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Previous Semester Course Listings (click to access the PDF):
In the list below, courses at the 600-level are normally an introduction to the field, covering a wide range of primary texts and building skills in critical writing. 800-level courses are usually more specialized, requiring more background reading in theory and criticism, and more advanced research. Current Courses--Fall 2007In the list below, courses at the 600-level are normally an introduction to the field, covering a wide range of primary texts and building skills in critical writing. 800-level courses are usually more specialized, requiring more background reading in theory and criticism, and more advanced research. ENGL 600: Research Methods “Methods of Research” will introduce graduate students to the standards and methods of professional scholarship and practice. The course will emphasize the style and methods of critical scholarship, electronic and library research tools, textual criticism, the editing of literary and non-literary texts, the location and use of manuscripts, and the principles of bibliography. The course will also discuss scholarship and the market for research and publication as well as how scholarship translates into the job market. Assignments include group projects, oral reports, short papers, a longer paper on the history of a book, and an editing project involving manuscript materials. ENGL 688: Teaching Composition To provide students a range of strategies for the teaching of writing, this course will examine why we teach writing as well as a range of theoretical approaches to writing instruction. Through reading, writing, research and discussion, students will connect these theoretical constructions to their classroom enactment. Representative assignments from the course will be position papers in response assigned readings, a teaching philosophy, a series of short reflective essays, three exams on contemporary composition theory and an annotated bibliography and related research paper. LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY A survey of film adaptation that begins with adaptations of two canonical texts, Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice, and then considers the problems posed by a wider range of adaptations (scriptural adaptations like The Passion of the Christ and adaptations of non-canonical novels like Psycho, unadaptable novels like Lolita, illustrated books like Alice in Wonderland, comic books like Batman, and fairy tales like “Snow White”). The emphasis of the film will not be on the goal of faithful transcription, still less on evaluation, but on the analysis of the different problems different kinds of adaptation raise for our assumptions about authorship, authority, textuality, and literacy. Reading assignments, mostly in source novels, will be relatively brief; viewing assignments will be more extensive and demanding. Each student will be asked to write a brief oral report and a substantial term paper and to lead the class for an hour or so. The course comes with a guarantee of more questions than answers. MEDIEVAL - RENAISSANCE This course will explore medieval texts that help define what we now call the Middle Ages, including and especially narratives of travel and of discovery. The emphasis will be on the later medieval period, including Chaucer, but we will examine writings from the earlier periods as well. Some of our readings will be in translation; others will be read in Chaucer’s Middle English. Some texts are available in (no-cost) online editions, although I will also order text (hard-copy) editions for those who prefer to read from books. Our points of departure for the course will be medieval sign theory and John Mandeville’s Travels, the latter to help situate us in medieval geography. Students will write weekly 1-2 page response papers and a final 13-15 page focused essay on a topic arising from the response papers. They will present a peer-reviewed teaching segment; and they will carry out a literature search for criticism of a work. The student who successfully completes this course should be well prepared to teach the medieval portion of a British Literature survey course. She also should have a good grasp of the critical issues and the major critics of medieval literature and culture. Readings will likely include selections from the Wycliffite Bible, Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Mandeville’s Travels, Marie de France’s Lays, Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, The Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Inferno, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s writings (selected), selected medieval dramatic works. The readings from Chaucer will be chiefly from the less familiar tales; I expect a Norton or Longmans familiarity with Chaucer’s writings and his Middle English language. ENGL 815: Renaissance Spacetime Over the last quarter century, literary studies have been investigating the material world. From consumerism and domesticity to mechanisms of colonialism to theories of embodiment, scholars have examined the realm of things. While the new historicism and cultural studies have made us more attuned to various aspects of materiality, these critical modes nearly always take for granted the space and time in which the material exists, leaving the spatio-temporal context unexamined. Spacetime (in the Einsteinian fusion of these two categories) has been tacitly assumed to be a historical or transhistorical, and thus immaterial when discussing cultural formations. This seminar will take as its starting the point the hypothesis that the ways in which we experience and understand spacetime are, in fact, deeply historically contingent. The question is: how do we interrogate the experience of spacetime? How do we analyze its cultural specificity? The seminar will be a group thought experiment in imagining how space and time were constructed and lived through in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the first half of the course, we will be reading some foundational texts by Plato, Aristotle, Paracelsus, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. We will also be reading some popular accounts of current work on physics (such as those by Stephen Hawking and others) to consider how contemporary models of spacetime build upon and yet are alien from earlier paradigms. We will also be exploring some of the cultural factors – such as the cultural interest in cartographic and geometric texts – that shaped an understanding of spacetime. For the latter half of the course, students will choose an early modern literary text through which to explore the operations of spacetime within the period. Students will submit an article-length paper at the end of the semester. *This course also satisfies the requirement for literary and cultural theory/genre studies. 1700-1900 This reading-and-discussion course on the major English Romantic poets will concentrate on Wordsworth, Coleridge, By ron, Shelley, and Keats, with attention to such texts as Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude, Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Childe Harold and Don Juan, Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, Eve of St. Agnes and Fall of Hyperion. We will also be reading critical texts (e.g., "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, Biographia Literaria, Defence of Poetry, and Keats's letters), as well as fiction by Mary Shelley (Frankenstein and her incest novella, Mathilda) and by Thomas Love Peacock (Nightmare Abbey). If time permits, we will also look at texts by such other writers as William Blake, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charlotte Smith. REQUIREMENTS: one short paper and one short oral report on a 1798-1832 text other than those discussed in class; one long oral report on a major text in the period; one long paper that may, if you chose, address some aspect of the long oral report; and class participation. Some at tempt will be made to bring you up to speed with Google, NASSR-L, RoN, Romantic Circles, Delcat, MLA Bibliography, ABELL, WorldCat, Past Masters, Times Digital Archive, and other research databases and sites. TEXTS: English Romantic Writers, 2d ed., ed. Perkins (Harcourt); TheMaryShelleyReader, ed. Bennett and Robinson ( Oxford); Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (edition yet to be named); Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Curran ( Cambridge); and possibly other texts available online or by photocopy. ENGL 830-010: 19 th-Century American Women’s Fiction: This course will consider American women's fiction of the nineteenth century from the perspectives of feminist literary theory, the impact of slavery and the anti-slavery movement, women’s changing roles in an immigrant and industrial society, and developments in education, printing, and publishing which affected women's access to a literary market. We will explore how the female narrative emerges as a contested site for traditions of sentimentalism, realism, regionalism, and naturalism. Some questions we may consider: What is the relationship of sentimentalism and regionalism to women’s changing roles in nationhood? How did sentimentalism become a narrative opportunity for anti-slavery depictions? How did that in turn re-fashion sentimentalism? How did African American, Chinese American, and Anglo American women writers use these literary traditions differently? What was the marketplace and what was the audience for fiction written by women of color in the nineteenth century? Why was women’s fiction delegated in literary studies to popular fiction? How did women’s popular fiction become a bad thing? Our readings of literary theorists will include the research of the ‘founding’ generation of feminist literary critics and historians as well as the research of a younger generation of scholars who are now defining the field. Depending on the interests of the group, we will likely discuss the changing representation of the female body and female sexuality, women's humor, access to female knowledge, and the vexed representations of repression. How did new possibilities for female labor perforce change plot? What did women do in the nineteenth century and what did they do in fiction? How were female friendships and relationships depicted in fiction? What did female relationships and female communities do to unravel the marriage plot? How did female authors represent their relationship to nature? What about mom? Likely authors include: Hannah Foster, Lydia Childs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sui Sin Far, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sara Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkes Freeman. After the first few weeks, the class will select the authors as previous readings, backgrounds and research interests become clear. Your participation will involve leading one class discussion on one of the authors, giving an oral report on relevant theoretical or critical materials, writing a seminar paper on a topic of your choosing that engages and integrates a number of theoretical, historical, and/or archival texts, and presenting this research to the class at the end of the semester. To prepare for conference presentations, your final paper will have two respondents from the class. There will also be a few short response papers. *This course also satisfies the requirement for literary and cultural theory/genre studies. 1900-Present ENGL 641:“What is an American?”: “What is an American?” St. John de Crèvecoeur queries at the opening of his Letters from an American Farmer, written on the eve of the American Revolution. For this Frenchman, born to an old French family of the minor nobility, the question rang with promise, based on the certitude that this vast new continent would produce nothing short of a “new man.” From Tocqueville in the nineteenth century to commentators today, that question is still being asked. Crèvecoeur’s Letters, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and other relevant commentaries will provide a context for our reading of major American novelists, each of whom attempts to explore—if not to answer--Crèvecoeur’s enduring question. Texts will include most (but not all) of the following: James, The American; Wharton, The Custom of the Country; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby or a selection of short stories; Nabokov, Lolita; Wright, Native Son; Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift; Didion, Play It As It Lays; Roth, The Human Stain; DeLillo, Cosmopolis. Rather than a term paper, writing assignments will take the form of several brief response-papers and two short papers (4-5 pp. and 5-8 pp, respectively). Students will also be responsible for two short oral presentations—one on a literary text, the other on a relevant critical or theoretical work of the student’s own choosing. ENGL 830-011: American Book Culture, 1773-1972 This course will take advantage of the university’s and the area’s rich resources in material culture to focus on the American book in its manifold forms. Its readings will focus on books that invite extended considerations of the intersection of form and content. Ranging from Phillis Wheatley’s poetry and Noah Webster’s “Blue-Back” speller to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, we will examine frontispieces and other illustrations, differences in editions, serial publication, bindings and covers, &c. in light of thematic engagements with key issues of producing and consuming texts in American print culture. Class meetings will be held at various locations, including the Winterthur and Hagley Museums and the UD library’s special collections, to facilitate hands-on interactions with the books that we are reading and regularly will include guest lectures from area curators and specialists in the history of the book. Assignments will include a substantial research project that is developed over the course of the term, consisting of a critical review, bibliographic essay, project abstract, and final seminar paper. ENGL 840: 20th Century Poetries *This course also satisfies the requirement for literary and cultural theory/genre studies. French for Ph.D. Candidates will be offered by the Foreign Language and Literature Department this fall. German will be offered next time around. FR 533: French Readings |
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