Spring 2017 Graduate Course Descriptions
Spring 2017
GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES
Teaching College Comp (ENGL 402)
Section: 800 #1989
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 #3068
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 textual studies: 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.
Old English Lang and Lit (ENGL 441)
Section: 802 #5645
Instructor: I. Cornelius
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC
In this course we learn to read English from over a millennium ago. The literature written in English between about 600 and 1100 is unusually rich for an early medieval vernacular: about 30,000 lines of poetry survives (including, most famously, Beowulf) and more than ten times as much prose (including medical recipes, chronicles, and the earliest translations of the Bible). The English language has changed so much in subsequent centuries that Old English must now be approached as a foreign language; nevertheless, the language is close enough to Modern English that it may be learned quickly. Learning the language affords unique access to a rich body of literature; it also foregrounds the essential literary-critical enterprise of making sense of text, and it sheds new light on today’s language.
In the first half of this course we learn the basic structure and vocabulary of Old English and learn to translate simple texts. In the second half, readings become more challenging and class discussion becomes more interpretative. Secondary readings introduce us to Anglo-Saxon England and thus help to contextualize our study of language. During the last two weeks we read Beowulf in Seamus Heaney’s translation, with occasional reference to the original Old English. There will be quizzes, an in-class presentation, a midterm, and a final exam. Graduate students will write a short essay.
Top Restor & 18th Century Lit (ENGL 460)
Section: 803 #5170
Instructor: T. Kaminski
3.0 credit hours Lecture
T 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
This course will consider three writers—Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson—whose works examine or embody many of the dominant artistic, moral, and social concerns of the eighteenth century. We will read a variety of satires and political tracts by Swift, as well as a representative sample of his poetry. We will consider Pope both as a mock-heroic satirist (The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad) and as a writer of satires and epistles in the Horatian tradition. We will examine Johnson in a variety of roles: as a moral writer (Rasselas), as a literary critic and biographer (the “Preface to Shakespeare” and the Lives of the Poets), and as the subject of perhaps the greatest biography ever written, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The writing requirements will include one or two short papers, plus a longer paper that will be done in two drafts.
Victorian Novel (ENGL 478)
Section: 804 #5171
Instructor: M. Clarke
3.0 credit hours Lecture
R 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC
The novel is at once work of art, interpreter of culture, and influential voice in the public sphere. In this course we will read eight Victorian novels. The course will be run as a seminar, with discussions, reports and seminar papers leading the conversation, supplemented by lectures and assigned readings on key historical, biographical, and critical materials.
Texts:
Anne Brontë, Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Charlotte Brontë, Villette
Wilkie Collins, Woman in White
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Topics in Modernism (ENGL 480)
“Queer Modernity”
Section: 805 #5172
Instructor: P. Caughie
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC
“The twentieth century is often called ‘the century of sex’.”[1] In the early decades, the birth control movement, the suffrage movement, increasing advocacy for homosexuals, and the new science of sexology all contributed to this moniker. Sex became more and more central to identity and to scientific research. Contemporary genealogies of transgender are now returning to the scene of the modern, for the modernist era (c. 1890-1940) witnessed tremendous change in concepts of sexual and gender identity. Psychoanalysts, sexologists, and endocrinologists were challenging the sacrosanct nineteenth-century belief in sexual dimorphism. Anthropologists were disclosing the tradition of the “man-woman” (men dressing and living as women) in various cultures. The “new woman” was cutting her hair, wearing pants, smoking in public, and riding the subway, arousing anxiety about "masculine women and feminine men," the title of a 1926 popular American song. In Germany in the 1920s endocrinologists and sexologists connected to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin were preparing for the first transsexual surgeries. In Copenhagen in 1928 Hirschfeld, British sexologist Havelock Ellis, and Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel founded the World League for Sexual Reform. Add to these events numerous literary examples of transgender, works such as Sherwood Anderson's “The Man Who Became a Woman” and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), and Djuana Barnes's Nightwood (1936), and is it any wonder that Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929, “No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own”?[2]
This is the historical context for this course on Queer Modernity. We will read primary works, fiction and nonfiction, from the early 1900s through the 1930s, along with secondary scholarship in modernist and queer studies. Readings include works by sexologists Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Norman Haire; novels by Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes, and Christopher Isherwood; and scholarship by historians Robert Beachy and Alison Oram, and literary scholars Tim Armstrong, Heather Love, and Christopher Reed (among others). Students will give one oral presentation with a written component and produce a final research project to be tailored to the student’s disciplinary interests.