2020—2021 English Graduate Course Archive
Fall 2020
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 5018: MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA
Shonni Enelow
CRN 43664
A survey of major American plays from the early twentieth century to the present, examined alongside contemporary scholarly debates in theater and performance studies. Topics of study will include theater and media, theories of spectatorship, ideologies of acting, performance as work and the performance of work, liveness and authenticity, and representations of difference. Playwrights studied will include (but not be limited to) Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Adrienne Kennedy, David Mamet, Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Annie Baker, and Jackie Sibblies Drury.
ENGL 5022 SHAKESPEARE’S HISTORY PLAYS
Stuart Sherman
CRN 43448
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 5111: RACE, RELIGION, AND MONSTROSITY IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Suzanne Yeager
CRN 43446
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/MVST 5112: MEDIEVAL TIME TRAVEL
Andrew Albin
CRN 44721
“If I woke up tomorrow in the Middle Ages...” Why wait until tomorrow? The medieval may be much sooner than you think—it might even be now. Post-historicism, queer temporality, deconstructionist historiography, and affect studies have all revealed the creative intellectual promise of time bending back on itself, especially when brought to bear on texts, objects, spaces, and cultures that occupy the shadowy middle span between modernity and antiquity. In this course, we will build multidirectional conversations among medieval sources and modern theorists that ask how we come in contact with the temporal fullness of the Middle Ages, how the medieval irrupts in the now, and how we and our medieval interlocutors meet across centuries in the flesh of our lived experience. Topics in primary sources include medieval theories of time, ghost and undead narratives, liturgy, civic drama, musical notation, meditations on the life of Christ, and song, lyric, and performance. Theorists/critics may include: Henri Bergson, Alain Corbin, Margreta de Grazia, Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Dinshaw, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, André Lepicki, Carrie Noland, Rebecca Schneider, Eve Sedgwick, Michel Serres, Diana Taylor, Nicholas Watson, Siegfried Zielinski. We will read texts in Middle English; no former experience with the language is required.
ENGL 5115: INTERNSHIP SEMINAR (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
CRN 33500
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 to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.
ENGL 5120: IM/POSSIBLE WORLDS: RACE, SOCIAL DIFFERENCE, SPECULATIVE FICTION, AND NORTH AMERICAN WRITERS OF COLOR
Stephen Sohn
CRN 44127
This course will focus on speculative fiction (penned by North American writers of color)—potentially including popular genres such as graphic narrative, young adult novels—that have often been dismissed as lowbrow or uncultured. We will reconsider them in light of their aesthetic complexity, political texture, racial and social differences, and popular constructs such as aliens, magical objects, vampires, and associated motifs and figures. Course selections may include: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things.
ENGL 5193: The Stuff of Fiction
Stacey D'Erasmo
CRN 44233
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 5225: JANE AUSTEN IN CONTEXT
Susan Greenfield
CRN 43327
In this course we will read all of Jane Austen’s major novels. There are three central goals. The first one is simply to enjoy Austen’s writing (as unsophisticated as that may sound). The second is to consider the historical contexts (political, social and economic) that helped shape her prose. And the third is to survey and analyze some of the recent trends in Austen scholarship, which will, ideally, aid you in developing your own critical skills.
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 8935: DISSERTATION SEMINAR
Maria Farland
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, & THE JOB MARKET(S)
John Bugg
CRN 14025
This 0-credit seminar, open to all graduate students. For Fall 2020 students who would like help with three kinds of professional documents are especially encouraged to sign up: articles for publication, fellowship applications (internal and external), and materials for the job market.
ENGL 8996: MA CAPSTONE
Maria Farland
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 2021
ENGL 5107: From Slave Narratives to Black Lives Matter
Leonard Cassuto
CRN 42246
This course works from the proposition that everything has a history, and we can understand something better if we know that history. To better understand Black Lives Matter, we’ll look at its literary history, with an emphasis on the literature of abolitionism and civil rights. We’ll be reading works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, among others — and then we’ll collaborate to choose works from the Black Lives Matter movement to study together.
ENGL 5115: INTERNSHIP SEMINAR (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
CRN 44277
This seminar is open to graduate students pursuing internships in publishing, museum management, or arts administration during the spring 2021 semester. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies Prof. John Bugg to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.
ENGL 5117: Language, Voice, and Sound in 19th-Century Literature
Lawrence Kramer
CRN 44278
Attempts to record sound have a long history. The first machines to synthesize voice date from 1769. By the time Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, English-language poets, especially in Britain, had begun treating the literary text as a medium of sound recording. The result was a fundamental change in the conception of literature. This course will ask when and how English poetry became aware of itself not simply as utterance or even as rhythmic utterance but as sounding utterance. It will ask what subsequent effects this awareness had not only on poetry but on fiction and the essay. And it will ask how the realization of sound in the text affected the literary representation of auditory experience. We will read a wide range of British poets—including Wordsworth, Shelley, Hemans, Poe, Lear, the Brownings, the Rosettis, Tennyson, and Hardy; some essays and short fiction by Fuller, Dickens, and James; and various essays by critics today who, in growing numbers, are seeking to link literary criticism with sound studies.
ENGL 5212: Asian Diasporic Literatures
James Kim
CRN 44279
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 5252: Exhibiting Latinidad: Curation/Display/Intervention
Robb Hernandez
CRN 44280
Museums have played critical roles in defining Latinidad for mass publics in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, curators and their exhibits can assume great power over our understandings of authenticity, cultural authority, and the historical “truth” about Latinx cultures. By retracing exhibition histories from classic shows like Cuba-USA and the Decade Show to the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time LA/LA initiative, we will confront the different material, textual, and visual dilemmas provoked by museums. We will also ponder alternative exhibition practices for Latinidad’s representation and remembrance in the future.
ENGL 5264: Chaucer
Suzanne Yeager
CRN 45508
This course is an introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry as well as to trends in medieval literary criticism. By reading Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and selections from his mid-length and shorter poems, we will 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. Discussion will also be animated by our exploration of Chaucer’s continued dialogue with his sources. No Prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval history is assumed; however, most of the primary readings will be offered in Chaucer’s highly accessible dialect of Middle English; study of this dialect will help us situate Chaucer’s status as a poet in a triglossic society. Because Chaucher is so commonly associated with a medievalist’s teaching expectations on the job market, we will also explore aspects of syllabus and undergraduate teaching design.
ENGL 5603: ROMANTIC WORKS/AUDIENCES
John Bugg
CRN 45764
This course will focus on the life and work of Mary Shelley (1797-1851). We will begin by considering the profound influence of her parents' writing on her work (her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father was William Godwin), and then move on to consider a range of her works, including History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), Frankenstein (1818), Maurice (1820), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826) and Lodore (1835). We will also read both classic and recent critical works on Mary Shelley, as we explore how her writing engaged with a wide array of political, scientific, literary, and biographical contexts.
ENGL 5622 - Eighteenth-Century Travel
Frank Boyle
CRN 45601
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 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 5959: WRITING A LIFE: A WORKSHOP
Diane Arterian
CRN 44281
“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction,” Katherine Anne Porter famously said. In this workshop we will explore the complicated and sometimes gossamer lines between fiction and memoir. Students will write and critique works of fiction and nonfiction, exploring the contingencies of form, the changing shape of memory, the specific demands of genre, and the choices writers make as they work. We will read such authors as Ann Patchett, Dave Eggers, Joan Didion, David Sedaris, Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, and Mary Gordon, as well as selected critical essays. Students will come away from this seminar with 40 pages of good writing and a new understanding of how and why they want to write.
ENGL 5998: MA CAPSTONE (Independent Study)
Maria Farland
CRN 45053
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.
ENGL 5999: COLLOQUIUM: PEDAGOGY THEORY PRACTICUM
Crystal Colombini
CRN 44282
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 44283
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.