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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 |
WINTER 2006 COURSES
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| 30201 | Intro Theories of Sex/Gender | |
| 31100/13900 | History and Theory of Drama 2 | |
| 32800/12800 | Theories of Media | |
| 33000/13000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 34600/14600 | Dialect Voices in Literature | |
| 35104/15104 | Newberry Library: Law and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England | |
| 36202/16202 | Spenser | |
| 37501/17500 | English Poetry from Wyatt to Milton | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading Research | |
| 40000 | Victorian Wives, Mothers, and Daughters | |
| 43701/29818 | The Cantos of Ezra Pound | |
| 48900/29600 | History of International Cinema II / Sound Era-1960 | |
| 52650 | Early Modern Sexualities | |
| 55403 | Studies in History of the Book | |
| 55502 | The American 1890s | |
| 56602 | Black Literature and U.S. Liberalism | |
| 57001 | Affect and the Self | |
| 57102 | Theories of the Novel | |
| 57300 | Lyric Poetry and the Philosophy of Mind | |
| 59301 | Drama, Theatre, Image, Performance | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English |
30201 Intro Theories of Sex/Gender
Berlant, Lauren
Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender: Bodies in Transition. This year
this interdisciplinary course will focus on inhabiting
conceptualizations of sex/gender formation via law, transnational,
transsexual, and transitive embodiments and practices. Beginning with
Foucault and Eve Sedgwick, we will then turn to theoretical and
practice-based formulations from psychoanalysis; literary, historical,
and anthropological disciplinary practices in Queer and feminist theory;
rhetoric, critical race studies, Deleuzian rhizomatics, and cinema
studies. Cases include: novels from Antigua and post-Apartheid South
Africa, trans-films like //Boys Don't Cry// and //Hedwig and the Angry
Inch//, working-class and queer autobiography, postcolonial conceptions
of emotional and economic labor. Theorists include: Judith Butler,
Gayatri Spivak, Elspeth Probyn, Patricia Williams, Zachie Achmat,
Carolyn Steedman, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner, Elizabeth Povinelli,
Renata Salecl. MAPH and English students given preference. PQ: Consent
of instructors required; GNDR 10100-10200 recommended.
31100/13900 History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David; Rudall, Nick
A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden. The course features voluntary but highly recommended end-of-week workshops in which individual scenes will be read aloud dramatically and discussed. Assignments at mid-quarter and at the end of the quarter will give the option of two substantial essays, or (in place of either or both) the putting on of a short scene in cooperation with some other members of the class. Acting skill is not required; the point is to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report.
32800/12800 Theories of Media
Mitchell, W.J.T.; Hansen, Mark
This course will explore the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices, and a habitat" in which images proliferate and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and modern texts such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. We will explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate sensory experiences? What sense can we make of concepts such as the "unmediated" or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the form of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become "mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at recent films such as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world of total mediation and hyperreality. Students will be expected to do one "show and tell" presentation introducing a specific medium. There will also be several short writing exercises, and a final paper. PQ: Any 100-level ARTH or COVA course, or consent of instructor.
33000/13000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney,Larry; Cochran,Kathryn; Weiner, Tracy
Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse) 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
34600/14600 Dialect Voices in Literature
Mufwene, Sali
In this course we will use linguistic techniques to analyze literary texts, especially to assess how successfully dialect is represented, whether it matches the characters and cultural contexts in which it is used, and what effects it produces. About half the quarter will be spent articulating linguistic features which distinguish English dialects (including standard English!) from each other and identifying some features that are associated with specific American dialects, such as African-American English, White Southern English, and Appalachian English. (We will work on dialects which interest the class!) During the second half of the quarter we will read and critique some writers, applying techniques learned during the first half of the quarter. My primary candidates include Toni Morrison, Zora Neal Hurston, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright, but the list is by no means closed. Students will be encouraged to select their favorite writers of dialect, especially for their term papers.
35104/15104 Newberry Library: Law and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England
Schulman, Jana
Law and literature are both narratives that reveal much about the community that produces them. This seminar will explore legal issues such as feud, marriage and status of women, and theft. We will read and translate the legal texts that discuss these issues and then see how literary texts incorporate legal elements to create tension and drive the narrative. Some texts include laws from Aethelberht, Alfred, Edmund, and Cnut, as well as selections from Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Juliana, and the Wife's Lament.
36202/16202 Spenser
Murrin, Michael
The class reads all of The Faerie Queene, plus The Shepheardes Calendar, the Amoretti, Epithalamion, and Prothalamion. Requirements are a final essay and perhaps an oral examination.
37501/17500 English Poetry from Wyatt to Milton
Cormack, Bradin
This course is an introduction both to renaissance poetry and to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture more generally. Although we will focus on the lyric in such writers as Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton, the readings will also include historical poetry and some examples of early rhetorical and literary criticism.
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.
40000 Victorian Wives, Mothers, and Daughters
Hadley, Elaine
This introduction to modern theoretical debates concerns the role of gender in Victorian society with a focus on the female gender in history, as well as instructive and medical texts. We begin with readings by Armstrong, Poovey, and Langland. We then concentrate on several contested and much-studied modes of identity: marriage, motherhood, the role of daughters, and related categories such as leisure and labor, reading Eliot, Wood, and Gaskell, among others.
43701/29818 The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Reddy, Srikanth
This course will introduce students to the Cantos of Ezra Pound - one of the most complex, ambitious, and problematic literary enterprises of the 20th Century. We will read the Cantos in their entirety (along with critical commentary) in order to familiarize ourselves with the philosophy, poetics, and politics of Pound's Modernist vision. Topics will include the aesthetics of history and historiography, classicism and modernity, the interdisciplinary epic, poetry and economic theory, the debates surrounding Pound's anti-Semitism, and the relationship between formal innovation and cultural conservatism.
48900/29600 History of International Cinema II / Sound Era-1960
Tsivian, Yuri
This is the second part of the international survey history for film covering the sound era up to 1960. It is strongly recommended that students take the first section first. This survey will deal with issues of film form, industry organization, and film culture during three decades, the 30', 40's, and 50's. The crystallization of the Classical Hollywood Film in terms of style and genre, as well as industry organization, will be a key issue. But international alternatives to Hollywood will also be discussed, from the unique forms of Japanese cinema to movements like Italian Neo-realism and the beginnings of the New Wave in France. The writings of Andre Bazin and issues of film in relation to realism and narrative form will provide a thread throughout the course. Film style, from the classical scene break down to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting) will form the center of the course, while the development of a film culture will also be discussed. Text will include Thompson Bordwell, Film History an Introduction, and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, Godard, and others. Screenings will include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.
52650 Early Modern Sexualities
Masten, Jeffrey
Before the homo/hetero divide, before what Foucault imagines as "the implantation of the perverse," before genders in their modern forms, what were the routes, locations, effects, and politics of desire? To what extent can we discuss "sexuality" in relation to "identity" in pre-modern England? To address these questions, and to begin to ask additional ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. The seminar will explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, affect, sex, gender, etc. in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will be particularly interested in gaining fluency in the seemingly familiar, simultaneously foreign languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. Readings: poems, plays, essays, letters, legal cases, including texts by Beaumont, Cavendish, Fletcher, Marlowe, Montaigne, Ovid, Shakespeare, and others; supplemented by historical, critical, and theoretical reading.
55403 Studies in History of the Book
Slauter, Eric
The Social Life of American Literature: Studies in the History of the Book. This course explores classic and cutting-edge scholarship in the theory and sociology of textual production and reception (the histories of the book, authorship, publishing, dissemination, distribution, and transmission on the one hand; the histories of reading, listening, and viewing on the other) in order to ask the following questions of American literary texts: How have the material forms of texts contributed to or determined their meanings? What can the sociology of texts tell us about the formation and reformation of literary canons? And finally, how does has the history of the book influenced understandings of the idea of literature at different points in time? Our case studies treat pivotal texts and moments in American literary history, from the New England Primer to Oprah's Book Club. Course meets in the Special Collections Research Center of Regenstein Library.
55502 The American 1890s
Brown, Bill
This course will be organized according to topics-political economy, law, immigration, psychology, &c- and it will strive to foreground the question of literary-historical periodization. What has made "the 1890s" coherent (or not) as an object of inquiry? We'll read well-known literary texts (by Cahan, Chesnutt, Dreiser, Harper, Norris, and Twain, for instance), as well as some well-known non-literary texts (by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Thorstein Veblen, and William James, for instance). But the course will begin-and it will be sustained by-our engagement with the journalism of the period, and with some of the popular fiction. Students will be expected to write an account of a critical text, to provide a report on journalism they've read, and produce a final paper.
56602 Black Literature and U.S. Liberalism
Goldsby, Jacqueline
This course will examine how mid-twentieth-century African American literature (1945-1964) (con)tests the central principles of Cold War liberalism by recovering and re-examining a remarkable set of literary experiments: James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee, Ann Petry's Country Place, Frank Yerby's Foxes of Harrow, Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door, and Richard Wright's Savage Holiday. Why do these works imagine conflicts over social inequality and individual liberty, political containment and intellectual freedom, internationalist intervention and domestic repression by featuring white protagonists as their pivotal narrative agents? By seeming to fulfill (or capitulate to) the long-standing demands placed upon African American authors to "enlarge" their concerns from the "narrow" particularities of racism to more "universal" interests, are these works in fact "raceless" or do they revise what liberal humanism symbolized and meant as such during these decades? Close examination of this fiction and drama, supplemented by archival research and cultural histories tracing the era's debates about race and liberalism, will shape the work of this course.
57001 Affect and the Self
Ruddick, Lisa
This course would be an opportunity for students to read intensively in current theory and criticism devoted to the nature of human affect, as well a to explore a variety of psychoanalytic theories that suggest how affect is integrated. Theorists and critics to be considered include Eve Sedgwick, Charles Altieri, Ann Cvetkovich, Silvan Tomkins, Paul Redding, Brian Massumi, Rei Terada, Barbara Johnson, D. W. Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, Masud Khan, Leonard Shengold, and Jessica Benjamin. At each meeting we would pair one of the theoretical texts with a poem, novel, or short story, as a way of grounding our consideration of the theory and thinking about how the various theoretical models can deepen literary interpretation.
57102 Theories of the Novel
Rothfield, Lawrence
This course introduces graduate students to some of the fundamental conceptual issues raised by novels: how are novels formally unified (if they are)? What are the ideological presuppositions inherent in a novelistic view? What ethical practices do novels encourage? Readings include Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Austen, Emma; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man; critics covered include Lukacs, Bakhtin, Watt, Jameson, and others. PQ: Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 12 students, as long as the majority of students are ComLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature.
57300 Lyric Poetry and the Philosophy of Mind
Izenberg, Oren
Poetry and the philosophy of mind share a number of concerns. Both attempt to create representations of thought and to explore the structures and limits of consciousness. Both are interested in the role that emotions play in knowing the world. Both explore the possibility that there might be such things as private languages or universal ones; both dwell upon the difficulties of knowing and understanding other minds. This course will consider what is to be learned when we consider literary texts (principally lyric poems) alongside some of our best recent philosophical accounts of how the mind is made.
59301 Drama, Theatre, Image, Performance
Kruger, Loren
This intensive reading course examines the interdisciplinary issues arising out of the confluence and conflict of word, image, and performance in various cultural contexts. Central concerns will include the representation of dramatic action, the aesthetics and ontology of performance, definitions of theatricality, visual and aural culture, and the phenomenology of performance. We will be looking closely at the nature of drama and theatre and the ways in which drama and theatricality manifest themselves in cultural activity more broadly. We will conclude by scrutinizing the ways in which metaphors of theatricality and performativity have been appropriated by other disciplines. Authors include Aristotle, Longinus, Bharata, Hegel, DIderot, Craig, Brecht, Artaud, Bazin, KLuge, Turner, States, Williams, and a range of recent critical articles on these subjects. Required readings are in English but readers of French, German, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit will have access to extra recommended material. Requirements: Two presentations and a review article (3000-4000 words) comparing two recent books on current debates in a chosen subfield of the course. NOTE: This is a PHD seminar; MA students may NOT register without a PRIOR interview.
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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