Fall Courses Unveiled!

Fall 2023 Course Descriptions 

ENG 8000 What’s Hot? Introduction to Literary Theory 

Dr. Heather Hicks 

THE 8200 Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics and Film 

Drs. Chelsea Phillips & Alice Dailey 

ENG 9640 Crime Fiction & Gender 

Dr. Jean Lutes 

ENG 9710 Contemporary American Poetry: The Documentary Turn 

Dr. Lisa Sewell 

ENG 9730 The Art of Translation  

Dr. Adrienne Perry 

 

Summer 2023 Course Description 

ENG 9530 Moby Dick 

Dr. Travis Foster 

 

ENG 9530: Moby Dick 

Dr. Travis Foster 

CRN 12006 

MTWR from 11:00 am to 01:20 pm  

Summer Session I: 5/31/23 - 6/28/23 

This course provides an opportunity to read, study, and discuss Herman Melville’s 1851 novel,  Moby-Dick; or,  The Whale. The story tracks two parallel quests: the antagonist Captain Ahab’s attempt to kill and thereby take revenge on the white whale; and the narrator Ishmael’s attempt to make sense of his experiences and observations. We’ll examine the novel for its literary qualities, including the sometimes-elusive nature of its narration, the density of its symbols, and the multiple different texts it incorporates. Beyond that, we’ll think about the novel’s many arguments about its world (and, indeed, ours), which range from the perils of demagoguery to the politics of race and white supremacy to the role eroticism plays in human sociality to the nature of God to the tragedies of human-caused species extinction, natural resource extraction, and environmental crisis. Our time together will include some very brief lectures, but mostly we’ll use our sessions to discuss and explore this tremendous novel together. Students will have the option of writing a more traditional seminar paper, designing a series of lesson plans for teaching Melville’s novel to either secondary or college-level students, or fashioning an alternative project that otherwise aligns with their interests. 

ENG 8000 What’s Hot? Introduction to Theory Across the Discipline of English 

Dr. Heather Hicks 

CRN 25198 

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. 

  

THE 8200 Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics and Film 

Drs. Chelsea Phillips & Alice Dailey 

CRN 26357 

Thursday 4:30-7:30 pm 

This interdisciplinary Theatre/English course, team-taught by Dr. Alice Dailey and Dr. Chelsea Phillips, will study a highly influential 16th-century play called  The Spanish Tragedy  in the context of western culture’s centuries-long fascination with the dynamics of revenge.  Written by Thomas Kyd in the 1580s,  The Spanish Tragedy  is a frequently studied precursor to Shakespeare’s  Hamlet  that shaped the revenge narratives we continue to reproduce in popular media today, but it is rarely staged because of its considerable theatrical demands, including onstage hangings and multiple plays within plays.  We will explore the play’s literary background—its roots in Senecan tragedy and its direct descendants in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—as well as its cognates in contemporary media, including literature, art, television, film, and gaming.  In addition to  The Spanish Tragedy,  the  course  syllabi will address three other Renaissance plays, Shakespeare’s  Hamlet  and  Titus Andronicus  and Thomas Middleton’s  The Revenger’s Tragedy; critical literature on  The Spanish Tragedy ; films from the  Batman  and  Kill Bill  franchises; graphic novels like  V for Vendetta; revenge epics like  Star Wars  and  Game of Thrones; and selections from video games and western and horror films that feature revenge as a primary plot motive.  Working in collaboration with an undergraduate Honors section of the course, we will use this background to edit the text of  The Spanish Tragedy  for performance and to develop production designs for various components of the play, such as sets, costumes, and screened projections.  We will work with and as theatre-makers to contribute to a spring production of the play in the Mullen Center’s Court Theatre.  (Spring participation—either credit or non-credit—is encouraged but optional.)  

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

  

ENG 9640 Crime Fiction and Gender 

Dr. Jean Lutes 

CRN 25204  

Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm 

This course studies detective fiction as an intellectually rich phenomenon that critiques social and economic realities and addresses fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge itself. As its title suggests, it also assumes that ideas about gender are central to narratives of detection—and that a rigorous inquiry into the genre yields insight into the startling array of meanings our culture has associated with sexuality and gender. Surveying a selection of American detective fiction beginning with two of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, we will read the genre as both an art form and an index of cultural beliefs. We will ask some hard-boiled questions of our own, including: how might this immensely popular genre reinforce existing power relations between the sexes, and how might it undermine them? What desires are created, fulfilled, or neglected by detective fiction? Finally, what can be known, how, and by whom? Likely texts include Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Pauline Hopkins’s “Talma Gordon,” Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer.  

 

ENG 9710 Contemporary American Poetry: The Documentary Turn 

Dr. Lisa Sewell 

CRN 25205  

Tuesday 5:20-7:20 pm  

While it seems as if the documentary, the factual and the research-based are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the subjective, introspective, lyric realm of poetry, research and documents of various kinds appear in the work of a wide range of contemporary poets. Poetry that incorporates or relies on outside sources (as opposed to solely on the inner resource of poetic inspiration) is part of our Modernist inheritance, but has been especially notable since the turn of the 21st century, causing some critics to refer to a “documentary turn” in contemporary American poetry. In this course we will endeavor to locate and interrogate this “turn,” along a number of different trajectories, exploring the ways poets accommodate or otherwise incorporate various kinds of source materials into their texts, asking how research and the documentary can inform a poetic practice. Part of this work will be an investigation of the category/genre of poetry itself, as much contemporary documentary poetry crosses boundaries between poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism. 

We will focus on the books that have appeared in the last two decades, reading eight complete works and supplementing that with other examples. Some of the questions we’ll explore include: in what ways are research and documents incorporated into contemporary poems? what methods of documentation can be found in poems? what might account for this turn toward research in poetry? how can poems allow for an investigation of origins, history, politics? what is the relationship between research and lyric subjectivity? And finally, a central question will be why write a documentary or investigative poem? why not just write an essay? In other words, why might poetry be the appropriate medium for documenting history and investigating truths? Some of the authors we’ll read may include Claudia Rankine, Layli Long Soldier, CD Wright, Don Mee Choi, Solmaz Sharif, Asiya Wadud, Philip Metres, Tyehimba Jess, Javier Zamora and others, and books that focus on the after effects of 9/11, a slice of the Civil Rights movement, the refugee crisis in Europe and the US American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lives of indigenous peoples in the ongoing aftermath of settler colonialism, and other effects of empire. We will also read a range of critical essays that help define the documentary mode. Requirements include a small group presentation and a final paper that can be critical or creative. 

  

ENG 9730 The Art of Translation  

Dr. Adrienne Perry 

CRN 25206  

Wednesday 5:20-7:20 pm  

The so-called language barrier is permeable.  

Differences in language signal larger differences in perception, culture, worldview, and mode of expression. Capital marshals difference as barrier.   

Language can be used to divide and conquer, and yet it can also be used to unite, to resist domination, to construct more humane and delightful realities.  

—Antena, from  A Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation    

 

I am many inside poetry. “I” as a subject, the cognizant “I” is deconstructed. I have never once lived as a single “I” inside poetry. The confusion of the multiple “I” is what makes me write poetry. I am a mother, a young unmarried woman, an angel, a prostitute. I am an infant just born, an old woman near death. When I am a mother, “I” the young unmarried woman is ill, and when I am a young woman, the mother is ill. Like the children who defy school and run out of the gate, multiple “I’s” dangle from the open skirt of the Buddhist goddess of Mercy. “You” inside poetry also dangle from the skirt.   

—Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi  

  

There are over 6,000 languages spoken around the globe, many of them in our own communities. Reading and writing across languages opens us up to that world. Translation, whether undertaken by us or others, is the art that makes this movement and its resulting encounters possible. “The Art of Translation” is a graduate seminar focusing on these encounters through the study of translation theory, practices, and the reading of literature in translation. As part of this focus, we will consider some of the issues undergirding contemporary and modern theories of translation. The course will ask a few basic questions. 1) What is translation? 2) What role does the translator play in translation? 3) As readers and writers, how can we use the practice of translation to rethink our relationship to language and, by proxy, power? As such, this course is also interested in the relationship between translation, language, ethics, and justice.   

Required Readings May Include:  19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Weinberger;  The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa translated by Stephen Snyder;  Mouth Eats Color: Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations & Originals, Sawako Nakayasu; “Thick Translation,” Appiah;  The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti;  Sphinx, by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan; and  The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector, translated by Idra Novey.   

 

ENG 8090: Thesis Direction 

CRN 25199 

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

 

ENG 8092: Field Examination 

CRN 25200 

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 26931 

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

 

ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation 

CRN 25203 

 

ENG 8093: Field Exam Continuation 

CRN 25201 

 

ENG 9035 

Dr. Evan Radcliffe 

CRN 26932 

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  

Public relations  

Advertising  

College admissions  

University administration  

Arts administration  

Library science  

Teaching

Rare book broker

Web design

Journalism

Testing industry

Tutoring industry

Technical writing

ENG 9800  

CRN 25207 

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.