Events
Master of Arts in English Literature
Spring 2009 Course Schedule and Descriptions
Course Schedule
Spring 2009
| ENGL 291A: Shakespeare’s Wars and Warriors | ||
| Professor Pasupathi | M | 4:30 - 6:20 |
| ENGL 292F: The Queer Victorians | ||
| Professor Sulcer | M | 6:30 - 8:20 |
| CRWR 291E: Poetry Writing Workshop | ||
| Professor Levin | T | 4:30 - 6:20 |
| ENGL 291M: Nobel Prize Winners | ||
| Professor DiGaetani | T | 6:30 - 8:20 |
| CRWR 291F: The Longer Work | ||
| Professor Markus | W | 4:30 - 6:20 |
| ENGL 203A: Approaches to Grammar | ||
| Professor Harshbarger | W | 6:30 - 8:20 |
| ENGL 294U: Critical Theory | ||
| Professor Sawhney | R | 6:30 - 8:20 |
Spring 2009
ENGL 203: Approaches to Grammar
Prof. Harshbarger
W 6:30 - 8:20
This class will explore the theory and practice of various approaches that use grammatical terms and concepts to improve writing. We will examine the history of grammar and grammar instruction, review pertinent research, and discuss the political and professional issues associated with this topic. We will have two exams, and students will be expected to write several response paragraphs throughout the course. Students will produce 15-page scholarly paper on an aspect of grammar of their own choosing and will give a 15-minute oral presentation based on their research and paper. Required Texts: Rhetorical Grammar, by Martha Kolln; Teaching Grammar in Context, by Constance Weaver.
ENGL 291A: Shakespeare
Prof. Pasupathi
M 4:30 - 6:20
This class will examine two Shakespeare’s most dramatized subjects: warfare and the soldiers who engaged in it. In exploring these subjects, we will discuss the literary aesthetics of violence and battle, as well as the capacity––and limitations––of the English stage to portray them.
Over the course of the semester, we will read several history plays and tragedies, apparently the most fitting genres for plays about warfare. Students in the course will battle Henry V, Macbeth, and Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra; their exploits with these texts will be supplemented by brief skirmishes with contrastingly light-humored works about war by Shakespeare’s less famous contemporaries, including the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
In addition to questions of imagery, tone, genre, and staging, we will also tackle the issue of personal responsibility with respect to national affairs, both as an early modern problem Shakespeare explored in his works and as a postmodern dilemma that Shakespeare’s works prompt us to explore in our own complicated world of wars and warriors.
Major assignments for the course will include the following: a presentation on assigned aspects of warfare in early modern culture to supplement our reading of one of the assigned literary texts; a group project in which students will develop strategies for staging battle scenes and additional material from the plays; a short close reading paper; a longer final literary analysis.
CRWR 291E: Poetry Writing Workshop
Prof. Levin
T 4:30 - 6:20
In this workshop we will concentrate on writing and revising new poems while studying essential elements of the craft. We will critique each other's work with an ear and an eye for problems and solutions, and problems as solutions - opportunities for risk, for an unending interplay of mystery, mastery, and discovery. Workshop participants will experiment with myriad ways of moving through a poem. As readers and writers we will consider various patterns and literary conventions, attending to the dynamic interaction of rhythm, line, stanza, syntax, rhetoric, image, idiom, and tone. We will also devote time to reading and discussing the work of published poets who deploy a broad range of poetic strategies that spur the development of voice and style. Regular attendance is mandatory, along with an ongoing commitment to revision, active participation in class, and constructive criticism of poems presented to the workshop. Students are expected to turn in a new poem every week.
CRWR 291F: The Longer Work
Dr. J. Markus
W 4:30 - 6:20
This graduate writing workshop explores the longer form in fiction or creative non fiction. The writer can chose to create the beginning chapters of a novel or memoir, complete a novella, or write the first two or three long short stories or non fiction pieces to be part of a book length collection. The student is encouraged to follow (or find) the genre which best suits his or her thematic and stylistic needs and talents. The process of writing a "book," from the first sentence to the completed manuscript will be discussed, including such issues as daily working methods, the myth of writers’ block, and the function that time plays in the creation of the longer work. All work will be read in class, or if time does not permit, at home and will be discussed in class and revised before being handed in for a grade.
This is a hands on writing workshop in which specific problems endemic to long prose works are discussed as they occur. Therefore critical participation in the workshop is stressed and attendance is compulsory. In conjunction with this approach and in consultation with the professor, the students will also chose a longer work from an established writer–creative or theoretical that has given them insight into the form they are attempting and will write a short paper that analyzes that work in terms of craft, vision, and how it has (or hasn’t) influenced the student’s own creative process. These will be read in the workshop and discussed as time allows, but all will be shared on line, discussed in conference with the instructor, and handed in as part of the final portfolio. By the end of the semester the protocol of submitting manuscripts for publication will also be addressed.
ENGL 291M: Nobel Prize Winners: Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter
Prof. DiGaetani
T 6:30 - 8:20
Shaw, Beckett, and Pinter--all modern British dramatists--have all won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This course will study how these three giants of the modern drama changed the course of modern British drama. Shaw developed a political theater, Beckett a philosophical theater, and Pinter a new theater of anthropology. In three different ways, these dramatists created a new kind of theater to respond to their own needs and the theatrical needs of a new generation of theater-goers. Our discussions in this course will emphasize approaches to teaching these playwrights to contemporary students. This course will include an oral report, a paper, and a final exam.
ENGL 292F: The Queer Victorians
Prof. Sulcer
M 6:30 - 8:20
When in 1885, England criminalized male homosexual acts, Queen Victoria was asked whether there ought also to be a law against lesbian sexual acts. She famously retorted, “No woman would do that!” How is it that the Victorians, supposedly the stodgiest of our literary forebears, witnessed the emergence of homosexuality as we know it, best exemplified by the life and works of Oscar Wilde? This class takes up the question of the “other Victorians” through an examination of canonical and noncanonical literature, historical and contextual documents, and a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, especially from gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. We mine the queer Romantic inheritance from Lord Byron, examine the tensions among women’s identifications and desires in Charlotte Brontë and Christina Rossetti, and trace the emergence of the century’s queerest figure, the aesthete, whose criticism inaugurated modern English studies and thus underwrote nearly every critical paradigm of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our focus is the professionalizaton of the queer—the proliferation of queer discourse (and queers) within the most powerful institutions of the day—in schools, universities, the literary establishment, the church, the law, medicine, and criminology.
Primary texts include the following: John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (selections) and other writings; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam,” George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays; Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, essays; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, plays, poems, essays; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Selected Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle; poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Edward Cracroft Lafroy, A. C. Benson, William Johnson Cory, “Michael Field” (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper)
Course requirements include frequent short responses, a close reading (5-7 pages) that serves as the draft for a seminar paper, the final seminar paper (15-20 pages), an oral presentation on a critical article, active class participation, and an open mind.
ENGL 294U: Critical Theory
Dr. S. Sawhney
T 4:30 - 6:20
"Theory," in the current academic idiom, refers to a genre of works that are not easily categorized in any one discipline. These works may originate in or otherwise deal with, issues connected to such fields as literature, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and so on.
One way of organizing this interdisciplinarity is by seeing these works as a far-ranging and comprehensive critique of the existing organizations of knowledge. That is to say, these works (by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Patricia Williams, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Joan Scott, et al.) attempt to indicate those mediating influences that enable us to first formulate and then articulate our understandings of concepts, the world, the text in front of us. These writings emphasize the way meaning is created and conveyed, rigorously questioning the various guiding principles of interpretation that we normally tend to take for granted. By focusing on our assumptions on how a sentence should proceed, or on our shared common-sensical notions of history, or of genres, these writers force us to see how much of what we think we understand is based on unspoken but powerful rationales; rationales which need to be discussed, and only then accepted, revised or discarded. For instance, the notion of "the universal" (as in universal applicability or universal appeal of ideas) relies on a very limited and circumscribed set; the notion of the universal functions only if we erase the differences and contradictions that any attention to gender, race or class may elicit.