2015—2016 English Graduate Course Archive

ENGL 5001 - Research Methods
Stuart Sherman
CRN 13250, Required for all first year PhDs and must be taken during the fall semester of their first year.
Master's students may take Research Methods or Critical Theory (ENGL 5002).
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.

ENGL 5345 - Theatrical Enterprise in Early Modern England
Mary Bly
CRN 28400, British 2
This course will offer a survey of English theatrical enterprise from the 1590s to the 1640s. The playing companies will serve as an organizing principle for study of dramatists including Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe.

ENGL 5616 - Romanticism and Private Life
Sarah Zimmerman
CRN 27459, British 3
This course considers the literary responses of a range of Romantic-era writers to two significant pressures on privacy in early nineteenth-century Britain. First, renewed agitation for parliamentary reform in the post-war era prompted intensified governmental repression of political dissent, including what John Barrell has described as the “politicization of private space.” Second, the early nineteenth century witnessed the definitive emergence of “modern celebrity culture,” as Tom Mole and others have recently defined it. Our writers include Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, and John Clare.

ENGL 5622 - Eighteenth Century Travel
Frank Boyle
CRN 27327, British 2
This course is concerned with European travel and the use of travel tropes in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature and other discourses, and in particular the ways the experience of travel from a period sometimes referred to as an “Age of Discovery,” informs the travel metaphors — the “discoveries” — of the period sometimes referred to as the “Age of Reason.” A central question of the course will be, How is the cultural relativism born of the recounting of the experience of travel reflected in the language and the literary works of the eighteenth century?

ENGL 5788 - Memory, Trauma, Narrative
Anne Hoffman
CRN 27328, elective
Drawing on memory studies, psychoanalysis, and narratology, this interdisciplinary course explores issues of narrative representation in literature and film. Recognizing that memory is the result of the interplay between past and present in the lives of individuals and of groups, the course examines the impact of trauma on narrative expression.

ENGL 5849 - Approaches to Pre-1900 American Literature
Glenn Hendler
CRN 27329, American 1
An introduction to recent Americanist literary scholarship, comparing and contrasting methodologies that have been brought to bear on three or four important works of U.S. literature published before 1900.

ENGL 5919 - 20th Century American Novel: A Violent Survey
Daniel Contreras
CRN 27330, American 2
Combining the sweep of a literature survey class and the thematic core of a seminar, this course will move through the twentieth century novel in the United States examining different modes of violence. We will include war novels along with novels of manners. Beginning with James and Wharton and their dissection of social violence, we will move through the realists (London; Dreiser), the Depression and labor struggles (Steinbeck), WW2 (Mailer; Vidal) and the postwar period (Salinger; Bowles) as it leads into the postmodern novel. Possible authors also include: Ellison, Vonnegut, Pynchon.

ENGL 6004 - Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory Practicum
Moshe Gold/Anne Fernald
CRN 13269, Required 10th course for PhD Students. To register, contact the graduate administrator after receiving a passing grade in the first part of the Practicum, 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: Pedagogy Theory/Practicum (taken in the fall of the English PhD student's 3rd year), introduces students to different pedagogical approaches and methods.

ENGL 6224 - The French of England: Texts and Literacies in a Multilingual Culture
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
CRN 29066, British 1
French of England helps prepare graduates in medieval disciplines deploy the newly important multilingual paradigms for the study of medieval English and related cultures. It looks at the rich and still under-researched francophone corpus (c. 1000 literary texts and large bodies of documentary records) composed and/or circulating in medieval England and related regions from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. French was a major regional and transnational language in England, used in literature, governance, administration, culture, trade, and the professions. Taking francophone literary and documentary culture into account changes our paradigms for English medieval literary history and prompts new thought about the relations between literature, literacy, and language.  Aiming to move as rapidly as possible from the pains of language-learning to the pleasures of reading text, the course combines a weekly linguistic practicum with a literary seminar and runs from 4 to 7 p.m. on Tuesdays. Previous experience of Old French is not required; basic reading or speaking of modern French is useful; experience with other languages is also sometimes enough of a help. This course will also explore early French uses of late Old English. If in doubt about whether your language experiences will be helpful, please email [email protected].

ENGL 6231 - Late Medieval Women
Mary Erler
CRN 27332, British 1
The course will study women as producers and consumers of literature, that is as writers and readers. Instead of examining women as subjects of literary representation, we will use non-literary disciplines--social history, bibliography, iconography--to recover elements of women's lives in order to understand their involvement with reading. Like much current medieval scholarship, the class will employ cultural perspectives in which literature, history, and visual materials illuminate each other.

ENGL 6575 - The Early Atlantic Novel
Edward Cahill
CRN 28843, American 1
This course will explore novels about America and Americans in the Atlantic world published during the long eighteenth century, including works by Behn, Defoe, Winfield, Rowson, Imlay, Foster, Tyler, Brown, Tenney, and Sansay. By considering a range of contexts, including the British tradition of picaresque and sentimental fiction, the theory of the novel (Lukacs, Watt, McKeon), and theories of Atlantic culture (Roach, Gilroy, Dayan), it will explore the history of the early American novel in terms of race, slavery, commerce, migration, mobility, and the many contingencies of colonialism in the Americas. Please email the Director of Graduate Studies directly ([email protected]) to enroll in this course.

ENGL 8935 - Dissertation Writing Seminar
Instructor TBD
CRN 19290, Open to all PhD's post 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.

ENGL 8936 - Issues in Scholarship and Academia
Instructor TBD
CRN 14025, Strongly recommended for PhD Students. Open to MA Students.
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.

ENGL 8996 - Master's Capstone Independent study with no assigned classroom hours.
Exit requirement for MA.
Instructor Director of Placement and Professional Development
Students will convert an existing 12-20 page class paper into a 20-25 page essay, revised for (theoretical) submission to a specific academic journal. In transforming a course paper into a prospective article, MA students will be required to review journals in the field, choose one, develop a critical methodology appropriate to that scholarly publication, and adapt their work to its specific editorial norms. Students will work under the supervision of the Director of Placement and Professional Development in English and must follow instructions as specified on the Master's Capstone webpage.

Creative Writing

ENGL 5177 - Master Class: Writers as Shapers: The Short Story
CRN 27325, This course is open to 5 English Master's students who may self-register and 5 undergraduate English majors with writing concentration students who receive an email recommendation from the Director of Creative Writing and who will then be registered by their dean. For Master's students, this course counts towards an elective requirement. For more information on undergraduate enrollment in the class, please write to [email protected].
Second-year PhD students may apply to enroll with the written permission of their advisor.
A short story can be constructed in an unlimited number of ways and each week we will explore the formal possibilities that are available to us. We will study the choices we have as writers—of narrative point of view, character development, beginnings, dialogue, description, structure, pacing, detail, plot and resolution. We will isolate and inspect strategies that published authors have used. Students will produce and workshop their own fiction from exercises. In the conversation between student writing and the studied literature we will hopefully arrive at a greater sense of writers as shapers, sculptors of the raw material of story.

ENGL 5700 - Playwriting Workshop
Cusi Cram, This course is open to English Master's students and counts towards an elective requirement. Open to a maximum of 2 non-THEA Master's students with approval. Interested students will be required to submit a writing sample and interview with the Program Directors. Please email [email protected] for more information. Second-year PhD students may apply to enroll with the written permission of their advisor.
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 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.

Spring 2016

Literature

ENGL 5002 - Critical Theory
Lawrence Kramer
CRN 27431, Required for PhDs. For MA Students, either this or Research Methods ENGL 5001 is required.
A representative but not exhaustive 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.

ENGL 5536 - 18th Century Novel I
Susan Greenfield
CRN 27433, Fulfills a British 2 requirement.
This course will focus on English novels from the first half of the eighteenth century. Our main goal will be to analyze and compare the novels. But we will also consider the larger debate about how to define the novel as a form. Until recently, Defoe, Richardson and Fielding were considered the “fathers of the novel.” Lately, however, many critics have pointed out that, in their time, female authors such as Behn and Haywood were as popular and important as the men who are now canonized. But women’s works tend to be different, less concerned with individual subjectivity, and more interested in traditional romance and scandal. When the novel is defined in terms of the male authors it looks very different than when women’s works are included, and some critics have suggested that this is precisely why women’s novels have been ignored.

ENGL 5634 - Modernists/Victorians R 5:30 - 8 p.m.
Chris GoGwilt
CRN 27434, Fulfills an American 2 or a British 3 requirement.
This course examines landmarks of Victorian literature and modernism, exploring breaks and continuities between the Victorian and the modernist moments. Offering a survey of literature from the 1840s to the 1960s, the course will consider theoretical arguments about the status of the “classic” in literary history, and specifically as these define the fields of Victorian studies, modernism, modernity. The focus of this semester’s seminar will be the work of Emily and Charlotte Brontë set in counterpoint with that of Jean Rhys and William Faulkner, a contrast of classic Victorian and Modernist texts mediated by W. E. B. Du Bois and Joseph Conrad. Canonical literary and theoretical debates about these writers will be framed by contemporary issues raised by the interventions of the poet Claudia Rankine (Citizen) and the critic Lisa Lowe (The Intimacies of Four Continents) who will be visiting Fordham during the semester.

ENGL 5742 - Milton's Major Works T 4 - 6:30 p.m.
Eve KelleR
CRN 27430, Fulfills a British 2 requirement.
This course will aim to offer a reasonably intensive study of Milton's major poetry and prose in the context of contemporary controversies in religion, politics (both social and domestic) and natural philosophy. We will also pay attention to the development of and developments in the enormous industry of Milton Studies. Requirements for the course include one set of study questions to be used by the class to direct discussion, one oral presentation, a book review, and a term paper.

ENGL 5838 - African American Print Culture T 4 - 6:30 p.m.
Jordan Stein
CRN 27515, Fulfills an American 1 requirement.
How does the study of African American literature change when seen from the perspective of print culture? And how does the study of print culture change when focused on African American archives? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African Americans participated in a rapidly emergent print culture as authors, editors, printers, readers, teachers, and librarians, among other roles. At the same time, African Americans frequently furnished the subject matter for this print culture, in ways they did not always control. This seminar will explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. It will draw on a range of primary materials related to African Americans, and seminar participants will combine these investigations with readings of recent work bridging critical race studies and material culture. Together we will ask how the methodologies of print culture might help us reconsider familiar notions of authorship and identity, and how African American materials might transfigure conceptual standbys of print culture studies such as circulation and publics.

ENGL 5839 - Literary Darwinism M 5:30 - 8 p.m.
Lenny Cassuto
CRN 28742, Fulfills an American 1 or an American 2 requirement.
This course will explore the diverse impact of Darwin's big idea on American literature and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection had a seismic impact on the natural science of his day, a practice then closely intertwined with religion. The vibrations spread through the social sciences- resulting in what we now call social Darwinism-and literature registered the tremors. Through readings of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and their contemporaries, we will consider the myriad effects of Darwinism on the American worldview.

ENGL 5999 - Colloquium: Pedagogy THEO/PRA 1 T 2:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Moshe Gold/Anne Fernald
CRN 17980, Required for PhD Students.
Some sessions of this course will be held at the Lincoln Center campus. Please allow for travel time when setting up your schedules.
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 6215 - Medieval British Historical Writing F 2:30 - 5 p.m.
Tom O'Donnell
CRN 27483, Fulfills a British 1 requirement.
History-writing was fundamental to medieval and early-modern literary sensibilities, but in its relation to truth, genre, and identity, medieval history differs dramatically from contemporary understandings of the discipline of history. This course will introduce you to the major historiographical thinkers and practitioners of the English Middle Ages and include selections from Gildas, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, and the Middle English Brut.

MVST 5095 - Medieval Pilgrimage R 2:30-5 p.m.
Richard Gyug and Suzanne Yeager
CRN 28764, Fulfills a British 1 requirement.
“Medieval Pilgrimage” is a new graduate seminar, team taught by Dr. Richard Gyug and Dr. Suzanne Yeager. Over the course of the semester we will focus on a variety of medieval pilgrims and their destinations, ranging from the well-known shrine at Compostela to those places mainly frequented by local audiences such as the shrine of St. Foy. In this seminar, we conceptualize pilgrimage broadly, entertaining a variety of aims for travel, and also considering the pilgrimage form as a purely conceptual exercise (seen, for instance, in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville) as well as those with more practical aims – such as the pilgrim’s guide to Jerusalem supplied by William Wey. We will also consider relics and the process of shrine-making and promotion in translatio accounts. Through the work of medieval as well as contemporary scholars of pilgrimage, we will consider pilgrimage anthropologically as well as a component of a variety of religious and political ideals of the Middle Ages. Readings include Egeria’s Letter, Guibert of Nogent’s treatise on relics, promotional materials of the crusading era, The Marvels of Rome, the Liber Sancti Jacobi, the Mandeville writer, the Voyage of St. Brendan, Edith and Victor Turners’ twentieth-century work on pilgrimage, and many others.

MVST 6209 - Themes in Pre-Conquest Literature T 11:30-02:00 p.m.
Martin Chase
CRN 28618, ​Fulfills a British 1 requirement.
This course is an advanced-level seminar on the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England. We will read (in Old English) a variety of texts from the period, including poetry, homilies, saints' lives, and chronicles. Substantial attention will also be given to Anglo-Saxon palaeography and relevant critical literature, with the aim of providing students with the resources needed for scholarly study of Old English. Some prior knowledge of Old English is expected.

ENGL 8935 - Dissertation Writing Seminar W 5:30 - 8 p.m.
Instructor TBD
CRN 15561, Open to all PhD's post 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.

ENGL 8996 - Master's Capstone Independent study with no assigned classroom hours.
Instructor Director of Placement and Professional Development
CRN 20785, Exit requirement for MA.
Students will convert an existing 12-20 page class paper into a 20-25 page essay, revised for (theoretical) submission to a specific academic journal. In transforming a course paper into a prospective article, MA students will be required to review journals in the field, choose one, develop a critical methodology appropriate to that scholarly publication, and adapt their work to its specific editorial norms. Students will work under the supervision of the Director of Placement and Professional Development in English and must follow instructions as specified on the Master's Capstone webpage.

Creative Writing

ENGL 5700 - Playwriting Workshop R 1 - 4:30 p.m. Offsite Location
Cusi Cram
CRN 23301, This course is open to English Master's students and counts towards an elective requirement. Open to a maximum of 2 non-THEA Master's students with approval. Interested students will be required to submit a writing sample and interview with the Program Directors. Please email [email protected] for more information.
Second-year PhD students may apply to enroll with the written permission of their advisor.
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 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 5777 - Master Class: Literary Magazine Workshop W 9 - 11:30 a.m.
Sarah Gambito
CRN 25019, This course is open to 5 English Master's students who may self-register and 5 undergraduate English majors with writing concentration students who receive an email recommendation from the Director of Creative Writing and who will then be registered by their dean. For Master's students, this course counts towards an elective requirement. For more information on undergraduate enrollment in the class, please write to [email protected].
Second-year PhD students may apply to enroll with the written permission of their advisor.
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.