Graduate Courses at the University of Maine:
ENG 505: Graduate Creative Writing Workshop
Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission of instructor
Recent offerings:
ENG 505: Graduate Creative Writing Workshop (Spring 2008, Alex Irvine)
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.
ENG 505: Graduate Creative Writing Workshop (Spring 2007, Kress)
Primarily, this course will examine forms and theories of fiction writing. In addition to workshopping your own writing, you will be doing extensive reading—both fiction and fiction writers writing about fiction—as well as performing numerous experiments in a variety of forms, voices, styles. The basic question for the course: what is a sentence and what can it do?
ENG 505: Graduate Creative Writing Workshop (Fall 2006, Moxley)
This course is an advanced workshop in the practice and theory of writing poetry. It is intended to help you improve your artfulness as a poet and your acumen as a reader. You will also be asked to begin the process of articulating your poetics, and to address the key formal and metaphysical questions facing any serious artist.
Required Texts (subject to change):
Yeats. Selected Poems
H. D. Selected Poems
Crane, Hart. White Buildings
Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind
Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field
Spicer, Jack. Collected Books
Howe, Susan. The Europe of Trusts
Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette
ENG 507: Graduate Writing Workshop – Fiction Writing
Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission.
Primarily, this course will examine forms and theories of fiction writing. In addition to workshopping your own writing and performing numerous experiments in a variety of forms, voices, styles, and modes, you will be doing extensive reading of fiction and fiction writers writing about fiction as well as essays on narrative theory and the theory of fiction. The basic question for the course: what is a sentence and what can it do? (Spring 2009, Kress)
ENG 508: Graduate Workshop in Poetry
Prerequisites: English master’s degree candidates concentrating in Creative Writing. All
others must submit a writing sample to obtain instructor permission.
A graduate poetry workshop for M. A. students concentrating in creative writing. (Fall 2008, Moxley)
ENG 529: Studies in Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of the instructor.
Recent offerings:
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - Staging History (Fall 2008, Brucher)
This course examines how history has been staged at different times, beginning with Shakespeare’s invention of the chronicle history play near at the end of the 16th century and ending with August Wilson’s and Susan-Lori Parks’ search for a dramatic form that reclaims African-American history near the end of the 20th century. The course interprets history broadly to accommodate a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. We’ll pay particular attention to how the plays use historical materials dramatically to examine social and political anxieties of the times in which the plays are written. The first half of the course covers English and European plays, using Shakespeare’s early history plays to establish conventions and motifs, and then pursuing those motifs (for example Joan of Arc and peasant revolts) into 20th-century plays by Shaw, Brecht, Churchill, and Stoppard. The second half of the course emphasizes American plays that sometimes use history (and sometimes one another) to examine recurring issues in American culture.
Possible texts:
Bertold Brecht, Mother Courage (Grove)
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, adapted by David Mamet (Grove)
Caryl Churchill, Plays, One (Methuen)
T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (Harcourt)
Adrienne Kennedy, The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (U of Minnesota Press)
Tony Kushner, Angels in America (TCG)
Eugene O’Neill, Three Plays (Vintage) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (Yale)
Susan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (TCG)
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan (Penguin)
William Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth (3 parts) and Richard the Third (any edition)
Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia (3 parts) (TCG?)
August Strindberg, Erik the Fourteenth (photocopy)
Naomi Wallace, In the Heart of America (TCG)
August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (Penguin/Plume)
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - A Postscript to Transgression (Spring 2008, Kress)
Beginning with Michel Foucault’s demolition of transgression as “disobedience” in his 1963 essay “A Preface to Transgression,” this course will explore both literature and literary theory as a way of building towards an understanding of transgression, particularly as it is often deployed in the world of an English department. After Foucault, we will look at several classics of transgressive theory and literature then move into an in-depth exploration of contemporary literature that seeks to get through the romantic/traditional conceptions of what transgression may have meant: although the term transgressive was most often attached to texts that are “simply” disturbing and rely on graphic description of the old stand-bys of drugs, sex, and violence, this course hopes to open towards a “going across” that is not merely naughty.
Possible Texts: The course will involve considerable reading in both literature and theory. While the theory readings are more or less set, I will cut several titles from the literary side to make things more manageable, but here is the list I'll be cutting from:
Walter Abish, How German Is It
Kathy Acker: Empire of the Senseless
JG Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition
Christine Brooke-Rose: Amalgamenon
William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch
Samuel Delaney: Dhalgren
Russell Edson: The Tunnel
Mary Gaitskill: Veronica
Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
Hubert Selby, Jr.: The Room
Jack Spicer: Selections
Jean Baudrilard, “Impossible Exchange”
Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book”
Judith Butler, “Excitable Speech”
Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Rhizome” and “One or Several Wolves?”
Jacques Derrida, “Difference”
Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression”
Martin Heidegger, “The Question of Technology”
Clarice Lispector, “This Sex Which is Not One”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and other selections
Michel Serres, “The Parasite”
Each student will write one research paper (approximately 20 pp.), give one in-class presentation, and create a website for the class “Transgression” website.
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - The American Romantics (Fall 2007, Lukens)
This is a graduate-level course involving participation as students and as teachers in ENG 443; graduate participation will include leading discussion, reading student writing, and discussions of pedagogy and content with the professor. The course will proceed chronologically, with some attention to the American social and philosophical context in which Romanticism took root. We will read some of the major authors of the American Renaissance whose works variously exemplify Romantic notions of freedom, optimism, transcendent experience, democratic equality, utopian experimentation, and the discovery of spirit in nature—and some works that could be classified as “backlash.” Besides examining American Romantic values, we will study some of the expressive forms created to convey them. This course provides an opportunity for exploration of the American Romantic period in depth and in a writing intensive format.
Required texts:
The Sketch-Book, Washington Irving (1819-20)
Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists (1819-1859), ed. George Hochfield
A Son of the Forest and other writings, William Apess (1829-35)
Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836-62)
The Portable Margaret Fuller (1840-49), ed. Mary Kelley
Walden and Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau (1854 & 1849)
Bartleby and Benito Cereno, Herman Melville (~1850)
The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852)
Selections from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (1855; supplement to Heath Anthology of American Literature)
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - Utopia and Postmodernism (Fall 2007, Jacobs)
By its conservative critics, Utopia has been characterized as a mode of thought at best naïve, at worst totalitarian. Its goals are said to be achievable only through the forceful imposition of a static model of perfection upon a necessarily conflicted, diverse and evolving humankind. While it is true that visions of utopia are everywhere employed by individuals and groups hoping to impose their versions of the good upon others, postmodern thought has informed a new generation of utopian thinkers and writers who address in more ambiguous and complicated ways the ancient utopian question: to what extent, and to what ends, do we humans create the realities we inhabit? And how then should we live?
Probable Texts:
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1985)
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton (1976)
Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home (1985)
Bernadette Mayer, Utopia (1984)
Thomas More, Utopia (1518)
Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1923)
Probably some short stories and essays on xerox
Another novel, work of theory, or film, to be arranged with student input
Critical texts by Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, Tom Moylan, and others
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - Listen! American Poetry in the Age of the MP3 (Summer 2007, Steve Evans)
In this course we'll explore the sonic archive of modern and contemporary poetry, focusing on the art of interpreting poems not just as printed texts but as voiced structures whose meaning can be "sounded" as well as seen. In addition to hearing, seeing, and reading a wide variety of poetry, we'll make use of secondary literature from the fields of literary criticism, poetics, linguistics, prosody, speech pragmatics, and the new media to fashion a supple critical vocabulary for the description, interpretation, and evaluation of poetry soundfiles. We'll also work with sound editing and analysis software applications (Audacity, Praat) that allow us to visualize the sound shape of poetic language. In addition to conventional writing assignments, students can also expect to program a radio segment (to be aired on WMEB) and to make regular postings to a course blog. No background in poetry or new media is required for this introductory course. May be of special interest to teachers interested in integrating new media into their lesson plans and to poets seeking to hone their performance styles.
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - Science Fiction After World War II (Spring 2007, Alex Irvine)
In this class, we will read novels and short stories from the end of the Golden Age right up to the present, as well as relevant criticism and theory. Authors will include Heinlein, Dick, Delany, Le Guin, Robinson, Ellison, Butler, Tiptree, Bester, Miller, Haldeman, and others. We will discuss the genre’s predilection for satire, its relationship with utopia, the impact of women writers, cyberpunk, etc. Prepare for a lot of reading.
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - Philosophy and Literature (Spring 2006, Brinkley)
The purpose of the course is to work with a number of theoretical works in the context of a number of philosophical works. I hope the course will function as a workshop and that from the works we read, participants will find themselves doing theory.
Readings:
Plato, Republic, the Cave Parable
Heidegger, "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," "The Anaximander Fragment"
Wittgenstein, Tractatus (Selections), Philosophical Investigations
Derrida, "Difference," Position
Lyotard, "Lessons in Paganism"
Descartes, Discourse on Method
Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Selections)
Heidegger, Nietzsche (Selections)
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (Selections)
Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious"
Lyotard, "The Dream-Work Does Not Think"
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Selections)
Irigaray, The Sex That is Not One (Selections)
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, "Sense Certainty"
Adorno, "How to Read Hegel"
Benjamin, Arcades Project, "N: Dialectic at a Standstill," "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, "Master and Slave"
Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844 Capital (Selections)
Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, "The Desire Named Marx"
Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Selections)
Deleuze, "Active and Reactive," "Nomad Thought"
Derrida, "The Question of Style"
Lyotard, "Notes on Capital and Return"
Irigaray, Nietzsche's Marine Lover (Selections)
Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (Selections)
Irigaray, "The Fecundity of the Caress"
Lyotard, "Levinas's Logic"
Bahktin, Speech Genres
Benjamin, "The Author as Producer"
Sausurre, Course in General Linguistics (Selections)
Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Selections)
Peirce, Elements of Logic (Selections)
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - American Poetry of the 1940s (Summer 2004, Visiting Assistant Professor K. Silem Mohammad)
This course is designed as a complement to the upcoming National Poetry Foundation conference Poetries of the 1940s, American and International, to be held June 23-27, 2004 in Orono. We will read selected work (both verse and criticism) by poets whose literary reputations were firmly established by the '40s (e.g., William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore), as well as those who were emerging or less well-known figures (e.g., Louis Zukofsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Robert Duncan). Topics will include World War II, the waning and transformation of modernism, new directions in African-American poetry, and the emergence of a "postmodern" poetics emphasizing proceduralism and other forms of experimentation. The course will begin with a brief survey of significant developments in American poetry in the early part of the 20th century (Imagism, the Objectivists, etc.), and will conclude with a glance at the legacy inherited from the poets under study by innovative contemporary writers (many of whom will be in attendance at the NPF conference). At the end of the third week, students will attend the conference for credit.
Texts: A course reader with a sampling of work by assorted poets and a weblog with links to various sites and electronic texts.
ENG 529: Studies in Literature - Four Postmodern American Poets (Spring 2003, Norris)
In this course we will be taking an intensive look at the poetry of Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg.
Texts:
The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
The House that Jack Built, ed. Gizzi
Selected Poems, Robert Creeley
Selected Poems, Frank O'Hara
Selected Poems (1947-1995), Allen Ginsberg
ENG 536: Topics in Canadian Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission.
Recent offerings:
ENG 536: Topics in Canadian Literature (Spring 2009, Norris)
In this course we'll be taking a look at a baker's dozen of the important English-Canadian novels of the twentieth century. We'll be reading and discussing a novel every week. No prior knowledge of Canadian literature is required.
Reading List:
Tay John O'Hagan
As for Me and My House Ross
The Double Hook Watson
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz Richler
Beautiful Losers Cohen
A Jest of God Laurence
Coming Through Slaughter Ondaatje
Lives of Girls and Women Munro
Not Wanted on the Voyage Findley
Almost Japanese Sheard
The English Patient Ondaatje
The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood
ENG 536: Topics in Canadian Literature - The Twentieth Century Canadian Novel (Spring 2007, Norris)
In this course we'll be taking a look at a baker's dozen of the important English-Canadian novels of the twentieth century. We'll be reading and discussing a novel every week. No prior knowledge of Canadian literature is required.
Reading List:
Tay John O'Hagan
As for Me and My House Ross
The Double Hook Watson
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz Richler
Beautiful Losers Cohen
A Jest of God Laurence
Coming Through Slaughter Ondaatje
Lives of Girls and Women Munro
Not Wanted on the Voyage Findley
Almost Japanese Sheard
Fugitive Pieces Michaels
The English Patient Ondaatje
The Blind Assassin Atwood
ENG 541: Early American Literature
Prerequisite: Graduate standing in English or permission
Recent offerings:
ENG 541: Early American Literature - Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville (Fall 2006, Friedlander)
In this seminar we will study the work of three significant poets from the second half of the nineteenth century: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Other writers from the same period are equally deserving of attention. What recommends these three in particular is their early articulation, in very different ways, of a modernist sensibility. In form, feeling, and attitude, as well as in their evocations of social and metaphysical crisis, their work speaks to us in a manner we still recognize as our own.
Required Texts: We will read two versions of Leaves of Grass, examples of Walt Whitman’s prose, and excerpts from his lively conversations with Horace Traubel; we will also read all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and a substantial number of her letters. The poetry of Herman Melville is more forbidding on first acquaintance and his total output too voluminous for meaningful abridgement, so we will focus instead on a single work: Clarel, a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a long narrative poem in rhymed iambic tetrameter, viewed by a small but growing number of admirers as one of the finest philosophical poems in the English Language.
ENG 541: Early American Literature - Poetry in an American Studies Context (Spring 2004, Friedlander)
This seminar will provide an introduction to the current state of Americanist literary study while querying the place within it for American poetry from before the twentieth century. The first six weeks will be devoted to a survey of classic and recent scholarship in the field, drawing on two wide-ranging collections of essays in which poetry is almost invisible: Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, ed. Lucy Maddox (Johns Hopkins UP, 1999) and American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader, ed. Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes (New York UP, 2002). We will also read a small selection of recent articles from scholarly journals. The final eight weeks will be given to four specific works: Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Several Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); The Croakers (1819), collaboratively written by Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, or perhaps Halleck's Fanny (1802); one of Emily Dickinson's "fascicles" (her handmade books of poetry in manuscript, 1858-1864); and Herman Melville's Clarel, a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1878). The emphasis throughout will be on working through the readings, which are extensive, in as much detail as possible. Students will produce six-eight response papers shared with their classmates and a final essay to be presented at the graduate symposium.
ENG 542: Studies in Multicultural American Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of the instructor.
Recent offerings:
ENG 542: Studies in Multicultural American Literature (Fall 2008, Lukens)
This is a course establishing some familiarity with a range of plays written by Native American and First Nations playwrights, but concentrating mainly on the production of critical and contextual writing about these plays and their potential audiences. Special emphasis on the development and application of theoretical approaches to intertribal theater, and on documenting the intersection of intertribal theater with both Native and non-Native communities. Some attention to the history and development of Native theater troupes will be included in the course; students will also seek out information on performance history and critical reception of plays in production. As necessary, these readings will be contextualized by instruction, research, and further reading on history and cultures of Native American and First Nations peoples and playwrights.
Required Texts:
A Stray Dog and other plays of the blood quantum, by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. Ed. Margo Lukens (forthcoming)
American Indian Theater in Performance: a Reader. Ed. Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T.
Darby (2000) UCLA.
Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Tomson Highway (1989) Fifth House.
Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Craig S. Womack (1999) University
of Minnesota Press.
Seventh Generation: an Anthology of Native American Plays. Ed. Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte
(1999) Theatre Communications Group.
Staging Coyote’s Dream: an anthology of First Nations drama in English. Ed. Monique
Mojica and Ric Knowles (2003) Playwrights Canada Press
Stories of Our Way: an Anthology of American Indian Plays. Ed. Hanay Geiogamah and
Jaye T. Darby (1999) UCLA.
The Rez Sisters. Tomson Highway (1988) Fifth House.
Where the Pavement Ends: five Native American plays. William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.
(2000) University of Oklahoma Press.
Beyond the texts listed above, you will be expected to do research on criticism of Native drama, as well as on performance history and critical reception of performances.
ENG 542: Studies in Multicultural American Literature - Intertextuality in Native American Literature (Fall 2006, Lukens)
When reading across any cultural divide, one needs to find information on unfamiliar contexts and influences on the work's creation. Writers of Native American heritage have sometimes written in response to the influence of mainstream Anglo-American texts or authors. However, often the influence is a text or narrative from within the tribal culture, both distinct from and ancestral to the modern work. We will read this semester with emphasis on the wide range of connections among texts and people in North America.
Texts will probably include:
James Stevens, Combing the Snakes from His Hair
Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America
Gerald Vizenor, Earthdivers (or another title)
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water
Mary Rowlandson, The Captivity and Restauration . . .etc
Hanay Geiogamah, ed. Stories of Our Way (anthology of plays)
Leslie Silko, Ceremony
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
Sherman Alexie, The Business of Fancydancing (film)
ENG 542: Studies in Multicultural American Literature - Stage Left: Playwrights from the Margins (Fall 2004, Lukens)
The course will be an opportunity to work with drama created by playwrights outside the dominant culture(s) of Anglo North America. We will read plays by Native American, African American, First Nations and Afro Canadian playwrights, and spend serious effort on searching out secondary work in the field. Emphasis on discovering ways to read across the borders of identity, experience, and disciplinary boundaries.
Texts will include some of the following:
Beatrice Chancy, George Elliott Clarke
Black Theatre USA, ed. Hatch & Shine
Red on Red, Craig Womack
Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, ed. Mimi Gisolfi D'Aponte
Staging Coyote's Dream
Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays, ed. Geiogamah and Darby
Where the Pavement Ends, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.
ENG 542: Studies in Multicultural American Literature - Reading Plays by Native American and First Nations Authors (Spring 2003, Lukens)
This is a course exploring a range of plays written by Native American and First Nations playwrights during the twentieth century; we will attempt to inform ourselves on performance history and critical reception of the plays in production and on the history and development of First Nations and Native American theater troupes, as well. Students must be prepared to participate in live readings of plays every week in class. These readings will be contextualized by instruction, research, and further readings on history and cultures of Native American and First Nations peoples.
Texts:
Diane Glancy, Death Cry for the Language
Diane Glancy, Mother of Mosquitoes
Thomson Highway, The Rez Sisters
Thomson Highway, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing
Daniel David Moses, Almighty Voice and His Wife
R. Lynn Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs: A Play
R. Lynn Riggs, The Cherokee Night
Ian Ross, Farewell
Drew Hayden Taylor, Someday
Gerald Vizenor, Harold of Orange: A Screenplay
Gerald Vizenor, Ishi and the Wood Ducks: Postindian Trickster Comedies
ENG 545: American Realism & Naturalism
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission.
Recent offerings:
ENG 545: American Realism & Naturalism (Fall 2007, Jeff Evans)
The course will both examine and interrogate the philosophical and aesthetic tenets of (American literary) realism and naturalism and their practices. A portion of the course will include non-canonical works and approaches. Emphasis throughout will be on close textual analysis and narrative techniques.
ENG 545: American Realism & Naturalism (Spring 2004, Jacobs)
The course will analyze representative texts of American literary realism and naturalism to consider definitions and problems inherent in these periods. The reading represents traditions but also its redefinition or adaptation as American literature moves into the twentieth century and modernism. The class is designed with some lecture but mostly discussion.
Texts:
Owen Wister, The Virginian
Alain Locke, The New Negro
Henry James, The Ambassadors or The Wings of the Dove, Norton Critical Edition (student's choice)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
James Weldon Johnston, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Frank Norris, McTeague (Norton Critical Edition)
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain
Nagel, ed., The Portable American Realism Reader
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
ENG 546: Modern American Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of instructor.
Recent offerings:
ENG 546: Modern American Literature (Spring 2008, Moxley)
The rhetoric of Modernist aesthetics was highly gendered—toward a powerful and clarifying masculinity, away from an ineffectual and mystificatory femininity. But is it that simple? In this seminar we will examine ideas of generation and birth in the modernist response to late Victorian anxieties over degeneration and death. Because generation is intimately tied to reproduction and race, we will also study modernist-period (1900-1939) ideas about femininity, masculinity, sexuality, birth control, abortion, and eugenics. We will read major literary works of the time, examining how such works reflect, engage, contribute to, complicate, and/or resist these ideas. Authors will most likely include: Freud, Goldman, Sanger, Eliot, Barnes, James, Hemingway, Cather, Moore, Pound, Stein, and others. Can be taken for the concentration in Gender and Literature.
ENG 546: Modern American Literature (Spring 2006, Kress)
Subtitle this course "Contemporary American Literature, Then and Now," since the overall approach will have two parts: the first half will look at and into what has been "contemporary" for the past 40 years or so, while the second half will be concerned with more recent works, books less than five years old. We'll focus on one book each week, and in addition there will also be a secondary reading each week. We'll be concentrating on fiction, but at least one week will center on poetry. Each week one (or more) seminar participant will be responsible for presenting the text of the week: a brief introduction to the life of the author, a bibliography on the author's other works and on the critical work already done on the book/author, ideas for critical work that could be done, and a series of questions to instigate discussion. We will concentrate on ways of working with the texts and how to write about them, but because many of the texts are in some ways "experimental" and downright tricky, "how to write about them" becomes a challenging topic indeed. In addition to the weekly presentation, each student will also write a final paper. The last week of the semester will be set up as a workshop, where each student will do a mini-presentation on her or his final paper.
Required Texts:
Dimitri Anastasopolous, A Larger Sense of Harvey
Richard Brautigan, Trout-Fishing in America
Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven
Percival Everett, Erasure
Shelly Jackson, The Melancholy of Anatomy
Gayle Jones, Corrigadora
Nathaniel Mackey, Djbot Baghostus's Run
Jennifer Moxley, The Sense Record and Other Poems
Vladimir Nabakov, Pale Fire
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Jonah Winter, Maine and Other Poems
In addition, there will be a course package and/ or handouts for the following secondary texts:
Roland Barthes, "Criticism as Language"
Maurice Blanchot, "The Language of Fiction?"
Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulation"
Charles Bernstein, "Frame Lock"
Helene Cixous, "Out and Out"
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "Rhizome"
Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"
Ihab Hassan, "Toward a Theory of Postmodernism"
Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"
Jeffrey Nealon, "Becoming Black"
Alain Robbe-Grillet, "A Future for the Novel"
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Why Write?"
Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"
Paul West, "The Shapelessness of Things to Come"
ENG 549: Studies in Gender and Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of the instructor.
Recent offerings:
ENG 549: Studies in Gender and Literature - Emily Dickinson (Fall 2008, Friedlander)
This seminar will focus intently on the collected poems of Emily Dickinson as published in R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition. For context, students will also read a small selection of poems by Dickinson's American contemporaries. No prior skill in reading poetry is required: students will get a crash course in the basics, with particular attention paid to the workings of figurative language. Issues to be taken up over the course of the semester will include textual editing, the construction of literary history, the intelligibility of experience, the autonomy of language; student interest will dictate other directions. Our discussions will be helped along by sample readings from the critical literature.
Required Texts: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Variorum Edition), ed. R. W. Franklin (Harvard UP, 1998), 3 vols. I may also assign the Library of America anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry (college edition). Unfortunately, this book does not include much work by ante-bellum "poetesses," which makes it only half serviceable for our purposes. Photocopy handouts would be the alternative. The class as a whole will read a few essential essays in photocopy handout. Students will otherwise be reading individually chosen or assigned works of literary criticism, to be drawn from the course reserve at Fogler Library.
ENG 549: Studies in Gender and Literature - “Inter-living”: Gender Constitution and Narrativization of Gender (Fall 2007, Billitteri)
This course will engage recent theoretical reflections on pragmatism and feminism and entertain the concept that the experience of gender is not inherently interior or subjective, nor exterior and objective, but the reflection of a constant “inter-living” of the individual in the community (and of the community in the individual). “Inter-living,” Shannon Sullivan argues in her book Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism, indicates the passing through of a series of transactions, both discursive (verbal and or verbalized) and performed (learned and reproduced by habit) between self and world. Implied in this understanding of the “experience of gender” is the notion that the constitution of the self as gendered subjectivity is a transactional event embedded in the social fabric and articulated in narrative acts. In other words, the “experience of gender” is the experience of the “narrativization” of gender.
This theoretical framework will guide our reading of eight modern and contemporary women authors: five fiction writers (Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Ann Quin, Carla Harryman, and Karen Mac Cormack) and three playwrights (Adrienne Kennedy, Caryl Churchill, and Susan-Lori Parks). The works of these authors present a powerful combination of transgressive reimagining and transgressive narrativization (through the use of innovative dramatic and fictional forms) of traditional gender roles and gender boundaries. These thematic and formal transgressions are not fanciful stylistic experiments but the vehicle of the authors’ critical explorations of the social and historical conditions regulating the dynamics of our “inter-living.”
ENG 549: Studies in Gender and Literature - Nineteenth-Century Women Writers: Transatlantic Dialogues (Fall 2005, Jacobs)
Many American and English women writers in the nineteenth century read and admired each other's work, in some cases carrying on personal correspondences as well. In addition, they worked within or against certain common cultural assumptions about the role of the woman writer, and they often addressed common subjects. This course will look at several major writers in relation to each other and to larger cultural concerns. We will begin with the didactic tradition in women's reform writings (Gaskell, Stowe, Jacobs, selected poems of Barrett Browning). From there we'll go to Barrett Browning's reform novel in verse, Aurora Leigh, which addresses the growth of and cultural pressures on the woman poet. We'll then contrast EBB's very public career with that of Emily Dickinson, who read Aurora Leigh with admiration and kept a picture of Barrett Browning in her room. Novels by George Eliot and Louisa May Alcott will present very different versions of a female bildungsroman. Along the way we'll consider critical arguments for the existence of a "women's tradition" in literature, together with critiques of those arguments.
Primary Texts:
Louisa May Alcott, Work
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, "The Cry of the Children," "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," selected sonnets
Emily Dickinson, selected poems
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
criticism to be assigned
ENG 551: Medieval English Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission.
Recent offerings:
ENG 551: Medieval English Literature (Fall 2007, Gerard NeCastro)
This course is an in-depth literary exploration of representative works of Medieval English literature, emphasizing the cultural and historical background of the period and covering a range of styles and genres, including allegory, dream vision, and romance; drama, lyric, and narrative; alliterative verse, rhymed verse, and prose. We will employ a number of different approaches to the material, and while we will often emphasize issues of class and gender, we will not limit ourselves to these. That is, as all members of the course play a part in its construction, we will all have the opportunity to contribute applicable approaches. The course will be available via the web, but will include some face-to-face components.
Probable Texts:
Chaucer. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Benson.
Anchoritic Spirituality. Trans. and Ed. Savage and Watson.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleaness, and Patience. Ed. Cawley.
Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays. Ed. Cawley.
ENG 551: Medieval English Literature (Fall 2005, Bauschatz)
This semester the class focuses in part on learning to read Old English. Some time will be spent on reading Old English prose and poetry. Toward the end of the semester, if possible, we will read part of Beowulf. In addition we will examine translations of Old English poetry analyzing how these modern versions extend, violate, or replicate the originals.
Texts:
Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English. 6th ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
Alexander, Michael (ed.) Beowulf. New York: Penguin, 1995.
ENG 553: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Prerequisite(s): Graduate standing or permission.
Recent offerings:
ENG 553: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Spring 2009, Brucher)
This course offers relatively broad reading in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (roughly 1587 - 1642) and scholarship. To develop a sense of this once popular (and still provocative and pertinent) drama we'll explore the conventions of revenge tragedy, domestic tragedy, and comedy of social life. Repeatedly the plays raise issues of class and gender, and justice and desire. We'll consider Shakespeare as a working dramatist among his contemporaries, sometimes using him as a foil for his contemporaries. Oral presentations and class discussions will define interpretive problems and test effects of the plays against critical principles and historical evidence.
Probable Texts:
David Bevington, ed., English Renaissance Drama (Norton, 2002). (Plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, and Ford, among others.)
David Scott Kastan & Peter Stallybrass, eds., Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Routledge, 1991).
William Shakespeare, any recent edition of the plays.
ENG 553: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Fall 2006, Brucher)
This course offers relatively broad reading in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (roughly 1587 - 1642) and scholarship. To develop a sense of this once popular (and still bold, quirky) drama we'll explore the conventions of revenge tragedy, domestic tragedy, and comedy of social life. Over and over the plays raise issues of class and gender, justice and desire. We'll consider Shakespeare as a working dramatist among his contemporaries, sometimes using him as a foil for his contemporaries. Oral presentations and class discussions will define interpretive problems and test effects of the plays against critical principles and historical evidence.
Required Texts:
David Bevington, ed., English Renaissance Drama (Norton, 2002). (Plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, and Ford, among others.)
David Scott Kastan & Peter Stallybrass, eds., Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Routledge, 1991).
William Shakespeare, any recent edition of the plays.
ENG 554: Renaissance and 17th Century Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of instructor.
Recent offerings:
ENG 554: Renaissance and 17th Century Literature (Spring 2008, Brinkley)
Readings in the lyric and narrative poetry and in the prose of the period from 1520 to 1660. Special emphasis on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton.
ENG 554: Renaissance and 17th Century Literature (Spring 2006, Hatlen)
This course will examine in some depth the major English lyric and narrative poets of the 16th and 17th centuries, with special emphasis on Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and Milton. The course will emphasize the close reading of poetic texts; but the course should also help students to understand the ways in which attitudes toward language evolved during the 16th and 17th centuries, the ways in which certain traditional poetic forms allowed poets of the period both to recover and to remake their cultural heritage, and the ways in which the poetry of the period both reflects and seeks to influence the evolving social and religious crisis of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Probably Required Texts:
Di Cesare, ed., George Herbert and the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets (Norton)
MacLean, ed., Edmund Spenser's Poetry (Norton)
Carey, ed., John Donne (Oxford Authors)
Kerrigan, ed., Shakespeare: The Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint (Penguin)
Orgel, ed., John Milton (Oxford Authors)
ENG 555: Literature of the Enlightenment
Prerequisite: Graduate Standing or permission
Recent offerings:
ENG 555: Literature of the Enlightenment (Spring 2007, Rogers)
Investigates unique features of 18th-century literature: e.g., prose satire, the gothic novel, domestic tragedy, the biography, periodical literature, etc.
ENG 555: Literature of the Enlightenment (Spring 2005, Rogers)
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.
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of the instructor
Studies in Romanticism with emphasis on the legacy of English Romantic poetry and prose in post-romantic literature. We will consider, for example, how Wordsworth's originality influenced such writers as De Quincy, Baudelaire, Proust, and Walter Benjamin. Or, to trace a different tradition, Whitman and Wallace Stevens. Or, still another tradition, Woolf and Lawrence. (Fall 2008, Brinkley)
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission.
* The Eighteenth-Century "Grand Tour": Roman ruins and the British sensibility.
* The English garden: From Versailles to the Picturesque to Burke and the Sublime.
* Rousseau and Blake.
* Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough.
* Horace Walpole and the gothic and the pagan.
* Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
* Paintings of Joshua Reynolds, John Constable and William Girtin.
* The 1840s: the emergence of photography, especially in the work of Henry Fox Talbert.
* Ruskin's Modern Painters.
* Paintings of J. M. W. Turner
* Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.
* The Pre-Raphaelites, in poetry and art, with an emphasis on D. G. Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John
Everett Millais, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and J. W. Waterhouse.
* The journey to inner nature, the landscape of the mind: The "aesthetic" end of the century: Walter Pater,
Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley: decadent and perverse? Does Freud belong here?
Using the resources of the Web and the technology of WebCT and PowerPoint, we'll explore, first, the creation of the Eighteenth-century platform from which the British romantics launched their verbal and visual pyrotechnics, and then explore the Victorian reaction in image and word to the romanticism of Wordsworth and his view of the natural world.
Students will learn technical skills useful in their academic futures by preparing a PowerPoint presentation (I'll teach you how to do this), and by publishing this work, along with a traditional academic essay, on my web site. (Spring 2008, Wilson)
ENG 558: Modern British Literature
Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission
Recent offerings:
ENG 558: Modern British Literature (Spring 2009, Cowan)
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
ENG 558: Modern British Literature (Spring 2005, Cowan)
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
Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission.
Recent offerings:
ENG 570: Critical Theory - A Science of the Singular? Roland Barthes and the Desire for Literary Theory (Fall 2007, Steve Evans)
At the start of a seminar offered just a few years before his death, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) defined literature as a "codex of nuances" and proposed as the primary task of literary semiology the act of "listening to or watching for nuances." In his final book, Camera Lucida, he spoke of his paradoxical desire for a "science of the singular" (paradoxical because science typically deals only in generalized, repeatable phenomena). In retracing the major phases of Barthes's divers and prolific intellectual career, we'll have ample occasion to generalize—about literature and the other arts; about literary theory, literary practice, and cultural studies; about structures of subjectivity and ideology—but we'll also attend to the singularity and nuance of Barthes's writing and thinking, striving to hear the distinctive "grain" of his voice and discern the particular contour of the desire that animates his many projects. We'll also discuss works by many of Barthes's literal and figurative interlocutors, including Nietzsche, Brecht, Sartre, Jakobson, Benveniste, Robbe-Grillet, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and others.
Required Texts: Texts will include Mythologies, Writing Degree Zero, Elements of Semiology, The Semiotic Challenge, The Rustle of Language, Image-Music-Text, The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Camera Lucida, and The Neutral.
ENG 570: Critical Theory - Literary Theory (Fall 2004, Friedlander)
This seminar will look at a variety of forms of "close reading," beginning with the practice as codified for literary critics by Cleanth Brooks and radicalized by Paul de Man, then moving backward and forward in time to consider alternative versions produced within different disciplinary contexts or with different conceptions of text as their basis. Our aim will not be a history of criticism or exhaustive survey of possibilities, but a close reading of specific instances of close reading supplemented with a short number of programmatic essays. To narrow our focus somewhat, we will limit ourselves to critical and theoretical texts published after World War Two.
Texts:
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading or The Rhetoric of Romanticism
and four others, probably to come from the following list:
Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct
George Bornstein, Material Modernism
Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, et al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
Russell J. Reising, Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
Peter Szondi, Celan Studies
Robyn Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop Cultural Forms
ENG 570: Critical Theory - The German Tradition from Hegel to Adorno (Spring 2003, Steve Evans)
This course will provide students with a thorough grounding in the tradition of critical theory that extends from Kant and Hegel through to the Frankfurt School. We will work our way through the key texts in this tradition - Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lukacs, and Weber - before coming to focus on the major works of Adorno. Topics will include: dialectical method, the critique of reified consciousness and instrumental reason, the concepts of the unconscious and of revolution, the situation of art within modernity. No prior training in philosophy is required, but a willingness to engage seriously with demanding texts is indispensable.
Texts:
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory (1998 edition).
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics.
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (Strachey translation, any edition).
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Strachey translation, any edition).
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (Strachey translation, any edition).
Hegel, G.W.F. The Hegel Reader (ed. Houlgate).
Horkheimer, Max & Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory.
Lukacs, Georg. History & Class Consciousness.
Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man.
Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels. Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic.
Recommended Text: Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination.
ENG 579: Theories of Composition
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission.
This course will survey major theoretical positions in composition studies, particularly on issues that arise out of process theories of writing and attendant pedagogies. How do we “compose,” and how do we teach “composing”? Cross-Talk in Composition Theory, 2nd edited by Victor Villanueva, and Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Teachers, edited by Peter Vandenberg, et. al. will provide key documents to get us started and guide us. We will be reading the most influential theorists in this new and developing field, including David Bartholmae, James Berlin, Patricia Bizzell, Kenneth Bruffee, Peter Elbow, Janet Emig, Donald Murray, Sondra Perl, Mike Rose, Nancy Sommers, Paul Gee, Brian Street and others. The focus of the course will be on acquiring a working knowledge of composition theory. Should you attend a national conference in composition studies, such as CCCC or NCTE or IWCA (knowing what those acronyms stand for and mean is part of what we will learn), you should by course's end feel theoretically well oriented and in a position to participate in an increasingly international conversation about academic writing. Should you apply for further graduate study in composition, you should be familiar enough with current theory and pedagogy to write a persuasive letter of application and to hold your own at the doctoral level. Should you currently be teaching writing, you should arrive at a more theoretically informed understanding of what and how you teach writing. Expect to work in a seminar environment in the survey phase of the course, writing brief reviews of theoretical articles, and expect to write an extended solo paper on one theorist or theory. The texts that we will be using are available in the writing center (near the TV monitor) for your perusal. (Spring 2008, Kail)
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of instructor.
Recent offerings:
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics - The Poetics of the Phonotext: Timbre, Text, and Technology (S. Evans)
This seminar will offer a systematic introduction to an exciting new development in the field of poetics (and literary studies more generally), the emergence of "phonotextual" studies concerned with the analysis and interpretation of poems not just as printed texts but as voiced structures whose meaning can be "sounded" as well as seen. In addition to exploring the sonic archive of modern and contemporary poetry through on-line resources like PennSound and Ubuweb, we'll work through a fascinating body of secondary literature from the fields of poetics, linguistics, literary criticism, prosody, speech pragmatics, psychoanalysis, and the new media as we seek to fashion a supple critical vocabulary for the description, interpretation, and evaluation of poetry soundfiles. Students will learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and to use sound editing and analysis software applications (Audacity, Praat) that allow us to visualize (and manipulate) the sound shape of poetic language. In addition to conventional writing assignments (including a substantial, research-based seminar paper), students can also expect to program a radio segment and to make regular postings to a course blog. One of the goals of the seminar will be to examine the way that concerns, concepts, and categories long associated with the field of poetics, from Aristotle to the modern age, can be restored to relevance in our digital age.
Note: No background in poetry, poetics, linguistics, or new media is required for this introductory course. May be of special interest to teachers interested in integrating new media into their lesson plans and to poets seeking to hone their performance styles.
Texts likely to be included on the syllabus (consult instructor before purchasing):
Augoyrad, Jean-François, and Henry Torgue. Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds. McGill-Queen's UP, 2005.
Roland Barthes. "Listening" and "The Grain of the Voice." Handouts.
Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford UP, 1998.
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT, 2006.
Eisenberg, Evan. The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. 2nd Ed. Yale UP, 2005.
Eno, Brian. Excerpts from A Year with Swollen Appendices. Faber, 1996.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia, 1984.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Fordham UP, 2007.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge, 1982; rpt. 2002.
Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. U of California P, 1990.
Tsur, Reuven. What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception. Duke UP, 1992.
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics - Poetry and Experience (Spring 2008, Friedlander)
"Experience" is an important keyword in both poetics and philosophy, and some of its most important elaborations have been in works that bring the two fields together--Wilhelm Dilthey's studies of Goethe and Hoelderlin, Walter Benjamin's unfinished Baudelaire book, Jacques Derrida's essays on Paul Celan. In this course we will sample those and similar works as well as others from history, psychology, and sociology, using two recent accounts of the topic as a guide: Martin Jay's Songs of Experience (2005) and Dominick LaCapra's History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004). The course will begin with two extremely influential essays by poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Experience" and Paul Celan's "The Meridian"; it will conclude with a case study, the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Students will write weekly response papers (wks 2-11) and a final essay on a topic to be developed in consultation with instructor.
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics - Visionary and Prophetic Tradition in English and American Poetry (Spring 2007, Hatlen)
This course will examine the relationship between religion and poetry during the past two centuries, through the reading and discussion of the works of thirteen poets, all of whom sought within poetry a way of carrying forward visionary and prophetic possibilities into an apparently secular era.
Texts:
William Blake, Selected Poems (Dover)
P. B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” and Other Poems (Dover)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems (Everyman’s Library)
Walt Whitman, Selected Poems and Song of Myself (both Dover)
Emily Dickinson, Text not yet selected
W. B. Yeats “Easter 1916’ and Other Poems (Dover)
D. H. Lawrence, “Snake” and Other Poems ( Dover)
H.D., Trilogy (New Directions)
Hart Crane, Complete Poems, Centennial Edition (Liveright)
Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems (American Poets Project: Library of America)
Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America (City Lights Pocket Books Series)
Robert Duncan, Selected Poems (New Directions)
Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950-2001 (Norton)
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics - The Symbolist Movement in Literature (Spring 2006, Moxley)
This seminar will focus on the writing of four major post-romantic 19th century French poets: Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stephane Mallarme. We will examine the philosophical and literary antecedents of these writers, their definition and/ or reflection of the aesthetic concerns of fin de siecle, as well as the role of their work in the formation of literary modernism and modernity. Because these four poets are often discussed under the rubric of Symbolism, we will investigate the origin and meaning of this term in both poetic and critical discourse. Subjects covered may include: Sadism, the Gothic, the Dandy, the metropolis, cosmopolitanism, fashion, theories of language, translation, aestheticism, degeneration, the role of the crowd, the underlying unification of things, and mystery in literature.
Texts:
Rimbaud Complete by Arthur Rimbaud
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire
To Purify the Words of the Tribe: The Major Verse Poems of Stephane Mallarme, trans. by Daisy Aldon
Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics - Reading and Poetics (Spring 2005, Billitteri)
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.
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics - Introduction to Poetics (Spring 2004, Steve Evans)
A systematic introduction to the levels and objects of analysis pertinent to modern (i.e. post-Saussurean) poetics. We'll conceive of "poetics" as a mode of inquiry into the full spectrum of social activities through which poetry enters the world. We'll draw on a variety of resources in the course of our collective and individual researches, including the hermeneutics of Freud and Gadamer, the formal analyses and theories of literary evolution articulated by the Russian Formalists and Czech Structuralists, the work of French post-structuralists like Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, the cultural studies of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, and statements by poets ranging from Poe, Hopkins, and Valery through to the contemporary moment. No prior work in poetics or critical theory is presupposed (with one exception noted below).
Note: Students will be expected to have read Aristotle's Poetics closely (and recently) prior to the first class meeting.
ENG 606 / CMJ 606: Rhetorical Theory
Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor only.
Survey of basic issues in and the contributions of major theorists, historical and contemporary. (Fall 2008, Nathan Stormer, CMJ)
ENG 649: Seminar in Modern & Postmodern American Poetry
Prerequisite: Graduate Standing or permission
Recent offerings:
ENG 649: Seminar in Modern & Postmodern American Poetry - Realism and Avant-Garde American Poetries, 1920-present (Spring 2009, Billitteri)
This seminar explores the transformation of Walt Whitman’s realist poetics in the work of the modern and post-modern American avant-gardes. Our focus will not be poetic influence but intellectual history; our efforts will be directed at a charting of the several transformations of a poetic project through time.
Whitman’s search for a poetry of the real—a poetry capable of recreating and faithfully transmitting the concrete reality of contemporary life—resonates with particular force in much of the most important American poetry of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. The realist research of the avant-gardes is not always perfectly aligned with all aspects of Whitman’s poetics. Indeed, as we will see, in the majority of cases poets operate on linguistic and philosophical premises that are at odds with Whitman’s own philosophical and linguistic beliefs. Nevertheless, the avant-gardes share with Whitman a foundational desire for a poetry that is socially, politically and ethically meaningful only insofar as it can legitimately claim (and demonstrate) to be vast enough and capacious enough as to encompass the epistemic multiplicity of the real in all its discordant manifestations.
We will read the poetry and the writings of Whitman, together with selected representative figures of the modern and post-modern American avant-garde: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Charles Olson, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, Nada Gordon, and Gary Sullivan. We will also consider such movements as imagism, objectivism, projectivism, language poetry, and flarf.
ENG 649: Seminar in Modern & Postmodern American Poetry - Poetry and the Politics of Representation in Twentieth-Century Materialist Poetics (Spring 2007, Billitteri)
This seminar will examine three specific moments in the history of twentieth-century materialist poetics: Objectivism, Projectivism, and Language Poetry. Our examination will involve the study of the foundational assumptions of materialist poetics: the critique of the romantic aesthetics of poetry as the beautiful medium of transcendental revelations and vatic illuminations; the insistence on the political thickness of language (a thickness poetry cannot avoid, nor dilute); the understanding of poetry-writing as intellectual work of critical intervention; the willingness to be actively engaged in a labor of oppositional cultural interpretation. The goal of this seminar is to familiarize students with the debate on the politics of representation lodged at the center of modern and postmodern American poetry. This debate is marked by the following issues and questions: What does it mean for poetry to take up the analysis of the politics of language and be self-reflexively engaged with the politics of its own linguistic representation? What does it mean for poetry to abandon the romantic aesthetics of the beautiful and account for the ugly, the unappealing, the non-poetic, and even the non-original? We will take up these questions with the aim of understanding the subject matter of the seminar and to reassess our cultural assumptions about poetry, language, and the politics of literature.
ENG 649: Seminar in Modern & Postmodern American Poetry - After Patriarchal Poetry? Gender and the Avant-Garde in 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics (Spring 2005, Steve Evans)
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.
ENG 649: Seminar in Modern & Postmodern American Poetry - The 1940s (Spring 2003, Friedlander)
The 1940s were a period of historical trauma and transition encompassing the Second World War, the opening of the Atomic Age and the beginning of the Cold War. In poetry, too, the 1940s were a period of intense conflict (trauma is too strong a word here) and transition, encompassing the high and low points of several modernist careers and the first inklings of postmodernism. In the present course we will consider the 1940s through a close reading of four poets (H.D., Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and Gwendolyn Brooks), as well as through a close consideration of the controversy over Ezra Pound's fascism and subsequent receipt of the 1948 Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos. A course reader will make available samples of work by some forty other poets.
ENG 693: Teaching College Composition
Prerequisites: Graduate standing and appointment as a teaching assistant in the department
of English.
A seminar in the theory and practice of teaching ENG 101, College Composition. Seminar participants actively review their understanding of the conventions and contexts of academic writing, practice and critique ways of responding to student writing and of planning sequences of writing assignments, and begin to read in the discipline of composition studies. They pay particular attention to current scholarship on processes of writing, on reading and writing as functions of academic discourse communities, and on the institutional setting of writing instruction. Throughout the semester, they keep teaching journals, plan assignments sequences with theoretical justifications and present these to their peers, compile annotated bibliographies on topics of interest, and write position papers on selected aspects of their teaching. (Fall 2008, Burnes)
ENG 697: Independent Reading/Writing
Prerequisites: 6 hours of graduate study in English and permission of Graduate Coordinator.
This course is arranged through the Graduate Coordinator and is available to current graduate students in English only. Credits: 1-6
Prerequisites: 6 hours of graduate study in English or permission of the instructor.
This course is arranged through the Graduate Coordinator and is available to current graduate students in English only. Credits: 1-6
Return to Course Descriptions.