Spring 2015 Graduate Course Descriptions
Spring 2015
Graduate-level COURSES
Teaching College Composition (ENGL 402)
Section: 800 #1537
Instructor: M. Bradshaw
3.0 credit hours Lecture
M 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
English 402 examines the practices of teaching college composition and the theories that support those practices. We begin by looking at how writing programs are positioned within English departments and within universities and then move to an exploration of major pedagogical movements in the discipline. As we explore different pedagogical approaches to teaching composition, students will work to develop their own teaching philosophies. Assignments include writing weekly response papers, creating sample assignments, lesson plans, and a syllabus, and crafting a formal teaching statement. ENGL 402 is mandatory for Ph.D. students who will be teaching UCWR 110, but it is also a good class for MA students who are interested in teaching college composition at junior and community colleges.
Textual Criticism (ENGL 413)
Section: 801 #4063
Instructor: P. Eggert
3.0 credit hours Lecture
R 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
This course provides an introduction to some of the forms and specialized skills of literary scholarship: the use of literary archives, aspects of physical bibliography and the production of books, and methodologies of scholarly editing, both print and digital, together with the theories that lie behind them. The course then investigates textual criticism (the study of versions) for its relevance to the interpretation of literature. Here, the history of the book and the role of readerships come into play as concepts of authorship, authority, authenticity, text, and the work are explored.
Postmodernism (ENGL 428)
Section: 802 #5136
Instructor: P. Caughie
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC
The focus of this course is on western fiction and theory since World War II that can be discussed in terms of this powerful contemporary discourse. The main point of the course is to come to terms with the term "postmodernism" and its various uses: as a literary period, as an aesthetic style, as an historical moment, as a cultural problematic, and as a theoretical imperative. Taking it as a given that postmodernism is an object of contestation for various strains of theory (e.g., Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist), we will trace out some of those portrayals in the work of a handful of theorists and writers who have developed influential characterizations of postmodernism. We will investigate a complex of aesthetic, social-historical, political, and theoretical issues which inform postmodern literature and culture, and, in doing so, we will take up that vexed issue of the relation between postmodernism and modernism as well as feminism. We will discuss postmodernism in relation to other art forms--architecture, painting, photography, film--as well. Our goal, in short, will be to map out the discursive domain of the postmodern era, keeping in mind that "postmodern" does not mean "contemporary." Course requirements will include participation in a two-day symposium on postmodernism (April 10-11th) with three visiting scholars whose work we will read: Brian McHale, Urmila Seshagiri, and Jeffrey Nealon. Readings will average a novel and several essays each week. Requirements include a report, a midterm, and a 15-20 page seminar paper.
Shakespeare (ENGL 455)
Section: 803 #5137
Instructor: J. Knapp
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC
The past two decades of Shakespeare scholarship have witnessed an increasing emphasis on material culture and the materiality of the early modern stage. Studies of stage properties, theatrical space, and the material conditions of playing in early modern London have shaped the ways in which we view the interactions of Shakespeare’s characters with their material surroundings. Likewise the material conditions of the early modern print trade have yielded insights into the relationship that the playwright had with the publication and circulation of his works in both print and manuscript. This new materially focused scholarship has largely displaced earlier scholarship that had concentrated on Shakespeare’s aesthetics, his place in the history of ideas and the nature of his linguistic innovation. Yet, the relationship between material existence and the immaterial world of ideas is a consistent focus of the plays and poetry. This course will examine how a focus on Shakespeare’s interest in the immaterial—the conceptual, spiritual, non-existent—complicates materially inflected readings of his poetry and plays.
Topics in Victorian Literature: Reception Then and Now (ENGL 475)
Section: 804 #5138
Instructor: F. Fennell
3.0 credit hours Lecture
W 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
The focus of this course will be on reception theory as it relates to four prominent—and eminent?—Victorians, the prose writer John Ruskin and the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But the emphasis will be on two kinds of reception: how the writer was received in his or her own Victorian time, and how the writer is being received now, in our time. In so doing we will intersect other interests, such as changing understandings of aesthetic value and changing understandings of class—this last following upon the movement away from the Marxist bête noir, the bourgeoisie, to the new literary ruling class, the scholar (i.e. you and me), and the consequences for general readers. Besides extensive readings in the four principal authors and the manifold responses to them, the course will include side glances into once-popular writers whose reputation has not survived the last 150 years intact, i.e. poets like Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell, and “Festus” Bailey or prose writers like Samuel Smiles. Requirements will include a short and a somewhat longer class presentation, a short paper and a longer research paper, and a brief summative essay.
Modern Novel (ENGL 483)
Section: 805 #5139
Instructor: M. Bosco
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 10:30 - 11:45 AM LSC
Catholic Literary Modernism
This course looks at the Modern novel through the lens of Catholic literary aesthetics, what is commonly called the Catholic literary tradition. The course engages an interdisciplinary study of literature and theological discourse by asking how a religious imagination produces culture. We will be looking at Catholicism as an “ideological discourse,” for the traces of philosophy, aesthetics, and theology that shape, interface, or perhaps transgress the more prominent ideologies embedded in both the Anglo-American canon of modernist literature and its theoretical assumptions. We will delve into a Catholic literary genealogy by discussing such authors as Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Ron Hansen, and other artists of film and poetry.
