Spring 2016 

GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES

Teaching College Composition (ENGL 402)

Section: 800 #1499
Instructor: M. Bradshaw
3.0 credit hours Lecture
M 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC

This seminar 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 #3480
Instructor: P. Eggert
3.0 credit hours Lecture
W 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.

Topics in Narrative Theory (ENGL 420)

Section: 802 #5521
Instructor: P. Jay
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC

This course will focus on recent developments in narrative theory, tracing the transition from classical to postclassical narrative theory, that is, from structuralist to poststructuralist, postmodern, and so-called “unnatural,” “decolonized,” and gendered and sexed theories of narrative. In this transition the narrow focus on formal universals and structural and categorical typologies gives way to a broader focus on difference, framed by a contrast between narrative defined narrowly in terms of a set of discrete formal devices, and the relationship between narrative, history, ideology, and gender, relationships which in our own time have led to a proliferation of narratologies, among them feminist, queer, and postcolonial. Through our reading of a broad range of contemporary narrative theory, and a few literary works in varying genres, we will chart what happens when formalist theories of narrative, conceived as a kind of science, become subject to the insistence that we pay attention to historical, ideological, gender, national, and even sexual and ethnic differences, what happens, that is, when a technical practice gets pressured to take social, cultural, and political differences into account.

Milton (ENGL 458)

Section: 803 #5522
Instructor: C. Kendrick
3.0 credit hours Lecture
R 7:00 - 9:30 PM LSC

We will read about all of Milton’s poetry in English, giving at least eight weeks to discussion of the major works (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes); and, from his prose works, we will read the pamphlets against (pre-publication) censorship, in favor of divorce at (considered) will, and against a national church (Areopagitica, the first Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, A Treatise of Civil Power).  We will generally be discussing critical essays along with the works, some of them “classic”, more of them fairly recent and reflective of current critical trends.  The main requirements will be a short paper, a seminar presentation, and a term paper.   (I will order the Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon [Modern Library, 2007]; and The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Smith and McDowell [2009].)​

Topics in Romanticism (ENGL 470)

Section: 804 #5523
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC

Once upon a time in the long eighteenth century, religion entered history.  It was now possible—urgently necessary, even—to fix spiritual things on material ground, unfolding the transcendental sureties of Revelation as an unsuspected network of social forms, textual effects, and contingent accidents. For skeptics, to historicize was to debunk, catastrophically and triumphantly: Bibles were books, miracles fiction, and Providence a category error. But as we’ll see, most of the agents of this “secularization” were in fact committed churchmen, who understood the turn to textual studies, natural theology, and empirical method as the best way of “proving” their Christianity against the newly differentiated possibilities of comparative religion. We’ll read philosophers and bishops, wild-eyed rabble-rousers and Oxbridge professors—but most of all, we’ll follow the ways “religion” slipped beyond the confines of “history” just as it was placed within them, and the ways this slippage marked an explicitly literary problem, constituting what we’ve come to call “romanticism.” Readings in Hume, Paley, Malthus, Radcliffe, Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, and all sorts of other last names

Literature of the Jazz Age (ENGL 484)

Section: 805 #5524
Instructor: D. Chinitz
3.0 credit hours Lecture
T 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM LSC

A decade of rapid and profound social change, the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s was also extraordinarily conscious of its own modernity. In this course we will examine the changes in culture, both high and low, that marked this period. Our focus will be interdisciplinary: we will cross over into music, film, and other genres in order to study the period more comprehensively, and to examine the cross-fertilization and mutual influences among the arts as the age of literary modernism reached its peak. We will read works by such authors as Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald as we consider such topics as, for example, the cult of the primitive, the reinvention of the "New Woman," the Harlem Renaissance, the rise of modern popular culture, and the relationship of jazz to all these phenomena. Work by Jazz-Age and contemporary critics will supplement our primary readings.