2018-2019

Required for students in their 6th year of the program and open to all English Ph.D. students on or preparing for the academic job market.

Required for students in their 4th year of the English Ph.D. program and all English Ph.D. students who have not yet entered candidacy.

Required for students in their 5th year of the English Ph.D. program, this course will be a venue for revising a significant seminar paper to make it suitable for publication.

This seminar will draw on examples from Alexander Pope, John Aikin, William Cowper, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and from the twenty-first century writer Louise Gluck to consider changes in poetic subject matter and poetic grammar that aimed to make poetry a version of literary realism. Although realism has frequently been associated with prose, we’ll be taking up the ways in which poetry from the eighteenth century to the present has aimed at approximating talk and handling voice so as to emphasize the question of uptake, its reception by readers and auditors . We’ll consider the recurrent emphasis on poetry as conversation as one aspect of the implicit claim that poetry is speaking directly to actual persons, and we’ll look at the role that poetic description of nature comes to play in the course of the eighteenth century. We’ll be examining the rise and proliferation of hymns in the eighteenth century, the importance of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s discussions of metrical prose, and Wordsworth’s remarks on meter in prose and poetry to get at the ways in which poetry of their time attempted to speak the language of daily life and to use meter to filter the language of daily life to bring out its own quasipoetic power. (18th/19th)

This course focuses on the major works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bowen, along with supplementary historical, theoretical, and critical material. Requirements include joint class presentations, regular postings to the online discussion board, and either a research paper of 25 pages or a conference paper of 10-15 pages. (20th/21st)

This survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (with an emphasis on the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world. We will address foundational and recent critical approaches to the many “natures” of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage the art of landscape, an influx of exotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism and naturalism of Gilbert White, the emergence of geological “deep time,” the (literal) fruits of empire, vegetarianism, and the place of pets. (Poetry,1650-1830)

This seminar will be conducted on two tracks. On the one hand, we will study major contributions to hermeneutic theory (including positions that understand themselves as anti-hermeneutic). Contributions to be considered include works by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, E.D. Hirsch, Manfred Frank, Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida. At the same time, the seminar will include a practical component in which we will collectively develop interpretations of works by Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Peter Hebel, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville. English translations of the assigned readings will be provided. (This course is restricted to students in Ph.D. programs.)

This seminar examines John Milton's encounter with Roman culture, first and foremost music, around 1640. It is built around the April 2019 performance in Logan Center of this music by the English early music group Atalanta, for which students will prepare notes and preconcert activities. Reading Milton's youthful texts, as well as literature and poesia per musica from Rome, while studying the musical genres and personalities that we know he encountered there, gives insight into this encounter between Puritan and Barbarini sensibilities, seemingly so distant, but mediated via music. In addition to preparing for the concert activities (including interacting with the singers in a workshop), students will write a research paper. Prerequisites: no music reading needed, but experience with 17th-century English or Continental literature will aid in that case.

2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, arguably the most famous horror story ever written. Frankenstein is also a mythopoetic tour de force whose searching moral and ethical questions—at what cost should we pursue scientific advances, or seek knowledge more generally? What are the effects of social marginalization? Where is the boundary between the drive to create and the desire for power?—command more attention today than ever. In this seminar we will examine the novel both as it engaged earlier cultural works (Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Godwin’s Political Justice, Wollstonecraft’sVindication of the Rights of Woman, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther), and as it morphed over the course of two centuries into a full-blown modern myth. Indeed, its adaptations, scholarly editions, imitations, and parodies are legion, spanning nineteenth-century melodramas, popular songs, numerous blockbuster films (including the prequel to Ridley Scott’s Aliens saga), comic books, a new Netflix miniseries, and even, rather amazingly, at least one children’s book series. We will have the unique opportunity of attending the world premier of the newest stage interpretation of Shelley’s novel at the Court Theatre and discussing the projects of adaptation and remediation with its director and cast. Students will have the option of producing their own creative adaptation as their culminating project for the course. (Fiction, 1650-1830)

This course examines the literature, aesthetics, and theory of global anarchist movements, from nineteenth-century Russian anarcho-syndicalism to Kurdish stateless democratic movements of today. We will also study the literature of “proto-anarchist” writers, such as William Blake, and stateless movements with anarchist resonances, such as Maroon communities in the Caribbean. Theorists and historians will include Dilar Dirik, Nina Gurianova, Paul Avrich, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Goldman, and Maia Ramnath. Particular attention will be given to decolonial thought, religious anarchism, fugitivity and migration, and gender and race in anarchist literature.