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Graduate Courses
Click on the course title to view its course description. Please note that all courses are subject to change without notice. For the most up-to-date and current day and time information, please refer to the University Time Schedules. Undergraduate course information is also available on this Web site.
2008-2009 |
2007-2008 |
2006-2007 |
2005-2006 |
2004-2005 |
2003-2004 |
SPRING 2009 COURSES
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| 32603 | India in English | |
| 33000/13000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 35412 | Lacan | |
| 36010/18903 | The Lives of Animals | |
| 37301 | Renaissance Lyric | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading & Research | |
| 43703 | Asian American Poetry | |
| 47800/27800 | American Poetry from 1945 to Present | |
| 47901/25103 | Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s | |
| 54302 | Victorian War Fictions | |
| 56600 | Birth of the Cool: African American Literature of the 1940s and 1950s | |
| 59303 | Translating Theory | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English |
Gandhi, Leela
This course will consider some primary nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian engagements with, and variations upon, the English literary tradition. Focussing upon the complex literary transactions that marked the Indo-British colonial encounter, our discussion will be loosely structured by two fields of enquiry. First, we will canvass the debate on the vexed relation between literariness, canonicity and imperialism that has haunted postcolonial theory through its various mutations, in a bid to read 'poetry', 'imagination', 'literature' as revolutionary signs for the anticolonial project. Second, and following on from here, we shall endeavour to glean in the anticolonial valorisation of literariness a new manifesto, presenting the domain of poetry as one of the principle sources for a postcolonial askesis; a unique way of reforming those selves that have known various historically disorting experiences of subordination. The texts being surveyed will include paradigmatic generic experiments with the epic, the novel, autobiography, philology and comparative literary theory (Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi), and select contemporary variations upon these literary predecedents (Ghosh, Rushdie). Participants will be required to offer one oral research / seminar presentation and write one long paper of approximately 3000 words.
ENGL 33000/13000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn;
Weiner, Tracy
This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coherent expository prose and to edit the writing of others. The course consists of weekly lectures on Thursdays, immediately followed by tutorials addressing the issues in the lecture. On Tuesdays, students discuss short weekly papers in two-hour tutorials consisting of seven students and a tutor. Students may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the consent of relevant faculty, write it in conjunction with another class or as part of the senior project. Materials fee $25
ENGL 35412 Lacan
Miller, Mark
An introduction to Lacan, with an emphasis on reconstructing the conceptual logic of his thinking. While the great enemy of this course will be the tendency to deploy Lacanian keywords in the service of interpretive work as though one already knew what was at stake in them, our readings and topics will be guided by some of the main ways Lacan has proven fruitful in literary and cultural studies, particularly to work on ideology, to queer theory, and to work on normativity broadly speaking. We will concentrate on a few selections from Écrits ("The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function," "The Signification of the Phallus," and "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire") and one book of the Seminar (Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis). We will also attend to the way Lacan's work emerges from the more radical strains and unresolved problems in Freud, especially concerning the relations among subject-formation, identification, the production of norms and the claim of normativity on subjects, and the place of pleasure and unpleasure in the psychic economy. Writing for the course will emphasize analytic exposition of Lacan's texts and will take the form of several shorter papers.
ENGL 36010/18903 The Lives of Animals
Keenleyside, Heather
This course begins from Foucault's claim that "life" did not exist until the end of the eighteenth century. In order to consider what this claim might mean, we will look at a range of eighteenth-century texts that depict the "lives" of all kinds of things, animals, and human beings (both real and imagined). We will ask: what is the relationship between "life" in the sense of biology, a concept that traverses species distinctions and stakes its territory around animation, generation, and death, and "life" in the sense of biography, the narrative identity of an individual person? Readings will include selections from Descartes, Locke, Hume, as well as works by Defoe, Swift, Sterne, Equiano, and others. We'll also read essays or selections from Foucault, Deleuze, Anscombe, Thompson, and Coetzee.
ENGL 37301 Renaissance Lyric
Strier, Richard
This course will study the development of the short poem in English from early in the sixteenth century to the second half of the seventeenth century, from Wyatt and Surrey to Andrew Marvell and Katherine Philips. It will especially focus on how "the Renaissance" enters the lyric, that is, on the adaptation to English poetry of Continental and classical modes. It will study the development of the sonnet and of the free-standing lyric which was not a song (developed for the first time in the early seventeenth century). It will also explore the adaptation of lyric modes to religious materials. Aside from the those already mentioned, poets to be studied include Sidney, Mary Wroth, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, An Collins, "Eliza," and Vaughan. There will be an explication exercise and a final paper.
ENGL 39900 Intensive Reading & Research
Staff
A student who wishes to study an author or a topic not covered by the course offerings may arrange for independent study with a professor willing to supervise that study. The student should indicate on the Registration Program Card the name of the professor from whom a grade is to be expected. Consent of Instructor required.
ENGL 43703 Asian American Poetry
Reddy, Srikanth
In this course we will read the work of Asian American poets who forego received lyric forms, genres, and styles in the search for a new literary idiom capable of investigating their own unique trans-national historical moment. Thus we will focus on the work of "experimental" writers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, John Yau, and Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, along with texts by emerging poets such as Shanxing Wang's Mad Science in Imperial City and Tan Lin's Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe. Topics of interest will include representations of war (the conflict in Vietnam, the Korean War), the notion of formal mastery as cultural assimilation, and the relationship between Asian American experimental poetics and West Coast Language writing.
ENGL 47800/27800 American Poetry from 1945 to Present
Izenberg, Oren
The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns—Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens. After the devastations of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. "After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, "what forgiveness?"
This course has two goals. The first is to introduce you to a representative sampling of important work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Allen Grossman, Frank Bidart and others. Our close attention to the forms, modes and themes of American poetry in the last half-century will enable us to see the poetry of the present, in all its volume and variety, for all its originality and innovation, as deeply continuous with the poetry of the past.
The second goal will be to pose to the poetry of the present two recurrent and related questions. The first: Can there be a poetry of the present? Not just, that is, a poetry being written in the present, but one that responds to or represents the fleeting urgency of the lived moment without either refusing the unfinished present by taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or skipping over the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future. And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that they are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind?
ENGL 47901/25103 Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s
Goldsby, Jacqueline
In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her verse collection Annie Allen. Eight years earlier, For My People brought Margaret Walker the Yale Younger Poets award. Ann Petry's The Street became a million-seller novel upon its publication in 1946. A Raisin in the Sun's twinned successes as a Broadway hit and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959 established Lorraine Hansberry as a playwright of note.
This second "woman's era" in African American literature is often neglected as one compared to those of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In this course, we will attend to this group of writers, to account for the unprecedented critical and popular acclaim that they received during the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the writings of Brooks, Walker, Petry, Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paule Marshall, we will consider the following issues:
How might we theorize the thematic and formal appeal of their works—what traditions did these writers continue, what innovations did they establish, and why did their craft and concerns resonate so keenly with mid-20th century American reading publics? What historiographies and sociologies might account for their formation as a cultural cohort—in what friendship and professional networks did these writers circulate? Why was their work so readily accommodated by the mainstream print venues? How did their circuits of contact and influence differ from support systems that black women writers enjoyed (or lacked) in prior or subsequent times? When read in sync with the governing ideals of literary culture and public intellectual life during the post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement eras, what models of black female authorship and intellectual authority emerge from this time?
ENGL 54302 Victorian War Fictions
Hadley, Elaine
It was once a commonplace in Victorian Studies to describe the middle decades of the British nineteenth century as an "age of equipose," to quote W.L. Burn's influential monograph. Students of the period were often taught that mid-century Victorians, suffused by the principles of liberalism, were a peaceful and peace-loving people in contrast to American and European nations tangled in civil and geopolitical conflict. The emergence of postcolonial scholarship in the last few decades has made this portrait of the age not only outdated but an instance of cultural denial on a spectacular scale. This seminar seeks to develop an account of this "condition of England question." Why did the continual warfare of Imperial Britain not register as a component of the British character? Why did the Crimean War—a large-scale European conflict, with multiple theaters and widespread geopolitical repercussions—not seem to unsettle this "equipoise"? Reading contemporary conceptual work on war and military conflict, periodical and newspaper coverage of the Crimea, and the few fictions of the period that address war and imperial conflict, we will try to develop some understanding of the relation between war and peace, between liberalism and imperial aggression, between national character and national practice during this era. Reading will include Tennyson, Thackeray, Hardy, Gaskell, possibly Browning, some Gladstone, Palmerston, and Disraeli speeches. We'll also look at Crimean war photography in an attempt to think about temporality and visibility in times of war.
ENGL 56600 Birth of the Cool: African American Literature of the 1940s and 1950s
Goldsby, Jacqueline
After the Harlem Renaissance and WWII but before the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements of the 1960s, an extraordinary group of African American writers came of literary age together: Russell Atkins, William Attaway, James Baldwin, Marita Bonner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Marshall Davis, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, Chester Himes, Bob Kaufman, Adrienne Kennedy, Paule Marshall, Willard Motley, Ann Petry, William Gardner Smith, Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright. Producing works that helped cast the shape of concrete poetry (Atkins and Kaufman), brought surrealism to prose fiction and drama (Himes, Ellison, and Kennedy), reanimated the sonnet (Brooks, Hayden, Tolson, and Walker), shamelessly embraced naturalism's pulp potential (Motley, Petry, and Smith), and envisioned the world as African American culture's stage (Baldwin, Bonner, Hansberry, and Wright), these authors raised the bar of aesthetic experimentation to new formal heights—all the while negotiating their ways around the social bars imposed by racial segregation. In a word, these authors and the cultural shifts that made their ascendance possible changed the terms and stakes by which African American (and, indeed, American) literature might be understood as "modern" or, in the parlance of post-WWII America, "cool." And yet, the achievements of this "lost generation"—which are considerable and unprecedented—remain understudied in African American and American literary history.
In this course we will focus our attention on selected authors whose works and careers lay bare the contexts that shaped the group's formation as a whole: the heyday of the Communist Party's drive to consolidate its Popular Front; the opportunities and risks posed by the consumptive energies unleashed by "middlebrow" culture; the successful resistance to European colonialism in Africa; the emergence of a more thoroughly capitalized Black press; the rights-depriving politics that were endemic to the cold war's prosecution on the homefront; and the ascendancy of jazz as America's "classical" music. Historicized in these ways, we will debate (by way of Bourdieu) how a "field theory" approach might situate this collective's place in African American and U.S. literary history. These inquiries, together with our close readings of the literary texts, will poise us to ask two other crucial questions. What kind of modernism(s) did this canon bring to the fore? And why do those aesthetic turns seem to be comparatively "late"? These issues we will treat via Said's On Late Style and Bhabha's Location of Culture. Through these lenses we will trace and assess the collective legacies of these writers, to ask why the cultural moment of the 1940s and 1950s energized Black authorship—indeed, American authorship—so profoundly.
ENGL 59303 (CDIN 51200, SLAV 40200, CMLT 51200, GRMN 51200) Translating Theory
Kruger, Loren; Bird, Robert
This seminar uses the theory and practice of translating texts of theory, criticism, philosophy and other genres of disciplinary inquiry to explore the boundaries between disciplines.
Authors may include: T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, José Ortega y Gasset, Roman Jakobson, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Viktor Shklovsky, and current theorists whose work raises questions of translation directly or indirectly such as Franz Fanon, Nestor García Canclini, and Philip Lewis. Topics include the translation of sacred and quasi sacred texts (including Marx) as well as contemporary theory. Open to all humanities *PhDs* including philosophy, visual art, and all language departments, as well as the divinity school and the committee on social thought. Cultural social sciences (eg anthropology or history) by application
PQ ACTIVE working knowledge of at least one source language: French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish; possibly Dutch
Admission to seminar based on a short in-class translation
ENGL 59900 Reading & Research: English
Staff
A student who wishes to study an author or a topic not covered by the course offerings may arrange for independent study with a professor willing to supervise that study. The student should indicate on the Registration Program Card the name of the professor from whom a grade is to be expected. Consent of instructor and advisor required.
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