Spring 2023 Courses Unveiled!

Spring 2023 Graduate English Course Offerings

Read on for info on our upcoming spring courses. Registration opens on Oct. 27th!

ENG 8106 Love & War in Medieval Romance

Dr. Brooke Hunter
CRN 33293
Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm

Medieval romances—the mode of literature that tells stories of chivalry, ladies, love, and martial prowess—shaped ideas about everything from racial and cultural identity to best practices for flirting. Focusing on the romances of King Arthur and other English heroes, this course will consider three main questions: how romances structure the experience of love, sexuality, and gender; how romances shape the practice of religion and notions of religious otherness; and how romances construct ideas about peoples (nationes) and political power. We will trace the romance and its conventions from the early origins of the form in historical epics through the addition of courtly love narratives as we also examine works that challenge and critique these conventions. By noting how the use of the genre varies in the changing historical landscape of medieval England and France we will also learn about the political, propagandistic, and cultural work these stories accomplished for their patrons, authors, and readers. We will read works in modern English translations including Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot: Knight of the Cart, but approximately half of the reading will be in Middle English. Previous experience with Middle English will be helpful but not necessary.

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

ENG 8560 Victorian Publics & Populations
Dr. Mary Mullen
CRN 33294
Wednesday 5:20-7:20 pm

This course thinks about publics, populations, masses, multitudes, groups, communities, mobs, and crowds in order to consider how Victorian literature imagines collectivities. We will study Victorian reading publics and the explosion of print culture, mass movements like Chartism, the growth of democracy, the expansion of the British empire and colonial publics while interrogating how race, class, and gender shape constructions of publics and a private domestic sphere. We will focus on the rise of demographic thinking, the rapidly growing population of Britain, as well as the demographic effects of colonial catastrophes like the Irish Famine. We will read theories of the public and the public sphere, essays by Victorian writers like Wilkie Collins and George Moore, novels by Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, and poetry by Lady Jane Wilde and others. We will experiment with public writing and practice academic writing.

ENG 8620 Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Shakespeare, Milton, and their Contemporaries
Dr. Lauren Shohet
CRN 33295
Monday 5:20-7:20 pm

This course explores how gender and sexuality are constructed and deconstructed in plays, poetry, political treatises, sermons, recipes, and midwives’ manuals of the English Renaissance. Our central texts will be Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Othello, and selected sonnets; Milton’s Paradise Lost and selected short poems; and Mary Wroth’s romance Urania. We’ll contextualize these with readings in other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, present-day criticism, and post-Renaissance adaptations of our primary texts. How do early-modern articulations of gender and sexuality shape subsequent versions of these categories? What’s familiar, alien, appealing, appalling about them? What can we recover, and what can we never know, what can we use, what do we misunderstand when we examine these traditions? Readings and informal assignments will give students opportunities to test out different theoretical models and contemporary critical tools; substantial final papers will revisit and expand on this earlier work. 

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

ENG 9730 Religion in Latinx Literature
Dr. Michael Dowdy
CRN 33299
Wednesday 7:30-9:30 pm

When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Anahuac, the native Mexica thought him a white god come to fulfill prophecy. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, the Taino cacique Urayoán ordered a conquistador’s drowning to determine if the Spanish were indeed gods. The Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada memorializes this insurgent act as the “idea / that conquerors on horseback / are not many-legged gods, that they too drown / if plunged in the river.” Centuries later, as Porfirio Díaz was flinging Mexico open to foreign capital, precipitating the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the first series of migrations to el norte, the dictator remarked, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” In the 1980s, the Sanctuary movement sheltered asylum seekers fleeing US-backed civil wars in Central America. From colonial to neoliberal encounters, religious doctrine, practice, and feeling, whether Catholic, Indigenous, syncretic, or evangelical, have been central to Latinx origin stories and hemispheric trajectories. To think through these complex coordinates, this course reads Latinx fiction, nonfiction, poetry, criticism, and trans-genre writing, from the nineteenth century to the present, that bring questions of religion and spirituality to bear, sometimes subversively and irreverently, on the material conditions structuring Latinx lives in the United States. How has religion, and the rejection of it, influenced Latinx place-making, literary and artistic practice, sociality and belonging? How have social and political movements been animated both by the embrace and the repudiation of religion? Requirements include informal and formal writings and an in-class presentation. Note: Knowledge of Spanish is not required.

GWS 8000 Critical Perspectives on Gender 
Dr. Yumi Lee
CRN 33482
Tuesday 5:20-7:20 pm

In this course, we will examine diverse feminist theories produced in and across different disciplines. The course will ground contemporary philosophical and theoretical developments in the study of gender in relation to specific histories of class, race, ethnicity, nation and sexuality. We will also examine select literary and cultural texts that allow us to work through the implications of these concepts and questions together. Participants in the seminar will incorporate a critical analysis of gender into a culminating final project based on independent research.

 

ENG 8090: Thesis Direction
CRN 33290

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

ENG 8092: Field Examination
CRN 33291

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 33296

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

ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation
CRN 33298

ENG 8093: Field Exam Continuation
CRN 33292

ENG 9035
Dr. Evan Radcliffe
CRN 33297

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 33300

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.