Spring 2021 Courses Announced!

Detailed descriptions of courses can be found below the course list!

Spring 2021 English Courses

ENG 8260 Revenge Tragedy - Dr. Alice Dailey

ENG 8560 Institutional Fictions - Dr. Mary Mullen

ENG 9640 Alone Together: Literature & Social Distance - Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh

ENG 9730 British Literature & Medicine 1700-1900 - Dr. Joseph Drury

GWS Courses that Count for English

GWS 8000 Critical Perspectives on Gender - Dr. Jean Lutes

ENG 8260: Revenge Tragedy
Dr. Alice Dailey
CRN 32463
Thursday 5:30-7:30 pm (hybrid)

Revengers, Murderers, and Malcontents in Renaissance Tragedy

One of the dominant features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama is its preoccupation with spectacular acts of murder and revenge and with the psychological, social, familial, and political circumstances that motivate and justify violence. This course will study the formal traditions of revenge drama and the genre’s place within Renaissance debates about concepts of family, gender, honor, patriarchy, sexuality, and individuality. Our discussions will focus on how violence is used in the plays to construct notions of ideal femininity and masculinity, often through the dramatization of rape, necrophilia, and honor killings. We will consider how revenge is imagined to reinforce bonds between fathers and sons, delimiting manhood in relation to homicidal violence. We will pay close attention to the roles described for women in these plays—witch, whore, murderess, madwoman, beautiful suicide, corrupted corpse—and we will think about how these categories function to police female sexual autonomy. We will consider how various playwrights make use of a shared vocabulary of revenge tragedy conventions that include ghostly appearances, supernatural intervention, real and feigned madness, language of horror and darkness, plays-within-plays, and counter-revenge. Our study will include the period’s seminal revenge tragedies, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy; tragedies that blend revenge elements with political intrigue, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy; as well as so-called “sex tragedies” focused on forbidden desire and jealousy, like Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Middleton’s The Changeling, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Coursework includes a presentation, annotated bibliography, and seminar paper. My current plan is to meet in person as much as possible with synchronous online meetings as necessary.

*This course will fulfill the pre-1800 British/Irish literature requirement

 

ENG 8560: Institutional Fictions
Dr. Mary Mullen
CRN 32464
Wednesday 7:30-9:30 pm (online synchronous)

Institutional Fictions 

This graduate seminar focuses on how institutions produce fiction and how fiction represents institutions. Beginning by reading theories of institutions, we will identify the key fictions that institutions depend upon—fictions of futurity, inclusion, agency, and enclosure—as we consider the promises and pitfalls of institutions as a mode of social and political organization. We will then study a specific institution—the university—and learn about critical university studies and abolitionist university studies in order to reflect on our experience within it. We will read nineteenth-century literature and nineteenth-century theories of institutions as well as contemporary literary theory and criticism covering authors like Thomas Hardy, Amy Levy, John Henry Newman, Cuthbert Bede and Virginia Woolf and theorists like Sara Ahmed, Roderick Ferguson, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. This class will help you become better critical readers of both literary and social forms, aesthetics and politics.

ENG 9640: Alone Together: Literature & Social Distance
Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh
CRN 32468
Tuesday 7:40-9:40 pm (online synchronous)

Alone Together: Literature & Social Distance

How can we feel connected even when alone? This is a problem that the pandemic has drawn to the surface for many of us. The forms of social distancing that we’ve adopted out of necessity have prompted feelings of isolation and loneliness, even as they’ve also given us a kind of shared experience on an unprecedented and global scale. How do we live through times like these, and how might we make sense of them? 

This course explores how the activities of reading and writing produce the strange and sustaining feeling of being alone together. In most of their forms, reading and writing might seem like solitary activities. Indeed, the figures of the hermetic poet, scribbling notes that no one will read, or of the absorptive reader, lost in a novel, are deeply imprinted in our way of imagining the production and reception of literature. And yet, despite the physical distance that often accompanies and may even be required for it, literature also makes it possible for people to feel connected with one another over vast spatial and temporal distances. How does literature make such contact possible? And what does it have to teach us about the distance it traverses? 

In order to answer these questions, we’ll study literary representations of solitude and contact. Authors will include Virginia Woolf, Claudia Rankine, James Schuyler, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Brenda Shaughnessy. Assignments will include formal and informal written exercises and at least one in-class presentation.

ENG 9730: British Literature & Medicine 1700-1900
Dr. Joseph Drury
CRN 32469
Monday 5:20-7:20 pm (online synchronous)

British Literature & Medicine 1700-1900

The theory and practice of medicine underwent dramatic changes in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Medical knowledge was transformed by the rise of the experimental method and the discovery of the circulatory and nervous systems, the introduction of new technologies, therapies, and drugs, the success of smallpox inoculation, the Mesmerism craze and the discovery of the “unconscious,” Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the emergence of public health and hygiene, anaesthesia, and germ theory. At the same time, medical practitioners raised their social status through the establishment of teaching hospitals, medical schools, and professional societies. Physicians began to present themselves as public authorities capable of diagnosing and treating the pathologies of modernity. Aetiological theories pointed to luxury, industrialization, urbanization, distraction, immigration, and empire as causes of sexual deviance, nervous illness, and degeneration. Diagnoses drew on cultural stereotypes about race, gender, and class. This class will consider how the literature of this period responded to these developments. We will ask: what use did literary authors make of new medical discourses? What did they understand to be the potentially medicinal uses of reading literature? How did new theories of the human body and mind shape their portrayal of the human subject and its environment? How did fiction writers represent medical practitioners and how seriously did they take their claims to have solutions to large-scale social problems? Readings may include poetry by Anne Finch, John Armstrong, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sick Room, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

*This course will fulfill the pre-1800 British/Irish literature requirement

GWS 8000: Critical Perspectives on Gender (online)

Dr. Jean Lutes
CRN 32629
Tuesday 5:30-7:30 pm

Critical Perspectives on Gender

An interdisciplinary study of gender, women, and sexuality, this course introduces you to some classic texts and surveys contemporary developments in feminist, gender, and queer theory. As you reckon seriously with the feminist tradition of uniting theory with praxis, you will consider both intellectual and activist work. You will also apply theories to a variety of historical and contemporary topics, such as gender expression, girlhood, reproductive rights, the history of sexuality, gender in the workplace, gender in the digital age, and gender in the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout, we will approach gender and sexuality as inextricably bound to other vectors of identity, including but not limited to race and class.

ENG 8090: Thesis Direction
CRN 32461

Direction of writing of the thesis, focused research on a narrowly defined question, under supervision of an individual instructor.

ENG 8092: Field Examination
CRN 32462

A broader exploration of a theme or area of literature than a thesis. The examination comprises a comprehensive statement essay and an oral exam component. 

ENG 9031: Independent Study
CRN 32465

A special project pursued under the direction of an individual professor.

ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation
CRN 32467

ENG : Field Exam Continuation
CRN

ENG 9035
Dr. Evan Radcliffe
CRN 32466

Professional Research Option (PRO)

This option for second-year graduate students is a three-credit independent study in which students identify one or a cluster of jobs or professions in which an advanced degree in literature is of benefit.  In the course of the semester, students will research the career options of interest, identifying one or two fields as the focus of their work.  They must generate a research paper that explores the history and future prospects of the field of interest, as well as current information about the requirements of the work, geographical information about centers of activity for the profession, and desirable employers.  This research should include at least two meetings with professionals who work in the field.  The paper must also analyze how advanced study of literature serves to enhance the students' desirability in the profession in question.  As part of their final project, students must develop a cover letter outlining the ways their particular training makes them suitable to work in this field.  Students will make their research available to other students in the program by uploading their final project onto a special section of the Graduate English Program blog. 

 

ENG 9800
CRN 32470

Internship in Teaching English

Second-year graduate students have the option to serve as an intern for a graduate faculty member in an undergraduate English course.  Interns will attend all class sessions, confer at least once with each student on their written work, lead two or three class sessions under the supervision of the faculty member, and complete a final project that is either (1) a substantial critical essay concerning the subject matter of the course or (2) a research project concerning trends and issues within college-level pedagogy.  The aim of the program is to provide students with teaching and classroom experience.  Students may apply to serve as interns by consulting with a faculty member who is teaching in an area of interest, and, if the faculty member is amenable, submitting a one-two page statement, outlining how this course addresses their larger intellectual goals, and what they hope to accomplish as an intern.