2014—2015 English Graduate Course Archive

ENGL 5001 - Pro. Sem: Research Methods
Julie Kim
CRN 13250, Required
An introduction to English studies at the graduate level, emphasizing bibliography, scholarly writing, and critical intervention. Although the emphasis of the course will vary according to the aims of the instructor, areas covered may also include book history, textual editing, historical research, and other issues of professional concern to graduate students. All incoming doctoral students must take this course during the fall semester of their first year.
NOTE: First year English PhD students are required to take this course in their first semester. One of the two courses, Research Methods or Critical Theory, is required for MA Students; PhD's must take both Research Methods and Critical Theory. This course is restricted to PhD and MA. Students only.

ENGL 5002 - Critical Theory
Keri Walsh
CRN 24217, Required
A representative but not inclusive sampling of key theoretical studies from roughly the past seventy-five years. After reading a series of now classic essays to lay a foundation, the course will consider closely the writings of a small number of influential thinkers, possibly including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, among others.
NOTE: One of the two courses, Research Methods or Critical Theory, is required for MA Students; PhD's must take both Research Methods and Critical Theory. This course is restricted to PhD and MA Students only.

ENGL 5208 - The English Language 1154-1776
Martin Chase
CRN 24218, British 1
This course will deal with the linguistics and sociolinguistics of Middle English and Early Modern English. The beginning date, 1154, is the year of the last entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the year Henry II, the first Angevin king, acceded to the throne. It is as good a date as any to mark the demise of Old English and the beginning of the Middle English period. 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence, marks another turning point, when Early Modern English began to become the English(es) of the present day. This course, which should be of special interest to students of medieval and early modern literature, will examine the ways in which the language developed from the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries. Topics will include dialects and standardization, lexicon, grammar and syntax, phonological change (The Great Vowel Shift), stress and prosody, palaeography and codicology of Middle English manuscripts, and early printing, all with an aim to better understanding and appreciating the literature of these periods.

ENGL 5264 - Chaucer
Susan Yeager
CRN 24265, British 1
This course is an introduction to Chaucer’s poetry as well as to trends in medieval literary criticism. Our goal is not coverage by any means, but to touch on some of the concerns that have animated Chaucer studies: Chaucer’s representation of the social world, religion, gender, and the self. Any analysis of Chaucer’s writing implicitly or explicitly raises a question about the most responsible approach to texts that are now over 600 years old. Indeed, this question has remained constant since the beginning of Chaucer studies. We will, therefore, be very interested in what it has meant and what it means now to read Chaucer historically. We will begin with a discussion of what constitutes historical criticism, both for Chaucer studies andfor literary criticism more broadly, then we will turn to the subtleties of the texts themselves, which stand, of course, at the center of our investigation. No prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval history is assumed, but I recommend that those of you who are unfamiliar with this time period take a look at Maurice Keen's English Society in the Later Middle Ages or May McKisack's The Fourteenth Century before the class begins.

ENGL 5700 - Playwriting Workshop
Cusi Cram
CCRN 23166, Elective or Writing-Crosslisted with MFA Playwriting
The primary goals of the course are to hone basic craft and to create an environment that will guide the writers’ exploration of their individual voices. We will concentrate on four major issues: storytelling, character, structure, and the poetic voice. The course is taught from overlapping perspectives of traditional and alternative techniques. Exercises are rooted instorytelling techniques and character development.

ENGL 5747 - Late Modernism
Rebecca Sanchez
CRN 24266, British 3 or American 2
Focusing on works produced between the 1930s-60s, this seminar will explore how writing in various genres during the latter part of the modernist period responded to ideas and formal techniques that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Interrogating works that often do not neatly fit into received notions of high modernism will enable us to interrogate critical questions of reinvention, disillusionment, lateness and periodicity.

ENGL 5965 - Master Class: Writing for the Big Screen
David Petersen
CRN 24267, Elective or Writing for 5 MA's / 5 Nominated Undergraduates
This course offers an introduction to the fundamentals of screenwriting: scenes, acts, narrative structure, character development, genres, and dialogue, through intensive study of major, award-winning Hollywood films, classics in their genre. Students will read and analyze five outstanding screenplays, and watch films made from them. The final requirement for this course is a completed first act (20-30 pages) of a feature film, as well as weekly assignments.
NOTE: This course is open to five undergraduate students with the a recommendation and five Master's with Writing Concentration or regular Master's graduate students for a total of ten students. For more information on undergraduate enrollment in the class, please click here: Applying to Master Class.

ENGL 5989 - Major Early Modern Texts and the Dynamics of Space and Place
Heather Dubrow
CRN 24268, British 2
Who “owns” the forest in As You Like It or the island in The Tempest—and how and why does ownership take different forms in such terrains? In what ways do space and place within a poem differ if it is read in print, or circulated in manuscript or sung? How do stanzas and similar poetic practices inflect concepts of space and place? How is that process accomplished by culturally specific paradigms and practices--the gendering of certain spaces, the development of nationalism, the reading of NeoPlatonic texts, and so on. This course has two related aims. In discussing questions like those, it will explore developments in space-place theory using methods ranging from intellectual history to materialist analyses to phenomenology to genre theory. But we will also engage with major early modern dramatic and non-dramatic texts from a number of perspectives besides space-place theory. Thus, this class is designed to be rewarding for a wide range of students, including people launching their graduate careers, advanced graduate students in early modern, those doing advanced work in other specialties who want to learn more about the early modern period and space-place theory. Students who are specializing in other fields will have some opportunities to read in and write on those fields. The reading will be about 2/3 lyric and narrative poetry and will also include a few plays by Shakespeare (probably comedies and romances) and possibly one other playwright, as well as a prose romance. Like all my graduate courses, it will include attention to “professionalizing”: we will, for example, practice the effective delivery of conference papers and think about our own roles as current or potential teachers.

ENGL 6004 - Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory/Practice
Moshe Gold/ Anne Fernald
CRN 13269, PhD Req-Teaching; Pass in ENGL 5999
Once students receive a grade of Pass for ENGL 5999, they will be approved to take the second part of the course in the fall semester (when English PhD students begin to teach). The second part, ENGL 6004 Colloquium: Ped Theory/Pr (taken in the fall of the English PhD student's 3rd year), introduces students to different pedagogical approaches and methods.

ENGL 6356 - Shakespeare's History Plays
Stuart Sherman
CRN 24269, British 2
Shakespeare’s first great hit was a series of history plays about the kings who ruled, and the wars they waged, a century and more before his birth. The eight plays produced (Harry Potter-style) over the course of eight years, gave London audiences then-and will give us now-a chance to watch Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare: to see him learn how to pack plays with a pleasure, impact, and amazement, a scene by scene and line by line, with a density and intensity no playwright before or since has ever managed to match.

ENGL 6506 - The Joseph Johnson Circle
John Bugg
CRN 24271, British 2 or British 3
This survey course takes shape around the British bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson, whose five-decade career stretched from the Seven Years’ War to the dawn of the Regency. Johnson published over four thousand titles during this time, in fields ranging from reform politics to children’s literature, from zoology to Baptist dissent, and from lyric poetry to visionary manifestos. His authors included Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sydney Owenson, William Cowper, Maria Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, William Hazlitt, Charlotte Smith, and hundreds more. Attending to what has been referred to as the “Johnson Circle,” we will trace broad orbits in British writing across the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with topics including aesthetics, religious debate, the American and French Revolutions, women’s rights, war, slavery, popular societies, science, and education. In this regard, this course will function as a broad survey of British writing from 1760 to 1820. Along the way, in studying the radiating influence of the imprint “J. Johnson, London,” we will also pay attention to the field of Book History and how it has energized and expanded eighteenth-century and Romantic-era studies.

ENGL 6914 - Home, Exile & Diaspora in Asian American Literature
James Kim
CRN 24272, American 2
This course will introduce students to major works of contemporary Asian American Literature. Possible authors include John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chang-rae Lee, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilyn Chin, and many others.

ENGL 7829 - Fictions of the Public Sphere: American Literature and Culture 1776-1900
Glenn Hendler
CRN 24289, American 1
Using concepts of the public sphere drawn from critical theory, feminism, and political philosophy, this course will examine the development in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture of the gendered distinctions between public and private, domesticity and the market, reason and sentimentality. Several historical problems will structure our theoretical, critical, and literary readings, including: the development of the doctrine of separate spheres, or domestic ideology; the effect of counter-publics, or alternative models of the public sphere, based in social movements such as temperance, feminism, and abolitionism; the political meanings of emotions, especially the key sentimental concept of sympathy; and shifting notions of how the practices of reading and writing literature were supposed to prepare citizens-especially boys and men-for participation in politics and civil society.

ENGL 8935 - Dissertation Writing Seminar
John Bugg
CRN 19290, Prerequisite: Post Comps PhDs
Designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects. Attention will also be given to the preparation of material for academic publication.

ENGL 8936 - Issues in Scholarship and Academia
Ed Cahill
CRN 14025, Highly recommended for PhDs
This 0-credit seminar, open to all doctoral students, will provide a forum in which to discuss the issues that shape the pursuit of a career professing literature as well as the pursuit of a career outside of the academy. Each semester’s combination of guest-presentations and brief, selected readings will vary according to participants’ desires, but typical topics might include the following: General Education and the English Department; Journal Editing and the Intellectual Life; Humanities Education and Globalism; and The PhD in English and the World Outside. Selected readings might include excerpts from Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (2010); Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (2008); Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities ; and Katherine N. Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.

Spring 2015

ENGL 5261 - Sir Thomas Malory: Political, Religious and Literary Cultures of the Fifteenth Century
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
British 1 - Crosslisted with MVST
Malory’s vast Morte Darthur and the wide multilingual reading that went into it is both object of study and the gateway into the troubled fifteenth century in this course.

MVST 5707 - Meditation, Contemplation, and the Spiritual Senses
Andrew Albin
British 1 - Crosslisted with MVST
The late Middle Ages saw an astonishing proliferation of texts, practices, and styles of devotion seeking to draw human beings closer to God through the body. New emphasis on Christ’s humanity and Aristotelian natural philosophy prompted the rediscovery of the five corporeal senses and their cognitive processes in devotional literature. In this course, we will examine the languages, knowledges, desires, and anxieties surrounding the senses in a diverse corpus of texts, probing them for their theological import as much as for their literary design. Major authors: Aristotle, Augustine, Origen, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Richard Rolle, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Meditationes Vitae Christi.

ENGL 5700 - Playwriting Workshop
Cusi Cram
Elective or Writing - Crosslisted with MFA Playwriting
The primary goals of the course are to hone basic craft and to create an environment that will guide the writers’ exploration of their individual voices. We will concentrate on four major issues: storytelling, character, structure, and the poetic voice. The course is taught from overlapping perspectives of traditional and alternative techniques. Exercises are rooted in storytelling techniques and character development.

ENGL 5707 - High Modernism: 1922
Philip Sicker
British 3
An exploration of five major works published in modernism’s annus mirabilis and the literary climate that fostered these seminal texts. The defining novel and poem of the twentieth century—Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, respectively—both appeared in 1922, along with Woolf’s first important novel, Jacob’s Room, Lawrence’s story collection, England, My England, and Yeats’s anthology volume Later Poems, including such works as “A Prayer for My Daughter” and “The Second Coming.”

ENGL 5758 - 20th Century American Autobiography
Elizabeth Stone
American 2
This course will focus on self-representations in print (essays, memoirs, autobiography), multimedia (graphic memoir, documentary, photography) and everyday life (Facebook, selfies, etc.).

ENGL 5777 - Master Class: Literary Magazine Workshop
Sarah Gambito
Writing
The aim of this class is to give students the experience and skills necessary to create a literary magazine in alignment with the most recent and rapid changes in literary consumption. Students will curate, edit and write for CURA, the print and online literary magazine of the Creative Writing program. Instruction will also focus on the marketing, publicity and event production protocols and practices crucial for successful literary publishing. Working collaboratively, students will endeavor to expand the boundaries of the literary magazine by examining the best powers of print and online venues in order to achieve the maximum impact of both.

ENGL 5841 - Early American Media
Jordan Stein
American 1
An introduction to early American literature by way of the transatlantic dynamics of printing, reading, and circulating media before the rise of industrial publishing in the late nineteenth century.

ENGL 5985 - Introduction to Early Modern Studies
Corey McEleney
British 2
An introduction to the major debates, conversations, and approaches in early modern studies, with a focus on what it means to define and contribute to a field, how canons are formed, and what constitutes evidence for a literary-critical argument. Students will be exposed to, and gain practice in, a variety of methodological strategies and techniques: close reading and rhetorical analysis, archival research, theoretical and interdisciplinary work, and textual editing, among others.

ENGL 5999 - Colloquium:Pedagogy Theory/Practice 1
Moshe Gold/ Anne Fernald
First part of 10th Required Course for PhD's
The required 10th course for English PhD students consists of sequenced pedagogy training spanning two semesters. ENGL 5999 is the first part of the Teaching Practicum, which is to be taken in the spring of English PhD student's 2nd Year. This part of the course is taken in the Spring (before teaching), and includes individual interviews, assignment of written work and practice teaching. Each student will have a mentor, complete a portfolio of materials, and create multiple assignments. This part of the course is graded as pass or fail. Once students pass the first part of the course in the Spring semester, they will be approved to take the second part of the course in the Fall semester - when English PhD students begin to teach. This part the "Colloquium" introduces students to different pedagogical approaches and methods. The second part of the course is registered as ENGL 6004 Colloquium: PED Theory:Pr.

ENGL 8935 - Dissertation Writing Seminar
Ed Cahill
Prerequisite: Post PhD Comps
Designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects. Attention will also be given to the preparation of material for academic publication.