Course Descriptions for Previous Semesters
: Spring 2005 Graduate Courses
ENG 505 (01)
Title: Creative Writing Workshop
Instructor: Hunting
Anticipated Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission.
Course Description: This is an intensive writing course at the
advanced level. Most of the work will take place in weekly workshop
settings. The instructor will also be available for individual
tutorial conferences. By the end of the semester each student
is expected to have completed a solid collection of short stories
or poems or to have made substantial progress on a novel.
Required Texts: None
Evaluation: Letter grade based on quality of work and participation.
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ENG 555 (01)
Title: Literature of Enlightenment
Instructor: Rogers
Anticipated Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate Standing
Course Description: Consideration of the Restoration and eighteenth-century
as a watershed that marks the change from Renaissance to Modern.
We'll discuss literature in terms of genre, culture, gender,
individualism, and representation. Authors to be studied include
.Behn, Cavendish, Finch, Congreve, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Defoe,
Richardson, Johnson, and Radcliffe.
Required texts: To be selected.
Evaluation: Numerous short papers, presentations, one longer
research paper.
ENG 558 (01)
Title: Modern British Literature
Instructor: Cowan
Anticipated Size: 15
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Course Description: This course is unapologetically about "High
Modernism." We will examine the notion of a modernist literature
and study works traditionally considered masterpieces of the
British modernist canon. The approach will be historical and
cultural. Our consideration of "modernism" will necessarily
involve some attention to the knotty issue of "postmodernism." Our
discussions should also include current reevaluations of "modernism." The
emphasis will be on poetry although we will also read representative
novels.
Possible texts may include:
Poems by Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Wyndham Lewis,
Oscar
Wilde, T. S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin,
Seamus Heaney
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent or Heart of Darkness
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
Rebecca West, Harriet Hume or The Return of the Soldier
James Joyce, Dubliners
Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway
Muriel Spark, The Comforters
Evaluation: Class participation, class presentation, one short
paper, "book review," one long research paper.
ENG 580 (01)
Title: Reading and Poetics
Instructor: Billitteri
Anticipated Size: 15
Prerequisites: Graduate student in English or permission
Course Description: This seminar will consider poetics as a
speculative branch of hermeneutics (a discipline concerned with
the activity of interpretation) by focusing on the work of four
poets: Laura Riding, Charles Olson, Lyn Hejinian, and Allen Grossman.
These poets are significantly different in their aesthetics,
politics, and historical locations, but share a keen interest
in the cognitive boundaries of language and in problems of meaning,
representation, memory, and absence. Reading their poetry against
the "operative horizon" of their theoretical and methodological
prose (together with a small selection of other critical texts),
we will construct accounts of the individual writers' poetics
intrinsic to the activity of reading.
Required texts: Poetry and prose by Charles Bernstein, Laura
Riding, Charles Olson, Lyn Hejinian, and Allen Grossman, as well
as selections from the work of Anthony Easthope, Denise Riley,
and others.
Evaluation: Weekly responses, in-class presentations, final
research project.
ENG 649 (01)
Title - Seminar in Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetry
Instructor: Evans, S.
After Patriarchal Poetry? Gender and the Avant-Garde in 20th-Century
Poetry & Poetics
Prerequisite: Graduate student in English or permission
Course Description: This seminar will focus on the many convergences
and contradictions between two powerful paradigms within modernity:
avant-gardism and feminism. We will anchor our investigation
in the works of four writers of the early 20th century— Gertrude
Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams—but
our collective researches will reach into the present as well,
with a likely emphasis on the work of contemporaries like Lyn
Hejinian, Alice Notley, Rosmarie Waldrop, Bernadette Mayer, and
others. Scholars and theorists to be discussed include: Susan
Rubin Suleiman (Subversive Intent), Peter Bürger (Theory
of the Avant-Garde), Janet Lyons (Manifestoes), Cary Nelson (Repression
and Recovery), Rachel Blau DuPlessis (The Pink Guitar), Judy
Butler (Gender Trouble), Julia Kristeva (Revolution in Poetic
Language) and others.
Texts: To be announced.
Evaluations: Students will contribute entries to an annotated
bibliography of the field, make in-class presentations, and write
a research paper of approximately 20 pages.
ENG 697 (Independent Reading) & ENG 699
(Graduate Thesis)
These courses are arranged through the Graduate Coordinator
and are available to current graduate students in English only.
Credits: 1-6
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