Fall 2021 Courses Announced

ENG 8000 - 001 Theory Seminar
R from 05:20 pm to 07:20 pm
Heather Hicks

This course will be run as a seminar in which each week, a different graduate faculty member will introduce you to a body of theory that is particularly important within current discussions in their field of specialization. What are some of the major theoretical approaches in medieval studies today? Early modern studies? What about 19th-century American literature and British literature?  Modernism?  Postcolonial Studies? Irish Studies? Contemporary literature? This class is an attempt to bring you immediately into dialogue with a wide variety of theories that are shaping literary study today. The course is intended to be a lively opportunity to meet most of the English faculty members who teach at the graduate level and to engage in dialogue about and analysis of the contemporary state of literary theory. Assignments will include biweekly journals and a final 15-page seminar paper.


ENG 8106 - 001: Chaucer
M from 05:20 pm to 07:20 pm
Brooke Hunter

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

This course will use Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as an introduction to current debates in medieval studies. Chaucer’s collection of stories and story tellers offers a wide-ranging introduction to the genres, forms, and interests of late-fourteenth century England. As we read the Canterbury Tales in its entirety, we will also consider current debates surrounding the Canterbury Tales and its presentation of gender and sexuality, medieval notions of race, religious devotion, and rank and social order. We will consider manuscript studies, medieval notions of authorship, and the special concerns of medieval textuality. Our secondary readings will be both theoretically informed and historical grounded and we will address on-going debates about using contemporary theory to read medieval texts. The course will function as a field survey for the material, historical, and theoretical concerns that shape medieval studies. This course will involve significant reading in Middle English and is designed to provide a solid grounding in the language. Prior experience with Middle English will be helpful but not necessary.

ENG 9530 - 001: How Sex Became Binary
W from 05:20 pm to 07:20 pm
Travis M. Foster

How Sex Became Binary

Combining queer studies, trans studies, and critical race studies with American literature and history, this multidisciplinary seminar explores the processes that made sex binary. We will study white supremacy and its apparatus of scientific racism; biopolitical liberalism and its fiction of the autonomous, rational individual; white feminism and its insistence on securing white womanhood as a protected and secure domain of belonging; and early gay rights rhetoric and its attempts to normalize same-sex desire by casting aside those with aberrant gender expressions. We’ll explore all of these processes along two parallel paths: on the one hand, reading the historical and theoretical interrogations of race and binary sex that have recently been so influential within humanities scholarship; on the other hand, reading from an archive of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature that alternately celebrates and resists the emergent binary sex model.

Readings along the former path include C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Kyla Schuller’s Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Emma Heaney’s The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory, and Julien Gil-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child. Readings along the latter path will include Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (composed ~1846, published 2004), Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Walt Whitman’s Calamus (1860-061), Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (composed 1890, published 1924), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Sui Sin Far’s “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1912), Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “His Heart’s Desire” (1900), the anonymously published “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” (1857), Eliza Leslie’s pair of short stories “Lucy Nelson; or, The Boy-Girl” and “Billy Bedlow; or, The Girl-Boy” (1832), and Jennie June’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918).

Photograph included by Jennie June in her 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne.

ENG 9720 - 001: Lives of the Undocumented
W from 07:30 pm to 09:30 pm
Tsering Wangmo

What can we learn about citizenship and conceptions of American national identity and belonging from the perspectives of undocumented immigrants? Through the genres of memoir, poetry, fiction, and critical essays, we will pay attention to the diversity of experiences as represented by those who were, or who remain without legal documentation in the United States. In this course we will think of the concept of noncitizenship to study the historical, social, racial, and theoretical gaps between citizenship and its absence. We will examine closely the concepts of illegality and deportability and other modes of excluding incorporation. Some of the questions we will discuss include: Who is permitted to enter the United States and who is forced to become a subordinated presence, or to leave? How did immigrants become “illegal”? We will examine the historical production of political designations such as “refugee,” “citizen,” and “noncitizen” and the differential access to rights, services, and representation based on the categories.

Readings will include Karla C. Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans (2020), Jose Antonio Vargaz’s Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018), Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How it Ends (2017) and Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us (2013). Other readings include essays and poems by Mae Ngai, Jose Olivarez, Javier Zamora, Nicholas De Genova, Armando Garcia, Nick Estes, Leisy Abrego, Renya Ramirez and so on.


ENG 9730 - 001 T.S. Eliot Among the Novelists
Days: T from 05:20 pm to 07:20 pm
Instructors: Megan Mathis Quigley

Eliot among the Novelists

Near the centennial of The Waste Land (2022), which shook the literary establishment at its time, this course aims to shed fresh light on a literary reputation that has been carefully guarded until now. T. S. Eliot once argued that fiction nourished his own work more than poetry did. In this seminar we will explore what Eliot might have meant by examining the novelistic practices of The Waste Land, such as narrative voice, character formation, section breaks, plot, and dialogue. We will also read novels and short stories by Eliot’s contemporaries—E.M Forster, Joseph Conrad, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes—and see how our understanding of Eliot’s poetry changes in light of these works and Eliot’s comments on them. We will also ask: Why are there so many fictionalized versions of Eliot’s life and what do make of Eliot biofiction and fanfic?

Eliot’s archive has exploded in the last decade, as much of what was recently under lock and key at Houghton library at Harvard or Firestone library at Princeton is now open to anyone who has access to the digital editions. The long-awaited publication of his letters and the complete prose, topped by the revelations of the Hale papers, are leading to a rapidly transforming notion of “Eliot” in the digital age. How does “Eliot” (Anglo-Catholic, classicist, royalist, as he proclaimed) change when we have access to all his essays, even his early erotic verse? Is our vision of Eliot as Anti-Semite, misogynist, misanthropist, humanist, revolutionary, or queer confirmed or undermined by these new materials? We will ask questions about literary reputations and literary estates, access, and canon formation. In addition to the traditional seminar paper, students will complete a short digital humanities assignment aimed at assessing the modernist “Eliot” put forth in editions such as The Cambridge Companion to the Waste Land (2015) through resource to the new digital Eliot.

T. S. Eliot by Cecil Beaton (1956)