Spring 2013 Graduate Course Offerings

ENG 105: Teaching Practicum (15755)
W. 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Dr. Rachel Hollander

This course, required for DA students, will be a collective endeavor to reflect on, revise, reinvigorate and share our experiences as teachers of writing and literature at the college level. I see the diversity of our graduate program, which includes both recently graduated first-time teachers and those who have been teaching for many years, as a great advantage, allowing us a wide variety of perspectives from which to consider what does and does not work. The coursework will include readings on “best practices” in the teaching of literature, an on-line discussion board for reflecting on the courses we are currently teaching, and interactions with other faculty members in the department. We may also observe each other’s classes, as well as those of other professors in the department. Written work will focus on syllabi, assignments, and responding to student papers, as well as papers designed to help students integrate pedagogical theory into their own course design and methods.

ENG. 141: Writing in the Academy: Histories, Theories, Pedagogies (16038)
T. 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller

In Writing in the Academy, we will explore students’ writing development beyond first year and general education composition courses. We will consider the history and current status of English’s involvement in this teaching and learning beyond first year composition by exploring how English departments took the lead in developing writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs and writing in the disciplines (WID) programs. We will study various philosophies and pedagogies of WAC/WID programs and consider strong critiques of WAC/WID. We will also work toward an understanding of how WAC and WID programs (as well as literacy across the curriculum and literacy coaching initiatives at the high school level) must ask questions of identity, language, community, disciplinarity, access, and exclusion that are both similar to and different from those questions composition scholars struggle with around first year writing. With these histories of – and challenges to – writing instruction across academic disciplines as our lens, we will read case studies of students’ experiences as writers, including descriptions of what students face as they write across and within disciplines and studies of the intersections of students’ literacies in and out of school.  We will also consider the growing body of research about writing transfer – how and when students carry their writing experiences and knowledge from one context to another.

Through the pedagogical descriptions in course texts students will enlarge their own teaching repertoire, and through the research and assessment methods illustrated in course texts (from the archival to textual meta-analysis to the qualitative on small or longitudinal scale) students will increase their understanding of approaches for exploring the experiences of student writers.

ENG. 370 Topics in Shakespeare (15879)
Shakespeare’s Globalization          
R. 7:10-9:10 p.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz

As a physical fact, Western globalization began with the return to Spain of one of Magellan’s four ships, minus their admiral, in 1522. This course explores the underpinnings of our twenty-first century fascination with globalization by interrogating the historical origins of the globalizing process in sixteenth and seventeenth century English literary culture. It is, in some ways, a post-colonial course that uses pre-modern material. We begin where all investigations of globalization should begin, with utopia: in this case, Thomas More’s fictional Utopia of 1516.  We’ll read a series of Shakespeare’s most global plays, particularly those that focus on Rome as world-encompassing civilization:  Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. We’ll also consider poetic responses to early globalization in Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Michael Drayton, and others, as well as contrasting portions of two substantial poetic epics, Camoes’s Lusiads (1572) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), and exploring English depiction of the New World, Far East, and other realms. We’ll also explore recent historical and theoretical works on early modern globalization by Todorov, Crosby, Heise, and others.

ENG. 430: Restoration & 18th Century Prose (15691)
Early English Feminisms, 1690-1812
W. 2:50-4:50 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey

This course will explore literary, social, and political texts that examine the role of women in the long eighteenth century. The age of the Enlightenment contains competing notions of women’s subjectivity. From one perspective, it is a historical era during which women become increasingly literate, public, and autonomous. But at the same time, eighteenth-century English culture applauded feminine docility, chastity, and servility. While Enlightenment philosophy posited individual sovereignty and refined understanding as personal ideals, women’s pursuit of these ideals was often condemned as misguided, socially disruptive, even promiscuous. We will seek to witness this unstable and embattled status of women in the writing of the period, and further, to continually revisit what we mean by “feminism” when working with texts that do not yet envision equality, rights, citizenship, and intellectualism as domains available to women. Such questions, I hope, will lead us to reflect on what early feminist thought can tell us about the relevance of the concept for us today. Readings will include texts by John Locke, Mary Astell, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as current scholarship by major thinkers in the field such as Joan Scott, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown. Requirements will include regular attendance, active participation, a response paper, and a seminar-length research paper.

ENG. 560: Revolution and Romanticism (15690)
T 2:50-4:50 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz

A research-oriented course on the political uses of literary and visual culture (art and film) from the French Revolution to the collapse of Nazi Germany. We will begin with historical Romanticism and progress to encounters with transhistorical “meta-romantic” literary forms, ideas, and iconographies that express nostalgia for pre-modern agrarian primitivism, are presupposed by a belief in the decline and decadence of Western civilization, and lead to the conviction that art is the only true vehicle of cultural revival and national rebirth in the twentieth century. Our survey will culminate with German fascism’s Blut-und Boden aesthetics, its millenarian utopianism, and its vast investment in the palingenetic mission of the arts. Whether Jacobin or reactionary, Communist or fascist, irredentist or supranational, we will examine how revolutionary movements co-opt romantic tropes as mimetic archetypes. Students will develop original projects and present their research and submit a term paper before the conclusion of the term. Readings and discussion will be supplemented by slides, films, and visits to area museums such as the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Frick, and the Neue Galerie.

Authors of interest to the course will include: Vico, Herder, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wagner, Carlyle, Morris, Pater, Spengler, Freud, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Jünger, Mann, Marinetti, Benn, Hitler, Goebbels, Heidegger.

Artists whose work will be considered: Blake, Friedrich, Runge, David, Ingres, Fuseli, Constable, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Overbeck, Schinkel, Goya, Turner, Böcklin, Feuerbach, Millais, Burne Jones, Thoma, Trübner, Liebermann, Corinth, Munch, Nolde, Marc, Schmidt-Rottluff, Marinetti, Breker, Thorak, Ziegler, Lanzinger, Junghanns, Peiner, Kampf, Padua, Fay, Klein, Gradl, Martin-Amorbach, Wissel.

Filmmakers: Harlan, Riefenstahl, Steinhoff, Baky.

ENG. 730:  Literary Modernism (15754)
Modernism and World War
R 2:50-4:50 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari

This course will seek to discover what impact the two great world wars had on literary production in Great Britain, Ireland, and the US.  It might prove useful to see if the realities of these wars – the enormous casualties as well as the sudden and powerful geopolitical changes that result – help accelerate the technical and thematic experimentation that makes literary modernism famous and important.  So we will read canonical texts from the period, from before the Great War to the beginning of the Cold War, charting the development of modernism as influenced by world war.  Texts to be read:  Conrad’s Lord Jim; Forster’s Howards End; -Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Woolf’s To The Lighthouse  and Between the Acts;  and selected poems by Yeats and Stevens.

ENG. 800:  Forms and Themes in Film (15880)
Death, Dying, and Moving Image Culture
R. 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Dr. Scott Combs

“We do not die twice.  In this respect, a photograph does not have the power of film;  it can only represent someone dying or a corpse, not the elusive passage from one state to the other.” –A. Bazin, 1958

This course takes up the issue of film’s specificity as a medium (both formal-esthetic and technological) by attending to instances of this “elusive passage” between life and death.  We will study screen representations of death and dying around conceptual clusters of inquiry:  film’s difference from photography and the “place” of death within moving (as opposed to still) images;  early film’s production of the death moment and its context within other machines characteristic of modernity;  patterns in dominant cinema;  the relatively recent documentary interest in end-of-life care;  new horizons for moving image commemoration;  and the relationship between cinematic and medical technologies.  There will be a short paper early on, and a longer paper due at the end of the semester.  The first paper will be a 4-5 page sequence analysis, and the longer paper (15-20 pages) will develop your own research interests based on course coverage.  You will present your final paper in a short presentation during the last two weeks of the semester.

ENG. 850: Jazz and Literature (15758)
M 2:50-4:50 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney

This course examines literary representations and adaptations of jazz from the New Negro Renaissance to the present.  Through the study of mostly African American literary texts that feature jazz as a social discourse as well as a mode of artistic expression, we will investigate how jazz has been represented as both a distinctive mode of African American cultural expression and a complex medium of interculturalism.  Jazz literature often underscores the rebellious desire implicit in jazz expression, whether it transgresses racial boundaries or asserts black autonomy and self-determination.  At the same time, jazz literature also foregrounds interracial and intercultural conflict, conflict that is often related to the transgressive sexuality that has been associated with jazz.  Emphasizing the importance of jazz for African American modernism, this course will consider how literary interpretations of jazz relate to theoretical articulations of internationalism as well as U.S. and African American cultural nationalism.  Readings will most likely include fiction by Claude McKay, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Paule Marshall; poetry by Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, and Jayne Cortez; jazz autobiographical writing; documentary film; and essays.

ENG. 877:  Workshop in Fiction (15689)
M 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein

This is a writing workshop for students of literature. You will write three pieces of fiction, and at the end of the semester put together a portfolio of your best finished work.  Classroom time will be spent on critiques of student fiction, and also on close readings of a varied set of writers—Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme, Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie, Denis Johnson, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

ENG.  975: Doctor of Arts Research and Workshop (11162) ( 3 credits)
M. 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis

This course is designed to assist students through all stages of the dissertation process.  Students must register for this course from the start through the completion of the dissertation.  The three credit course, in which students are required to enroll for two semesters, guides students through the early stages of dissertation research and writing and assists more advanced students in peer-review and revision. Students will choose and/or refine a dissertation topic, write a dissertation proposal, develop a dissertation timeline for completion of chapters, workshop a chapter with peers, and cultivate effective writing strategies. For more advanced students, the course will emphasize peer-review workshops, techniques for revision, and strategies for completion.

ENG. 500: Colloquia (10109)

ENG. 900: Master’s Research (15692)

ENG. 901: Readings & Research (11629)

ENG. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (10107)

ENG. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (10106)

ENG. 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) Workshop (13824) (1 credit)

This is the one-credit version of ENG. 975, only to be taken after the student has completed two semesters of the three-credit version of ENG. 975.