Department of English
700-Level Courses
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713 - Studies in Seventeenth-Century British Literature
713-01 M 18:30-21:20 - M. Dowd
Literary Spaces of Seventeenth-Century England. In this seminar, we will consider how texts written primarily in the early seventeenth century engage with cultural, physical, and literary conceptions of space. In particular, we will investigate how some of the most influential and popular genres of this period (including verse satire, city comedy, and pastoral poetry) represent and redefine ideas about the country, the court, the city, and beyond. Readings will include drama, poetry, and prose by such authors as Dekker, Shakespeare, Marvell, Jonson, and Lanyer. We will read these works within the context of seventeenth-century literary theory and social history in addition to considering a range of secondary criticism and the work of spatial theorists (including de Certeau and Lefebvre). Requirements include participation and careful reading, short written exercises, oral presentations, and a final research project.
717 - Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
717-01 W 18:30-21:20 - J. Keith
We will focus on approaches to the senses in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and culture. We will chart the role of empiricism, moral theory, and aesthetics in the historical shifts that span the flagrant writing and behavior of the libertines to the cult of sensibility that relied on the liberty of feeling. In analyzing the senses as a site for self-indulgence as well as social reform, we will study satirical, scatological, and sentimental poetry (e.g., by Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, William Collins, Ann Yearsley, and William Cowper); eighteenth-century literary and moral theory; and prose narratives, including Horace Walpole's gothic tale The Castle of Otranto, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, and Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. We will conclude our study of the relation between the senses and freedom with the visual and verbal designs of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Requirements: class participation, discussion question, oral presentation, and research paper.
719 - Studies in British Romanticism
719-01 R 18:30-21:20 - A. Wallace
Since Jerome McGann's intervention in The Romantic Ideology (1983), we have not been able to think of the writings of the British Romantic period as the expression of a single (if complex) system of thought or to evaluate these writings by means of that reconstructed ideology. Yet the term, Romanticism, and the assumptions it carries persists. In this course we will examine one of the most intransigent elements of "the Romantic ideology": the valorization of rural life and rural writers as the ideal human and artistic condition. After a brief survey of Romantic culture and canonical writings, we will turn to this surprisingly vexing topic in the work of select authors: Charlotte Smith, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, and John Clare (or so my list reads at this moment). Our seminar discussions will be fueled by your presentations of "problem papers," and the rest of the course work will consist of a graduated series of assignments leading to the research essay and a conference-length revision of that essay.
730 - Studies in American Literature
730-01 W 18:30-21:20 - N. Morrissette
Postwar Counterculture Imaginaries
This course offers graduate students an advanced introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies through literature of the post-World War II to contemporary period. We will consider the development and redirection of American Studies as an academic field of inquiry through the idea of counterculture imaginaries, tracing its characteristic themes, methods, and controversies. Authors may include Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, Percival Everett, George C. Wolfe, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, and others; films may include Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
731 - Studies in American Literature before 1900
731-01 T 18:30-21:20 - M. Rifkin
Race, Space, and Law in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.
This course will explore the relationship in the nineteenth-century between discourses of race, national territory, and legal subjectivity. How were certain populations categorized as nonwhite, although in different ways and to different effects? How did ideologies of racial difference help define the boundaries of the U.S. ? What rhetorical and political strategies did affected populations adopt in challenging institutionalized racism and imperial policy? How did those defined as racially “other” narrate their own identities and geographies? To what degree does the idea of citizenship, or full inclusion in the nation, actually address the grievances and self-representations of racialized groups? We will engage these questions through a focus on the writings and changing legal status of African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans. We will be reading both literary and legal texts (such as statutes and court decisions). Authors may include Frank Webb, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, Juan Seguín, and María Amparo Ruíz de Burton.
733 - Studies in American Literature after 1900
733-01 T 15:30-18:20 - S. Romine
History and Its Fictions
This course will read a range of American "historical novels" in an effort to better understand the relationship between history, narrative, and fiction. There will be a cluster of Reconstruction novels, period novels (Doctorow's Ragtime, for example), and several novels dealing with discrete historical events (JFK's assassination, the lynching of Emmitt Till). The course will also involve a range of theoretical readings and at least two films. There will be frequent seminar presentations and a longer, research-based essay.
735 - Studies in African-American Literature
735-01 M 18:30-21:20 - S. Ferguson
(The African American Slave Narrative)
This is an intensive study of the founding texts that outline the basic techniques, characters, motifs, symbols, and so forth of the African American literary tradition. Students will read early Black Atlantic slave narratives, including those by Olaudah Equiano, James Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and African Muslim Omar Ibn Said; as well as narratives written by such fugitive slaves as Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, Harriet Jacobs, and William and Ellen Craft; and postbellum slave narratives written by Booker T. Washington and Mary Todd Lincoln confidante Elizabeth Keckley. They will also read New York Solomon Northup's "reverse" slave narrative that recounts how this freeman feigned illiteracy (signified) in order to survive twelve years of Southern bondage. Students will examine a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to these writings, make an oral report, write short position papers and an original longer course essay of no less than 15 pages.
744 - Seminar in Composition Studies
744-01 W 15:30-18:20 - K. Ritter
Special Topic: Writing Program Administration
Course Overview:
This is a seminar in current theories and practices of writing program administration; design and implementation of writing program curricular development and assessment; and historical studies of writing program administration. The seminar is designed for all interested MA and PhD students, but will be particularly valuable for those considering administrative work post-graduation in first-year composition programs at small or large colleges.
After completing this course, students will be able to:
- Articulate a personal/individual philosophy of writing program administration for use in a future professional setting;
- Locate and situate the key institutional and curricular issues facing writing program administrators (WPAs) today;
- Understand the historical conditions under which WPAs have labored in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the ways in which those histories affect current WPA theory and practice;
- Differentiate between multiple theories of leadership, management, and administration, including those rooted in collaborative models, as applicable to the setting of a university writing program.
Requirements:
- Four critical responses of 3-5 pages (750-1250 words) each, to assigned course readings (20%).
- A 3-4 page (750-1000 word) critique of a book related to, or focusing on, Issues in Writing Program Administration (20%), or a similar-length critique of a university writing program web site
- A 1-2 page (250-500 word) Statement of Administrative Philosophy (10%).
- A final seminar paper of 15-20 pages (3750-5000 words) on a topic of interest within issues of Writing Program Administration (40%).
Course Readings (Tentative List):
Brown, Stuart, and Theresa Enos, Eds. The Writing Program Administrator's Resource. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
George, Diana, Ed. Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers & Troubadours: Writing Program Administrators Tell their Stories. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
L’Epplantenier, Barbara, and Lisa Mastrangelo, Eds. Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Community, and the Formation of a Discipline. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2004.
Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, Eds. The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist: Making Knowledge Work. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002.
Shirley Rose and Irwin Weiser, Eds. The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
Ward, Irene, and William J. Carpenter, Eds. The Allyn & Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators. New York: Longman, 2002.
746 - Studies in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory
746-01 W 18:30-21:20 - H. Roskelly
Emerson in the Agora: Transcendental Rhetoric Then and Now
Emersonian rhetoric had a dramatic effect on the writers and thinkers of his generation, from Margaret Fuller to Walt Whitman. His approach to readers, his understanding of voice, his use of topoi, the sites for his creativity, and especially his notion of time and timing, were rhetorical elements that became firmly linked to American transcendentalism. His influence continues today, with similar rhetorical moves, in the work of thinkers—environmentalists, artists, theorists and teachers—who use Emerson’s concepts of language, art, experience and community to remake transcendentalist notions in the early 21st century.
This course investigates Emerson’s ideas in the marketplace of ideas in 19th c. America by looking at Emerson and his Concord circle of fellow intellectuals, including Alcott and Thoreau. It then places those ideas in a new agora of current American culture to explore the work of those like Cornel West, Paul Krugman, Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie and others, whose rhetoric echoes and reworks Emerson’s own.
Possible texts include: Emerson’s Complete Essays, Emerson’s biography The Mind on Fire, Louisa May Alcott’s Work, Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, Cornel West’s Prophetic Faith, bell hooks’s All About Love.
778 - Directed Reading
778-01. N. Myers
778-02. N. Myers
Pr. admission to the Ph.D. program, 24 hours of course
work beyond the M.A., and the permission of Director of Graduate Studies.
Individual conferences. Program of reading formulated to meet the varying needs of each student.
780 - Independent Doctoral Study
780-01. N. Myers
780-02. N. Myers
Pr. 36 hours of Ph.D. course work and the permission of Director
of Graduate Studies.
Intensive review of literature and criticism in a given field in preparation for preliminary examination or dissertation. May be repeated for up to six hours credit.