Spring 2003 Graduate Courses
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- 503/703: English Language
- 536: History of Criticism
- 570F/771C: Milton
- 570R/773C: Fighting Words: British Radicalism, 1785-1805
- 570P/775C: Errands into the Wilderness: American Writing and the Politics/Poetics of Literary Theory from the Civil War to WWI
- 692: Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction
- 692 Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
- 765: Form and Theory of Poetry
- 777: Doctoral Colloquium
- 780: Special Studies Seminar: Electronic Discourse
- 791: Professional Issues
503/703: English Language
Instructor: Marsha Dutton
Description:
Languages change over time and vary over space. This fundamental linguistic concept, which is as true of English as of all other languages, explains both the emergence of Old and Middle and Modern English from Indo-European and the existence of varieties of English from Bangladesh to Meigs County. This course will explore the temporal development and the spatial varieties of English, with a particular emphasis on reading in primary texts. We will consider not only the social and historical events and conditions that have shaped and continue to shape the language but the invention of the printing press, the creation of dictionaries, and the development of the science of linguistics.
Texts:
- Burnley, David. The History of the English Language: A Source Book. London: Longman, 2001.
- Fennell, Barbara A. A History of English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
- Princeton Review Staff. Grammar Smart: A Guide to Perfect Usage. New York: Random, 1998.
Assignments:
5-page critical review of a scholarly article, a critical edition, or a translation; midterm exam; twenty-page paper involving a combination of primary and secondary linguistic research.
536: History of Criticism
Instructor: Robert Miklitsch
Descriptions:
In the first half of this course we will review the history of contemporary criticism from structuralism to post-structuralism. After a brief glance at the structural-linguistic turn as it is played out in Saussure, we will turn to a number of exemplary discourses associated with (post-) structuralism, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. In the second half of the quarter, having, as it were, set our course, we will turn our attention to other influential formation in contemporary critical theory and cultural studies, such as feminism, queer theory, and race studies. As per usual, I will mobilize filmic and televisual texts (such as, for example, American Beauty and Sex and the City, respectively) for illustrative purposes.
Texts:
Required texts will probably include one overview of the field or, more properly perhaps, fields and a course packet of critical readings that will be available to be copied at Duplication Station.
Assignments:
There will be weekly reading assignments. Written responses to the criticism and mass-media texts (2 pp.) will be due each week. A final, informal, "reflective" paper (3-4 pp.) will be due at the end of the quarter.
570F/771C: Milton
Instructor: Beth Quitslund
Description:
Milton's literary biography is the literary biography of the seventeenth century. Intimately involved with the political, religious, and social upheavals that marked England's entry into modern nationhood and eventually into Enlightenment culture, both the conservative and radical impulses of the period shape (and are shaped by) England's most important early modern poet. We'll study Milton's major works with an eye to illuminating life in seventeenth-century England as well as Milton's own influential poetic sensibility.
Readings:
Lyric poems, "A Maske at Ludlow Castle," "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes;" selected prose.
Assignments:
A substantial research paper, with other shorter written assignments during the term.
570R/773C: Fighting Words: British Radicalism, 1785-1805
Instructor: Nicole Reynolds
Description:
This course will explore Romantic poetry, fiction, and polemic in the context of the political and cultural radicalism of the 1790s. From the lyrical reflections of William Cowper and Charlotte Smith to the Jacobin novels of Robert Bage and Mary Hays, we will trace the ideological and aesthetic imperatives of various radical discourses: dissent, sensibility, abolition, feminism, revolution, gothic. By situating the work of William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, and William Wordsworth within the literary and social milieu of the 1790s, we'll work to re-evaluate and complicate our inherited notions of Romanticism both as a literary movement and as an academic discipline. Throughout the term, we'll discuss the competing and complicit demands of personal and national identity, sexual autonomy and textual authority, working-class unrest and bourgeois idealism, history and modernity.
Readings:
- Robert Bage, Hermsprong
- Anna Letitia Barbauld, from Selected Poetry and Prose
- Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative
- William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney
- Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray
- Mary Robinson, Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter
- Charlotte Smith, Desmond
- Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France
- Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman
Collections of poetry and nonfiction prose that we'll draw from include Marilyn Butler's Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy and Duncan Wu's Romanticism: An Anthology. A course packet will provide additional primary and various supplementary texts: historical/cultural readings from Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, a selection of theoretical/critical essays, contemporary reviews and political cartoons, etc.
Assignments:
Weekly position papers (1-2 pages), class presentation, seminar paper (20 pages).
570P/775C: Errands into the Wilderness: American Writing and the Politics/Poetics of Literary Theory from the Civil War to WWI
Instructor: Robert DeMott
Description:
This could change, but right now I am thinking that this course will examine, in a highly selective manner, a vital yet contested and drastically changing concept—literary journeys/errands (forced and voluntary) into the wilderness frontier (outer and inner; natural and cultural/social) through investigation of some American writings primarily in fiction (and forays into nonfiction) that bear on the continuing issues and problematics related to nationhood, landscape, gender, nature, selfhood, identity, representation, and textuality.
Readings:
In addition to treating a number of primary texts by canonical authors , including, for example, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau, Twain, Cather, and Faulkner, during the first half of the quarter, we will follow up with answering texts by Marilynne Robinson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paul Auster, Terry Tempest Williams, John Edgar Wideman, and ending with Susan Howe's The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. As an integral part of the course, we will also discuss an impressive and exciting but woefully neglected strain of discourse—the poetical, elliptical, alternative tradition of 20th century American literary criticism (written by creative writers), which raises intriguing issues about whether a critical text can be a primary text. We will discuss (via selections) Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael, Edward Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live, William Bronk's Vectors and Smoothable Curves, William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Wright Morris's The Territory Ahead, etc., and of course, Howe's The Birth-mark.
Assignments:
Will be the usual—one or two oral seminar presentations, a couple of short papers, and a 15-page final essay (MA students) or 20-25 page research paper (PhD students).
692: Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction
Instructor: David Lazar
Description:
An introduction to writing the personal essay.
Readings:
Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb. Woolf, Orwell, Didion, M.F.K. Fisher, Rachel Blau Du Plessis and three or four essays presented to workshop.
692 Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
Instructor: TBA
Description:
TBA
765: Form and Theory of Poetry
Instructor: Erin Belieu
Description:
In this course we will examine contemporary poetry written by American women during the last 10 years. Our focus here will be not only to encounter and explicate poems by individual authors, but also to explore the embattled notion of a literary tradition singular to women writers. The most pertinent questions for the seminar will be: how has the theory of this aesthetic and political trajectory changed, grown and/or been realigned since the initial exploration of this idea began in the early 1970s? Has post-first-wave-feminist thought changed our thinking about separating out writing by women from contemporary literature-at-large? And is it ultimately useful at this point in literary history to read poetry by contemporary American women outside of the work and commentary generated by contemporary male authors?
Readings:
Louise Gluck's Proofs And Theories; Adrienne Rich's What Is Found There; Aizenberg and Belieu's The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry By American Women; Sharon Bryan's Where We Stand: Women Poets On Literary Tradition; Essays by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Alicia Ostriker, Sandra Gilbert, etc.
Assignments:
The seminar will culminate in a final paper of 15 pages exploring the work and commentary of a single author. This paper should work within the framework of the critical conversation developed over the course of the quarter.
777: Doctoral Colloquium
Instructor: Susan Crowl
Description:
This colloquium prepares doctoral students in English for the profession of college teaching and research. It discusses professional matters which are not usually addressed in more traditional, subject-matter centered courses. These concerns may be practical or theoretical. Specific topics will be suggested by contemporary conditions within the profession and they will vary from year to year.
780: Special Studies Seminar: Electronic Discourse
Instructor: Albert Rouzie
Description:
Early experiments in hypertextuality led theorists to view the computer as the apotheosis of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory. Texts instantiated non-linear, deconstructive turns in their structures. The electronically-mediated subject was truly fluid, its new spaces part of a burgeoning hyperreality. Early experiences with virtual communities led theorists to believe in the utopian democratic potential of cyber-communion. Obviously, a correction has taken place, as the web has become more commercialized, the hacker ethic recedes into the past, and the class-based asymmetries of access to networked computers become clear. Meanwhile, experimentation continues, people still converse and forge relationships in virtual spaces, education becomes more intensely mediated, and McCluhan's famous "the medium is the message" takes on fresh meaning. All this raises some interesting, difficult questions for English studies. This seminar will try to articulate what those questions are and the participants will attempt to collectively arrive at possible answers and perspectives. To do so, we will read a variety of discourse, some in print and some on-line, that participate in this general inquiry into the effects, promises, perils, and potentialities of electronic discourse for readers and writers, teachers and students. Projects will range from short papers on readings to print and electronic experiments in writing. Some class discussions will be held online in a MOO. The class will meet in a computer classroom.
Readings:
A packet of articles and book excerpts; On-line literary and rhetorical hypertexts; Transcripts of MOO sessions; Each others' short papers on the readings.
Assignments:
Frequent short papers on the readings; A formal proposal for the final project; A major electronic project, including a brief critical essay reflecting on the project.
791: Professional Issues
Instructor: Jennie Nelson
Description:
Colloquium for apprentice teachers designed to explore alternative approaches to classroom planning and presentation and to discuss professional issues in the discipline.