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.

 

 

 

English 402 examines the practices of teaching college composition and the theories that inform these practices, familiarizing students with the professional work of composition and rhetoric. As we explore composition pedagogy, students will begin designing their own writing courses and defining their teaching philosophies. Course requirements include the design of a first-year composition course (syllabus, schedule, assignments, etc.), a composition class observation and reflection, and a series of reading response papers. This course is required for all doctoral students who will be teaching UCWR 110 and is strongly recommended for all graduate students who want to use their degree to teach composition courses.

 

 

 

 

One of the most influential and debated figures in modern literature, T. S. Eliot is known for his pioneering experimental poetry and for his later work expressing Christian feeling. His critical writings dominated the study of literature for half a century; his plays ran on Broadway; his poems for children became the musical Cats, for which he won a posthumous Tony Award. Eliot has also long been a controversial figure, early on because of his radical modernism, later because of the peculiar conservatism of his politics. (Peculiar: for example, he defended the British class system as essential to the transmission of culture, yet he was also consistently anti-capitalist.) His expressions of anti-Semitism have troubled readers for decades; occasional racism has been noticed more recently; questions about misogyny have been raised as well.

 

Over the past 15 years, a great deal of Eliot’s work has been published or collected for the first time: nine volumes of letters (and still counting), a two-volume scholarly edition of his poems, an eight-volume Complete Prose, and over a thousand love letters that had been sequestered for a half century. These “new” publications emerging from the archives have shaken up entrenched views of who Eliot was and what he stood for, reigniting intense discussion of a literary figure critics thought they had long fathomed. Eliot is now proving to be interesting ground for scholars working in sexuality and gender, ecocriticism, decolonial studies, and other areas of contemporary concern.

 

In this seminar, we will study a broad range of Eliot’s poems, plays, and essays in their literary and cultural contexts, confront the controversies, and examine the new editions. We will try to understand “what the fuss is about”—meaning both why Eliot’s work has been so important and why aspects of his legacy have been so contested—with the goal of working toward our own conclusions.

 

This course will focus on the concept of the world in Shakespeare’s drama. Taking the complex and evolving understanding —both geographical and cosmological—of the world in Shakespeare’s England as a starting point, we will explore the way Shakespeare’s plays exploit and foreground early modern theater’s reliance on worldmaking. The relation between early modern reevaluations of the known world will guide our inquiry into Shakespeare’s worlds. Along the way we will consider how an appreciation for the emergent sense of a global economy in the 16th and 17th centuries helps make sense of the tension between the stage perceived as an insular English cultural milieu and the expansive fictive worlds projected in Shakespeare’s plays. Recent theoretical work in the areas of world-making, global exchange, and early modern cosmology will inform the seminar throughout. Plays may include: As You Like It, Henry V, Coriolanus, King Lear, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest.Requirements will include a conference-style presentation, an archival project, some short written assignments, and a seminar paper.

 

 

 

 

Born one year before the first patent for a steam-powered press, Edgar Allan Poe lived during a time of rapid transformations in communications technology. This course will offer a survey of Poe’s literary works with a focus on his immersion in the world of industrial printing. As a professional writer, printer, and editor, Poe was profoundly shaped by upheavals in technology. This course will combine the study of Poe’s own writings with scholarship on the history of industry, considering how developments in printing machinery shaped Poe’s professional prospects and artistic vision. Throughout, we will seek to use Poe’s works as a starting point for a broader consideration of the relationship between literature and technology. However, we will no doubt also find plenty of time to explore by the weirdness and wonder of his writings, which today are among the most popular authored by any nineteenth-century American.

 

 

 

This course will focus on historical, cultural, textual, and methodological dimensions of Latinx literary study. We will begin with some of the earliest literature in English published by Mexican American and Puerto Rican writers in the United States, where new national and cultural identities are being formed. Texts from the 1970s to 1980s will trace the origins of the Chicano movement and its attention to identity and resistance. More recent works will address theoretical aspects of historical writing, genre, psychoanalysis, sexual and gender identities, and horror. The authors I’ve chosen to study bridge Chicanx, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban American, and mixed-race perspectives from María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Julia de Burgos, “Zeta” Acosta, Arturo Islas, Junot Díaz, Daisy Hernandez, Carmen María Machado, Justin Torres, and Ana Castillo. Assignments will include three brief papers and a final project. Each of these assignments can be collaborative, creative, and comparative in hopes that you will find overlap with your own goals for literary study as well as new ways of expressing and circulating the work that we do.