Course Descriptions
ENGL 4011 Creative Writing Fiction
While careful examination/discussion of your work will be at the center of our weekly deliberations, we will also be exploring a variety of writings that (hopefully) bust paradigms, interrupt orders, rewrite histories and just generally upset the apple cart of standard received notions of the literary status quo. Writers we will look at to fuel our conversation and inspire our own writing efforts will include Kirstin Allio, Ann Quin, Roberto Bola and Patrik Ouredník. Workshop participants will be asked to make presentations on their current writing interests and obsessions.
ENGL 4017 Travel Writing
This course will study particularly Egypt, the uneasy relations between anthropology field writing and travel writing, and the idea at the heart of much travel writing, travel through history. In Don DeLillo’s novel, The Names, a character says, “in modern travel there are no artists—only critics.” We will ask of contemporary travel writing whether this is true—does it only react to its material or does it try to find connections between disparate places, as if they were texts? We will also look at the question of poetry—not actual poetry, but the glitter, rather than the gold, of poetic language in travel prose. Most important, we will look at the notion that most travel writing is fiction, either a large fabrication or series of small fibs. I don’t believe any attempt to recall events of a trip (or a divorce or a car accident) can faithfully render the events. We are all fiction-makers—memory and consciousness condense and reorganize the past. This does not make the narratives we’ll read any less valuable or intriguing.
ENGL 4125 Old English
English 4125 provides an introduction to the Old English language and to literary works written in England before 1066 CE. Because Old English literature is, in the words of Stanley B. Greenfield, “to all effects in a foreign language,” students will be asked to read aloud and translate in class. There will be weekly quizzes, a midterm and a final exam to test knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, and a short paper involving both translation and interpretation. Students who take not only Old English but also the Beowulf tutorial in the spring and an exit exam can satisfy one component of the language requirement.
ENGL 4220 Seminar—Studies in Shakespeare
This course will focus on Shakespeare’s development from his apprenticeship to the height of his tragic period, focusing on parallel themes in his comedies and tragedies. The plays we will focus on include Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and King Lear.
ENGL 4732 Early American Aesthetics
This course is an extension of an earlier course called Puritan Poetics. This time I want to extend the reading into the 18th and 19th centuries in search of different expressions of how American culture deals with aesthetic questions. So, from the Puritan suspicion of representation, we will move through such things as Anne Bradstreet’s “doctrine of weaned affections”; Cotton Mather’s curious meditations on the body during the witchcraft trials; Jonathan Edwards’ sense of spiritual experience (“sweetness”); the emergence of the sublime in Jefferson’s Notes; and 19th century ideas like the picturesque, the sentimental, democratic idealism, etc.
ENGL 4001 The Self, The World, The Poem
How do we mediate between an inside and outside life? Does the “contemporary moment,” does “public space” matter? How can the lyric bring in the current world and its materials in a direct way? Is that political? How do we include the political or contemporary without soapboxing? Does the poem distinguish between knowledge and information? Can or does the lyric/self torque the world to its own ends?
ENGL 4150 Love Visions in Early Chaucer
In his early poems, Chaucer is concerned to create a world of illusion, using the genres of dream-vision and romance. In the poems, he explores themes of interest to people of all eras: the nature and transitoriness of earthly love, the mutability of the sub-lunar world, the importance of fame and reputation, and the fact that men and women must learn to cope with loss, betrayal and death.
ENGL 4200 Re-Visionary Poetics: Milton, Blake & Co.
Anglo-American poetry, poetics and prose shaped by the works and legacies of Milton and Blake. Transhistorical (17th through 20th centuries) in scope; tropological in orientation. Primary emphasis: Milton, Blake and poetic theory. Secondary concerns: Wordsworth, Eliot, Susan Howe, Eva Figes, Peter Ackroyd, Paul West, Ronald Johnson and other poets, novelists and critics writing within and against this line of tradition.
ENGL 4650 The Practice of Translation
This is a workshop based on the idea that “translation” equals “transformation.” How do the choices one makes in vocabulary, style, conceptual approach, when one writes anything at all, “translate one’s thoughts into words,” affect the results? How does one know that the literature in a translation one reads is an accurate reflection of the original? These and other questions will be analyzed and, through our own production, put to the test. This production will take the form of a semester-long translation project. Relevant theoretical texts will be discussed on a weekly basis.
ENGL 4650 Modern & Postmodern Poetics and Historiography
From Eliot’s “historical sense” to Howe’s “collision or collusion with history,” this course examines the many ways in which twentieth-century American poets have written within and against the grain of history. While some of our concerns will address questions of theory and methodology—that is, poetics from Mallarmé to Perloff, and historiography from Nietzsche to de Certeau—the primary matter for this class will be poetry. Major works will include: Crane’s The Bridge, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s Maximus Poem, Johnson’s Ark, Swensen’s Such Rich Hour, and Howe’s Souls of the Labadie Tract. Alongside those primary works, we will also consider selected poems by a variety of writers, including: Wylie, Rukeyser, Pound, Lowell, Moore, Bishop, Hayden, Clampitt, and Hejinian.
ENGL 4701/4702 Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
This is a course in poetic meter and poetic form. We examine the organized and regulated patterns of metrical verse beginning with the quantitative, classical line, the alliterative, accentual line of old English (and later accentual poetry), the syllabic line and, of course, the accentual syllabic line that dominates English poetry from Wyatt and Surrey into the 19th and much of the 20th century. Identifying these lines will necessarily require an examination of the foot—iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic, spondaic, pyrrhic and so on—as the basic unit of metrical verse, and the various techniques of scansion prosodists have quarreled about for centuries. From these fundamentals we will move to other considerations: relative stress as a technique of scansion, metrical variations on the established norm and how they often contribute to meaning, abstract patterns of meter and their relationship (sometimes tense but telling) to actual speech rhythms, and how other poetic techniques of ordering, such as rhyme, caesural pauses, line breaks and stanza forms, may be said to be “projections and magnifications of the kind of formalizing repetition meter embodies.” Because prosodic study is inexact and theoretical interpretations abound, we will be looking at not only graphic, but also alternative methods of scansion, and at arguments intended to “rethink” meter, abolishing the foot in favor of the syntactical unit as a way of reading traditional metrical verse, for example, or giving the pentameter the heave altogether in favor of free verse or “the variable foot,” or closing the circle by exhuming from some free verse the old three- or four-stress pattern said to be reasserting itself from our beginnings.
ENGL 4732 American Indian Nonfiction
This course focuses on three critical time periods and three critical moments in American Indian literary history with the purpose of analyzing the ways in which writing has functioned within American Indian intellectual, cultural and political discourse. The course begins in the early 19th century with an examination of writings by Elias Boudinot (Cherokee), William Apess (Pequot) and the Haudenosaunee Constitution. We then examine two different written versions of the vision of Oglala Lakota holy man Black Elk. Finally, we end the course by reading a memoir published in 2005 by Peter Razor (Ojibwa) recounting his experiences growing up in a state orphanage, and engaging Winona LaDuke’s (Anishinaabe) survey of Native American political and environmental battles entitled All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Other critical and nonfiction texts and readings will be spread throughout the course, and include works by Robert Warrior, Brian Dippie, Thomas King, Taiaiake Alfred, Philip Deloria and Vine Deloria, Jr. A consideration of Paolo Freire’s conception of “literacy” and “critical literacy” as political acts will set the critical tone for the course, and we consider the potential application of these terms in understanding American Indian experiences with writing. This course is designed to be challenging and useful, introducing students to both the current debates in American Indian literary studies and to American Indian cultural, political and literary history.
ENGL 4000 Modernism in Theory and Practice
Early 20th-century authors are well known for their efforts to “stretch the illusion” to test their chosen genres to their theoretical and practical limits. The aim of this course will be to explore the work of three significant artist-theorists: Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Bertolt Brecht. This will, one hopes, open up a world of early artistic experiment conducted in “peoples’ theater,” little magazines, critical polemic, etc.
ENGL 4001 Creative Writing Seminar: Collaborations, Soundscapes, Pictures, Points of (No?) Return
In this workshop, we will play at the pleasures of collaborations: with audioscapes, places, “found” texts, “facts” and our own works. Some things we might essay: investigative poetics projects; translations of the world’s rich and constant visuals and aurals; erasures; ekphrastic exercises; multi-handed poems and more.
ENGL 4011 Fiction
In this creative writing workshop, we will allow ourselves to be haunted by the questions: Why write fiction, and what, in fact, is fiction? From what sense of necessity does our work erupt? We will explore our identities as writers, locate our tricks, filters and crutches, and seek to embody our work in more authentic—and therefore more powerful—ways. By positioning our work at the intersection where such meditations/questions cross with issues of craft, we will explore in depth the elements of fiction, including the poetics of syntax and the energetics of technique (point of view, time, repetition, silence, artifice, constraint, etc.). In juxtaposing philosophical texts with contemporary texts, film images and sound recordings, we will relieve ourselves of the need for “inspiration” and allow our craft to be informed by the art of seeing what originates from proximity.
This is a workshop less interested in polishing or affirming existing pieces, and more interested in staying close to the strange, wonderful and bloody pulse of fiction itself through poignant experimentation. We will create textual artifacts that can inform existing bodies of work, while also becoming pieces in and of themselves.
ENGL 4200 Special Topic—Poetics and Historiography (Classical to Early Modern)
In “An Apology for Poetry” (1595)—often cited as a text that epitomizes English Renaissance poetics—Sir Philip Sidney elevates poetry above philosophy and history, arguing that “the poet only bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit.” Which theories of poetry and history (from England and the Continent) have the greatest influence upon Sidney? Which challenge Sidney’s model? And how do English dramatists and poets (women and men) work within and against that dynamic context of power relations among competing fields/forms of discourse and knowledge from Plato (ca. 427–347 BCE) to Katherine Philips (1631–1664)? This class will investigate a major topic in the early modern era: the relationship between poetics and historiography. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, students will study the works (both canonical and non-canonical) of Continental and English philosophers, poets and historians from the 13th through the 17th century. The course will also involve examinations of recent scholarship, theory and criticism in the field. Students are requested to be prepared to discuss the following texts at the first meeting: Plato’s Republic, Book X (ca. 373 BCE); and Aristotle’s Poetics (ca. 330 BCE).
ENGL 4213 Advanced Studies-Early Modern Literature
Using Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as a touchstone, we explore the development of Jacobean tragedy as a rhetorical response to the cultural and sociopolitical crises of early 17th century England. Testing modern critical assumptions about these plays, we will explore just how “postmodern” these tragedies are in temperament. How did the skepticism of the time shape dramatic character as an element of class and gender inquiry? As incipient forms of modern mimesis, representatives of early modern literature, how do they invite “postmodern” readings? Why do female figures arise as central to the inquiry?
ENGL 4300 Advanced Studies in 18th Century Literature: Travelers’ Tales and Fables of the East
This course will examine the traffic of narratives between the Orient and Occident in the 18th century. During the period the “mysterious” East was poised between fabulation and “fact,” between trade and fantasy, science and myth. We look at a range of texts—travelers’ tales, prose fictions, plays and poems. Many of the texts can (and should) be downloaded from the 18th century online collection that we (fabulously) have in the library. Inevitably, we will also examine the relevance/irrelevance of Edward Said’s construction of “Orientalism” to the literature and mental maps of this period. If you have not read Orientalism yet, now would be a good time to do so.
ENGL 4424 Special Topic: 19th Century Romantic Poetry/British Romantic Poetry
The course will focus on British Romantic poetry. We trace its roots to 18th century Enlightenment philosophy and 18th century sensibility and examine how these influences converged in the Romantics’ reaction to the political, economic and social upheavals of their time. We examine the differences between the first- and second-generation Romantics. Along with primary works, we will read political tracts, philosophical works and a selection of contemporary criticism. All reasonable critical approaches will be considered in the hope that this course will help you with your own projects and further individual interests. Course requirements include a seminar-length paper and an oral presentation.
ENGL 4736 African-American Autobiography
According to historian V.P. Franklin, “The autobiography has been the most important literary genre in the African-American intellectual tradition.” This course introduces students to the rich tradition of African-American autobiography, exploring the forms and functions of the works and examining them within their historical contexts. We address such concerns as “autophylography,” bearing witness and concepts of selfhood.
ENGL 4830 Seminar in Teaching Writing and Literature
What does it mean to teach college English? What are the rhetorical demands placed on today’s instructors? How do these demands change in response to theoretical shifts in the study of literature and writing? This seminar will introduce students to the professional requirements of today’s English scholars and writers, giving them an objective foundation for considering the pedagogical implications of their graduate studies as they prepare to enter the academic profession.
ENGL 4150 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
A study of the tales and the historical and philosophical context within which Chaucer wrote. In addition to reading the tales themselves, we will read a number of critical studies of Chaucer’s work and some medieval documents that provide background available to Chaucer and his first audience.
ENGL 4600 Virginia Woolf and the Victorians
The graduate seminar will examine some of the principal Victorian novelists—Bronte, Dickens and Eliot—through the critical lens of Virginia Woolf’s and her father Leslie Stephen’s essays on these authors. Readings will include Woolf’s and Stephen’s periodical essays on the nature of criticism, the role of the critic and the role of the reader. Texts will include Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s David Copperfield, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Woolf’s Night and Day, The Years and Granite and Rainbow. Final projects will focus either comparatively on Woolf and one of the Victorian authors or on Woolf’s role as reviewer/critic and novelist.
ENGL 4000 Colloquium
The second-year graduate colloquium is a mandatory 2-hour course for all second year PhD students in English. It is supervised by the director of graduate studies with guest lectures/discussions by most of the Department of English faculty. The colloquium addresses a variety of topics from year-to-year, including preparation for the profession.
For More Information
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