Department of English - Graduate Program Requirements

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Requirements

In the first two years, students are required to enroll in six graduate courses each year (including two to three seminars the first year and at least three the second year). All first year students also participate in a one-quarter colloquium designed to introduce theoretical and practical questions posed by the study of literature. In the fall of their third year students will also take a one-quarter course in various approaches to the teaching of literature and composition. Of the required courses, all must be taken for letter grades; one course the first year and two the second year (but no more than one seminar) may be taken outside the department. Besides fulfilling the minimum requirements, students may take additional English courses, independent-study reading and research courses, foreign language or literature courses, or other courses outside the Department.

While there are no distribution requirements for course work, the Department believes that both intellectual and professional progress depend on encounters with historical and generic difference as well as competence in an area of specialization. Nearly every beginning teacher is expected to teach a wide range of courses, including surveys. We advise students to become well-grounded in more than a single area of generic, historical, and national expertise and to attend to the different problems of at least one field relatively remote from their major interest. We expect students to demonstrate, through course work or selection of oral fields, that they have sought such encounters in their study.

By the end of the third year, students will take the oral fields examination. In consultation with faculty specialists, the student will specify one major and two minor fields for the examination. A field consists of either a historical period or an otherwise-constituted domain of literary practice, defined by generic, theoretical or methodological parameters. For professional convenience the Department currently recognizes the following fields; however, students are not limited to these fields: Old English; Middle English; Tudor; Stuart; Restoration and Eighteenth Century; Romantic; Victorian; British Modern (1900-1945); British Contemporary (1945-present); Earlier American; Later American; American Modern (1900-1945); American Contemporary (1945-present); African-American; Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures; Film; Literary and Cultural Theory; History and Theory of a Major Genre or Literary Category; Popular and/or Mass Culture; Gender Theory (including Feminist and Gay/Lesbian Studies); Rhetoric, Stylistics and Discourse Theory. While the choice of fields should be sensitive to potential areas of dissertation research, the Department encourages students to express a breadth of interest by preparing fields in more than one literature or chronological period. By the beginning of the fourth year of the doctoral program, students are expected to submit a dissertation proposal to potential faculty readers and to secure approval of the proposal.

Students in their third and fourth years will normally teach at least one quarter-course each year: initially as course assistants in Departmental courses for undergraduates; then as lecturers in the Departmental methods and issues course for majors, as B.A. paper supervisors, or as instructors in courses of their own design. Other opportunities for teaching are available as writing tutors, assistants in introductory Humanities and Social Sciences core courses, instructors in the College Writing Program course in expository writing (which provides its own training in the teaching of composition); or at other area colleges and universities. The Department believes that both training and experience in teaching is an important part of the graduate program.

By the end of their third or fourth year in the Ph.D. program, students must have formally met the standard of the English Department's foreign language requirement in one of the following ways: receiving an A or A- grade in a one-quarter graduate course, or in two undergraduate courses, in the literature of one language, taken at this University; passing the Department's proficiency examination in one language by translating without the use of a dictionary a text from the literature of that language and by writing an essay (in English) on the literary characteristics of a text in that language; or completing at this University the three quarters (or intensive summer program) of elementary-to-intermediate Latin or Greek, with grades of A or A-. No credit is given for foreign language examinations taken elsewhere.

A student will be admitted to candidacy when the foreign language requirements have been met, the oral fields examination passed, and a dissertation proposal has been approved. The candidate will then be responsible to the committee that will supervise the writing of the dissertation. The dissertation must constitute a significant contribution to literary or film study, and it must be approved by the committee before the final oral examination may be scheduled. The final oral is conducted by the dissertation supervisors, members of the Department in the candidate's field, the Chair of the Department, and a Dean's representative from another department within the Humanities Division. The examination consists of a defense by the candidate of the method and conclusions of the dissertation and a demonstration of general and contextual competence in the field of specialization.

For more information on graduate programs, please review the Graduate Student Handbook 2006-2007 or e-mail Caitlin Spies.