a compact survey of twentieth-century American fiction. Readings will cover four primary areas of research: media aesthetics, media studies, communication, and new media. Each cluster of topics will involve the reading and re-reading of a central text for imagining media in twentieth-century America: these include works by James, Dos Passos, Baldwin, Highsmith, Danielewski, and Jackson. This broad range of readings is designed to make media a rich and multidimensional topic of inquiry, and to ground any discussion of the role of computing and technological innovation in twenty-first century scholarship in a long history of thinking about media as an object of philosophical investigation.
            The semester will conclude with a critical study of digital humanities programs and projects throughout the country, followed by a mini-conference in which students present either a media analysis of one of our literary texts, or a collaborative project putting the tools and critical practices of the digital humanities to work in a critique of modern media theory.

Euro-Romanticism Lit & Nation

Literature and the Nation building process throughout European Romanticism

TR 5:00 – 6:15

LIT 73567

Mauro Pala (new visiting)

The course aims at reconstructing and debating how, since the late eighteenth century, European literature has not just passively reflected the process of nation building, but rather has actively developed patterns of identification present in the idea of a nation. Novels from Fielding to Dickens in Great Britain, Manzoni and Nievo in Italy, various poems by Foscolo, Heine and Wordsworth will be analyzed in the light of Edward Said’s, Homi Bhabha’s and Benedict Anderson’s works, and, more in general, of all theoreticians who have elaborated instruments appropriate for understanding the nation itself as a fiction. Far from weakening the original meaning of nation, the literary term “fiction” in fact encompasses and comprehends the different elements that are present in the concept of a nation.

The history of European literature in the so called “Age of revolution” (1789-1848) reveals how nationalism has to be understood within those large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which - as well as against which-it came into being. Literature in particular shows how the representation of social life is the first step for acknowledging a common purpose and a collective identity as bases of a modern nation. 

Practicum: Teaching Writing

F 12:30-2:30 (1 credit hour)

ENGL 92001

John Duffy

The aim of English 92001 is to prepare graduate students to teach First-Year Composition (FYC) in the University Writing Program at Notre Dame. The course does this in two ways: first, by introducing you to readings in rhetoric and composition that provide a basis for making informed choices in the classroom. Second, by providing you with opportunities to practice such classroom skills as lesson planning, designing writing assignments, responding to student papers, and managing writing groups. To these ends, you will read selectively in rhetoric and composition theory, complete a series of short writing assignments, and observe faculty currently teaching in the University Writing Program. By the end of the course, you will have designed your own syllabus for teaching FYC.

Practicum: Preparing for the Profession

Time TBA

ENGL 92003

Sara Maurer