Fall 2008 Graduate Course Offerings

ENGL 600: Introduction to Literary Theory         W 2-4:52 pm              McDayter

Introduction to graduate study, including literary and critical theory, research, and other elements of literary scholarship.

ENGL 603: Seminar in Creative Nonfiction          T 1-3:52 pm               CamutoThis course is an advanced workshop in writing an extended nonfiction essay for students who have written nonfiction at the introductory level. Each student will write a 35-page (minimum) essay in any sub-genre of nonfiction: memoir, travel, nature, science, art—any subject that can be wrought from personal experience. Because most students write one variety or another of personal essay, we study various forms of the personal essay with a close eye on the techniques and thematic development of successful essays. Most of our class time will be taken up by workshop critique—at an intense level of detail—of student work-in-progress. Our primary goal will be to help each writer pursue subjective literary goals with the use of the objective literary techniques that have made the essay such an adaptable and enduring literary form. In short, we will work on the craft of essay writing in pursuit of the art of it. Although designed primarily for creative writing concentrators, I am particularly interested in working with an interdisciplinary group of students—especially from the environmental, earth and life sciences as well as anthropology and archaeology—who would bring a wide range of interests to the workshop. In addition to student work-in-progress, we will read essays by a wide range of classical and contemporary writers such as Seneca, Sei Shonagon, Kenko, Montaigne, Charles Lamb, R. L. Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, Natlaia Ginzburg, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, Adrienne Rich, Richard Selzer, Loren Eiseley, Maxine Hong Kingston,, Rachel Carson, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, Cynthia Ozick, Gretel Ehrlich, E. B. White, Langston Hughes, N. Scott Momaday, and Elizabeth Bishop. This is primarily a workshop course with time distributed equally among students for critique and discussion of their essays-in-progress, usually twice—once in partial form and once as complete drafts. This exposes students to the craft of writing the nonfiction personal essay at all levels of detail.

ENGL 605: Early American Literature                  R 1-3:52 pm               Drexler

We will explore this tumultuous age through the novels of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), who wrote about Indian-killing sleep-walkers, homicidal maniacs driven by mandates from God, and utopian conspirators. Brown was also fascinated by the Yellow Fever epidemics that periodically ravaged Philadelphia during his lifetime, especially the fever season of 1793, which claimed over 5000 lives. What made "fever" such a powerful trope for Brown and others? Contagion, conspiracy (literally--to breathe together), rebellion--the keywords of the age? What about liberty, equality, and fraternity? We will also read selections of early American drama about treason, novels and poetry about seduction, betrayal, race-warfare, and madness. What inspired such sensational fare at the beginnings of US national literature? What was the connection between terror, conspiracy, madness, and imagination for these early Americans? What did madness mean at the turn-of-the-century? in America? in Europe? An early case study of paranoid schizophrenia--the first to document a man who believed he was being controlled by a mind-influencing machine--will be considered. Toward the end of the semester, we will jump forward to study three works by the American master of madness, Edgar Allan Poe (Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, and The Fall of the House of Usher).

ENGL 608: Seminar in Writing Poetry                  T 1-3:52 pm               McCallum

This course is an advanced workshop in poetry writing. The objectives will be for students with previous experience in a poetry workshop to improve their own writing and to augment their critical skills in reading and responding to the poetry of others (both the work of published poets and that of their peers). The subject matter for the course will be centered on the work of contemporary poets, issues of craft in published writing and in student work, and issues of poetics and aesthetics in general. Throughout the semester, we will read books by a variety of contemporary poets as well as essays on poetics and craft. Student work will be central to discussion and thus will also serve as a primary text for the course. Poetry readings and lectures held on campus will provide an additional source of instruction. Class discussions and workshops will be the primary mode of instruction. In addition, we will use in-class exercises and free-writes to generate material. Drafts of new work will be due weekly. Short responses to the readings or issues of craft central to the class will be required periodically. Attendance at poetry readings and lectures throughout the semester will also be required. The final project for the course will be a portfolio of student poems (substantially revised), accompanied by an introductory, reflective essay.

ENGL 609: Seminar in Writing Fiction                  MW 3-4:22 pm          STAFF

Personal direction of individual projects and criticism of manuscripts.

ENGL 626: Seminar in Yeats                                  M 2-4:52 pm              Rickard

Objectives: The primary focus of the course will be on reading and discussing the poetry written by the Irish writer William Butler Yeats, whose poetry won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, but we will also meet Yeats the dramatist, Yeats the folklorist, and Yeats the essayist. We will not read Yeats in isolation, however, but will place him within a number of contexts, including Irish nationalism and the Irish Literary Revival, gender politics, literary modernism, fascism, and early 20th-century European politics. A few selected works by other Irish writers such as Lady Gregory, James Joyce, and John Millington Synge will also help us better understand Yeats in context. Yeats wrote a large number of lyric poems, but he also wrote many plays, stories, and critical and autobiographical essays. Over the course of his long career, Yeats produced some of the most influential writing of the twentieth century. We will supplement our extensive reading of Yeats's poetry, prose, and drama with selections from his contemporaries and his successors in an attempt to better understand his place in modern literature and his influence on twentieth-century writing.

ENGL 640: Empire and Archipelago                     F 2-4:52 pm                Siewers

Celtic cavalry riding from the Scottish lowlands to a desperate last-ditch effort to stop the Anglo-Saxons from gaining control of lost Celtic realms in northern Britain. The Germanic invaders encountering awe-inspiring ruins of the old Roman province. Monsters in the fens. Bards and storytellers and monastics in the highlands and western isles reinventing old cultures and native Christianities. Warlords mourning lost ways of life. A new English history and poetry erasing native traditions and appropriating Roman pasts. These will be some of the stories and texts we’ll be examining in relation to changing ideas of place and landscape in the formative years of English literature. In the process, we’ll try to develop our own literary history of place in late classical and early medieval literatures, in the British archipelago with all its fluid boundaries of ethnic and cultural identities. We will read (in translation) the earliest Welsh and Scottish poetry, Cambro- and Hiberno-Latin accounts from the early Irish Sea zone including works by Patrick and Gildas, the Anglo-Latin history of Bede, Adomnan’s Life of St. Columba the quintessential Irish saint based on the Scottish isle of Iona, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon elegiac and allegorical poetry, and the Welsh Mabinogi. We’ll also examine works about Britain from the early Norman period, including Geoffrey of Monmouth and William of Malmesbury, and the origins of Arthurian legend. In the process we will be using Edward Casey’s study of the history of place, The Fate of Place, and works on place and the body by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Luce Irigaray, and Deleuze-Guattari as theoretical guides to our literary mappings of cultural flux in early medieval Britain.

ENGL 658: Shakespeare on Film                TR 2:30-3:52 pm       Peterson, Jean

                                                                        W 7-9:52 pm

When the First Folio of his work appeared a few years after his death, Shakespeare was commemorated by Ben Jonson in terms that framed a debate that has continued ever since. Jonson (in one part of his commemorative poem) referred to Shakespeare as "the Soul of the age," but later in the same poem he said that Shakespeare was "not of an age but for all time." How Shakespeare is both the essence of his time and transcendent of it continues to be an issue of major importance in the understanding of his work. To help us think this matter through, we will also be reading Stephen Greenblatt, who is the founder of a movement in literary study known as new historicism (or cultural poetics.) Greenblatt is also, arguably, the most influential living Shakespeare scholar in America. The goal of the course is to read, understand, and enjoy five plays by Shakespeare-1 Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest--and to consider the impact of new historicism on the current understanding of Shakespeare's work.

ENGL 670: Baggy Monsters: Dickens/Eliot           TR 1-2:22 pm                        Zimmerman

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry James described the famously long nineteenth-century novels as “large loose baggy monsters.” In this seminar, we will explore some of the most famous of these baggy monsters as we read key works by Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Dickens and Eliot are certainly among the most important novelists of the nineteenth-century and arguably of all time. They both weave textured fabrics of nineteenth-century life, attending to central cultural concerns such as the spread of technology, advances in science, the growth of the cities and the related changes in rural life, philosophies of education for both genders and all classes, the struggles of the members of the lower classes, the corruption that can accompany wealth, and the perils of the marriage market. Dickens and Eliot attend no less to their characters’ inner lives, and we will explore the psychological aspects of their novels as well as the cultural aspects. All the while, we will consider narrative concerns such as serialization, the advance of realism and the impact of a strong narrative voice. We will read six novels, most of them quite long, as well as selected essays and short stories, all written by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Charles Dickens. Any student considering this class should be aware of the length and density of the novels, which range from 500 to 900 pages. The writing can seem dense to twenty-first century readers, but the narratives are vibrant and captivating, the characters complex and fascinating, and the prose among the most graceful and finely wrought you will ever read. In addition to primary texts by Eliot and Dickens, we will also read contemporary critical articles on each text.

ENGL 678: Thesis Workshop                                  F 2-4:52 pm                Drexler

This course is designed to provide thesis writers with an opportunity to develop their ideas for the master's thesis, to learn and perfect the art of writing thesis proposals, and to present substantial sections of their work in progress. In conjunction with our discussions of writings produced by class members individually, we will address issues of research design and methodology, bibliography, uses of sources, and theory. We will also consider what qualities make scholarly writing "good" or "bad," as we strive toward producing writing that meets our individual goals as writers. This course will be conducted as a workshop, with students making presentations and responding to each other's work on a regular basis. Students will first submit thesis proposals and then chapters (or sections of chapters) of their work.

ENGL 692: The African-American Novel              T 1-3:52 pm               Gillespie

Although black writers historically were often denied access to public artistic expression, contemporary African American writers are enjoying a renaissance of proliferation and acclaim. In this seminar, we will explore the contemporary African American novel and discuss the questions the genre raises including: what is the relationship between the concerns of African American and American literature generally?, How do gender concerns manifest in this literature?, How do changing definitions of race affect the focus and characterizations of this literature?, What are the aesthetic concerns and conventions of this genre? The course reading may include novels by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Danzy Senna, Percival Everett, Octavia Butler, and Walter Mosely.