2019—2020 English Graduate Course Archive

ENGL 5001 – Research Methods
Frank Boyle
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 5102 – Global Postmodernisms
Daniel Contreras
CRN 40215
Global Postmodernisms: This course historicizes postmodernity--or the historical period beginning in 1945 after WWII-- as reshaping the globe into different geographic and political formations after World War II. As the globe starts looking very different various national literatures engage with different questions about nationalism, history, and catastrophe. We will read widely drawing on short fiction from all the continents and writers may include: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, J.M. Coetzee, Michel Houllebecq, Martin Amis, Mo Yan, Gao Xingjian, Salman Rushdie, Mahmoud Darwish, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon.

ENGL 5542 – Early Black Atlantic Archives
Julie Kim
CRN 40440
Building on Paul Gilroy's concept of the black Atlantic, this course will examine the literature and art of the early black Atlantic world. Specifically, it will look at the aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual productions of members of the African diaspora from the long eighteenth century. These productions included poetry, autobiographies, slave narratives, essays, letters, portraits, and novels, which we will analyze to see how they shaped eighteenth-century conceptions of slavery, colonialism, resistance, freedom, justice, human rights, and selfhood. At the same time, we will think, at a metacritical level, about the scholarship and archival work that led to the recovery of this body of literature and art. As many scholars have pointed out, dynamics of erasure and silencing have had a profound influence on what types of black expression have been preserved, and one of the main challenges of doing work on the early black Atlantic world involves countering these dynamics. As such, in addition to reading about archives, we will practice engaging creatively with them for new insights into black thought and life. Early black Atlantic readings will include works by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany. Critical readings will include works by Saidiya Hartman, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Nicole Aljoe, Pablo Gómez, Britt Russert, and David Kazanjian.

ENGL 5775 – Luminous Details
Katherine Lederer
CRN 40538
We take for granted that poetry relies on imagery.  But how exactly do we engage with, and reflect on, the information and the ‘facts’ of the material world? Using exercises, experiments, and readings from contemporary poetry, we will write new work, and revise it, with a focus on transformation and the ‘luminous detail.’ NOTE: This course is open to five undergraduate students with the instructor's permission and five graduate students for a total of ten students.

ENGL 5788 – Memory, Trauma, Narrative
Anne Golomb Hoffman
CRN 40213
Drawing on trauma 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, we will explore the impact of trauma on the distinctively human capacity to represent experience in narrative form. Course texts include Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

ENGL 5905 – Modern Poetry
Rebecca Sanchez
CRN 40217
This course will explore how writers in the first half of the twentieth century responded to modernity through experiments with poetic form. Taking seriously the notion that form is political, modernist poets reimagined the ways language could mean through formal experimentation and interaction with other disciplines and media. By combining close reading (a technique we derive from the modernists) with cultural analysis, we will interrogate the impact of historical events and aesthetic movements on modernist writing, as well as the ways poetic forms actively contributed to the constitution of the modern world. Authors to be studied include Claude McKay, Christopher Okigbo, Gabriela Mistral, Melvin Tolson, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Paul Celan, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.B. Yeats, and Mina Loy, among others. 

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 6212 – MEDIEVAL TO EARLY MODERN DRAMA
Mary Erler
CRN 40702
When we think of early drama, we usually think of the cycle plays, the great civic, multi-part, day-long productions from English towns: York primarily, but traditionally also Chester, Towneley, and N-Town in East Anglia. But scholarship in the last ten years has forced us to rethink that model in ways that investigate the context of these plays. The text we have from Chester is not really medieval but 16th-century, performed after substantial religious change had occurred, and marked by different local religious positions, hence a site of civic conflict. The Towneley plays, it seems, were not a performed cycle at all, but probably a collection of plays from different places, assembled for private reading, perhaps as an attempt to preserve some elements of an old dramatic religious tradition when that religion had fallen out of favor. These are two examples of the way the course will examine the cultural context of late medieval/early modern English drama. A third example: the most profound way in which this drama differs from later commercial drama is in the shift away from community theatre which occurred in London with the construction of the Theatre in 1572. We will explore the economic issues around the emergence of commercial theatre. Before the Theatre was built, who paid for plays? where were they staged? was there a performing community? In addition to excerpts from the cycle plays we will read some moral plays like Manynd and Everyman, some Tudor drama by John Heywood and Henry Medwall, and will finish up with Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus.

ENGL 6215 – Medieval British Historical Writing
Tom O'Donnell
CRN 40216
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 Middle Ages in Britain and include selections from Gildas, Nennius, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, and several French-language romances. Our interdisciplinary discussions will focus on the literary practices of medieval history.

ENGL 8935 – DISSERTATION WRITING SEMINAR
Leonard Cassuto
CRN 40212
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 & Fellowships
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 2020

ENGL 5002 – Critical Theory
Lawrence Kramer
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 5021: Modernism, Cinema, and Literature: Edison to Cuarón
Keri Walsh
CRN 40847
Without cinema, perhaps there would have been no artistic movement known as “Modernism.” This course investigates this premise through the study of a range of films, theoretical texts, and literary works that shed light on a mutual influence: that of cinema on the development of modernist literature, and that of literature on the development of the art of film, from the late nineteenth century through the modernist period and into the present. We will study the works of filmmakers Georges Méliès, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, John Ford, Orson Welles, Wu Yonggang, Maya Deren, Satyajit Ray, Wong Kar-wai, Agnès Varda, and others. Readings will include key works of film history and theory on concepts such as montage, Surrealism, melodrama, and film noir. At each stage, we will consider modernist cinematic aesthetics in relation to literary works such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

ENGL 5115 – INTERNSHIP SEMINAR (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
CRN 31422
This seminar is open to graduate students pursuing internships in publishing, museum management, or arts administration during the spring 2020 semester. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies Prof. John Bugg to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.

ENGL 5193 – Master Class: Stuff of Fiction
Stacey D’Erasmo
CRN 38974
“’The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist,” Virginia Woolf declared in an essay called “Modern Fiction”: “everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.” In this workshop we will explore the process of transforming imaginative musings and life experience into fiction, looking particularly at how memory and place can serve as points of departure. We'll examine how the details of everyday life can be transformed imaginatively into fiction through the use of character, setting, and dialogue. Along the way, we will stop to examine various aspects of craft such as theme, style, plot, and pacing in students' own writings as well as in selected readings.

ENGL 5211 – Intro to Old English Language and Literature
Martin Chase
CRN 40648
This course is an introduction to Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language and literature. Old English was the language of England from the 7th to the 12th centuries, the language in which Beowulf was composed. We will read a representative selection of Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry in the original language, including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, works by King Alfred and Bede, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, and The Dream of the Rood. Students will be introduced to Anglo-Saxon palaeography so that they can read the texts from medieval manuscripts as well as from printed editions.  

ENGL 5315 – Periodization: Early Modern 
Heather Dubrow
CRN 38975
We will engage with the debates about periodization currently central to literary studies and many other disciplines. Though our principal focus will be early modern England, students will have the opportunity to do some readings and perhaps write their seminar papers on the literatures of other periods.

ENGL 5863 – Three American Authors
Glenn Hendler
CRN 38973
In this course we will read works by three important American authors: Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), who produced works of children's fiction, sensational Gothic stories, and realist novels; Mark Twain (1835–1910), who wrote humor, realism, and social satire; and Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), whose characteristic genres included dialect stories, social realism, and the essay. We will also familiarize ourselves with the current critical conversation about each of these writers.

ENGL 5999 – COLLOQUIUM: PEDAGOGY THEORY PRACTICUM
Moshe Gold/Kirk Quinsland
CRN 17980
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 8935 – DISSERTATION 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
Maria Farland
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.