English

ENGL 5001. Pro.Sem: Res.methods Engl. (3 Credits)

An introduction to English studies at the graduate leve, emphasizing bibliography, scholary writing, and critical intervention. Although the emphasis of the course will vary according to the aims of the instructor, areas covered may also include book history, textual editing, historical research, and other issues of professional concern to graduate students. All incoming doctoral students must take this course during the fall semester of their first year.

Attribute: ENGT.

ENGL 5002. Critical Theory. (3 Credits)

A representative but not inclusive sampling of key theoretical studies from roughly the past seventy-five years. After reading a series of now classic essays to lay a foundation, the course will consider closely the writings of a small number of influential thinkers, possibly including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, among others.

Attribute: ENGT.

ENGL 5018. Modern American Drama. (3 Credits)

A survey of major American plays from the early 20th century to the present, examined alongside contemporary scholarly debates in theater and performance studies. Topics of study will include theater and media, theories of spectatorship, ideologies of acting, performance as work and the performance of work, liveness and authenticity, and representations of difference. Playwrights studied will include (but not be limited to) Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Adrienne Kennedy, David Mamet, Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Annie Baker, and Jackie Sibblies Drury.

Attribute: ENG3.

ENGL 5019. Staging Blackness: Black Drama and the African American Literary Tradition. (3 Credits)

A literary, historical, and performance-oriented exploration of African American literature.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5020. Fear on the Homefront: The Literature of Peace and War. (3 Credits)

The decision to wage war is one of the most consequential moral choices we make. The struggle to achieve and maintain peace is one of the most challenging and abstract human goals. For all the ways that war and peace are tied up with politics, we can come to a better understanding of our human experience of peace and war through art. This seminar explores literary and cinematic representations of peace and war from Classical times to the present day. We look at war stories and the special case of civil war, as well as the more recent phenomenon of fear on the homefront. We end with a unit on pacifism and peace work. In every unit, we will read nonfiction sources highlighting ethical and moral ideas about war (by Abraham Lincoln, Simone Weil, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Walzer and others). Authors include Homer, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, and many others.

Attribute: PJST.

ENGL 5021. Modernism, Cinema, and Literature: Edison to Cuarón. (3 Credits)

Without cinema, perhaps there would have been no artistic movement known as “Modernism.” This course investigates this premise through the study of a range of films, theoretical texts, and literary works that shed light on a mutual influence: that of cinema on the development of modernist literature, and that of literature on the development of the art of film, from the late 19th century through the modernist period and into the present. We will study the works of filmmakers Georges Méliès, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, John Ford, Orson Welles, Wu Yonggang, Maya Deren, Satyajit Ray, Wong Kar-wai, Agnès Varda, and others. Readings will include key works of film history and theory on concepts such as montage, Surrealism, melodrama, and film noir. At each stage, we will consider modernist cinematic aesthetics in relation to literary works such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5022. Shakespeare's History Plays. (3 Credits)

Shakespeare's first great hit was a series of history plays about the kings who ruled, and the wars they waged, a century and more before his birth. The eight plays produced (Harry Potter-style) over the course of eight years, gave London audiences then-and will give us now-a chance to watch Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare: to see him learn how to pack plays with a pleasure, impact, and amazement, a scene by scene and line by line, with a density and intensity no playwright before or since has ever managed to match.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 5023. The Phenomenon of Oprah's Book Club. (3 Credits)

Since its inception in September 1996, Oprah’s Book Club (OBC) has transformed the literary landscape—from ushering in a new wave of enthusiastic readers and spiking the sale of books around the globe to reshaping the advertising and marketing of literature and offering readers strategies for engaging it. This course will explore the phenomenon of OBC, thinking through its formation and rise as well as its strategies and approaches to literature. We will tackle these matters as we examine closely themes of racial beauty, sexual assault, racism, imprisonment, disability, and politics in OBC-selected texts, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5024. Cultural Studies and Literary Studies: Keywords. (3 Credits)

This course is designed to encourage critical analysis of the language we use in the study of literature and culture. Our primary texts will be short essays drawn from "Keywords for American Cultural Studies" and other related volumes. These essays will draw us to longer works of theory and scholarship; for instance, keyword essays on “race” and “racialization” will be linked to major works of critical race theory. Students will try out forms of research and writing other than the standard critical essay, including but not limited to writing both individual and collaborative keyword essays of their own.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5025. Black Protest from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter. (3 Credits)

The history of Black cultural production in the United States is a legacy of protest. Since Black bodies were first considered property and then only fractionally human, claiming personhood through arts and letters is a revolutionary act. This course will consider the canon of African American literature through an expansive definition of protest. We will theorize how the definition of protest has evolved since the 18th century while continuing to inform our own sociopolitical moment. We will find protest in both obvious and unlikely places—from the seemingly conservative poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the nearly instantaneous archive of resistance enabled by social media and 21st-century screen technologies. As we interrogate the meanings of blackness and protest, we will also reveal how that history has consistently shaped American identity. Throughout the course, we will encounter narrative, memoir, essay, speeches, poetry, and film. Here are some of the questions we will consider in this course: What happens to the canon of African American literature when seen through the lens of Black protest? Are protest, revolution, resistance, riot, and rebellion interchangeable? What is the relationship between Black protest and gender? What is the relationship between Black protest and sexuality? What value can we place on Black protest songs? Is there a genre most apt for Black protest? If so, why? How does Black protest instruct beyond Black identity? What is its political utility? What does it mean to be a “Black protest text”? Who is the audience for Black protest? What do we do with those texts resistant to a Black protest tradition? Ultimately, in this sociopolitical moment, is there a limit to Black protest? How and why?.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ, PSRR.

ENGL 5026. Ethnic Camera: Race and the Visual Archive. (3 Credits)

This seminar examines the intersections of race, culture, and technology. Assessments of different camera-generated records will elucidate how ideas of race have been visually prevalent in various photographic genres including (but not limited to) tourist keepsakes, postcards, ethnographic documentation, portraiture, street photography, fotonovelas, conceptualism, and the contemporary selfie. Students will be challenged to not only compare long-standing and emergent thinkers at the cutting edge of race and visual culture studies but also to “read” image-based texts. The origins of these visual genealogies will be foregrounded in the seminar while giving students opportunities to see how visions of racial difference continue to shape contemporary life.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5027. To Bear Witness: Poetry & Social Justice. (3 Credits)

How do we practice writing poetry as witnesses of our time? In her important 1993 anthology, "Against Forgetting," Carolyn Forché defines “poetry of witness” as writing that serves as evidence, voicing resistance against political violence or trauma. Since the 1990s, a revival of documentary poetics and a transformed media landscape have widened our sense of “witness.” In this workshop, we will explore a range of modes and strategies that allow us, as poets, to engage with challenging material, whether historical or contemporary. Together, we will imagine and create an ethical poetics of witness.

Attributes: CVW, CVWG, ENRJ.

ENGL 5102. Global Postmodernisms. (3 Credits)

A survey of literary development in postmodernity and global literary studies.

Attributes: ENAL, ENBL, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5103. Feminism and American Poetry. (3 Credits)

This course will address mid- through late-twentieth century poetry by women in relation to second-wave feminism, feminist theories, and queer theories. The writing and publishing of women's poetry played an important role in second-wave feminism, often serving as the artistic arm of the movement, assuming identity politics as its governing principle. We will first examine women poets of the feminist and black arts movements who developed a series of radical new poetries to “embody” gender and racial identities. We will then discuss the ways that poets and theorists since that time have challenged the tenets of identity politics and, accordingly, pushed poetics into new terrains in search of diverse groundings for politics and aesthetics alike. Figures discussed may include Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra María Esteves, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and others.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 5104. Natural History and Ecology. (3 Credits)

This course will examine the genre of natural history, which flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as Europeans engaged in ambitious projects of empire-building that brought them into contact with thousands of new plants and animals. Prior to the development of anthropology as a distinct discipline, natural histories also included within their purview the description of non-European peoples. We will think about how natural histories portrayed environments and the relationship between human and non-human actors. We will also read recent works from the fields of ecocriticism and ecology to think about the meaning and value of studying natural history today.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG2.

ENGL 5106. Early American Novel. (3 Credits)

This course will explore novels about America and Americans in the Atlantic world published during the long eighteenth century, including works by Behn, Defoe, Winfield, Rowson, Imlay, Foster, Tyler, Brown, Tenney, and Sansay. By considering a range of contexts, including the British tradition of picaresque and sentimental fiction, the theory of the novel (Lukacs, Watt, McKeon), and theories of Atlantic culture (Roach, Gilroy, Dayan), it will explore the history of the early American novel in terms of race, slavery, commerce, migration, mobility, and the many contingencies of colonialism. in the Americas.

Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5107. From Slave Narratives to Black Lives Matter. (3 Credits)

This course works from the proposition that everything has a history, and we can understand something better if we know that history. To better understand Black Lives Matter, we’ll look at its literary history, with an emphasis on the literature of abolitionism and civil rights. We’ll be reading works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, among others—and then we’ll collaborate to choose works from the Black Lives Matter movement to study together.

Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5108. Visionary Epic Writers from the Late Renaissance to the 19th Century: Spenser, Milton, and Blake. (3 Credits)

In this course, we'll discuss manageable selections from three classically “canonical” English writers who worked between 1591 and 1827, from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Spenser, Milton, and Blake (both a writer and visual artist) all wrote epics—historically the career-topping genre for ambitious writers. All three were powerful, even extreme imaginers—visionaries who in some ways affirmed the dominant values of their times but who also questioned, attacked, and saw beyond them—pre-moderns, in other words, who often uncannily foreshadowed post-modernism.

Attributes: ENG2, ENHD.

ENGL 5109. African American Literature. (3 Credits)

A survey of African American literature from the Jazz-age to the present.

Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5110. Queer Renaissance. (3 Credits)

This seminar will explore the intersections between early modern studies and queer theory, focusing on three key issues: the charged relations between queer theory and other critical frameworks such as psychoanalysis, feminism, and poststructuraHsm; the ongoing role of historicism in shaping major debates and conversations in the field; and the place of aesthetics, genre, and form in early modern and contemporary treatments of eroticism. Writers to be discussed will likely include Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Marlowe, Nashe, Crashaw, and Philips, alongside Foucault, Sedgwick, Butier, Lacan, Bataille, Edelman, and others .

ENGL 5111. Race, Religion, and Monstrosity in Medieval Literature. (3 Credits)

The medieval taste for the exotic has introduced many audiences to a range of monstrous beings, from ferocious giants and dog-headed men to the peace-loving sciapod. Medieval studies of monstrosity have often been linked solely to theorize the different human "races" found there. Yet the medieval language of monstrosity was not always limited to travel narrative, nor to the pejorative, for it was used to describe heroes, saints, even the Christian deity in far more familiar contexts than many would imagine. In this course we will examine the discourse of monstrosity as a complex critical lens through which premodern writers asked important questions of race, religion, civic virtue, and human morality. We will read from Pliny, Augustine, the Beowulf Manuscript, medieval romance, and Mandeville's account.

Attributes: ENG1, ENGD, ENHD, ENME, MVSG.

ENGL 5112. Medieval Time Travel. (3 Credits)

This graduate course asks how theories of time can help us approach medieval literature in unexpected and exciting new ways.

Attributes: ENG1, MVSG.

ENGL 5115. Graduate Internship Seminar. (3 Credits)

Seminar designed for graduate students engaged in a professionally relevant internship during the semester that the seminar is offered.

ENGL 5116. African American Fiction. (3 Credits)

A study of twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 5117. Language, Voice, and Sound in 19th-Century Literature. (3 Credits)

Attempts to record sound have a long history. The first machines to synthesize voice date from 1769. By the time Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, English-language poets, especially in Britain, had begun treating literary text as a medium of sound recording. The result was a fundamental change in the conception of literature. This course will ask when and how English poetry became aware of itself not simply as utterance or even as rhythmic utterance, but as sounding utterance. It will ask what subsequent effects this awareness had not only on poetry but on fiction and essay. And it will ask how the realization of sound in the text affected the literary representation of auditory experience. We will read a wide range of British poets, including Wordsworth, Shelley, Hemans, Poe, Lear, the Brownings, the Rosettis, Tennyson, and Hardy; some essays and short fiction by Fuller, Dickens, and James; and various essays by critics today who, in growing numbers, are seeking to link literary criticism with sound studies.

Attribute: ENG2.

ENGL 5118. Writing That Heals: Storytelling Lab. (3 Credits)

How do we heal and recover from illnesses and other bodily and mental challenges? We usually think that this question needs to be answered by science, but this course will consider the interdisciplinary field of narrative medicine and the connections it draws between scientific and humanistic practices of treatment. Narrative medicine holds that stories and storytelling are foundational to healing. Together, we will explore this premise by doing two things. First, we’ll read works about the methods of narrative medicine, as well as relevant stories of illness and healing from the 18th century to the present. Second, we’ll write our own stories to experiment with the connections between narration and healing. Additional activities will include workshopping the stories of our peers and working together as a “lab” or collaborative group of researchers on a collective storytelling project. The goal of this course is both to learn about new approaches to humanistic inquiry and to experience how writing can be a creative process of play that feeds into all areas of life, academic and otherwise. Texts may include Rita Charon’s “Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness,” Hans Sloane’s “Voyage to Jamaica,” Mary Prince’s “History of Mary Prince,” Saidiya Hartman’s “Lose Your Mother,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” Kimiko Hahn’s “Unbearable Heart,” and Danez Smith’s “Homie.”.

Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5119. Early Caribbean Literatures. (3 Credits)

The Caribbean has been called everything from a crossroads to a crucible of modernity. What is the history of the Caribbean, and what is the Caribbean's place in the world? In this course, we will answer these questions by analyzing a wide range of writings about and from the early Caribbean. We will also think about how writers described—or struggled to describe—such developments as the genocide of indigenous peoples, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, and late 18th-century revolutions. We will focus in particular on the emergence of new literary forms and modes of expression, including American travel narratives and natural histories, colonial georgics, and slave or freedom narratives. Authors may include Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, James Grainger, John Bartram, John Stedman, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince.

Attributes: ENG2, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5120. Im/possible Worlds: Race, Social Difference, Speculative Fiction, and American Writers of Color. (3 Credits)

This course will focus on speculative fiction (penned by North American writers of color)—potentially including popular genres such as graphic narrative and young adult novels—that have often been dismissed as lowbrow or uncultured. We will reconsider them in light of their aesthetic complexity, political texture, racial and social differences, and popular constructs such as aliens, magical objects, vampires, and associated motifs and figures. Course selections may include Gene Luen Yang’s "American Born Chinese," Nidhi Chanani’s "Pashmina," Nnedi Okorafor’s "Binti," Cherie Dimaline’s "The Marrow Thieves," and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s "Certain Dark Things."

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5121. Medieval Paleography. (3 Credits)

Reading handwritten sources—records, chronicles, treatises, Bibles, works of literature, and many other genres and types—is fundamental for primary source research, especially in premodern periods, and for understanding the basis for many secondary works. In this course, we will develop our ability to decipher and understand handwritten sources by considering the history of medieval handwriting. Weekly exercises will ask students to transcribe (not translate!) medieval sources from a range of genres, in Latin and European vernaculars. No prior knowledge of Latin or medieval vernaculars is required or assumed. We will consider the purposes, preparation, transmission, and preservation of the materials contained in each type of source, with an emphasis on the use of these sources in our scholarship and the tools important for their study.

Attributes: ENG1, ENHD.

ENGL 5122. Camp, Art, and Kitsch: Questions in Postmodern Aesthetics. (3 Credits)

In this class, students will employ literary and theoretical perspectives to define and critique problems in contemporary aesthetics and cultural difference. We will draw on historical works on the aesthetic, including those by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the primary focus of the course will be on “camp” and “kitsch,” which are important and vital aesthetic categories but remain fiendishly difficult to define. This class will work to historicize these slippery terms and then employ them to critique postmodern Latinx literature and art. One of the objectives of the course is to think of cultural difference (for example, Latinx) as being composed of a history and an aesthetic, rather than one that is based on an “identity.” Camp and kitsch, I argue, are a way out of the impasse of identity politics and offer a resistance that comes from irreverence and subversion.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5123. The Literature and Psychology of Disgust. (3 Credits)

Disgust is considered a primary emotion; that is, all cultures have similar expressions and experiences that characterize the presence of disgust. Interestingly, despite the universal experience of disgust, we don’t understand it very well. Recent work has revealed that disgust is a complex emotional state, ranging from basic food-based revulsion to morally based reactions. Concurrent with the increased attention given to disgust by researchers, there have been widespread depictions of disgust in many fields. Literature is full of disgust, and so are other media, like movies. You might even say that storytelling depends on it. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that humanists have studied “the aesthetics of disgust.” There’s good and interesting work on the subject of disgust in literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology—and we’ll be reading in those disciplines in our own effort to understand this fundamental but (perhaps because it’s so reflexive) mysterious emotion. The idea of emotion opens the door to psychology, and the interdisciplinary partnership at the heart of this course. Psychological research on disgust began with descriptions and experiments around the basic experience of the emotion. The nature of disgust has been covered in a wide range of traditions within psychology—basic experimental, social, psychodynamic, behavioral, clinical, developmental, psychometric, and evolutionary psychology, as well as experimental neuroscience. All have research investigating disgust. This collective line of inquiry shows that what was originally considered an emotion with a single aim—protection from ingesting harmful substances—evolved to reflect a highly complex emotional experience that covers death, animals/insects, sex, blood and exposed human or animal organs, contamination, and moral standard violations. We will approach each of these disgust domains and the individual differences in the experience of the emotion with the basic question of “What does it mean to feel disgusted?” In this interdisciplinary, team-taught course, we will use the imaginative and philosophical literature on disgust as a way to understand the emotion, and vice versa: We will use disgust, which we will explore with the tools afforded us by psychology, to understand literature and the human imagination that produces it. In implicating the work of one discipline with another, we will put them into dialogue as we seek to understand a complex and powerful human response.

Attribute: ENG3.

ENGL 5124. Early Modern Lyric And Analogues. (3 Credits)

The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of critical interest in early modern/Renaissance lyric. Many issues it raises are germane to the lyric poetry of other periods as well. We will focus on the challenges and controversies surrounding defining and describing lyric. Other likely questions include: What are the potentialities and problems of recent critical and interdisciplinary approaches, such as affect studies, space/place theory, the new formalisms, and materialist criticism? How, if at all, should close reading be recuperated? How does the new interest in the material text lead us to interpret the visual appearance of lyric poetry, other results of printing and publishing practices, and the poem as artifact or object? In what ways does lyric gender, and in what ways is it gendered? The course will provide a fruitful overview of the period between about 1500 and 1660 for those who have done little prior work on it and an opportunity to delve deeper for those who have. Although most of the readings will be drawn from that era, it will include some other texts and is also designed for those with other areas of expertise. Those primarily involved with lyric poetry written in other periods can focus intensively on earlier or later poetry in at least one class and, if they wish, write their seminar papers partly—if not entirely—on it. If any participants in the group are poets themselves, they will have opportunities to consider issues of craft and to submit poems in lieu of one of the shorter assignments. We will have a course conference, and one written assignment will address teaching.

Attributes: ENG2, ENHD.

ENGL 5125. Hybrid Forms and Literary Liminality. (3 Credits)

With each development in printing and publishing technology, our understanding of what literature can be shifts. Much of what we study when we study literature is intricately tied to the economic means of production and distribution of that literature. Even as commercial and generic pressures influence what people write, experimental forms innovate at the fringes. In this course we will come to a deeper understanding of the ways in which hybrid forms, multimedia writing, and experimental texts have developed alongside the publishing industry in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider a wide range of authors such as Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, Roland Barthes, Wanda Coleman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carolina Ebeid, Anne Carson, Kate Zambreno, and others. Students will work on two main projects: one will take a familiar scholarly form, the other will deliberately challenge the typical forms of scholarly production.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ, ENRW.

ENGL 5127. Queer Ladies. (3 Credits)

In this hybrid literature and workshop course, we focus on fiction written by and about queer ladies, which doesn't mean only or even primarily cisgender women. We will explore, and respond creatively, to nonbinary, gender-fluid, high femme, and cisgender queer writers and characters.

Attributes: CVW, CVWG, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5128. Four American Authors, 1850-1950. (3 Credits)

Before this course begins, students will help select four important American authors who primarily wrote between 1850 and 1950. The instructor will put forward a list for students to choose from, and students will be polled on their interests. By mid-summer the instructor will select the four for the course, primarily drawing on student interest but also taking into account historical range, the range of literary genres, race and gender diversity, and other factors. We will read major and characteristic works by each author, and also familiarize ourselves with the current critical conversation around each. Students will be evaluated using a labor-based grading system that requires active participation (including but not exclusively online); annotations and other responses to both primary and secondary texts, and a final project that may take a variety of forms, including (but not limited to) a critical essay or book review. The main requirement of the final project is that it must deal with at least two of the authors treated in the course.

Attribute: ENG3.

ENGL 5129. Disability Studies and Justice. (3 Credits)

In this seminar, we will engage with contemporary conversations in critical disability studies and disability justice movements. Drawing on disability literature and aesthetic forms, activist writing, and theoretical texts from around the world, the seminar will trace histories of discourse about body-mind norms and difference that center the perspectives of disabled people.

Attributes: ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5130. Poetry and Politics. (3 Credits)

Since roughly 1800, lyric poetry has been regarded as a “higher” literary genre defined primarily as experimental in form, personal in content, and apolitical. Political poetry, though it flourished at the same time, has generally been regarded as a “lesser” genre with limited formal and thematic interest. In this course, we will look at the sources of this conventional wisdom about poetry and politics and test its claims against a wide range of “lyric” and “political” poems by poets embodying a broad spectrum of differences—from the 19th century to the present.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5131. Theory of Mind and Literature. (3 Credits)

The term “theory of mind” originated in cognitive animal studies in the 1970s, alongside a range of related concepts that came to have a significant impact on literary studies—a phenomenon significant enough for the New York Times to ask in a 2010 headline, “Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ save the humanities?” This course takes a longer view, starting with key early modern neurological and literary texts and moving selectively across time to contemporary literary and theoretical texts that consider and/or represent our changing understandings of what happens in our brains. As an organizing principle, the texts selected will as often as possible consider these questions in relation to comparative cognition in humans, other animals, and machines. Texts include: Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body,” Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Anne Finch’s “The Spleen,” Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” Amy Bonnafon’s “Horse,” Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” J.M. Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals,” and Ted Chiang’s “The Evolution of Human Science.”.

Attributes: ENG2, ENG3.

ENGL 5132. Early Environmental Humanities. (3 Credits)

In this class, we will explore the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, which brings together methods from literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, and other disciplines to address pressing questions involving our environment. In particular, we will focus on the question of ‘how we got here’: what historical factors, including ways of thinking about our relationship with nature, have contributed to the present-day climate crisis? The rise of colonialism, empire, industrialization, and capitalism in the 16th through 19th centuries will be of special interest, although we will also pay considerable attention to writers, artists, and others who dissented from the idea that the non-human world was primarily a natural resource from which to extract economic value. How can looking at early works of literature and art provide us with a long view of our current problems—and with possible solutions? How can we use our knowledge of old stories about Earth to create new ones that imagine a sustainable and equitable future? Because of its focus on the early modern era, this class will serve as an introduction to studying and writing about the past. At the same time, it will be centrally concerned with the question of how scholars of English and the humanities can contribute to widespread academic and societal debates happening today about environmental history, destruction, and justice. As such, assignments will allow you the opportunity to practice multiple forms of writing, including literary analyses, conference papers, syllabi, and proposals for public humanities and collaborative work.

Attributes: ENG2, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5133. Fiction and Other Forms. (3 Credits)

Neither the writing nor the reading of fiction happens in an aesthetic vacuum. We read, watch, listen, feel, and even taste all manner of other art forms, and these experiences inspire us, move us, and often find their way into what and how we write. In this course, we will explore the influence of music, the visual arts, film, architecture, and the internet on the fiction we read and write, and vice versa. Authors may include Sofia Samatar, Ali Smith, Gaston Bachelard, Toni Morrison, and Albert Murray.

Attributes: CVW, CVWG.

ENGL 5134. Queer Theory. (3 Credits)

This course provides a survey of the field(s) of intellectual inquiry known as “queer theory,” which arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s and continues to shape important conversations in the humanities and social sciences. We will begin by considering how queer theory emerged in tandem with a variety of academic, artistic, and activist contexts, such as the AIDS epidemic, lesbian and gay studies, women of color feminism, poststructuralism, and the New Queer Cinema. We will then spend the rest of the semester tracing the contours and limits of queer theory as it has divided and mutated over issues of rhetoric, race, class, disability, gender, religion, and temporality. Because queer theorists have often expressed their ideas in experimental modes of writing that challenge the conventions of scholarly, academic discourse, we will work and play with the styles and forms of their work as much as with the argumentative content.

Attributes: DISA, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5135. Paleography. (3 Credits)

This course offers an in-depth introduction to the history of handwriting and book production (“paleography” and “codicology”) in western and central Europe during the years 400 to 1500—a critical period for the creation of the book as we know it. Students will receive training in the handling and interpretation of rare materials from across the whole medieval period and will have the option to complete a manuscript description as their final project. Students will learn how to read and transcribe ancient and medieval writing (a set of skills that will transfer to later periods of handwriting); how to determine the place and date of production of a book based on its script, material, or decoration; and how to interpret the manuscript book as a primary source for the study of society, politics, and culture. Trips to special collections and visits from period experts are a feature of the course. No prior knowledge of Latin or another medieval language is required or assumed, and specialists of any historical period are welcome.

Attributes: ENG1, ENHD.

ENGL 5141. African American Autobiography. (3 Credits)

This course explores how Black writers use their lived experiences to shape political discourses and to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability. Considering slave narratives, memoirs, personal essays, and lyrics alongside conventional autobiographies, this class examines how and why Black writers have chosen to write their own stories as well as what is at stake in their autobiographical writings. Some writers may include William and Ellen Craft, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Claudia Rankine, Janet Mock, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5145. Geographies of the Book: Nation, Colony, Plantation. (3 Credits)

This theory and methods seminar will assess, explore, and develop connections among book history, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. Our semester will move from major historiographic accounts of books and printing that center on England and France to colonial and postcolonial studies that center on the U.S., India, and New Zealand before engaging bibliographic research into histories of printing in plantation zones, including Haiti and Jamaica. Along the way, we’ll consider how this history bears out against more theoretical accounts that nuance key concepts like nationalism, colonialism, diaspora, labor, and literacy. Course emphasis will skew toward the 18th and 19th centuries, but final projects may engage any historical period(s) and any geographic region(s). The seminar will support its members as they pursue their own original research in NY-area archives. No prior experience with rare books will be presumed.

Attributes: ENG2, ENGD, ENHD.

ENGL 5151. Master Class: Writing. (3 to 4 Credits)

ENGL 5177. Master Class: Writers as Shapers: The Short Story. (3 Credits)

A short story can be constructed in an unlimited number of ways and each week we will explore the formal possibilities that are available to us. We will study the choices we have as writers--of narrative point of view, character development, beginnings, dialogue, description, structure, pacing, plot and resolution. We will isolate and inspect strategies that published authors have used. Students will produce and workshop their own fiction from exercises. In the conversation between student writing and the studied literature we will hopefully arrive at a greater sense of writers as shapers, sculptors of the raw material of the story.

Attribute: CVWG.

ENGL 5180. Anthologizing Poetry in the Middle Ages. (3 Credits)

This course surveys important medieval poetry collections in several different languages in order to explore the shifting relationships between poetic expression, verse collection, and book production during the Middle Ages. How and why did medieval people collect poetry, and how should manuscript context guide our interpretation of individual works? Some tuition in Middle English will provided; translations will be available for literature in Old English, Latin, French, Welsh, and Occitan.

ENGL 5193. Master Class: Stuff of Fiction. (3 Credits)

“’The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist,” Virginia Woolf declared in an essay called “Modern Fiction”: “everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.” In this workshop we will explore the process of transforming imaginative musings and life experience into fiction, looking particularly at how memory and place can serve as points of departure. We'll examine how the details of everyday life can be transformed imaginatively into fiction through the use of character, setting, and dialogue. Along the way, we will stop to examine various aspects of craft such as theme, style, plot, and pacing in students' own writings as well as in selected readings.

Attributes: CVW, CVWG.

ENGL 5194. Master Class: Fiction and Other Art Forms. (3 Credits)

Neither the writing nor the reading of fiction happens in an aesthetic vacuum. We read, watch, listen, feel, and even taste all manner of other art forms, and these experiences inspire us, move us, and often find their way into what we write and how we write. In this course, we will explore the influence of music, the visual arts, theater, film, and even cooking on the fiction we read and write, and vice versa. Bring your curiosity and your willingness to be changed as a writer by other ways of making art.

Attribute: CVW.

ENGL 5196. Master Class: Dragons, Daggers, and Dukes: Writing Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Romance/Mystery. (3 Credits)

Genre fiction is, by definition, writing that bows to limitation: Conventions shape the parameters of a story. Yet, in excellent genre fiction, the imaginary world is doubly creative despite constraints or conventions. In this class, we’ll tackle bestsellers—pop fiction that engages and enthralls readers. We will study and experiment before setting into a final manuscript in the genre of your choice.

Attribute: CVWG.

ENGL 5201. Autobiography and Politics. (3 Credits)

When did writing one's life story become political? Following St. Augustine's "Confessions," most autobiographies until the 18th century (despite some notable exceptions) were narratives of religious conversion, and some element of redemption has remained a typical feature. But by the end of the 18th century, autobiography in English had begun to replace redemption with personal development and religion with politics. These two trends were closely intertwined, as we will see in a series of readings that begins with Olaudah Esquiano and William Wordsworth, whose accounts engage respectively with slavery and the French Revolution. Subsequent readings will investigate the mutuality of public and private life in works by John Stuart Mill, Henry James, Jane Addams, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.

Attributes: ENG2, ENG3, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5203. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. (3 Credits)

Postcolonial study has been a productive scholarly approach for decades. The accuracy of the term, “postcolonial,” with reference to premodern literature, has been an ongoing subject of debate. According to accepted, critical definitions, postcolonial literatures are products of colonizing communities and previously colonized cultures, rising in the wake of periods of industrial colonization; moreover, postcolonial study has been linked to modern European communities which formed global empires. These expectations and others have made the “postcolonial” Middle Ages appear controversial. In spite of these controversies, productive understanding of premodern culture has emerged from research under the postcolonial lens, encouraging the study of diverse premodern cultures, displaced or subjugated voices within the medieval period, the production and performance of identity, and the ways in which communities define, remember, and perpetuate themselves. This course is global in its scope, and will focus on medieval texts produced in Africa, Asia, England, France, and the Levant under changing premodern regimes, and will explore the varied literary responses to colonization, diaspora, and displacement that occurred long before the Age of Empire.

Attributes: ENG1, ENGD, ENHD, ENRJ, MVSG, MVST.

ENGL 5208. The English Language 1154-1776. (3 Credits)

This course will deal with the linguistics and sociolinguistics of Middle English and Early Modern English. The beginning date, 1154, is the year of the last entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the year Henry II, the first Angevin king, ascended to the throne. It is as good a date as any to mark the demise of Old English and the beginning of the Middle English period. 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence, marks another turning point, when Early Modern English began to become the English(es) of the present day. This course, which will examine the ways in which the language developed from the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries. Topics will include dialects and standardizations, lexicon, grammar, and syntax, phonological change (The Great Vowel Shift), stress and prosody, paleography and codicology of Middle English manuscripts, and early printing, all with an aim to better understand and appreciating the literature of these periods.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.

ENGL 5210. Intro Old Norse Lang & Lit. (3 Credits)

The course will begin with an introduction to Old Norse language, using E.V. Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse, and as students become comfortable with the language, we will read a selection of representative works from a variety of genres: historical prose, saga prose, and hagiography, as well as eddic poetry (wisdom, myth, legend) and the encomiastic poetry of the skalds. Readings will be partly in Old Norse, partly in translation. We will attempt to situate the texts in their medieval cultural context (analogues in English, French, German, and Latin literature), and we will spend some time on Old Norse palaeography and codicology so that students can better appreciate their material context. There is no prior required coursework for the course and no prior knowledge is assumed, but students should be aware that the course will involve language study.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.

ENGL 5211. Introduction to Old English Language and Literature. (3 Credits)

This course is an introduction to Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language and literature. Old English was the language of England from the 7th to the 12th centuries, the language in which Beowulf was composed. We will read a representative selection of Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry in the original language, including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, works by King Alfred and Bede, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, and The Dream of the Rood. Students will be introduced to Anglo-Saxon palaeography so that they can read the texts from medieval manuscripts as well as from printed editions.

Attributes: ENG1, ENHD, ENME, MVSG.

ENGL 5212. Asian Diasporic Literature. (3 Credits)

This course will introduce students to major works of contemporary Asian American literature. Possible authors include John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chang-rae Lee, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilyn Chin, and many others.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5213. Studies in Old English Literature. (3 Credits)

This course immerses students with a basic knowledge of Old English language and literature in an in-depth study of one of the major Old English codices, its texts, and critical contexts: Vercelli, Junius, Exeter, or the Beowulf (Nowell) Codex.

Attributes: ENG1, ENHD, MVLA, MVLI, MVSG, MVST.

ENGL 5215. Dissent, Devotion, and Drama in Medieval England: East Anglia. (3 Credits)

England's flat eastern edge, a day’s trip from the Low Countries, was a center for the period’s most troubling heresy, Lollardy; for its most remarkable female visionaries, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich; and for a school of theater quite different from York's northern three-day civic pageants. In this study of regional culture we will look at the development of lay rather than monastic forms of spirituality; at the related rise of mercantilism in this wealthy cloth-producing region; at the possible evolution of an anti-hierarchical position of resistance; at the interest in particular saints like St. Anne and Mary Magdalene; and at the role of women in theology and theater. Besides portions of Margery Kempe’s Book and Julian’s Showings, we will read some of the following plays: Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Digby Mary Magdalene, and the Mary play, and we will discuss the records of Lollard belief found in trial records.

Attribute: ENG1.

ENGL 5216. Three Medieval Embodiments. (3 Credits)

In this course, we will explore three models of human embodiment (theological, medical, and musical) available to the high and late English Middle Ages; we will examine how writers, doctors, artists, and musicians gave expression to those models; we will locate and interrogate the places they overlap, interweave, and fall apart; and we will challenge ourselves to imagine how they constituted alternative modes of embodied experience in the world. To reach these goals, we will cast a wide net and study diverse primary sources drawn from philosophy, medicine, theology, drama, poetry, music, and visual art alongside secondary sources in historical phenomenology, cultural studies, and performance theory. Major authors/texts include: Bernardus Silvestris (Cosmographia), Chaucer, Second Shephard's Play, Aristotle (De anima), The Trotula, Boethius (Consolatiophilosophiae and De institutione musica). All readings in English or Middle English.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME.

ENGL 5225. Jane Austen in Context. (3 Credits)

In this course we will read all of Jane Austen’s major novels. There are three central goals. The first one is simply to enjoy Austen’s writing (as unsophisticated as that may sound). The second is to consider the historical contexts (political, social and economic) that helped shape her prose. And the third is to survey and analyze some of the recent trends in Austen scholarship, which will, ideally, aid you in developing your own critical skills.

Attributes: ENBE, ENBL, ENG2.

ENGL 5226. Langland's Piers Plowman and the Poetry of Social Justice in the Late Medieval England. (3 Credits)

William Langland's dream-vision poem, Piers Plowman, composed, like Chaucer's works, in late fourteenth-century London, treats many of the things Chaucer skirts or omits. Langland's accounts of social unrest, some forms of religious argument and conflict, policy and practices regarding poverty, and his critique of social structures and experimentation with alternatives gives us a different Middle Ages from Chaucer's more court-centered writing. This course will put reading Piers Plowman, arguably the greatest single medieval English poem, at its center, while paying due attention to its context in other texts and in the poem's surrounding world.

Attribute: ENG1.

ENGL 5230. Richard Rolle and His Influence. (3 Credits)

A study of the early fourteenth century writer Richard Rolle and his influences.

Attribute: MVSG.

ENGL 5252. Exhibiting Latinidad: Curation/Display/Intervention. (3 Credits)

Museums have played critical roles in defining Latinidad for mass publics in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, curators and their exhibits can assume great power over our understandings of authenticity, cultural authority, and the historical “truth” about Latinx cultures. By retracing exhibition histories from classic shows like Cuba-USA and the Decade Show to the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time LA/LA initiative, we will confront the different material, textual, and visual dilemmas provoked by museums. We will also ponder alternative exhibition practices for Latinidad’s representation and remembrance in the future.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5261. Malory: Cultures of the C15. (3 Credits)

Malory's vast Morte Darthur and the wide multilingual reading that went into it is both object of study and the gateway into the troubled fifteenth century in this course.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.

ENGL 5264. Chaucer. (3 Credits)

This course is an introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry as well as to trends in medieval literary criticism. By reading Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales" and selections from his mid-length and shorter poems, we will touch on some of the concerns that have animated Chaucer studies: Chaucer’s representation of the social world, religion, gender, and the self. Any analysis of Chaucer’s writing implicitly or explicitly raises a question about the most responsible approach to texts that are now over 600 years old. Indeed, this question has remained constant since the beginning of Chaucer studies. We will, therefore, be very interested in what it has meant and what it means now to read Chaucer historically. Discussion will also be animated by our exploration of Chaucer’s continued dialogue with his sources. No prior knowledge of Middle English or medieval history is assumed; however, most of the primary readings will be offered in Chaucer’s highly accessible dialect of Middle English; study of this dialect will help us situate Chaucer’s status as a poet in a triglossic society. Because Chaucer is so commonly associated with a medievalist’s teaching expectations on the job market, we will also explore aspects of syllabus and undergraduate teaching design.

Attribute: ENG1.

ENGL 5300. Occitania: Language and Power. (3 Credits)

This course introduces students to the cultural world of a medieval “south”: Occitania. Texts in Old Occitan include documentary writing, historical narrative, and the poetry of the troubadours. Topics include urban/rural communities, gender and power, the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath and the beginning of vernacular book production.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME.

ENGL 5301. Romanticism and Ecocriticism. (3 Credits)

In the work of Raymond Williams, Jonathan Bate, and others, the field of British Romanticism made important contributions to an early ecocriticism. This course will consider how this work participated in the growth of an interdisciplinary body of environmentalist studies that includes Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, Timothy Morton, Monique Allewaert, and Anne-Lise Francois. Our historical questions will focus on how the period’s writers developed an acute attention to their natural environments in the midst of a “second scientific revolution,” the enclosure acts, urbanization and industrialization, the rise of a global tourism industry, and imperial expansion. Authors, artists, and tourists alike employed the popular aesthetic traditions of the sublime, the beautiful, and picturesque in viewing their surroundings. We will concentrate on authors such as Edmund Burke, Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Clare. We will also spend some time on visual media, including book illustrations, and on the experiments of Constable and Turner on clouds and sunsets (respectively) in the light of new scientific understandings of the atmosphere.

Attributes: ENG2, ENHD.

ENGL 5311. Modern Irish Literature. (3 Credits)

This course aims to strike a balance between two goals. On the one hand, we will attempt to deepen our understanding and catch up with recent critical developments relating to the most canonical figures in the Irish literary tradition, such as Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats. On the other hand, we will seek to expand our understanding of the Irish canon and its range by looking beyond the texts that have been most studied in English departments to include works by women (Elizabeth Bowen, Maud Gonne, Edna O’Brien, Eavan Boland), those who compose in the Irish language (Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill, Máirtín Ó Cadhain), writers from the North (Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian), and contemporary writers (Eimear McBride, Ursula Rani Sarma).

Attributes: ENBE, ENG3.

ENGL 5315. Periodization: Early Modern and Other Literatures. (3 Credits)

We will engage with the debates about periodization currently central to literary studies and many other disciplines. Though our principal focus will be early modern England, students will have the opportunity to do some readings and perhaps write their seminar papers on the literatures of other periods.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 5331. Early Modern Skepticisms. (3 Credits)

Graduate course on the discourses of skepticism during the early modern period.

ENGL 5345. Theatrical Enterprise in Early Modern England. (3 Credits)

This course will offer a survey of English theatrical enterprise form the 1590's to the 1640's. The playing companies will serve as an organizing principle for study of dramatists including Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 5541. Climate Change and Literature. (3 Credits)

What does it mean to be a scholar of literature in a time of climate crisis? This is the question that we will take up in this course. Just as rising temperatures and sea levels around the world are forcing human beings to rethink their everyday behaviors, so have the theoretical insights of scholars working on climate change forced the rest of us to reevaluate key concepts. What meaning do standard literary periods have when we should be thinking on geological scales of time? Now that human beings have proven themselves capable of transforming the planet on a global scale, can we continue to rely on narrow models of human agency? If works of literature and art have made us desire green expanses of lawn, machines powered by fossil fuels, and other environmentally destructive commodities, can we still read and view these works with pleasure? While this course will be centered on texts coming out of Europe and the Americas during the long 18th century (authors will include Milton, Bartram, Austen, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and others), it also will range broadly among writings by scholars from multiple disciplines and backgrounds seeking to understand the place of the humanities in our currently unsettled state (Chakrabarty, Kolbert, Heise, Ghosh, Kimmerer, Tsing, and others). In fact, a primary goal of the course is to use the 18th century as a test case for reconceiving traditional modes of study and connecting them to issues of present-day concern. As such, while the course will include familiar assignments, including a research-based paper, it also will include experimental ones that allow us to explore different ways of doing literary studies today.

Attributes: ENAE, ENBE, ENG2, ENGT.

ENGL 5542. Early Black Atlantic Archives. (3 Credits)

Building on Paul Gilroy's concept of the black Atlantic, this course will examine the literature and art of the early black Atlantic world. Specifically, it will look at the aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual productions of members of the African diaspora from the long 18th century. These productions included poetry, autobiographies, slave narratives, essays, letters, portraits, and novels, which we will analyze to see how they shaped 18th-century conceptions of slavery, colonialism, resistance, freedom, justice, human rights, and selfhood. At the same time, we will think—at a meta-critical level—about the scholarship and archival work that led to the recovery of this body of literature and art. As many scholars have pointed out, dynamics of erasure and silencing have had a profound influence on what types of black expression have been preserved, and one of the main challenges of doing work on the early black Atlantic world involves countering these dynamics. As such, in addition to reading about archives, we will practice engaging creatively with them for new insights into black thought and life. Early black Atlantic readings will include works by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany. Critical readings will include works by Saidiya Hartman, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Nicole Aljoe, Pablo Gómez, Britt Russert, and David Kazanjian.

Attributes: ENAE, ENBE, ENG2, ENGD, ENGT.

ENGL 5600. Special Topics in Rhetorical Theory & Criticism: Rhetoric, Race, and Identity. (3 Credits)

Using a rhetorical lens, this course explores the ontological and epistemological history of race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories as they have been invented alongside capitalism. We will begin with overarching theories, studying scholars like Silvia Federici on gender and sexuality; Silvia Wynter and Cedric Robinson on race and the invention of political-economic man; and Glen Coulthard and Walter Mignolo on settle colonialism. This focused genealogy provides insights for how theorists, critics, and activists might produce alternative political-economic, ecological, and humanist relations. Consequently, we will explore a range of contemporary scholarship that takes up these theories to produce more socially just modes of being in the world. There will be a stress on Black studies scholarship as an extended case study of such future-oriented production, but this work will intersect with feminist, queer, and settler-colonial scholarship. This course will serve as an introduction to rhetorical theory, but no previous experience studying rhetoric is required. This course will count toward the in-process Certificate in Rhetoric and Writing for degree and non-degree students, but will also be of interest to students with diverse interests, including rhetoric and writing, capitalism, neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and more.

Attributes: ENGD, ENRJ, ENRW, PSJH, PSNM, PSRR.

ENGL 5603. Romantic Works/Audiences. (3 Credits)

This course will focus on the life and work of Mary Shelley (1797-1851). We will begin by considering the profound influence of her parents' writing on her work (her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father was William Godwin), and then move on to consider a range of her works, including History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), Frankenstein (1818), Maurice (1820), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826) and Lodore (1835). We will also read both classic and recent critical works on Mary Shelley, as we explore how her writing engaged with a wide array of political, scientific, literary, and biographical contexts.

Attribute: ENG2.

ENGL 5616. Romanticism and Private Life. (3 Credits)

This course considers the literary responss of a range of Romantic-era writers to two significant pressures on privacy in early nineteenth-century Britain. First, renewed agitation for parliamentary reform in the post-war era prompted intensified governmental repression of political dissent, including what John Barrell has described as the "politicization of private space." Second, the early nineteenth century witnessed the definitve emergence of "modern celbrity culture," as Tom Mole and others have recently defined it. Our writers include Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, John Keats and John Clare.

Attributes: ENBL, ENG2.

ENGL 5622. 18th-Century Travel. (3 Credits)

This course is concerned with European travel and the use of travel tropes in 17th- and 18-century literature and other discourses and the ways the experience of travel from this period referred to as an "Age of Discovery" informs the travel metaphors—the "discoveries"—of the period sometimes to as the "Age of Reason." A central question of the course will be: How is the cultural relativism born of the recounting of the experience of travel reflected in the language and the literary works of the 18th century?.

Attribute: ENG2.

ENGL 5634. Modernists/Victorians. (3 Credits)

In this course, students examine landmarks of Victorian literature and transatlantic English modernism, exploring breaks and continuities between Victorian and modernist writers. Covering major texts from the 1840s to the 1940s, the course will also consider theoretical arguments about the status of the "classic" in literary history, and specifically as these define the fields of Victorian studies, modernism, modernity, and the classifications of "English" and "American" literature.

Attributes: COLI, ENAL, ENBL, ENG3.

ENGL 5650. Special Topics in Writing Studies. (3 Credits)

This course will survey selected issues in writing studies, with an emphasis on intersectionality. Possible topics including public writing, community writing, theories in writing program administration, WAC/WID, all with attention to the needs of increasingly diverse university settings. May be repeated when topics vary but not more than 2 courses (6 credits) may be applied to the certificate.

Attributes: ENGD, ENRJ, ENRW, PPWD, PPWF.

ENGL 5660. Research Methods in Rhetoric & Writing Studies. (3 Credits)

This seminar will introduce key research paradigms and methodologies in rhetoric and writing, including ethnography, rhetorical field methods, archival research, textual analysis, case studies, qualitative research, discourse studies, and more.

Attribute: ENRW.

ENGL 5670. History of Rhetoric. (3 Credits)

This seminar will provide a foundational introduction to the history of rhetoric, tracing classical rhetorical traditions via contemporary rhetorical theories with an emphasis on major thinkers, texts, and movements from antiquity onward.

Attributes: ENG1, ENG2, ENRW.

ENGL 5680. The Writing & Rhetoric of Scholarly Genres. (3 Credits)

This course in writing and rhetorical studies focuses on theories and practices of writing for academic and professional purposes. Drawing on scholarly research into topics such as rhetorical genre studies, advanced academic literacies, graduate writing and acculturation, and discipline-specific writing and publishing practices, as well as on practical guides for successful academic writing, this course is designed to help students expand knowledge of key topics in writing and rhetorical studies while also coming to better understand forms, genres, and values of publishable peer-reviewed writing in their fields. The course explores scholarship on academic discourse and provides a framework for writing in a range of published genres, including the book review and the scholarly research article.

Attribute: ENRW.

ENGL 5690. Seminar in Professional & Technical Writing Pedagogy. (3 Credits)

This seminar will introduce students to key pedagogical theories and methods in professional and technical writing, preparing them to teach courses in this area.

Attribute: ENRW.

ENGL 5700. Playwriting Workshop. (3 Credits)

ENGL 5707. High Modernism: 1922. (3 Credits)

An exploration of five major works published in modernism's anus mirabilis and the literary climate that fostered these seminal texts. The defining novel and poem of the twentieth century--Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, respectively--both appeared in 1922, along with Woolf's first important novel, Jacob's Room, Lawrence's story collection, England, My England, and Yeat's anthology volume Later Poerns, including such works as "A Prayer for My Daughter" and "The Second Coming."

Attributes: ENBL, ENG3.

ENGL 5708. Meditation, Contemplation, and the Spiritual Senses. (3 Credits)

The late Middle Ages saw an astonishing proliferation of texts, practices, and styles of devotion seeking to draw human beings closer to God through the body. New emphasis on Christ’s humanity and Aristotelian natural philosophy prompted the rediscovery of the five corporeal senses and their cognitive processes in devotional literature. In this course, we will examine the languages, knowledges, desires, and anxieties surrounding the senses in a diverse corpus of texts, probing them for their theological import as much as for their literary design. Major authors: Aristotle, Augustine, Origen, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Richard Rolle, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Meditationes Vitae Christi.

Attributes: ENG1, ENHD.

ENGL 5717. Transatlantic Women Modernists. (3 Credits)

This class looks at gender and modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. We will read a generous selection of women modernists, canonical and noncanonical, representing high modernism and "bad modernism" (to use Mao and Walkowitz's term), fiction, film, and poetry from the first half of the 20th century. Our transatlantic focus offers a special opportunity to examine multicultural and cosmopolitan modernisms: many women writers in this period were travelers and immigrants. We will also analyze the complex and often fraught relationships among feminist criticism, feminist theory, and theories of modernism both in the early 20th century and today. Authors include: Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf.

Attributes: ENBL, ENG3, ENGD, ENRJ.

ENGL 5718. Modern Language Politics. (3 Credits)

Early twentieth century literature and theory was preoccupied with the relationship between language and politics, from the acknowledgment of minority and non-standard linguistic forms, to questions over the relationship between violence and language (whether or not, to paraphrase Adorno, one can write poetry after Auschwitz), to the idea of literary form itself enacting a kind of political resistance. In this course, we will analyze some of the competing philosophies about language circulating during this period and interrogate how modernist writers responded and contributed to these discussions.

Attributes: ENBL, ENG2, ENG3.

ENGL 5747. Late Modernism. (3 Credits)

Focusing on works produced between the 1930s-60s, this seminar will explore how writing in various genres during the latter part of the modernist period responded to ideas and formal techniques that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Interrogating works that often do not neatly fit into received notions of high modernismn will enable us to interrogate critical questions of reinvention, disillusionment, lateness and periodicity.

Attributes: ENAL, ENBL, ENG3.

ENGL 5749. Twentieth-Century Studies: Decolonization and World Literature. (3 Credits)

Introductory graduate course in the study of selected twentieth-century figures from comparative cultural, literary, and theoretical perspectives. The course will examine the changing contours of literary theory, literary studies, and the status of literature itself in the twentieth century, in light of contending imperatives of decolonization and globalization. The course will focus on three pairings of writers: Joseph Conrad and W. E. B. Du Bois; Jean Rhys and C. L. R. James; Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Amiltav Ghosh. Select works from these writers will be studied in conjunction with critical selections from Fanon, Glissant, Pheng Cheah, and others.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5758. 20th Century American Autobiography. (3 Credits)

This course will focus on self-representations in print (essays, memoirs, autobiography), multimedia (graphic memoir, documentary, photography) and everyday life (Facebook, selfies, etc.)

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 5775. Master Class Luminous Details. (3 Credits)

We take for granted that poetry relies on imagery. But how exactly do we engage with, and reflect on, the information and the 'facts' of the material world? Using exercises, experiments, and readings from contemporary poetry, we will write new work, and revise it, with a focus on transformation and the 'luminous detail'.

Attribute: CVWG.

ENGL 5777. Master Class: Literary Magazine Workshop. (3 Credits)

The aim of this class is to give students the experience and skills necessary to create a literary magazine in alignment with the most recent and rapid changes in literaray consumption. Students iwll curate, edit and write for CURA, the print an donline literary magazine of the Creative Writing program. Instruction will also focus on marketing, publicity and event production protocols and practices crucial for successful literary publishing. Working collaboratively, students will endeavor to expand the boundaries of the literary magazine by examining the best powers of print and online venues in order to achieve the maximum impact of both.

ENGL 5778. Flawless/Freedom/Formations: Writing on Race, Gender and Popular Culture. (3 Credits)

This is a class about creative non-fiction writing as cultural reportage. In this class we will read a survey of cultural reportage—primarily reviews, profiles, editorials, opinion pieces—for textual, cultural, and aesthetic analysis to think about the ways that race—and intersectionally, gender and sexuality—operates thematically and politically in that writing. Our study of this writing will impact the main focus of this class: It is a writing workshop, in which each student will present her or his work for critique. Writing assignments will be expected of each student and possibly lead to the production of a class-produced blog or magazine at the end of the semester.

Attributes: CVWG, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5788. Memory, Trauma, Narrative. (3 Credits)

Drawing on memory studies, psychoanalysis, and narratology, this interdisciplinary course explores issues of narrative representation in literature and film. Recognizing that memory is the result of the interplay between past and present in the lives of individuals and of groups, the course examines the impact of trauma on narrative expression.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGT.

ENGL 5791. Poetry of Witness: Masterclass. (3 Credits)

Poets have always sought to address social, personal, and political challenges--upheaval, trauma, and change. But how exactly do we practice writing poetry as witnesses of our own time and of our own lives in context? In this course, we will read and write poetry that seeks to bear witness in a wide range of forms and to an array of social/personal contexts.

Attribute: CVWG.

ENGL 5801. Anatomy of a Bestseller. (3 Credits)

This class will deconstruct bestsellers in different genres, looking at the process from proposal, editing, finished manuscript and on to covers, marketing and promotion. Students will also develop their bestseller project over the semester.

ENGL 5832. Slavery in American Fiction. (3 Credits)

The course focuses upon depictions of slavery in American fiction during the years before the Civil War. We will read a selection of novels by blacks and whites, men and women, all concerned with the intensifying debates over "the peculiar institution." We will focus on the turbulent and troubled decade of the 1850s; our exploration this time of increasing sectional tension through fiction will spotlight the birth of the African American novel and its dialogic engagement with the burgeoning literature of race in the United States. Authors include Melville, Stowe, Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, among others.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5838. African American Print Culture. (3 Credits)

How does the study of African American literature change when seen from the perspective of print culture? And how does the study of print culture change when focused on African American archives? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African Americans participated in a rapidly emergent print culture as authors, editors, printers, readers, teachers, and librarians, among other roles. At the same time, African Americans frequently furnished the subject matter for this print culture, in ways they did not always control. This seminar will explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. It will draw on a range of primary materials related to African Americans, and seminar participants will combine these investigations with readings of recent work bridging critical race studies and material culture. Together we will ask how the methodologies of print culture might help us reconsider familiar notions of authorship and identity, and how African American materials might transfigure conceptual standbys of print culture studies such as circulation and publics.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5839. Literary Darwinism. (3 Credits)

This course will explore the diverse impact of Darwin’s big idea on American literature and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection had a seismic impact on the natural science of his day, a practice then closely intertwined with religion. The vibrations spread through the social sciences – resulting in what we now call social Darwinism – and literature registered the tremors. Through the readings of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and their contemporaries, we will consider the myriad effects of Darwinism on the American worldview.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG3.

ENGL 5841. Early American Media. (3 Credits)

An introduction to early American literature by way of the transatlantic dynamics of printing, reading, and circulating media before the rise of industrial publishing in the late nineteenth century.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG2.

ENGL 5843. Early Women Novelists. (3 Credits)

In this course we will read a selection of early novels by English women authors, including at least some of the following: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Frances Burney’s Evelina, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, and the anonymously authored The Woman of Colour. Our goal is to develop rigorous, historically sensitive, close readings of each novel, in part by focusing on the representation of gender, class and race. The last category is especially important. Several of the novels above feature Black characters and address the slave trade, slavery and/or British colonialism. Given our own moment in history, I believe it is imperative to foreground discussions of race and antiracism, and I will organize my pedagogy accordingly.

Attribute: ENG2.

ENGL 5844. American Bestseller 1870-1940. (3 Credits)

Since novels both register and shape public attitudes towards the world, a study of best selling novels suggests insight into how changes in literary tastes relate to broader social changes (e.g., political events, technological developments, changing demographics, and education policies). What affected changes in public taste after the Civil war, and how may we see those changes represented in books people most avidly read? Bestsellers presumably share important characteristics that can explain their broad appeal to reading public- and the goal of this course is to try to understand those characteristics and that appeal. Authors may include Edward Bellamy, Pearl Buck, Thomas Dixon, Edna Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, Zane Grey, Edith Wharton, Owen Wister, and Richard Wright.

Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 5845. Early American Novel. (3 Credits)

This course will sketch the tradition of the American novel from its beginnings through the Civil War. Authors will range from traditional canonical standards such as Hawthorne and Melville to more recent additions to the tradition like Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG2, ENGD, ENHD.

ENGL 5849. Pre-1900 American Literature. (3 Credits)

An introduction to recent Americanist literary scholarship, comparing and contrasting methodologies that have been brought to bear on three or four important works of U.S. literature published before 1900.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG2, ENG3.

ENGL 5861. Gender in American Literature. (3 Credits)

An interdisciplinary study of the social and cultural forces that shape gender difference and sexuality in American literature from 1830 to 1930.

ENGL 5863. Three American Authors: Alcott, Chesnutt, and Twain. (3 Credits)

In this course we will read works by three important American authors: Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), who produced works of children's fiction, sensational Gothic stories, and realist novels; Mark Twain (1835–1910), who wrote humor, realism, and social satire; and Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), whose characteristic genres included dialect stories, social realism, and the essay. We will also familiarize ourselves with the current critical conversation about each of these writers.

Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5905. Modern Poetry. (3 Credits)

This course will explore how writers in the first half of the 20th century responded to modernity through experiments with poetic form. Taking seriously the notion that form is political, modernist poets reimagined the ways language could mean through formal experimentation and interaction with other disciplines and media. By combining close reading (a technique we derive from the modernists) with cultural analysis, we will interrogate the impact of historical events and aesthetic movements on modernist writing, as well as the ways poetic forms actively contributed to the constitution of the modern world.

Attributes: ENAL, ENBL, ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 5919. 20th Century American Novel: A Violent Survey. (3 Credits)

Combining the sweep of a literature survey class and the thematic core of a seminar, this course will move through the twentieth century novel in the United States examining different modes of violence. We will include war novels in the United States examining different modes of violence. We will include war novels along with novels of manners. Beginning with James and Wharton and their dissection of social violence, we will move through the realists (London; Dreiser), the Depression and labor struggles (Steinbeck), WW2 (Mailer; Vidal) and the postwar period (Salinger; Bowles) as it leads intot the postmodern novel. Possible authors also include: Ellison, Vonnegut, Pynchon.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 5920. James Hardy Conrad. (3 Credits)

ENGL 5930. Neuro-Literature in Historical Perspective. (3 Credits)

Our current literary interest in neurology has a history. This course will look at the relatively recent history of the move from philosophical approaches associated with Cognitive Theory to biological brain research (fMRI scans of brains reading Jane Austen). And it will look at a longer history in which early modern brain research influenced literary representations of the self. In each of these historical moments, 17th and 18th-century writers have played curious and important roles, and so authors including Milton, Marvell, Swift, Finch, Addison, Pope, Sterne, Austen, and the Scriblerians, will be considered.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 5940. Novel, She Wrote. (3 Credits)

Novel, She Wrote: Black Female Writers and Their First Novels - "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then," Toni Morrison declares, "you must write it." The impulse for black female authors to write novels and the diverse manifestations of that impulse will be of primary concern in this course. What compelled black female authors in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century to write their first novels? How are themes of sexuality, motherhood, beauty, respectability, and intra- and interracial conflict represented in their texts? In what ways do their novels complement, build upon, and refer back to each other and other works? These are a few of the questions we will tackle as we read through the literature. Texts will include Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha (1953); Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970);Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970); Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place (1982); Edwidge; Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); A.J. Verdelle's The Good Negress (1995); Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998); and Ayana Mathis's The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012).

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 5959. Writing/Life: A Workshop. (3 Credits)

“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction,” Katherine Anne Porter famously said. In this workshop we will explore the complicated and sometimes gossamer lines between fiction and memoir. Students will write and critique works of fiction and nonfiction, exploring the contingencies of form, the changing shape of memory, the specific demands of genre, and the choices writers make as they work. We will read such authors as Ann Patchett, Dave Eggers, Joan Didion, David Sedaris, Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, and Mary Gordon, as well as selected critical essays. Students will come away from this seminar with 40 pages of good writing and a new understanding of how and why they want to write.

Attribute: CVWG.

ENGL 5960. Memoir and Personal Essay. (3 Credits)

This class will function as a writing workshop where we will spend at least half of class time critiquing your works in progress. Since the techniques of memoir are indistinguishable from the techniques of fiction, we will concentrate on dialogue, exposition, scene, character, managing narrative time (past, present, future) and, most of all, the development of a persona. The course will include trends in autobiographical theory as well as analysis of major texts by writers such as Didion, Hampl, Orwell and Sedaris.

ENGL 5965. Master Class: Writing for the Big Screen. (3 Credits)

This course offers an introduction to the fundamentals of screenwriting: scenes, acts, narrative structure, character development, genres, and dialogue, through intensive study of major, award-winning Hollywood films, classics in their genre. Students will read and analyze five outstanding screenplays, and watch films made from them. The final requirement for this course is a completed first act (20-30) of a feature film, as well as weekly assignments.

ENGL 5985. Introduction to Early Modern Studies. (3 Credits)

An introduction to the major debates, conversations, and approaches in early modern studies, with a focus on what it means to define and contribute to a field, how canons are formed, and what constitutes evidence for a literary-critical argument. Students will be exposed to , and gain practice in , a variety of methodological strategies and techniques: close reading and rhetorical analysis, archival research, theoretical and interdisciplinary work, and textual editing, among others.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 5989. Major Early Modern Texts and the Dynamics of Space and Place. (3 Credits)

Major Early Modern Texts and the Dynamic of Space and Place. Who "owns" the forest in As You Like It or the island in The Tempest-- and how and why does ownership take different forms in such terrains? In what ways do space and place within a poem differ if it is read in print, or circulated in manuscript or sung? How do stanzas and similar poetic practices inflect concepts of space and place? How is that process accomplished by culturally specific paradigms and practices--the gendering of certain spaces, the development of nationalism, the reading of NeoPlatonic texts, and so on.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 5992. Art of Literary Nonfiction. (3 Credits)

You will be introduced to the techniques of non-fiction writing by closely reading a wide variety of authors and by putting the lessons gained therein to practice in your own non-fiction pieces. The course will focus upon the basic techniques of non-fiction writing - which, in a phrase, amounts to telling a story about the verifiable world. This course will introduce you to a number of different non-fiction genres, including the profile, the personal essay, the informative or "reported" piece, the social commentary, and the review. There will be lectures on the genre, short exercises, and in-class writing, but the main emphasis will be on work-shopping student writing. We will broaden the notion of "research" to include interviews and non-traditional fact-gathering methods as well as the standard approaches. We will discuss and practice the notion of shaping and restructuring linear "reality" in order to sustain reader interest while maintaining allegiance to fact. There will be three medium-length writing assignments of approximately 5-7 thousand words each plus short assignments.

ENGL 5998. Master's Capstone. (3 Credits)

Required course for M.A. students who wish to fulfill the Capstone assignment. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.

ENGL 5999. Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing. (3 Credits)

This course introduces students to central histories, issues, and debates in writing and rhetorical studies. By highlighting key theoretical and terminological developments, this course lays the way for informed self-reflective practice based in awareness of the most current scholarly work in rhetoric and composition, thereby helping participants start to define their own identities as teachers of first-year composition as well as literature and other courses.

Attribute: ENRW.

ENGL 6004. Practicum in Writing Pedagogy. (3 Credits)

This course builds on the foundation developed in ENGL 5999 by delving into research-supported best practices for preparing students for diverse writing contexts. Readings and discussions will highlight writing and teaching strategies that support students' critical thinking and writing skills, covering topics related to primary and secondary research, information literacy, discourse and disciplinary communities, rhetorical and audience analysis, multimodal composition, effective response and assessment strategies, cognitive scaffolding and assignment design, and more.

Attribute: ENRW.

ENGL 6101. Rereading Close Reading:Hist Perspectives,Contemporary Challenges/Shakespeare's Poetry,Spenser,Don. (3 Credits)

We will evaluate both the history of close reading and the renewed interest—and renewed antagonism—revisionist versions of it are sparking today. What was, is, and will be “close reading” in literary studies? In engaging with the early history of this methodology (I.A. Richards, the New Critics, British analogues etc), we will consider how the climate in the academy and the country at large encouraged these approaches and how they interacted with and reacted against alternative methodologies. We will then explorer and evaluate the many attempts to develop a type of close reading appropriate to our own critical moment—and the reactions against them by critics like Moretti; we will, for example, discuss the relationship of those attempts to the digital humanities and the implications or close reading for debates about the workings of lyric. The authors on whom we will focus are Shakespeare (mainly the nondramatic poems, though we will also discuss at least one play), Donne, and Spenser. Students will, however, have the option of writing their final paper on another poet from the early modern period – or from a different period.

Attributes: CEED, CENS, ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 6103. News and Plays: 1660-1779. (3 Credits)

An examination of the relation between theatre and news media in the long eighteenth century.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 6104. Crip, Queer, and Critical Race Theory. (3 Credits)

This seminar will examine cutting-edge work in critical race, crip and queer theories and their intersections in order to prepare you to both intervene in these discourses and effectively engage with them in your analysis of literary texts. We will consider critical embodiment in works drawn from a range of historical periods and genres. Likely writers to be considered include José Esteban Muñoz, Eli Clare, Indra Sinha, Mel Chen, Ellen and William Craft, Robert McRuer, Roderick Ferguson, Jasbir Puar, and Alison Kafer. Fulfills: American 2 and Theory requirements.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3, ENGD, ENGT.

ENGL 6105. Post-1945 US Literature and Culture. (3 Credits)

This course will explore American writing, mainly prose, during the Cold War and after, while also considering trends in critical approaches to this period.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 6106. Medieval Communities and Modern Thought. (3 Credits)

This interdisciplinary course will consider the roles played by modern images and ideas of the medieval past in the formulation of modern ideas of community, nation, subjectivity, and habitus. Course readings will include modern theoretical texts, modern popular texts, and medieval source material (mostly in translation).

Attributes: ENG1, ENME.

ENGL 6107. Early Modern Lyric. (3 Credits)

What is lyric poetry? In this course, we will explore the transhistorical and transcultural challenges of defining and analyzing lyric compositions. What cultural and critical work is done when poets, critics, anthropologists and so on affix a generic label? Why is lyric distinctively tricky—and intriguing—to identify? What are the implications of this mode for cutting-edge questions about subjectivity, gender, affect, and the material text, as well as for more longstanding but recently contested concerns about the workings of genre and the relationship of poetry and song? Our reading will focus on early modern English poetry, including about eight of the major poets of the period (e.g., Wyatt, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and Phillips) and include some less-known work and lyrics from other periods and countries. We will deploy—and evaluate—a wide range of critical methods, including cultural critique, study of the material text, and the new formalisms. The course is tailored to students with a range of backgrounds and interests. We’ll also work together on techniques of “professionalizing”—e.g., beginning to publish, delivering conference papers successfully.

Attribute: ENG2.

ENGL 6108. The Dynamics of Space and Place: Early Modern and Other English Texts. (3 Credits)

Who "owns" the forest in "As You Like It" or the island in "The Tempest" or the spaceship in Vonnegut's "Slaughter-House Five"—and how and why does ownership take different forms in such terrains? How do concepts of space and place interact with cultural issues (e.g., gender, subjectivity, etc.) and formal issues, such as the workings of stanzas and genres? We'll discuss these and many other questions primarily in relation to early modern writings (in the sense of ones composed between about 1500–1660) but with several opportunities to engage with texts from other periods as well. While our primary focus will be academic careers, the course will also offer preparation for some other possible careers and will include the option of a creative project. We will also expand and deepen our expertise in teaching and oral presentations at conferences and elsewhere. (We'll have a course mini-conference.)

Attribute: ENG2.

ENGL 6201. Race and Affect Theory. (3 Credits)

This seminar will stage a dialog between the field of race and ethnic studies on the one hand and that of affect theory on the other.

Attributes: ENAE, ENAL, ENBL, ENG3, ENGD, ENGT.

ENGL 6212. Medieval to Early Modern Drama. (3 Credits)

When we think of early drama, we usually think of the cycle plays, the great civic, multi-part, day-long productions from English towns: York primarily, but traditionally also Chester, Towneley, and N-Town in East Anglia. But scholarship in the last ten years has forced us to rethink that model in ways that investigate the context of these plays. The text we have from Chester is not really medieval but 16th-century, performed after substantial religious change had occurred, and marked by different local religious positions, hence a site of civic conflict. The Towneley plays, it seems, were not a performed cycle at all, but probably a collection of plays from different places, assembled for private reading, perhaps as an attempt to preserve some elements of an old dramatic religious tradition when that religion had fallen out of favor. These are two examples of the way the course will examine the cultural context of late medieval/early modern English drama. A third example: the most profound way in which this drama differs from later commercial drama is in the shift away from community theatre which occurred in London with the construction of the Theatre in 1572. We will explore the economic issues around the emergence of commercial theatre. Before the Theatre was built, who paid for plays? where were they staged? was there a performing community? In addition to excerpts from the cycle plays we will read some moral plays like Manynd and Everyman, some Tudor drama by John Heywood and Henry Medwall, and will finish up with Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG1, ENG2, ENME.

ENGL 6215. Medieval British Historical Writing. (3 Credits)

History-writing was fundamental to medieval and early-modern literary sensibilities, but in its relation to truth, genre, and identity, medieval history differs dramatically from contemporary understandings of the discipline of history. This course will introduce students to the major historiographical thinkers and practitioners of the Middle Ages in Britain and include selections from Gildas, Nennius, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, and several French-language romances. Our interdisciplinary discussions will focus on the literary practices of medieval history.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME.

ENGL 6216. Late Medieval Autobiography: T. Hoccleve, O. Bokenham, M. Kempe. (3 Credits)

Margery Kempe's Book is often called the first female autobiography in English, but the writing of her fifteenth-century contemporaries Thomas Hoccleve, and London scribe and bureaucrat, and Osbern Bokenham, and East Anglian friar, also offes a personal voice. We will explore the social and theological context of each author as we read their work in Middle English.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG1, ENG2.

ENGL 6224. French of England: Texts and Literacies in a Multilingual Culture. (3 Credits)

French of England helps prepare graduates in medieval disciplines deploy the newly important multilingual paradigms for the study of medieval English and related cultures. It looks at the rich and still under-researched francophone corpus (c. 1000 literary texts and large bodies of documentary records) composed and/or circulating in medieval England and related regions from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. French was a major regional and transitional language in England, used in literature, governance, administration, culture, trade, and the professions. Taking francophone literary and documentary culture into account changes are paradigms for English medieval literary history and prompts new thought about the relations between literature, literacy, and language. Aiming to move as rapidly as possible from the pains of language-learning to the pleasure of reading text, the course combines a weekly linguistic practicum with a literary seminar and runs from 4pm to 7pm on Tuesdays. Previous experience of Old French is not required; basic reading or speaking of modern French is useful; experience with other languages is also sometimes enough of a help. This course will also explore early French uses of late old English. If in doubt about whether your language experiences will be helpful, please email woganbrowne@fordham.edu.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME, MVSG.

ENGL 6231. Late Medieval Women. (3 Credits)

The course will study women as produces and consumers of literature, that is as writers and readers. Instead of examining women as subjects of literary representation, we will use non-literary disciplines--social history, bibliography, iconography--to recover elements of women's lives in order to understand their involvement with reading. Like much current medieval scholarship, the class will employ cultural perspectives in which literature, history, and visual materials illuminate each other.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME, HGOH, MVSG.

ENGL 6235. Medieval Travel Narrative. (3 Credits)

Some of the most engaging questions about the Middle Ages have to do with the narratives of cultures in contact. Join me and other scholars who work on the medieval travel genre, finding in its discourses productive sites for exploration of premodern race, gender, religion, and more. This course will focus on a range of traditions, including crusade romances, such as "Richard, Coeur de Lion" in light of contemporary chronicler, Roger of Howden’s, "Chronica." Pilgrim and merchant narratives, from Egeria to Margery Kempe, and Mandeville to Marco Polo, will provide a contrast to romance and chronicle modes. We will also study the accounts by European missionaries who left extensive records of their interactions with Mongols. This course is designed to contextualize travel within the medieval world as we read and discuss those narratives as they relate to cultural projects of salvation, conquest, and conversion.

Attributes: ENG1, ENGD, ENME, MVSG.

ENGL 6236. Romanticism and Peace. (3 Credits)

"Peace is not an absence of war," wrote Spinoza, "it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." Proceeding from Spinoza's notion that peace is an active principle rather than a void between times of military conflict, and drawing upon the interdisciplinary field of Peace Studies, in this course we will study literary and philosophical engagements with peace in a period often thought synonymous with continual war. To view the Romantic era soley through the lens of war runs the risk of overlooking the reaching after peace that also marks the period (reflected in the vast array of treaties produced at this time, from the Peace of Paris (1783) to the London Straits Convention (1841). Attempts to theorize, to imagine, and to bring about peace were crucial forces in Romantic-era culture. Many familiar works, such as Wordsworth's Prelude, Joanna Baillie's plays, Jane Austen's novels, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic reflections on domestic tranquility, Thomas DeQuincey's escape into opium, Olaudah Equiano's modeling of the skills of a virtuosic negotiator, and Keat's famous odes are illuminated afresh when read in the context of a culture preoccupied not only with conflict but with conflict resolution.

Attributes: ENBL, ENG2.

ENGL 6237. The French of England II. (3 Credits)

Studies the rich, under-researched corpus (c. 1000 texts) in the Frenches of medieval England; includes projects of translation/editing (for acquiring techniques of presenting and interpreting medieval texts). FOE I not necessarily required.

Attributes: ENG1, ENME.

ENGL 6506. The Joseph Johnson Circle. (3 Credits)

This survey course takes shape around the British bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson, whose five-decade career stretched from the Seven Years’ War to the dawn of the Regency. Johnson published over four thousand titles during this time, in fields ranging from reform politics to children’s literature, from zoology to Baptist dissent, and from lyric poetry to visionary manifestos. His authors included Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sydney Owenson, William Cowper, Maria Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, William Hazlitt, Charlotte Smith, and hundreds more. Attending to what has been referred to as the “Johnson Circle,” we will trace broad orbits in British writing across the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with topics including aesthetics, religious debate, the American and French Revolutions, women’s rights, war, slavery, popular societies, science, and education. In this regard, this course will function as a broad survey of British writing from 1760 to 1820. Along the way, in studying the radiating influence of the imprint “J. Johnson, London,” we will also pay attention to the field of Book History and how it has energized and expanded eighteenth-century and Romantic-era studies.

Attributes: ENBE, ENBL, ENG2.

ENGL 6552. Film/Theory/Literature: Horror and Madness. (3 Credits)

Confronting the expansive theoretical, literary, and cinematic representations of fear, horror, terror, abjection and madness, we will delve into works of David Cronenberg, George Romero, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Cynthia Freeland, Julia Kristeva, Toni Morrison (among others). Warning: Several films are not for the squeamish. Please be aware that we will need a few hours each week (outside of official class time) for watching the films.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 6641. Reading and Teaching the Nineteenth - Century Novel. (3 Credits)

In this course we will consider the nineteenth-century novel from the interfused perspectives of readers and teachers. Our remit will be the British novel across a relatively broad span of decades: Maria Edgeworth’sCastle Rackrent (1800), Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871/2). After reading and discussing each novel we will then turn to consider the various ways that it might be taught in the college classroom. And for each novel, both our readings and our conversations about pedagogical approaches will be informed by critical articles on the works themselves and on broader issues in nineteenth-century studies. This seminar is open to all graduate students, but because the structure of the course will require an unusual amount of active student participation, please keep in mind that silent spectatorship will not be possible.

ENGL 6751. The New Formalism and Early Modern Literature. (3 Credits)

In the past decade formalism, the F-word of the professsion for over twenty years, has attracted many critics in its revisionist version often termed "the new formalism." What are the potentialities--and problems-- of this approach? How should we resolve debates about the working of the new formalism, such as whether it is necessarily historical? How does it interact and/or conflict with other methodologies, such as gender studies and materialism? We will approach these questions by reading a wide range of early modern texts in the principal genres, the list being planned to avoid major overlap with other early modern courses at Fordham in the past year or two. Thus the course aims to serve the needs of a range of students: those interested in a broad overview of early modern texts, and of those wanted to engage with formalist approaches and/or connect those approaches with other types of criticism. Like all my graduate courses, it will also include attention to professionalizing, such as discussions of giving papers effectively and of teaching.

Attributes: ENBE, ENG2.

ENGL 6767. Marriage and Nation in 19 Century British Literature. (3 Credits)

This course will explore literary and cultural conceptualizations of British marriage in the nineteenth century—the period traditionally seen as an age of nationalism and one in which Parliament passed or attempted to pass an unprecedented number of reforms of the marriage law. We will examine how marriage plots written after the Union with Ireland Act (1800) envision the mutually constitutive relationship between British identity and British marriage, as well as how they address crises of national self-definition and uphold—or question—the sense of national uniqueness and superiority that the institution of marriage was meant to reinforce.

ENGL 6769. Finnegans Wake. (3 Credits)

One of the most intriguing and entertaining literary works ever crafted, James Joyce’s "Finnegans Wake" sends us on seriously hilarious trips around the world, through human (especially Irish) history, and into the sleeping mind. Joyce’s “book of the night,” a comic masterpiece, constructs not one thing, but "two thinks at a time," multiple meanings that uproariously cross national, linguistic, sexual, historical—just about all kinds of—boundaries. A resurrection of dead ends that generates new beginnings (finn-again), this “collideorscape” asks readers to "wipe their glosses with what they know,” and revolutionizes all kinds of creative energies and theoretical discourses. Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't. Nearly always, though, things emerge that charm, surprise, and delight.

Attributes: ENG3, ENGD.

ENGL 6779. Brecht: Aesthetics and Politic. (3 Credits)

Bertolt Brecht was arguably the most important theater theorist of the twenthieth century, and his theory of the function of art under capitalism transformed thinking about the relationship between culture and politics and continues to resonate today. This course will examine Brecht's theater and theory in several contexts: first, in the context of modernist theater theory and practice, and third, via the legacy of his theories in late twenthieth- and twenty-first-century art and philosophy. Philosophical readings will include Marx, Adorno, and Horkheimer, Benjamin, Lukacs, Arendt, Barthes, Jameson, and Ranciere; theatrical readings will include, in addition to a substantial number of Brecht's own plays, considerations of German Expressionism; non-European, especially Chinese, theater, modernist cabaret, and postwar avant-garde and postdramatic theater. Discussions will address, among other things, the relationship between theater and politics, the role of mass culture, methodological issues in materialist criticism, theories of spectatorship, and the fate of political art after modernism.

ENGL 6800. God and Mammon in British America. (3 Credits)

Did the English explore, conquer, and settle North America in the name of true religion or the earthly pursuit of gain? How was the one aim shaped by the other, and how have these mutual concerns shaped colonial American writing? Taking Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a conceptual point of departure, this course will explore the cultural history of spiritual and material wealth in colonial New England, the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and the West Indies. We will examine both the central texts of dissenting Protestantism from the perspective of the colonial economics and social class and the central texts of colonial economics and economic self making from the perspective of theology, morality, and the transformation of religious culture in British America over the course of nearly two centuries.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG2.

ENGL 6888. Reading the Indian Ocean World. (3 Credits)

A new configuration of study has emerged in the last decade or so known as Indian Ocean Studies. It employs a robust interdisciplinarity to study the cultural flows and encounters over time of the peoples and traffic of the Indian Ocean and the formations of its vast littoral. This includes exchanges in trade, commerce, and war between the East African littoral and Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and the South East Asian archipelago including China. The migration of populations, the slave trades and slavery, establishment of overseas or expatriate settlements, the emergence of lingua franca, (such as Kiswahili), maritime life, and the spread of technology and creation of empires and colonies are studied in their interrelation. This course will focus on the archives, the literature, writing (including histories) and expressive practices (including film, music and performance) that this confluence of peoples has created in over more than two (actually seven) millennia. Starting with the earliest extant documents from Antiquity, to the contemporary scholarly and creative work of writers such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Barlan Pyamootoo, Monique Agénor, Kuo Pao Kun, Isabel Hofmyer, Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nuruddin Farah and Yvette Christianse, we will spend the semester “reading” the Indian Ocean world.

ENGL 6905. Concepts of Culture. (3 Credits)

What do we talk about when we talk about "culture"? This class will explore this keyword in and around literary studies along two parallel tracks. First, we will explore the historical development of different concepts of culture over the last two centuries or so. Second, we will explore a range of theoretical perspectives from the past three decades that fit loosely under the rubric of Cultural Studies. Both tracks will necessitate broadly interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. We will explore, for instance, a relatively literary manifestation of the concept in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, but also how the concept of culture figures in the early history of the human sciences, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Similarly, since work in the contemporary field of Cultural Studies only rarely limits its objects of study to the literary; we will sample theoretical developments in the study of popular music, film and television, etc.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3, ENGT.

ENGL 6914. Home, Exile and Diaspora in Asian American Literature. (3 Credits)

This course will introduce students to major works of contemporary Asian American Literature. Possible authors include John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chang-rae Lee, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marilyn Chin, and many others.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 6921. Modern Language Politics. (3 Credits)

Early twentieth century literature and theory was preoccupied with the relationship between language and politics, from the acknowledgement of minority and non-standard linguistic forms, to questions over the relationship between violence and language (whether or not, to paraphrase Adorno, one can write poetry after Auschwitz), to the idea of literary form itself enacting a kind of political resistance. In this course, we will analyze some of the competing philosophies about language circulating during this period and interrogate how modernist writers responded and contributed to these discussions. Likely authors include James Dawes, Theodor Adorno, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Celan, Gertrude Stein, Americo Paredes, Zitkala-Sa, and Jean Toomer.

Attributes: ENAL, ENG3.

ENGL 7001. Early Modern Lyric Poetry. (3 Credits)

The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of critical interest in early modern/Renaissance lyric. Many methodological issues it raises are germane to the lyric poetry of other periods as well. The questions we will explore include, among others: What are the potentialities and problems of the new formalism? How if at all should close reading be recuperated? How does the new interest in the material text lead us to interpret the visual appearance of lyric poetry, other results of printing and publishing practices, and the poem as artifact or object? In what ways does lyric gender, and in what ways is it gendered? How does space/place theory, more often deployed in relation to drama and prose fiction, illuminate the workings of the lyric? Whereas the primary focus of this seminar is the period between about 1500 and 1660, it is also designed for those with other interest and areas of expertise. If any participants in the group are poets themselves, they will have opportunities to engage with issues of craft and to submit poems in lieu of one of the shorter assignments. And those primarily interested in lyric poetry written in other periods can focus on those texts in at least two classes and if they wish write their seminar papers partly or entirely on it.

ENGL 7007. Displacing the Renaissance: Travel, Race, and Colonialism. (3 Credits)

Investigates how literature of the English Renaissance takes part in developing discourses of race and colonialism in the period. Authors to be studied include Ascham, Nashe, Spenser, Marlow, Shakespeare, and Massinger, among others.

Attributes: ENAL, ENBE, ENG2, ENG3, ENGD, ENGT.

ENGL 7744. Paracolonial Studies: After Postcolonial Theory. (3 Credits)

This course will examine recent developments in (and beyond) postcolonial theory. While the primary focus will be on 20th and 21st- century theory and literature, the course will consider texts and cultural documents from earlier periods to explore how postcolonial studies belong to a wider reshaping of literary histories. The course will be organized around the study of a select few contemporary writers (Toni Morrison, Amitav Ghosh, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are likely choices). Works by these writers will be read alongside postcolonial theorists (e.g., Homi Bhabha, Ania Loomba, Walter Mignolo, Gayatri Spivak, Gauri Viswanathan) and in conjunction with earlier works both canonical (e.g., Collins, De Quincey, Defoe, Dryden, and Shakespeare) and less canonical (e.g., Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir's Hikayat Abdullah, and documents from the Dutch and English East India Company records).

ENGL 7829. Fict Pub Sph: Am Lit 1776-1900. (3 Credits)

Using concepts of the public sphere drawn from critical theory, feminism, and political philosophy, this course will examine the development in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture of the gendered distinctions between public and private, domesticity and the market, reason and sentimentality. Several historical problems will structure our theoretical, critical, and literary readings, including: the development of the doctrine of separate spheres, or domestic ideology; the effect of counter-publics, or alternative models of the public sphere, based in social movements such as temperance, feminism, and abolitionism; the political meanings of emotions, especially the key sentimental concept of sympathy; and shifting notions of how the practices of reading and writing literature were supposed to prepare citizens - especially boys and men - for participation in politics and civil society.

Attributes: ENAE, ENG2, ENG3.

ENGL 8935. Dissertation Writing Seminar. (0 Credits)

Designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects. Attention will also be given to the preparation of material for academic publication.

ENGL 8936. Issues in Scholarship and Academia. (0 Credits)

This 0-credit seminar, open to all doctoral students, will provide a forum in which to discuss the issues that shape the pursuit of a career professing literature as well as the pursuit of a career outside of the academy. Each semster's combination of guest-presentations and brief, selected readings will vary according to particpants' desires, but typical topics might include the following: General Education and the English Department; Journal Editing and the Intellectual Life; Humanities Education and Globalism; and The Ph.D. in English and the World Outside. Selected readings might include excerpts from Louis Menand, "The Marketplace of Ideas"(2010); Stanley Fish, "Save the World on Your Own Time "(2008); Frank Donoghue, "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities"; and Katherine N. Hayles' "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary."

ENGL 8997. Master's With Writing Concentration Capstone. (0 Credits)

The MA with Writing Concentration (MA w/WC) degree students who have completed 6 of their 10 courses toward their degree requirements will complete a substantial writing project of approximately 30 pages of poetry or 40 pages of fiction or nonfiction under the direction of a creative writing faculty member as their exit requirement.

ENGL 8998. English Graduate Internship. (1 to 3 Credits)

Will be processed through graduate internship.

ENGL 8999. Independent Study. (0 to 4 Credits)

Independent Study.

ENGL 9999. Dissertation Direction. (1 Credit)

Doctoral students who have had their dissertation proposals accepted must register for this each semester up to and including the one in which they defend. The one exception is for students defending in the summer semester before their summer graduation deadline, the registration may be for ENGL 0910 Maintenance.