Summer 2015 

GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES

Pedagogy: Theory and Practice (ENGL 404)

Section:  800 #1019
Instructor:  Bradshaw, Melissa
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 6:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., LSC

In this course we will be thinking intensely about teaching: what we teach, how we teach it, and the ways in which we assess what our students have learned. We will also be thinking about how we learned what we know, and how our understandings of the exchange between teachers and students have been shaped by cultural representations of teaching. More than simply content and technique, pedagogy constitutes a social and ethical practice in response to a wide range of influences that are not confined to the academy. This course takes a theoretical and historical, as well as practical approach to the subject; it is designed to make us reflect on how and why we teach as we do, and how we might teach differently. In this seminar we will read about various models of teaching (e.g. feminist, formalist, deconstructive, performative; the banking model and the conflicts model), and about the desires, anxieties, (hidden) agendas, and motivations that structure the pedagogical exchange. Readings will include theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Pamela Caughie, Paolo Friere, Henry Giroux, Gerald Graff, and bell hooks. Students will write a review essay, teaching statement, and a syllabus for a literature or theory course, as well do a presentation and/or a teaching demonstration.

Postcolonial Literature (ENGL 487)

Section:  805 #2440
Instructor:  Mann, Harveen
3.0 credit hours Lecture
MW 6:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.  LSC

This course traces the origins and key developments of postcolonial literature as well as postcolonial theory, with a view to investigating three of its major, current emphases: texts that have come to be regarded as "classics" in the field (for example, the works of Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, and Salman Rushdie); issues of Orientalism, gender and subalternity, hybridity, nationalism, and globalization raised by contemporary theorists and practitioners like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, and Arjun Appadurai; and challenges to postcolonial studies on the grounds of its multiple definitions, its interdisciplinary reach, and the politics of its institutional location, among others.  To these ends, the course will investigate the following topics in the main:  

(a) the history of colonization,
(b) the institutional history, emergence, and definitions of postcolonial studies and literature,
(c) theories of resistance, including those of Negritude, anti-colonial violence, and cultural decolonization,
(d) metropolitan theorizing, for example that of ethnicity in Britain and of the settler communities in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada,
(e) colonial knowledge and power, gender and subalternity, hybridity, nationalism, and globalization, and
(f) the intersections of postcolonial literature and studies with other analyses of race, language, sexuality, nationalism, culture, religious fundamentalism, and diaspora, among others. 

A segment of the course will be devoted to readings of literary texts from particular postcolonial theoretical perspectives.  Therefore, in its dual emphasis--on postcolonial literature and theory--the course will meet the Modern and Contemporary Literature AND Critical Theory distribution requirements of the Ph.D. program in English. 

Topics in American Literature (ENGL 490)

Section:  806 #2441
Instructor:  Kerkering, Jack
3.0 credit hours Lecture
TR 3:00 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.  LSC

Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

This course examines the poetry of U.S. writers from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Readings will include selected poems, related prose writings, recent criticism of these writers and their works, and theoretical accounts of poetics. Students will write annotations of criticism, make an oral presentation, write one short paper (5-6 pages) based on their oral presentation, and write a final seminar paper (12 pages).