2021—2022 English Graduate Course Archive

Fall 2021

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.
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Required for all incoming PhD students.

ENGL 5118: WRITING THAT HEALS: STORYTELLING LAB
Julie Kim/Sarah Gambito
CRN 45456
How do we heal and recover from illnesses and other bodily and mental challenges? We usually think that this question needs to be answered by science, but this course will consider the interdisciplinary field of narrative medicine and the connections it draws between scientific and humanistic practices of treatment. Narrative medicine holds that stories and storytelling are foundational to healing. Together, we will explore this premise by doing two things. First, we’ll read works about the methods of narrative medicine, as well as relevant stories of illness and healing from the eighteenth century to the present. Second, we’ll write our own stories to experiment with the connections between narration and healing. Additional activities will include workshopping the stories of our peers and working together as a “lab” or collaborative group of researchers on a collective storytelling project. The goal of this course is both to learn about new approaches to humanistic inquiry and to experience how writing can be a creative process of play that feeds into all areas of life, academic and otherwise. Texts may include Rita Charon’s Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, Hans Sloane’s Voyage to Jamaica, Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Kimiko Hahn’s Unbearable Heart, and Danez Smith’s Homie.

ENGL 5194: MASTER CLASS: FICTION AND OTHER ART FORMS
Stacey D'Erasmo
CRN 45543
Neither the writing nor the reading of fiction happens in an aesthetic vacuum. We read, watch, listen, feel, and even taste all manner of other art forms, and these experiences inspire us, move us, and often find their way into what we write and how we write. In this course, we will explore the influence of music, the visual arts, theater, film, and even cooking on the fiction we read and write, and vice versa. Bring your curiosity and your willingness to be changed as a writer by other ways of making art. 

ENGL 5203: THE POSTCOLONIAL MIDDLE AGES
Suzanne Yeager
CRN 45457
The course addresses the multiplicity of ways in which postcolonial theory can be used to illuminate pre-modern texts. Texts to be read in Middle English include the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and Prioress’s Tale, among others, along with medieval texts in translation, such as The Letter of Prester John, and the Beauvais Play of Daniel. These works offer complex views of alterity, conquest, place, space, and performance which are foundational in discussing how the Middle Ages can be viewed as postcolonial.

ENGL 5301: ROMANTICISM AND ECOCRITICISM
Sarah Zimmerman
CRN 45544
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 5717: TRANSATLANTIC WOMEN MODERNISTS
Anne Fernald
CRN 45458
This class looks at gender and modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. We will read a generous selection of women modernists, canonical and noncanonical, representing high modernism and “bad modernism” (to use Mao and Walkowitz’s term), fiction, film, and poetry from the first half of the 20th century. Our transatlantic focus offers a special opportunity to examine multicultural and cosmopolitan modernisms: many women writers in this period were travelers and immigrants. We will also analyze the complex and often fraught relationships among feminist criticism, feminist theory, and theories of modernism, both in the early 20th century and today. Authors include: Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bishop, Una Marson, Jean Rhys, Bessie Smith, and Virginia Woolf.

ENGL 5749: Twentieth-Century Studies: Decolonization and World Literature
Christopher GoGwilt
CRN 46560
Introductory graduate course in the study of selected twentieth-century figures from comparative cultural, literary, and theoretical perspectives. The course will examine the changing contours of literary theory, literary studies, and the status of literature itself in the twentieth century, in light of the contending imperatives of decolonization and globalization. The course will focus on three pairings of writers: Joseph Conrad and W. E. B. Du Bois; Jean Rhys and C. L. R. James; Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Amitav Ghosh. Select works from these writers will be studied in conjunction with critical selections from Fanon, Glissant, Pheng Cheah, and others.

ENGL 5998: MA CAPSTONE
Leonard Cassuto
CRN 45455
Seminar for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone requirement (note: the Capstone requirement may also be fulfilled, as an independent study, during the spring or summer semesters. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.

ENGL 6105: Post-1945 US Literature and Culture
Maria Farland
CRN 46215
This course considers US authors from the post war period--John Hershey, Lorraine Hansberry, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and others--in terms of contemporary cultural trends (suburbanization, the Cold War, censorship, McCarthyism) and countercultural movements (beatniks, hippies, feminists, free speech, antipsychiatry). We examine changing definitions of America’s “mainstream” and “margins” amidst social movements from the 1960s through the 1980s, and analyze the trajectory of new forms of dissent and protest. Topics include the Cold War, the racial politics of suburbanization, the Beats and the counterculture, the civil rights struggle and Black Power, the anti-war movement, environmentalism, the sexual revolution, cultural conservatism, and questions of trauma and memory.

ENGL 5115: INTERNSHIP SEMINAR (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
CRN 33500
Open to graduate students who have secured an internship in publishing or other degree-related fields for the fall 2021 semester. Before enrolling in this Tutorial, you must contact the Director of Graduate Studies to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.

ENGL 6004: COLLOQUIUM: PEDAGOGY THEORY PRACTICUM
Crystal Colombini
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. 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 research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects.

ENGL 8936: ACADEMIC ISSUES: PUBLICATION, FELLOWSHIPS, & THE JOB MARKET(S)
Andrew Albin
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. 
 

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Spring 2022

ENGL 5024: Cultural Studies and Literary Studies: Keywords
Glenn Hendler
CRN 47036
This course is designed to encourage critical analysis of the language we use in the study of literature and culture. Our primary texts will be short essays drawn from Keywords for American Cultural Studies and the other books listed at http://keywords.nyupress.org/; Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society; Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism; and Keywords for Radicals. These essays will draw us to longer works of theory and scholarship; for instance, reading keyword essays on “race” and “racialization” will be linked to major works of Critical Race Theory that they cite. Students in the class can expect to try out forms of research and writing other than the standard critical essay, including but not limited to writing both individual and collaborative keyword essays of their own. 

ENGL 5025 Black Protest from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter
Dennis Tyler
CRN 47073
The history of Black cultural production in the United States is a legacy of protest. Since Black bodies were first considered property and then only fractionally human, claiming personhood through arts and letters is a revolutionary act. This course will consider the canon of African American literature through an expansive definition of protest. We will theorize how the definition of protest has evolved since the 18th century while continuing to inform our own sociopolitical moment. We will find protest in both obvious and unlikely places—from the seemingly conservative poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the nearly instantaneous archive of resistance enabled by social media and 21st century screen technologies. As we interrogate the meanings of blackness and protest, we will also reveal how that history has consistently shaped American identity. Throughout the course, we will encounter narrative, memoir, essay, speeches, poetry, and film.

Here are some of the questions we will consider in this course: What happens to the canon of African American literature when seen through the lens of Black protest? Are protest, revolution, resistance, riot, and rebellion interchangeable? What is the relationship between Black protest and gender? What is the relationship between Black protest and sexuality? What value can we place on Black protest songs? Is there a genre most apt for Black protest? If so, why? How does Black protest instruct beyond Black identity?  What is its political utility? What does it mean to be a “Black protest text”? Who is the audience for Black protest? What do we do with those texts resistant to a Black protest tradition? Ultimately, in this sociopolitical moment, is there a limit to Black protest? How and why? 

ENGL 5119: Early Caribbean Literatures
Julie Kim
CRN 45811
The Caribbean has been called everything from a crossroads to a crucible of modernity. What is the history of the Caribbean, and what is the Caribbean's place in the world? In this course, we will answer these questions by analyzing a wide range of writings about and from the early Caribbean. We will also think about how writers described--or struggled to describe--such developments as the genocide of indigenous peoples, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, and late eighteenth-century revolutions. We will focus in particular on the emergence of new literary forms and modes of expression, including American travel narratives and natural histories, colonial georgics, and slave or freedom narratives. Authors may include Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, James Grainger, John Bartram, John Stedman, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince.

ENGL 5121 Medieval Paleography
Thomas O’Donell
CRN 47037
Reading handwritten sources -- records, chronicles, treatises, Bibles, works of literature, and many other genres and types -- is fundamental for primary source research, especially in premodern periods, and for understanding the basis for many secondary works. In this course, we will develop our ability to decipher and understand handwritten sources by considering the history of medieval handwriting. Weekly exercises will ask students to transcribe (not translate!) medieval sources from a range of genres, in Latin and European vernaculars. No prior knowledge of Latin or medieval vernaculars is required or assumed. We will consider the purposes, preparation, transmission, and preservation of the materials contained in each type of source, with an emphasis on the use of these sources in our scholarship and the tools important for their study.

ENGL 5193: Master Class: Stuff of Fiction
Stacey D'Erasmo
CRN 45809
“’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 5201: Autobiography and Politics
Larry Kramer
CRN 45807
When did writing one's life story become political?  Following St. Augustine's Confessions, most autobiographies until the eighteenth century (despite some notable exceptions) were narratives of religious conversion, and some element of redemption has remained a typical feature.  But by the end of the eighteenth century, autobiography in English had begun to replace redemption with personal development and religion with politics. These two trends were closely intertwined, as we will see in a series of readings that begins with Olaudah Esquiano and William Wordsworth, whose accounts engage respectively with slavery and the French Revolution.  Subsequent readings will investigate the mutuality of public and private life in works by John Stuart Mill, Henry James, Jane Addams, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.

MVST 6225: Old French in the Medieval World: Language Contact, Conquest, and Difference
Thomas O'Donnell/Nicholas Paul
CRN 47034
This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the cultural history of French language and literature during the Middle Ages. Before it was the national language of France, French was a language of empires in England, Italy, Cyprus, and Greece; a tongue of invaders and reformers; and an idiom spread by immigrants, scholars, merchants, sailors, artisans, poets, and romancers. We will explore the diversity of old French, its connections to political power and ideologies, its manuscript contexts, and its contact with other medieval languages and works of literature, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old English, Middle Welsh, and Old Occitan. In addition to interdisciplinary seminar topics and readings, weekly language instruction and fully supported readings from Chrétien de Troyes's Story of the Grail will allow students to gain competence in a primary language for research at the graduate level in several disciplines and perhaps the key to eternal life. Previous experience of old French is not expected; basic reading or speaking of modern French is not required but may be helpful; experience with other older languages is welcome.

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 2020 semester. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.

ENGL 5998: MA CAPSTONE (Tutorial) 
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: Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing
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
Andrew Albin
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.