Graduate Courses in English for 2011 Summer Session I & II

Summer Session 1 (25 May - 28 June)

ENGL 203: APPROACHES TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Section A Prof. Scott Harshbarger MW 6:00-8:40pm
Section B Prof. Robert Sulcer TR 6:00-8:40pm

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. There will be two exams and two writing projects: a series of short papers applying theory to practice, and a 15-page research paper on an aspect of grammar of your own choosing. You will also give a 15-minute oral presentation based on your research and paper. Required texts: The Writer's Options and Teaching Grammar in Context.

ENGL 291P: EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE
MW 6:00-8:40pm
Prof. Joseph Fichtelberg

The years spanned by early American literature—roughly 1600-1820—are punctuated by revolution. At the beginning of the period, the Puritan revolution turned many English dissenters into colonists, as they sought refuge in the New World. Toward the end of the period, the American Revolution turned colonists into republicans, committed to building a virtuous new nation. And by the nineteenth century, the market revolution began to turn those selfless republicans into self-seeking entrepreneurs. To come to terms with these changes many of the culture's most significant texts sought boundaries, limits that defined piety or civility, commercial morality or citizenship, even as the very conditions for those practices were changing. Americans never tired of writing about that struggle—success stories shadowed, and often overtaken by disaster. In this course, we will explore their ambiguous designs.

The course will be divided into four units. Under the topic of "selves," we will consider how the early Puritans Thomas Shepard and Anne Bradstreet sought to explore and curb the opportunities for self-expression in the New World. With the next group of writers—the captivity narrator Mary Rowlandson and the ex-slaves Phillis Wheatley, James Gronniosaw, and John Marrant—we will ask how the contact with cultural "Others" changed long-held assumptions and provided opportunity for expression. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur grappled with the dangers and opportunities of economic "Exchange," as they tried to master new market behaviors. And after the American Revolution, Hannah Webster Foster and Charles Brockden Brown sought to define the "Citizen" against a background of social experiment and political strife. Throughout our discussions, we will be interested in how these writers respond to a central aspect of American culture: its vivid, but often terrifying freedoms.

Course requirements include an oral presentation, a 5-page response paper, and a 15-20-page research paper.

(This course satisfies a pre-1800 requirement for the M.A. in English Literature and the pre-1900 requirement for the MFA in Creative Writing.)

ENGL 294P: MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN VIOLENCE
TR 6:00-8:40pm
Prof. Joseph Fichtelberg

The great German intellectual Walter Benjamin once wrote, "The history of civilization is the history of barbarism." Benjamin's old world pessimism was shaped by his experience during the Second World War. Yet early American writers could have endorsed Benjamin's maxim. In this course, we will explore the strange literary and cultural links between idealism and barbarism—the American sense that the road to perfection lies through violence. After a brief survey of Puritan precursor literature, we will focus on works of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—gothic fictions like Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; studies in psychological terror, like the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; narratives of actual terror, like Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. Yet our discussions will not be limited to tales of mayhem: we will also mine the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to discern the shaping hand of terror in the most commonplace affairs.

Course requirements include a short paper, a 15-page research paper, and a seminar report.

(This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for both the M.A. in English Literature and the MFA in Creative Writing.)

Summer Session 2 (5 July - 5 August)

ENGL 274: AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITIONS
MW 6:00-8:40pm
Prof. John Bryant

How did America grow to become a nation, from colonial times to the Civil War? How did Americans use writing to explore the deepest problems they had to confront, in their sense of Self, in their relation to God and Nature, and in their understanding of race and sexuality? This course addresses these problems as we examine different kinds of writing unique to the American experience: sermon and essay, poem and play, the captivity and slave narratives, and the tale. We will be reading works by John Winthrop, Ann Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, as well as great short works by Poe, Melville, and Whitman. The course will be conducted in a discussion format; students will write one short writing assignment and a final paper.

(This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for both the M.A. in English Literature and the MFA in Creative Writing.)

ENGL 291J: LITERATURE & PSYCHOANALYSIS
TR 6:00-8:40pm
Prof. Shari Zimmerman

The terms and concerns of psychoanalysis have long been in dialogue with the practice of literary study. But these days, the language of psychoanalysis has come to mark just about everything we read, see, and hear. It is there—in talk shows and television dramas; in academic analyses of loss, assimilation, or subject formation as well as violence, atrocity and war; in accounts of 9/11 as not simply source but also symptom of overwhelming trauma; or, say, in Obama's campaign speech about a nation whose only way forward is to engage with its past—and so pursue the ongoing, arguably endless, labor of mourning. In this course, then, and against this backdrop, we explore key concepts in psychoanalysis—among them, the unconscious, trauma, transference, and mourning—by reading widely in Freud and by examining some of the contributions of several scholars and theorists whose work might be said to directly engage or extend, re-think or critique Freud's own. In addition, we shall examine literary texts (including Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," selections from Joyce's Dubliners, and Williams's "The Use of Force") that will shed light on the theoretical material we are studying. For, to be sure, some of the greatest literary work might be said to have taught psychoanalysis about history, trauma, and repression; mourning and melancholia; memory and unconscious knowledge. And any number writers (from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Dickinson to Faulkner, or James to Morrison) might be said to illustrate, more fully than psychoanalysis can perhaps theorize, the play of transference; the language and logic of dreams and symptoms, phobias and obsessions; the closely related (often indistinguishable) dynamics of "acting out" and "working- through"; or, say, the very notion of a speaking subject as somehow always foreign to itself. As we make our way through some of Freud's most central claims, then, which are themselves (as we shall see) always being refined and rethought (by himself and by others), we shall at every turn consider how literary texts—like films, cultural constructs, political documents or historical events—illuminate, even while being illuminated by, psychoanalysis.

Requirements include a 5-page essay explicating a psychoanalytic idea or concept advanced in the readings and a 15-page essay engaging analytic questions in its treatment of a given text—literary or otherwise—to be chosen by the individual student in consultation with the professor. Throughout the course, students will be free to explore their own intellectual passions; and individual research interests (in a given film or literary text, a given theorist or, say, a given issue as approached by different theorists) will be strongly encouraged.