Spring 2020 Graduate Course Descriptions
ENGL 402 Teaching College Composition
ENGL 440 Topics in Medieval Literature
ENGL 450 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture
ENGL 478 Victorian Novel
ENGL 480 Topics in Modernism
ENGL 485 Contemporary Literature
ENGL 402 Teaching College Composition
Section: 100 #1390
Instructor: M. Bradshaw
3.0 credit hours Seminar
R 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.
ENGL 440 Topics in Medieval Literature
Section: 105 #6448
Instructor: E. Wheatley
3.0 credit hours Seminar
M 7:00–9:30 PM LSC
Disability and Marginality in Medieval England and France
This course will focus on disabled bodies and the cultural forces that acted upon them, as represented in a variety of types of early Christian and medieval texts in Latin, French, and English. We will devote special attention to blindness because of its strong metaphorical associations in medieval Christian discourse. The course will begin with readings in disability theory and its relation to the study of literature. Literary texts will include Old French farces and fabliaux, hagiographic texts, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The Tale of Beryn, and texts by Chaucer and Henryson. Students will write two essays and a research paper based on an oral report presented to the class.
ENGL 450 Topics in Early Modern Literature and Culture
Section: 101 #5394
Instructor: J. Biester
3.0 credit hours Seminar
TR 4:15–5:30PM LSC
This course will examine magic and the representation of magic in the literature and culture of the early modern period, or Renaissance, when ideas about magic overlapped with ideas about nature and science, religion, social and political hierarchy, gender, and crime. To explore how magic intersected with these various spheres of the culture, and how writers envisioned their art in relation to magic, we will read texts in a variety of genres, including plays, poems, ballads, witchcraft pamphlets, and selections from treatises on magical practices, and consider a variety of approaches to the study of magic. Requirements will include short and long papers, presentations in class, and possibly a take-home final exam.
ENGL 478 Victorian Novel
Section: 102 #3376
Instructor: P. Jacob
3.0 credit hours Seminar
MW 4:15–5:30 PM LSC
The Paper Trails of Victorian Literature
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.
ENGL 480 Topics in Modernism
Section: 103 #5395
Instructor: P. Caughie
3.0 credit hours Seminar
T 7:00–9:30 PM LSC
Queer Modernity
“The twentieth century is often called ‘the century of sex’.” 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”?
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.
ENGL 485 Contemporary Literature
Section: 104 #5453
Instructor: L. Le-Khac
3.0 credit hours Seminar
W 7:00–9:30 PM LSC
Literatures of the New U.S. Immigration
The immigrant narrative has long been a central trope in American literature, culture, and politics. But because of landmark changes in U.S. immigration law, Cold War conflicts, and global economic restructuring, the nature of immigration has changed dramatically in the contemporary period. The new U.S. immigration looks very different than the waves that came around the turn of the 20th century. Migrations from Latin America, Asia, and Africa are reshaping the social landscapes of the U.S. This course asks, how are the literatures emerging from these groups in turn reshaping the literary landscapes of America? What new forms, stories, and concerns are they interjecting as they claim American literature and wrestle with the economic, legal, political, military, and imperial forces that shape their communities? How do they rework the immigrant stories that are so central to American identity? We’ll focus on some of the central texts and debates in the fields of Latinx and Asian American literatures and touch on literature from the new African diaspora. This course will be an opportunity to practice methodologies of comparative ethnic studies as we draw out and compare the shared aesthetic and political challenges Latinx, Asian American, and African diasporic writers are tackling.