Fall 2009 English Graduate Courses
Medieval European Literature - 18228 - ENGL 524 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Sarah McNamer
In this seminar, we will read classics of the medieval European literary tradition: troubadour lyrics, Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, the Lais of Marie de France, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, legends of St. Francis of Assisi, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, and selections from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Our focus will be on close readings of the literary works, but we will also bring cultural contexts to bear in our efforts to better understand and enjoy them.
All readings will be in modern English translation.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm T New North 311
Milton - 18229 - ENGL 536 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Jason P Rosenblatt
By starting with the early literary productions in poetry and prose and concluding with Samson Agonistes, written in old age, when Milton, like his champion, was blind and disillusioned, we will give attention to the development of his literary powers. But we will spend most of our time on Paradise Lost. With all due reverence for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear, Milton's epic is the greatest single work ever written in English. We will try to understand it mostly on our own but also with help from some of the best contemporary essays. Besides a longer final paper, everyone will turn in a short paper (500-750 words, no more than two to three double-spaced typed pages) every two weeks. Since the class will be split in two, and the assignments staggered, one half of the class will be turning in an assignment every time we meet. Papers should concentrate on interpretive problems or questions raised by the work to be discussed in class that week.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm W New North 311
Wordsworth and Anglo-American Poetic Traditions - 18230 - ENGL 586 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Michael Ragussis
The first half of this course will focus on William Wordsworth’s radical experiments and innovations in poetic form and content, set within the context of the radical politics of the 1790s (especially with reference to the French Revolution). In this light we will explore the ways in which poetic forms and theories of language are connected to questions of class, gender, and power more generally. We will examine Wordsworth’s relation to the poetic traditions that preceded him, especially in light of Keats’s claim that “Wordsworth is deeper than Milton . . . [who] did not think into the human heart as Wordsworth has.” The second half of the course will explore the kinds of poetic experiments (in diction, syntax, genre, and content) that occurred in the wake of Wordsworth’s poetic revolution by focusing on British and American poets such as John Keats, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, and Adrienne Rich. Our exploration of these poets will be set within the personal, aesthetic, and political contexts within which they wrote, and we will attempt to understand how these poets’ innovations broke with certain conventions and created new traditions, specifically along national/nationalist (British versus American) lines. In addition to a rigorous reading of the poetry, some attention will be given to such poetic manifestoes as Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800” and Whitman’s “Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass.” Several brief writing assignments, a longer final essay, and daily class participation will be required. Students will able to choose any of the above mentioned poets as the basis of their research and final essay.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm R New North 311
Modernism and its Discontents - 18231 - ENGL 619 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Andrew Rubin
What does it mean for a literary text to be modernist? What is the significance of modernism as a descriptive category for the dominant literary movement in early twentieth century Europe? Does modernism have a project, and if so, why does it assume the form and force that it does? What are its features and what are its limitations as a particular practice? How do theories of modernism address these limits?
Through our readings of texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett among others, this course examines various attempts to define modernism as a trope for generating alternative narratives. Analyzing the cultural pressures informing the modernist shift away from earlier literary forms, we shall examine both how and why modernist texts enact this rupture, and what this historically specific disjuncture entails for understanding alternative modernities. Critical readings in Arjun Appadurai, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukács, Edward Said.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm T New North 311
Borges, Beckett, Nabokov - 18232 - ENGL 653 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Edward Maloney
In his seminal 1967 article “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth identifies Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov as the standard bearers of a new literary tradition, one that eventually became known as postmodernism. This course will examine the move from late modernism to postmodernism with Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov serving as representative writers and instigators of the period. We will work through various attempts to define modernism and postmodernism and explore the relationship of these literary periods to contemporary literary theory. The primary readings for the course will include a selection of critical articles, Beckett's Murphy, Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths and The Aleph; and Nabokov's Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm R New North 311
Poetics of Diaspora - 18233 - ENGL 660 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Mark D Mc Morris
This course will concentrate on Anglophone poetry of the Caribbean, with special attention to the work of Derek Walcott & Kamau Brathwaite, and including poetry produced in North America & England by poets of Caribbean origin. We will be concerned broadly with the meaning for this poetry of British colonization, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation system; and more specifically with various problems pertaining to language, culture, tradition, race & gender as articulated by the poets themselves and in recent literary criticism and cultural theory. Readings will include texts in translation, notably from the work of Aimé Césaire, other poets of Negritude, and their allies such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, to provide a context and a point of reference for our study of the creative and varied explosion of postcolonial works after 1960.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
6:20 pm - 8:20 pm M New North 311
Intro to Critical Theory - 18234 - ENGL 712 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Samantha Pinto
In this course, we will study a range of theoretical texts and methods with an eye towards how we might employ these approaches in literary and cultural studies. Rather than organize the course chronologically or through particular schools of theory, we will use various strategies in approaching important rubrics of inquiry-- into "the subject," for instance, or modernity, the body, space, time, history, or culture. Through this organization, we will both learn the general methodological imperatives of a school of thought (such as Marxism or Feminism) and contemporary professional approaches to such theory, which emphasize synthesis rather than a singular investment in one mode of thought. With this in mind, we will spend the first half of the course working with the same small set of primary texts in various genres alongside our theory. For the second half of the course, students will choose their own brief primary texts or excerpts and present them to the class to read along with the assigned theory. Assignments will include one or two presentations, a short critical paper, an abstract and outline for your seminar paper, and a long seminar paper.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
6:20 pm - 8:20 pm T New North 311
Approaches to Teaching Writing - 11065 - ENGL 722 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Norma Tilden
This course offers a practical introduction to the history, theories, and issues that shape the field of Writing Studies. The systematic study of the production of texts – rhetoric and composition -- began as a “school” discipline, and these origins are preserved in the title of our course. Written assignments and class discussion will focus on writing pedagogy and course development, paying particular attention to the integration of writing and reading. Weekly readings will assist you to theorize your own practice in the assignments you compose and the courses you design. But the teachable parts of writing cannot be reduced to techniques, whether of close reading or mechanisms of process, skill, and craft. In the words of theorist Walter Ong, “Writing is a technology that restructures thought.” We will explore issues of cultural and critical literacy as these concepts inform the teaching of writing.
By definition, a graduate seminar offers the opportunity to enter an ongoing conversation among scholars in a particular field as well as a forum for intellectual exchange among peers. Students will be expected to take an active role in the course as evidenced by close, critical attention to the readings; contributions to discussion; organized seminar presentations of their research; and engaged, informed writing.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
6:20 pm - 8:20 pm W New North 311
Lit of the Irish Revival - 18235 - ENGL 835 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
George O'Brien
The making of the modern nation state of Ireland was not only a complex political event but also a political event that had its origins in the country's literary, cultural, and linguistic heritage. This course examines how that heritage was adapted and deployed in the years leading up to the coming into being of the modern Irish state.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm M New North 311
Literacy & the Law - 11067 - ENGL 861 - 01
Permission needed from instructor.
Graduate seminar offered jointly with Georgetown University and Law Center. Course follows Law Center calendar and is held at the Law Center.
Associated Term: Fall 2009
John C Hirsh
This seminar explores the relationships between literacy and law. The course will explore learning theories and practices regarding emergent literacy and examine their legal and social implications. Readings will be drawn from three areas: educational theory and practice, law, and children’s literature. The course will focus upon whole language and other approaches which now inform literacy instruction in America. Legal implications to be considered may include restrictions on literacy due to slavery and educational disadvantage, statutory interpretation, equal protection and diversity, freedom of speech, school finance, discipline, and English as a second language. In order to provide practical experience in emergent literacy, students are required to participate in a practicum of at least one hour per week in which they work with a student in emergent literacy. The practicum may be a tutorial or literacy program sponsored by the Law Center (normally, the beginning reading program at Sursum Corda community near the Law Center) or some other arrangement approved by the instructors. Writing requirements include both a journal and short paper. The seminar is also open to graduate students in the Department of English, with permission of the instructor and Director of Graduate Studies.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
3:15 pm - 5:30 pm M TBA
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Sarah McNamer
In this seminar, we will read classics of the medieval European literary tradition: troubadour lyrics, Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, the Lais of Marie de France, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, legends of St. Francis of Assisi, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, and selections from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Our focus will be on close readings of the literary works, but we will also bring cultural contexts to bear in our efforts to better understand and enjoy them.
All readings will be in modern English translation.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm T New North 311
Milton - 18229 - ENGL 536 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Jason P Rosenblatt
By starting with the early literary productions in poetry and prose and concluding with Samson Agonistes, written in old age, when Milton, like his champion, was blind and disillusioned, we will give attention to the development of his literary powers. But we will spend most of our time on Paradise Lost. With all due reverence for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear, Milton's epic is the greatest single work ever written in English. We will try to understand it mostly on our own but also with help from some of the best contemporary essays. Besides a longer final paper, everyone will turn in a short paper (500-750 words, no more than two to three double-spaced typed pages) every two weeks. Since the class will be split in two, and the assignments staggered, one half of the class will be turning in an assignment every time we meet. Papers should concentrate on interpretive problems or questions raised by the work to be discussed in class that week.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm W New North 311
Wordsworth and Anglo-American Poetic Traditions - 18230 - ENGL 586 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Michael Ragussis
The first half of this course will focus on William Wordsworth’s radical experiments and innovations in poetic form and content, set within the context of the radical politics of the 1790s (especially with reference to the French Revolution). In this light we will explore the ways in which poetic forms and theories of language are connected to questions of class, gender, and power more generally. We will examine Wordsworth’s relation to the poetic traditions that preceded him, especially in light of Keats’s claim that “Wordsworth is deeper than Milton . . . [who] did not think into the human heart as Wordsworth has.” The second half of the course will explore the kinds of poetic experiments (in diction, syntax, genre, and content) that occurred in the wake of Wordsworth’s poetic revolution by focusing on British and American poets such as John Keats, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, and Adrienne Rich. Our exploration of these poets will be set within the personal, aesthetic, and political contexts within which they wrote, and we will attempt to understand how these poets’ innovations broke with certain conventions and created new traditions, specifically along national/nationalist (British versus American) lines. In addition to a rigorous reading of the poetry, some attention will be given to such poetic manifestoes as Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800” and Whitman’s “Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass.” Several brief writing assignments, a longer final essay, and daily class participation will be required. Students will able to choose any of the above mentioned poets as the basis of their research and final essay.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm R New North 311
Modernism and its Discontents - 18231 - ENGL 619 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Andrew Rubin
What does it mean for a literary text to be modernist? What is the significance of modernism as a descriptive category for the dominant literary movement in early twentieth century Europe? Does modernism have a project, and if so, why does it assume the form and force that it does? What are its features and what are its limitations as a particular practice? How do theories of modernism address these limits?
Through our readings of texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett among others, this course examines various attempts to define modernism as a trope for generating alternative narratives. Analyzing the cultural pressures informing the modernist shift away from earlier literary forms, we shall examine both how and why modernist texts enact this rupture, and what this historically specific disjuncture entails for understanding alternative modernities. Critical readings in Arjun Appadurai, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukács, Edward Said.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm T New North 311
Borges, Beckett, Nabokov - 18232 - ENGL 653 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Edward Maloney
In his seminal 1967 article “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth identifies Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov as the standard bearers of a new literary tradition, one that eventually became known as postmodernism. This course will examine the move from late modernism to postmodernism with Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov serving as representative writers and instigators of the period. We will work through various attempts to define modernism and postmodernism and explore the relationship of these literary periods to contemporary literary theory. The primary readings for the course will include a selection of critical articles, Beckett's Murphy, Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths and The Aleph; and Nabokov's Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor.
Main Campus
Lecture
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm R New North 311
Poetics of Diaspora - 18233 - ENGL 660 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Mark D Mc Morris
This course will concentrate on Anglophone poetry of the Caribbean, with special attention to the work of Derek Walcott & Kamau Brathwaite, and including poetry produced in North America & England by poets of Caribbean origin. We will be concerned broadly with the meaning for this poetry of British colonization, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation system; and more specifically with various problems pertaining to language, culture, tradition, race & gender as articulated by the poets themselves and in recent literary criticism and cultural theory. Readings will include texts in translation, notably from the work of Aimé Césaire, other poets of Negritude, and their allies such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, to provide a context and a point of reference for our study of the creative and varied explosion of postcolonial works after 1960.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
6:20 pm - 8:20 pm M New North 311
Intro to Critical Theory - 18234 - ENGL 712 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Samantha Pinto
In this course, we will study a range of theoretical texts and methods with an eye towards how we might employ these approaches in literary and cultural studies. Rather than organize the course chronologically or through particular schools of theory, we will use various strategies in approaching important rubrics of inquiry-- into "the subject," for instance, or modernity, the body, space, time, history, or culture. Through this organization, we will both learn the general methodological imperatives of a school of thought (such as Marxism or Feminism) and contemporary professional approaches to such theory, which emphasize synthesis rather than a singular investment in one mode of thought. With this in mind, we will spend the first half of the course working with the same small set of primary texts in various genres alongside our theory. For the second half of the course, students will choose their own brief primary texts or excerpts and present them to the class to read along with the assigned theory. Assignments will include one or two presentations, a short critical paper, an abstract and outline for your seminar paper, and a long seminar paper.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
6:20 pm - 8:20 pm T New North 311
Approaches to Teaching Writing - 11065 - ENGL 722 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
Norma Tilden
This course offers a practical introduction to the history, theories, and issues that shape the field of Writing Studies. The systematic study of the production of texts – rhetoric and composition -- began as a “school” discipline, and these origins are preserved in the title of our course. Written assignments and class discussion will focus on writing pedagogy and course development, paying particular attention to the integration of writing and reading. Weekly readings will assist you to theorize your own practice in the assignments you compose and the courses you design. But the teachable parts of writing cannot be reduced to techniques, whether of close reading or mechanisms of process, skill, and craft. In the words of theorist Walter Ong, “Writing is a technology that restructures thought.” We will explore issues of cultural and critical literacy as these concepts inform the teaching of writing.
By definition, a graduate seminar offers the opportunity to enter an ongoing conversation among scholars in a particular field as well as a forum for intellectual exchange among peers. Students will be expected to take an active role in the course as evidenced by close, critical attention to the readings; contributions to discussion; organized seminar presentations of their research; and engaged, informed writing.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
6:20 pm - 8:20 pm W New North 311
Lit of the Irish Revival - 18235 - ENGL 835 - 01
Associated Term: Fall 2009
George O'Brien
The making of the modern nation state of Ireland was not only a complex political event but also a political event that had its origins in the country's literary, cultural, and linguistic heritage. This course examines how that heritage was adapted and deployed in the years leading up to the coming into being of the modern Irish state.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
4:10 pm - 6:10 pm M New North 311
Literacy & the Law - 11067 - ENGL 861 - 01
Permission needed from instructor.
Graduate seminar offered jointly with Georgetown University and Law Center. Course follows Law Center calendar and is held at the Law Center.
Associated Term: Fall 2009
John C Hirsh
This seminar explores the relationships between literacy and law. The course will explore learning theories and practices regarding emergent literacy and examine their legal and social implications. Readings will be drawn from three areas: educational theory and practice, law, and children’s literature. The course will focus upon whole language and other approaches which now inform literacy instruction in America. Legal implications to be considered may include restrictions on literacy due to slavery and educational disadvantage, statutory interpretation, equal protection and diversity, freedom of speech, school finance, discipline, and English as a second language. In order to provide practical experience in emergent literacy, students are required to participate in a practicum of at least one hour per week in which they work with a student in emergent literacy. The practicum may be a tutorial or literacy program sponsored by the Law Center (normally, the beginning reading program at Sursum Corda community near the Law Center) or some other arrangement approved by the instructors. Writing requirements include both a journal and short paper. The seminar is also open to graduate students in the Department of English, with permission of the instructor and Director of Graduate Studies.
Main Campus
Seminar
3.000 Credits
3:15 pm - 5:30 pm M TBA
Upcoming Events
- Nov 24, 12pm-1pm: CCT Library Research Help with David Gibbs
- Nov 24, 6pm: Tuesday Film Series: Being Jewish in France
- Dec 1, 12pm-1pm: CCT Library Research Help with David Gibbs
