Fall 2017

GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES

Intro to Graduate Study (ENGL 400)

Section: 800 #1886
Instructor: P. Jay
3.0 credit hours Lecture
R 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to graduate-level work in literary studies. We will begin by examining the historical development of English as an academic discipline, paying particular attention to how that history is shaped by debates about critical theories and methodologies. We'll use this as a point of departure for studying contemporary critical theory and its relationship to recent trends in literary studies. Particular attention will be paid to the challenge of writing successful seminar and conference papers. In addition, we will review practical advice about choosing your course of study, conducting research, participating actively in class discussion, and thinking ahead to preparing for your M.A and doctoral examinations (and the dissertation for those of you in the PhD program). Requirements will include informal critical commentaries, two short critical essays, an in-class presentation, and a longer seminar paper.

Marxist Literary Theory (ENGL 423)

Section: 801 #5697
Instructor: C. Kendrick
3.0 credit hours Lecture
M 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC

If Marxism is distinct conceptually from other forms of social thought, the difference centers on the key notions of surplus value, modes of production, and class struggle, and early on in the seminar we will review these ideas, which are also problems.  After that, the seminar will be concerned with the following topics, among others: theories of narrative and genre (Marxist and other); debates on the novel and realism; issues of ideology and form; and arguments about contemporary capitalism (late, postmodern, neoliberal, financialized, globalized, postcolonial).  Readings will include the following writers:  Gyorgy Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, Nancy Fraser, Susan Buck-Morss, Raymond Williams, David Harvey, Alain Badiou. 

Chaucer (ENGL 447)

Section: 802 #5698
Instructor: E. Wheatley
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC

This course will focus on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and some of The Canterbury Tales. We will also read works important to Chaucer, such as Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and some of his likely source texts. Critical readings will engage with these works in their historical and literary-historical contexts. Students will learn Middle English grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.

Modern Poetry (ENGL 481)

Section: 803 #5699
Instructor: D. Chinitz
3.0 credit hours Lecture
T 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC

This course will investigate the process by which different ways of creating a modern poetry arose in dialogue with and, sometimes, in reaction against each other. We will investigate such competing and synergistic concepts as Decadence, Symbolism, and Imagism, and the conceptions of modernity, the cultural politics, and the poetic techniques associated with them. These rubrics hardly define a neat field, and we will see that conflicting impulses frequently coexist within the work of a single writer, and that one category of modernism often blurs into another. While considering modern poetry from this generally literary-historical perspective, the course will focus on such key figures as William Butler Yeats, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot.

Modern Novel (ENGL 483)

FROM HARDY TO LAWRENCE: Studying Versions
Section: 804 #5700
Instructor: P. Eggert
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC

This course is mainly in the fiction of the late Victorian to early Modernist period. It brings textual criticism (the study of versions) to bear on your literary criticism. Your habits of close reading will be refocussed 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 interest to students who have completed Textual Studies – English 413-801 or are contemplating taking it in the future.)

Topics in American Lit (ENGL 490)

Regionalism, Racial Identity, and Conspicuous Consumption
Section: 805 #5701
Instructor: J. Kerkering
3.0 credit hours Lecture
W 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC

This course examines how racial identity serves as a marker of elevated class status by enabling “conspicuous consumption,” or the social display of wealth and leisure.  Commencing with recent accounts of this phenomenon, the course then turns to the American 1880s and ‘90s, the period when the drive for conspicuous consumption first began to make identity a luxury item.  The first identities to be consumed as luxuries were the regional identities marketed to the leisure class through regionalist fiction.  In the work of later African-American writers, this course will suggest, the conventions of literary regionalism were adapted to display the identity not just of place but also of race, thereby making racial identity available as an object of conspicuous consumption.