Department of English
600-Level Courses
Please note: some items require a free Microsoft Office Viewer. Please select the appropriate viewer and download it from the Microsoft web site. Each Office file type link is labelled as such.
608 - Chaucer
608-01 W 18:30-21:20 - A. Vines
This course is devoted to Chaucer’s best known work: The Canterbury Tales. Special attention will be paid to the tensions between the various cultural practices represented in the pilgrims’ Tales and their interactions with one another in the context of late fourteenth-century England. In addition, we will also examine The Canterbury Tales as an innovative anthology of medieval literary genres and consider how our modern ways of dealing with these cultural and social struggles and modern textual praxis can help us to read and understand this medieval masterpiece. We will read this text in the original Middle English, carefully working our way through the tales. We will also engage with both the recent and more traditional critical perspectives brought to bear on the Tales, such as Marxist criticism, cultural studies, post-coloniality, gender and queer studies, and manuscript studies. No prior knowledge of Middle English is required for this course; however, by the end of the semester, you will be able to read Chaucer’s language with fluency.
616 - Restoration & 18th Century Drama
616-01 TR 14:00-15:15 - J. Evans
This seminar will focus on comedy in its cultural contexts through reading and discussion of ten plays that span the period. They include Restoration comedies (Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Etherege’s The Man of Mode, Behn’s The Rover), late Stuart and early Georgian comedies (Congreve’s The Way of the World, Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, Centlivre’s The Busybody, and Steele’s The Conscious Lovers), and late Georgian comedies (Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem). Student writing will include a critical reading journal and a research paper; in addition students will present an article report and, in teams, lead a class discussion.
621 - Seminar on Publishing
621-01 M 18:00-20:50 - R. Langenfeld
Our seminar on publishing mixes the old and the new. Students team up to lead discussions on John Tebbel’s seminal history of American publishing, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America. To add context to Tebbel, we will read selected articles about the history of the book. Contemporary issues are part of our discussions as we talk about current articles from Publishers Weekly Online. Your book critiques of biographies of twentieth-century editors and publishers lead us into discussions of other memoirs I will assign.
In the major assignment you team up with a fellow student to ready a "book" for press. You and your colleague will originate an idea for a book, select a press, write a proposal, and then design your book (ad copy, book jacket, prelims, opening pages of chapter one). This desktop publishing project will employ Adobe's InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. You will learn to use these programs. In addition to our readings on book cover design, I will offer background on book design, book proposals, and copy writing. At the end of the semester you will present your book to the "editorial board" (i.e., the class).
This seminar advances the study of subjects initially covered in the prerequisite course, English 620 (Contemporary Publishing) and prepares students for English 622 (Writing and Editing Internship).
623 - Writing - Advanced: Nonfiction
623-01 W 18:30-21:20 - M. Parker
625 - MFA Fiction Workshop
625-01 R 14:00-16:50 - C. Brown (M.F.A. students only)
628 - MFA Poetry Workshop
628-01 R 14:00-16:50 - J. Grotz (M.F.A. students only)
682 - Structure of Verse
682-01 T 14:00-16:50 - D. Roderick
688 - Women's Rhetoric and Feminist Pedagogy
688-01 M 18:30-21:20 - N. Myers
Two questions will drive this course: 1) How do the genres of women's discourses restrict and support their rhetorical agency? and 2) How do theories of feminist pedagogies critique and extend the practices of the classroom? Given the focus on genre, we will start with three versions of The Women: Clare Boothe Luce's play and two movie adaptations (1939 and 2008). We will then explore across time the genres women have written within, the rhetorics they have embraced, and feminist theories tied to teaching. We will be dealing with film, letters, poetry, conduct books, speeches, sermons, magazines, educational treatises, etc. Besides specific readings and class discussion, assignments include weekly written reading responses, researched group presentations, and a final individual pedagogy or rhetorical theory text.
697 - Composing Theories in Reading and Writing
697-01 T 18:30-21:20 - E. Chiseri-Strater
This course explores the connections between theories of composition and theories of reading and implications for both research and teaching. We’ll consider current traditional, process and post-process theories of writing and psycholinguistic and transactional theories of reading as well as the influences of feminism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, and ethnography on the reading/writing processes. Seminar participants will read a contemporary novel together, conduct a case study of a reader/writer or reading/writing group and write a scholarly research paper on a topic of their choice.