Graduate Studies in English
Spring 2010 Course Descriptions
400- and 500-Level Literature Courses
402 1U/1G DESCRIPTIVE ENGLISH GRAMMAR, D. Baron. MW 10-11:15 (CRN 32124)
same as BTW 402
Area Requirement: None
In this course we will study the English language: how we use it; how it uses us. We will learn and practice techniques for describing English, both its words and sentences and larger elements of discourse in context. We will look at the social, historical, and political forces that shape language and its use. And we will suggest ways to use what we learn about language both in the classroom and in the professional world.
Attendance: This is a discussion course. Your presence is essential, as is your participation: without both of these elements, as Capt. Renault says to Rick in Casablanca, you will find the conversation a trifle one-sided. Worse than that, excessive absence and poor preparation will affect your final grade.
Assignments: there will be a midterm quiz, a final paper, and a final exam. In addition, each student will sign up for a turn to be part of a “class expert” team. The class expert team will give a brief (ten minute) introduction to the topic of the day (expert days are marked with an asterisk in the syllabus) and ask both factual and open-ended questions to start off the discussion.
The course syllabus, all handouts, and study guides will be posted on the class website: www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron/402/402.htm
TEXT: Curzan, Anne, and Michael Adams. 2008. 2nd. ed. How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction. New York: Pearson.
403 1U/1G HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. MWF 9-9:50 (CRN 43198)
Area Requirement: None
Language variation and change from the earliest forms of English to the present day, with emphasis on the rise of Standard English and the social, geographic, and cultural aspects of linguistic change in English.
404 U3/G4 ENGL GRAMMAR FOR ESL TEACHERS, Ionin. TUTH 10:30-11:20 (CRN 43879)
same as EIL 422
Area Requirement: None
This course is designed to help prospective teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) enhance their understanding of English grammar and develop pedagogical approaches to teaching English grammar. This course has two main components: (1) instruction in English grammar, with particular emphasis on those areas that present difficulties for ESL students; and (2) development of pedagogical approaches for teaching English grammar. In order to provide practical teaching experience, the course also offers a tutoring practicum where participants tutor ESL students on topics of English grammar that have been covered in the course, using pedagogical materials that are sound in light of current second language acquisition (SLA) theories, research findings, and teaching methodologies.
416 1U/1G DRAMA OF SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMP, Kay. TUTH 9:30-10:45 (CRN 39243)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
We will sample some of the most interesting and important plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, ranging from the romantic fantasies of Greene and Dekker and Marlowe’s tragedies of ambitious over-reaching through the satiric City comedies of Middleton and Jonson and the dark tragedies of Tourneur and Webster. Class sessions will provide background information about the physical conditions of the theater and about contemporary social contexts which explain the popularity of these dramatic sub-genres, but our primary emphasis will be on the plays' dramatic energy and poetic power.
Class members will be expected to take part in a dramatic reading or presentation of a scene, but acting skills are not required. Coursework will include a 5 page essay, a 10-12 page essay, a mid-term and a final exam.
TEXTS: English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington and others, and a course packet.
419 1U/1G SHAKESPEARE II, Gray. TUTH 11-12:15 (CRN 32137)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
This course aims to introduce you to Shakespeare’s later plays, from Hamlet to The Winter’s Tale. We will explore Shakespeare’s versatility in a range of dramatic genres—tragedy, comedy, and romance—focusing on language and theme alongside plot and character. We will think about his plays both as historical artifacts produced within a specific context and as living texts that continue to be performed today. We will therefore intertwine multiple methods in our analysis of these texts, engaging in close reading of his dramatic verse (which is, after all, often poetry), analyzing historical background and contemporary critical articles (to situate Shakespeare both within his historical time period and within present day critical debates), and performing key scenes. Throughout, we will focus on the way Shakespeare’s plays explore issues of identity and disguise, gender hierarchy and social order, political power and tyranny, and war and nation-formation.
419 2U/2G SHAKESPEARE II, Perry. TUTH 9:30-10:45 (CRN 32140)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
This class will introduce students to plays in various genres written and performed during the second half of Shakespeare’s career. These include several of the best-known tragedies in the western literary tradition (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth), but we will also consider less well-known plays like Measure for Measure, Coriolanus and Cymbeline.
419 3U/3G SHAKESPEARE II, Cole. TUTH 9:30-10:45 (CRN 32142)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
The second and richer half of Shakespeare’s career is examined through very careful readings of nine plays, each selected for the new things it says about his changing interests and developing dramatic skills. The first nine weeks deal with five of the mature tragedies; discussion centers on the plays themselves, but it will also attempt to relate the plays to one another and to the time in which they were written. This section is followed by several weeks on at least two of the dark comedies (where romance turns sour) and several more on the last two romances (where romance turns philosophical). A sixth-week exam covers the first three plays, a 10-12 page paper on one of the dark comedies is due the tenth week, and the final exam includes only the last six plays.
TEXT: The Riverside Shakespeare, Evans, ed.
419 4U/4G SHAKESPEARE II. MWF 12-12:50 (CRN 39227)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
Mature tragedies, dark comedies, and late romances.
423 1U/1G MILTON, Gray. TUTH 9:30-10:45 (CRN 45971)
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
This course introduces you to one of the greatest British writers—John Milton. Milton was a blind seer, a regicidal prose-writer, and an inspired poet. He also wrote arguably the most ambitious English epic, one that aimed to explain the origins of life itself: Paradise Lost. This class will explore Milton’s prodigious and ostentatiously learned output in the context of his own life and the historical turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century that transformed it. We will focus on the complex issues of religion, gender, and politics he engages, looking at his often contradictory responses to the ideas, literature, and men and women of his time. We will also trace his carefully crafted public image, thinking about Milton’s view of the role of poetry and polemic within a revolutionary historical context.
431 1U/1G BRITISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE, Underwood. TUTH 11-12:15 (CRN 32164)
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
The early decades of the nineteenth century were marked by what Lee Erickson has called a “poetry boom.” Publishers paid surprising sums for books of poetry, and poets became some of the most famous (or notorious) celebrities of the age. This course will pay some attention to the history of fiction (the readings will include a novel by Jane Austen). But we will focus on poetry, striving both to appreciate the poetry of the British Romantic period (1789-1832), and to understand the circumstances that gave poets a new kind of cultural authority. Authors will include Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, John Keats, P. B. Shelley, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, and J. S. Mill. Weekly reading responses, two papers, and two exams.
435 1U/1G 19TH C FICTION, Courtemanche. TUTH 2-3:15 (CRN 32170)
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
In the 19th century, British writers took the newly-popular form of the novel and vastly expanded its ambitions, adding cliffhangers, complex moral dilemmas, subtle wit, metaphysical reflections on history, and biting social critique. Many of the novels we’ll be reading are based on a combination of the romance plot (in which a happy marriage solves other problems) and the Bildungsroman plot (in which a young person achieves his or her desires by struggling against a cruel world), but they also deftly undermine and chop up these generic expectations, leading to sudden new perspectives and surprising twists. Readings will include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and several critical essays. These novels are tremendously fun to read, but also very long, so be prepared for a great deal of reading. The course will require one close-reading paper, one research paper, a midterm and final, weekly written assignments, and active class participation.
442 1U/1G BRITISH LIT SINCE 1930, Innes. MWF 2-2:50 (CRN 32177)
Area Requirement: British, 1900 to present and MFA Literature
In “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Theodor Adorno declares that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; in The Postmodern Condition, J-F Lyotard correlates postmodernity with the “decline of narrative.” Together, these two axioms seem to imply that in the twentieth century, the weight of history has crushed altogether the possibility inherent in poetry, fiction, and aesthetics generally. Yet twentieth century British literature repeatedly deploys formal experiments in poetry and fiction in ways that seem calibrated to deflect the determining force of history—an impulse exemplified best by the avant-garde experiments of high postmodernism.
This course will survey late modernist and postmodernist British literature in order to assess how and why literary texts of the period refract history through experimental aesthetics. Our working hypothesis will be that such texts seek to enable new conceptions of history and community: novel ways of thinking about human relations to events and to others.
Assignments will include two papers, two exams, frequent written responses, and a class presentation.
Our reading list likely will include some of the following texts: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show; George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia; Iris Murdoch, Under the Net; Lawrence Durrell, Justine; Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means; B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates; Brigid Brophy, In Transit; J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands; Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry; Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow; W.G. Sebald, Vertigo; selections from theorists Seymour Chatman, Linda Hutcheon, Frederic Jameson, J-F Lyotard, Lee Edelman, Astradur Eysteinsson, Ihab Hassan, Mark Currie, Amy Elias.
450 1U/1G AMERICAN LIT 1865-1914, Freeburg. TUTH 11-12:15 (CRN 39267)
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
The literary history of the postbellum United States contains both the vibrant persistence of romance novels as well as the emergence of realism and naturalism. This course tracks the conflict between these genres of fiction by examining novels, short stories, and essays that also reflect debates by artists and intellectuals over the new task of American literature. American literature after the Civil War, in various guises, reflected the nation’s rapid technological development and industrialization as well as the social and cultural shifts that correlate with these developments. To bring out the significance of these shifts this course will examine how imperial expansion, immigrant labor disputes, and struggles for racial and gender equality unfold within romantic and realistic modes of expression. Authors may include: Henry James, W.D. Howells, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, Theodore Dreiser, Helen Hunt Jackson, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Frances Harper. There will be three formal essays and unannounced essays during class that will be graded. Regular attendance and full class participation is also expected to pass the course.
452 1U/1G AMERICAN LIT 1945-PRESENT, Hutner. MWF 10-10:50 (CRN 32199)
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
This semester’s version of English 452 will concentrate on fiction published in the last ten years. Rather than contemporary novel courses that emphasize experimental or postmodern or graphic fiction, we will concentrate on American realism, the literature of the way we live now. While you will encounter writers you may already know something about, you will certainly be reading some writers for the first time. Some of our authors will be at the peak of their powers; others have begun their careers decades ago and are in their final phases, while still others are only just beginning. Most of the novels we will read have won some prize or been a finalist for another, but, combined they will present a broad and various representation of contemporary realism. Some will be interested in racial or ethnic experience in the US; some will be more concerned with general issues of livelihood and intimacy. Still others will turn to historical settings or exotic locales to make the case about the character of twenty-first century life in the US.
455 1U/1G MAJOR AUTHORS, Loughran. TUTH 12:30-1:45 (CRN 32205)
TOPIC: Melville and Whitman
Area Requirement: American, Beginning to Civil War and MFA Literature
In an era when the U.S. union sprawled from the Atlantic to the Pacific without connecting telegraph wires or railroad lines, at least two great writers—Melville and Whitman—responded by writing VERY LARGE and often disconnected works meant to represent the great size and potential of an emerging U.S. empire. We will scale the sometimes intimidating canons produced by each of these authors step by step, starting with issues of local style and syntax, moving towards close analysis of a single text, and finally placing both writers in cultural context, trying to make sense of their grandness and grandiosity by situating their authors in the expansive and politically divisive historical moment in which they lived. Reading will include autobiographical memoirs, criticism, and, of course, the very good stuff both men wrote: for Whitman, multiple editions of Leaves of Grass, Drum Taps, and Specimen Days; for Melville, Typee, Moby Dick and The Piazza Tales.
455 2U/2G MAJOR AUTHORS, Hansen. TUTH 2-3:50 (CRN 32210)
TOPIC: Hitchcock’s Libidinal Fear
Area Requirement: Film
By focusing on the films that Alfred Hitchcock directed between 1935 and 1960, this course will explore the psychoanalytic and ideological fears that animate some of the most talked about texts in cinema history. Framed by the historical horrors of World War II and the subsequent expansion of American economic and military power, the films of Hitchcock’s most fertile period helped to develop—and simultaneously to conceal—psychological concerns about modern masculinity, sadism, masochism, and consumer culture. By interrogating films ranging from “The Lady Vanishes” and “Rebecca” to “Psycho,” we will attempt to engage not only with the manifest messages of Hitchcock’s cinema, but also with the latent and troubling fears about our society and ourselves that his cinema seems to embody.
The course will meet twice a week in a lab format. Course requirements include two 8 page research papers, 1 in-class presentation, a daily reading journal, and two exams.
455 3U/3G MAJOR AUTHORS, Chai. TUTH 12:30-1:45 (CRN 32215)
TOPIC: DeLillo and Pynchon
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
A detailed look at two of the premier postmodern authors. We’ll begin with Don DeLillo, specifically his most famous novel: White Noise. From Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies, to the Airborne Toxic Event, to Dylar pills that make you happy, to shopping in the mall, to city heat and the most photographed barn in America, we’ll explore the vast array of topics in this novel that make up the chaos of contemporary life, and the strategies by which characters try to navigate it. From there we’ll turn to Libra, DeLillo’s fictional reprise of the Kennedy assassination. Here our focus will be on the endless possibilities for interpretation engendered by any historical event, and how these are complicated by our awareness of the medium through which we get our version of the story—in other words, metafiction. Finally, we’ll explore one of the most ambitious novels to emerge from the second half of the 20th century: Gravity’s Rainbow. Although set in Europe in the last days of World War II, we’ll see how Pynchon ranges freely over space and time to create an intricate weave of people, events, and patterns into which they might or might not coalesce. Some recurrent themes we’ll encounter in the process: an obsession with codes and occult symbolism, the elasticity and even reversibility of time and other numerical sequences, stream of consciousness and the depth of individual subjectivity, imaginative ways to discern connections and/or relationships, and throughout, the effort to preserve and even retrieve forms of human communion despite all the ravages caused by war.
455 4U/4G MAJOR AUTHORS, Mahaffey. MWF 12-12:50 (CRN 44786)
TOPIC: Angela Carter and the Contemporary Women
Area Requirement: British, 1900 to present and MFA Literature
Angela Carter: even the name suggests opposite extremes. An angel and a cart-horse, perhaps; the incorporeal and the beast (of burden). We will read Angela Carter’s novels, short stories, essays, and her polemical work, The Sadeian Woman (perhaps supplemented with a selection by the Marquis de Sade himself). We will also look at the film adaptation of one of her stories that she did with Neil Jordan, now a cult horror classic: The Company of Wolves. The questions we will be concentrating on throughout will include the following: how can we best understand Carter’s critique of contemporary womanhood? To what extent does she, in her fiction, try to shape a new kind of woman, one that is more comfortable with her physical, sexual, and even bestial power? How does comedy operate in her late novels? How can we best understand her creation of a large, farting female protagonist who is half bird, an aerial artist in a circus? What is her vision for “new” women of the future?
Requirements include two short essays and a final exam.
455 G/GG MAJOR AUTHORS, Stenport. TUTH 2-3:20 (CRN 41763)
meets with SCAN 464, CWL 464, THEA 484
TOPIC: The International Playwright: Stringberg in Translation
Area Requirement: None
The international legacy of Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) ranges from the derisive, as in “demented woman-hater,” to the laudatory, “the father of modern drama.” Strindberg’s impact on Western literature and art is indisputable. This course will both introduce Strindberg to a non-Scandinavian audience and explore the scope of his contributions in a comparative, international perspective. The course emphasizes the wide range of Strindberg’s fascinating production, evident in his unique contributions to naturalist and psychological drama, his work as an artist and photographer, and his forays into expressionism and surrealism. Strindberg’s influence on English-language drama will be emphasized. All reading in English.
Course reading includes texts by Strindberg and plays by George Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Sarah Kane, as well as films by Woody Allen
459 UJB/GJB TOPICS IN AMERICAN INDIAN LIT, Byrd. TUTH 2-3:15 (CRN 50271)
same as AIS 459
TOPIC: American Indians, Popular Culture, and Genre Fiction
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
Representations of American Indians have played a significant role in the formation of popular culture and popular genres. From the imagination of Stephen King that grounds horror within “Indian burial grounds” to X-Men comic books, references to American Indian history and characters continue to function as a cultural touchstone within U.S. popular texts. This course examines the intersections between literary and cultural representations of American Indians and the ways in which American Indian authors have reimagined some of the core genres of popular fiction—ranging from historical romance, science fiction/fantasy, horror, and mystery—to not only transform those representations, but challenge the expectations that American Indian literature is a sub-genre within American literature. Texts may include Daniel Heath Justice’s Kynship, Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize, Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer and Stephen Graham Jones’ Demon Theory.
461 1U/1G TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Mahaffey. MWF 2-2:50 (CRN 32225)
meets with GWS 495
TOPIC: Fairy Tales and Gender Formation
Area Requirement: British, 1900 to present and MFA Literatue
What does it mean to be female in contemporary culture, and how is that meaning related to definitions of femininity in other cultures, and at other times? Children are taught the difference between male and female roles, and one of the main ways this instruction takes place is through the pleasurable media of books, tales, and, more recently, films. Yet relatively few children reared on “Sleeping Beauty” know that once upon a time it was a tale about rape (Jane Yolen, in sharp contrast, turns it into a story about the Holocaust); similarly, one set of “Cinderella” stories (the “Donkeyskin” variant) concerns father-daughter incest. The stories currently found in nurseries are often sanitized versions of older, more complex and varied narratives that take many different forms. Reading other cultural versions of a familiar tale throws into high relief the values of one’s own culture. For example, the “Cinderella” of Charles Perrault, designed for the French court, is very different from the much earlier Chinese version: the elegant and fragile glass slipper contrasts sharply with a celebration of small feet in a culture in which it is customary for women to bind their feet. Disney versions of fairy tales, peopled with slim, colorful, singing cartoon characters, differ markedly from the sexually explicit Inuit tales, since the warmth offered by sexuality was necessary for survival. Our overall aim, then, is to understand how sexual identity is constructed differently in different cultures, and to explore the ways that fairy tales work to express psychological reactions to maturation while conditioning both characters and readers to adopt specific social roles in adulthood.
We will look at different versions of such fairy tales as “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Bluebeard,” “Snow White,” and “Hansel and Gretel.” We will also sample Inuit tales, contemporary film versions of fairy tales, and feminist rewritings of these stories by Anne Sexton, Jeanette Winterson, and Angela Carter.Assignments consist of an oral report, two essays (which may involve a rewriting of a fairy tale accompanied by a comparative analysis), and a final exam
461 2U/2G TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Nazar. TUTH 12:30-1:45 (CRN 39304)
TOPIC: Jane Austen and the Culture of Sentiment
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
One of the most striking features of the dynamic critical industry that has developed around Jane Austen’s fiction in the last few decades is a book title that reads “Jane Austen and [something].” We have Jane Austen and Food, Jane Austen and Leisure, Jane Austen and Sigmund Freud but, curiously, no book-length study situating Austen’s fiction in relation to the dominant intellectual culture of her day, “the culture of sentiment” or sensibility that flourished in Britain in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. This omission appears to be the product of the widespread perception that Austen was fundamentally an “anti-sentimental” novelist, who valued the head over the heart, decorum over spontaneity, communal norms over personal preferences. This course seeks to complicate these commonplaces by putting Austen’s fiction into dialogue with key works of literary and philosophical sentimentalism, including Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and William Godwin’s Fleetwood or The New Man of Feeling (1805). You might think of us as collaboratively writing that book, Jane Austen and Sentimentalism, which still hasn’t seen the light of day. Readings from Austen will include the juvenilia as well as Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Persuasion (1818).
461 3U/3G TOPICS IN LITERATURE, Somerville. TUTH 11-12:15 (CRN 39306)
TOPIC: American Narratives of Passing
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
Recent critical and theoretical work on identity has drawn attention to the phenomenon of passing, that is, the movement from one identity to another, across lines of race, gender, or sexual orientation. We will study a range of texts—including fiction, autobiography, and film—that have portrayed or enacted various kinds of passing in the United States. Along the way, we will become acquainted with contemporary theories of identity. Our guiding questions will include: To what extent does the act of passing reinforce or unhinge seemingly natural categories of race, gender, or sexual orientation? What are the connections or disjunctions between closeting and crossing the color line? How might literary texts themselves pass? How do different historical and political contexts shape passing narratives and their reception? To what extent does passing across one axis of difference unsettle other categories of identity? The course format will be primarily discussion, with frequent opportunities for you to shape these and other questions.
465 1U/1G TOPICS IN DRAMA, Barrett. MWF 11-11:50 (CRN 52280)
same as CWL 465
meets with THEA 199/591
TOPIC: Watching Their Flocks by Night: The Chester Shepherds’ Play in Context and Performance
Area Requirement: British, Beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
In this course, we will explore broader sixteenth-century British culture through the paradoxical lens of a single biblical drama, the Chester Shepherds’ Play. Staged by the Painters’ Company as part of Chester’s summertime Whitsun plays, this play depicts the shepherds of Luke 2:8-20 as comic Welshmen feasting, fighting, and singing en route to their encounter with the child in the manger. We will start by looking at the play itself, considering its manuscript variants and textual cruces. Then we will begin a process of constantly widening our frame of reference, situating the Shepherds’ Play in a variety of contexts: Catholic, ethnic, gendered, iconographic, liturgical, national, Protestant, regional, and so on. We will examine how the play fits in with the rest of the Chester cycle, and we will look at other treatments of the shepherds in biblical drama as well as other genres.
470 1U/1G MODERN AFRICAN FICTION, M. Basu. TUTH 12:30-1:45 (CRN 52394)
same as AFST 410, CWL 410, FR 410
Area Requirement: None
“Modern African Fiction” endeavors to highlight the connections and links (as well as the disparities) between representative writings from different regions of the African continent. Indeed, the term modern calls for precisely such an inter-textual understanding. After all, the regions we somewhat loosely territorialize as ‘modern Africa’ are also congruous in so far as they were almost all irredeemably transformed by the experience of colonialism. The term ‘modern’ has in fact since then come to be inextricably tied to the distinct twists and turns of the colonial encounter in various parts of Africa. What Simon Gikandi calls “the colonial factor” will therefore be an important entry point into our comprehension of the isomorphisms between the required texts for the course. We will also take the term ‘modern’ seriously in so far as it emerges from a manner of periodization that has had a great deal to do with the novel as a generic form. As we read for the course, we will thus attempt to understand how African writers have kneaded this particular genre to the specificities of their colonial and postcolonial conditions. Given that this course reads modern African fiction in relation to theorizations of colonial and postcolonial conditions in the continent, we will not only concentrate on developing abilities such as close-reading, comparative analysis, and argumentative logic, but will also attempt to broaden the horizons of our interpretation by allowing the close reading of an individual text to be informed by readings of social structures and political-cultural events.
481 1U/1G COMP THEORY AND PRACTICE. MWF 1-1:50 (CRN 44165)
Area Requirement: Critical Theory for Writing Studies students only. Fulfills no requirement for Literature students.
History and theory of written composition; basic rhetorical principles; and guidance and criticism of student writing.
481 2U/2G COMP THEORY AND PRACTICE. MW 2-3:15 (CRN 52463)
Area Requirement: Critical Theory for Writing Studies students only. Fulfills no requirement for Literature students.
History and theory of written composition; basic rhetorical principles; and guidance and criticism of student writing.
482 1U/1G WRITING TECHNOLOGIES. MW 3:30-4:45 (CRN 44168)
same as LIS 482
Area Requirement: None
Examines the relationship of computer technology to the larger field of writing studies. Topics include a historical overview of computers and other writing technologies; current instructional practices and their relation to various writing theories; research on word processing, computer-mediated communication, and hypermedia; and the computer as a research tool.
504 A THEORIES OF CINEMA, Kaganovsky. TU 3-6 (CRN 43352)
same as CINE 504
Area Requirement: Film
Seminar on influential theories and accompanying debates about the textual/extra-textual mechanisms and cultural/political impact of cinema and related screen media. Contact CINE for a more detailed description.
506 T WRITING STUDIES II, Prior. M 3-4:50 (CRN 37165)
same as CI 564
TOPIC: Writing in Multimodal Genre Systems
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
This seminar (for which Writing Studies 1 English 505/C&I 563 is not a prerequisite) aims to foster an in-depth experience of theory, research, and pedagogy in Writing Studies. It begins with an overview of some central issues that have shaped the field. It then turns to an in-depth examination of a theme—writing in multimodal genre systems—that integrates work on writing processes, genre, and multimodality in different contexts (school, workplace, home, community) and at different levels of development (from pre-school children to adults). Course readings and discussion will explore the theoretical grounds for genre theories, trace empirical studies of multimodal writing processes, sketch the bases for a semiotic approach to literate activity, and consider implications for instruction. In addition to active participation in class activities and regular informal writing, each student will be expected to explore and write on an issue of particular interest in greater depth.
Texts: Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays and readings by scholars such as Charles Bazerman, Carol Berkenkotter, Jay Bolter, Bill Hart-Davidson, Sharon Crowley, Amy Devitt, Judith Irvine, George Kamberelis, David Kirkland, Gunter Kress, Bruno Latour, Kevin Leander, Theresa Lillis, Carolyn Miller, Anthony Pare, Kristen Perry, Louise Phelps, Paul Prior, Kevin Roozen, Jody Shipka, John Swales, Valentin Voloshinov, Stephen Witte, and Anne Wyoscki.
511 R CHAUCER, M. Camargo. TH 1-2:50 (CRN 52284)
same as MDVL 511
TOPIC: Chaucer the Metapoet
Area Requirement: British, Beginning to 1485 and MFA Literature
More than any other English poet of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer foregrounds the nature of poetry and the status of the poet in his work. Through explicit statement, ironic implication, and dramatic juxtaposition, he confronts his audience with competing standards for assessing poetic accomplishment. Some of the terms his metapoetics put in play are traditional, such as the association of successful poetry with formal brilliance (rhetoric) or moral instruction (ethics). Others, such as the accurate representation of lived experience (mimesis) and the aspiration to create poetry in English that matches the prestige (auctoritee) of literature in Latin and French, are more particular to Chaucer’s personality and orientation toward the historical environment in which he lived and wrote. This seminar will explore these and other related issues through selective study of the copious scholarship on Chaucerian (meta)poetics and close examination of Chaucer’s poetry, in particular the prologues and epilogues where such issues are most directly and complexly engaged. Course requirements include participation in class discussion, one or two oral presentations, and an article-length research paper.
524 E SEMINAR IN 17TH C LITERATURE, Stevens. W 1-2:50 (CRN 32264)
TOPIC: The Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
Area Requirement: British, 1485-1660 and MFA Literature
When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good: this course takes a close look at some more lurid and violent tragedies written between 1585 and1638/9 (none of which happen to be written by Shakespeare). Notable highlights from these plays include the severing of a tongue, the presentation of a heart on a dagger’s point, a dance of madmen, and the “much searing” of a woman’s breasts.
Our focus on early modern tragedy will allow us to consider a range of important questions about genre, gender, and the performance of violence. My approach to the teaching of drama also emphasizes theater history, questions of staging and performance, and questions related to the publication and circulation of early playscripts. Plays include The Spanish Tragedy; Edward II; The Revenger’s Tragedy; The Duchess of Malfi; The Changeling; Tis Pity She’s a Whore; and The Fatal Contract.
The class is a seminar, so expect each meeting to involve informal and formal student presentations. Other requirements include one long paper written in two stages and conceived of as a journal article, and one more open-ended project using a non-canonical early modern play of your choice not covered in the class and not available in any scholarly edition. Also expect to make frequent use of EEBO.
TEXTS: Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (eds Bevington, Engle, Maus, Rasmussen); a course packet TBA and/or critical readings available on reserve.
537 R SEMINAR IN VICTORIAN LITEARATURE, Saville. TH 1-2:50 (CRN 32276)
TOPIC: The English in Italy/Italy in England: 1840-1875
Area Requirement: British, 1800-1900 and MFA Literature
Between the 1840s and the 1870s, the Italian Risorgimento—Italy’s determination to unite and free itself from French and Austrian domination prevalent since the Napoleonic wars—became a focus of profound interest to British poets and aesthetes. The efforts of the latter to define their own contribution to the public sphere at a time when the realist novel had caught the popular imagination were coupled with their sense of England’s longstanding indebtedness to Italy as an imaginative resource. Poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Algernon Charles Swinburne who considered themselves members of an international aesthetic community saw Italy’s struggles for national freedom as an opportunity for reshaping British views of civic responsibility at home and abroad. At the same time, Italian exiles and immigrants such as Giuseppe Mazzini and the Rossetti family (supported by British citizens who had experienced protracted residences in Italy like Robert Browning) became a force for stimulating and diversifying a moribund and conformist English aesthetics from within.
In studying the poetic and aesthetic exchanges between England and Italy our primary texts may include Romantic precedents such as de Stael and Byron, prose and poetry selections from writers mentioned above, and possibly their successors (like Henry James). Critical readings will include the work of current theorists on rooted cosmopolitanism and internationalism such as Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah, on Victorian poetry, such as Yopie Prins, on Italian history, as well as a range of critical essays.
543 Q SEMINAR IN MODERN BRITISH LIT, Hansen. TH 12-1:50 (CRN 43359)
TOPIC: Formalism, Modernism, and the Ends of Politics
Area Requirement: British, 1900 to present and MFA Literature
The aim of the seminar will be to assess the links between formalism and the problem of politics in the contemporary academy. Along the way, we will look at the resurgence of “new formalism” and the subsequent debates about close reading between such critics as Marjorie Levinson, Jonathon Loesberg and Isobel Armstrong. Primarily, the course will engage with the revival of formalist theory by providing a genealogy of different literary-critical approaches that have deployed the central concept of formal stylistics. Beginning with Kant, Hegel, and the division between form and content, we will explore the writings of the Russian Formalists (Skhlovsky, Tynjanov, Jakobson, Propp, some Bakhtin), and the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin), but we will also look to the modernist conceptions of form offered by the English critics Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, and Wyndham Lewis before observing how politically ambiguous writers such as Beckett, Nabokov, and Conrad challenge the very idea of a literary politics.
Students will be required to participate in class discussion, write a 20 page paper, and deliver 2 presentations during the course of the Semester.
553 R SEMINAR LATER AMERICAN LIT, Bauer. TU 1-2:50 (CRN 32278)
TOPIC: U.S. Women Modernists
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
This course will be focused on three major movements in women’s writing: high modernism, middle-class modernism, and working-class writing. We will spend roughly five weeks on each topic, and your assignments will include a book review on recent modernist writing, as well as a historical paper on one of the authors we are reading.
Tentative Reading List: Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Lummox;Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady;Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Anzia Yeziereska’s Salome of the Tenements; Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl; Edith Wharton’s A Mother’s Recompense; Age of Innocence; Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun; Gertrude Stein’s writings; Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood; Nella Larsen’s Passing; Edna Ferber’s Emma McChesney series
563 G SEMINAR THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, T. Newcomb. W 3-4:50 (CRN 32280)
TOPIC: Modern Literature and the Industrial-Age Metropolis
Area Requirement: American, Civil War to present and MFA Literature
This course will examine how the growth of the industrial metropolis, as both physical space and social environment, shaped the successive emergence of two dominant paradigms of modern literature, realism and modernism. We’ll use work by such theorists of urbanization as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Marshall Berman, and David Harvey to frame some key questions for a literary-cultural history of metropolitan modernity, such as: how did material alterations in urban space create new categories of experience, and new forms of interaction among genders, races, classes, nationalities? What were the consequences of changing relationships between public space and private space, work-time and leisure-time? How did the 19th-century emergence of metropolitan consumer culture (commodity fetishism, advertising, collecting, market research, conspicuous consumption) affect modern literature? How did transformative metropolitan technologies, and the unpredictable sociopolitical changes they brought, produce new styles of behavior, compulsion, and creation? Where, if anywhere, is God to be found in such a world? We’ll test these questions and others against a variety of literary responses to America’s headlong urbanization between the Civil War and 1940, including works by Poe, Whitman, Melville, Crane, Alcott, Chopin, Sandburg, Eliot, Dos Passos, Williams, Hughes, Millay, among many others.
578 C LIT AND OTHER DISCIPLINES, Fouche. TU 2-3:50 (CRN 39658)
meets with CAS 587
TOPIC: Interpreting Technoscience: Exploration in Identity, Culture, and Democracy
Area Requirement: Writing Studies/Critical Theory
This seminar will examine the ways technoscience (the confluence of scientific practices and technological artifacts) influences and affects human identity, cultural knowledge, and democratic action. This focus will explore historical, contemporary, and emerging interpretations of technoscience as a means to understanding connections between science, technology, and human existence.
581 G SEMINAR IN LITERARY THEORY, Rothberg. W 3-5:20 (CRN 32282)
TOPIC: Trauma, Memory, Justice
Area Requirement: Critical Theory
This course will consider three linked keywords of recent literary and cultural theory: trauma, memory, and justice. In the first section of the course, we will explore the emergence of trauma theory, an approach meant to shed light on the event and aftermath of extreme violence. Working from both classic texts such as Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and post-Freudian interventions by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra, and others, we will address the contributions a theory of trauma can make to understanding modern histories of violence. Because such a theory seeks to describe a form of violence that persists beyond an initial event—a “structure of experience” characterized by belatedness—memory becomes a central category in approaches to trauma and will constitute the second focus of our course. Trauma both troubles ordinary memory and seems to call for new forms of remembrance, testimony, and witness as part of strategies of working through and confronting violence. In taking up the paradoxical category of “traumatic memory,” we will draw on influential work on individual and collective memory by theorists such as Freud, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Andreas Huyssen, Marianne Hirsch, and Saidiya Hartman. Yet, as crucial as memory is in responding to trauma, remembrance alone cannot constitute an adequate response to histories of extreme violence. Such histories also raise questions about justice, that is, about what forms of social practice and organization can address and transform the conditions that have produced trauma in the past and continue to do so in the present. In this third section of the course, we will read theorists of justice such as Jean-François Lyotard, Nancy Fraser, and Adi Ophir and confront questions about commensurability, recognition, redistribution, and representation. Throughout the course, we will also take up feminist, Marxist, queer, postcolonial, and other critiques of the concepts of trauma and memory by scholars such as Alain Badiou, Lauren Berlant, Laura Brown, Wendy Brown, Frantz Fanon, Kerwin Lee Klein, Ruth Leys, David Lloyd, Peter Novick, and Walter Benn Michaels. Such critics raise questions such as the following: What are the political and conceptual limits of trauma as a category? How well does it translate beyond a Eurocentric horizon? Do discourses of trauma and memory always serve the interests of justice or can they turn into catalysts for revenge and further cycles of violence? What categories beyond trauma and memory might contribute to alternative conceptions of justice?
In seeking answers to these theoretical conundrums, we will also weave in readings of specific literary and cinematic examples that explore what Paul Gilroy has called the “underside” of modernity: colonialism, slavery, and genocide. These texts may be chosen from the following list: Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits; Octavia Butler, Kindred; J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace; Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit; Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory; Michael Haneke, Caché; Ghassan Kanafani, “Returning to Haifa”; Claude Lanzmann, Shoah; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound or Higher Ground; W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz; and Art Spiegelman, Maus.
Supplementary recommended texts that students might want to familiarize themselves with ahead of time include: Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question and Anne Whitehead, Memory. This course will count toward the Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies.
582 E TOPICS RESEARCH AND WRITING, D. Baron. M 1-2:50 (CRN 32283)
same as CI 565
TOPIC: Technologies and Words
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
Words may be abstractions, but they are communicated through real-world technologies of writing and reading. The tools we use to write with impact who gets to write and affect the manner and kinds of writing that gets done. Technology also shapes how we read. In turn, our reading and writing practices affect technology. We will examine reading, writing, literacy and technology from a historical point of view, from the dawn of writing to the age of the computer, exploring the different theories of orality and literacy, and looking at the spread of the written word through various communities. We will examine earlier communication technologies (the manuscript, clay tablet, print, typing, and the telephone). We will look as well at the ways in which present-day reading and writing practices are affected by the computer revolution, exploring such topics as responses, both positive and negative, to new technologies; the perennial information glut; class, gender and literacy; the development of virtual genres; changing notions of authorship, text, audience, and publication; changing notions of public and private; the dark side of the web; and the emergence of a transnational web culture.
Online readings will draw from history, anthropology, psychology, education, law, engineering, and computer science. Seminar students will produce a semester project and be responsible for a presentation.
584 T TOPICS DISCOURSE AND WRITING, Kirsch. TU 3-4:50 (CRN 32287)
same as CI 569
TOPIC: Alternative Sites of Rhetorical Education
Area Requirement: Writing Studies
In the last few decades, scholars in rhetoric and writing studies have begun to study rhetorical education in a range of new settings, during different historical periods, and among often marginalized groups. The most interesting and unusual research has included studies of rhetorical activities among small town rural women (e.g., Charlotte Hogg); women’s political organizations after suffrage (e.g., Wendy Sharer); literacy and social change among African American women (e.g., Jacqueline Jones Royster); resistant pedagogies developed by nineteenth-century women teachers of African American, Native American, and Chicano/a students (e.g., Jessica Enoch); rhetorical activities of Japanese Americans imprisoned in Internment camps during WWII (e.g., Gail Okawa); activist rhetorics created by educators teaching working-class students (e.g., Susan Kates); and sites of rhetorical educational in 19th century Black America, such as places of worship and military camps; African American literary societies; sewing circles, and the black press (e.g., Shirley Wilson Logan).
In this seminar, we will examine these and other alternative sites of rhetorical education. We will also discuss the nature of archival research, paying close attention to how identity, place, and cultural memory can intersect with our own lives; how serendipity and creativity can inspire our work; and how archives can resist or re-inscribe existing power structures (Kirsch and Rohan). Students will have the opportunity to engage in their own archival research and study alternative sites of rhetorical education. Students will be encouraged to contribute to ongoing conversations in the rhetoric and writing studies by developing and submitting an abstract for a conference presentation; crafting and submitting a proposal for a book chapter or article; and writing a review of a recently published book. Several colleagues from the Midwestern region will visit our seminar and discuss their scholarship.
593 R PROF SEMINAR COLLEGE TCHG, Wood. TU 1-2:50 (CRN 32290)
TOPIC: The Teaching of Literature
Area Requirement: None
This seminar is designed to help graduate students develop and theorize courses in literary study, focusing on the related practices of lesson-planning, discussion-leading, outcome-assessment, and pedagogical self-reflection. Framed occasionally by readings in educational theory, our discussions will be organized around the following three projects: 1) we will analyze the comparative strengths of different pedagogical strategies in achieving a wide range of curricular goals in the literature classroom; 2) we will develop persuasive powerful ways of describing precisely what we do as teachers of literary and cultural studies, as well as why and how we do it; and 3) we will articulate flexible criteria for designing effective syllabi and assignments for different kinds of courses and texts.
By the end of the seminar, each participant will have designed lesson plans teaching in at least two of the major genres covered in English 200 (and beyond), in addition to producing polished drafts of several documents—including sample syllabi, assignment sequences, statements of teaching philosophy, and the initial elements of teaching portfolios—materials that will be of significant practical use both in the teaching of literature and in preparing for the academic job market. Grades will be based on participants’ final completion of these key documents, and on their consistent, engaged, and thoughtful participation in seminar discussions and workshops.
Creative Writing Graduate Seminars
504 V WRITING WORKSHOP IN FICTION, Howe. TH 4-6:20 (CRN 43388)
Area Requirement: None
Directed projects in fiction writing, either short stories or sections of a novel, with group discussion and critique. There will be a course packet for the class, featuring short stories and essays on the writing of fiction and related topics; there will be a discussion of these readings at the beginning of each class meeting.
506 G WRITING WORKSHOP IN POETRY, Estes. TU 3:30-5:20 (CRN 43390)
Area Requirement: None
Directed individual projects, with group discussion in fiction.
560 NL LITERARY PUBLISHING & PROMOTION, Stanley. Arranged (CRN 43391)
Area Requirement: None
A working practicum designed to teach graduate students the basics of literary journal publishing and to introduce them to career and entrepreneurial opportunities in other types of literary arts organizations. Students will attend weekly editorial meetings, complete weekly reading assignments, and will work 2 hours per week in the 'Ninth Letter' office, reading manuscript submissions and completing various clerical tasks for the journal. Approved for both letter and S/U grading. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite: MFA candidate standing.
563 DW SPECIAL TOPICS, D. Wright. Arranged (CRN 43392)
TOPIC: Creative Nonfiction Writing
Area Requirement: None
Examination of the process of creative nonfiction writing from the perspective of aesthetics and techniques, illustrated from the work of selected authors. This is not a workshop but a directed study. The students will meet individually with the professor and will write a series of essays, among them the personal essay, food writing, travel writing and research-based narrative history.
