Simon Critchley, in his book The Book of Dead Philosophers, argues that thinking about death is fundamental to our being human: "To philosophize, then, is to learn how to have death in your mouth," But how do we acquire “death in our mouths”? How do we think death? And what does this thinking have to do with literature, with reading and writing? This course will examine these questions.

Reading List: 
Being and Time — Martin Heidegger
Introduction to a Reading of Hegel — Alexandre Kojève
The Station Hill Blanchot Reader — Maurice Blanchot
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe—Edgar Allan Poe
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Taught by Jeffrey DeShell.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. 
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

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The term “Renaissance” means “rebirth.” But rebirth of what? In this class, we’ll look at the new ways in which English writers began to explore familiar questions about the nature of desire, the limits of power, and the relation of individuals to structures of community, family and faith. How might emergent forms like the public stage play or the epyllion - an imitation of sexy Classical myths - allow writers to work through these questions, while simultaneously reinventing what literature is and does? Reading and thinking together, we’ll encounter girls disguised as boys, sonnets about animals, and men who fall in love with statues. Believe it or not, this is the stuff that shaped English literature.

Taught by Dr. Dianne Mitchell.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: British Literature to 1660

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Designed to give students time and impetus to generate fiction 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. 

Taught by Marcia Douglas.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. 
Requisites: Restricted to English Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

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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. 

Taught by Khadijah Queen.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. 
Requisites: Restricted to English Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

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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. 

Taught by Dr. Mary Klages.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted:  
Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. 
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses
MA Designation: Required for 1st Year MAs, Elective 

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What does it mean to undertake graduate studies in English in 2019? The objective of this seminar, which has both conceptual and applied components, is to give each student the opportunity to consider how their intellectual pursuits and professional plans fit into to the broader issues at the heart of the study of English and the humanities in the twenty-first century and how these, in turn, inform their individual academic goals.

We shall draw on and select together a wide range of sources—scholarly publications, blogs, periodicals, guest speakers—to weigh the state of the discipline and discuss such topics as interdisciplinarity, digital humanities, the politics and economics of higher education, the globalization of the study and teaching of English, climate and the humanities, and the place of the humanities outside academe (the list of topics may vary depending on students’ interests).

Alongside these big-picture questions, we shall also consider the nuts and bolts of graduate research and the academic and alt-ac job markets. Students will have the opportunity to explore different forms of academic writing, including abstracts, conference papers and posters, writing samples, fellowship applications, book reviews, and scholarly articles as well as other options, if/as needed.

Each student will, in consultation with the instructor, design and complete an individual or group project based on their professional interests, either within or without academe. Projects will then be brought into the public sphere using the method best suited for the dissemination of the final product: conference-style presentations, poster sessions, webpage, actual submission to a publishing venue, and so on.

Reading List: G. Semenza, _Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities_; miscellaneous articles; professional periodicals such as _The Chronicle of Higher Education_.

Required of all MA students in English.

Taught by Dr. Catherine Labio.

Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses
MA Designation: Required for 1st Year MAs

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This course has two goals—to introduce you to Mexican and LatinX cultural forms and theory, mostly literary, from the 18th to the 21st century. The second is to explore theories of documentality, necropolitics and spectrality, in order to explore how Mexicans have engaged and been constituted by discourses of what I am calling “un/documentality.” By exploring the necropoetics of “un/documentality,” we will engage how “acts” across historical, political and aesthetic boundaries constitute and reveal “traces” of an un/documented self. In doing so, we will juxtapose myriad cultural forms, mainly print narratives and some film, in order to chart the complicated ways in which Mexicans and other Latino groups have engaged and located themselves within US documentary culture. Along the way, we will also locate important liminal moments in Latin@ literary, political, cinematic and cultural history. By the end of the course, I hope we will have a strong grasp of Mexican film, letters, history and the political, gendered, and racial formation of Mexicans and Latinos/as in the US.

Taught by Dr. John-Michael Rivera.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term. 
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses
MA Designation: Multicultural/Postcolonial 

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Introduces graduate level study of Romantic, Victorian, Modern and Postmodern writing. Emphasizes a wide range of genres, forms, historical background and secondary criticism. Cultivates research skills necessary for advanced graduate study. Topics will vary. 

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term. 
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Section 001: The Decadent 1890s

MA Designation: Poetry Intensive

Taught by Dr. Emily Harrington.

Section 002: Modernism in Britian 

This course is a survey of British modernism. Like all surveys, it will necessarily have gaps and omissions. Notwithstanding the limitations of the genre, this course aims to do the following: first, to introduce you to some of the key British texts that have been written in the time period usually called modernism (roughly 1900-1950); and second, to give you a sense of how literary periodization within modernism has been constructed, from the Edwardian to the high modernist to the late and midcentury modernist periods. Although our thematic concerns are likely to emerge out of the texts themselves and thus should be both plural and varied, one thread we will pursue throughout grapples with a longstanding concern in modernist criticism: that is, the politics of modernist form. Given that the modernist era coincided with both massive political turbulence and major ideological battles—from the rise of communism and fascism to the decline of liberalism to the breakdown of empire to the onset of two world wars—how did modernist aesthetics respond to and refract these political questions? What kinds of ideological implications follow from modernist experimentations with form?

Texts are likely to include some of the following: (a) in the genre of poetry, World War I poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Graves, and Wilfred Owen; T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and other shorter poems; and selected poems by W.H. Auden (b) in drama, plays by George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett; (c) novels by E.M. Forster (Howards End), Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim); Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier); Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse); James Joyce (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day); Evelyn Waugh (Black Mischief), Elspeth Huxley (Red Strangers), and Mulk Raj Anand (Coolie); (d) non-fictional writing by George Orwell (Road to Wigan Pier); and (e) possibly documentary films by the General Post Office Film Unit. While our main focus will be on the primary text, we will also read a range of theoretical and secondary criticism by Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Perry Anderson concerning the question of the politics of modernism. We will also assess the usefulness of periodizing categories, such as late modernism and midcentury modernism. Assessment will include participation; response papers; a presentation; a shorter paper based on the presentation; and a longer research paper. Students will also be expected to conduct some archival research in groups using the Modernist Journals Project and will present their findings during the semester.

MA Designation: Post 1800

Taught by Dr. Janice Ho.

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John Milton is among the most important and gifted poets to have written in the English language.  His poetry (and prose) are centrally occupied with questions about the nature of personhood and about the claims, obligations towards, and risks associated with collective life.  Milton’s efforts to understand what it means to be a person and what it means to live a life engaged with other persons in acts of collective governance are advanced in relation to the social struggles leading up to the English Civil War, the experiment of founding a Commonwealth, and the experience of revolutionary defeat in the wake of the Restoration of Charles II.  This seminar will track Milton’s early development as a poet and his initial efforts in lyric poetry, sample some of his extensive writing in prose—focusing especially on pieces that illuminate his commitment to the English Revolution—and will culminate in a careful study of his primary poetic achievements, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.  Given the scope of Milton’s imagination, our discussions necessarily will be wide ranging, though we’ll be concerned especially to address the political, legal and theological contexts that impact his poetic vision, and the formal resources Milton brings to bear on the project of representing persons and communal life.

Taught by Dr. David Glimp.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term. 
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Graduate Courses
MA Designation: Pre-1800 Poetry Intensive 

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Beowulf is much stranger, sadder, and more timely than you think. Experience the poem in its original language, using the skills built in Introduction to Old English (Engl 4003/5003)! Students will produce daily translations, and seminar-style class discussions will involve both linguistic and literary aspects of this enigmatic poem.

Reading List: Beowulf

Taught by Dr. Tiffany Beechy.

MA Designation: Elective

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