Fall '22 Courses Announced!
ENG 8000 What’s Hot? Introduction to Theory Across the Discipline of English
Dr. Heather Hicks
CRN 22340
Monday 5:20-7:20 pm
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 8460 Consuming Desires in Industrial Britain
Dr. Joseph Drury
CRN 22344
Tuesday 5:20-7:20 pm
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a consumer revolution that allowed a greater share of the population than ever before to enjoy the experience of acquiring material goods. Tastes and pleasures once confined to the rich became the aspirations of all. Previously exotic goods imported from around the world became the fabric of everyday life. Consumer habits once determined by need now became driven by fashion. Such profound and rapid change inevitably excited anxiety as well as enthusiasm. Detractors warned of the enervating, corrupting effects of “luxury,” lamented the decline of rural life, and noted consumer culture’s debt to slave labor and colonialism. Others, however, welcomed the new opportunities for self-exploration and self-expression afforded by consumer culture and embraced the city as a recreational space for experiments in sexuality and gender identity. To women in particular, fashion appeared to offer a realm of unprecedented agency and authority. Rather than condemning conspicuous consumption, connoisseurs and critics sought to regulate it by devising the founding principles of modern aesthetics. The authors we will read in this course responded to these debates through works that give brilliant formal expression to the material, social, and affective complexity of modern consumer culture. Readings may include works by Frances Burney, William Beckford, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker as well as secondary materials by Georg Simmel, Colin Campbell, and Sianne Ngai, among others, that explore the history and sociology of modern consumerism and its significance for the history of sexuality, aesthetics, and British literature and culture.
*This course fulfills the pre-1800 British/Irish literature requirement
Dr. Heather Hicks
CRN 22340
Monday 5:20-7:20 pm
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 8460 Consuming Desires in Industrial Britain
Dr. Joseph Drury
CRN 22344
Tuesday 5:20-7:20 pm
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a consumer revolution that allowed a greater share of the population than ever before to enjoy the experience of acquiring material goods. Tastes and pleasures once confined to the rich became the aspirations of all. Previously exotic goods imported from around the world became the fabric of everyday life. Consumer habits once determined by need now became driven by fashion. Such profound and rapid change inevitably excited anxiety as well as enthusiasm. Detractors warned of the enervating, corrupting effects of “luxury,” lamented the decline of rural life, and noted consumer culture’s debt to slave labor and colonialism. Others, however, welcomed the new opportunities for self-exploration and self-expression afforded by consumer culture and embraced the city as a recreational space for experiments in sexuality and gender identity. To women in particular, fashion appeared to offer a realm of unprecedented agency and authority. Rather than condemning conspicuous consumption, connoisseurs and critics sought to regulate it by devising the founding principles of modern aesthetics. The authors we will read in this course responded to these debates through works that give brilliant formal expression to the material, social, and affective complexity of modern consumer culture. Readings may include works by Frances Burney, William Beckford, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker as well as secondary materials by Georg Simmel, Colin Campbell, and Sianne Ngai, among others, that explore the history and sociology of modern consumerism and its significance for the history of sexuality, aesthetics, and British literature and culture.
*This course fulfills the pre-1800 British/Irish literature requirement
ENG 8680 James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100
Dr. Joseph Lennon
CRN 22345
Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm
This course will take place during the 100th anniversary year of the publication of Ulysses, James Joyce’s great modernist novel. He published the book on 2/2/22, his fortieth birthday, and the book was quickly banned in the United States and the United Kingdom for what the British director of public prosecutions called its “unmitigated filth.” The novel follows three Dubliners over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, and is now considered by the Modern Library the greatest novel written in English.
Ulysses used almost every literary device known at the time to retell Homer’s epic on the streets of Dublin. Joyce wrote as both an Irish author and an international avant-garde modernist, and we will survey contemporary scholarship on modernism, postcolonial Ireland, and more recent readings in memory studies and network theory. We will read the text alongside Homer’s Odyssey and a few scholarly aids: Harry Blamires’s Bloomsday Book, Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, a hypertextual concordance, multiple digital maps, and a virtual simulation produced by Boston College. We will also review recent illustrations and attend a live dance performance by one of Ireland's leading choreographers, Liz Roche, as we develop a critique for visual representations of the novel in the digital age.
You will be expected to read or review Joyce’s earlier works Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the second week of class, so you may want to read them before the semester begins. We will also touch on his poetry throughout the semester. Everyone will present on a chapter and write a short piece and a final research essay. The bulk of our work, however, will be devoted to closely reading Ulysses.
Dr. Joseph Lennon
CRN 22345
Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm
This course will take place during the 100th anniversary year of the publication of Ulysses, James Joyce’s great modernist novel. He published the book on 2/2/22, his fortieth birthday, and the book was quickly banned in the United States and the United Kingdom for what the British director of public prosecutions called its “unmitigated filth.” The novel follows three Dubliners over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, and is now considered by the Modern Library the greatest novel written in English.
Ulysses used almost every literary device known at the time to retell Homer’s epic on the streets of Dublin. Joyce wrote as both an Irish author and an international avant-garde modernist, and we will survey contemporary scholarship on modernism, postcolonial Ireland, and more recent readings in memory studies and network theory. We will read the text alongside Homer’s Odyssey and a few scholarly aids: Harry Blamires’s Bloomsday Book, Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, a hypertextual concordance, multiple digital maps, and a virtual simulation produced by Boston College. We will also review recent illustrations and attend a live dance performance by one of Ireland's leading choreographers, Liz Roche, as we develop a critique for visual representations of the novel in the digital age.
You will be expected to read or review Joyce’s earlier works Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the second week of class, so you may want to read them before the semester begins. We will also touch on his poetry throughout the semester. Everyone will present on a chapter and write a short piece and a final research essay. The bulk of our work, however, will be devoted to closely reading Ulysses.
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| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/books/ulysses-james-joyce-illustrated.html? |
ENG 9710 What is Poetry?
Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh
CRN 22349
Wednesday 5:20-7:20 pm
“I, too, dislike it.” That is how Marianne Moore begins “Poetry,” a poem that then attempts to define the thing it claims to dislike—a distaste that it assumes (“I, too, dislike it”) you share.
Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh
CRN 22349
Wednesday 5:20-7:20 pm
“I, too, dislike it.” That is how Marianne Moore begins “Poetry,” a poem that then attempts to define the thing it claims to dislike—a distaste that it assumes (“I, too, dislike it”) you share.
This course will, in some sense, follow Moore’s strategy: We’ll begin by confronting our resistance to poetry head-on, asking where such a distaste comes from, and then teasing out the implicit understandings (of poetry, language, our selves) that activate these forms of skepticism. Is there something called “poetic language” that is fundamentally different from “ordinary language”? Where does the idea that poetry, more than any other form of literature, is centrally concerned with (and representative of) consciousness come from? What kinds of poetry does such an idea allow, and what kinds of poetry does it marginalize or obscure? These are some of the questions that will animate our discussions.
We’ll pursue these questions by reading a wide variety of poems (by poets like Stevens, Ashbery, and Rankine), of course, but we’ll also see what poets themselves have had to say by looking at selections from the private letters of Keats, Dickinson, and Bishop. Finally, throughout the course we’ll explore the most influential critical and theoretical discussions of these topics, where our goal will be to put formalist and historicist approaches into conversation with each other.
Assignments for the course will include one shorter and one longer critical essay as well as periodic and less formal written and oral exercises.
ENG 9720 Reading the Ethnic Canon
Dr. Yumi Lee
CRN 22350
Tuesday 7:30-9:30 pm
The rise of “ethnic” literatures has been a hallmark of 20th and 21st century American literature. Works by African American, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American, and other nonwhite authors have both circulated on best-seller lists (think Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club) and been closely studied by scholars and literary critics, becoming mainstays on college syllabi (say, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior). But when, why, and how does a work become part of a canon? Ethnic literary communities have built their own canons, curated, protected, and celebrated within their own literary traditions. At the same time, works marketed as “multicultural” have been integrated over time, with much difficulty and debate, into a mainstream American literary canon, marked by the ascension of certain works to the status of general “Great Books,” the conferral of major prizes upon ethnic authors, and the like. This course explores the history of the emergence of “ethnic” literature and investigates the conditions of possibility for the creation of an ethnic literary canon (or ethnic literary canons). We will consider questions such as: what is the burden of representation for the ethnic author? Can ethnic literature be universal? Should it be? Along the way, we will investigate how the rise of multicultural literature has intersected with histories of immigration, the Civil Rights movement, feminism and queer liberation, and student movements. At the conclusion of the course, we will examine several contemporary texts and debate the status and value of identity politics and ethnic canons in the present (and future) political and cultural climate. Literary texts may include works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Julia Alvarez, and Chang-Rae Lee; critical texts will include essays by Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Christian, Lisa Lowe, and Roderick Ferguson, among others.
ENG 8090: Thesis Direction
CRN 22341
Direction of writing of the thesis, focused research on a narrowly defined question, under supervision of an individual instructor.
ENG 8092: Field Examination
CRN 22342
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 22346
A special project pursued under the direction of an individual professor.
ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation
CRN 22348
ENG 8093: Field Exam Continuation
CRN 22343
ENG 9035
Dr. Evan Radcliffe
CRN 22347
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. Potential fields of research include the following:
E-Book Industry Teaching
Public relations Rare book broker
Advertising Web design
College admissions Journalism
University administration Testing industry
Arts administration Tutoring industry
Library science Technical writing
Entertainment industry work
ENG 9800
CRN 22351
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.
We’ll pursue these questions by reading a wide variety of poems (by poets like Stevens, Ashbery, and Rankine), of course, but we’ll also see what poets themselves have had to say by looking at selections from the private letters of Keats, Dickinson, and Bishop. Finally, throughout the course we’ll explore the most influential critical and theoretical discussions of these topics, where our goal will be to put formalist and historicist approaches into conversation with each other.
Assignments for the course will include one shorter and one longer critical essay as well as periodic and less formal written and oral exercises.
ENG 9720 Reading the Ethnic Canon
Dr. Yumi Lee
CRN 22350
Tuesday 7:30-9:30 pm
The rise of “ethnic” literatures has been a hallmark of 20th and 21st century American literature. Works by African American, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American, and other nonwhite authors have both circulated on best-seller lists (think Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club) and been closely studied by scholars and literary critics, becoming mainstays on college syllabi (say, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior). But when, why, and how does a work become part of a canon? Ethnic literary communities have built their own canons, curated, protected, and celebrated within their own literary traditions. At the same time, works marketed as “multicultural” have been integrated over time, with much difficulty and debate, into a mainstream American literary canon, marked by the ascension of certain works to the status of general “Great Books,” the conferral of major prizes upon ethnic authors, and the like. This course explores the history of the emergence of “ethnic” literature and investigates the conditions of possibility for the creation of an ethnic literary canon (or ethnic literary canons). We will consider questions such as: what is the burden of representation for the ethnic author? Can ethnic literature be universal? Should it be? Along the way, we will investigate how the rise of multicultural literature has intersected with histories of immigration, the Civil Rights movement, feminism and queer liberation, and student movements. At the conclusion of the course, we will examine several contemporary texts and debate the status and value of identity politics and ethnic canons in the present (and future) political and cultural climate. Literary texts may include works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Julia Alvarez, and Chang-Rae Lee; critical texts will include essays by Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Christian, Lisa Lowe, and Roderick Ferguson, among others.
ENG 8090: Thesis Direction
CRN 22341
Direction of writing of the thesis, focused research on a narrowly defined question, under supervision of an individual instructor.
ENG 8092: Field Examination
CRN 22342
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 22346
A special project pursued under the direction of an individual professor.
ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation
CRN 22348
ENG 8093: Field Exam Continuation
CRN 22343
ENG 9035
Dr. Evan Radcliffe
CRN 22347
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. Potential fields of research include the following:
E-Book Industry Teaching
Public relations Rare book broker
Advertising Web design
College admissions Journalism
University administration Testing industry
Arts administration Tutoring industry
Library science Technical writing
Entertainment industry work
ENG 9800
CRN 22351
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.
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