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Spring 2019 Graduate Courses

Content List: Spring 2019 Graduate Literature Courses

ENGL 5013-001: Intermediate Old English I (Spring 2019)

This course is the payoff for having learned the grammar of Old English in Introduction to Old English (which is the prerequisite for the course unless you see me for permission)! You will continue to develop your skills in Old English reading and translation as you read shorter canonical texts in verse and prose, such as riddles, charms, and shorter poems such as The Dream of the Rood and The Seafarer. Students will produce idiomatic translations for every class, write short assignments considering the lit...

ENGL 5029-001: British Literature and Culture Before 1800, Slavery and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Spring 2019)

In 1790, the planter-historian William Beckford claimed that Jamaica was “one of the richest jewels in the crown of Great Britain.” In the eighteenth century, slave-grown sugar was Britain’s most important colonial commodity, and Caribbean colonies, her most prized economic possessions, more valuable in gross economic terms than the Thirteen (American) Colonies. The rise of chattel slavery in the Caribbean, supported by labor from Africa and capital from Europe, not only restructured socio-economic life in ...

ENGL 5029-002: British Literature and Culture Before 1800, Beowulf: The Culture and The Critics (Spring 2019)

The Old English poem we call Beowulf has long been held as a kind of canonical “beginning” for English literature, though in more of a “prehistoric” sense than a foundational one. English departments liked to have an Anglo-Saxonist around to expose students to Old English as a way to inculcate a sense of a long history, of firmly rooted origins so dim as to be unrecognizable, uncivilized. As claims to tradition, to patrimony, and to cultural legitimacy have surged to the forefront of national consciousness ...

ENGL 5059-001: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Forms of Victorian Poetry (Spring 2019)

The Victorian period was a time of tremendous poetic experiment. Browning and Tennyson are credited with inventing the dramatic monologue, and innovations in the verse novel and the epic by Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and William Morris rival the period’s prose novels. At the same time, Victorian poets revitalized standard lyric forms such as the sonnet and the ode, stretching them to their very limits. This period saw what Meredith Martin has called the “prosody wars” in which battles raged over whe...

ENGL 5059-002: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Bloomsbury Group (Spring 2019)

Course Description: Both celebrated and maligned, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-known English artistic coterie of the twentieth century. This course will examine some of the works of the individuals who made up this charmed circle, such as prose writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Vita Sackville West, and Lytton Strachey; artists Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Duncan Grant; the economist John Maynard Keynes; and art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The course will focus on Bloomsbury's influence ...

ENGL 5109-003: The Early American Novel (Spring 2019)

Incest. Seduction. Suicide. Abandonment. Immolation. Cross-dressing. Revolution. For fun, toss in ventriloquism and hauntings. Welcome to the early American novel. Even such a simple welcome raises all sorts of questions: at what point does America become “America”? what role does literature play in that transformation? at what point does America actually begin to develop a literary tradition? and, what makes that tradition recognizably American? We will set the stage to approach these questions with a seri...

ENGL 5139-001: Global Literature and Culture, Post/Colonial Fictions of Development (Spring 2019)

“Development”—and its myriad cognates, including “underdevelopment,” “uneven development,” “developing nations,” “human development index” and so forth—has been the central paradigm framing colonial and postcolonial geopolitical and economic structures over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The aim of this graduate course is twofold: first, we will trace the history and evolution of the term “development”; its historical impact on colonial, postcolonial, and international forms of governance; and it...

ENGL 5169-001: Multicultural/Postcolonial Studies, Ralph Ellison (Spring 2019)

Ralph Ellison may be the preeminent black American author of the twentieth century, though he published only one novel, 1952’s Invisible Man. Over a career that spanned more than half a century, Ellison published two essay collections, wrote dozens of articles, and delivered numerous speeches, but he never published the second novel he had been composing for more than forty years. This seminar provides an opportunity for close and comprehensive study of the oeuvre of a single writer. We’ll read all of Ellis...

ENGL 5459-001, 002: Introduction to the Profession (Spring 2019)

Introduces purposes, methods and techniques of professional scholarship in English. Provides an overview of the discipline, including traditional areas of research and recent developments. Teaches students how to use research, bibliographic, and reference tools to prepare papers for conferences and publication. Required of all MA students in English. MA-Lit Course Designation: Required

ENGL 5529-001: Studies in Special Topics, Teaching English (Spring 2019)

Studies special topics that focus on a theme, genre, or theoretical issue not limited to a specific period or national tradition. Topics vary each semester. MA-Lit Course Designation: Elective, B (Technologies/Epistemologies)

ENGL 5529-002: Studies in Special Topics, The Geopolitical Renaissance (Spring 2019)

This course tests the usefulness of assemblage theory, actor network theory, and similar approaches, for our understanding of international relations in the English Renaissance. Our primary focus will be on the work of a number of Renaissance literary authors who depict a variety of forms international interaction--dynastic conquest, colonial or imperial expansion, exploration, commerce, intellectual exchange, and so forth. We will approach such questions in relation to texts by authors such as Thomas More,...

ENGL 5549-001: Studies in Special Topics 2, Spacetime in the US Millennial Novel (Spring 2019)

Positioning itself at the crossroads of contemporary literature, geography, and new materialist philosophies, this course will explore how American millennial fictions map and navigate, construct and alter, inhabit and evacuate spacetime; and in tandem it will consider how theoretical texts on space and time (re)conceptualize these categories. In the wake of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene (in which the divisions between nature and culture, human and extra-human scales have been destabili...

Content List: Spring 2019

ENGL 5229-001: Poetry Workshop (Spring 2019)

Designed to give students time and impetus to generate poetry and discussion of it in an atmosphere at once supportive and critically serious. Enrollment requires admission to the Creative Writing Graduate Program or the instructor's approval of an application manuscript.

ENGL 5239-001: Fiction Workshop (Spring 2019)

Writing is never done in a vacuum; it occurs always in context. Often fiction writing is provoked by contact with other art forms like painting, music and film. If composition is a series of decisions about what goes where, shouldn’t the translating of decisions from painting, music and film into narrative language be possible? And if it is possible, how can we go about it? Or, to start from the other direction: how can we weave our obsessions with music, painting and film into our fiction writing? The Gree...

ENGL 5299-001: Studies in Fiction, Women and Representation in Modernism (Spring 2019)

This will be an experiment in reading and studying a strain of modernist art created by women that questions the stability and efficacy of the terms ''Modernist," "art," "create" and "woman." We will pay attention to artifacts, objects and texts from Paula Modersohn-Becker, Claude Cahun, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Simone Weil, and Maya Deren. Class participation, a class presentation and seminar paper required.