Loyola University Chicago

Department of English

Spring 2018 Graduate Course Descriptions

Spring 2018  

GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES

Teaching College Comp (ENGL 402)

Section: 800 #1410
Instructor: M. Bradshaw
3.0 credit hours Lecture
T 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 response papers, a sample assignment, a syllabus, a formal teaching statement, and a teaching demonstration. This course is required of doctoral students who will be teaching UCWR 110, and is strongly recommended for MA students who want to use their degree to teach composition courses.

Textual Criticism (ENGL 413)

Section: 801 #2887
Instructor: P. Eggert
3.0 credit hours Lecture
M 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.

Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture (ENGL 450)

Natural Philosophy and Early Modern Poetics
Section: 802 #5444
Instructor: J. Knapp
3.0 credit hours Lecture
W 7:00 – 9:30 PM LSC

This course will focus on the interconnections of literature and natural philosophy in early modern England. “Natural philosophy” is the name given to the study of the natural, physical world in the medieval and early modern periods. Encompassing what would become chemistry and physics—and sometimes biology—it is the precursor to modern science. Yet, around the turn of the seventeenth century, natural philosophers drew as much from classical and medieval authorities as they did from the observation of nature. This would change as the early modern period gradually gave way to the Enlightenment, but in the transition, poets and dramatists exploited conflicting accounts of the constitution of the natural world in the pursuit of their art. The literature we will consider in this seminar draws on the language and conceptual frameworks of natural philosophy to make sense of humanity’s place in the natural world and to explore connections between material and spiritual ways of knowing unsettled by the Reformation.

We will read poems and plays by Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan alongside works relating to natural philosophy, medicine, and faculty psychology by minor figures as well as better know writers including Bacon, Burton, and Browne. Requirements will include a presentation, an archival project, some short written assignments, and a seminar paper.  

Topics in Romanticism (ENGL 470)

Natural Religion: Romanticism and the Markings of Belief
Section: 803 #5445
Instructor: J. Cragwall
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 1:00 – 2:15 PM LSC

This course considers our most conventional sense of Romantic difference: Romanticism as “nature worship.” We’ll start with natural theology, the careful attention to empirical knowledge that was the bedrock of orthodox Protestant theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But as we’ll see, just as English theology domiciled spiritual forms in ever more material grounds, conceptualizing “religion” as “natural,” inevitable and unproblematic, English literature turned increasingly to cases of “naturals”—children, animals, historical and aboriginal peoples—who seemed discomfitingly immune to sacred instincts. This may well be the crux of secularization and the sortings of modernity, and it’s our real subject: the ways in which literature figures “religion” both as the ultimate unmarked category, intractably conflated with human identity, and as a profoundly alien reservoir of uncanny impossibilities. Readings in Hume, Paley, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Austen, Blake, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and more.

Victorian Novel (ENGL 478)

Victorian Novel: The Paper Trails of Victorian Literature
Section: 804 #4348
Instructor: P. Jacob
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC

Before we went “paperless,” paper was the substance of our letters, our laws, and our literature. The nineteenth century saw an outpouring of paper (and paper litter), as innovations in paper production coincided with the expansion of print media, advertising, and a nationalized postal service. These bits of paper make their way into the novel as well—from the torn clue to the well-timed love note. In this seminar on Victorian literature, we will examine the literary function of paper objects: the letters that ricochet through the long narrative poem; the crucial piece of paperwork that drives plots of blackmail, detection, and inheritance; and the eerily multiplying documents of late-Victorian Gothic fiction. We will explore paper as a material, a medium, and a metaphor. Paper will also serve as an entry point for considering questions of law, media, authorship, and the archive—as well as the ways that social networks and affective ties are constituted through the circulation of calling cards and, eventually, telegrams. We will pay special attention to developments in information technology over the course of the Victorian period, and we will directly encounter the serial installments of some Victorian texts in the Special Collections. Toward the close of the semester, we will also consider the lingering place of paper in the digital world. Readings will include: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George Gissing’s New Grub Street, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and, briefly crossing the pond, Henry James’s “In the Cage” and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.

African American Lit (ENGL 496)

Section: 805 #5446
Instructor: B. Ahad
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 4:15 – 5:30 PM LSC

Though love is often taken for granted as an “ordinary affect,” to quote scholar Kathleen Stewart, those affects that we might consider common are, in fact, “a kind of contact zone where the overdetermination of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place” (Ordinary Affects, 3). While the subject of love permeates almost every facet of our everyday lives, sentiments like love, joy, romantic desire, pleasure, and bliss are undertheorized aspects of black interiority. In addition to fiction, we will examine a range of texts and critical methods including feminist and queer theory, affect studies, and visual culture, as well as explore how the concept of love intersects with other critical terms like intimacy, respectability, and deviance. Key questions we will consider are: how is love imagined, represented, and anticipated in African-American literary culture, and how has the desire for love in black narratives also functioned as a desire to be recognized as modern, American and even human?​