Fall 2015 Graduate Course Descriptions
Fall 2015
GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES
Intro to Graduate Study (ENGL 400)
Section: 800 #1989
Instructor: J. Kerkering
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC
This course introduces incoming graduate students to important issues in the profession of literary studies. It offers insights into current critical theories and methodologies as well as discussion of research techniques and bibliographic methods. Students will write weekly response papers and annotated bibliographies, one short paper (6-8 pp), and a longer final paper (10-12 pages).
History of the Book to 1800 (ENGL 412)
Section: 801 #5644
Instructor: E. Wheatley
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC
This course will examine the history of written and printed texts from their beginnings to 1800, including such topics as book production and distribution, early ideas about textual editing, literacy, copyright, and censorship. Students will make use of the rich collections of primary source materials in the Newberry Library as the basis for much of their research. (Students based near the Lakeshore Campus can reach the Newberry easily by taking the free shuttle bus to the Water Tower campus and walking about 10 minutes to the library at 60 W. Walton St.) Assignments are: a project based on one of the Newberry’s medieval manuscripts with a presentation to the class which will be written up as an essay of 10-12 pages, an oral report on a historical topic relating to book history that will be written up as a paper of at least 10 pages; and a final project on a topic of the student’s choice that will be presented to the class and written up as an essay of 15-20 pages.
Seminar in Individual Authors (ENGL 433)
Section: 802 #5645
Instructor: M. Clarke
3.0 credit hours Lecture
R 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
In this seminar we will read all of Emily Brontë’s extant works, i.e., Wuthering Heights, some 150 poems, and a few diary papers and essays. Our reading of the works will be informed by study of a representative selection of reader responses, beginning with Brontë’s contemporaries (including her sister Charlotte), and moving through various major works of 20th and 21st century criticism. Our readings will include feminist, political, historical, formal, biographical, and other approaches to Brontë’s writings, with particular emphasis on the subjects of nature, psychology, imagination, morality and spirituality. We will also examine the extraordinary contemporary interest in the Brontë family that continues to generate plays, songs, films, novels, and blogs, and that has made Haworth such a popular destination for literary tourism. Since this is a seminar, students will lead classes by providing reports and questions for discussion. At the end of the semester, each student will present a work-in-progress version of his or her seminar paper to the class, which will be critiqued by fellow students before being revised and submitted.
Poetry of the Romantic Period (ENGL 471)
Section: 803 #5646
Instructor: S. Jones
3.0 credit hours Lecture
T 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
In this seminar we’ll read romantic poetry, along with selected criticism and theory, with a focus on textual materialities. Orrin Wang has pointed out that Jerome McGann’s “fifteen-year-long development of a theory of textual materiality” can be seen as “the ‘positive’ reading of literature which should ‘follow’ the negative critique that The Romantic Ideology carries out against Romanticism’s idealist mystifications” (2000, 83). A philological attention to the cultural history of textual forms and versions originated with the romantic poets themselves. Studying the production, transmission, and reception of embodied texts reveals varieties of immanence, materiality, and object-oriented awareness that are often in (literally) productive tension with the well-known romantic tendencies toward transcendence and otherworldliness. Watch Jones’s website (http://stevenejones.org) for the syllabus.
Modern Novel (ENGL 483)
Section: 804 #5647
Instructor: P. Eggert
3.0 credit hours Lecture
W 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
This course mainly in the fiction of the late Victorian to early Modernist period brings textual criticism (the study of versions) to bear on your literary criticism. Your habits of close reading will be refocus upon the texts of versions of individual works by Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Henry Lawson, Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. The textual ‘lives’ of these works also inhabited the lives of their authors and, more fluidly, the social and literary currents of their period. We will find ways to correlate this cluster of literary concerns. There will be opportunity to concentrate on individual authors, works, or theoretically on the phenomenon of versions and their representation in scholarly editions. (This last concentration may be of value to students who have completed Textual Studies – English 413-801 or are contemplating taking it in the future.)
Rethinking Nostalgia in Contemporary African American Literature (ENGL 496)
Section: 805 #5649
Instructor: B. Ahad
3.0 credit hours Lecture
M 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM LSC
Contemporary African-American literature and culture is largely defined by the relationship it bears to the historical past. Pivotal moments in American history, particularly the Civil War era and the Civil Rights/Black Power movements, provide the basis for creative “remembrances” of a past never experienced. This course will examine novels, films, and visual works by recent African-American artists who are interested and invested in re-envisioning the black historical past in order to critique and make sense of socio-political inequities in the present. Often deemed “apolitical” and “retrograde,” nostalgia is not a term generally associated with progressive ideas and politics . However the past few decades, in particular, have witnessed broad artistic representations of the black historical past as a way to both redefine and reimagine the status of black subjectivity in the 21st century. Students will write a précis, an annotated bibliography and a final research essay (20-25 pages). Given the advanced nature of this course, students will also be expected to co-facilitate class discussions.
