Graduate Courses

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

GRADUATE PROGRAM COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

SPRING 2010

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.

MEDIEVAL/RENAISSANCE (Pre-1700)

ENGL 627 – Shakespeare’s History/History of Shakespeare

Time: Tues 3:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.

Instructor: Kristen Poole

This is a two-part course that explores Shakespearean plays and their relationship to history. In the first half of the course, we will be reading some of the history plays and the Roman plays in the context of sixteenth-century historiography. The 1500s witnessed a tremendous outpouring of historiographical texts: Holinshed’s Chronicles, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Plutarch’s Lives, to list a few. What was the function of these texts? What was their conception of “history”? How did they use narrative? How do the Shakespearean history plays work with or against these historiographical texts? In the second half of the course, we will be asking a very different set of questions: how has the idea of “Shakespeare” figured in our own history? How were the plays used to define history itself? How have they been used to shape the history of education? In asking these questions we will be considering not only the plays themselves, but other manifestations of “Shakespeare” in popular culture. Throughout the semester, students will be doing a number of exercises (in-class presentations, annotated bibliographies, peer editing) that will lead into a final article-length essay.

ENGL 804—Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture:

The Popular Literature of Medieval England

Time:W-F - 1:25 p.m. - 2:40 p.m.

Instructor: James Dean

What counts as “popular” literature of the Middle Ages? Who were the “people,” and what literature did they demand and produce? Does the number of extant manuscripts tell us something about how writings were received in the earlier periods? In this seminar we will scrutinize several “traditions” of literary composition, including oral habits, minstrel productions, didactic literature, advice books, and “learned” traditions. The focus in this course will be literature rather than language, but there will be time set aside for study of Middle English language. Students will engage in some manuscript transcription. Our point of departure for this course will be The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (1985), a work that cries out for revisiting using postmodern theory. Key texts will likely include the Old English riddles and charms, Piers Plowman, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legenda Aurea (saints’ lives), and earlier Middle English romances (Havelok the Dane, King Horn, Sir Orfeo). I will conduct the class as a graduate seminar and expect considerable student participation.

Requirements include class discussion, talks on scholarship and term project progress, three response papers, and a 20-25 page term essay probably arising from one of the response papers.

EIGHTEENTH/NINETEENTH CENTURY (1700-1900)

ENGL 634: Transatlantic Improvisations: Gender, Rhetoric, and 19th-Century

Women’s Writing

Time: Tues-Thurs-12:30 pm-1:45 pm

Instructor: Melissa Ianetta

How did nineteenth-century literature contribute to the formation of British and American ideals of women speakers and writers? To explore the implications of the period’s belletristic rhetoric — which by century’s end, divided into the scholarly areas of literature, composition and elocution — this courses focuses on a single figure of the eloquent woman, the improvisatrice. A well known construction of the extemporaneous woman speaker / writer, the improvisatrice began the century as an emblem of woman’s rhetorical excellence and was widely accepted as a viable representation of woman’s oratory. She finished the era, however, as a symbol of the “slip-shod sybil,” an inappropriate, incoherent and garrolous enthusiast. By connecting these literary representations to the century’s dominant rhetorical theory and discussions of woman’s role in the civic sphere, this course aims to enrich students understanding the mutual importance of rhetorical and literary culture.

This course will examine such works Germaine de Stael’s Corinne Or Italy; Letitia Landon’s The Improvisatrice, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, Henry James’ The Bostonians and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes as well as contextualizing materials from rhetorical and literary theory. The course will conclude with an examination of the improvisatrice’s twentieth century legacy in rhetorical and critical theory. In addition to leading class discussion, students will write an annotated bibliography, a brief mid-semester paper (5-8 pages) and a final seminar paper (20+ pgs).

FALL 2009

ENGL 667: Intro to Grad Studies in English (1-credit overload)

Time: M – 3:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.

Instructor: Matt Kinservik

The goals of this colloquium are to (1) teach new graduate students to negotiate the modes of reading and modes of authority they will encounter in their academic work; (2) introduce them to the library and other resources for graduate study in English; and (3) help them acquire a better understanding of the genres of our profession—especially the academic article and monograph. The colloquium will exemplify the reading practices that are essential to scholarship in the discipline of English. The class will focus on a single text and move from a basic reading to a close reading, turning finally to a critical reading that prepares them for producing scholarship on the text.

ENGL 688: Teaching Composition

Time: Tue -Thur - 2:00 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.

Instructor: Melissa Ianetta

To provide students a range of pedagogical approaches to the teaching of writing, this course will examine why we teach writing as well as a variety of theoretical approaches to writing instruction. Through reading, writing and discussion, students will connect these theoretical constructions to their classroom enactment. Course texts include Victor Villanueva's Cross-Talk in Composition Theory and Joseph Harris¹ ReWriting: How to Do Things With Texts. Assignments include biweekly position papers, a series of reflective responses, a teaching philosophy and a teaching portfolio.

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

ENGL 830: American Book Culture, 1773-1972

Time: Th – 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Instructor: Marcy Dinius

This course takes 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 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 Library, the Library Company of Pennsylvania, 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. (Students should make sure that their schedules will allow for travel to these occasional off-site class meetings.) Written work for the seminar will culminate in a substantial research project that is developed in consultation over the course of the term.

MEDIEVAL RENAISSANCE

ENGL 625-010: Introduction to Renaissance English Literature and Culture

Time: Mon - 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Instructor: Julian Yates

This course serves as an introduction to the literature and culture of Renaissance or early modern England from 1509-1625. We will embark on what literary critics have traditionally called literary history: a survey and explanation of the major genres, literary movements, and tropes that shaped what, today, we traditionally call "English Renaissance Literature." Over the semester, we will map how different genres or kinds of writing were read, providing a kind of “social cement” that generated different communities of readers. Media specificity is also an important technological variable in this as in all historical moments—so we will think also about the types of writing available: manuscript, print, as well as other more ephemeral forms (chalk, smoke, pottery, embroidery). Key primary texts will likely include: Thomas More’s Utopia, some examples of early Tudor “project” literature, Roger Ascham’s The Schole-Master, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler, George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F. J., Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy and Astrophil and Stella, Edmund Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, John Donne’s poems and sermons. Plays from the public theater will be chosen based on local theater performances but will likely include plays by one or more of the following: Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton. Key secondary works will include: Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Jonathan Goldberg’s Writing Matter, Juliet Fleming’s Graffiti. Requirements will include active participation, palpable enthusiasm, willingness to experience critical enjoyment, epiphanies, tolerance for epistemological whiplash, oh, and, of course, the oral and written expressions of such states of being: discussion leading, weekly short responses / exercises, one review of a secondary work, and a longer essay project of between 10-25 pages depending on the nature of the project. I am also delighted to accommodate writing projects tailored to your larger writing needs as you progress through the graduate program and so happy to entertain the writing of dissertation chapters, bibliographical essays, etc in lieu of a final essay.

1700-1900

ENGL 634: Studies in 19^th Century Literature

Time: Wed – 12:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Instructor: Charles Robinson

This readings/discussion 600-level course, which will focus on the major works of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley that were written 1816-1821, will attempt to do 2 things: provide a context for these major works by a brief review of earlier English Romantic poetry (e.g., by Wordsworth and Coleridge and even the early Byron); and provide an in-depth and intertextual study of such major works as Byron's Childe Harold, Manfred, Don Juan, and Cain; Percy Shelley's Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais, and Defence of Poetry; and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mathilda. We will also read shorter works by each author, we will read Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (a satire on Byron and Shelley and the other Romantics), and there may be other ancillary readings. Students will give short reports on other works published at this time. Requirements: one short report; one short paper developing from the short report; possibly leading discussion on one major work or major issue; one long paper (15-20 pages). Texts will include:

-Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Reiman and Fraistat (Norton)—required

-The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Bennett and Robinson (Oxford)—required

-Byron (Norton--will be published in time), ed. A. Levine (Oxford)--required

-Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Curran (Cambridge)--required

Engl 641: Environmental Imagination in America

Time: Tues – 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Instructor: Martin Bruckner

This course provides a survey of environmental literature from the colonial period to the end of the 19^th century. During this period, the radicalism of the “American” experience – from New World discoveries, the search for Eden, the representation of wilderness, the Enlightenment theories of order and sublimity to Transcendentalist claims about the natural world, capitalism and slavery, western expansion/domestic contraction, to the trope of rugged individualism– all this resulted in distinctive narratives and figures shaping today’s environmental imaginings. Throughout the course we will be reading classic and lesser known texts from genres such as travelogues, captivities, biographies, gothic fiction, sentimental novels, short stories, essays, and poetry. Two short written presentations and one long research paper.

ENGL 820-010: The Enlightenment after Dark

Time: M - 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Instructor: Matt Kinservik

How did people deal with sex in the 18^th century? How did they do it? How did they talk and write about it? What laws and social customs did they use to regulate it? These questions are particularly interesting for the 18^th century, which is often called the “Age of Enlightenment” or the “Age of Reason.” How did the Age of Reason deal with passion? What the Enlightenment do after dark? This seminar will survey major works from the period in order to look at issues such as sex, gender identity, and laws regulating sex, marriage, and the family in eighteenth-century Britain. Course readings will focus on the canonical (The Relapse, Pamela, Tom Jones), but will also include the ephemeral and obscure. For the latter, we will make heavy use of the electronic databases, Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Course requirements will include a grant proposal, two in-class presentations, and a formal research paper.

1900 - Present

ENGL : 884: Studies in Literature & Cultural Theory: Intellectual Freedom

Time: Tue – 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Instructor: Joan DelFattore

At the heart of our understanding of literary and scholarly expression lies the concept of intellectual freedom, including free speech and the right to dissent. Students in this course will explore this concept as it has evolved in Western culture from the Middle Ages through the period following 9/11/01. Among other things, students will read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Harlan Ellison's Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," e.e. cummings' "i sing of olaf glad and big," and (of course) George Orwell's 1984. Students will also read such materials as handbooks written by Inquisitors, excerpts from the real-life trials of Joan of Arc and Galileo, excerpts from the proceedings of the Salem witch trials, Supreme Court decisions, and accounts of post-9/11 dismissal proceedings against university professors. This is not primarily a lecture course; active participation in seminar-style discussion is expected. In addition, each student will be responsible for writing and presenting two short response papers and a long seminar paper (15-20 pp.).

This course also satisfies the requirement for literary and cultural theory.

SPRING 2009

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

ENGL 684-010: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Time: T Th 2:00 – 3:15 p.m.

Instructor: Tim Spaulding

The aim of this course is to begin a conversation about the way we read “texts” and how “theory” can help us in both our intellectual development and teaching lives. We will focus on the major schools of 20th-century literary and cultural theory such as formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies and post-colonial theory. We will also move into more focused engagement with landmark theoretical texts which foreground key issues (authorship, textuality, gender politics, postmodernity, minority discourse). Our primary goal is to apply “theory” to specific texts over the course of the semester. To this end, we will have a constellation of texts to ground our discussions. In addition to the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism course texts will include Passing by Nella Larsen, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, Bladerunner by Ridley Scott, and Foxy Brown by Jack Hill. Writing assignments will include several short response essays (1-2pgs) and a 10-12 page final essay.

MEDIEVAL – RENAISSANCE

ENGL621-010: Medieval Literature & Culture

Time: M 9:05 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

Instructor: James Dean

Although this is an introductory course, it will be organized around a theme: medieval journeys, literal and metaphorical. A key text for the course will be Dante’s Inferno, since his fictional claim is that he visited hell, purgatory, and heaven. Another important text, in counterpoint with Dante’s, will be the Wife of Bath’s contributions to the pilgrimage to Canterbury. Chaucer will receive considerable attention, including and especially the “roadside realism” aspects of his frame narrative, The Canterbury Tales. A few of the texts we study this semester will be the same as the Fall, 2007 621 course, but most—including The Romance of the Rose, Pearl, Piers Plowman, and The Book of Margery Kempe—did not receive emphasis in the previous course. The format of the class will be lecture and plenty of discussion. Course materials will be mounted on Sakai for easy access to Schedules and materials. Students will be encouraged early on to identify and exploit an area of special interest in medieval literature and culture. They will deliver periodic progress reports with respect to their areas, and they will compose a number of response papers on the assigned readings leading to a final, substantial research essay (15 pages). That essay will be composed in two stages: a draft stage and a final version.

1700-1900

ENGL641: Realism and Representation: American Realist and Naturalist Fiction

Time: W 9:05 a.m. - 12:05 p.m.

Instructor: Jeanne Pfaelzer

This course will introduce realist and naturalist American short stories and novels and consider the critical debates surrounding realism and representation. How are realists theorized and contextualized? What is the relationship between realism and sentimentalism, realism and early feminism, realism and materialism, and realism and history? How has the realist tradition become associated with the bourgeois and humanistic biases of the "great tradition" on the one hand, and with the resistant gestures of naturalism and socialist realism on the other? How to position class as a discursive (and political) cultural category in realist fiction? Do realist texts preclude pluralities of readings? Is there an identifiable tradition of Afro-American Literary Realism? What happens when realist discourses seek to represent the body? What is the link between realism and humor? How do realists represent history? Where did American realism come from?

Our primary readings will likely include Harriet Wilson, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Jacob Riis, Henry James, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt. Theorists of realism will likely include Georg Lukacs, Hayden White, June Howard, Penny Bouhmelha, and Cora Kaplan.

Depending on the pace of the class, we will compare 19th c. realists to the later modernist-realism of Tillie Olsen.

WRITTEN WORK INCLUDES REACTION/RESPONSE PAPERS , CLASS PRESENTATIONS, AND ONE RESEARCH PAPER AND PRESENTATION.

This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

English 844: The Literature and Politics of the American Revolution

Time: F 9:05 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

Instructor: Edward Larkin

The American Revolution asked the inhabitants of British North America to reassess many of their most fundamental assumptions about their world, including the viability of their political institutions, the nature of social relations, and their cultural and aesthetic values. This course takes up the major questions of the Revolution with a particular emphasis on what we might call the intersection of the literature of politics and the politics of literature. We will study the literature of the period, poems, magazine writing, novels, and plays, side by side with the major political writings, such as the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and popular newspaper debates. Our goal will not only be to see how political concerns of the day shaped the literature produced in the early United States, but also how the political writings of the day we shaped by aesthetic and literary ideals.

1900-PRESENT

ENGL 884-050: Media Literacy

Time: W 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Instructor: Tom Leitch

Taking its cue from Frank Zingrone’s assertion that the one-medium user is the new illiterate, this course aims to broaden traditional, lexically-based approaches to literacy in two ways. The first is to consider the question of what counts as literacy for users of different media—that is, different ways to assemble, represent, communicate, and disperse data or sensory stimuli in patterns that are satisfyingly meaningful. In this connection, we’ll consider the relation between lexical literacy and literacy in music, painting, cinema, television, comic strips, such lexical modes as history, poetry, and fiction, and emerging cybermedia. At the same time, the course aims to explore the dimensions of literacy within each of these media—what different sets of skills and abilities have been equated, for instance, with literary competence, cinematic literacy, and music appreciation. Weekly reading assignments will be in primers of literacy in different areas, from E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion to Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. In addition to keeping up with the reading, each student will be responsible for leading a class discussion, preparing an annotated bibliography on some topic in media literacy, and producing several brief response papers before undertaking a more substantial essay at the end of the term.

This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL846: James Joyce’s Works

Time: W 12:20 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.

Instructor: Bernard McKenna

In a survey of writers and critics conducted at the end of the twentieth century, Joyce's Ulysses ranked as the best book of the twentieth century. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ranked third. Moreover, most secondary-school literature courses include stories from Dubliners. The course will explore the themes and issues of each of these works, focusing on close textual readings and on a critical and theoretical context for the author and his writings. The course will also discuss Stephen Hero, Exiles, and Joyce's poetry. Graduate students will write a 4000-5000 word research essay, make a class presentation on an aspect of the critical/theoretical discussion of Joyce's works, and write a 1000 word bibliographic essay based on the presentation. The course will utilize the holdings of UD's Special Collections and the fair-copy manuscript held at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia.

ENGL 846-010: TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE VICTORIAN

Time: Tu Th 3:30 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.

Instructor: Margaret D. Stetz, Mae & Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies

This course will examine some of the ways in which twentieth-century (and also twenty-first-century) British novelists, cultural critics, filmmakers, television producers, biographers, literary theorists, and academics have created and used representations of Victorianism. Our focus throughout will be on gender. We will pay particular attention to changing representations of the Victorian woman and to the rise of feminist theory, as well as to scholarly and popular redefinitions of individual figures such as Charlotte Bronte and Oscar Wilde in the field that is now called “Neo-Victorianism.” Texts will range from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and Virginia Woolf's Flush to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman and Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives, along with selections from the essay collections Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (2000), The Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (2002), The Victorians Since 1901 (2004), and from Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana (2007).

Important: Students who register for the course should read or reread Bronte's Jane Eyre before the first meeting.

ENGL 853-010: Modern / Postmodern American Novel

Time: M 2:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Instructor: Elaine Safer

This seminar aims to explore how major postmodern writers exemplify continuity and transformation of works by four of our greatest American modernist authors: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner. We shall discuss such subjects as the use of myth and myth making for experimentation and innovation; the Kafkaesque mode; self-reflexiveness; postmodernism and metafiction; deconstructionism; the absurd; entropy. REQUIRED TEXTS: Two Novels published since 2000--Philip Roth, Indignation (2008); Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2003), as well as Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl , Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, William Gass, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country, John Barth, The End of the Road. Four major modern American writers: Stein, Three Lives (esp. Melanctha), Hemingway (Farewell to Arms), Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Faulkner (Light in August). Course Requirements: an oral report, leading to a long paper (CA. 15 PAGES); participation in small oral presentations, individually and in groups (based on 4 two-page response papers).This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

FALL 2008

ENGL 688: Teaching Composition

Time: T R 2:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.

Instructor: Melissa Ianetta

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

ENGL 673: Studies in Poetry

Time: W 12:20 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

Instructor: Jeanne Walker

We will read modern and contemporary poetry, first for the pleasure of the work, then for the pleasure of discovering how it describes and addresses the human problems of the twentieth century. The voices that will dominate our semester are T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Philip Larkin, each of whom carved eloquent and permanent images into the granite of history. We will read later poets more briefly in order to get a sense of where poetry is going now. Western Wind (Nims and Mason) will serve as our handbook of prosody. Students will be expected to become familiar with poetic strategies such as different kinds of metaphor, rhyme, scansion, as well as traditional poetic forms like the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, and the dramatic monologue. We may compose in some of these forms and we may memorize some poetry well. The primary work of the course will be two or three short in-class presentations and a long paper.

ENGL 685: Postcolonial Literature and Theory

Time: R 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Instructor: Emily Davis

This course is designed to provide an overview of some of the key texts and debates central to the development of the field of postcolonial studies. However, any attempt to present a canon in this case points to the paradox of such a project for a field known for its antifoundational bent. In fact, postcolonial studies has, from its inception, been characterized by an intense ethos of self-critique, and claims of its imminent demise go back nearly as far as the field itself. These predictions have intensified in recent years with the emergence of new fields such as globalization studies, as well as the decision of prominent scholars such as Gayatri Spivak to redefine her work as “transnational cultural studies.” In our discussions, we will assess both the construction and the ongoing transformation of this dynamic (anti)field, including key issues such as language, the psychology of colonialism, nationalism, the subaltern, gender and sexuality, capitalism, diaspora, and biopolitics. Potential texts include Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Devi’s Imaginary Maps, Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Ania Loomba’s Colonialiam/Postcolonialism, as well as critical pieces by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Gopinath, Ranjana Khanna, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and others. Course work will include an annotated bibliography, two presentations, and a 20-25 page paper.

MEDIEVAL RENAISSANCE

ENGL 625: Renaissance Literature

Time: R 12:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Instructor: Miranda Wilson

Shakespeare’s works are littered with “remainders.” Mementos, images of Catholicism, corpses and body parts, ghosts and the recovered dead, tombs, and ruins all haunt the plays and poetry. In this course, we will explore questions arising out representations of “that which is left.” We will also consider the textual remains of Shakespeare’s own life - why does Shakespeare, both the man and his works, continue to retain a hold on scholarship and the popular imagination? This course will include consideration of current scholarship and methodology as well as primary texts. Assignments will include several short response papers, leading class discussion, and a conference-length paper (8-10 pages).

Pre-1700

ENGL 802: Old English

Time: T R 5:00 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.

Instructor: Mary Richards

Using the second edition of Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English, this course will provide students with a working knowledge of Old English grammar and literature. Quick-start sections begin the major chapters of Baker's text, allowing students to learn the basics of Old English quickly. Numerous short texts and longer works will be used to develop translation skills. A new book of critical readings by Roy Liuzza will encourage students to probe the literature more deeply. Course requirements include class participation, examinations over grammar and translations, and a short critical paper.

1700-1900

ENGL 634: The Victorian Novel

Time: W 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Instructor: Heidi Kaufman

This course will survey the novel during the period of Queen Victoria’s reign. We will examine some of the ways in which Victorian novels interacted with their political and cultural contexts. Along these lines we will look at Victorian publishing history, debates about science, the woman question, questions of faith and secularism, Victorian London, Imperialism, and a host of other issues which shaped and were shaped by the history of the novel. Authors will include Dickens, Eliot, Bronte (Emily and/or Charlotte), Gaskell, Haggard, Gissing, Zangwill, and others. Course work will include heavy readings in primary and secondary materials, two short presentations, short essays and one seminar-length essay.

*This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL 844:010: Things in Early American Literature

Time: T 12:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Instructor: Martin Brueckner

This interdisciplinary research seminar explores the changing aesthetics and politics of “things” by looking at the relationship of literary and material culture in early America. Using methods and theories from material culture studies, art history, print history, and anthropology, we will discuss canonical and lesser known texts, including Rowlandson, Hamilton, Brown, Rush, Sedgwick, Cooper, Fern, and Hawthorne. Seminar meetings will address the relationship between elite and popular culture; the consumer revolution; the habits of literacy; the issue of (self) representation; and strategies of accumulation, alienation, and fetishization in the ages of reason and sentimentalism. Requirements include presentations and research paper. *This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL 844-011: Special Topics in American Literature

Time: W 9:05 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

Instructor: Susan Goodman

In a cramped office above the book store of Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, Will Howells, the assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly, first met Sam Clemens. The building stood within blocks of the Boston Common, the Granary Burial Ground, King’s Chapel, and the Parker House, home to Parker House rolls, Boston Cream Pie, and the Saturday Club, whose members launched The Atlantic in 1857—

twelve years before Howells and Twain escaped their elders to stride the city and claim it for their own. These were golden times in Boston, and The Atlantic was the center of it all. This course examines the reasons why The Atlantic Monthly, conceived as an anti-slavery and literature magazine, had the cultural authority it did through analyses of individual authors who formed part of the company’s ‘stable” and also through the lens of crucial years in the magazine’s first fifty years. We will focus on the construction of the magazine itself, especially its implied politics and aesthetics. Students will be responsible for presenting an hour-long overview of the magazine over the course of a single year in addition to several drafts of an article-length essay and short weekly writing assignments.

If you are interested in the course, please order the following out-of-print book available through Amazon and other online distributors: Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909, Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 1994. We will be reading one or two longer works as they appeared serially. (Right now I have only settled on Howells’ The Undiscovered Country, but I will email the syllabus as soon as I complete it.) We will read excerpts from Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment and William Parker’s ‘Freedman’s Story,” which chronicles Maryland’s “Christiana Rebellion.” Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zitkala Sa, and Jacob Riis all wrote for The Atlantic, which barely survived Harriet Beecher Stowe’s shocking revelation that Lord Byron had an affair with his half-sister. Topics include the relationship between magazines and publishing houses; various forms of advertisement and self-promotion; the creation of a cannon of national literature; copyright law; The Atlantic’s ties to Great Britain and its authors’ understanding of other cultures, notably Japan; as well as contemporary politics, scientific controversies, debates about higher education, and the rights of women, minorities, and labor.

1900 - Present

ENGL 636: The Man Who Cried I AM: Black Men, America, and the Cultural Politics of Being

Time: M 12:20 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

Instructor: Carol Henderson-Benton

American culture has long been fascinated with the “image” of black men. From the demonization of black men in historical and cultural lore, and the emasculation of black men in literature and film, to the “commercialization” of the “ghetto fabulous” young black man in gangsta films and music videos, the consensus of scholars and historians alike is that the “average” black man has become lost in this maze of extremities. As author Omar Tyree explains, “the average brotha is the new ‘invisible man’.” Analogously, gender studies, long thought to be the conduit of women issues only, has neglected to investigate the ways in which African American men are props in a larger cultural paradigm uncomfortable with their very presence in society.The purpose of this class will be two-fold. First, we will investigate the current scholarship that traces the complicated “conception” of the “black male image.” This image is very much tied to ethnic and cultural “positioning,” as Stuart Hall argues, which complicates the dynamics of power and privilege in the Americas. To this end, we will read a range of literary texts from the latter half of the 20th century which have been written about the aesthetic, social and political experiences of black people in America. We will focus on key issues and themes that have consistently been important to African American authors, such as the emancipatory impulse, "“double consciousness,” the black struggle for human rights, the rise of Postmodernism and gender politics, the contemporary inscription of the slavery motif, and new, emergent expressions of black social identity as ways to combat cultural alienation. Writers read include such noted authors as Ralph Ellison, John Edgar Wideman, Maurice Wallace, Valerie Smith, Patricia Hills Collins, and bell hooks. We will also read first person narratives by Barak Obama, James McBride, and Nate McCall.

Secondly—and more interestingly—we will trace the ways in which filmmakers, writers and producers have engaged in cultural politics on screen, and in visual and print media, reconstituting the dynamics of universal personhood using the stories of African American people. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which race inflects issues of production, representation and address the similarities/ differences between literary and cinematic institutions. Requirements include weekly reading responses, a short paper, oral presentations, and a 15-20 page research paper.

* This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL840: Appalachian Bluegrass and Deep Delta Blues: Race, Region, and Economics in American Music and Literature, 1900-1950

Time: T 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Instructor: McKay Jenkins

In this class we will study the heart-breaking, soulful music and literature that has risen from two distinctive regions in the American South: the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi Delta, from roughly 1900 to 1950. We will read (and listen to) both canonical and lesser-known works as we try to follow the development of and influences left by a pair of major American art forms: Appalachian bluegrass and Delta blues. From what specific cultural, historical, and economic roots did these traditions arise? Where have they led? How have they influenced everything from contemporary country music and film to rock and roll? Our canonical readings will be drawn from the likes of Richard Wright, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, Erskine Caldwell, WJ Cash, and James Dickey, but we will also read musicology and cultural histories that will make both the music and literature come alive. Each week, for the first half of class, one student will prepare a 10-minute (4-page) biographical/geographical/historical/genre sketch of that week’s author; for the second half, a student will do a 10-minute “teaching” of the book in relation to one (or both) of the week’s critical essays. This latter can clarify the essay, critique it, or place in in historiographical context. The remainder of each class will be a thorough discussion of the primary work and the secondary essays; class attendance and participation are, of course, mandatory.

Writing requirements will include a four-page review of three critical books on an author, period, or region; a three-page op-ed style piece for a non-academic publication; and a 15-page critical essay, due at the end of the semester.

EIGHTEENTH/NINETEENTH CENTURY (1700-1900)

ENGL 634: Transatlantic Improvisations: Gender, Rhetoric, and 19^th-Century

Women’s Writing

Time: Tues-Thurs-12:30 pm-1:45 pm

Instructor: Melissa Ianetta

How did nineteenth-century literature contribute to the formation of British and American ideals of women speakers and writers? To explore the implications of the period’s belletristic rhetoric — which by century’s end, divided into the scholarly areas of literature, composition and elocution — this courses focuses on a single figure of the eloquent woman, the improvisatrice. A well known construction of the extemporaneous woman speaker / writer, the improvisatrice began the century as an emblem of woman’s rhetorical excellence and was widely accepted as a viable representation of woman’s oratory. She finished the era, however, as a symbol of the “slip-shod sybil,” an inappropriate, incoherent and garrolous enthusiast. By connecting these literary representations to the century’s dominant rhetorical theory and discussions of woman’s role in the civic sphere, this course aims to enrich students understanding the mutual importance of rhetorical and literary culture.

This course will examine such works Germaine de Stael’s Corinne Or Italy; Letitia Landon’s The Improvisatrice, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl,Henry James’ The Bostonians and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes as well as contextualizing materials from rhetorical and literary theory. The course will conclude with an examination of the improvisatrice’s twentieth century legacy in rhetorical and critical theory. In addition to leading class discussion, students will write an annotated bibliography, a brief mid-semester paper (5-8 pages) and a final seminar paper (20+ pgs).

TWENTIETH CENTURY - PRESENT (1900- PRESENT)

ENGL 641: “What is an American?”:

The Novel and American Identity from Crèvecoeur to DeLillo

Time: T – 9:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Instructor: Ellen Pifer

“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 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, though not always so optimistically.

Crèvecoeur’s Letters, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and selections from writers such as James Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Barack Obama, and Richard Rodriguez will provide a context for our reading of post-1900 American novels. We’ll examine the ways in which each novelist explores, if not answers, Crèvecoeur’s enduring question. In addition to Crevecoeur’s Letters, texts will include most of the following: James, The American; Cather, My Antonia; Wharton, The Custom of the Country; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Nabokov, Lolita; Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift; Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son; Larsen, Passing; DeLillo, Cosmopolis.

Assignments will comprise frequent response-papers, one short and one longer paper, and several oral presentations.

ENGL 671: The African American Novel

Time: Tues-Thurs – 2:00 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.

Instructor: Tim Spaulding

This course will examine the African American novel in both its generic and its historical contexts. As such it will function as both a general survey of African American literature from the slave narrative to the present and as a examination of the African American novel as a form. We will read theoretical texts by Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson, Henry Louis Gates, and others as a way to contextualize African American novels such as Clotel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Quicksand, Invisible Man, and Jazz within the African American literary tradition and within the evolution of the modernnovel. The writing for this course will include several short (1-2pg) response papers, two 5-7 page interpretive essays, and one conference-length (8-10 pg) essay.

ENGL 840: The Turbulent 1920’s

Time: W – 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Instructor: Susan Goodman

Van Wyck Brooks identified the 1920s as the most favorable to the growth of America writers. The power that Henry Adams had seen transferring from the Virgin Mary to the Dynamo had passed to the artist who seemed the one bulwark against the century's yawning void. The whole country seemed on the move to places such as Harlem, Greenwich Village, Santa Fe, and Paris. "Feelin' tomorrow lak Ah feel today," go the St. Louis Blues, "I'll pack my trunk, make ma getaway." The gulf between generations-and audiences-had never seemed wider, as writers struggled to represent the old verities, such as "truth" and "reality," "time" and "self" and "memory"-in a world that could agree upon only one constant: uncertainty. We will study a variety of materials trying to formulate our own understandings of the period and its writers, including many of its most well-known representatives-Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston-as well as those largely lost to literary history like Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blonds. I want to devote at least one class to magazines- Ladies Home Journal, The Crisis, or specialty consumer-driven publications-and am open to including best-selling writers such as Zane Gray and Mary Roberts Rhinehart. Please email me your interests or areas of study and I will try to incorporate them into the class material as I finalize my syllabus.

Requirements include a seminar-length paper, a short paper that will inform class discussion, and a report on a text, film, performing artist, historical document, or site listed on the bibliography. If you want to begin reading about the period, I intend to order The 1920s, by Kathleen Drowne and Patrick Huber.

ENGL 846: Material Modernisms

Time: M – 12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Instructor: Bernard McKenna

The course will explore how the material production and print culture of "Little Magazines" and anthologies, published between 1914 and 1938, inform readings of Modern texts. The course will make use of the original source material in "Special Collections" and the digital archives of the "Modernist Journals Project." The course will examine modernism in what George Bornstein calls "its original sites of production and in the continually shifting physicality of its texts and transmissions." Such an examination "results in alternative constructions very different from current ones." To frame the discussion, the initial meetings of the course will discuss concepts such as 1) Analytical, Descriptive, and Critical Bibliography; 2) Semantic Autonomy; 3) Sociology of texts. We will also develop working definitions of "Modernism" and "Modernity." The first three meetings of the course will focus on theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts. The subsequent ten meetings will explore an anthology or a number of a periodical, applying the concepts/contexts discussed early in the course to a discussion of these texts. We will read Blast, The Little Review, and To-Morrow among other modern periodicals. We will also discuss anthologies, including The Muse in Arms and Negro. Weekly readings will also include critical essays, which discuss aspects of the "texts" under discussion. The final class meeting will revisit the working definitions of "Modernism" and "Modernity," in light of our explorations of Modern anthologies and periodicals. Students enrolled in the course will be required to participate in weekly discussions, to deliver a presentation, and to write a critical essay of 5000 words.

FALL 2004

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.

ENGL 600: Methods of Research and Literary Study

Time: R 12:30 PM - 3:15 PM

Instructor: Martin Brueckner

This course is designed to train graduate students in the methods and theories that inform research on and critical reading of literary texts. Each meeting will address a specific topic by putting into dynamic relation different methodologies, genres, and research approaches. Topics range from textual and genre studies to the art of researching archives and the state of the profession. Requirements: two oral presentations and one substantial research paper (20-25 pp).

ENGL 688: Teaching Composition

Time: M 12:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Instructor: John Jebb

This course seeks to prepare students to be effective teachers of writing. Specifically, the course gets students ready to conduct their own sections of English 110. The readings include a guide- and source-book on composition augmented by essays about theories and issues in the scholarship about writing. The writing assignments may include the following: a report on an extended visit to an English 110 class, short essays on issues in composition practice, one-page essays about the readings, and a longer project of the student's choosing. We will also practice grading students' essays and devising teaching plans. The course will culminate in the draft of a 110 syllabus.

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

ENGLISH 684: Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism

Time: T 9:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Instructor: Jeanne Pfaelzer

This is an introductory course in feminist literary theory. We will focus on six central issues:

1) Is canon formation still a concern? 2) What's the relationship between ethnicity and feminism? 3) What happens to the body on display? How do we write, read, and gaze at the body? What does it mean to represent a female body? what is a female body? 4) What happens to feminist theory in a global context? 5) What are the debates and links between French Feminists (more accurately called “post-structuralist theoretical feminists”) and British and American liberal/humanist/pragmatic/empiricist theorists? 6) Feminism and Materialism; Feminism and Historicism: what are the links between feminist literary theory and social practice? What's the truth to the rumor about the “social passivity of theory?”

Of course there are overlaps among topics and texts in a field that is constantly re-constituting itself even as we study it. I have chosen these issues because they are current, rich, and interesting, and because they take place both within literary studies and across disciplines. Feminist literary theory allows us to explore various sites of knowledge and put them into dialogue with one another.

Here are some assumptions I'll bring to this course: Theory appears in many places and forms (and we can't explore all of them in one semester); you inevitably have some prior experience with feminist ideas, texts, and knowledge (just by being an intellectual and just by being alive). Differences in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, nation, region, ability, class background, religion, embodiment, and ideology exist in society, in our classroom, and within each of us; some of these differences are enmeshed with differences in access to privilege and power; these differences can be a source of productive debate, analysis, and activity; and (or but) neither bodies nor ideas are simply reducible to these “differences.” We’ll hopefully meet at some common borders.

So that we have texts in common as we consider theory we will read four short stories: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, Sui Sin Far’s Her Wavering Image, Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me A Riddle, and Alice Walker’s Everyday Use. (Great summer reads if these are new to you.)

Theorists may include Virginia Woolf, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Barbara Christian, Paul Lauter, Catherine Belsey, Wai-Chee Dimock, Jane Gallop, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Helene Cixous, Hortense Spillars, Cora Kaplan, Jane Desmond, Trin Minh Ha, Judith Butler, Chela Sandoval, Judith Newton, and Nancy Armstrong.

Course work: Attendance at all class meetings, careful weekly reading, short response papers, and a final project involving a presentation in class and a substantial piece of writing (20 pp.) Each of you will be responsible for leading the first part of class discussion once or twice during the semester.

ENGL884-010 : Narrating Race, Narrating Nation

Time: W 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM

Instructor: P.X. Feng

AKA “Postcolonialism for Beginners,” an introduction for Americanists as well as Brits. We’ll examine how nations are constructed through discourse and myth-making (through narrative) and the role that racial discourses play in those constructions. While we may look at a few primary texts (i.e., literature or film), our main focus will be on theories of the discursive construction of racial and national identities: e.g., Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Edward Said’s Orientalism, as well as essays by Henry Louis Gates, Sander Gilman, Paul Gilroy, Chandra Mohanty, et al.

Written work to be negotiated individually (totaling 25 pages): one article-length essay is the norm, but multiple short essays are a possibility.

PRE-1700

ENGL 625-010: Introduction to the Renaissance

Time: W 9:05 AM – 11:50 AM

Instructor: Lois Potter

This course will attempt to provide basic knowledge for those new to the period and opportunities for more specialized work for those who already have some interest in it. It will focus on the concept of love and friendship: texts to be studied will probably include Plato’s Symposium; Cicero’s dialogue on friendship; Castiglione’s The Courtier; Shakespeare’s sonnets; the 3rd and 4th books of The Faerie Queene (on love and friendship); Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Two Noble Kinsmen; Jonson’s Epicoene; and works by Donne, Bacon, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Assessment will be based on a class presentation, in-class activities, and either one long paper or two shorter ones.

ENGL 802: Studies in Old English Language and Literature

Time: TR 6:30-7:45 PM

Instructor: Mary Richards

Using an exciting collection of essays entitled READING OLD ENGLISH TEXTS,

ed. K. O’B. O’Keefe (Cambridge U. P., 1997), we will translate and discuss a broad selection of Old English prose and poetry. Our anthology/grammar will be the latest edition of Mitchell and Robinson’s A GUIDE TO OLD ENGLISH. Assignments, including a short paper and at least two examinations, will be tailored to the background and interests of the individual student. Prior knowledge of Old English, therefore, is not required.

1700-1900ENGL634: Readings in the English Romantics

Time: W 12:20-3:05 PM

Instructor: Charles Robinson

This reading-and-discussion course on the major English Romantic poets will concentrate on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, 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, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson. REQUIREMENTS: one exam and one paper (or two papers and no exam); one short oral report on a 1798-1832 text other than those discussed in class; and class participation. Some attempt will be made to bring you up to speed with Google, NASSR-L, RoN, Romantic Circles, Delcat, MLA Bibliography, ABELL, WorldCat, and other research databases and sites.TEXTS: English Romantic Writers, 2d ed., ed. Perkins (Harcourt); The Mary Shelley Reader, 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.

English 850: Studies in Colonial American Literature

Time: M 3:35 PM – 6:20 PM

Instructor: Leo Lemay

In addition to reading widely in early American literature (up to 1830), students will be required to write five papers: four short ones (c. 6 pages) based on the reading with no scholarship required, and one long paper (c. 20 pages) with the appropriate scholarship. I'll give out a list of 80 to 100 suggestions for notes, articles, dissertations, and life-time projects. Some students will choose a topic from the list for a paper or two. Some will have already have an interest in a subject that they will want to write about. Most students do literary studies, but some choose cultural topics. The seminar meetings are mainly devoted to reading and discussing the papers. Every student will be expected to write one short paper on a seventeenth-century topic, one on an eighteenth-century topic, one on Benjamin Franklin, and a fourth on any topic in the period. The long paper generally revises and expands one of the short papers.

1900-Present

ENGL651: Modern Irish Literature: Fiction and Drama

Time: T 3:30 – 6:15 PM

Instructor: Kevin Kerrane

This course will survey Irish stories and plays since 1920, focusing on such canonical writers as James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Brian Friel. But students will be encouraged to explore a wide range of work by younger writers dealing with women’s issues, religious conflicts, gay themes, and the continuing puzzle of Northern Ireland. The course will include readings from major Irish critics, such as Declan Kiberd and Seamus Deane, and will also examine several texts (especially Joyce’s Ulysses) in the light of recent critical theory.

ENGL848-010: Twentieth-Century Novel: Literary Migrations, Cultural Confrontations

Time: T 12:30-3:15 PM

Instructor: Ellen Pifer

We live "at a time," says Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, "when the novel has never been a more international form." The social, cultural, and historical forces at work in a world linked by electronic media and a global economy do not halt at national borders. Acknowledging the ceaseless interchange of ideas and influences giving rise to twentieth-century novels, we'll explore major works of fiction from a cross-cultural as well as multi-cultural vantage. Cross-fertilization of literary themes and forms will be examined in novels written at home and abroad, by minority as well as mainstream writers.

For purposes of contrast, we'll start with Flaubert's nineteenth-century "classic" of literary realism, Madame Bovary, and quickly move on to contemporary narratives of cultural transplantation and dislocation. We'll discuss the changes that twentieth-century novels ring on earlier transatlantic themes as we read about displaced Americans, Englishmen, and Europeans; populations enslaved or colonized by foreign powers; and those made strangers in their own land by cataclysmic events.

Twentieth-century texts will include the following: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot; Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child; Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Graham Swift, Waterland; Toni Morrison, Beloved; J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace.

In addition to a short paper and a final paper, students will be responsible for weekly discussion questions on the reading and two in-class presentations.

SPRING 2005

ENGL-404/604: Poetry Workshop

Time: M 12:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Instructor: Jeanne Murray Walker

This is a poetry writing workshop, cross-listed with the advanced undergraduate poetry writing workshop. It is my hope that the work in this small group will be individually tailored to each participant. You will pursue the poetic voices that interest you most by choosing at least two books (if possible, Selected Poems) of individual poets, studying those books, and presenting the work of those poets to the group. I will ask you to subscribe to at least one periodical that publishes poetry so you can read current work in the form. You will be asked to keep a journal, in which you will sometimes write exercises. We also will do in-class improvisations from time to time in an attempt to solve strategic writing problems. Finally, we will regularly read and comment on one another’s poems, and consider issues presented by the need to revise. It will be assumed that you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of English poetic forms, including the sonnet, the villanelle, and the sestina.

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

ENGL 684: Introduction to Literary Theory

Time: M 3:35 PM – 6:20 PM

Instructors: Julian Yates and Tim Spaulding

The aim of the course is to begin a conversation about the way we read "texts" and how "theory" can help us in both our intellectual development and teaching lives. We will begin by surveying several overlapping terrains: the "Rise of English" as a discipline in England and the USA; the post-World War II intellectual scene in France; the transformation of French and German philosophy into Anglo-American theory in the ‘70s and ‘80s; and the formation of cultural studies and post-colonial theory. We'll then move into more focused engagement with landmark theoretical texts which foreground key issues (authorship, textuality, ideology, gender politics, minority discourse). This is a skills course and is designed to help you learn new reading strategies and apply them to a cultural text (books, film, theater, etc).

One of the distinctive features of this course is that it is team-taught alongside a section of English 300 (Texts and Contexts), our undergraduate introduction to literary theory. This gives us the ability to offer a series of different ways of taking this course, depending on your workload, stage in the program, and intellectual goals. Assuming no prior knowledge of the field, you are welcome to take this as a readings course pure and simple. Alternatively, you may be interested in exploring how learning theory can invigorate pedagogy as well as our own methodologies. To these ends, we imagine a series of different ways of satisfying the requirements for this course that may include weekly writing assignments, a longer theorized “reading” of a text, class plans, draft syllabi, and discussion-leading. If schedules permit, you are also invited to attend the large lecture meetings of English 300. We are happy to chat with you via email ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) if you have questions or concerns about the course or the materials to be covered.

Books: We will be using the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory. Useful starting-points for holiday reading are found in Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory (Minnesota, 1996). Cultural texts may include Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jewlle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Pretty Woman, and Secretary.

ENGL 685: Imag (in) ing America: African-American Body in Literature

Time: R 12:30 PM – 3:15 PM

Instructor: Carol Henderson

There is no question that the superficial and metaphoric difference between various groups of human beings adversely affected the ideological figurations of “race” in the Americas. As Dana Nelson notes, “`race’ has never been a fixed concept,” but an evolving idea intimately connected to the cultural, moral, metaphysical, and biological landscape of American’s history. It is the latter—the biological landscape of America—that we will concern ourselves with in this class. In particular we will investigate the ways in which America, through its literary, social, and legal cultures, sought to “define” itself through the body of the “Other.”

Nineteenth-century America is one of the most fascinating periods in literary history. Still in its infancy, America struggled to define itself along moral, national, and spiritual lines. Often, these struggles added to and increased the national angst, creating a cultural vortex that directed unfair and unethical practices towards women, immigrants, and those deemed "different" within the borders of North America. What I hope to do in this course is to explore the often contentious atmosphere created by these public "discussions.” These “dialogues,” which constitute the cultural and theoretical essence of America’s developing discourse on “difference,” shape the racial imaginings of that time, and as such, provide a segue into the implicit and explicit political development of American identity, particularly as it relates to the “black” body. Our course materials will explore the parameters of this “identity” within the body of literature written by such authors as Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, and Kate Chopin. We will also look at contemporary imaginings of the black body from writers like Toni Morrison and Phillip Roth (The Human Stain). In focusing on these and other materials, we will discover that form is as important as content when chronologically assessing the generic development of literary and cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Likewise, these investigations will point up those gestures of resistance subtly embedded in the discursive practices of these writers as they simultaneously provide us a set of touchstones relevant to the social and political movements of that time. Requirements include weekly response papers (via e-mail), discussion leading, and a 15-20-page essay.

PRE-1700

ENGL 631: The “Long” 18th Century

Time: M 12:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Instructor: Matt Kinservik

This course is a proseminar in British literature from 1660-1800. Its primary goal is to provide coverage of the major authors and important genres of the period. The readings will be organized under the general theme of the “Battle of the Books,” otherwise known as the battle between the “Ancients” and “Moderns.” This will allow us to regard the texts as contributions to the major cultural debate of the era and to question the validity of terms like “neo-classicism” and the “Augustan Age.” It will also usefully expand the concept of major authors to include not just the usual suspects (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, etc.) but also important authors who don’t quite fit the “neo-classical” mold (Behn, Haywood, Sterne, Inchbald, etc.). There is no term paper for this course; instead, the writing will take the form of shorter assignments geared toward a longer critical argument, such as book reviews and bibliographical essays.

ENGL 806: Robin Hood & the Outlaw Tradition, 1450-present

Time: T 9:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Instructor: Lois Potter

Because this course will spend at least half its time on the medieval and Renaissance literature of Robin Hood, it will fulfill the medieval/Renaissance requirement for the MA. Works studied will include some of the oldest ballads in English, as well as the ballad-epic A Little Gest of Robin Hood (published c. 1500), the Robin Hood plays of Antony Munday, Shakespeare’s quasi-outlaw play As You Like It, and Ben Jonson’s unfinished The Sad Shepherd. The rest of the course will look at the development of the legend since that period and at some of the theories about it, both anthropological and political. Major nineteenth-century works in which Robin Hood figures include Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian. The character can also be traced in various revivals of medievalism, in children’s and young adult literature (much of which now focuses on Maid Marian!), in folksongs of protest (e.g., those of Woody Guthrie), and in twentieth-century films, including such Robin Hood analogues as Bonnie and Clyde. Those who are interested may also wish to look at Robin Hood figures in other cultures. There will be opportunities for following up specialized interests, such as representation in the visual arts (Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth) or in operetta and traditional pantomime.

The biennial meeting of the International Society for Robin Hood Studies will be held at the University of Delaware from 29 Sept. to 2 Oct. 2005, and the UD Library has been extremely helpful in buying books, videos, and DVDs for an exhibition and film showing to accompany this event. Stephen Knight, whose Robin Hood: a Mythic Biography will be one of the set texts for the course, is to be the keynote speaker. This means that there should be a good deal of interesting material on which to work; there’s also the possibility (but no guarantee) that the best seminar papers may lend themselves to presentation at the meeting.

1700-1900

ENGL 844: American Humor Through Twain

Time: T 3:30 PM - 6:15 PM

Instructor: Leo Lemay

The seminar in American Humor will focus upon the major creators and traditions of American humor from the seventeenth century through Twain. Requirements: Four brief papers (5-7 pages) and a final paper (c. 20 pages). The general topics for the four brief papers will be 1)seventeenth- and eighteenth-century humor; 2) humor of the Old South; 3) New England and urban humor; and 4) Mark Twain. The long paper will usually revise and expand one of the short papers. I'll distribute a list of a few well known humorous works in each period that we can read in common, and a longer list of other humorous works that the student may decide to read. Of course, the student may choose to write about humor in any work from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. After the first session, the class will mainly consist of reading and commenting upon the short papers.

ENGL 846: Imperialism in the 19th Century Novel

Time: R 3:30 PM – 6:15 PM

Instructor: Heidi Kaufman

How did England imagine itself as a nation? In what ways did British Imperialism shape the discourses of race and nation in this period? What role did the novel play in reflecting and producing such discourses? This course will take up these questions by examining novelistic depictions of England, Englishness, the British Empire, race, whiteness, darkness, slavery, theft, imperial guilt, orientalism, mapmaking, and world domination. In addition to foregrounding the significant role the novel played in naturalizing and sustaining empire, we will examine the relationships that emerged in nineteenth-century fictional narratives between race (and racial othering), gender, and discourses of nation. Readings may include such texts as Edgeworth’s Belinda, C. Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Collins’s The Moonstone, Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Kipling’s Kim, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. This course will be structured around contemporary criticism and theory (especially postcolonial and critical race theory) in addition to nineteenth-century fiction.

1900-PRESENT

ENGL 673: Modern Poetries (Twentieth-Century Poetries)

Time: W 12:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Instructor: Steve Helmling

We will begin with a three-week consideration of T. S. Eliot (in relation to Yeats, Hardy, Lawrence, and others) to get an idea of some of the things "modern" and "poetry" could mean as the century began. From there we will look at Pound, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Auden, Ginsberg, Lowell, Plath, Rich, Merrill and others. After consideration of these "canonical" poets of the first half of the century, in the second half (or so) of the course, we will confront the delegitimation of the ideology of "canon" in readings of more recent poets to be selected (and introduced) by students. We will work with a large anthology rather than individual volumes, so we will have great freedom to pursue comparisons and contrasts in class, and to sample many "minor" authors alongside the "canonical" figures. In addition to the oral presentation, each student will write thirty pages, in format(s) to be negotiated individually.

ENGL 853: Modernism & Postmodernism

Time: W 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM

Instructor: Elaine Safer

This course aims to explore how major postmodern writers exemplify continuity and transformation of works by four of our greatest American modernist authors: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner. We shall discuss such subjects as the use of myth and myth-making for experimentation and innovation; the Kafkaesque mode; self-reflexiveness; postmodernism and metafiction; deconstructionism; the absurd; entropy. TEXTS: Two novels published in the last two years--Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (2004), and Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2003)-- as well as Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, William Gass, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country, Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Joseph Heller, Catch-22. Four major modern American writers: Stein (Melanctha), Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Faulkner (Light in August). Course Requirements: an oral report, leading to a long paper; participation in small oral presentations, individually and in groups (based on five 2-page response papers). FALL 2005 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.

ENGL 494/694: History of English Language

Time: TR 5:00 PM – 6:15 PM

Instructor: Mary Richards

This course surveys the history of English from its Indo-European origins until the present day. Using Baugh and Cable’s A History of the English Language (5th edition) and the Companion workbook (3rd edition), we will combine lectures with class participation. Additional requirements will include textbook and workbook assignments, a book report, and three examinations. ENGL 600: Methods of Research and Literary StudyTime: R 12:30 PM - 3:15 PMInstructor: Bernard McKenna “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 oral reports, short papers, a longer paper on the history of a book, and an editing project involving manuscript materials.

ENGL 688: Methods of Teaching Composition

Time: T 9:30 AM –12:15 PM

Instructor: John Jebb

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

ENGLISH 684: Aesthetics, Politics, and Critical Theory

Time: M 3:35 PM – 6:20 PM

Instructor: Peter Feng

The Frankfurt School (and specifically Adorno’s and Benjamin's debates about aesthetics) form the lynchpin of this course, which will begin with key texts that formed the philosophical basis for the Frankfurters (Marx, Freud, Bakhtin, perhaps Gramsci) and continue with the Frankfurters' descendants (Habermas, Arendt, Jameson, perhaps Foucault and Derrida). The core of the course will be Horkheimer & Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Benjamin's Illuminations, with particular attention to discussions on popular culture (radio, music, film, window shopping aka flanerie).Writing assignments will be individually negotiated; numerous shorter papers may be more beneficial than one longer essay for many, while advanced students might take this as an opportunity to work on a literature review for a theory-based dissertation chapter.

PRE-1700

ENGL 804: Chaucer & His Contemporaries

Time: M 9:05 AM – 11:50 AM

Instructor: James Dean

In this course we will attempt to map Chaucer’s imaginings of England as a proto-nation against the international culture he looked to (“France,” “Italy”) but also against the often quite different mental spaces imagined by his fellow English authors, especially the Pearl-poet, William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, and John Mandeville, author of the Travels. Is to be “English” to be part of an international culture that included Le Roman de la rose and the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio? We will start out by consulting physical world maps, including maps of England, which was at the extreme margin of medieval world maps. We will then explore what Chaucer and his contemporaries declare about both England and the “world” beyond England—“doutremer” (“beyond the sea,” as Chaucer puts it in The Book of the Duchess). We will pursue issues of visionary literature (in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and in Pearl) and of women’s voices (as represented in writings by men). This class is a seminar, so I will assume considerable familiarity with medieval literature and its issues. I will take for granted that students can read Chaucer’s Middle English with some proficiency. I also suspect students have not yet been exposed to the Northwest Midlands dialect. The major requirement of the course will be an 18-20 page research essay. Much of the class will be constructed around student presentations that lead up to and into the final essay.

ENGL815: Milton

Time: W 5:00 PM – 7:45 PM

Instructor: Joan Bennett

Participants in this seminar will read all of Milton's major poetry and some of his prose works. Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes will receive the most sustained attention. Discussions will assume an interest in today's versions of "the Milton question": At intervals in each century since the aging, blind, defeated regicide first published his great poetic works, "Milton" has been canonized, attacked, even overthrown, and recanonized. Why does Milton continue to figure inevitably, and controversially, in Western literary and cultural affairs? Each seminar member will help to focus discussion by preparing one or two reports on current critical, theoretical or historical studies in relation to selected portions of Milton's poetry and will lead a seminar discussion using these. Students will prepare weekly brief reading-response statements to be distributed by email prior to the seminar meeting. Students will write one short critical paper, due at mid-term, and one full-length seminar paper. A writers' workshop treating the longer papers will conclude the course. Text: The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flanagan (Boston, 1998). 1700-1900 ENGL830: Studies in AutobiographyTime: W 9:05 AM - 11:50 AMInstructor: Carl Dawson This course mixes British and American autobiographies, mainly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is not a survey but an approach to the study of autobiography and works in a variety of ways. In the first few weeks we will read about eight, very different autobiographical works, discussing issues of historical context, narrative, genre, questions of personal identity, and some of the main critical and theoretical writings on the topic. The second half of the course will be yours. You will report on any autobiography you choose, from St. Augustine, say, to Joan Didion. At the same time, you will be focusing on your final, 20-page paper and writing a chapter of your own autobiography, a few pages of which you will be asked to submit in the second week of class. Our object is to understand, from personal experience and extensive reading, an elusive and perennially interesting genre.

1900-Present

ENGL636: The Waste Land and Its Sources

Time: T 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM

Instructor: Lois Potter

During Eliot’s lifetime and even after, his insistence on the impersonality of the writer was sufficiently influential to inhibit biographical interpretations of his work. Although some information is still unavailable to researchers, a great deal is consolidated in Lyndall Gordon’s 1998 biography, which will be one of the background texts for this course. Over the past thirty-five years, we have also been acquiring more information about how The Waste Land was put together. Valerie Eliot’s edition of the drafts appeared in 1971; Inventions of the March Hare, Christopher Ricks’s edition of the notebook in which Eliot entered drafts of his early poems, came out in 1994. We shall read many of the authors whom Eliot himself acknowledged as his chief influences: Dante, the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne, and the French symbolists. Other texts may also be included, depending on the class’s interests (for instance, in music, art, and literature in other languages). We shall compare some of the early poems with their drafts. Finally, we shall approach the famous poem with as full an understanding as possible of its various components. The course will be assessed on the basis of responses, participation, and two papers (one of 5-8 pp, one of 15-25). We shall read aloud frequently. At the end of the course we shall also perform The Waste Land in public – probably with sound and visual effects to accompany it -- including material later cut by Pound and by Eliot himself.

ENGL 671: Writers of the American West

Time: R 9:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Instructor: Susan Goodman

“Geographers of Hope”? Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Wallace Stegner, and Leslie Silko This course operates on Stephen Greenblatt’s premise that “self-expression is always and inescapably the express of something else, something different”—and its converse: that what we perceive as different is almost always an expression of ourselves. It looks at the work of four writers who are identified with the American West: Willa Cather, Mary Hunter Austin, Wallace Stegner, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Like the South or New England, the West is both an emotional entity and a geographical place. Austin believed that some writers simply wrote about the West. Others were so intrinsically western in their point of view that any book they wrote became western. This was certainly true of Austin herself, who understood the essence of America to be a composite of "so many local intimacies." Her appreciation of indigenous customs, languages, and crafts predates the work of Harlem Renaissance anthropologists, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Arthur Huff Fauset, who collected African folk-tales. A self-appointed ambassador for Mexican and what she labeled "Amerindian" cultures, she chided her friend Willa Cather for giving allegiance in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) to the French, whose presence proved such a "calamity to the local culture." Although Cather’s name has become almost synonymous with the West, she was the kind of regional writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings called “accidental”—meaning that she used a specialized locale as a logical or coherent background for shared feelings and beliefs. Stegner disliked critics calling him a “western” writer; he thought they really meant “minor writer.” In his opinion, an expanse of space-- or “elbow room”-- gave Western writers whatever particular brand they bore. The remaining wilderness he described as “the geography of hope.” Silko, who sees human consciousness as part of the landscape, argues that “the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading.” Debates about culture and the importance of place are just a few of the ideas we will explore through our study of very different, yet related writers, who wrote--apart from novels--personal essays, criticism, and poetry, which will also inform our course. Requirements include a 4-5 page paper that will introduce our weekly discussions, a revised seminar-length paper, and an annotated bibliography of at least ten books from the course bibliography. Please see me for a reading list. Most of the books are available at reduced prices through Amazon.com. I suggest reading the Stegner novels, The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose, over the summer. (They’re long.) We will refer to Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, especially chapter one.

FALL 2006

ENGL 600: Methods of Research

Time: T 6:30 PM – 9:15 PM

Instructor: Bernard McKenna

“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

Time: T R 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

Instructor: Melissa Ianetta

Pre-1700

ENGL 625: Introduction to the Renaissance

Time: W 12:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Instructor: Lois Potter

We shall look at some major Renaissance texts and authors, with particular focus on three general topics: the clash of providential and Machiavellian world views, the varied uses of allegory, and varieties of erotic writing. You will be expected to keep a Commonplace Book of short extracts from your reading (advice about this will be given in the opening session). You will write 2 papers (5-8pp) plus a book review (2-3pp), and give one class presentation; you will also be asked to give feedback on other people’s presentations.

Texts to be studied will probably include the following:

More, Utopia

Machiavelli, The Prince (Penguin)

Bacon, (Penguin)

Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Books 1 and 2 (Penguin ed. Of complete Faerie Queen preferred)

Marlowe, The Jew of Malta and Edward II (in Oxford ed.)

Middleton, Michaelmas Term, The Revenger’s TragedyBeaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Shakespeare, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Antony and Cleopatra, selected sonnets

Donne, Poems (Norton ed.)

Henry Woudhuysen and David Norbrook, ed., The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse

A course packet of critical readings

ENGL 802: Old EnglishTime:

Time: T R 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM

Instructor: Mary Richards

English 802 is a course in Old English Language and Literature. It combines a study of grammar with readings in prose and poetry, along with a discussion of critical issues in the field. The texts will include a combined grammar and reader supplemented by an anthology of essays. Extensive class participation is required in the areas of translation, presentation, and discussion. In addition, there will be a mid-term, final exam, and a short paper.

1700-1900

ENGL 631: The Enlightenment after Dark

Time: F 9:05 AM - 11:50 AM

Instructor: Matt Kinservik

How did people deal with sex in the 18th century? How did they do it? How did they talk and write about it? What laws and social customs did they use to regulate it? These questions are particularly interesting for the 18th century, which is often called the “Age of Enlightenment” or the “Age of Reason.” How did the Age of Reason deal with passion? What the Enlightenment do after dark? This seminar will survey major works from the period in order to look at issues such as sex, gender identity, and laws regulating sex, marriage, and the family in eighteenth-century Britain. Course readings will focus on the canonical (The Relapse, Pamela, The Rape of the Lock), but will also include the ephemeral and obscure. For the latter, we will make heavy use of the electronic databases, Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Course requirements will include a book review, two in-class presentations on primary and secondary readings, and a formal research proposal with annotated bibliography.

This course also satisfies the requirement for literary or cultural theory/genre studies.

ENGL 844:011 The Performance of Geography in Early American Literature

Time: R 9:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Instructor: Martin Brueckner

This course examines early American literature through the lens of the emerging critical movement identified as “cultural geography.” Critical readings are interdisciplinary in scope, taken from literary studies, linguistics, history of cartography, spatial theory and geography, visual arts, theater history, material culture, philosophy (theory) and psychology. Primary texts are selected from canonical and less known writers with the goal to see how culture of geography applies to genres such as the travel reports, spiritual biography, captivity narratives, belles letters, the novel, and early American drama. Major subjects are: the invention of America, the language of self and early modern space, the politics of genre, maps and narrative mappings, mnemonics and the art of memory, the empire of sights/sites, strategies of self-emplacement, creolization and other trans-Atlantic identities, architectural space, public and private spheres, and the performance of the national home/land. Requirements: weekly assignments; one research paper.

This course also satisfies the requirement for literary or cultural theory/genre studies.

ENGL 830: Victorian Poetry

Time: W 9:05 – 11:50

Instructor: Carl Dawson

This course emphasizes Victorian poetry but looks before and after. We start with Wordsworth, who meant so much to those English poets who followed his example or rejected him out of hand, and we will read him in the context of Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Then Tennyson, with some attention to the Brownings, Arnold, and Clough. Our turn-of-the-century poet will be Hardy, and along with Hardy we will talk about Swinburne, Lionel Johnson, and other contemporaries with a look at Christina Rossetti and Hopkins. Lastly, we focus on Yeats, relating him to earlier traditions (including French and German) along with poets of the nineties like Johnson and Imagist and Georgian poets from Pound to D. H. Lawrence. We will also consider the Irish Renaissance more generally and look ahead to poets such as Seamus Heaney. I ask you to pick a later poet (Auden, say, or Eliot, Tony Harrison or Philip Larkin) for one of your presentations. In other words, we read clusters of writers across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, but with intense study of four poets. I will ask you to read nineteenth-century discussions of poetry in writers such as Coleridge, Arnold, and Mill, as well as the records of critical responses in the volumes of the Critical Heritage series. We will discuss shifting notions of poetry, its readers, its values, its historical changes. Your two class presentations will bring to bear historical and biographical information along with the overviews of more recent work. You should expect to write one book review, one short, close reading of a poem, and a 15 to 20 page seminar paper on one of the poets we have discussed or on any other British poet from 1790 to 1930.

I suggest that before we begin in the fall you read a few numbers of Studies in Romanticism and Victorian Poetry. M.H. Abrams' work on the Romantic poets is still very useful, if you don't have much background. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry is just about essential. Finally, I intend the course as a paradox: a kind of concentrated approach through four very different writers to a century (and more) of British poetry.

This course also satisfies the requirement for literary or cultural theory/genre studies.

1900-Present

ENGL 651: 20th-Century Irish Drama

Time: T R 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

Instructor: Kevin Kerrane

Two persistent feature of modern Irish drama deserve sustained attention: its sheer verbal energy (using both traditional and modern idioms), and its unusual blending of tragedy and comedy. This course will survey the work of major dramatists--Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, Behan, Beckett, and Friel--but it will also feature plays by such contemporary figures as Marina Carr, Billy Roche, Conor McPherson, and Martin McDonagh. We will look at a wide range of political and psychological issues, and at an array of dramatic forms: mythic, realistic, and experimental. Other course readings will draw on scholars like Christopher Murray, critics like Fintan O'Toole, and journals like New Hibernia Review.

Assignments in the course will include a brief research project in the Special Collections archives, weekly postings on the class web site, and an article-length paper conceived for publication. To do justice to the performative nature of course material, we will do unrehearsed readings in almost every class, and will take at least one play trip off campus.

This course also satisfies the requirement for literary or cultural theory/genre studies.

ENGL 853: Modern/Postmodern American Literature

Time: T 3:30 PM - 6:15 PM

Instructor: Elaine Safer

This course aims to explore how major postmodern writers exemplify continuity and transformation of works by four of our greatest American modernist authors: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner. We shall discuss such subjects as the use of myth and myth making for experimentation and innovation; the Kafkaesque mode; self-reflexiveness; postmodernism and metafiction; deconstructionism; the absurd; entropy. TEXTS: Two novels published since 2000--Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (2004) and Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2003)--as well as Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl , Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, William Gass, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country, John Barth The End of the Road (1958). Four major modern American writers: Stein (Three Lives (esp. Melanctha), Hemingway (Farewell to Arms), Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Faulkner (Light in August). Course Requirements: presentation of one 10-12 page paper; four 2-page response papers.

This course also satisfies the requirement for literary or cultural theory/genre studies.

SPRING 2007

LITERARY OR CULTURAL THEORY/GENRE STUDIES

ENGL 636-010: Caribbean Literature: Women’s Writing, Culture, and Identity

Time: M 6 PM–9 PM

Instructor: Bernard McKenna

The course will explore the diversity of women’s writing from the Caribbean region, including examples from a variety of genres (creative non-fiction, drama, travel writing, memoir, the historical novel, the novel, and poetry). The course will draw from authors from throughout the area, including but not limited to writers from Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, Antigua, Grenada, and Dominica. We will explore, in particular, the response of women to the cultural, social, and historical forces that have shaped and continue to shape Caribbean society. We will engage in discussion of the texts; students will be expected to contribute to class discussion. Students will also be required to deliver a scholarly presentation and to write a semester essay of approximately 4500-5000 words.

ENGL 680-010: Composition Theory since 1970

Time: M 12:20–3:05 PM

Instructor: Melissa Ianetta

In 1960, it was not possible to pursue graduate work in Composition, yet in 2007 Composition Studies is the field most commonly advertised in field in the MLA Job Information List. When and why has it developed into one of the dominant – and still growing – specializations in English Studies? How has it shaped and been shaped by the dominant cultural, material, and theoretical conditions of postsecondary writing instruction? To answer these questions, this seminar will survey major works in the field, including James Berlins’ Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, Keith Gilyard’s Let’s Flip the Script: An African American Discourse on Language Literature and Learning, Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham’s Feminism and Composition: In Other Words and Lisa Ede’s Situating Composition: Composition Studies And The Politics Of Location.

ENGL 684-010: Introduction to Literary Theory

Time: T/R 12:30 PM-1:45 PM

Instructor: Peter Feng

The goal of this course is to orient students toward the presuppositions and practices of contemporary (post-1960) literary theory and criticism. Rather than a "tool box" course that applies a theory-a-week to a given literary text, this course is designed to help students understand current theory and criticism in relation to the long history of literary criticism. Therefore, readings will draw on philosophy and theory generally (Saussure, Benjamin, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Butler, et al.) as foundation for literary theory (Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, Fish, Hernstein Smith, et al.).

PRE-1700

ENGL 846-010: Shakespeare in Performance and Criticism, 1660-1900

Time: M 9:05 AM–11:50 AM

Instructor: Lois Potter

Dryden referred to Shakespeare and his contemporaries as “the giant race before the flood.” By the flood, he meant the English Civil War, which closed the theatres of London. When they reopened in 1660, Shakespeare had been dead less than 50 years, but the performers of his plays confronted a new world. A stage that had been all-male now saw the introduction of actresses; the theatre buildings gradually replaced the largely unlocalized stage of the pre-war public theatres with the framed and decorated one formerly associated with the private theatres and the court masque. Criticism, as a formal activity, was just beginning and was closely bound up with performance. In the 250-year period that we shall be studying, one question we shall be exploring is the balance of power between these two activities -- that is, whether performance affected criticism more than criticism affected performance.

The interests of seminar members will be taken into account when I design the details of the syllabus. At this stage, I expect that topics will include adaptations (e.g., The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, and King Lear), operatic versions, accounts of famous performances, promptbooks (our main source for performance history before the development of recording technology), and major critical texts from Dryden to Shaw. Everyone should be prepared to attend and review at least one theatrical production. In particular, in April 07 there will be two very different productions of The Taming of the Shrew: one at the Lantern Theatre, Philadelphia, with an all-male cast, and one by the PTTP in our new Center for the Arts. I hope that we shall all be able to see both productions, as well as Shakespeare’s R and J, which the Delaware Theatre Company is performing in Wilmington, 18 April - 6 May, and any other local and regional productions of special interest. Assessment: there will be some small projects to do with editing, the study of promptbooks, and reviewing, but the main form of assessment will be a 15-25 page paper (the wide latitude here is designed to cater for the varied degrees of specialization of those who take this course).

This course also satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.

1700-1900

ENGL 641-010: What is/was the “American Renaissance”?

Time: T 9:30 AM-12:15 PM

Instructor: Marcy Dinius

That mid-nineteenth century America experienced a so-called Renaissance with the publication of several now-canonical literary texts has been the contention of several generations of American literary critics. More recently acknowledged is the role that other mid-century writers played in the development of the period’s literary culture. The writings of F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance authors (Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman) were published alongside poetry and fiction by their equally, if not better known contemporaries, including Poe, Stowe, Fern, and Dickinson, and all-but-forgotten authors such as N. P. Willis and T. S. Arthur.

This class will focus on works by these major mid-nineteenth and their less-familiar contemporaries in an effort to rethink the American literary canon in terms of its construction instead of its inevitability. In reading these texts alongside each other, and along with a survey of literary criticism on the American Renaissance, we will learn about the major ideas and aesthetics of the period, consider the status of the author in antebellum American society, and think about the many consequences of understanding literary works as alienable property. Assignments for the course include one 3-5 pp. book review, one 6-8 pp. essay, and a final 12-15 pp. essay.

ENGL846-011: Victorian Bibliography and Books

Time: W 12:20 PM-3:05 PM

Instructor: Heidi Kaufman

This course will focus on book history and the sociology of texts in the Victorian period. We will look at the transmission of texts, the material and technological means by which texts were created and reproduced, and the effect of printing and publishing history on the novel’s form and reception in this period. The course will be divided into two parts. The first will work with materials in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection of British literature and art, 1850 to 1900, on loan to the University of Delaware Library. Using this collection, we will study the physical book and research method of textual scholarship. The second part of the course will look at Victorian books written by (among others) Prince, Dickens, Braddon, Eliot, and Carroll as we consider some of the ways in which books were valued and understood by those who wrote, read, produced, sold, and designed them. Finally, the course will examine the ways in which modern technologies like the World Wide Web help us to understand new methods of learning about Victorian printing and book history.

1900-PRESENT

ENGL 685-010: Women in Motion: African American Poets

Time: R 9:30 AM–12:15 PM

Instructor: Carol Henderson-Belton

This course is framed around women of the African Diaspora writing their life experiences and the experiences of others through the genre of poetry. Of key concern for our discussions in this class are the ways in which these writers chart the pre-eminent social movements in American culture utilizing the personal and communal histories of their companeras in the struggle. Topics discussed include the development of an Africanist “voice" in the wake of segregation, the development of an urban aesthetic, the reconceptualization of the African American "double consciousness" in the post-Du Boisian era, the resurgence of gender politics during and after the Civil Rights era, and the intracultural conflicts that complicate social unity amongst various hybrid communities in native and immigrant African cultures. My aim is to build an ethnic, theoretical, and historical base from which we may discuss issues important to the African American community in the twenty-first century and beyond. In the same fashion, we will chart the ways in which these artists (re)vision and revise the poetic literary tradition to more fully accommodate their need for social change.

This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL 846-012: Twentieth-Century Constructions of the Victorian

Time: T/R 3:30 PM-4:45 PM

Instructor: Margaret Stetz

This course will examine some of the ways in which twentieth-century British novelists, cultural critics, filmmakers, television producers, biographers, literary theorists, and academics have created and used representations of Victorianism. Our focus throughout will be on gender, and we will pay particular attention to changing representations of the Victorian woman and to the rise of feminist theory, as well as to scholarly and popular redefinitions of individual figures such as Charlotte Bronte and Oscar Wilde. Texts will range from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and Virginia Woolf's Flush to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman and Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives, along with selections from the essay collections Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (2000), The Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (2002), and The Victorians Since 1901 (2004). Important: Students who register for the course should read or reread Bronte's Jane Eyre before the first meeting.

Requirements include a presentation in class and the writing of two conference-paper-length essays.

This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL844-010: Literary Couplings

Time: W 9:05 AM-11:50 AM

Instructor: Susan Goodman

It is a blow to think that our great Henry should be au fond, only a Howells. Edith Wharton to the historian Gaillard Lapsley I want to enthuse over you, I yearn to, quite— Henry James to Edith Wharton about her 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree Imagine Henry James and Edith Wharton dancing their own minuet on her “dear old Aubusson carpet.” She flings him the handkerchief, literally casts it at his feet: “The real marriage of true minds,” she insists, “is for two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights.” “But, Edith dear, he amends, “the drama must speak charmingly.” For James, Wharton was the drama. ‘Oh how I want your news,” he wrote her in 1909, “the real, the intime—how I want it, how I want it!” She complied by providing him with a feast of données. This course looks at literary relationships through correspondence, short fiction, novels, and criticism, while examining questions of art, by which I mean aesthetics and also representations of artists and artist-figures. It focuses on two great artists who also happened to be great friends, Edith Wharton and Henry James. We will spend at least half of the semester on Wharton and James, with the last half open for you to create your own couplings. To give just a few possibilities: Willa Cather thought James part of triumvirate with Napoleon and Balzac, whom James thought the father of all novelists; yet her novel of a woman artist, The Song of the Lark, owes more to Mary Austin’s A Woman of Genius than James’s The Muse’s Tragedy. Austin, who lent Cather her house in Santa Fe to work on Death Comes to the Archbishop, met James in London, but not Wharton, whom she considered the best American novelist. Austin was not Wharton’s only admirer. As literary editor of The Crisis, the novelist Jessie Fauset advised readers in need of models to turn to Wharton, along with John Galsworthy and her boss, W. E. B. Du Bois—honored in 1924 by a host of writers, including Austin, through courses of fruit salad, broiled chicken with Virginia peas, and savarin ice cream. I can imagine any number of combinations Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett to Fauset and Du Bois or Fauset and Wharton; Cather and James; Austin and May Sinclair or Rebecca West, both of whom she interviewed in England—the list is endless. Transatlantic connections are welcome, as indeed anything quirkily revealing. Requirements will include presentations of research, papers, and texts; a short paper to prompt class discussion; and a seminar paper. Feel free to stop by my office, Memorial 133, to discuss your interests.

FALL 2007

ENGL 600: Research Methods

Time: M 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Instructor: Bernard Mc Kenna

ENGL 688: Teaching Composition

Time: T/R 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM

Instructor: Melissa Ianetta

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

ENGL 685-010: From Page to Screen

Time: W 9:05 AM -12:05 PM

Instructor: Tom Leitch

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

ENGL 621-010: Medieval Literature & Culture: Mapping the Middle Ages

Time: T/R 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

Instructor: James Dean

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 Space

Time: M 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM

Instructor: Kristen Poole

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 ENGL 634: Readings in the English Romantics

Time: R 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Instructor: Charles Robinson

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 attempt 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); The Mary Shelley Reader, 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: 19th-Century American Women’s Fiction: Resisting Sentimentalism, Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism

Time: T 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Instructor: Jean Pfaelzer

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?”: The Novel and American Identity from Crèvecoeur to DeLillo

Time: 3:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Instructor: Ellen Pifer

“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

Time: F 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM

Instructor: Marcy J. Dinius

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

Time: W 12:20 PM – 3:20 PM

Instructor: Steve Helmling

The plural in the course title is to acknowledge that "poetry" has been up fopr grabs for over a century. The course aims to give an idea of the range of possibilities "poetry" might attempt in the period since 1900. We will begin with a three-week consideration of T. S. Eliot in relation to Yeats, Hardy, Lawrence, and others to get an idea of some of the things "modern" and "poetry" could mean as the century began. From there we will look at Pound, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Auden, Ginsberg, Lowell, Plath, Rich, Merrill, Heaney, Larkin, Harrison, Reading, Perelman, Bernstein and others. We will work with a large anthology rather than individual volumes, so we will have great freedom to pursue comparisons and contrasts, and to sample many "minor" authors alongside the "canonical" figures. Thirty pages of writing, in format(s) to be negotiated individually. To the extent possible, writing requirements will accommodate the (presumably) diverse needs of students, from "coverage" for the novice to opportunities for advanced research for those with a self-generated agenda to pursue. *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

Time: W 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Instructor: Judy Celli

Spring 2008

ENGL 494-050/694-050: History of the English Language

Time: TR 5:00 – 6:15

Instructor: Mary Richards

ENGL 684-010: Introduction to Literary Theory

Time: W 12:20 – 3:20

Instructor: Martin Brückner

This seminar will serve as an introduction to theoretical models and analytical methodologies that shape the field of literary study today. We will examine major intellectual paradigms of the twentieth century raised by formalism and poststructuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, feminism and cultural studies, ethnic and postcolonial theory. Importantly, the seminar seeks to bring theories down to earth by applying them to a small selection of literary texts and by practicing how to write short critical essays that use the various theoretical idioms.

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

ENGL685-010: Theories of Difference

Time: M 12:20 – 3:20

Instructor: Peter Feng

A survey of theoretical writing on differences (sexual, gendered, racial, national, etc.) with particular attention to questions of liminality (border-crossing) and affinity (identifications). We will focus on how difference is discursively constructed but we will also consider how difference is "lived" (i.e., what it means to be "othered," but also how otherness is celebrated or romanticized). Reading list is still evolving, but the following texts are among the front-runners: Anzaldua's Borderlands - La Frontera, Butler's Gender Trouble, Dyer's White, Foucault's Herculine Barbin, Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, hooks' Yearning, Lott's Love and Theft, Prashad's Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, Said's Orientalism, Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Spivak's Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Trinh's Women - Native - Other, and Wittig's The Straight Mind. Expectations: each student will be responsible for one text (that is, for researching the text and guiding discussion), and for producing 20 pages of writing (exact format to be negotiated, i.e., students will need to justify departing from the tried-and-true "article-length" essay).

ENGL 884-010: Fetish: How to do People with Things

Time: TR 2:00 – 3:15

Instructor: Julian Yates

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fetish” as “something irrationally reverenced…originally, any of the objects used by the inhabitants of the Guinea coast as amulets or regarded by them with superstitious dread.” In the nineteenth century, it was to such “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world” that Marx reached in order to find an analogy capable of communicating the mechanisms of “Commodity Fetishism,” and to which Freud turned for a way of describing the apparently bungled object-choices made by some of patients as he was plumbing human sexuality. Fetishes, so it seems, are bad, embarrassing, pagan, non-western, incompetent, queer. Their syntax is messy. This course takes up the vexed, disturbing, and highly productive category of “fetish” in western discourses to trace the shifting meanings of the term as it travels from its scene of emergence as a linguistic by-product of contacts between West African and Portuguese traders in the fifteen century, into the texts of Marx and Freud, and then on to become a touchstone for much contemporary theory and criticism. Methodologically, this course is structured by the history of the word “fetish”—its changes in meaning will dictate the chronology of the texts we read. Readings will include texts by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, William Pietz, Bruno Latour, fetish theorists in a range of fields, and by representatives of what has come to be called “thing theory.” Case studies will begin with a reading of William Shakespeare’s Othello, possibly to be followed (possibly) by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s The Tropic of Orange. Participants in the seminar will also have an opportunity to contribute “fetish” texts of their own choosing. All fields / interests / approaches are welcome. Assessment will be based on class participation, several turns at running discussion, weekly short writing assignments, and a final essay of 18-25 pages. If you would like more information or have questions about content, requirements, etc, please contact me via email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

MEDIEVAL - RENAISSANCE

ENGL 815-010: Milton

Time: W 3:35 – 6:35

Instructor: Joan Bennett

1700-1900

ENGL 480-050/680-050: 18th-Century Revolutions

Time: T 6:00-9:00

Instructor: Matt Kinservik

The eighteenth century has been called the Age of Revolutions, most often in reference to the American and French Revolutions in the last quarter of the century. But there were other, equally significant revolutions during the period that this proseminar will focus on. Specifically, we will study the revolutions in science (the “new science” of the late seventeenth century), faith (deism and Methodism), money (the creation of deficit financing and joint stock corporations), manners (the emergence of “polite” society), and print (the expansion of the literary marketplace). This is an ambitious list, and many of these revolutions are overlapping phenomena. The goal is to see how literary texts register the influence of and participate in these various revolutions. Course readings will focus mainly on canonical literary texts, such as the Tatler and Spectator, Tom Jones, The Deserted Village, and Evelina. But we will also draw heavily from ephemeral material available from Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and other sources. Course work will include in-class presentations, a formal topic proposal, and two drafts of a term paper.

ENGL 641-050: The American Novel before 1840

Time: W 6:30 – 9:30

Instructor: Edward Larkin

For much of American literary history, novels written before Hawthorne’s arrival on the publishing scene were deemed subliterary at best. If Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper had their advocates, for the most part they remained on the fringes of the narrative of American literature. In this course we will focus in particular on the central role the novel played in promoting narratives of American national development in the years after the Revolution. From Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster and Charles Brockden Brown, to Cooper, Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick the early American novel served as a forum for important debates about the nature of American identity, the basis of US culture, and the aspirations of the young republic. Course work will include in-class presentations, a formal research paper proposal, an annotated bibliography, and two drafts of a research paper.

This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL 830-010: American Book Culture, 1773-1972

Time: T 9:30 – 12:30

Instructor: Marcy Dinius

This course takes 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 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 Library, the Library Company of Pennsylvania, 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. Written work for the seminar will culminate in a substantial research project that is developed in consultation over the course of the term.

1900-PRESENT

ENGL 639-010: America in the 1960s

Time: M 9:05 – 12:05

Instructor: Joan DelFattore

Students in this course will study the literature of the 1960s in the context of the political, social, and legal culture from which it arose. The course focuses on literature dealing with racial issues (e.g., Margaret Walker's Jubilee, William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner), war (e.g., Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Joseph Heller's Catch-22), and rebellion against authority (e.g., Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night). In each segment of the course, we will examine not only the literature but also related historical events (e.g., school desegregation battles, the Vietnam War, the March on the Pentagon) and Supreme Court cases (e.g., school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Pentagon Papers). In addition to the final paper, students will write short response papers and will sign up for ten-minute presentations of background research on topics related to the course.

English 844-010: The New Negro Movement and its Discontents

Time: TR 3:30 – 4:45

Instructor: Tim Spaulding

In this seminar will be focus on the cultural production of African Americans during the period of time alternately referred to as the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Jazz Age and the Prohibition Era. Although our primary concern will be with the literary works of the period (poetry, essays, novels), we will examine these texts within the contexts of other expressive forms (music, visual arts, theater) in an attempt to re-conceptualize the links that critics have made between these diverse texts. To what extent do these texts operate within the broader space of American modernism? On what basis do we see these texts as part of a coherent cultural movement? Some of the key texts we will examine include: Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues, Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,” Countee Cullen’s Color, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, Bessie Smith’s blues, Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho, Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Archibald Motley’s portraits of the era. We will also look at contemporary re-imaginings of the era such as Toni Morrison’s Jazz, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Writing requirements will involve an article-length paper (20-25 pages) or a series of short essays (5-7 pages) including a conference length paper (8-10 pages).

This course also satisfies Literary or Cultural Theory/Genre Studies requirement.

ENGL 853-010: Philip Roth and Saul Bellow

Time: W 3:30-6:30

Instructor: Elaine Safer

This seminar will focus on the novels of two prize winning contemporary American novelists: Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Also included are short stories and critical essays by these writers on the art of the novel (Roth’s Reading Myself and Others and Bellow’s It All Adds Up). The work will be explored against a background of cultural, philosophical and literary trends. The fiction of Roth and Bellow shows the directions American literature has taken from World War II to the present. The earlier work of these writers has been thought of as realistic. However, in their later novels, they show a postmodern influence as they engage in experimentation with unreliable narrators, absurdist themes, and fragmented plot structure. Readings include: for Roth, his 2007 work Exit Ghost, as well as The Human Stain, American Pastoral, The Plot Against America, and The Ghost Writer; for Bellow, his last novel Ravelstein, as well as Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, More Die of Heartbreak, and A Theft. Course Requirements: Presentation of one full length seminar paper; and three 2-page response papers.

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