2018—2019 English Graduate Course Archive

ENGL 5001 - Research Methods
Stuart Sherman
CRN 13250
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 5019 - Staging Blackness: Black Drama in the African American Literary Tradition
Scott Poulson-Bryant
CRN 37611
This course will embark on a literary, historical, and performance-oriented exploration of African American literature through the study of black drama and the ways in which the genre contributes to the African American literary tradition. Starting at the post-bellum/pre-Harlem period, we will discuss, among other topics, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements, the renaissance of black women writers in the 1970s, and the New Black Aesthetic. We will engage in close readings of dramatic texts as well as literary criticism and performance theory that present key issues in African American cultural thought. Major authors will include but not be limited to August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Suzan-Lori Parks, Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Lynn Nottage, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston.

ENGL 5180 - Anthologizing Poetry in the Middle Ages
Thomas O’Donnell
CRN 36597
This course surveys important medieval poetry collections in several different languages in order to explore the shifting relationships among poetic expression, verse collection, and book production during the Middle Ages. How and why did medieval people collect poetry, and how should manuscript context guide our interpretation of individual works? Some tuition in Middle English will be provided; translations will be available for literature in Old English, Latin, French, Welsh, and Occitan.

ENGL 5791 - Poetry of Witness
Elizabeth Frost
CRN 37526
Poets have always sought to address social, personal, and political challenges—upheaval, trauma, and change. But how exactly do we practice writing poetry as witnesses of our own time and of our own lives in context? In this course, we will read and write poetry that seeks to bear witness in a wide range of forms and to an array of social/personal contexts.

ENGL 6004 – Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory Practicum
Moshe Gold/Kirk Quinsland
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.

ENGL 6234 - Race, Religion, and Monstrosity in Medieval Literature
Suzanne Yeager
CRN 36226
The medieval taste for the exotic has introduced many audiences to a range of monstrous beings, from ferocious giants and dog-headed men to the peace-loving sciapod. Medieval studies of monstrosity have often been linked solely to the pre-modern understanding of the exotic East, and have been viewed as attempts to theorize the different human “races” found there. Moreover, crusading further complicated the discourses of monstrosity in the perception of non-Christian religious Other who was perceived, as Debra Higgs-Strickland put it, “as ugly as sin.” Yet, the medieval language of monstrosity was not always limited to travel narrative, nor to the pejorative, for it was used to describe heroes, saints, even the Christian deity in far more familiar contexts than many would imagine. In this course we will examine the discourse of monstrosity as a complex critical lens through which pre-modern writers asked important questions of race, religion, civic virtue, and human morality. In our study, we will read selections from Pliny, Augustine, and others before moving through a range of texts, including the Beowulf manuscript, medieval drama, romance, and Mandeville’s account.

ENGL 6641 - Reading and Teaching the Nineteenth-Centure Novel
John Bugg
CRN 37835
In this course we will consider the nineteenth-century novel from the interfused perspectives of readers and teachers. Our remit will be the British novel across a relatively broad span of decades: Maria Edgeworth’sCastle Rackrent (1800), Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ;(1818); Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871/2). After reading and discussing each novel we will then turn to consider the various ways that it might be taught in the college classroom. And for each novel, both our readings and our conversations about pedagogical approaches will be informed by critical articles on the works themselves and on broader issues in nineteenth-century studies. This seminar is open to all graduate students, but because the structure of the course will require an unusual amount of active student participation, please keep in mind that silent spectatorship will not be possible.

ENGL 6888 - Reading the Indian Ocean World
Fawzia Mustafa
CRN 35278
A new configuration of study has emerged in the last decade or so known as Indian Ocean Studies. It employs a robust interdisciplinarity to study the cultural flows and encounters over time of the peoples and traffic of the Indian Ocean and the formations of its vast littoral. This includes exchanges in trade, commerce, and war between the East African littoral and Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and the South East Asian archipelago including China. The migration of populations, the slave trades and slavery, establishment of overseas or expatriate settlements, the emergence of lingua franca (such as Kiswahili), maritime life, and the spread of technology and creation of empires and colonies are studied in their interrelation. This course will focus on the archives, the literature, writing (including histories) and expressive practices (including film, music and performance) that this confluence of peoples has created in over more than two (actually seven) millennia. Starting with the earliest extant documents from Antiquity, to the contemporary scholarly and creative work of writers such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Barlan Pyamootoo, Monique Agénor, Kuo Pao Kun, Isabel Hofmyer, Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nuruddin Farah and Yvette Christianse, we will spend the semester “reading” the Indian Ocean world.

ENGL 6914 - Asian Diasporic Literatures
James Kim
CRN 36225
This course will examine the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and empire as they are imagined in major works of Asian American/Asian diasporic literature and culture. Some figures we may examine include Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Jessica Hagedorn, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Young Jean Lee, and John Yau.

ENGL 7001 - Early Modern Lyric Poetry and Lyric Theory
Heather Dubrow
CRN 37579
What is lyric poetry? The course will explore the transhistorical and transcultural challenges of defining and analyzing lyric. What cultural and critical work is done when poets, critics, anthropologists and so on affix a generic label? Why is lyric distinctively tricky—and intriguing—to identify? What are the implications of this mode for cutting-edge questions about subjectivity, gender, affect, and the material text, as well as for more longstanding but recently contested concerns about the workings of genre and the relationship of poetry and song? And in what ways are all these questions also historically and culturally specific?
Our reading will focus on early modern English poetry, including about eight of the major poets of the period (e.g., Wyatt, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and Phillips) and also some less known work like poetry from miscellanies. It will, however, also encompass some work on lyrics from other periods and countries. Students whose specialty is lyric from another era may write on it in their final paper; students engaged with creative writing can substitute a project in it for one of the shorter assignments (though not the seminar paper). We will deploy—and evaluate—a wide range of critical methods, including cultural critique, study of the material text, and the new formalisms.
As this description suggests, the course is tailored to students with a range of different backgrounds and interests. It is designed to be valuable for people interested in lyric poetry written in other eras and in form and genre in general. It will also provide intensive work on the major English poets of the period for both specialists and non-specialists. As in all my graduate courses, we’ll work together on techniques of “professionalizing”—e.g., beginning to publish, delivering conference papers successfully.

ENGL 8935 - Dissertation Seminar
Leonard Cassuto
CRN 19290
This 0-credit seminar is 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.

ENGL 8936 - Academic Issues: Publication
John Bugg
CRN 14025
This 0-credit seminar, open to all doctoral students, provides 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. The focus for Fall 2018 will be academic publishing: the course is strongly recommended for students who wish to prepare an article for publication.

ENGL 8996 - MA Capstone
Leonard Cassuto
CRN 19758
Required course for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone assignment. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.

Spring 2019

ENGL 5002: CRITICAL THEORY
Christopher GoGwilt
CRN 27431
A broad sampling of recent critical approaches, grounded in selections from classical theories of mimesis, romantic aesthetic theories, and modernist theories of form.

ENGL 5226: LANGLAND’S PIERS PLOWMAN AND THE POETRY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
CRN 36126
Chaucer’s great contemporary, William Langland, writes a different, equally brilliant and fascinating kind of verse, but is not harder to read than Chaucer. Langland’s dream-vision poem, Piers Plowman, composed, like Chaucer’s works, in late fourteenth-century London, treats many of the things Chaucer skirts or omits. “Piers Plowman!” is, famously, one of the rebel slogans from the 1381 uprising, and Langland’s accounts of social unrest, some forms of religious argument and conflict, policy and practices regarding poverty and his critique of social structures and experimentation with alternatives give us a different Middle Ages from Chaucer’s more court-centred writing. Langland also offers some challenging early visions of social justice that can often interrogate our own society’s priorities and assumptions. This course will put reading Piers Plowman, arguably the greatest single medieval English poem, at its center, while paying due attention to its context in other texts and in the poem’s surrounding world.

ENGL 5331: EARLY MODERN SCEPTICISMS
Corey McEleney
CRN 36124
A survey of the various forms of skepticism circulating in early modern English culture, with particular attention to the way skepticism gets enacted formally as well as conceptually in prose and drama of the period. Writers to be studied will likely include Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Nashe, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and others.

ENGL 5778: FLAWLESS/FREEDOM/FORMATIONS: WRITING ON RACE, GENDER AND POPULAR CULTURE
Scott Poulson Bryant
CRN 36277
This is a class about creative non-fiction writing as cultural reportage. In this class we will read a survey of cultural reportage—primarily reviews, profiles, editorials, opinion pieces—for textual, cultural, and aesthetic analysis to think about the ways that race—and intersectionally, gender and sexuality—operates thematically and politically in that writing. Our study of this writing will impact the main focus of this class: It is a writing workshop, in which each student will present her or his work for critique. Writing assignments will be expected of each student and possibly lead to the production of a class-produced blog or magazine at the end of the semester.

ENGL 5832: SLAVERY IN AMERICAN FICTION
Leonard Cassuto
CRN 37100
The course focuses upon depictions of slavery in American fiction during the years before the Civil War. We will read a selection of novels by blacks and whites, men and women, all concerned with the intensifying debates over "the peculiar institution." We will focus on the turbulent and troubled decade of the 1850s; our exploration this time of increasing sectional tension through fiction will spotlight the birth of the African American novel and its dialogic engagement with the burgeoning literature of race in the United States. Authors include Melville, Stowe, Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, among others.

ENGL 5861: GENDER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Maria Farland
CRN 36258
This graduate seminar explores a variety of discursive and social forces that have shaped and constructed gender difference in America since the early nineteenth century. Stressing that sex can only be understood in terms of its historical contexts and the cultural meanings assigned to it, the readings examine the transformation of ideas about gender and sexuality between 1830 and 1930. During this period, pioneering sexologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists began to elaborate detailed classifications and categories for sexual difference and behavior. Readings demonstrate how literary, medical, and social-scientific representations of gender and sexuality organized the ensembles of beliefs, concepts, and ideas that have come to define modern individuals. Sample authors include Dickinson, Whitman, Wharton, Frost, and Plath.

ENGL 5999 – COLLOQUIUM: PEDAGOGY THEORY PRACTICUM
Moshe Gold/Kirk Quinsland
CRN 17980
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 the year before the student begins 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/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 subsequent fall semester (ENGL 6004).

ENGL 7021: ROMANTICISM AND ECOCRITICISM
Sarah Zimmerman
CRN 36123
In the work of Raymond Williams, Jonathan Bate, and others, the field of British Romanticism made important contributions to an early ecocriticism. We will consider how this work participated in the growth of an interdisciplinary body of environmentalist studies that includes Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, Timothy Morton, and Monique Allewaert, and Anne-Lise Francois. Our historical questions will focus on how the period’s writers developed an acute attention to their natural environments in the midst of a “second scientific revolution,” the enclosure acts, urbanization and industrialization, the rise of a global tourism industry, and imperial expansion. Authors, artists, and tourists alike employed the popular aesthetic traditions of the sublime, the beautiful, and picturesque in viewing their surroundings. We will concentrate on authors such as Edmund Burke, Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Clare. We will also spend some time on visual media, including book illustrations, and the experiments of Constable and Turner on (respectively) clouds and sunsets in the light of new scientific understandings of the atmosphere.

ENGL 8935: DISSERTATION WRITING SEMINAR
John Bugg
CRN 15661
This 0-credit seminar is 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.

ENGL 8996: MA CAPSTONE
Leonard Cassuto
CRN 20785
Required course for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone assignment. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.