Spring Semester 2008
For the most up-to-date and comprehensive course schedule, including course additions, cancellations, and room assignments, visit the Registrar's Schedules website (PDF format).
Spring 2008 - Course Descriptions
Abbreviations:
- MAC = Satisfies MA Core Requirement
- PLC = Satisfies Program in Literature Core Requirement
- PRC = Satisfies Program in Rhetoric and Composition Core Requirement
ENGG 112: Rhetorical Criticism
Beth Britt
Key # *This course has been canceled.*
Thursday, 3:30-5:45 p.m.
(PRC)
Just by virtue of being what Kenneth Burke calls “the symbol-using, symbol-misusing animal,” humans evaluate discourse as part of everyday life. Rhetorical critics make that process conscious by using the tools of rhetorical theory and allied disciplines to explore the function of symbolic events. In this course we will explore a range of approaches to rhetorical criticism, including neo-Aristotelian, feminist, generic, narrative, and dramatistic methods. We will read examples of rhetorical criticism and some pieces about rhetorical criticism, but the main business of the course will be to practice rhetorical criticism. By examining a single rhetorical artifact of your choosing through the lenses of various methods, you will come to understand more about that artifact and about doing rhetorical criticism. The course will be run as a workshop so that we, as a group, can see the effects of applying the same approach to a wide range of artifacts. Assignments include short weekly papers and a final project.
ENGG 213: Topics in Early American Literature: Transatlantic Print Culture and Early American Literature
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon Key #27648Monday, 6:15-8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
This course will explore the development of print culture in relation to Atlantic colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will read a variety of genres: exploration narratives, captivity narratives, novels, poetry, and drama from British, Caribbean, and U.S. traditions with an eye toward understanding the relation between Atlantic colonialism and the circulation of printed texts. In addition to reading primary texts, we will work our way through a number of theoretical fields: theories of the transatlantic, accounts of colonialism and diasporic culture, and theories of the print public sphere.
ENGG 251: Contemporary American Fiction
Bonnie TuSmith Key #23446
Tuesday, 3:30-5:45 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
This course examines selective works of American fiction from 1965 to the present. Topics include literature and postmodern culture, how art is influenced by social and historical conditions, experimental narrative strategies (e.g., tricksterism, blurring of fiction and nonfiction, multiple points of view), and how American literature is affected by issues of race, class, and gender. We will study full-length works by Alexie, Brooks (Geraldine), Castillo (Ana), Doctorow, Jen, Morrison, Ozeki, Vonnegut, and Wideman, as well as short works by writers such as Diaz, Erdrich, Gaines, Lahiri, Mukherjee, Oates, Updike, and Walker.
ENGG 286: Topics in Victorian Literature: Sexual, Social, and Economic Bodies in Victorian Literature
Laura Green Key #23410
Tuesday, 6:15-8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
Although we still tend to think of the body as a tabooed topic in Victorian culture, bodies were central subjects of representation for a variety of vocabularies: visual, literary, scientific, legal. Claims about group and individual identities and social roles (gender, class, nationality) were often made and debated in terms of bodily capacities and limitations. In this class, we will explore the significance of bodily representations across a variety of literary (and some visual) forms--primarily novels but also some poetry and nonfiction prose as well as pre-Raphaelite painting.
Authors read will include some combination of the following: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, Harriet Martineau, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tennyson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde. We will also read some relevant current criticism and theory.
Students in the seminar will write one term paper of 20-25 pages, the writing of which will have some intermediate stages, including one oral presentation.
ENGG 332: Topics in Film: Surrealism
Inez Hedges, Professor of French, German, and Cinema Studies Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies Key #24860Wednesday, 6:15-8:30 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
The historical part of the course will consider the origins of surrealism in the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s as a response to the emergence of new social configurations in the post-WWI period. We will look at the way surrealism attempts to redefine the role of the artist and of artistic production—whether in painting, film or literature—as oppositional and subversive. We will study major figures from this period (André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington and Gisèle Prassinos), developing a gendered perspective on such concepts as l’amour fou, black humor, dream logic, objective chance, and the surrealist image.
The second half of the course will deal with the legacy of surrealism in narrative film of the last three decades (1970-present).
Theoretical readings will include diverse approaches, including psychoanalysis, cognitivism, and Marxist aesthetics.
ENGG 351: Topics in Literary Study: Irish Film and Literature
Patrick Mullen Key #26058Wednesday, 3:30-5:45 p.m.
(MAC, PLC)
This course will introduce students to the field of Irish studies. We will consider a range of texts, genres, and media and will examine both Irish cultural production specifically and problems of national cultural more generally. In order to manage this broad topic, we will focus on two moments of intense literary and cultural production and examine how this production relates to, in the first instance, nationalist anti-imperial struggle (the Irish Renaissance), and in the second instance, the dynamics of globalization and the contemporary surge in Irish cultural expression. We will also explore a line of critical inquiry that addresses the nature and function of the nation and the state, questions of post-colonialism, the contemporary dynamics of globalization, problems of memory and translation, questions of gender and sexuality, and problems race and ethnicity. Potential authors and filmmakers include: Joyce, Keating, Moore, Wilde, Hyde, Edgeworth, Synge, Yeats, O’Neill, Jordan, Ford, Sheridan, and Quinn. Students will write a series of short essays and be responsible for short in-class presentations.
ENGG 396: Composition Pedagogy
Susan Wall Key # *This course has been canceled.*Monday, 3:30-5:45 p.m.
(PRC)
This seminar takes “pedagogy” to mean fully theorized and coherent teaching, whether the occasion is a first year writing course, a course in advanced writing or rhetoric, or a literature course that is writing intensive, where teachers are concerned with student drafts as well as finished papers. The texts we’ll consider will represent pedagogies that are exemplary in several senses of the term. That is, our readings will both represent some of the best current work in Composition and reflect current areas of interest within English Studies, e.g., cultural studies, rhetoric, poststructuralism, and feminist criticism. Assigned texts will be chosen that show how the typical concerns of writing instruction (e.g., composing assignments, the uses of writing to teach reading and vice versa, development and assessment, teaching literacy in a diverse society) may be addressed as they must be in an actual course: in relationship to one another, to the pedagogical assumptions and purposes of the teacher, the curriculum, and the theory informing both, to the kind(s) of students who take the course, and to the outcomes of the work that teachers and students do together. Requirements: weekly written responses to the readings, a class presentation, and a final paper. For the final project, seminar participants may choose to do further research on a particular kind of pedagogy or to design a fully theorized sequence of assignments for teaching a writing or writing-intensive course.
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